Chekhov

Chapter Thirteen

In August 1895 Chekhov visited Tolstoy and stayed a day and a half with him. Tolstoy’s play The Power of Darkness had had a success at Suvorin’s little theater. Tolstoy made a “marvelous impression” on Chekhov, and so did his daughters.

They adore their father [Chekhov wrote Suvorin] and have a fanatical faith in him and that means that Tolstoy is a great moral force…. A man can deceive his fiancée or his mistress as much as he likes, and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher.

But “daughters are like sparrows: you don’t catch them with empty chaff.”

Then out came the news:

Can you imagine it—I am writing a play which I shall probably not finish before the end of November. I am writing it not without pleasure, though I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage. It’s a comedy, there are three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, landscapes (view over a lake); a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love.

In a later letter to Suvorin he says of the play: “I began it forte and ended it pianissimo—contrary to all the rules of dramatic art…. [it] will be altered a million times before the coming season.”

On top of that there is the censor. The privileged Tolstoy had absolutely refused to alter a line of The Power of Darkness. It was played exactly as he wrote it. Not so with Chekhov.

The play is The Seagull. As is well known, the first performance in Petersburg was a disaster, chiefly because Chekhov had allowed a popular music-hall actress—who had no part in the play—to use the occasion for her benefit night, and so a large part of the audience was drawn from fans of her romping farces. From the moment of Nina’s exalted speech about the World Spirit, beginning

Men, lions, eagles, partridges, horned deer, … silent fishes, denizens of the deep, starfish and creatures invisible—in a word all life, all life has completed its cycle and died. For thousands of centuries Earth has not borne a single living creature…. Eternal Matter has turned them to stones, water, clouds …

and on to the claim

That World Spirit am I…. Within me is the soul of Alexander the Great, of Caesar, Shakespeare and Napoleon and of the most miserable leech …

Chekhov was satirizing a current fad. The audience shouted out “Intellectual rot” and were soon in a state of riot. When the dead seagull was brought in, a wit sitting next to a friend of Chekhov’s shouted out, “Why does this Apollonsky [the actor who played Treplev] carry a dead duck about with him?” Hiding alone in a dressing room, Chekhov was appalled at what seemed to him an attack on his person, and left the theater. He said, “Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play.”

When we look at the intimate sources of the play, we see that there was private embarrassment among Chekhov’s closest friends. Chekhov’s sister arranged for Lika Mizinova to go with her on the second night. Potapenko, who had made Lika pregnant but done nothing to help when their child was born, brought his wife with him. There were fears of “confrontations.” There was also the question of the suicidal Levitan, the painter, who had earlier threatened a libel action when he had been portrayed years before in Chekhov’s story The Grasshopper, but had recanted. Chekhov had once been called urgendy, to a country house, near a lake, to save Levitan’s life. He had attempted to shoot himself in the presence of a lady who had turned down his advances. And there was another real-life incident, which had occurred when he and Chekhov had gone out to shoot woodcock. Levitan had wounded a bird and was too distressed to kill it and had made Chekhov do the nasty job. There was no trouble with Levitan or with Potapenko after the play but Lika Mizinova did make one disturbing straightforward comment: “Everyone says The Seagull was borrowed from my life but also that you gave a good dressing down to a certain person.” Who was that? Mizinova’s defaulting lover Potapenko, obviously. But he was not the only one of Chekhov’s friends to be pilloried, however obliquely, in The Seagull. The other was Lydia Avilova, who was still pursuing him, and to whom he sent a disguised teasing message in the text of the play.

What is certain is that The Seagull stands alone among Chekhov’s plays, a marvelous lyrical experiment never repeated. It is spontaneously personal and quite unlike any of the plays he had written before. His earlier play, Ivanov, was dominated by a declamatory hero, the confession of the private guilt of a ruined landowner. Except for Nina’s family the people of The Seagull are not traditional landowners. They are Bohemian artists, deep in literary confessions and theatrical illusions. The detached observer of their follies is a doctor. At the center of the play is the conflict of the young artists—the playwright Treplev and his sweetheart, Nina—with Treplev’s mother, the famous and parsimonious old-style actress Arkadina, who talks only of her successful career. The deeper conflict is Oedipal. Chekhov borrows from Hamlet: Treplev is a young Hamlet, his mother is an absurd Gertrude seen in Shakespeare’s dire “play within a play.” The sexual jealousy is powerful and not concealed. The famous words “enseamed bed” are said to have been there; the censor was so shocked he cut them out.

The slave to literature is Trigorin, Arkadina’s lover. He draws Nina to him by telling her that his fame and glory as a novelist are empty; its fine effects are produced by cynical slavery to sentences. A writer who is enslaved by a famous actress, he says, is a prisoner.

Is Trigorin Chekhov’s self-portrait? A good deal comes from Potapenko, the facile and popular best seller. Treplev, who hates Trigorin and dismisses him as a popular fiction machine, even picks out one of Chekhov’s well-known sentences, in which he wrote that a gleam of moonlight is best evoked by pointing to the gleam reflected on a broken bottle. Trigorin’s main resemblance to Chekhov lies in the keeping of notebooks in which he writes down subjects and people for stories, their mannerisms and absurdities, listing images and phrases that will be useful. He frankly tells Nina that words of hers will be useful in the novel he is writing. He has, he says, no personal life. There is the moment when, happening to see a cloud pass by, he suddenly sees it comically as “a grand piano” and writes the sentence at once in case it will at some time become useful. Chekhov’s Selected Notebooks are indeed filled with bizarre sentences he has heard and characters he has met. At one point Trigorin is most certainly Chekhov when, talking of the hollowness of fame, he says that when he dies people will say, “A good writer, but not as good as Turgenev.” Still, there is in Trigorin a good deal of Potapenko, who had gone off with Lika Mi-zinova and who annoyed Chekhov by the machinelike speed of his writing: a real best seller, and a seducer of women.

The interest of The Seagull lies in its break with traditional theater. The play is at once lyrical and bizarre: it mocks conventions. Chekhov has been excited by the new European playwrights—Ibsen (though he thought Ibsen novelized far too much), Hauptmann, Maeterlinck and above all, it strikes one, by the Strindberg of Miss Julie. Strindberg’s short stories had loosened the restraints of formal speech and had released the spontaneous, even the incongruous, common utterance. The classic chorus had replaced the formal rhetoric of the ruling gods. That drilled moaning is now stopped; the crowds speak up variously; they are the gods now. They have replaced rhetoric by the utterance of their own histories and fantasies, each man and woman a walking inconsequent, self-portrayed creature carrying his own play about with him.

Why does the exalted young Treplev shoot himself at the end of the play? He has lost the love of Nina, the dream of success. His suicide is a revenge on his mother and her lover. His inner drama is too much for him. His vision of what theater ought to be, his desire to “go to the top” instantly, cannot be fulfilled because he lacks Nina’s stamina, her willingness to go through the mill as an actress. There is something else: The Seagull is “strange” in its mingling of the artifices and isolating demands of art, the conflict with reality—that is to say, between two hostile realities. It is an alluring mixture of the poetic and the dire, an extravagant and disturbing dream.

At Melikhovo Chekhov tried to rid himself of his anger at the reception of The Seagull by turning to a new subject. His exhausting labor on the census had given him a theme of which he had long experience: the Russian peasant. We have already had a sight of the violence of peasant life in My Life, which was at last published after a struggle with the censor; surprisingly, the public and the critics had little or nothing to say about it. Now, in The Peasants, villagers themselves fill the pages. This story made a powerful impression on its readers; it aroused a political storm, especially among Marxists and Populists, because Chekhov seemed hostile to the peasantry, which he was not; the Marxists welcomed his unvarnished picture but the Populists protested against it. There is no doubt that The Peasants is one of Chekhov’s masterpieces and, on the same theme, will be surpassed only by In the Ravine, written a year or two later.

The Peasants has one of Chekhov’s most casual beginnings and like so many of his finest stories is the tale of a journey, of departure and return, by which the leading characters are changed. A poor Moscow waiter in a luxury restaurant is dismissed from his job because of an accident. He has dropped a plate of ham and peas as he rushes it to a customer. Ill and desperate, he takes his wife, Olga, and his daughter, Sasha, to stay with their relations, who live in a filthy hut infested by flies in an isolated village. When they arrive all their relatives are out at work in the fields except for an unwashed and pathetic little girl who stands by the stove. Near her is a white cat.

“Puss, puss,” Sasha called to her cat. “Puss!”

“She can’t hear,” said the little girl. “She has gone deaf.”

“How is that?”

“She was beaten.”

The visitors wait in the street until the family comes back from work. When they come, the story gradually develops into a year’s chronicle of their lives as seen mainly through the eyes of the waiter’s wife, Olga, a naive peasant woman whose strength lies in the humble religious intimations we have already read of in The Student. Her religion may be literal and trite, but she knows the spell of archaic biblical words and has trained her daughter to use them and to be an echo of herself. In the course of a dreadful and riotous year she will awe her savage and quarreling relations. We shall see the quarrels, the young hurting the old, the ragged children huddled on the stove with their savage grandmother. We shall see a wife beaten, a young woman stripped naked. The village will catch fire and the men, drunk on vodka, scream for water; the children hope their neighbors will be burned to death; the geese, as savage as the people, seize the opportunity to raid the gardens; doves turn red as they fly over the flames of the burning huts; the tax collector comes round to collect arrears and goes off with the sacred samovars, the only treasure peasant women have. When the disaster is over we shall have a glimpse of the gentry and their sons and daughters in church on Sunday, and the waiter’s daughter will copy her mother’s singsong voice, saying,

“God lives in the church. Men have lamps and candles but God has little green and red and blue lamps, like little eyes. At night God walks about the church and with Him the Holy Mother of God and Saint Nicolai, thud, thud, thud….”

When the end of the world comes the church itself will be carried to heaven. The myth silences the family crowded in the hut. Olga cries, not only because of the legend but also from pride in her daughter’s telling of it.

We notice, throughout The Peasants, Chekhov’s genius for seeing events as they strike his people differently, and above all his ear for the changing of sounds. When the village crops are on fire he gives us the confusion, but it is Olga who “makes it true” for us when we see her rushing out to save her daughter.

The terrible year of crowded events, in which the intruders are hated by their relatives, reaches a climax in the winter. The waiter dies after being cupped by the village tailor, a Jew who serves as a kind of doctor. In the spring, Olga and her daughter leave the village to go back on foot to Moscow. They are reduced to the condition of beggars. We see Olga and Sasha look back as they leave this hell, thinking how terrible the people were, worse than beasts, spending their lives stealing from each other, fighting. Yet, Olga reflects,

they were human beings, they suffered and wept like human beings, and there was nothing in their lives for which one could not find excuse…. And now she felt sorry for all these people, painfully so, and as she walked on she kept looking back at the huts.

That “looking back,” so casual, so impelled, is the perfect touch of nature. That is how we shall remember her. And Chekhov—a man who knows his art—will presendy repeat the “looking back.” Some miles further on Olga will pass. another woman and, “looking back,” will remember that she had met this woman in Moscow, perhaps as a cook to a rich family. The second “look back” brings home to Olga that she has no job and is herself now a beggar. Passing a grand house she sings out in a beggar’s whine:

“Good Christian folk, give alms, for Christ’s sake, that God’s blessing may be upon you, and that your parents may be in the Kingdom of Heaven in peace eternal.”

And her daughter joins in, copying the voice of her mother, Again, agony is made real to us by hearing its echo.

The Peasants was a sensation when it was published. Chekhov’s mastery was recognized by all the critics. The censor had cut out a page at the end. We notice that he will not stand for any hostile criticism of the police or tax collectors. The simple Olga reflects that if the peasants brutalize one another,

they had none to whom they could look for help…. the paltriest little clerk or official treated the peasants as though they were tramps, and addressed even the village elders and church wardens as inferiors, and considered they had a right to do so. And, indeed, can any sort of help or good example be given by mercenary, greedy, depraved, and idle persons who only visit the village in order to insult, to despoil, and to terrorize? Olga remembered the pitiful, humiliated look of the old people when in the winter [one of them] had been taken to be flogged.

Two years later, as we shall see in In the Ravine, Chekhov will be far more radical in his attack on authority.

Did no one notice the effect of this frantic activity on his health? In March 1897 he dined with Suvorin at the Hermitage, where there was a convention of theater workers. Just before the dinner, blood started pouring from his mouth and over his short beard. The doctor rushed him to a clinic and discovered—as Chekhov himself pointed out—that the hemorrhage came from his right lung. He was kept at the clinic for more than two weeks and to Suvorin he made a literary joke: “The author of “Ward No. 6’ has been moved from Ward No. 16 to Ward No. 14.”

He was plagued by visitors, he said, who came to see him two at a time, each one begging him not to speak and at the same time pestering him with questions. The worst was Tolstoy, who did not stop talking about himself for four hours. The incurable egotist said he had given up writing Resurrection and had started a long book, clearing up, once and for all, the question of Art. An addict of documentation, he said he had so far read sixty books on the subject. Tolstoy’s thinking is not new, Chekhov wrote; wise men have always sung this song in a variety of tunes.

Old men have always been prone to see the end of the world, and have always declared that morality was degenerating to the uttermost point, and that Art was growing shallow and wearing thin, that people were growing feebler….

Mellifluous and tactless, Tolstoy talked about life after death:

He holds that all of us (people and animals) will live in a principle (reason, love), the essence and purpose of which is a mystery to us. To me this principle or force presents itself as a formless jelly-like mass…. my individuality … will be fused with this mass—such immortality I don’t need, I don’t understand it.

Tolstoy’s visit provoked another hemorrhage. The doctor’s orders were severe. No more drinking or smoking. No more farming: he must give up his medical work for good. He must never again spend his winters in Melikhovo but must go south to Nice and join the rest of the European consumptives.

His brother Ivan took him by train to Melikhovo. Chekhov told his friends he was fairly well and only coughed in the mornings, but he did have migraines and there was trouble with his left eye. All the same, he was trying to pass as a man of twenty-eight, with some success, “because I buy expensive neckties and use Vera Violetta scent,” He has given up active work on the farm and does no more than prune roses and feed sparrows and talks of going to Egypt or to Sochi. At home they are cramming him with food but he does not put on weight. He has still got the building of two more schools on his hands, and he is fussing with his brother Alexander’s scheme of establishing a clinic for alcoholics, (The generous Suvorin was one of those who subscribed money to help this cause.) There, in his little hut on the estate—Chekhov put up a flag there when he was ready to receive guests—he was still in trouble with the censor about The Peasants and had to make further cuts in The Seagull.

Scores of guests poured in without mercy: Chekhov could not resist inviting them and his sister could not hold them off. One or two unscrupulous people stayed for weeks, brought their families, treating the place as a pension. His brother Alexander even had the nerve to send his two noisy sons down for the holidays.

To get away from the guests and against the doctor’s advice, Chekhov escaped secredy to Moscow for a night or two to see Lika Mizinova, who, like his Nina in The Seagull, had “shown stamina,” and had recovered from her folly. At last, when the summer came, he took the advice of the doctors—but after his own fashion: he went south, but via Paris, where he stayed a day or two with the Suvorins and went to the Moulin Rouge once more and saw the danse du ventre, and afterwards to Biarritz, where he took French lessons with a pretty French girl who promised to come to visit him later in Nice but who didn’t turn up. Biarritz delighted him. One seems to see the flashy necktie of the complete tourist as he sits on the plage and listens to the voice of the Bay of Biscay that “roars even on a calm day.” The bracing fashionable resort was full of instantly detectable and boring Russians. There were letters from Lika and he returned to his game with her.

All day I sit in the sun and think of you and why you love to write about lopsided things and I’ve decided … that your own sides are a bit wonky. You want people to realize this and find you attractive.

He loved her letters: “I value not only Reinheit in women, but also kindness.”

Then, in September, the Atlantic rain blew in and he got off at last to Nice and found a cheap room in the Pension Russe, 70 francs all in, and it had carpets everywhere—his Balzac-like passion—and a bed “like Cleopatra’s.”

Culture juts out of every shop window, every wicker basket, every dog smells of civilization.

The pension was always full of a mixed lot of bickering Russian ladies. He could not speak French but he could read it after a fashion. He was reading Voltaire.

He loved Nice and its cafés, its street noises, and the musicians who played under his windows. He liked the French égalité. The only bore was the mosquitoes, he said, “but I passionately love the sun.” Later, in December, he was spitting blood again. It wasn’t serious, but he found going upstairs exhausting. He wrote one or two slight stories: the famous Pecheneg, about the old Cossack officer (we have heard of him before in The Steppe) who had brought up his children as savages (they threw chickens into the air and shot them) and who bored his guests with his theories about the Golden Age. Then there is On the Cart, about the misery of a girl teaching in a rural school at Melikhovo—stories diat came from his memory:

I have never written directly from Nature. I have let my memory sift the subject, so that only what is important or typical is left in it as in a filter.

In January 1898 he read in the French papers that Émile Zola was being prosecuted for libel in his famous letter J’accuse. The attack on Zola in the conservative Russian press, especially in Suvorin’s paper New Time, infuriated Chekhov. He set about a thorough study of the Dreyfus case and protested fiercely to the aging Suvorin, who was, after all, the proprietor if not now the editor:

You write [he wrote to Suvorin] that you are annoyed with Zola. Here everyone feels as though a new, better Zola has arisen. In his trial he has been cleansed as though in turpentine from grease-spots, and now shines before the French in his true brilliance. There is a purity and moral elevation that was not suspected in him. You should follow the whole scandal from the beginning.

He went on to write that

a brew has been gradually concocted on the basis of anti-Semitism, a principle reeking of the slaughterhouse. When something is wrong with us we seek the cause outside ourselves … capitalism, the Masons, the Syndicate, the Jesuits—all phantoms, but how they do relieve our anxieties!

He reminded Suvorin of Dr. Fyodor Haas, who in the previous generation had spent his personal income on prison reform; of Korolenko, who saved the Multans from forced labor—a Finnish-speaking people, resident in the Russian Empire, who had been falsely accused of making sacrifices to pagan gods. Yes, Chekhov agreed, Zola was not Voltaire, “nor are any of us Voltaires, but there comes a time when not being a Voltaire is as irrelevant as can be.”

Chekhov had read the stenographic notes of Zola’s trial. He wrote to his brother Alexander, who was now employed by New Time, that the paper had behaved abominably:

The old man and I have exchanged letters on the subject (in a tone of great moderation, however), and have both dropped the subject. I don’t want to write and I don’t want his letters in which he keeps justifying the tactlessness of his paper by saying he loves the military.

Was there a break with Suvorin after this protest? Many of Chekhov’s friends hoped for it. But no. Chekhov knew how generous Suvorin had been with financial help for his school building at Melikhovo. On the other hand, he did say that “the old man,” who was now in his sixties, had left the running of his paper to his reactionary young sons.

More seriously, at the beginning of 1899 there was a students’ strike in Petersburg on the anniversary of the foundation of the university. The new generation of students were radicals and the new Tsar had turned out to be more reactionary than his predecessor. The police were called in to disperse the students in Moscow, to which the rioting had spread, and there was a threat of forcing them into military service. Suvorin’s paper supported the authorities and was boycotted by the students. Chekhov told his brother Alexander that he was sorry for the old man: “but I’m not at all sorry for those who are surrounding him.” There had long been a rumor that the paper had taken a subsidy from the government and the French General Staff. Suvorin was called upon to appear at a “Court of Honor” by a writers’ committee known as the Self-Aid Committee. Suvorin refused and Chekhov supported him in this.

In an Asiatic country, where freedom of the press and freedom of conscience do not exist, where the government and nine-tenths of society look upon a journalist as an enemy, where life is so cramped and vile, where there is little hope of better times—in such a country amusements like pouring slops on one another in Courts of Honor etc. put writers in the ridiculous and pathetic position of little caged animals biting each other’s tails off.

He warned Suvorin about his politics: “Drive nature out of the door and she’ll fly in by the window.” And when Suvorin’s wife reproached Chekhov for not coming strongly forward in defence of his generous benefactor and friend, he said:

Whatever people are saying now they have been saying for a long time everywhere, and you and your husband did not know the truth, as kings do not know the truth.

Chekhov told his friends he liked Suvorin very much but that he had “never known a man so irresolute and lacking in character.”

Chekhov’s friends were noticing that, whatever he said about his health, he had aged. His beard was turning gray and behind the glasses of his pince-nez his eyes were narrower; his smile was dim and his jokes were few. In Nice the painter Braz made a second attempt at painting his portrait, and indeed it is the picture of a melancholy and defeated man. Chekhov wrote: “If I have become a pessimist and write gloomy tales then the fault is in this portrait of me.

He was getting tired of Nice and wanted to get back to Melikhovo. Euphoria and desperation alternate in the classical condition of the consumptive. He falls back on the reckless optimism and the skills of his affections. Skills? He was still pursued by the relentless Lydia Avilova and eventually hit upon the solution of diverting her by getting her to hunt through magazines for copies of his early stories, which he had lost, so that he could revise them for a collected edition of his works. She eagerly agreed. It was a strange cure but it seemed to calm her. It is again noticeable that he still had the art of turning his half-love-affairs into friendships. Once more we have to suppose that his sexual temperature was low.