Chekhov: A Biography

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.

We are struck first by the plain austerity of Chekhov’s style. The narrator investigates the dreadful condition of an out-of-date hospital (such as many Chekhov must have seen when he was organizing resistance to the cholera). The hospital stands in a barren wilderness outside the town: the only other building in sight is the prison. We see the patients in the crowded wards, hear of the corrupt sale of drugs and medicines. Then the outside narrator slips away and the scene moves into the close-up of a particular room, Ward 6, in which five lunatics are isolated. Dr. Ragin, in charge of the hospital, is visiting them. All except one of the lunatics belong to the artisan class. There is a laborer who simply stares at the floor all day; another is a post-office sorter who gazes secretively from time to time at a medal under his shirt. He believes he has been awarded the Stanislas Medal and that he will shortly get the Swedish medal of the Golden Star. Another is a harmless Jew who went mad when his hat factory was destroyed in a fire—the only patient who is allowed out into the town, where he begs for a ruble or two and is the butt of the shopkeepers. The fifth, Gromov, is an educated paranoiac who gradually went mad after his father was imprisoned for fraud. Gromov believes he is guilty of murder. They are supervised by a warder, a brutal ex-soldier, who beats the lunatics when they become restive.

Dr. Ragin strikes us at first as being a concerned and humane man. He is aware that the hospital is scandalously out-of-date and offers nothing from the great advances in medicine of the last thirty years. He is drawn to Gromov, who has a sharp intellect and is a good talker in a destructive way, even if he will, in the end, fly into a paranoiac rage. To Ragin he is the only man in the hospital with whom he can discuss serious subjects, or indeed in the self-satisfied little town outside. He has stopped going out into local “society.” He consoles himself with serious philosophical reading, and he and Gromov have arguments about Marcus Aurelius and stoicism and dispute the necessity of suffering. Gromov is mad and Ragin is trying to calm him. Conversation is the spell. At one point he makes the distinctly Chekhovian remark that “books are the printed score, while talk is the singing.” Gromov will attack Ragin’s arguments savagely one day and the next he will be languid. Ragin likes Gromov’s voice, his young intelligent face, and he even admires the man’s anger when he admits his mania and cries out that there are moments when he is overwhelmed by the thirst for life and begs for news of the outside world. Ragin makes regular visits to the Ward. Gromov suddenly asks him what will turn out to be a disturbing question:

“Have you any idea of suffering? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed in your childhood?”

(This is, of course, one of Chekhov’s own obsessive memories.) Ragin says he was not. Gromov pounces:

“No one has laid a finger on you all your life…. You grew up under your father’s wing and studied at his expense, and then you dropped at once into a sinecure. For more than twenty years you have lived rent-free with heating, lighting and service all provided…. You have handed over your work to the assistant and the rest of the rabble while you sit in peace and warmth, save money, read, amuse yourself with reflections, with all sorts of lofty nonsense, and [looking at Ragin’s florid peasant face] with boozing.”

Yes, in his self-isolated life in the hospital, Ragin has become a tippling conformist, his mind closed to change. Hospital regulations are a cocoon or simply a convenient private study.

The drama now is reversed. An ambitious young doctor, Khobotov, is intriguing to climb into Ragin’s job. The rumor is spread that Ragin’s visits to Ward 6 are suspect, a sign of “tiredness,” “illness,” or perhaps worse. He is summoned before a small informal commission of local doctors and officials (essentially a trial of his sanity), after which it is suggested that he should go on holiday. He gladly does so with the only friend he has in the town, an amiable, irresponsible postmaster, who takes him on a trip to Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw. The postmaster is an average lazy, unreliable “good fellow,” a genial liar, who is eager for a spree and thinks the trip will do Ragin good. This is the necessary “moment of rest” in the story, the point at which it will turn. Halfway through the holiday Ragin is bored by “the real world of pleasure.” His will goes. While the postmaster goes out looking for women, gambling, losing his money and borrowing heavily from Ragin—money he will never repay—Ragin lies all day in the hotel, his face turned to the wall. “Real happiness,” he says, “is impossible without solitude.” When he returns to the hospital he finds that Khobotov has taken his job. Ragin utters an alarming phrase: “I have got into an enchanted circle.” Indeed he has: Khobotov slyly puts Ragin into Ward 6 and Gromov is triumphant.

“So they have put you in here too. You sucked the blood of others, and now they will suck yours.”

And, sarcastically,

“You should be philosophical.”

When Ragin goes to the door to leave the ward, and complains, the warder knocks him out. Mad or not, Ragin dies of a stroke. Chekhov took pride in evoking this death in detail and is as effective in the last visions of the dying as he was in the death scene in Gusev:

[Gromov] and millions of people believed in immortality…. But [Ragin] did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter.

That registered letter! How perfect that random, final item of his vision is.

In his letters Chekhov was surprisingly offhand or defensive about Ward 6. This is partly due to his modesty or perhaps also to his awareness that to create characters whose opinions are simplifications of a conflict in his own nature was no more than analysis and derived from his reading. The contrast between the man who believes in a gospel of endurance derived from Marcus Aurelius (whose Meditations were very influential reading all over Europe at that time) and the man who rebels against his chains is a matter of fruidess debate. To judge from Chekhov’s reply to a letter from Suvorin—who seems to have suggested the story was “lemonade” and needed more “alcohol”—Chekhov was almost submissive when he replied that this was an illness of his generation. In short, for Suvorin the story was a passive allegory when it ought to have had the dramatic force of parable. The great masters of the past not merely were good writers, but, Chekhov said, make one feel that

they are going towards something… have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing…. And we? … We paint life as it is, but beyond that—nothing at all.

He also agreed that the story stinks of the hospital and the mortuary.

And he writes, perhaps slyly, to the incurably sentimental and pursuing Lydia Avilova:

I am finishing a story (“Ward No. 6”), a very dull one, owing to a complete absence of woman and the element of love. I can’t endure such stories.

The truth remains that if Chekhov has projected a frightening and sterile universe, the line-by-line events of the story are powerful and blasting. Perhaps he felt that the irony of a situation in which a prison governor himself becomes voluntary prisoner was too neat. Ragin is a portrait of a governor who has come to think the real criminals are outside the walls. The truth is that the story is a study of the nightmare of absolute solitude.

One more story closes what has been called the “clinical” period of Chekhov’s writing at Melikhovo, The Black Monk, and it is much weaker. It sprang, according to his sister, from a dream that had excited Chekhov one afternoon at Melikhovo. Here, Kovrin, the dreamer, is suffering from nervous exhaustion. He is staying on the enormous estate of a certain Pesotsky, who has barbered his trees into bizarre shapes, as if in mockery of Nature. Kovrin marries Tanya, the daughter of the house, and becomes a university professor, all the while feeling that he has betrayed his genius by keeping healthy and leading a normal life. This obsession is strengthened by hallucinations when he comes to imagine himself being visited by the Black Monk of the tide. This visionary figure comes gliding over the grounds and tells Kovrin that he is ill because his genius puts him above the common herd and is incompatible with mortal love and that he will soon the. Kovrin is in a state of nervous breakdown, and on the monk’s final visit he falls to the ground spitting blood: “his frail human body could no longer serve as the mortal garb of genius.” He dies with “a blissful smile … upon his face.”

An allegory of Chekhov’s inner life at Melikhovo? A passing, visiting intuition of what Chekhov knows about his own dilemma as a sick man, an artist and an evasive lover? Or, at the lowest, a neat fantasy the writer is turning to account? There are poetical moments—particularly when the monk comes softly as a shadow passing over the miles of fields, taking away the light from the grasses and trees—that are as evocative as the strange sight of the deer that passes before the eyes of Dr. Ragin in Ward 6. But until that moment, the narrative in The Black Monk is far too mannered and bookish. Chekhov himself spoke of it as a study of megalomania, but he has forgotten his own rule: the essential thing, when one is writing about strong or strange feelings, is to be ice-cold.

We may be guessing, for good stories do not come straight from real experience but evolve from contemplating an essence of it, but this story could very well spring from a precise instance of self-isolation in Chekhov’s life. We remember that his sister’s friend Lika Mizinova often stayed at Melikhovo. She was fascinated by his talk. Did he see that the girl was in love with him? Did he fall back on his usual fantastic jokes in self-defense? Again, he pretends she is captivated by “the Circassian Levitan” and that he has just had a charming letter from the artist containing expressions like “The devil flay you: the devil choke you.” To Levitan he has supposedly answered:

If you don’t stop pursuing Lika I’ll shove a corkscrew into you, cheap riff-raff. Don’t you know that Lika belongs to me and that we already have two children.

Lika would write back with annoyance, accusing him of egoism. Eventually she wrote him plainly in 1893:

You know quite well how I feel about you and I am not ashamed to write about it. I know also that your behaviour to me is condescending and indifferent.

In the summer of 1893 Potapenko, a young journalist from Odessa, came to stay at Melikhovo. He was a good singer and Lika accompanied him on the piano. She had notions of becoming an actress or opera singer and she may have turned to him in order to make Chekhov jealous. She went back to Moscow and wrote to him:

I must know whether you are coming to Moscow, and when, or not at all. It is all the same but I have to know. Only two months remain to me in which to see you, after that perhaps never.

Chekhov wrote to her:

Lika, when will it be spring? Accept [this] question literally and do not seek for a hidden meaning in it. Alas, I am already an old young man, my love is no sun and does not make a spring for me. … It is not you whom I so ardently love. I love in you my sufferings of the past and my now perished youth.

And again he wrote to her:

You say I used to be younger. Yes, imagine! I have passed thirty some time ago and already feel forty close at hand. I have grown old, not in body only, but in spirit…. I get up and go to bed feeling as though interest in life had dried up in me.

These are not the words of a cold-hearted man who is amusing himself. He was indeed self-protective: no saint but certainly not cruel. He had a strict conscience and yet one sees him restless, burning himself out. The gende skeptical Chekhov is also the greedy observer. He will stand by his principles and yet be unknowable both in his reserve and in his laughter. In her old age and long after his death, his sister wrote about his feelings for Lika:

I do not know what was in my brother’s mind, but that it seemed to me that he strove to overcome his feelings [for Lika]. In her there were certain traits alien to him: a lack of character and a fondness for a Bohemian existence.

Defeated, Lika had an affair in Paris with Potapenko. She soon found herself deserted, pregnant, wretched and alone in Switzerland. She wrote to Chekhov and told him her story. He replied:

[T]hough you … taunt me with having rejected you, yet thank you all the same; I know perfectly well you are not going to the, and that no one has rejected you.

He himself went off on one of his sudden journeys to the south for his health. He says he simply must “write, write and write.” And then comes the usual fantasy:

Dear Lika, when you become a great singer and are paid a handsome salary, then be charitable to me, marry me, keep me at your expense, that I may be free to do nothing.

There is something odd about Chekhov’s journey. There were indeed two journeys: one with Potapenko in August 1894 down the Volga, in which Potapenko said nothing about his betrayal of Lika, and another, three weeks later, when Chekhov went off again to see his uncle Mitrofan, who was dying, then on an erratic trip to Odessa, Lvov, Vienna, Abbazia, Trieste and Venice, where he caught nettle rash, on to Genoa, whose ornate cemetery he visited, and finally to Nice, where he found the letter from Lika that told her wretched story. She was in Switzerland:

There is not a trace of the old Lika left and I cannot really say that you are to blame for it…. If you are not afraid to be disappointed you may come…. Still I don’t think you will cast a stone at me. It seems to me you were always indifferent.

Later she wrote: “What was I to do, Daddy?”

He replied that he was not indifferent to people, and that is indeed true, but he did not visit her in Switzerland. It is odd that he went on these long haphazard journeys; odder too that before he left he did not tell his family and even forgot to leave them with money.

Chekhov had supposed that Abbazia would be an innocent, antiquated little place. It turned out to be a new tourist trap, with up-to-date hotels where the rich Russian landowners, with their wives or mistresses, confided their debts or their love affairs at the top of their voices, very much in the manner of Ivanov in his play of that name. Chekhov uses Abbazia as the background to a short scene in his story Ariadne, which also has some Italian background. Ariadne is a beautiful, fickle young woman. She contracts a liaison with a landowner, Shamokhin, and the story consists of his frustrations and sufferings, as confided in the narrator, an author by profession. Shamokhin says that when Germans or English meet they talk of nothing but their business or their crops, whereas

[we Russians] discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women. … A mediocre philosopher like Max Nordau would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slave-owners…. I take … a different view. … we are dissatisfied [with women] because we are idealists.

He evokes Ariadne’s spell when he knew her as a willful and spoiled young girl who so fascinated him that he has almost ruined himself and his father to pay for her extravagances. He believes he can hold her by educating her, for he sees her predatory habits arise from lack of education, and he has been dragging her around art galleries and museums and has introduced her to celebrated and learned men. She simply pretends to know what they are talking about; indeed she is a natural liar in everything. This comedy is well done, for Ariadne is not a caricature of the socialite, though it must be said that Chekhov does rather press his serious view that women need to be emancipated and trained, as males are trained. To be brought up only as a sheltered wife and mother is wrong. Considering the idleness of Shamokhin, his talk is comic. On the other hand, there is no doubt of Ariadne’s beauty and allure. She loves her beautiful body and its spell and is entranced by gazing at it. She is proud of her erotic nature. (Earlier, in The Duel, Chekhov had shown some Tolstoyan disgust when, in his account of the bedroom scene, the lady herself has no shame.)

In Petersburg the gossip was that Ariadne was drawn from the actress Yavorskaya, who was briefly Chekhov’s mistress and who was notorious for her passion for publicity. She had once stayed at Melikhovo because Chekhov was “a famous man” and the acquaintance would give a push to her career. She said that Chekhov had been in love with her. She encouraged the rumor and was far from displeased by the tale. She later intrigued for a part in The Seagull but there he firmly turned her down.

In An Anonymous Story Chekhov turns a possible Ariadne into a very different figure. It is an unbelievable venture into the glossy well-worn subject of the Sins of Society. Perhaps it springs from his observation of the rich and cynical company Suvorin kept in Petersburg, a city Chekhov hated. An Anonymous Story is a confession. We see a young naval officer who has joined a secret group of terrorists disguise himself as a footman to a rich top Petersburg official called Orlov in order to spy on him and go through his papers. The weakness of the story is that we never see or hear of any of the “footman’s” comrades or their “Cause.” Dostoyevsky had never made that kind of mistake. Orlov has a mistress, a married woman (Zinaida), who insists on leaving home and coming to live with him, much to his dismay. The “footman” falls in love with her, studies her, obeys her orders and notes her determination to take charge of Orlov’s household. She even wants to cook, and yet she has been reading Turgenev and sees herself, he thinks, as the luxurious Odin-tsova in Fathers and Sons. When the corrupt Orlov is unfaithful to her the “footman” nobly rescues her and escapes with her to Nice and Venice. The two are not lovers, for she is pregnant by Orlov and indeed dies in giving birth to a baby girl. There is even a suggestion that she has poisoned herself. The plot and scene are plain Ouida: it is an odd fact that Chekhov had read Ouida with admiration! Before the girl’s death the “footman” confesses that he has broken with the terrorists on principle. She comes to life in our minds when she points out that he has done this simply because he has no character, no will of his own. She knows his only “terrorist” act had been slapping the face of one of Orlov’s important friends with a bunch of newspapers! The good things in the story are the thumbnail portraits of Orlov’s corrupt, card-playing and wenching friends. There is also a neat portrait of Zinaida’s thieving maid. Orlov’s polished cynicism is well observed. Chekhov noted that Orlov reads a great deal but that “even when he reads” there is a look of irony on his face. Chekhov admitted that he had “botched” the end of the tale.

It is a relief to see him turning to the world he really knows in two genuine stories: The Teacher of Literature, into which he dipped when he came to writing The Three Sisters; and the one he once called his favorite among all his works, The Student. It is certainly one of his most tender, subtle and poetic allegories. It may have been suggested by the simple religious parables that Tolstoy was writing at this time, or by the pious Leskov’s mystical tales, though, unlike Leskov, Chekhov was a confirmed atheist. Chekhov’s story takes a step far beyond trite religious insinuation, and if it is a parable, it is a parable about the imagination. On the eve of Good Friday a young and pious theological student is seen walking home along empty marshland in a bitterly cold wind and he is thinking:

[J]ust such a wind had blown in the days of Ryurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter [the Great], and … there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression—all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better.

He comes upon two widowed peasant women, a mother and her daughter, who live in an almshouse. They are sitting by a bonfire in the garden, washing up their bowls and spoons, and he joins them to warm his frozen hands by their fire. They tell him they have been to a Bible meeting—professional news for a naive young theologian. He holds out his hands to the fire and to profit by the occasion he says, “At just such a fire the Aposde Peter warmed himself … so it must have been cold then, too.” And then he is impelled to remind them, almost as gossip, of how, little by little, Saint Peter had denied Christ three times before the Crucifixion. And as he goes on, earnestly bringing to life that faraway time, he notices that the older woman is moved to sob “as though ashamed of her tears,” and that the young woman, who had in her time been beaten to a state of stupidity by her husband, has become tense like “someone enduring intense pain.” The student leaves them, pleased at first by his skill in bringing to present life an old story, and then he begins to wonder why the woman wept.

[It was] not because he could tell the story touchingly … but because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul. And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. The past, he thought, is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another … when he touched one end the other quivered … that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvelous and full of lofty meaning.