Chekhov: A Biography

Chapter Nine

The immediate reward of Chekhov’s Sakhalin adventure was an extraordinary leap of his imagination. It was prompted by an incident he had witnessed on the sea voyage home. He had seen two men buried at sea. In Gusev he turns from his prison documents to a fable that grows out of this incident and, one must suppose, from his preoccupation with his own illness. Gusev is traveling by sea with other soldiers sent home on sick leave. They are on edge and their talk is querulous and wanders between their real life of the moment and delirium. At sea one simply exists, outside society. Three soldiers are playing cards, and one of them drops his cards in the middle of the game and lies down on the floor. Dryly and offhand the others realize he has died. We listen to Pavel, a townsman, who is angered by his fears: his pain has made him sadistic. He is a class-conscious political, a real recalcitrant, who hates the officer class: he is contemptuous and patronizing of the naive Gusev, who is a peasant. Pavel jeers at Gusev, telling him that he won’t last the voyage; he is an ignorant peasant anyway. For example, Gusev believes what some soldier had told him: that in the night a big fish had collided with the ship and made a hole in it. When the wind howls Gusev believes that “the wind has broken loose from its chain.” Pavel mocks him. To Gusev’s peasant imagination images are facts. He says:

“Suppose the fish were as big as a mountain and its back were as hard as a sturgeon and, in the same way, supposing that away yonder at the end of the world there stood great stone walls and the fierce winds were chained up to the walls.”

Tiring of that fancy, Gusev’s fevered mind drifts to precise visions of his home, and he sees his little daughter come out on her sleigh wearing big felt boots, and then, in terror, he sees

a huge bull’s head without eyes, and the horse and sledge are not driving along, but are whirling round and round in a cloud of smoke. But still he was glad he had seen his own folks.

Pavel grouses about the injustices that have been done to him and boasts of how clever he had been in tricking officials into thinking he is a man of superior class. “I am a living protest,” he says. Pavel carries on with his sneers and his rage. He is going back to Russia to defy everyone: “That is what one can call life.” It is Pavel who dies next. Days later Gusev dies. Orderlies wrap up the bodies in a sailcloth and manhandle these human parcels. We see Gusev’s body somersaulting into the sea.

Here the imagination of Chekhov himself breaks into the story, which has become a poetic allegory. We remember that he had allowed the boy’s imagination to take over scenes in The Steppe. Now Chekhov becomes the dead body of Gusev hitting the sea when he is buried.

After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he began moving more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though he were hesitating…. Then he was met by a shoal of the fish called harbour pilots…. After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.

At the very end of the story Chekhov turns our eyes away to the relieving presence of the evening sky, to evening clouds changing shape and color as the sun sinks. One will take the shape of a lion, another a triumphal arch, a third cruelly like a pair of scissors. More strangely, there is a moment when a cold green light shoots across the sky at the day’s beginning and again at its end—an earthly yet strangely unearthly message of birth and death, a signal: Nature is “other.”

At first reading the underwater scene seems to be an escape into the bizarre and breaks with the tone of the story: perhaps it was introduced because Chekhov himself, during his voyage home, could not resist swimming! He was tied to the ship by a rope, in the shark-infested Indian Ocean. On second thoughts we see that the whole story is a visionary meditation on the helpless “holiness of the human body,” and we see also that the incident is entirely written in the same key as the talk of Pavel and Gusev: they are sick, they are delirious. Pavel’s boastings of his political wrongs and his angry conviction of his superiority are as much fantasy as is Gusev’s peasant vision of the bull’s head and his belief that a fish can make a hole in the ship and that the winds are breaking out of walls to which they are chained. Chekhov’s imagination seems to be transforming and allaying his own fears in his race with death. The realist is for the moment a Symbolist.

The more lasting influence of Sakhalin was that the convicts and settlers had given him an intimate and grimmer knowledge of peasant life in Russia—where 80 percent of the population were peasants. Peasant Wives is plainly a Sakhalin story. Crime grows out of the family quarrels of the peasants, quarrels of greed, jealousy and adultery in which the women, especially, brood on the killings they urge the men to do. Their talk tells all.

The married Varvara is sleeping with the priest’s son for half a ruble a time, but she tells another woman:

“[It’s] better to be struck dead by thunder than live like this. I’m young and strong and I’ve a filthy crooked hunchback for a husband, worse than Dyudya himself, curse him! When I was a girl, I hadn’t bread to eat, or a shoe to my foot, and to get away from that wretchedness I was tempted by Alyoshka’s money, and got caught like a fish in a net, and I’d rather have a viper for my bedfellow than that scurvy Alyoshka…. You work like a horse and never hear a kind word…. I’d rather beg my bread, or throw myself into the well.”

The two women lie down to sleep in the yard and talk about young Mashenka, who poisoned her husband and died in jail.

“I’d make away with my Alyoshka and never regret it,” Varvara says softly.

“You talk nonsense, God forgive you.”

Varvara whispers: “Let us get rid of Dyudya and Alyoshka.”

“God would chastise us.”

“Well, let Him.”

So thoughts of murder creep into the next day. The sunrise lights up the crosses in the churchyard and the next moment the sun is flashing on the windows, the sheep have got loose and peasant women are shouting at the shepherd, who is playing his pipes and pauses to crack his whip. What had been a woman’s raw and short confession in Sakhalin Chekhov has domesticated in the working life of any Russian day. Mashenka had poisoned her husband after he had thrashed her with a bridle. He had walked with her in the chain gang after her trial. Their forgotten life comes to us as we listen to the two women’s whispering.

Another story whose roots can be traced to Sakhalin is the extraordinary, violent Murder, written four years later in 1895, in which we find a wretched, religious hypocrite—a character who recalls the peasant hypocrite Iudushka, who appears in Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family.

While Chekhov was still working on and off on the Sakhalin book—and indeed while he continued his research for it—he was writing stories to “keep my family from starving”; to pay off the debts he had run into in his travels. He continued to run after two hares—literature and what had become social medicine. There was famine among the peasants in many provinces, and he put down his pen to collect subscriptions for its relief, and went to the scene. In The Wife, a story that has been underrated by many critics, there is an account of a landowner being forced by his wife against his will to collect relief. He drives wildly by sleigh through the stricken villages and achieves nothing beyond a night of gluttony.

Before Sakhalin Chekhov had been strangely carried away by Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. Now he begins to change his mind about Tolstoy:

Something in me protests…. reason and justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat. War is an evil and legal justice is an evil; but it does not follow that I ought to wear bark shoes and sleep on the stove with the labourer and so on…. But that is not the point, it is not a matter of pro and con; the thing is that … Tolstoy has passed for me, he is not in my soul, and he has departed from me, saying: “I leave this your house empty.” I am untenanted. I am sick of theorising of all sorts…. Patients in a fever do not want food, but they do want something, and that vague craving they express as “longing for something sour….” I, too, want something sour. … I notice the same mood in others. … It is as if they had been in love, had fallen out of love … and now were looking for some new distraction…. Natural science is performing miracles now.

Natural science! In The Duel we see the conflict between Tolstoy’s Christian ethic and Darwinism and a reply to the accusation that Chekhov had evaded the crucial Russian demand for a statement of his “convictions.” In his letters he calls The Duel a novel. It is not episodic and haphazard like the discarded Stories of the Lives of My Friends, but a long, carefully designed piece of work held together by a central conflict of ideas sustained to the end and rooted in the interplay of the characters and the influences of the scene. It is one of his most sustained yet various and discreetly ordered fictions. It seems to have been provoked by a meeting with a German zoologist, a strong Darwinian and a dogmatic believer in the survival of the fittest. In the story Chekhov describes a zoologist, Von Koren, who happens to be staying briefly at a Caucasian seaside resort before setting out on a scientific expedition to the Bering Strait.

In the resort he passes the time with an idle hospitable doctor, studies the guests and decides that one of them, Layevsky, is a decadent and irresponsible Petersburg type whom Nature will reject as unfit to survive. If the Layevskys of this world are not disposed of they will corrupt and destroy civilization. They are vain, they are loose in their morals, they corrupt women, they are irresponsible and idle. The mere sight of Layevsky wandering about the town in his slippers, playing cards all night and talking about himself and his ideals, condemns him in Von Koren’s eyes.

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.