Twinning Art With Evil : CHEKHOV’S SISTER A Novel <i> by W.D. Wetherell (Little, Brown: $16.95; 288 pp.) </i>

W.D. Wetherell’s new novel, “Chekhov’s Sister,” is a meditation on the melancholy nature of the 20th Century, a time of brutality, alienation, a lack of human values: what the author calls the end of history. But he is not wholly without hope: The creation of art, and its subsequent preservation, is a record of mankind’s soul, an expression of mankind’s heart, and as long as these two organs remain alive, there exists a possibility of redemption from our sadness.

The majority of the novel’s action takes place in Yalta, during World War II. The Germans have invaded Russia, and all of the uncertainties of occupation prevail. Chekhov has been dead since 1904, yet, nearly 40 years later, his sister, Maria Pavlovna Chekhov, keeps a shrine to his life and art (a confusion that will put her in moral and physical jeopardy) at his home in Yalta, where his desk must be kept exactly as he liked it when he was alive--his bookshelves undusted because this was the only way he could tell which books he hadn’t recently read.

Kunin, a young man with a club foot who aspires to being a writer but shows little talent or desire to practice his craft, helps Maria Pavlovna keep this sacred place along with her faithful Maid, Varka.A shadowy manservant, Gerassim, also helps, but without the dog-like spirit of the others: He has no difficulty hacking a portrait of Tolstoy to bits on the eve of the German occupation.

When the Germans do arrive, Maria Pavlovna finds an ally in Nazi Minister of Culture Rene Diskau. Diskau had translated her brother’s work into German, and now he seeks to stage a performance of “The Seagull” in an effort to win Russian minds and hearts. In her zeal to have the play once more performed, Maria Pavlovna does not question her seeming collaboration with the enemy; her devotion to one cause blinds her to the moral turpitude of her actions.

But Diskau is not one of the faithful; instead, he represents, along with Gerassim (who turns out to be a Russian partisan), the world, or politics. These men lack human values, and live in a dangerous and deadly reality as separate from art as Maria Pavlovna is from political concerns.

The play will go on after the importation of an actress to play Nina, a lovely, shimmering creature who has been rescued from an SS bordello for the part, who is dying of tuberculosis (as Chekhov himself did) and whose artistry cannot be questioned. She (and Chekhov) represent the third category of beings, those who are artists, and who, alone, have the ability to transcend base reality through the flights of their imaginations. They are the only ones without fierce tunnel vision, the ones who comprehend something broader, sadder, deeper about the human spirit. Of course, these three polarized groups will clash; of course, life will be lost, as the other “character,” the 20th Century itself, propels them toward different types of destruction.

The novel is beautifully, lyrically written, and in its questioning of what both art and reality are, its form as well as its content voices its concerns. Wetherell uses the play form, in four acts (like “The Seagull”), to begin sections of the book; he also uses dramatic monologue, remembrance and straight fictional narrative to clue us as to where he stands in the moral battle between art and reality, human values and politics. Its structure mirrors its themes, in a gorgeous stylistic symmetry, giving the novel more cohesion than most contemporary fiction.

Art, Devotion, the World: Like a tarot deck of mysterious meaning, Wetherell’s half-fictional realm (Chekhov really did have a sister; she really did preserve his final home as a museum) moves ineluctably toward its climax in a rhythmic river of narrative that is completely hypnotic.

It is only at the end, when the narrative lets go, that questions arise, mostly about Maria Pavlovna herself, and the faithful as a group. Can collaboration ever be justified? Can art be twinned with pure evil and still remain an unsullied expression of the human spirit? Can art actually redeem the 20th Century? Finally, the concerns of the novel begin to seem precious and small when one thinks of the horrors of the time it documents; one performance of “The Seagull” cannot save the lives of millions in the concentration camps, cannot stop the inevitable cruelty of the century.

Where Wetherell and his fine novel stand on this issue remains unclear, though this may be the only failing of this fascinating account of belief, disappointment, zealotry and the human soul.