Chekhov, page 9
And indeed, in one of the most original ironical opening scenes Chekhov ever wrote, we see Layevsky at his most lamentable. He and the amiable doctor—one of Chekhov’s skeptics who are ashamed of their good nature—have gone to the beach to take a morning dip and are up to their shoulders in water. The secretive Layevsky has chosen this moment to ask the doctor’s advice: “Suppose you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or three years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel that you had nothing in common with her. How would you behave in that case?” Just tell her to go where she pleases, says the doctor. But suppose, says Layevsky, she has no friends to go to, no money, no work. Five hundred rubles down or an allowance of twenty-five a month, the doctor says. Nothing more simple. But, Layevsky says, even supposing you have five hundred rubles and the woman is educated and proud, how would you do it?
Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the shingle. The friends got out and began dressing. “Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don’t love her,” said Sa-moylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. “But one must look at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I would never show a sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I died.” He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said: “But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go to the devil.”
Layevsky nags away shamelessly. He is one of those “superfluous men of the sixties”—we have seen the type in On the Road and in Ivanov. “I have to generalize about everything I do,” Layevsky continues. “Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!” He had run away with a married woman to live an idyll, the simple life in the Caucasus, but now they are quarreling. The house smells of ironing, powder, medicine. The same curling irons are lying about every morning. The doctor says: “You can’t get on in the house without an iron,” and blushes at Layevsky speaking “so openly of a lady he knew.”
There is no hotel in the little resort. The doctor, who loves his food, runs a little table d’hôte where he entertains his friends, who include a silly young deacon who is Von Koren’s butt because he will talk of nothing but religion. The deacon’s only resource is liability to accident, a matter of importance to the story later on.
We now see Nadezhda Fyodorovna at home. She has no idea that Layevsky is plotting to leave her. She is absorbed in her restlessness. She has been unable to resist going to bed with a vulgar police officer in the town and is also being tempted by the son of a shopkeeper to whom she owes money for her gaudy dresses. She knows she cannot control her sexuality. The Duel is one of the rare Chekhov stories in which the sexual subject is explicit. Her state is activated by an intimate illness.
She was glad that of late Layevsky had been cold to her, reserved and polite, and at times even harsh and rude; in the past she had met all his outbursts, all his contemptuous, cold or strange incomprehensible glances, with tears, reproaches, and threats to leave him or starve herself to death; now she only blushed, looked guiltily at him, and was glad he was not affectionate to her. If he had abused her, or threatened her, it would have been better and pleasanter, since she felt hopelessly guilty towards him.
In her kitchen she flushes “crimson” when she looks at her cook, as though fearing the cook might hear her thoughts.
In another beach scene we see her sharing a bathing hut with a deeply respectable married woman. Later, after Na-dezhda’s husband has died, this woman will tell her that it is her duty to society to marry Layevsky at once, and will refer to the state of Nadezhda’s underclothes—emblems of sin—which she has seen at the beach. She cannot allow her children to come near her. Nadezhda is naïvely incredulous. While she lies in bed all day, Layevsky, who has a minor and neglected job in the Civil Service, is out all day and night on secretive journeys, intriguing to get the doctor to lend him money or to raise it from his friends, so that he can leave his mistress and go to Moscow.
We notice that Chekhov has the art of building his stories out of small journeys that lead to longer and more decisive journeys, in which his people gather together and then redistribute themselves and unknowingly create the stages of their fate. In The Duel the picnic scene is one of the most impressive examples of this art. His people drive in coaches to a gorge in the wild mountains where all will have the sensation that Nature has shut them in. As if a chorus, silent peasants, perhaps alien Tatars, will creep out and watch the picnic as polite Samoylenko lights a fire and fusses over cooking a meal. The tourists wander about and Layevsky provokes an argument with Von Koren. Later, Von Koren talks of Layevsky and Nadezhda as a pair of immoral brainless Japanese monkeys. She is wandering gaily off, followed by her ex-lover, the coarse police captain, whom she is ashamed of, and now snubs. He works himself up into a stage speech: “And so it seems our love has withered before it has blossomed, so to speak,” and sulks off. She is now approached by a beach acquaintance, the dandyish son of a rich shopkeeper, and is surprised to find herself thinking that she could easily get her large debt to him wiped out if she agreed to go to bed with him. It would be fun to do that and then send him packing.
The peasants, sitting apart in the darkness, start quietly singing, and this stirs the naive deacon and sends his mind traveling in the dream that in ten years’ time he will be a holy archimandrite, leading beautiful religious processions in his uncle’s church. At midnight the party will return quarreling, each frantic to pursue a secret dream. Nadezhda will be forced to give in to the police captain once more; his rival, the shopkeeper’s son, will take his revenge and in a very dramatic night scene will take Layevsky to the low house of rendezvous, where he will be convinced of his mistress’s guilt. Layevsky will have an attack of hysteria and accuse the doctor and Von Koren of “spying” on him and will fling at them a challenge to a duel. Firmly the challenge is accepted by Von Koren; he has been itching for it.
Chekhov is dramatic, but never melodramatic. Once more the rippling details of the journeys of the mind disperse melodrama. He has an instinct for the musical interweaving of changing moods. It is perfect that the duel is at dawn, at the remote, innocent scene of the picnic, where the morning landscape is changed after a stormy night. We see the foolish deacon, frightened and yet unable to resist the deplorable sight of a duel. In his way the deacon is a comic, calming, diversionary character, born to lose the thread of his ideas, but he is delightful in his naive curiosity, which saves him from his doubts: though duelists are heathens and an ecclesiastical person “should keep clear of their company,” was it just to shun them?
“They are sure to be saved,” he says aloud, lighting a cigarette. “Human life,” he reflects, “is so artlessly constructed….” He compromises, when he arrives at the scene, by hiding in a field to watch.
How does Chekhov evoke the first sign of daylight? By a simple, strange detail: the deacon knows that daylight has come because he can at last see the white stick he is carrying.
The duel itself is amateurish. Von Koren has brought two young officers as seconds; they have never been present at a duel and bicker comically about the formalities. Is this the moment to propose a reconciliation? There is a doctor, who is careful to demand his fee. Layevsky is certain, as he stares at Von Koren, that the man intends to kill him. A second before Von Koren fires the deacon jumps up in the maize field and shouts and the shot faintly grazes Layevsky’s neck.
To later critics the final act of the story is spoiled by its moral ending in the Tolstoyan fashion, for the lovers forgive each other. This is, however, very convincing. Layevsky has had a fright and gets down seriously to work in order to pay his debts. He and his mistress move into a humbler house. We hear no more of the minor characters, who have played their part in the indispensable chorus. On second thoughts we see the end is open, even after the reconciliation, which embarrasses the two enemies. Layevsky eagerly goes to see his enemy off at the harbor. Von Koren is rowed out to the steamer that will take him on his expedition. The sea is very rough. Born to dramatize and moralize about his situation, Layevsky watches the boat driven back by the waves yet, in the end, strongly making progress. He thinks:
So it is in life … in the search for truth man makes two steps forward and one step back…. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last.
Chekhov took great trouble with the last lines of his stories. Here he is dryly dismissive:
It began to spot with rain.
The strength of The Duel lies in the ingenuity of its playlike architecture, in which the major characters make speeches and the minor characters act as a chorus. They are not a passive moralizing chorus—they incite the action. The Tatar onlookers watch almost in silence. To them the imbroglio is alien. If, as everyone has noticed, Tolstoy’s influence is still marked, Chekhov is more forgiving of Nadezhda’s sexual misdemeanor than Tolstoy is of the wife in The Kreutzer Sonata. Reserve rather than abstinence, pity rather than condemnation, are more characteristic of Chekhov.
While he was deep in the elaborate design of The Duel and still laboring over his documentary book on Sakhalin, he could rely on his virtuosity to write satirically of an adultery in The Grasshopper. It is very sternly a Tolstoyan story; indeed Tolstoy admired it as a parable on “the wages of sin.” We see a giddy young wife, married to a doctor who is dedicated to his profession, having a secret affair with a painter whom she has drawn to her silly “artistic” salon. She is soon disillusioned when the painter takes her to live among an art colony in the country. The painter drops her and she returns to her husband, a shy and saintly man, who pretends not to know. This, at the center of the story, is ingeniously managed. Accident intervenes: the doctor catches a fatal infection at his hospital and dies. The wife is frantic with remorse. How to convey her remorse at a deathbed? Here Chekhov, the doctor, is masterly. Her head is full of noises of the house as the doctors try to save her husband. She hears the monotonous striking of the clock, hour after hour, and the sound grows into a dull roar. She sinks into a doze on her bed.
She dreamed that the whole flat was filled from floor to ceiling with a huge piece of iron and that if they could only get the iron out they would all be light-hearted and happy. Waking she realized that it was not the iron but Dymov’s illness that was weighing on her.
Nature morte, port … she thought, sinking into forgetfulness again. Sport—Kurort … and what of Shrek? Shrek … trek—wreck…. And where are my friends now? …
Her lover, the fashionable painter, had the silly boring habit of making up nonsensical, rhyming words that used to amuse her: now they are part of her torture.
And again the iron was there.
How close to the images and sounds, frightening and then puerile, Chekhov comes.
Too close, in fact. Making up silly rhyming words was a mannerism of his friend the painter Levitan, who was enraged and threatened a libel action. He was a well-known fantasist and suicidal neurotic. However, the quarrel passed off.
Chapter Ten
In 1891 Chekhov was living under great strain. He was unable to take his family to the Lintvaryov estate in the Ukraine because the doctor-daughter of the family, the woman with the tumor on the brain, had died. Chekhov’s father, Pavel, had retired from his ill-paid job at the haberdashery warehouse and now plagued the home and raged against his wife. Chekhov did at last find a house for the summer months at Bogimovo, a huge mansion in which the family occupied only the top floor, but it was annoying that the rest of the house had been sublet. He was still grinding away at the now uncongenial and long documentary study of Sakhalin. He got up at five in the morning to toil on Sakhalin on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The rest of the week he worked on stories.
I dream of winning forty thousand [rubles], so as to cut myself off completely from writing, which I am sick of, to buy a little bit of land and live … in … seclusion.
And then comes news of famine in Nizhny Novgorod. The crops had failed and the peasants were killing their horses. He stopped writing and for months gave himself solely to the national appeal for funds to save the farmers. He traveled about begging money—helped by Suvorin—from the rich landowners and exhausted himself. By the winter he had a long bout of influenza; his secret illness was now attacking his stomach and bowels. It was clear that he could not stay in Moscow. He must get a house of his own in the country. In the early spring he heard of one in the village of Meli-khovo in the Serpukhov district, two hours away from Moscow by train. A painter was selling up and, typically, Chekhov was sure of the house before he saw it. It was more than a house. Five hundred and seventy-five acres of land went with it. The “son of a serf” was fulfilling a secret dream: he was setting up as a landowner himself with an estate! There was a park, a fruit garden, a long avenue of limes. Chekhov borrowed four thousand rubles from Suvorin and got a ten-year mortgage: the total cost was thirteen thousand rubles. If he had been in Germany, he said, he would certainly have been made a duke! The land was divided into two plots, one hundred acres being woodland and copse:
The barns and sheds have been recently built, and have a fairly presentable appearance. The poultry house is made in accordance with the latest deductions of science, the well has an iron pump. The whole place is shut off from the world by a fence in the style of a palisade.
The roof of the house was of corrugated iron, there was “a verandah, French windows, and so on,” but the house was “not sufficiently new, having outside a very stupid and naive appearance, and inside swarms with bugs and beetles.”
There was the indispensable pond full of carp and tench, and a stream. The family moved in and slaved for months at putting the house to rights. One amusing effect of the move was that old Pavel’s choleric temper calmed down. It was he, indeed, the real “son of a serf,” who at once gave himself the airs of an aristocratic landowner, who insisted on being called Master by the peasants and servants and restored dignity to the village by organizing the Easter singing at the church. The peasants were delighted to have a doctor in residence for the first time in their lives and Chekhov soon had a thousand patients trooping to the door. “A nice man,” one said. “He gives me medicine and doesn’t charge me anything.” Labor was cheap: “I begin to see the charms of capitalism,” Chekhov said.
Mice swarmed in the house. Chekhov trapped them and went out into the woods to set them free. He loathed killing animals and had given up shooting years before. His sister gave up her art classes in Moscow, and they were soon out planting hundreds of trees and she managed the large kitchen gardens. In the first year there were “mountains of cucumbers, marvelous cabbages,” and the corn harvest was excellent. The disasters were enjoyable:
Our gander [Chekhov wrote to his friends in the South] jumped on the back of a farm woman and hung on to her kerchief. Our cook, Darya, drunk as usual, dropped the eggs from under the geese, so that only three hatched out. Our pig has a nasty habit of biting people and eating our Indian corn. We’ve bought a calf for six rubles and she keeps on serenading us in a low bass voice.
All he knows about agriculture, he says, is that the earth is black. His debt depresses him, but he forgets it as he puzzles over the proper way to sow wheat and clover. The snow gives way to the mud of the thaw, the starlings return, the nightingales sing, the frogs are croaking. Soon his brothers and their families and a predatory crowd of visitors arrive, and just as he had had to do in Moscow, he is eventually obliged to leave the house and write in a one-room chalet he has rigged up. Among the visitors is a friend of his sister’s from Moscow, Lika Mizinova, to whom he writes teasing notes.
Ah, lovely Lika! when you bedewed my right shoulder with your tears (I have taken out the spots with benzine), and when slice after slice you ate our bread and meat, we greedily devoured your face and head with our eyes…. Ah, Lika, Lika, diabolical beauty! … When you are at the Alhambra with Trofimov [an imaginary lover], I hope you may accidentally jab out his eye with your fork.
Other visitors are Lydia Yavorskaya, a young actress whom he called a “hussy,” and a sentimental young novelist, Lydia Avilova, whose manuscript he had read. He gave her sound and very Chekhovian advice on writing:
When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh.
At Melikhovo he was soon appointed “cholera superintendent doctor” (for twenty-five villages, which included four factories and one monastery)—also “sanitary attendant” for the zemstvo (district council) without remuneration. He drives about in a scurvy carriage. He has begged lime, vitriol and “all sorts of stinking stuff” from the manufacturers, necessary when cholera comes nearer.
It was important to him that this work was a matter of private conscience. When cholera creeps as near as twenty miles from the place, he goes begging for money from his rich neighbors. On one of his begging missions he goes to a rich landowner’s house where he is treated de haut en bas as a tiresome official, and he puts the rich man and his wife at a loss by pretending to be a millionaire. He had little respect for the country gentry, who had no sense of public obligation and who, as we see in The Wife, passed their days and nights in gluttonous eating, heavy drinking and playing cards, patronizing everyone, especially doctors, as being beyond the pale. They dismissed the peasants as cadgers and thieves.
Chekhov complains that his doctoring in this period has stopped him from writing. What he meant was that he was not finishing what he wrote. In his letters he says that he is kept going financially by the royalties from a one-act “Vaudeville,” The Bear, which he had scribbled out years before. Now he turns to an unfinished story, one in which Sakhalin becomes Russia itself. The story, Ward 6, is one of the most intense, powerful and claustrophobic he ever wrote. He was eight months writing it and it runs to fifty pages. When Lenin read it in his youth he said it had made him a revolutionary: for ourselves it may seem to foretell Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward.
