Chekhov

Chapter Fourteen

Chekhov at last surrendered to his doctors and agreed that he must now spend every winter in the Crimea at Yalta. Before he left he had seen Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, who had recently founded the Moscow Art Theater and were anxious to include The Seagull in the repertoire of their first season. The earlier failure of the play still embittered Chekhov but he gave in. He mistrusted Stanislavsky and his literal realism, especially his taste for banal “noises off”—the croaking of frogs, the chirping of grasshoppers and the barking of dogs. One of the actors told him that Stanislavsky wanted to bring in a crying baby among the servants who come to say good-bye to Arkadina at the end of the play. All the same, public hostility to The Seagull had gone. The following year when he left Yalta on a short defiant trip and went back to Moscow, the company put on a private performance for him “without the stage sets,” and he complained. He said that he could not judge the play dispassionately. He said the actress who played Nina gave an abominable performance, sobbing violently: that Trigorin walked and talked like a paralytic without “a will of his own.” Still, he did say honestly that the play gripped him “so that I could hardly believe it was I who had written it.” In spite of his “war with the bacilli,” he did not want to leave Moscow. He was very excited by the revival of his play.

Lovely actresses! If I’d stayed on any longer I should have lost my head. The older I get, the faster and stronger does the pulse of life beat in me.

The play was now an enormous success.

In his rooms at Yalta in 1898 Chekhov said he felt “locked in.” Patriotically, he said the little resort was more agreeable and cleaner than Nice. The warmth of the sea, the mountains and especially the flowers delighted him, though he found the leaves of the southern trees metallic. The claims of Yalta to be the cultural capital of the Crimea were absurd. Fame in Petersburg or Moscow was an excitement: one kept to one’s set. But in Yalta the public thought they owned you personally and you were on duty for tedious chats in the street or sudden callers. He was not a man to say no, and he soon found himself elected as a trustee of the girls’ secondary school and going into the question of building a new sanatorium for the population of consumptives and—of all minor annoyances—becoming a kind of estate agent. Doctors in Moscow plagued him for addresses where they could send their patients.

The railway had not yet reached the town. To leave one had to take the steamer to Sevastopol and drive over the mountains to the nearest railway station. Books took weeks to arrive; the mail was erratic. He remembered that years before in Yalta he had written A Dreary Story, which had established his fame as a writer. Now he knew he had matured and was free to look back. We find him telling a correspondent that the lazy man has time for listening to more people than the man who sticks to his desk all day, who “hears little” and is really shut up in a shell.

Listening is Chekhov’s impulse in the three new stories he is now working on. They are linked stories of remembering: The Man in a Case, Gooseberries and About Love, in which the talkers will talk of love “in the Russian fashion.” We have heard this kind of declamation in Ariadne; now Chekhov frames these three stories so that they will be a series. We see two friends on a shooting holiday in the country, sleeping rough, in a barn, and telling their stories in the evening. Burkin, the schoolmaster in The Man in a Case, tells about a former colleague of his, Belikov, a teacher of Greek. He is distinctly a character of Gogolian absurdity. He is a petty tyrant, a frightened bachelor who hates all innovation, all pleasure, and above all fears the dangers of freedom; he has a terror of “repercussions” and worships official edicts. He is compared to a hermit crab:

His great feat was to sport galoshes and an umbrella even on the finest days and he always wore a warm padded greatcoat. He kept his umbrella in a holder, his watch in a gray chamois-leather bag.

All the masters at the school, including the headmaster himself, unite in an intrigue to get Belikov married. They find a hearty, shouting Ukrainian girl who cannot stop laughing. They might have succeeded, but unfortunately Belikov sees she has gone recklessly in for the new, morally subversive craze for bicycling. There had been signs, up till then, that he was attracted to her, but now he goes to the length of protesting to her brother, who is also a cyclist, and threatens to protest to the authorities. In an angry scene the brother pushes him downstairs. Belikov is broken. His health goes. He dies, and the Ukrainian girl bursts into tears at his funeral. “Ukrainian girls can only cry or laugh,” says the narrator. ‘They have no intermediate mood.” Still, “it’s a great pleasure, frankly, burying a Belikov.” But, the storyteller adds, “what a lot of other such encapsulated people remain, and what a lot of them the future holds in store!”

The next story, Gooseberries, is told by the veterinary surgeon. The sportsmen are soaked by rain and are given shelter by an old friend, Alyokhin, who slaves in his fields. He stops work to lead them to his handsome manor. He himself works so hard that he has not washed for months. He takes them first to his millpond. The water looks filthy— “cold, muddy and malignant”—but the veterinarian dives in. We see water lilies rock as he goes to the bottom again and again and comes up crying out, “Oh my goodness, oh Lord have mercy on me!” as he floats to enjoy the rain pouring onto his face. At the house they all clean up and go to Alyokhin’s elegant drawing room, where they see his beautiful servant Pelageya. The veterinarian then tells the story of his brother, a civil servant. He married a rich widow, who soon conveniendy died and left him all her money, after which he bought an estate in the country. He has become self-indulgent and gluttonous, especially of the irresistible gooseberries he has cultivated. He believes that the peasants, whom he corrupts with kegs of vodka, love him because he calls himself a gentleman. The veterinarian warns his friends about the deceits of country bliss and comfort. He says:

“Evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible…. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that … life will show him her claws sooner or later, trouble will come for him.”

Then Alyokhin tells the final story, About Love. It begins with a reference to Pelageya, the beautiful and graceful servant, who is in love with the bestial cook, a man who is fanatically religious and a drunk, and who beats her. She had not wanted to marry but simply wanted to live with him, which his religion forbade.

“How love is born [says Alyokhin], why Pelageya does not love somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external qualities, and why she fell in love with Nikanor, that ugly snout… how far questions of personal happiness are of consequence in love—all that is unknown…. We Russians of the educated class have a partiality for these questions that remain unanswered.”

Alyokhin’s own story is not of stormy attractions. It is simple and sad. He had become a close friend of a neighboring couple, a judge and his wife, who have been more than generous to him. He was a constant visitor. The result was that he and the judge’s wife slowly fell in love, without admitting it to each other or disturbing the husband. They were often alone together. This unacknowledged love went on for years.

“Anna Alekseyevna and I used to go to the theater together, always walking there; we used to sit side by side in the stalls, our shoulders touching. I would take the opera glass from her hand without a word, and feel … that we could not live without each other…. When we came out of the theater we always said goodbye and parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people were saying about us in the town already, but there was not a word of truth in it all.”

Years go by and in time Anna becomes irritable; she is becoming ill. “If I dropped anything, she would say coldly ‘If I congratulate you.’”

One evening when he is dining with the family Alyokhin bursts out with indignation about a political scandal. Four Jews have been falsely charged with incendiarism in some town or other. The wife appeals to her husband, the judge, and asks how such a thing could happen. The judge is one of those simpleminded men who firmly believe that once a man is charged before a court he is guilty, that doubt about guilt can only be expressed in legal form on paper. Certainly not at a private dinner. “You and I did not set fire to the place,” he explains gently to his wife, “and you see we are not condemned and not put in prison.” In short, the judge, his wife and indeed Alyokhin are as much “encased” as the grotesque Belikov was.

The judge is transferred to a distant province, and his wife follows later. Alyokhin joins the large crowd who go to the station to see her off. At the last moment he dashes into her compartment and they both declare dieir feelings as they part. And here we see a variation of Chekhov’s classic goodbyes. The train moves off; Alyokhin escapes alone to the empty compartment next door and sits weeping and gets off at the next station. At that moment (Alyokhin tells his friends) he “understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhap-piness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.”

The rain has stopped, the sun comes out, the schoolmaster and the veterinarian leave the handsome drawing room, where the family portraits have seemed to be alive and even listening to the talkers. The sportsmen gaze at the garden and the millpond, which is no longer dark and malignant but shines like a mirror. They think of the sorrow that must have been on Anna’s face when Alyokhin declared his love too late. In the last line of the story she comes doubly to life:

Both of them had met her in the town, and Burkin knew her and thought her beautiful.

For Chekhov the story had an exasperating consequence. Lydia Avilova wrote to him that it portrayed her and an incident in their imaginary romance. The clinching fact was that he had once put her and her children on a train somewhere. Chekhov did his best to disillusion her and their exchange of letters was tart. Nevertheless, after his death she went back to romanticizing a love affair which had not existed.

Chekhov did not continue with the conversational series. He had tired of his talkers. To talk of love in this fashion was a too comfortable, too wistful, even generalizing, device, too close to the manner of Turgenev. His best stories are not safely framed: they are direct and open. He was mature enough to say good-bye to good-byes. If in early life he had been evasive, now, in middle life, he is willing to see love as a continuing gift, surviving its difficulties. In the delightful, well-known The Darling there is no need of discussion. The simple heroine is a woman who loves by nature, cannot think or speak for herself, but instinctively echoes the opinions of a husband. If he ignores or tricks her, she will adopt his worries or interests as if they were hers. When he runs a puppet show and the public is driven off by bad weather, she groans with him at his failures as if they were hers. When he dies she will take up with a timber merchant and her talk will be about the terrible anxieties of the timber trade. If she is deserted she will look for someone else whose miseries she can take over. At the famous end of the story, when there is no man left, she takes over a small boy who is not her son and gives herself to all his troubles in his lessons, learns them herself and denounces the schools for making the boy’s life a misery. A simpleton, a mindless fool, a comic echo without personality or interests? Is she without will? No, she is no one unless she loves. It is not a matter of charity, nor of subservience or possessive nullity. It is not even a talent. Without loving she has no self. Tolstoy admired this story more than any other Chekhov had written and, of course, imposed his own theories on it in a well-known introduction.