Chekhov: A Biography

Chapter Eleven

The summers at Melikhovo were delectable, but the winters were severe. By 1893, when he was thirty-three, Chekhov was still slaving half the week at the book on Sakhalin, which was being serialized in the “thick journal” Russian Thought, and the rest of the week working on the stories. There were exhausting trips to Moscow and Petersburg, where he restlessly “feasted,” as he said, with his friends. There was a price: he returned with what he called bronchitis caused, he said, by smoking cigars. He gave them up. He groaned about his debts and added to the work in hand his official duties as sanitary inspector of the hospitals of his region and on the zemstvo, the local council. He had become deeply depressed and talked wildly of going abroad—to South Africa, Japan and India—more precisely, of joining Tolstoy’s son Leo on a trip to the World’s Fair in Chicago! Nothing came of these dreams of travel. One reason for his depression, his brother Alexander said after a querulous visit to Melikhovo, was that he was shut up in the tedious company of his father and his simple mother, with whom he had nothing in common. Alexander said, “What sense is there in letting the A la Tremontanas devour your soul the way the rats devour candles.” (This absurd word was the nickname the sons had given their father.) Alexander begged his brother to give up the dream of idyllic peace of country life. Anton listened and said nothing. He had become notoriously an apparent listener who, even in more exciting company than Alexander’s, was given to uttering apparently irrelevant yet gnomic or fantastic comments that killed the subject. He had once interrupted a wrangling discussion of Marxism with the eccentric suggestion: “Everyone should visit a stud farm. It is very interesting,” as if his mind were wandering. Was the remark so irrelevant? Chekhov’s apparent perversities were sly. The peace of country life? The industrial revolution had seeped in here and there into the country around Melikhovo. As a doctor Chekhov saw disturbing instances of a new sickness. The traditional idle landowners and the ignorant peasants were being replaced by a new race: the factory owners, enterprising and ruthless men from the towns.

Chekhov’s concern at first is with the lives of the wives and daughters of the rich manufacturers whose homes are attached to the factory sites. His impressions are those of a doctor and are diagnoses. In A Doctor’s Visit we hear the hellish noises of the factory and are told of the boring, squalid lives of the workers. The industrial dust lies on the leaves of the lilac trees near the factory. Chekhov is a man for sounds. We hear the metallic banging made by the watchmen to warn off intruders, we sense the military nature of the organization. We see the third-rate oil paintings and terrible chandeliers of the factory owner’s house. The husband has died, but his widow lives fretfully on, tarnished by a dreary life; her daughter is on the point of a nervous breakdown. She is isolated in the home, emotionally starved, and is ruled by the classic greedy governess who is “in heaven” because she can now eat food and drink wine that were beyond her means before she took the job.

In the long story A Woman’s Kingdom there is a variation of the factory theme. Here a woman has inherited an iron works from her uncle. Although her father was his brother’s heir, he was kept “in the position of a workman [and] paid … sixteen rubles a month,” so the woman had grown up as the daughter of a “simple workman.” She hates the falsity of her new position and bitterly regrets leaving her class. Chekhov admired the novels of Zola, though, unlike Zola, he is never melodramatic. Chekhov is the doctor examining the moral sickness of industrial life, and his style remains quietly concerned and expository. He is never lush or theatrical.

He now turns to the commercial aspect of industrialism in Three Years, the chronicle of the Laptev family, whose founder has come up to Moscow from the provinces and becomes a millionaire. He makes his money in wholesale haberdashery, buying cheap, selling dear and keeping the wages of his large staff down. The father is a miserable fellow, sentimental and pious in family life, but an “Asiatic despot” in his huge warehouse. The firm is probably drawn from the one in which Chekhov’s father had been humbly employed after his flight as a bankrupt from Taganrog. The staff are obliged to “live in”; they take all their meals in the canteen; they are marched en masse to church on Sundays and old Laptev shrewdly controls them by trading on their anxieties.

Bonuses were given to all the clerks every year, but privately, so that the man who got little was bound from vanity to say he had got more…. Nothing was strictly forbidden, and so the clerks never knew what was allowed, and what was not.

Old Laptev has two sons, who are crippled by their wealth. The younger plays the fool in self-defense and goes mad; the elder makes a loveless marriage with a genteel and pious provincial girl who has married him for his money and middle-class security. The marriage is disappointing at first, but she grows fonder of her husband as the story progresses. Before his marriage he had vague “artistic” interests. He had had a mistress but now dreads the “inconvenience” of meeting her in Moscow, although he hankers after her. The mistress is said to have been drawn from the noisy Kun-dasova, the independent Bohemian friend of Suvorin and Chekhov, whom they called the “astronomer.” (She had worked in an observatory.) In the story she turns up in Moscow, cheerfully hard up, and she gets a living by giving piano lessons. She is on good terms with Yartsev, a Bohemian polyglot and writer who lives precariously by his wits.

Three Years has been called Chekhov’s “Hymn to Moscow,” and if that is so, it is Yartsev who shouts it out at the top of his voice. Unlike the colorless Laptev, he has imagination and is one of Chekhov’s Gogolian eccentrics. In a cab ride through the beautiful Moscow parks Yartsev’s fantasies run wild at the sight of the famous sunsets. Villages are on fire, he cries out, hordes of Asiatic savages are pouring in.

One of them, a terrible old man with a bloodstained face all scorched from the fire, binds to his saddle a young girl with a white Russian face, and the girl looks sorrowful, understanding…. A huge wild boar, frantic with terror, rushed through the village…. And the girl tied to the saddle was still looking.

The chronicle rambles on in its year-to-year tour of middle-class gentility, sexual frustration, familial worry and second-rate tastes. There is a small scene, absurd yet sympathetic, when the older Laptev brother is seen going in for Art and taking his wife to buy a picture at an art exhibition. With an air she poses and looks at the pictures “as her husband did, through her open fist or an opera glass.” She then drifts into a daydream and imagines herself walking through the countryside the artist has depicted. When she goes home she is angry about the vulgar pictures her husband has bought and all the knickknacks he has collected. At the end of the story we shall see her daring to wake up and venturing on flirtations with her husband’s friends. One is reminded of the chronicles of petit bourgeois ups and downs, of puzzled shames and resignations, in English and French novels of the period.

If Chekhov’s alacrity is dimmed by the duties of this long chronicle, it revives in An Anna on the Neck, written in the same year. This is set in the provinces. We see an eighteen-year-old girl forced to marry a pompous official of fifty-two because her father has ruined the family by heavy drinking. Anna is glad to get away from her sordid home and she will become as dominant and predatory as the grander lady in Ariadne; but what will remain in our minds is the guilt of the father as he says good-bye at the railway station when the honeymoon couple go off:

Anna leaned out of the window towards him and he whispered something to her, enveloping her in stale wine-fumes, blowing into her ear—it was impossible to understand what he was saying—and making the sign of the cross over her face and breast and hands…. Anna’s brothers, Petya and Andryusha, schoolboys, tugged at his coat from behind and whispered in embarrassment. “Papa, stop it … Don’t Papa.”

When the train moved, Anna saw her father running a little way after it, staggering and splashing wine out of his glass, and saw how pathetic and kind and guilty he looked.

“Hurrah!” he shouted.

That “Hurrah!” will haunt us with its absurdity and pathos; the crushed girl is entitled to her shameless and successful revenge. It will be at the unloved husband’s expense.