Chekhov: A Biography

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.”