Chekhov

Chapter Fifteen

Chekhov was bored at Yalta and was tired of living in two rooms as a lodger, of going every day for his meals to the little restaurants of the town. He was bored with food and drifted into eating less and less. Local acquaintances told him he ought to buy a house, but he was not rich. He was supporting his parents at Melikhovo and in his letters he is still talking about his debts! There is an expansive Balzac in Chekhov’s nature. For the moment, he buys a cheap cottage of two or three rooms in the mountains outside the town, on the excuse that his parents and sister can stay there if they come to see him. He was never to live there. The early improvement in his health did not last: his other lung was now infected. Presently a dramatic event changed his situation. A garbled telegram arrived at the post office, undelivered because it was misaddressed. “All Yalta” knew what it said before he did. The proud and seemingly immortal tyrant Pavel had suffered a rupture while lifting a heavy box of his son’s books at Melikhovo. He had been rushed to a Moscow clinic and had died. Chekhov’s first words were “If I had been there to operate I could have saved his life.” He saw at once that his mother could not stay at Melikhovo alone. His sister was there only at weekends because she was still teaching in Moscow. In any family crisis Anton had always taken his mother’s part and now he at once resumed his responsibility as head of the family. It was clear that Melikhovo must be sold, that his mother and sister must come to Yalta and live with him. Responsibility renewed his will. Where would he put his mother? Not in lodgings. He was tired of lodgings. He must get a house. Rent it? No. Melikhovo must be sold, and he would build a house in Yalta and so provide for his mother and sister, after his own death.

Chekhov stuck to his independence. Money? His only hope lay in pressing Suvorin to hurry with a complete edition of all his stories. The proposal had been made long ago but was languishing, for the old man had left his business in the hands of his negligent sons, who were uninterested in complete editions and, in any case, were slow payers. Indeed they owed Chekhov five thousand rubles and payment was overdue. Reluctantly, Suvorin’s sons offered him twenty thousand rubles. While he was considering this he heard that a new publisher called Marx had just published Tolstoy’s Resurrection on generous terms, and Tolstoy had recommended that he go to Marx, who had the reputation of being sharp and cunning but who paid well. Unlike Su-rorin’s books, which were cheap and unattractive and intended for the mass market, Marx’s editions were elegandy bound and were well printed on decent paper. When Marx heard of Chekhov’s dilemma he at once offered him thirty thousand rubles, to be paid in installments. Chekhov consulted Suvorin, who pointed out the flaw in the offer. Marx was tricking him. He was proposing to buy outright all Chekhov’s copyrights, past, present and future. Chekhov’s level-headed sister agreed with Suvorin. She said she would take charge of his contracts, just as the Countess Tolstoy had so successfully done in defense of her children’s future when Tolstoy had renounced his royalties on ethical grounds. Like all authors, Chekhov knew, at heart, that the outright sale of copyrights was a folly, but he brushed that aside. His response was to push Marx’s offer up to seventy-five thousand, but he did refuse, happily, to include the copyrights on his plays and on all new works as published in periodicals. The contract was signed and he made one of his jokes: “I am a Marxist now.”

Suvorin said Chekhov would regret his decision, and indeed it was not long before he did. For years Marx made a fortune at Chekhov’s expense. Suvorin also said that he knew what would happen when Chekhov received his first installment: Chekhov would simply increase his charities. He did. He immediately gave away five thousand rubles as a contribution to the building of a new school on the outskirts of Yalta and one thousand rubles to his brother Alexander, who had at last given up drinking and needed the money to buy a new house. Anton also gave money for the education of the daughter of a needy man who had once slaved as underpaid apprentice at Chekhov’s side in his father’s shop at Taganrog.

Now Chekhov started looking for a site for a house in Yalta for his mother, his sister and himself. He was soon deep in mortgaging, for the sale of Melikhovo, which his sister was managing, took longer than he had hoped. There was a pause, during which he was looking for a site and finding a young and enterprising architect of sufficient originality, for he was eager to build a house that would be modern, original and a credit to the town. He was indeed building what would become his monument. His sister came down at last to see and approve the site. She was shocked at first when she was taken to a stretch of wasteland covered with scrub on the outskirts of the town: it had attracted Chekhov because the garden adjoined a Tatar cemetery. (As we know from his trip to Genoa and from the two moonlight scenes in the story Ionych, he had a poet’s response to cemeteries. Was not every grave a complete story or life history?) A Tatar funeral was taking place when he and his sister got there, and she was depressed by this ominous incident, but when they went back to his lodgings they were soon excited and laughing over his plans and his talk of the roses he would grow there, which would outdo the roses of Melikhovo. He wrote to his brother Mikhail, still pretending that the house was simply for the winter:

Nothing will be needed apart from the house, no outbuildings of any sort; it will all be under one roof. The coal, wood and everything will be in the basement. The hens lay the whole year round, and no special house is needed for them.

It was some time before Melikhovo was sold and the new house could be built and made fit for his mother and sister to live in. In the meantime he had moved them into a more comfortable flat in Moscow, where he could stay if he took a trip to the city. Meanwhile his health was deteriorating: he had little sleep at night and he could eat little. Still, there were good days in which, with the help of a Turkish gardener, he turned his little garden into a paradise of new trees and flowers. They made a pool, which was soon inhabited by frogs and, he said, “other crocodile-like creatures.” Two stray dogs had adopted him and also a crane, which followed him around. On the bad days he had prolonged headaches, when he could not work, and visitors noticed that he would stuff a bloodstained hankerchief into his pocket.

If the contract with Marx was dubious it had one benefit. In the first six months he had reread, corrected and judged a lifetime’s stories for the complete edition. Much of his early work had been done in a hurry: now he had to cut, tighten or reject. In his later work he had been alert to the false image or sentence. The danger—as we know from Henry James’s revisions—lay in the temptation to elaborate, but Chekhov was a cutter, sensitive to the musicality of simple language.

When, at last, Chekhov moved into his new house, which was far from being finished, he was alarmed to see how fast the installments of his contract with Marx melted away. He was cheered by the news that an old play of his, Uncle Vanya, had been successfully revived and played on tour in the provinces, but he told Gorky that he had given up the theater for good and was going back to writing nothing but stories. Rereading his own work had revived his imagination. He would soon be writing The Lady with the Little Dog and two of his surpassing masterpieces: In the Ravine and, above all, The Bishop.

We must go back a year to September 1898, when Chekhov was still at Melikhovo and had gone to Moscow and had seen the rehearsals of the new production of The Seagull. He was struck by the beauty and acting of Olga Knipper, who played the part of Irina. He wrote to Suvorin that her voice, her nobility and warmth were superb: “I felt choked with emotion. If I had stayed in Moscow I would have fallen in love with this Irina.” In the following year, when he had risked another trip to Moscow, he saw Olga again and took her to an exhibition of Levitan’s pictures. He met her family, who had relatives known to him in Yalta, and she had been brought by his sister to stay at Melikhovo. Olga’s father was an engineer of Alsatian origin, now working in Moscow. Her mother was Russian and a talented musician. Olga was going off on holiday to the Caucasus with her brother and Chekhov begged her to visit him in Yalta on her way back. At the age of thirty-eight he had fallen seriously in love. He wrote to her and she did not answer.

What does this mean? [he wrote]. Where are you? You are so stubborn in not sending news of yourself that … we are already thinking you have forgotten us and have got married in the Caucasus…. The author is forgotten—how terrible, how cruel, how perfidious!

She was ten years younger than himself.

She replied that his letters had made her “burst out laughing with joy.” He wrote again, arranging to meet her on her journey back from Batum and take her back to Yalta. She came and, very properly, stayed with the family of his doctor, and Chekhov stayed in an hotel near the harbor. Only one wing of his new house was finished, and she was depressed. She was worried about his health. She noticed that he never had regular meals, that he looked neglected and was soon tired. Although they met every day, she could rarely persuade him to have dinner with her at the doctor’s. He went back to Moscow with her, where she had a part in a new play, and they drove by carriage together on a memorable journey across the mountains. Their friendship warmed. It was not until the following summer that she came to Yalta again, when his mother and sister were in the house. By now Chekhov and Knipper were lovers.

Now he bursts out in a letter to her. She is his “precious, unusual actress,” his “wonderful woman,” and

if you only knew how happy your letter made me! I bow down before you, bow low, so low that my forehead is touching the bottom of my well, which has today been dug to a depth of sixty feet. I have got used to you and miss you….

And then comes one of his evasive fantasies:

If Nadenka only knew what is going on in my soul there would be quite a scandal.

(“Nadenka” was Chekhov’s imaginary jealous wife or fiancee.)

There is no doubt that Chekhov’s passion was serious. Before he met Olga he had written to his brother Mikhail, who was thinking of getting married:

What am I to say? To marry is interesting only for love; to marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at a bazaar solely because it is of good quality.

The most important rivet in family life is love, sexual attraction. … all the rest is unreliable and dreary, however cleverly we make our calculations. So you see, what’s needed isn’t a nice girl but one you love. No mean obstacle, that you’ll agree.

Now, alone in Yalta, Chekhov writes what was to become the best-known of his love stories, The Lady with the Little Dog, in which a chance love affair takes possession of two people and changes them against their will, and which closes with them far apart and rarely able to meet. Their fervor for each other grows with every new good-bye. If the story seems to evoke aspects of Chekhov’s meetings with Olga Knipper, it is transferred to a couple totally unlike them. In The Lady with the Little Dog, Gurov and Anna are both married. He works in a bank in Moscow, Anna lives in a dead provincial town called S—, a town which will reappear in The Three Sisters. Each has gone on a stolen holiday to Yalta, a resort notorious for its casual love affairs. Gurov is an experienced forty-year-old amorist who has a stern wife. Anna is married to a dull provincial civil servant. She is ten years younger than her husband. The opening sentence of the story dryly establishes the inciting spell of holiday gossip.

It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea front: a lady with a little dog.

This at once stirs the hunting instinct of the experienced Gurov. He sees her, “the new person,” sitting near him in an open-air restaurant. Her dog growls at him and he shakes his finger at it. He has seen at once that she is pretty, naive and “angular” in her gestures. She marvels when he tells her that he has an arts degree and has been trained to be an opera singer, but had given it up to work in a bank. She tells him, in her awkward way, that her husband is some sort of official.

In Yalta the only exciting event of the day is the arrival of the evening steamboat. She says she is expecting a friend. They join the crowd at the harbor and he notices that Anna is pretending to look at the disembarking passengers for her “friend.” They wait on the quayside until the crowd has dispersed and dusk creeps up on the couple standing alone. He suggests they go for a drive along the coast. She does not answer. He kisses her and whispers, “Let us go to your room.” Silently she agrees. Her room is lit by a single candle and smells of the scent she had bought the day before at a Japanese shop. Gurov thinks, “What encounters one does have in life.” He had known “carefree, good-natured women, happy in their love and grateful for happiness, however brief.” He had also known women

like his wife who loved insincerely, with idle chatter, affectedly, hysterically, with an expression suggesting that this was neither love nor passion, but something more significant.

In others he had glimpsed a rapacity, a wanting more from life than it could give, and these were

unreflecting, domineering, unintelligent women… not in their first youth, and when Gurov grew cold to them their beauty excited his hatred, and the lace on their underclothes seemed to him like scales.

We shall not see the seduction. Unlike later novelists, Chekhov never describes the sexual act: Russian manners and especially the censor would not have allowed such scenes. We shall know the seduction has occurred only by the look of consternation on Anna’s face,

as though someone had suddenly knocked at the door. She had her own special view—a very serious one—of what had happened. She thought of it as her “downfall,” it seemed, which was all very strange and inappropriate.

“It’s wrong,” she says, and adds the hackneyed words, “You will be the first to despise me now.” The nonplussed Gurov cuts himself a slice of a watermelon which is on the table and for a silent half hour “eats without haste.” (Yes, we think, that is the point so many novelists have missed: a seduction stuns.) She begins to sob, “God forgive me, it’s awful,” and breaks into banal confessions of guilt, how she had wanted, for once, “to live, to live!” She has been mad and dazed in Yalta and lied when she had told her husband—whom she calls a “flunkey”—that she was going away because she was ill. Gurov calms her and at last they both begin laughing. They eventually go for a long drive to Or-eanda along the beautiful coast, and we hear that her husband’s grandfather was a German but her husband is Orthodox Russian—oddly close to Olga Knipper’s origins.

At Oreanda they sit by the shore and listen to the monotonous, conniving, breaking of the sea. One remembers the sea breaking in The Duel. For Gurov it is a symbol of the mystery of an eternity that seems to both enlarge and dwarf us. (In his Notebooks Chekhov had written one of his gnomic phrases: “It seems to me: the sea and myself.”) The couple sit a little apart on a bench and are silent. Gurov is thinking:

[E]verything is beautiful in this world—everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of existence and our human dignity.

True or untrue? Gurov, the experienced seducer, is changing.

The couple part: he to Moscow, she to the town of S— For Gurov the affair seems simply one more conquest, yet he finds Anna haunts him. To relieve the seriousness of the tale, Gurov is seen about to confide what has happened to a man at his club, but the man mishears him and thinks he is talking about the sturgeon they had just eaten. Gurov is surprised and disappointed that he does not dream of Anna. He now looks at other women, thinking for a moment to find her in them. He cannot rid himself of her image. This might be the end of many of Chekhov’s earlier love stories but now he wants it to grow, and we shall see Gurov driven to unforgettable pursuit. He is impelled to go to S—, and does so, telling his wife that he has to go to St. Petersburg on some errand. There he finds Anna’s house. It is ominously surrounded by a long gray fence, studded with nails, a symbol of the inaccessible “prison” in which she has had to live since her marriage. The sound of a piano being played suggests she and her husband may be there. He catches sight of her dog being let out into the garden by a housekeeper and he has the impulse to call it, but he is in such fear and confusion that he has forgotten the dog’s name. He returns to his hotel and is desperate until he sees a poster saying that The Geisha is opening the following night at the local theater—an occasion when she, her husband and all official people are likely to be there. Now the story changes key.

Gurov goes to the theater. There she is, “this little woman, in no way remarkable,” clutching the “vulgar lorgnette in her hand,” and there also is her tall, obsequious husband, wearing an order on his uniform, and it does indeed look like a waiter’s number. Gurov sits there dirough the first act; then at the interval the husband goes out to smoke. Thinking that all eyes in the audience are on him, Gurov goes over to speak to Anna. He can hardly speak, nor can she, and she stares in terror at him. She rushes out of the auditorium and he follows her into the drafty corridor. Their love becomes theater within theater. A cold stale wind seems to blow as she races past vulgar crowds of officials in uniforms “legal, scholastic and civil,” past ladies, past fur coats swaying on their pegs as they rush by, down stairs and passages, until at last he catches up with her, breathless, under a balcony. A Chekhovian detail: two bored schoolboys who are smoking cigarettes look down to watch as Gurov takes Anna into his arms and kisses her and she clings to him. There the lovers stand, dazed, almost speechless, in the buzz of chatter and the sound of the meaningless tuning up of the orchestra. She gasps out a promise to find an excuse for coming to Moscow to see him. And so they part and he leaves the theater.

Remember that we have seen the story through Gurov’s eyes and that Chekhov’s intention is to show him as a maturing and feeling man arguing with himself about the unexpected situation. The scene requires a momentary point of ironic distraction. It happens that Gurov has to drop his little daughter at her school on the way to his secret rendezvous, and as they walk the child asks her father why the pavements are still slushy after the sleet storm in the night. Gurov tells her kindly: “It is three degrees above zero, and yet it is sleeting…. The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different temperature in the upper strata of the atmosphere.”

The child chatters on: “And is there no thunder in the winter, Daddy?”

He explains that too. When he has dropped the child at her school he is free to reflect on his two lives, full of stereotyped truths and untruths.

Everything … in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.

The real subject of the story is this serious conflict in the minds of the lovers. At the hotel they are in each other’s arms and their theories vanish. Every two or three months after this they will meet and wrestle with their dilemma.

[They] could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband…. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both…. And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin.

And there Chekhov leaves them. As he once said, it is not the function of art to solve problems but to present them correctly.

In the year before writing The Lady with the Little Dog Chekhov had been entirely occupied with stories: lonych, The Darling, The New Dacha, which echoes Misail’s struggle with the peasants in My Life, and On Official Duty. The last is remarkable for its portrait of a country policeman who has to spend a wretched night during a blizzard with the body of a ruined landowner who has committed suicide, while the young magistrate wines and dines well in a country house. Tolstoy admired this story. Chekhov was eager to write a long story, the famous In the Ravine, but this had to be put aside. The Moscow Art Theater was pressing him for a new play. At Yalta he was ill, “torn up by the roots,” he said, longing for Olga.

I am torn up by the roots. … I don’t drink though I am fond of drinking. I love noise and don’t hear it. … I am in the condition of a transplanted tree which is hesitating whether to take root or to begin to wither.

All he can offer the Moscow Art Theater for the new season is an old play, Uncle Vanya, which has never been put on in Moscow.

Uncle Vanya has a curious history. It was extracted from an earlier play, The Wood Demon, which was much longer. Chekhov had written it when he was staying with the Lint-varyov family in the Ukraine.

The people and scene of the earlier play recall something Chekhov had said about life in the Ukraine:

There are old neglected gardens and poetical estates, shut up and deserted, where dwell the souls of beautiful women.

In Uncle Vanya the scene is less seductive. The forests are being cut down in a haphazard way, the railway has crept in, factories have followed. We shall see a large half-neglected house with twenty-six rooms which is occupied by Uncle Vanya, who manages the estate, and his niece Sonya, who helps him with it. She actually owns the place, having inherited it from her mother. The profits, such as they are, go to support Sonya’s father, an elderly, gouty, cantankerous professor of art who does not reside on the estate but who happens to be staying there with his young second wife, the beautiful Yelena. Other characters include Astrov, a local doctor, Telegin, an impoverished garrulous landowner, and the widowed Mariya Vasilyevna, mother of Vanya and of the professor’s first wife.

Peace? We are about to see an absurd and acrimonious “month in the country” which will be very far from Tur-genevan. The interrelationships are complicated, as they often are in country life. The play may strike us as being something of an intricate novel, but its popularity in the provinces even before it was revived by the Moscow Art Theater suggests that it had the spell of normal country gossip about “goings on.” The professor has some of the disturbing egotism of the professor in A Dreary Story. His arrival puts everyone’s back up, especially Uncle Vanya’s, and, as in The Seagull, if very tentatively, there are “tons of love,” but here open tippling is added. Uncle Vanya tipples and so does Dr. Astrov, and both make passes at Yelena, who is beginning to hate her exasperating elderly husband. The plain Sonya longs for Dr. Astrov, who is treating the professor. Astrov is one of Chekhov’s strong if frustrated doctors and is close to him in that he is not only a doctor but also an active propagandist for the conservation of the forests. He hates having to treat the workers who have been injured by industrial accidents—a feeling, we suppose, Chekhov would not have shared. At the center of the play is Uncle Vanya’s mad jealousy of the learned professor. If only, Uncle Vanya cries out, he had “had a normal life,” he could have been “a Dostoyevsky or a Schopenhauer!”

The general situation comes to a head when the professor has the nerve to call together everyone in the house to appall them with the suggestion that the estate should be sold and the proceeds invested in securities. This is too much for Uncle Vanya. He announces that the professor cannot do this because the estate is not his to sell. It belongs to his daughter, Sonya. In any case, Uncle Vanya and Sonya have nowhere else to live. They have run the farm for twenty-five years. And so in a mad fit, Uncle Vanya gets a gun and fires two shots at the professor. They miss. This is too much for Yelena, who is tired of Uncle Vanya’s drunken attempts to seduce her, and of the doctors also. She forces the professor to give up his plans and leave. She has been disturbed by Dr. Astrov’s insinuation that as a faithful wife she will soon tire of living with a cantankerous old scholar. She is frightened by the insinuation for she has been more impressed by Dr. Astrov than she cares to admit. Life in the country is out of date, dull and corrupting in its spell.

For all its mingling of angers and farce, Uncle Vanya is a very subde, thoughtful and imaginative play. Chekhov has the art of showing us farce as inverted poetry. Uncle Vanya is absurd but we are drawn irresistibly to his side. The professor is ruthless because he is locked up in his conceit as a scholar. Dr. Astrov is angered by the passing of youth and its illusions but is passionately indignant at the fallen condition of the Russian peasant. He is also manly and shrewd. There is a good moment when, privately talking to Uncle Vanya after the absurd shooting scene, he comforts him, saying:

In the whole district there have only been two decent, civilized people—you and I. But ten years or so of this contemptible parochial existence have dragged us down.

And then suddenly he turns to the attack and says to Uncle Vanya: “Give me back what you took.” (He has detected that Uncle Vanya has stolen a bottle of morphia from his medicine chest.)

If you really must put an end to yourself why don’t you go to the woods and shoot yourself diere. But do give me back my morphia or else there will be talk and suspicion or people might think I have given it to you…. It’ll be quite enough to have to do your post mortem.

In the end we shall see Uncle Vanya and Sonya alone, doing the farm accounts while the impoverished landowner Telegin rambles on about the past and plays his guitar. Less happily, for it is too pretty and too touching, Sonya says: We shall hear the angels, we shall see the heavens covered with stars like diamonds. We shall see all earthly evils, all our sufferings, vanish in the flood of mercy which will fill the whole world, and our life will become peaceful, gentle, sweet as a caress. I believe it…. We shall rest.