Synopsis:
The “student” of the title is a seminary student, the son of a verger, named Ivan Velikopolksy. One very cold and windy night, Ivan walks home from fowling. It is Good Friday. On his walk, Ivan stops by a fire in the “widow’s gardens”, so named for the two village widows Vasilisa and Lukerya, a mother and daughter, who keep the gardens. As Ivan warms himself by the fire, he strikes up a conversation with the women and tells them the Biblical story of the Apostle Peter denying Jesus.
When Jesus knows he will be betrayed by Judas, he warns Peter that after the betrayal, Peter will deny his relationship to Jesus three times. Peter is upset by this knowledge, but ultimately does deny Jesus even though he loves him “passionately to distraction”. The two women are upset by the story; the mother begins to weep and her daughter stares “as someone who is trying to suppress intense pain.”and as the student takes his leave he thinks how “something that had taken place nineteen centuries ago had a relation to the present” and the “past…is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events”.
With this understanding, “life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with lofty meaning”. This shows that what truly matters in life is human connection and feeling close to others. The inherent loneliness felt at the beginning of the story is lifted because Ivan feels connected to his community and those around him. His life is part of this “chain of events”; it is not insignificant. This is a comforting understanding for all readers, but also gives each of us an implicit responsibility in what happens to those around us.
In his comments, Jake asks “what does it mean?” and while I do not have that answer, I do feel as if the story stresses the importance of human connection and empathy. The mother widow sheds tears at the plight of Peter and Christ, showing that everyone is connected to each other. If every person in this world could feel such empathy, we would exist in a truly “delightful and wondrous” place. Perhaps, in overly simplistic terms, this story shows us that life gains “lofty meaning” when you connect with others?
One of Chekhov’s most famous quotes: “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.” If we look closely in “The Student”, we may be able to tease out the influence of Chekhov the doctor upon Chekhov the writer. I’m thinking particularly of the powerful tears and mysterious anguish that Ivan elicits from Vasilisa and Lukerya. I imagine that Dr. Chekhov spent ample time scrutinizing his patients–their speech, expressions, fears and feelings–and certainly the insights gleaned from such appointments found a way into his fiction. In this case, then, the parable of Peter’s betrayal becomes less important than the fact that Ivan could relate a common narrative to two very different people and draw out an emotional, ambiguous, beautifully-crafted reaction. Only an attentive writer with intimate exposure to other human beings could capture the mysteries and subtle intricacies of the interaction between Ivan and the two widows.
In my first few reads of this story, I was hard-pressed to find an answer to the question, “what does it mean?” Nabokov once said that Chekhov relied on “undercurrents of suggestion to convey a definite meaning”. Indeed, he seems to steer clear of Dostoevskian soul-searching and Tolstoyan moralism and pay greater deference to being “true-to-life” (a cliche often applied to Chekhov). In this and many (if not most)of his stories, we are impressed with the fact that everything is so wondrously believable yet guides us no closer to an answer.
The critic Conrad Aiken wrote of Anton Chekhov (in an eponymous 1968 essay), “No artist has known, by introspection, more ‘states of mind’, no artist has known better, by observation, what shapes they assume in talk or behavior”.
I read somewhere that of all his short fiction, this was Chekhov’s personal favorite… Why? For me, I enjoyed the interplay of light and dark, harmony and disorder, the cold wind and the warmth of the widows’ fire; and of course, the ending provided a welcome change–alas, a Chekhovian character who exits stage right with a happy gait and hopeful gaze! Thus,in this story I felt less of the Chekhov that Shestov describes in his 1916 essay: the “treasure-digger”, “sorceror”, “necromancer”, and “adept in the black art”.
This academic text by Andrey Shcherbenok uses “The Student” as one example in the argument that Chekhov “killed realism” by taking the reader away from classical realism and not into another literary movement, but essentially his own version of nowhere.
http://www.academia.edu/557433/Killing_Realism_Insight_and_Meaning_in_Anton_Chekhov
This poem by Brian Culhane is inspired by Chekhov’s story
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/183497