Chekhov, page 6
The end of the story is flat, as life is for us when waking up from a long dream. Reality returns. His elders abruptly hand him over, at a cottage in a small town, to a woman who will take him to the school he dreads. The stern uncle and the jolly priest go off.
Some critics thought The Steppe was no more than a string of disconnected incidents; but the discerning saw it as a superb and sustained prose poem. If his reputation had been uncertain, now Chekhov is seen to be a master. The story at once appeared in one of the “thick journals”; he was awarded the Pushkin prize.
Chekhov also wrote other, shorter stories on comparable themes. One of these is Happiness (sometimes called Fortune). We are in the longer, secretive minds of the peasants and the shepherds. We can point to the exact incident in The Steppe from which Happiness was conjured. We see a shepherd sitting with others in the evening while the sheep are asleep and the dogs are quiet. The only sound is the talking of the men. Another figure (whom we have also briefly seen before) is a superior man, in fact the landowner’s overseer, who stands listening with condescension to the folkish fancies of the shepherds, saying little beyond “Yes, it could happen.” They are gossiping about a man called Yefim who was possessed of the Devil: it is claimed he had “whistling melons” in his “market garden” and a pike has been heard to laugh when it was caught by him; a shepherd says he has seem Yefim disguised as a “talking bullock.” It is agreed that the Devil can make a rock whistle, for this was heard on the Day of Freedom when the serfs were liberated. And now the talkers are cunning enough to reveal other preoccupations with hearsay. Pretending to be stupid, they are testing the overseer. Is it true that there is treasure hidden in the steppe? Yefim had said so. He also said he had discovered it. They tell the dramatic story of the find and of how this clever man died without revealing where the treasure was hidden. We see the dream of Fortune—nevertheless, they ask, Is this happiness?—brought into the open. There is profit for everyone, but not for the peasants—is that not so?
The overseer gets on his horse and evades the question. He says, “Your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it,” and gallops off, leaving something in their minds never spoken of in the boundless steppe:
The ancient barrows … had a sullen and death-like look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence.
They know tales of all the treasure buried by generation after generation of robbers and Cossack invaders: Is that the real treasure?
The night goes on, the dawn begins. There is a sudden menacing sound racing over the steppe: “Tah! Tah! Tah! Tah!”—the sound of a bucket falling down a mine shaft. (We shall hear it years later in The Cherry Orchard, pronouncing the new industrial order that will ruin that feckless family.) The mines—they are the buried treasure! The industrial revolution is already destroying the grace and fertility of Nature. And who has the treasure? The gentry, the foreign immigrant miners, the government, all have it; not the shepherds.
Happiness has the note of fable, and its merit lies in the exact rendering of the shepherds’ sly, wondering, legend-consuming talk as they interpret a new aspect of human fate. The ancient burial mounds of the steppe are monuments to races of men who have died, as all men and dispensations the. The drollery of the shepherds is a mask for longheaded thoughts. And one thing is historically important: Chekhov knows that shepherds are not peasants. As shepherds they are the last survivors of a nomadic culture and have an inherited earlier precivilized apprehension of human fate.
Chapter Six
In May 1888 Chekhov sent his brother Mikhail to the south to find a cottage which would house the “abnormal family” for the summer. Hearing their son’s talk of the steppe, his parents longed for the scenes of their early years. The first reports were gloomy, but at last Mikhail found a place that was miraculously beautiful near Sumy on the Psyol River on the edge of the Ukraine. Anton wrote to Suvorin that it was delectable. Nightingales sang all day, he wrote. The countryside was a paradise of neglected gardens, sad and poetical estates shut up and deserted, where lived the souls of beautiful women, old footmen on the brink of the grave, young ladies longing for the most conventional love. It was a place that made one think of old novels and fairy tales. You could swim and fish in the river and angle for crayfish. A man for mysterious sounds, Chekhov heard the cry of the bittern for the first time, a cry that every Little Russian knew but none described the same way. It was partly the echoing blow on an empty barrel, partly the moo of a cow; but no one had even seen the bird!
The cottage was on the estate of the Lintvaryov family.
They were cultivated liberals in an old-fashioned way and gently reproved Chekhov for his ties with the conservative Suvorin. They were strict teetotalers. The mother was a kind, if flabby, old lady who adored old-fashioned poets and read Schopenhauer. Two of the daughters were doctors, one of them blind, epileptic and dying of a brain tumor, who laughed when Chekhov read some of his stories to her. Chekhov wrote:
What seems strange to me is not that she is about to die, but that we do not feel our own death and write [stories] as though we would never die.
He went with the second daughter on her rounds to see her patients. She also managed the house and estate and knew all about horses. She was a tender doctor who suffered with her patients and Chekhov said he believed she had never hurt anyone, and “it seems to me that she never has been nor ever will be happy for a single minute.” The third daughter was a vigorous girl with a loud voice, always laughing and singing, a passionate Little Russian patriot who had started schools in the village and taught the children there. There were two sons, one modest and hardworking—he had been sent down from the university for political reasons, “but of that he doesn’t boast.” The second son was mad about Tchaikovsky but had no talent. He admired the teachings of Tolstoy, though he could not stand Tolstoy’s disciples. There were exploring trips in an ancestral four-in-hand carriage into the province of Poltava:
If you had only seen the place where we stayed the night and the villages stretching eight or ten versts through which we drove! What weddings we met on the road, what lovely music we heard in the evening stillness, and what a heavy smell of fresh hay there was!
He stayed for a night with a friend of the Lintvaryovs called Alexander Smagin, whom they nicknamed the Shah of Persia, in a crumbling and neglected house. The suckers of cherry and plum trees grew through the floorboards, and one night he saw a nightingale nesting between the window and the shutter and saw “little naked nightingales, looking like undressed Jew babies, hatched out from the eggs.”
Chekhov went on to a literary pilgrimage through Gogol’s country and came back with the astonishing idea of raising money for the founding of what he called a “climatic station” for writers. It would free them from the wasteful political quarrels of Moscow and Petersburg. Nothing came of this. On his return to Sumy there was trouble. Alexander’s wife had died and he arrived with his children at the cottage. Alexander celebrated his arrival by escaping to the little town of Sumy and, in the public park, “assisting the performance of the local conjuror and hypnotist” by drinking and shouting foul language. He had to be dragged away. Worse, he had fallen in love with Yelena, one of the Lintvaryov sisters, and wanted to marry her. The girl might very well have been longing to marry but Chekhov sternly saw disaster. He knew his uncontrollable brother. After a serious row Alexander was packed off, protesting, to Petersburg: later he admitted he had been stupid to think of marrying her; he had got used to living alone. In fact he found another lady and married her.
When high summer came Chekhov went to stay at Suvorin’s house at Feodosiya in the Crimea. The journey to Sumy and then to Kharkov (he wrote to his sister) was dull, the Crimean steppe was as dull as the tundra, but he was enchanted by the ravines, they were superb, and he said they let his imagination work in tune with Gogol’s story A Terrible Vengeance. Then he was in Sevastopol and saw the blue sea. At Feodosiya Suvorin talked too much: the subject was a play, The Wood Demon, which he wanted to write in cooperation with Chekhov. Feodosiya was a grayish, dreary little town, but the bathing was wonderful. On to the estate of Ivan Konstantinovich Ayvazovsky, a well-known marine painter who “is a combination of a general and a bishop … and a naive grandfather and an Othello.” He was a vigorous seventy-five-year-old and claimed to have known Pushkin but had never read him. “Why should I read,” he said, “if I have my own opinions.” After that Chekhov went on a dirty little cargo steamer called Dir. The sea was rough. The ship stank and during the night narrowly escaped a collision. He was seasick. A terrible night. The crew said the incompetent fat captain would wreck the ship, and the following year he did. Chekhov went on to ugly Batum, “a café-chantant sort of town,” then on to Tiflis and Baku on the Caspian, “a rotten place,” appallingly hot and stinking of kerosene, but he did see at last the superb sight of the famous Georgian Military Road, a road of “unbroken poetry, a wonderful, fantastic story written by Demon in love with Tamara.”
Suvorin was repeating his warning not to hunt after two hares and urging Chekhov to give up medicine. Chekhov replied that if he did not have his medical work he doubted if he could give his leisure to literature. ‘There is no discipline in me.” The “clinical” concern continues in the elaborate, long The Birthday Party, which follows Tolstoy’s tedious habit of underlining what the characters speak with the very different thoughts they are harboring. Chekhov borrowed this manner because of his own obsession with what he called “lying,” and in The Birthday Party he seems to be novelizing and moralizing rather than telling. We see a wife, oppressed by pregnancy, becoming jealous of her husband’s habit of charming the ladies, and especially at his birthday party. The jealousy becomes a mania of dislike. He, too, has his hidden worry. Charming, all things to all men, he is nevertheless a bad-tempered judge, who is worried because his conduct at a trial is being challenged in the High Court. Chekhov follows the tension closely and begins well. The difficulty, he said, was to deal with the middle of the story, but here he is admirable. Nimbly he takes us through the wife’s touchiness and snobbery at the party. Out in the exquisite garden there is a scene (cleverly taken from the scything scene in Anna Karenina) in which the self-important judge takes the scythe out of a young lady’s hand and shows her how to use it as it should be used. And then, by a stroke of comic genius, the story “turns.” A boating party is arranged. The husband jumps into the boat, causing it to “lurch violendy,” and takes charge. After sitting through the picnic on an island, the wife excuses herself and goes home in a carriage. That night her labor starts.
As a doctor, Chekhov was very proud of this scene, in which he records the mingling of jealousy and pain in the emotions of the woman. Ladies who read the story told him that he had exactly caught the emotional and physical sensations, the unreason and exhaustion, a woman feels. In the end the baby is stillborn and the husband and wife are facing a fact that calls them to account. When he read the story Suvorin was naïve enough to complain that Chekhov had not ended the story with the court scene, which the judge had yet to face.
In the following summer Chekhov took his family to the Lintvaryovs’ estate once more. Nikolay had caught typhoid in Moscow and his tuberculosis was reaching its final stage. Anton nursed him day and night for weeks and was himself exhausted. He sent for Alexander—their quarrel had been made up—and then went off to stay with the Smagins once more to recover. He was no sooner there than a telegram came saying that Nikolay had died. After a terrible journey, changing trains at little junctions, Anton arrived in Sumy in time to join his brothers in carrying the body in an open coffin to the cemetery on the Ukrainian estate in the traditional manner of Ukrainian funerals. “We see people die,” he had once said, “but do not think of our own death.” He could not bear to stay at Sumy and did not know where to go or what to do.
“If there were faults in Nikolay’s character,” Anton said, “he has expiated them by his sufferings.” And to Suvorin: “There’s not a kopeck’s worth of poetry left in life.”
By chance an old school friend turned up: he was a cheerful fellow who had worked with Chekhov in The Alarm Clock days. They went off to the handsome city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, where they found a group of young actresses from the Maly Theater in Moscow, who were on tour, and their frivolity distracted Chekhov. He was in and out of cafés and their rooms day and night.
“I practically wore skirts myself,” he wrote to his brother Ivan, “and am living without thinking.” He had spent nearly all his money. The girls tried to keep him, but when they saw he was determined to leave they gave him a couple of neckties—one of his minor vanities—and he left alone for one more tiring journey to “abominable Yalta.”
Chapter Seven
Only writing, then, would purge his grief, but what would he write? He had wasted time at the Lintvaryovs. He started writing A Dreary Story, and it was to become one of the longest, strangest and most powerful and self-accusing stories of his “clinical” type. It is divided into six parts. The theme springs from a growing obsession which he had often discussed with Suvorin, and perhaps a chance meeting in Yalta brought it to a head. There was a colony of writers in the resort, and one morning Chekhov was stopped in the street by a bold young girl of fifteen who addressed him by name. She wanted him to read and criticize a tale she had written. Chekhov was one of the few writers who responded to such intrusions from women. He read the story, liked it and sent it to Suvorin, who published it. For a while he wrote, encouraging her, and then the acquaintance stopped.
But—to be addressed by a stranger by name in a strange town! He had found a subject: the price of fame is that one ceases in everyone’s eyes, even in one’s own, to be “an ordinary human being who knows he will die.” This is the preoccupation of the famous professor of medicine in A Dreary Story and indeed of Chekhov himself. (Moscow gossip said that the death of a professor in the medical school was the source. This seems to have been quite untrue.)
One is bound to think of A Dreary Story as a catharsis, even from the perversity of its tide. It is a tour de force and an exemplar of the rule “When in doubt a writer should increase the difficulty.” The twenty-nine-year-old Chekhov set himself the task of projecting himself into the intimate life of a learned man of sixty-two who has an incurable disease and knows he will soon die but has revealed nothing of this to his family and friends. He is a professor of medicine and celebrated throughout Russia and Europe. He is a member of all the Russian, and three European, universities. “All that and a great deal more,” he writes, “makes up what is called my ‘name.’” It is a matter of pride that his fame eclipses his life as an “ordinary human being.” We see him writing a day-to-day diary, in the present tense and in the first person, looking back with rigid pride on his distinguished career and in the manner of a doctor recording his symptoms. Dryly—if with some vanity—he sets out his physical condition: a bald, dingy wrinkled old man with false teeth, mouth turning down at one side when he talks or lectures. He is subject to attacks of tic douloureux, the sight of which must stir “in everyone the grim and impressive thought, Evidently that man will soon die.” His memory is going, his ideas now lack sequence; the simpler the subject he writes about, the more agonizing is the effort, and he feels more at ease writing a learned article than when composing a congratulatory letter or a memorandum. He notes that he writes better in German or English than in Russian. Intellectually he is devastating. He knows he is unrepen-tantly an egotist. He still retains the belief
that science is the most essential thing in the life of man; that it always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love…. This faith is perhaps naïve and may rest on false assumptions, but it is not my fault that I believe that and nothing else.
Although the voice in the story is exclusively the professor’s, his “stream of consciousness” is as stern, sweeping and controlled as the Preacher’s in the withering book of Eccle-siastes, yet the narrative is particular and rippling with the Chekhovian sense of intimate drama.
The professor is an insomniac. At night his household becomes clear to us because of the sounds made by his family.
Two rooms away from me my daughter Liza says something rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the drawing-room with a candle and invariably drops the matchbox; or a warped cupboard creaks.
An uneasy family. At dawn a cock crows, the porter below coughs with anger. The professor wakes and waits for his wife to come in and say—what she always says—that she is “just looking for something,” before she asks how he has slept. He knows by heart what she will say. It will be about money: that he owes money to the porter; that he has forgotten to send the monthly fifty rubles to their son, who is leading an extravagant life in Warsaw; that bread (thank God) is cheaper, but sugar is going up; that their daughter Liza, who is studying at the conservatoire, is ashamed to go out in her shabby fur coat when everyone knows that her father is a professor of the highest distinction; and on to her nagging lament that he refuses to add to their income by going into private practice as a doctor. He tries to calm her. Liza comes in, looking as pretty as his wife used to look when she was young, but after his sleepless night it seems to him that her kiss is “like the sting of a bee. I give a false smile and turn my head away.” Although he is a confirmed egotist he is ashamed of the secret thought that if his daughter were really concerned for him she would give up her expensive music lessons!
He is glad to be off to the university, to his real home, the home of his fame and power. Every day as he passes the little beer shop where, when he was a student, he used to make notes for his thesis, he never fails to remember dryly that this was where he wrote his first passionate love letters to his wife and that his diesis was entided Historia Morbi. Now at the university he meets the old hall porter who knows by heart every item of the careers of a whole generation of professors; in his way, the porter is an unconscious parody of them. He has picked up a hundred words of Latin and makes “free use of our terminology” and is vain of being able to set up a skeleton for the lecturers. There is the comedy of the professor’s interchanges with the faculty. They are all watching one another, of course; each of them obviously hoping to be his successor.
