Chekhov: A Biography

Chapter Sixteen

In 1899 the Academy of Sciences celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Pushkin by admitting writers as Honorary Members. Tolstoy and Chekhov were among the first to be honored (in January 1900) by this very conservative society of scholars. Chekhov was skeptical, in two minds about the scholarly embrace, and joked about the honor. It meant that he could not be arrested, would not have to get a special passport for foreign travel and would be free of the supervision of customs officials. He signed letters to his friends as “Academicus, Hereditary Honorary Academician.” And he wrote to a friend that he was pleased, but

I shall be even more gratified when I lose that tide as the result of some misunderstanding. And a misunderstanding is bound to occur, because the learned Academicians are very much afraid that we shall shock them.

Two years later he resigned when Gorky’s membership in the Academy was revoked.

Meanwhile he was writing In the Ravine for Gorky’s Marxist paper Life. What astonishes us is that this long, richly crowded story—it runs to fifteen thousand words—should have come from him when his disease was worsening. He deepens his portraits of people, he absents himself and becomes them and lets them speak in their voices as they live out their passions.

In The Peasants he evoked a village which had not changed for centuries. In the new story the corruption comes from contact with the intruding factories. The story opens with what seems to be one of his jokes:

The village of Ukleyevo lay in a ravine so that only the belfry and the chimneys of the calico-printing factories could be seen from the high road and the railway-station. When travelers asked what village this was, they were told: “That’s the village where the deacon ate all the caviare at the funeral.”

No joke at all. The young novelist Bunin told Chekhov later on that he knew of the grotesque incident and had seen the place. We expect a story like this to be a study done in stark black and white; in fact it subtly evokes the inconsequent yet decisive and sudden passions of its people. Those who worked in the factories could afford to eat and simply glutted themselves. The rest took their chances, stole or crowded round the back door of the local grocer’s store and begged. On many days the village lay invisible under a chemical mist which rose from the stream that had been poisoned by the factories. Fever was endemic. The factory owners had bribed the police to do nothing about the contamination. Tsybukin, the owner of the village store, is a dishonest trader who sells everything from provisions such as bad meat and poor-quality vodka to cattle, pigs and hides. He even manages to sell peasant women’s bonnets for export as fashionable wear. Yet he has also the character and habits of a patriarch. His second wife—not from the village—has made a half-charitable man of him.

As soon as she was installed … everything in the house brightened up, as though the windows had been newly glazed…. the tables were covered with snow-white cloths. … at dinner, instead of eating from a common bowl, each person had a plate.

The new wife is the soul of simple charity, and the old man astonishes everyone by allowing her to feed the beggars who crowd round the store at night. He has shrewdly married off one of his sons, who is deaf, to a domineering shrew called Aksinya. She is a frightening money-minded sensual predator. Now he finds a wife for his second son, Anisim, a gaudy, excitable fellow who has bettered himself by becoming a police detective. Tsybukin has charitably found a poor waif from a nearby town for him, a charwoman’s daughter called Lipa, a child who has only just reached the legal age for marriage. The decisive theme of the story is Aksinya’s jealous hatred of Lipa. At Lipa’s wedding to Anisim, Aksinya throws herself into the orgy of drinking, guzzling and dancing, and dominates the wedding:

Aksinya had naïve gray eyes which rarely blinked and a naïve smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snake-like. Dressed all in green except for the yellow bodice, smiling, she looked like a viper stretching itself, head uplifted, in the young rye, as it watches someone go past in the spring.

Anisim, the bridegroom detective, is a plausible liar, an exhibitionist, creating rumor and alarm. He boasts that he can spot stolen goods instantly anywhere and claims that the rise in crime is due to the decline of religious belief; he himself privately denies the existence of God. We shall soon see that he is passing false coinage and, in this, is the slave of a bigger crook than himself. A few weeks after the marriage the village will learn that he has been caught, tried and given penal servitude. As a patriarch defending his family, Tsybukin tries to get Anisim released by bribing the prison governor, offering him “a silver glass stand with a spout,” inscribed with the words “The soul knows its right measure,” and he is naïve enough to be surprised that the traditional remedy fails. Tsybukin will be worried for the rest of his life about the difficulty of deciding what coinage is genuine and what is false, not only in trade but in the heart. We see all this through the voices and general mind of the village: the people are at first proud of Anisim and even defend him for a time. Then they will forget him, as indeed his young wife, Lipa, does once she has borne his son. The child is her total delight—and old Tsybukin’s also. She cannot stop watching the baby in his cradle. She often bows to him and says, “Good day, Nikifor Anisimych!” And then she rushes at him and kisses him and says the same thing again when she leaves the room. To her mother, who has come to work in the family kitchen, she often remarks: “Why do I love him so much, mamma? Why do I feel sorry for him? … Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb. … I love him like a real person…..”

Tsybukin’s delight is marred by his worry about having accepted some of Anisim’s false coins. He confesses his complicity to Varvara, his charitable wife, and naïvely, to calm him, she tells him to make his will and to make the baby his heir.

We come to a scene of horror. Aksinya is jealous of Lipa because a piece of land, which she covets, has been willed to Lipa’s child. One day Aksinya finds Lipa washing clothes in a tub of boiling water, screams that Lipa is the wife of a convict and throws a pail of boiling water over the baby, shouting, “You stole my land: now take that!” She rushes out into the garden shouting out to the gaping crowd, who have heard the screams, that Tsybukin is a bandit who has a store of false coins, and she starts pulling the clothes off the washing line and stamps on them. “What a wild woman!” the crowd says in admiration of the scene. “She has gone mad.” It is perfect that her frightened, doltish husband comes out and picks up the washing and pegs it back on the line—a classic example of Chekhov’s skill at “making it true” by anticlimax. Lipa takes the scalded baby to a hospital many miles away, and there it dies.

The finale of the story is so thronged with the conflicting voices of the people that the village itself—and not some orderly narrator—seems to be telling it out of the passions they all share.

We see Lipa’s long walk back from the hospital, alone on the empty country road, carrying the dead baby in her arms, too simple, too stunned, to be frightened or to grieve. Chekhov is at one with all who travel alone. Dusk has come: we see the moon rise, hear the mysterious cowlike call of the bittern, the mocking cries of the cuckoos and the operatic nightingales, the croaking of frogs, all indifferent to human misery. Lipa is not broken. What sustains the simple Lipa is a naïve question: “Where is the baby’s soul now?” She is at last given a lift by a couple of carters and asks them how long a soul remains on earth after death. The older carter says:

“Who can tell? Ask Vavila here, he has been to school. Now they teach them everything.” …

Vavila stopped the horse and only then answered: “Nine days. My uncle Kirilla died and his soul lived in our hut thirteen days after.”

“How do you know?”

“For thirteen days there was a knocking in the stove.”

“Yours is not the worst of sorrows,” the old man says. “Life is long, there will be good and bad to come, there will be everything. Great is Mother Russia.” And he tells her that he had been to Siberia and walked back, and his wife died there. “I have had good as well as bad. … I would be glad to live another twenty years, so there has been more of the good than the bad.” The young Gorky enormously admired this part of the story.

Lipa does not get back to Ukleyevo until sunrise and there she can cry at last. She realizes that she has no place in the house and Aksinya shouts at her: “What are you bellowing for?” At the funeral of the baby Aksinya is dressed up in new clothes and has powdered her face. The crowd of guests and priests eat as if they had not eaten for days and Lipa waits humbly at table. A detail:

The priest, lifting his fork on which there was a salted mushroom, said to her: “Grieve not for the babe, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Three years pass. The tragedy has been assimilated into village history. Aksinya has triumphed. After the funeral she has driven her rival, Lipa, out of the house, and Lipa goes to live with her mother and earns her living working in the brickfields with the crowd of village women. The avaricious Aksinya has bought land and virtually owns the brickfield. She has become rich as the mistress of one of the mill owners. Everyone is afraid of her. Even at the post office the postmaster jumps to his feet and says: “I humbly beg you to be seated, Aksinya Abramovna.” She also controls the shop and there is a rumor that she has driven Tsybukin out of the house and gives him nothing to eat. He spends his time sitting on a bench in the street, where he still fears to be caught for his connection with the false money. His frightened, muddle-minded wife can do nothing. The last we see of Lipa is in the evenings, marching home and singing with the crowd of workers from the brickfields. Like them she is “singing in a high voice … as though triumphant and ecstatic” because the long day is over and she can rest. We see her and her mother lagging behind in the crowd to bow to Tsybukin and give him a piece of pie before going on their way, and crossing themselves for a long time afterwards. Some people in the village are sorry for the old man; others say he deserved what has happened to him.

Powerful as the story is, it is all the more powerful for being a drama which is heard in the day-to-day voices of the people as they work in their poisoned valley and yet also talk out of their inherited imagination. How exactly Chekhov has caught Aksinya’s nature when he notes the naïveté of the face of this snakelike and ruthless woman: the naïveté of uncontrollable sexuality incited by the pursuit of money. In his maturity Chekhov goes to the inborn “nature” of his people, not to their merely observable idiosyncrasies. Who would have suspected that poverty would have given Lipa, the simple waif, an inborn will? How admirable it is that Chekhov accepts all contradictions. How much more remarkable that in a story so powerful in its drama, he has avoided all theatrical rhetoric but has let life tell its own tale.

The story was acclaimed by most critics and Gorky wrote a long ecstatic essay on it and made an important point:

Chekhov has been reproached with having no philosophy. The reproach is absurd…. Ever more often our ears can catch in his stories the melancholy but severe and deserved reproach that men do not know how to live, but at the same time, his sympathy with all men glows even brighter.

The Moscow Art Theater was still pressing Chekhov for a new play but he was too ill to go to Moscow to discuss it with them and persuaded them to bring their company to the Crimea to put on performances of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. Their success was sensational in Yalta and Sevastopol and there were exhausting festivities: the whole company swarmed in his new house. Olga for some time had been hinting at marriage. She found the gossip about their situation unpleasant. He calls her his sweet little actress, his wonderful Olga, the joy of his life, his delightful Knip-perschitz, but she is determined on marriage.

I am tired of the game of hide and seek. I cannot bear to watch your mother’s suffering. … It is awful. I feel as if I were between two fires at your place. Tell me what you think about it…. You never say anything—don’t always dismiss everything as a joke. I can’t help feeling you don’t love me any more.

He points out that most of the year, when she was playing in Moscow or on tour, they would be as much apart if they were married. But she insists. At last he gives in.

If you will give me your word that not a single soul in Moscow will know of our wedding until it is over, I will marry you on the day of my arrival if you like. For some reason I have a fearful dread of the ceremony, the congratulations and the champagne which one has to hold in one’s hand while smiling vaguely.

He had always hated being the center of public occasions; he loathed speeches. And, he told her, he had everything in order except one thing: his health. “Just as I’ll be alone in my grave, so in essence I shall live alone.”

He went to Moscow on May 11, 1901, and was examined by a famous consultant, who said his state had worsened and ordered him to go at once to a sanatorium in the distant province of Ufa, where patients took the koumiss cure: drinking the fermented milk of mares. The marriage took place in a Moscow church on May 25; neither his family nor Olga’s friends were told or invited. There were four witnesses: Olga’s uncle, and her brother, and two students. A few close friends were invited to a special luncheon, at which the bride and groom did not turn up. Chekhov and his wife went to see Olga’s mother briefly, then took the train to Nizhny Novgorod to see Gorky, who had been exiled there, and after that they went by boat to Ufa and on across the steppe by coach to the sanatorium.

He sent a telegram to his mother, asking for her blessing, and saying: “Everything will remain as before.”

The shock of his marriage was felt most strongly by his sister, for she had been closer to him than anyone else in his working life. Mariya (“Masha”) had managed his practical affairs. Her help had been indispensable in his social doctoring and in the building of schools at Melikhovo and in the detail of organizing his complex practical fight against the cholera. She had sacrificed her chances of marriage. When she had been with Chekhov in the Ukraine they had spent some time with a landowner, Alexander Smagin, who had fallen in love with her and she with him. Smagin indeed had come to stay at Melikhovo, and she asked her brother anxiously what she should do. He stared at her for a long time and said nothing. She read the meaning of it: she broke with Smagin, and she wrote after her brother’s death that he had made two people who loved each other miserably unhappy for years. Chekhov’s blank stare was unanswerable. It is extraordinary to see Chekhov become as ruthless as the woman teacher who destroys the love affair of her pretty sister in The House with the Mezzanine.

Now, deeply hurt above all because Olga, who had been her friend, had not confided in her, Mariya struggled to master her distress. She wrote to her brother: “For me you have always been the nearest and dearest person and your happiness is my only concern.” And then, overwrought, she made an extraordinary proposal: she asked to be allowed to visit the couple on their honeymoon. He replied that he and Olga would be delighted by this. Mariya, wisely, decided not to join them.

The journey to Ufa had enlivened the traveler. Everything went well, despite the primitive condition of the sanatorium. The oak woods around it were beautiful. Chekhov delighted in the wildflowers and was thrilled by the droves of wild horses and, of course, went fishing. He made an effort to drink bottle after bottle of mares’ milk and his weight went up at once. Olga and he were happy, though he hated to be without books and having to depend on newspapers that were a year old. He missed, above all, the talk of his intellectual friends: Olga had noticed long ago that he rarely talked about literature to her and as an earnest, educated, half-German Russian, she felt that he believed her not to be up to it and that he evaded the subject with his usual jokes. The cure was supposed to last two months, but at the end of a month he decided to go back with Olga to his house in Yalta, where his mother and sister were, as usual, staying for the summer. For the women the situation was difficult. Who had the natural right to rule, the wife or the sister? In the past Masha had taken charge of looking after Chekhov’s diet and health, had seen that he washed his hair and brushed his clothes and that he changed his ties. Although Masha’s jealousy of her friend had faded, it revived when she heard Olga say she was thinking of giving up the theater and becoming a teacher in order to look after her husband.

Before the marriage Chekhov had made his will. Masha was to have his house “during her lifetime and the income from my dramatic productions.” To his wife he left one of his Crimean cottages. Decent sums were left to his brothers. After his mother’s and Masha’s deaths what remained, except the income from the plays, was to go to the Taganrog administration for public education. He clearly felt that the young Olga would be in far less need because of her now successful career.

Olga returned to Moscow, and he was soon bored and longing for her. He joined her briefly to see a performance of The Seagull in its new season and was at last delighted by it. They saw very little of each other because her rehearsals went on for hours, even into the night. She loved late parties, she could sing well, was a good pianist and, naturally, a good linguist, and she did not hide her excitement at being the wife of “the Russian Maupassant.” But he could not keep up with her energetic life in Moscow. He and Masha would wait for her to return, often after midnight, from rehearsals or sprees, in the new large flat he and Olga had taken. Not surprisingly Chekhov’s illness returned and he had to go back to Yalta once more alone, but it was clear that his sister had now accepted the situation and, although still watchful, was calmer.

The story of Chekhov’s happy marriage to Olga is plain in the letters they wrote almost every day in their absences. Then in June 1902 comes their tragedy. She is pregnant, at first without knowing it; then she tells him and he is full of joy. They talk about their “little half German.” He longs for a son and he tries to stop her going to all those exciting parties that last half the night. He has heard of them from her but also from his worried sister. Olga miscarries: her hope of having a “little half German” has gone.

For a time Olga talks of giving up the theater so that they can spend all their time together, but Chekhov will not hear of it. It occurs to her that he says this because he would be bored in her continuous company. She has a sudden attack of peritonitis and Chekhov is patiently nursing her in a villa outside Moscow.

When he saw she was recovering he abruptly went off on a long journey to Perm with a millionaire mill-owner, Mo-rozov, who regarded himself as a revolutionary of sorts. Olga was hurt that he did not invite her to join them. The journey was not the last fling of the restless nomad.