Anton Chekhov is one of the greatest poets of loneliness the modern world has produced. But he is also a dramatist, an exponent of our most public, extroverted art form. Two recent novels inspired by Chekhov—Our Country Friends (2021) by Gary Shteyngart and Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett—reveal how these two sides of Chekhov render him an ideal muse for chroniclers of Covid. Because of how Chekhov’s themes resonate with life during the pandemic, but his genre evokes a world after it, these novels are able to use Chekhov to explore the hardships of the pandemic, while also conjuring aspects of life that Covid forced us to leave behind. Through these novels, Chekhov emerges as an invaluable bridge figure for contemporary writers: a muse who lets them balance between acutely portraying our recent past and looking beyond it.

In parsing the turn toward Chekhov, and toward theater, of pandemic novels, it is useful to compare this trend with a version of it that has played out before. David Kurnick traces this pattern in his book Empty Houses (2011). In the Victorian era, as the novel became increasingly focused on the representation of interiority—and as the collectivity of society writ large seemed to wither—novelists revealed their continued “longing … [for] public worlds” by invoking the theater. By engraining the theater in their novels—for example, by depicting “theatricalized” public spaces, or likening characters to actors on a stage—authors like George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray evinced a yen for communal life that the fascinations of interiority could not stamp out.

Shteyngart and Patchett were responding to a more literal and acute shutting down of public life than were their 19th-century counterparts. Still, the continuity between these trends is striking. Both cohorts of novelists turned to the theater to temper a retreat into the interior, thematizing it for the sake of the yearned-for property it could evoke.

The critical difference between the Victorian trend and its pandemic-era redux lies in the specific quality of theater that is longingly called up. In the novels Kurnick examines, theater is a figure for collectivism. In Our Country Friends and Tom Lake, theater stands, by and large, for drama.

Theater connotes drama as strongly as it does community. We were also as much robbed of drama, by the pandemic, as we were of community. Unless we were on the frontlines of the pandemic, encountering drama in forms nobody would envy, Covid was, for most of us, a time of narrative stasis. The plots in our lives—our fledgling relationships, our workplace intrigues—were shunted into the anemic realm of the virtual, if not put wholly on pause. Nor could we hope to be regaled with the drama of others.

This is the pandemic privation that Patchett and Shteyngart use theater to alleviate. In their novels, theater brings eventfulness and structure to what is precedingly the mush of characters’ lives. It also brings drama’s emotional corollary: the suffusion of life with a sense of stakes and meaning.

Of course, unlike a yen for community, a lust for drama is something we have cause to doubt. Given the damage drama can do, it is far from clear whether it is ethical or, indeed, in our interest to crave it. Accordingly, Shteyngart and Patchett’s novels are ambivalent about the desire they gratify. They feed our drama hunger—but also indict it.

Anton Chekhov was born in southern Russia in 1860 and died in Moscow, of tuberculosis, in 1904. The four dramatic masterpieces he wrote in his short life—The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904)—are all odes to the stunted human spirit. The archetypal Chekhov character is a person caged by his own inefficacy. His regrets, which he cannot alleviate, his wishes for the future, which he is powerless to realize, his quirks and foibles, which a life of tedium has exacerbated, so preoccupy him that—although he is surrounded by other people—he is incapable of connecting with them.

As a result of this psychic affliction, dialogue between Chekhov characters is not really dialogue at all but rather, as Peter Szondi writes, “monologic responses framed as conversation.” Chekhov characters talk at and past each other. They allow others’ speeches, however pertinent to their own concerns, to fly over their heads.

Yet, Chekhov’s plays are undeniably dramas. They generate drama through its apparent refusal. Characters commit suicide (or, Chekhovianly, try and fail to) because their cries for help are ignored. They break each other’s hearts because they are unable to acknowledge their feelings, much less act on them. They make their problems go from bad to worse by denying their existence.

Even if the maxim about nothing happening in Chekhov plays were true, Chekhov is leagued with drama by association. He is one of the world’s most famous playwrights, and so summoning him summons the theater—with all its conventional qualities—the tenor of his plays aside. This is especially true in the context of a novel, because of the contrast with the genre at hand. In Our Country Friends and Tom Lake, Shteyngart and Patchett turn this dynamic to their advantage. Both novels use their inspiration by Chekhov to plumb pandemic-era malaise. But they are also highly theatrical novels that, by channeling that genre, look toward life after the pandemic.

even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to “Tom Lake” and “Our Country Friends,” these novels are irradiated by the theater.

There is nothing subtle about the Chekhovian-ness of Our Country Friends. The Hudson Valley estate it takes place on is the modern, American equivalent of the Russian country estates on which Chekhov set all his masterpieces. And the characters Shteyngart assembles there are all modernized, Americanized versions of classic Chekhovian types. There is a landowner whose profligacy threatens to ruin him; a millionaire app creator, standing in for Chekhov’s men of commerce who recognize how the tides of wealth creation have turned; a famous actor who is a fraud; a failed writer who is a true artist; an ingenue with whom several older male characters promptly fall in love; and a doctor.

These characters suffer from the same essential problem as their Chekhovian forerunners: inability to connect, despite proximity. But the modern world has created new triggers for their solipsism. Of course, today, they are estranged from each other by technology: Shteyngart throws down the gauntlet on page one, introducing us to one character “illuminated by a screen … in a lonely public world of her own.”

Just as isolating are the downstream effects of technology (over)use. Shteyngart’s characters are driven inward by guilt spirals, as their news streams remind them that, while they are in their upstate idyll, “refrigerated trucks” are filling up with the “bodies of the dead.” They are estranged by self-concern, as the several celebrities among them watch their public images degrading on social media. For Chekhov’s characters, the agents of isolation are the past and the future: reflection on either is apt to send them into hermetic reveries. Shteyngart’s modern Chekhovians, in contrast, are alienated from each other by the present: the always looming, always mediated wider world to which they have at once too much and too little access.

Shteyngart is also interested in showcasing—and so his characters are also plagued by—forms of disconnect that the novel is better equipped than drama to represent. Occasionally Shteyngart’s characters miss each other in conversation just as Chekhov’s are wont to. “Often the two were happy talking past each other,” Shteyngart writes of two characters who sit together rhapsodizing about separate topics.

More often, though, Shteyngart’s characters miscommunicate in ways that can only be exposed via the novel’s staple device of narrating interiority. Popcorning from one consciousness to another, we see how the same sign is interpreted differently by different characters, often to the detriment of their relationship. One character’s sympathetic glance is misread by another as indicating “anger instead of sorrow.” A conversation that triggers paranoia in one character is experienced by another as “delightful.”

Shteyngart’s first imaginative leap, with Our Country Friends, must have been recognizing how the pandemic rendered the starting premise of Chekhov’s plays—a diverse-ish group of people cohabiting on the closed world of an estate—newly plausible. In keeping with its Chekhovian group focus, as well as with Chekhov’s favorite theme, Shteyngart’s pandemic novel is not about the isolation that Covid directly caused. Rather, it is a meditation on how Covid forced a reckoning with our capacity to feel alone even when with others.

Tom Lake is a stranger to this plight. Indeed, the family it centers on, the Nelsons, is so loving and close-knit as to strain credulity.

This decidedly un-Chekhovian context reflects the novel’s other, and primary, source of theatrical inspiration: Our Town. Thornton Wilder’s paean to everyday life provides the backdrop for the retrospective narrative that largely comprises the novel. The adult Nelson daughters, banished home by the pandemic, are helping their parents harvest the cherries on their family farm. As they work, their mom, Lara, tells them the story of her short-lived acting career, which revolved around her starring in several productions of Our Town, and her dating a now-famous actor.

The Chekhovian aspects of Tom Lake at first look like superficial bunting. The Nelsons own a “cherry orchard,” Lara’s daughters are “three sisters.” But gradually, more substantive points of contact emerge. Lara is acutely aware of dynamics that hamper even her and her daughters’ above-average communication. She ruminates continually on the self-editing she is doing when telling her story. Meanwhile, her daughters exhibit Chekhovian selective hearing, refusing to accept the parts of Lara’s story that clash with their preexisting ideas (about their mom, about love, about narrative logic).

These Chekhovian threads temper the rosy vision engendered by Patchett’s main muse. The enduring gift Lara received from her stints in Our Town was assimilating its philosophy: she is fiercely committed to appreciating the present, as Wilder’s play admonishes us to do. The pandemic has brought Lara fresh inspiration to live by this creed: because it has brought her daughters home, it is, she admits, “the happiest time of [her] life.”

It is perhaps to excuse her focus on such a privileged experience of Covid that Patchett loops in Chekhov as an auxiliary source of inspiration. Lara is exceptionally fortunate not only in her lockdown situation, but also in her relationship to her past. She is able to tell her story without experiencing the enervating nostalgia, or crushing regret, which retrospection invariably triggers in Chekhov. By sustaining a Chekhovian hum beneath the roar of Wilder, Patchett reminds us that these maladies were far more common responses to the pandemic than Lara’s Wilderian gratitude.

But even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to Tom Lake and Our Country Friends, these novels are irradiated by the theater. In Our Country Friends, metaphorical winks at theater abound. Dramatic encounters unfold on the “poorly lit stage of the porch.” Spectating characters “lean … forward as if they were observing from a theater balcony.” The theatricality of Tom Lake is more literal yet less on-the-nose: the novel is filled with actual auditions, rehearsals, performances—and backstage drama between actual theater people. Eventually Our Country Friends also extrudes its theatricality into its plot. After the truly gifted writer falls dangerously ill from Covid, the famous actor tries to fuel publicity for the writer through a performance of Uncle Vanya.

If the above gesture strikes you as suspect, you are on the same page as these novels. While Our Country Friends and Tom Lake embrace the theater as a narrative framework, they are also insistent about the perils of a theatrical sensibility run amok.

In this respect, these novels’ turn toward the theater continues to be distinctly Chekhovian. Being a dramatist fixated on loneliness was not Chekhov’s only paradox. He was also an artist who was skeptical of his own kind. The Seagull and Uncle Vanya are both cautionary tales about the danger of artists and the drama they instigate. In The Seagull, the writer Trigorin ruins the young actress, Nina—“destroy[ing] her,” by his own admission, because he has “nothing better to do.” In Uncle Vanya, the title character is driven to despair by the realization that the scholar he has dedicated his life to supporting has produced nothing of worth: “Not a page of his writing will survive him.”

In Our Country Friends and Tom Lake, the main fonts of drama—and, ultimately, tragedy—are characters who distinctly resemble Chekhov’s pernicious artists. The famous actor in Our Country Friends—known only as “the Actor” for much of the novel—breeds drama both through his own actions and by implanting dramatic compulsions in others. “Like a small damaged atomic reactor,” he unleashes emotion “into the air as background gamma.” Under his influence, all the characters become vectors of drama. A long-dormant romantic plot shudders into motion. A betrayal, concealed for decades, is exposed.

This is what theater is for: not for conflating with reality, but for
illuminating it.

Some of these developments yield love and catharsis. But the drama the Actor directly causes only does harm. He deliberately provokes others, feeling he “deserve[s] that privilege after baring himself in front of his audiences.” He is also, like Chekhov’s Trigorin, a thief. In The Seagull, Trigorin slinks around with a notebook, pilfering details from the lives of those around him. In Our Country Friends, the Actor uses his ability to emote at will to usurp the feelings of others. One character, balked by his weeping on her behalf, ends up dry-eyed, “listening to the sounds of his unsubstantiated grief.”

Shteyngart’s Actor also mirrors Trigorin in that his egotism eventually has fatal consequences. After a period away from the estate, he returns bearing Covid—leading to the illness for which his Uncle Vanya becomes a misguided apology.

Tom Lake also features a famous actor (or at least one bound for fame, at the time of Lara’s story) whose talent makes him a menace. Peter Duke charms Lara with his ability to make life into theater. His magnetism charges everyday interactions with significance. Talking with him is like trading “line[s] from a play.” But Duke turns his dramatic prowess against Lara, making her a pawn in his self-serving plots. He is able to do so repeatedly, the force of his charisma operating on Lara even after she has ceased to trust him.

Duke’s grip on Lara echoes her attraction to the theater, which is likewise rooted in its ability to impart meaning. Of rehearsals for the Our Town in which they co-star, she reflects, “Where we stood and how we stood and how we placed our chairs and looked into the lights and spoke to one another and listened, all of it mattered.”

Patchett leaves unsaid the opposing truth that renders Lara’s observation worth making: normally, we don’t feel like “all of it matter[s].” Drama—both the on-stage kind and the kind theatrical people can lend reality—is seductive because of how it lets us feel like we have triumphed over life’s refusal to conclusively mean something.

Patchett is sympathetic to how the allure of meaning renders her protagonist vulnerable to Duke. But she is uncompromising in exposing the sheen that Duke imparts to life as an illusion, and in vilifying those who exploit their power to cast that spell. Mending costumes after Duke has thrown her over, Lara wonders (her words recalling Trigorin’s), “Did actors destroy everything they touched?”

Through their Chekhovian bad actors, Shteyngart and Patchett stop short of endorsing our desire for drama even if they are willing to sate it. They carefully manage the quality of theater that they evoke, catering to drama-starved audiences but classifying that yen as one we should mistrust.

Yet, these novels leave us with an unqualified longing for drama, as in actual theater. This is because neither novel lets its wariness of theatrical people shade into wariness of theater proper. Tom Lake, while it warns against being dazzled by actors, anoints actual theater as the appropriate place to experience certified meaning. In Our Country Friends, the Actor’s Vanya is ill advised but informative: for the dying writer, watching the mediocre performance turns up valuable insights about both Vanya and the Actor. Similarly, in Chekhov’s own The Seagull, the famous play-within-the-play is not good, but it gives at least one of the characters, the thoughtful doctor Dorn, an enlightening lens on the world.

This is what theater is for: not for conflating with reality, but for illuminating it. Affirming this power of theater—like Chekhov before them—Shteyngart and Patchett subdue our drama hunger but pique our appetite for Chekhov’s genre. By the time Tom Lake came out, in 2023, life was mostly back to the normal. It made me feel even more grateful for the theater I could finally go see. But Our Country Friends came out in the thick of the pandemic. Its caution against creating drama notwithstanding—I could almost have flung it at the wall for how badly it made me want to see a play.