Correspondence No. 4: "The Stationary Journey," a poem by Edwin Muir // "The Student," a short story by Anton Chekhov
Muir can embark on his oxymoronic “stationary journey”* because it’s entirely mental in nature: the poet sits back somewhere, possibly in a comfy chair at home (“here at my earthly station set”), and imagines the long run of history, first going backward, then mixing the chronology of events. He wonders: if he could “retrace the path that led me here, / Could I find a different way?”
And time moves backwards. Gray hairs turn black, a dead Charlemagne moves his hand, Jesus follows St. Augustine rather than the reverse, and we arrive in ancient Egypt (“…for a while among the sand / Unchanged the changing Pharaohs sit”). Beyond this we see nothing but “waste and rocks” – the world before civilization – and “on the thinning Asian plains / A few wild shepherds with their flocks…” The ellipsis is in the original, so you can continue tracing the thought as far back as you like – from those prehistoric shepherds muttering in some early form of Indo-European or Proto-Altaic, all the way to Neanderthals, dinosaurs, or the Big Bang.
But, whether going back or forward, we are still trapped in time (“Eternity’s the fatal flaw / Through which run out world, life and soul”). The poet seeks a solution in “the mind’s eternity,” where he can “see the dead world grow green within / Imagination’s one long day.”
Chekhov separates the narrator from himself – his protagonist is Ivan Velikopolsky, a divinity student – and puts him out in the world, somewhere in rural Russia. He is on the way home, walking through a windy, twilit landscape. The cold, dampness and wind inspire grand, melancholy thoughts: “he was thinking that exactly this wind was blowing also in the time of Rurik, and of Ioann the Terrible,** and of Peter [the Great], and that in their times there was the same dire poverty, hunger, the same leaky thatched roofs, ignorance, despair, the same wasteland all around, gloom, a sense of oppression – all these horrors had been, were now and would yet be.”
In contrast to Muir, who runs through a series of historical events in a kind of slideshow of the mind, Chekhov focuses on one specific story, Peter’s denial of Christ. The student recounts this story to two women, a mother and a daughter, who thus embody the flow of time by their generational difference. His telling of the story brings forth an emotional reaction from the mother. “The student thought again that if Vasilisa wept and her daughter was disturbed, then obviously what he had just told them, something that had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present.”
This leads to the story’s nodal point – in Joycean terms, the epiphany: “‘The past,’ he thought, ‘is connected to the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing from one to the other.’ And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”
In both poem and story the main action is mental – it’s all about seeing patterns in history, the past in the present, the flow of time. Chekhov’s student is more of an active participant, out in the world and talking to people, yet acting also as a thinker, receptive to the flow of time and its meaning.
Both works give us a feeling of being trapped in time, but differ in the attitude they present. Muir finds an escape from time in “the mind’s eternity,” while Chekhov’s student finds comfort in the continuity of tradition. Associated with this is a sense of discovering something greater than yourself. In his own autobiography Muir said: “It is clear that no autobiography can begin with a man’s birth, that we extend far beyond any boundary line which we can set for ourselves in the past or the future, and that the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man.”
*You can find the text of the poem in this collection.
**Chekhov uses the Old Slavonic version of the name of the Tsar Ivan IV, probably to impart a religious tone. His epithet “the Terrible” reflects the archaic meaning of the word: “inspiring dread and awe.”