Chekhov

Chapter Twelve

By the spring of 1895 Chekhov had been three years at Melikhovo and had contrived to make his responsibilities as a son, a concerned landowner, a doctor and restless writer interlock. As for money, it was always short. In Russia, he says, the smallest success in farming is gained only at the price of a cruel struggle with nature: “You have to take the axe and scythe yourself.” Still, his copse has grown a yard taller and “will make capital for my heirs, who will call me an ass, for heirs are never satisfied.” We reflect on his secret bad health: at the heart of that concern is his responsibility to his parents and his sister. But for her devotion to him his sister might well have married.

In this year, 1895, his writing was interrupted by a conference of doctors in the province. They inspected hospitals. Then Chekhov turned to building a new school; the old one was dark, poorly furnished and not fit for teachers or children. Chekhov, helped by his sister, drew up plans, dealt with the contractors about bricks, mortar and timber, and pressed for higher pay for the wretched schoolteachers. In January and February 1897 Chekhov helped to conduct the national census of that year. He had to traipse from one peasant hut to another, knocking his head on the low doorways, carrying “detestable inkpots,” wearing an official badge, and carrying a portfolio into which the census forms did not fit.

When they turned from Chekhov’s life at Melikhovo during this period to the story The House with the Mezzanine, his readers were at first astonished to see that he seemed to be attacking everything he believed in. How was it possible that the builder of schools, libraries, the advocate of better hospitals, the practical worker in popular education could ridicule a young educated woman who is giving her life to these practical and enlightened causes? She is no idle do-gooder who forgets to attack the root of the matter—the government official who is the source of the corruption of the province. When the story begins we see at once that Chekhov has been careful to unself himself by turning the narrative over to a narrator unlike himself: an idle landscape painter. To get away from his host, a local landowner, whose conversation is tedious, the painter wanders about the idyllic countryside and discovers a charming little house owned by a pleasant old lady and her two good-looking daughters. One is a public-spirited teacher, the other an idle girl of seventeen who sits about reading. Antagonism arises between him and the teacher. He is soon arguing that her attempts to enlighten the peasants are futile, that education, libraries, even medical centers are useless. The misery, the very ignorance of the peasants, arises from back-breaking physical labor. (The liberal editor of Russian Thought, Vukol Lavrov, had heard this argument from Chekhov himself.) The elder sister is domineering. She is nevertheless excellent in argument as she fights back. What use is landscape painting? And she makes one deadly point: the painter’s landscapes lack an indispensable element—they have no people in them. Her temper and no doubt her jealousy are aroused when she sees the painter and her sister falling in love. Drastically and secretly she packs the young girl away to stay with distant relations, the end of the affair that has not even had a farewell kiss.

If landscape with its indifference to people pervades the debate in The House with the Mezzanine, it has little place in the theme of fierce class conflict in My Life, one of Chekhov’s longest and most vigorous stories. In its freedom from the episodic weakness of Three Tears it has the elaborate and sustained design of a short novel. It clearly derives from Chekhov’s experience in building schools and working with the common run of manual laborers: the carpenters, roofers and painters, and also with the peasants, whom he has now intimately observed. Again, he had been reading Zola’s studies of class conflict, and although he rejected Zola’s forced afflatus and his spells of orgiastic sexual symbolism, he admired his careful social realism. What gives My Life its special force is that his own imagination has been refreshed once more by a return to the scenes of his boyhood in Taganrog. His early conflict with his father, old Pavel, has been brought forward and reconsidered in the light of ideas closer to experience in our own century. The father, who had been a bankrupt shopkeeper, now reappears as a provincial architect, still believing that he is filled “with the divine fire,” who builds ugly and pretentious houses. The real Pavel—whom we had seen in the story Difficult People and who ruled by beating his sons—is now succeeded by a fictional father who strikes his son in the face and hits him with his umbrella. But the father is more than half romantic in his pretensions: he has given his son and daughter affected names, Misail and Cleopatra, suited to grown children who have been brought up to marry into the genteel families of the town.

It is his son, Misail, who writes the story of his revolt, and in the first person. The revolt is not simply a conflict with his father: it is a revolt against the corrupt money-making respectability and ethos of the ruling citizens of the town itself. Misail is not a political figure. As many critics have noticed, he is an early example of our contemporary “dropout.” We see him refusing to “get ahead” in the necessary office job. He has in fact lost nine office jobs, and not only his father but the whole town turns against him as he drifts into earning a precarious living as an ill-paid laborer in the building trade, without a decent home. The sight of him in mud- and paint-stained workman’s clothes in the streets of the town arouses jeers, and shopkeepers enjoy throwing a pail of dirty water over him from their doorways as he passes. At one time, when he is out of work, a friendly butcher, Prokofy, hires him to work in the slaughterhouse and this leads to an absurd scene with the governor of the province, who summons him to explain his rebellion. The governor remonstrates with him, suggesting that he should change his way of life or leave the area. When Misail goes to his interview wearing his stinking bloodstained clothes, the governor asks him if he is a vegetarian! A Chekhovian joke? Yes—but double-edged. Vegetarians pass as shiftless and disaffected religious sectarians in the town, to the point of being politically dangerous, or even “holy fools.” Misail’s rebellion gives him an intimate knowledge of the realities of working-class life and especially of the painters and roof builders. At first they too regard him as a crank and a fool, but then accept him because he works hard, though they are somewhat put out when he will not join them in stealing paint and cadging drinks from employers. Misail becomes particularly friendly with one craftsman, nicknamed Radish, a venturesome and crankish roofer:

He walked the roofs as freely as though he were on the ground. In spite of his being ill and pale as a corpse, his agility was extraordinary: he used to paint the domes and cupolas of the church, without scaffolding, like a young man, with only the help of a ladder and a rope, and it was rather horrible when, standing at a height far from the earth, he would draw himself erect and for some unknown reason pronounce: “Lice consume grass, rust consumes iron and lying the soul.” Or, thinking about something, would speak his thoughts aloud: “Anything may happen. Anything may happen.”

Presently the story and its scene widens. Enter the engineer who is in charge of building a new railway, a shrewd fellow, also of working-class origin, who once had a job as a greaser in Belgium. He has learned to like luxury and has bought up the houses of the ruined landowners and has given his pretty daughter an excellent education. (We have seen such a character as the engineer in Chekhov’s early story Lights.) He is blunt to Misail, who belongs to the gentry class by origin, and he sees his daughter is in love with him. Like any self-made man, he is sentimental. He encourages their idyll. They marry and he gives them one of his large country houses. His daughter longs to farm “by the book.” Here, Misail is up against another breed of manual laborers—the medieval Russian peasants. He sows and scythes but the peasants are wholesale thieves. They demand vodka by the keg, they make off with his crops openly by the wagonload, they brawl and tear up his garden. The young wife is terrified of them, and on one frightful night Misail has to rush outside to grapple with two men who are fighting. This episode confirms his wife’s growing dislike of rural life and contributes to the decision which she takes to leave him. He understands this decision and has to let her go. She wants to join her father, who has gone to America to build a railway, and Misail goes back to his life as a painter and builder.

Misail has only two friends besides Radish. One is a young and plausible doctor who argues that Misail’s proper duty to society lies in being a thinker, a scientist and intellectual, advancing civilization and the cause of human freedom. Mi-sail’s other friend is his unmarried sister, who covertly slips away from their father when she can, to console her brother. The young doctor often joins them. Why? It is one of the great merits of the story that Misail is slow to know what is going on in his sister’s mind. In her longing to get away from home she is in love with the doctor, is entranced by his talk of freedom—also, naïvely, by his dressy appearance. He is a military doctor and has a wife and three children in Petersburg. Misail doesn’t guess that his sister has been seduced by the doctor and his talk of freedom in love, and is pregnant. The scene of revelation is masterly. She is asked to take part in an amateur theatrical organized by a ludicrous couple who regard themselves as the leading patrons of the arts in the town. She goes, but on the little stage she forgets her lines, drops down to her knees, and bursts out sobbing. The hostess cries out, “She is with child,” and insists that Misail take her away at once. At the end of the story we learn that the sister has died in childbirth. The child is a little girl.

There is nothing sentimental or melodramatic in My Life. Misail tells his story honestly and plainly. Dryly, he says he is now respected in the town for his austerity. He is indifferent to pity. Like Chekhov, he is a stoic. He is now a contractor, trusted in his job, and admits he bores his workers by his moralizings. As a chronicler, he is still recording the daily stupidities of the town. Again, like Chekhov himself, he is an ardent reader of the press: “When we had the cholera [he writes], Prokofy cured the shopkeepers with pepper-brandy and tar and took money for it, and as I read in the newspaper, he was flogged for libeling the doctors as he sat in his shop.” Misail takes his sister’s little girl to see her mother’s grave. He is not withdrawn; he observes that the shopkeepers no longer throw pails of water on him as he passes down the street, though he does note that he is older, stern, rarely laughing, and has been told that he has become like “Radish.”