Chekhov: A Biography

Chapter Seventeen

The young novelist Bunin had long talks with Chekhov at Yalta and later wrote the best portrait we have of him in these last years. He saw the wasted body, the strangely darkened face, and noticed how, when he took off his pince-nez, he looked younger. He noticed how he lisped on some syllables when he talked and how he would suddenly flash with excitement, but more often spoke tonelessly, yet said the most bizarre things without a smile and loved a fantastic image. (He spoke of a boring, nonstop talker who was Tolstoy’s emissary, as being like “a funeral cart standing up on end.”) One evening Chekhov was walking with Bunin to his lodgings up a dark street and he saw a lighted window and said: “Did you hear that Bunin had been murdered there by a Tatar?” Another time Chekhov spoke of his own death and said that in seven years he would be forgotten and that people would say, “A good writer, but not as good as Turgenev,” a line that came from Trigorin in The Seagull.

At this period he was working on two stories: one, The Bishop, is one of his finest works and reads like a sustained anthem to his own death. The other is The Bride, sometimes called The Betrothed or The Fiancee. These are his last stories, written while he was working on his two great plays The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The Bishop returns to his early manner in The Artist and The Student, to his delight in the chants and ceremonies of the Orthodox Church, his love of the naivete of its deacons, the drollery of the “chaff and grain” in their pious lives.

The bishop, like Chekhov, has risen to fame from humble peasant origins, and at the end of his life he finds he is no longer regarded as an ordinary human being. The awe he inspires leaves him isolated: fame and rank have turned him into an institution. Now he is concerned with the rediscovery of his human self. There is something dreamlike yet totally exact in the marvelous opening pages, something plain yet melodiously Proustian in the glide from the particular to its associations. We see the bishop standing near the altar on the Eve of Palm Sunday, looking at a vast congregation:

When they began distributing the palm it was close upon ten o’clock, the candles were burning dimly, the wicks wanted snuffing; it was all in a sort of mist. In the twilight of the church the crowd seemed heaving like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for the last three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and young, men’s and women’s—were alike, that everyone who came up for the palm had the same expression in his eyes. In the mist he could not see the doors [of the cathedral]; the crowd kept moving and looked as though there were no end to it. The female choir was singing, a nun was reading the prayers for the day. How stifling, how hot it was!

Then he is disturbed when a religious maniac utters shrieks in the gallery, and we get our first sight of his private drama:

[A]s though in a dream or delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though his own mother, … whom he had not seen for nine years, or some old woman just like his mother, came up to him out of the crowd, and, after taking a palm branch from him, walked away looking at him all the while good-humouredly with a kind, joyful smile until she was lost in the crowd…. tears flowed down his face.

And then:

Someone close at hand was weeping, then someone else farther away, then others and still others, and then little by little the church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later, within five minutes, the nuns’ choir was singing; and no one was weeping and everything was as before.

After the service the bishop drives off in his carriage and we hear the changing sound of the horses’ hooves as they strike the sandy road. In the moonlight “the white walls, the white crosses on the tombs, the white birch-trees and black shadows, and the far-away moon in the sky exactly over the convent, seemed now living their own life, apart and incomprehensible, yet very near to man.” In the town an enterprising shopkeeper has just put in electric lighting, a wonder that attracts the crowd. Suddenly we find that Chekhov has played one of his dramatic tricks: the bishop arrives at his rooms at the monastery and finds that the woman who had smiled at him in the church was indeed his mother, a woman who had had nine children and forty grandchildren and who had suddenly taken it into her head to make the long journey from her village just for the sight of her famous son. We are at the heart of the drama: the relationship of a simple peasant mother with a famous son who has moved into a position of learning, power and sacredness, who has even been on foreign missions. She brings a naughty little niece with her and later we shall see the unawed child showing off and knocking a glass off the table where they are eating. (Amusing, but Chekhov is aware of the comic principle that accidents must happen twice and, later, to advance the story, the child knocks a saucer over before the meal is done.) The naughty child tells the bishop that his stomach is making a noise, and that his cousin Nikolay, a medical student, “cuts up dead people.” She is behaving badly with a purpose. Her father had died because he had a bad throat. Her chin begins quivering. She puts on the manner of a little peasant beggar and makes tears come to her eyes:

“Your holiness,” she said in a shrill voice … “uncle, mother and all of us are left very wretched…. Give us a little money, do be kind, Uncle darling.”

Suddenly after this meal the bishop is ill. Perhaps the fish he has eaten at dinner is the cause? He notices that his legs are numb and he cannot understand what he is standing on. At night he cannot sleep, for Sisoy, a rough servant-monk who is in the cell next door, mutters and snores loudly without a break. The bishop’s mind wanders over trivial incidents of his early years in his village, remembering priests who got drunk and saw green snakes, and the nephew of the priest whose task, at services, was to read out the names of the parishioners who were ill and who needed prayers for their souls. Memories of childhood and youth come back, “living, fair and joyful as in all likelihood it never had been.” Perhaps in the life to come, he thinks, we shall remember our “distant past, our life here, with the same feeling. Who knows?” In the morning he is roughly woken by Sisoy. From church to convent in his district the bishop travels throughout Holy Week, seeing supplicants, and on his return has to meet visitors. It irks him to hear his mother, who does not know how to talk to him, chattering away easily to Sisoy and others about goodness knows what, except that in every story she always begins with the words “Having had tea,” or “Having drunk tea,” as if she had done nothing but drink tea all her life.

Now the bishop is very ill. He has got typhoid, Sisoy tells him brutally, and the monk insists on rubbing his body with tallow. Doctors are called and the bishop knows for certain that he is dying.

“How good,” he thought. He has attained what he has longed for: “Insignificance.”

His simple mother sits with him and she has forgotten he is a bishop and now calls him “my darling son” and says, “Why are you like this? Answer.”

The night before Easter Sunday he is dead.

What happens in a little town like this one when a famous man dies? Nothing. On the morning of Easter Sunday, as always, the joyful bells clang, the birds sing, the spring air quivers; in the market square barrel organs play, the accordions are squeaking, the drunks are shouting. After midday people began driving in carriages up and down.

Notice the precision of that return to the normal habits of the town. Notice also that at the end of the story Chekhov returns to his inner theme. Like an ordinary person, the bishop is forgotten. Except by his mother,

who is living today with her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, [and] when she goes out at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the pasture, [she] begins talking of her children, her grandchildren, and says that she had a son a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed. And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.