Chekhov

Chapter Three

During the three or four years when he was working for Leykin, Chekhov moved his family eventually into a better house in a more congenial Moscow district: a litde red house with a spiral staircase, with carpets on the floor—he had an extravagant taste for carpets—a room for his growing library of books and, at last, a study where he could work alone. We begin to notice several stories of serious merit. If they are comic, they are not crude: they have a core of serious moral insight. This is true of A Daughter of Albion, in which a gross landowner is out fishing with the English governess. She cannot speak Russian, he cannot speak English, and he thinks her cold, proud, prim—in short, very English. His line is caught on a root and, hoping to shock her, he takes off his clothes and goes naked into the river to detach it. She is quite indifferent, and when he comes out she simply baits his line for him while he talks to a neighbor. What, in his earlier work, would have been a raw joke now has an unspoken judgment on the landowner’s ignorance and coarseness. Slight as the incident is, it “tells.”

More pointed is Anyuta, in which a medical student and a painter share a poor sewing girl as a model. We see her in the medic’s dirty room. She has taken her blouse off and he is marking her ribs with a piece of chalk as he recites his lesson in anatomy: “The right lung consists of three parts…. Upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches the fourth or fifth rib.” The painter comes in to borrow the girl to model for a picture of Psyche and lectures his friend on the filth of his room and tells him that he is not living as “an educated man” and that he ought to make the girl clean up the place. The story now becomes serious. While she is away and he is on his own the medical student takes the painter’s words to heart, reflects that one day he will be a successful doctor, even a professor, and that he must get rid of the girl. But how to say this? After an hour she comes back and he blurts out in a muddled way that she knows one day they will have to part and that they’d better do it now. They have been drinking tea; she puts on her coat and with tears in her eyes says, “That’s your sugar.” This breaks him. He begs her to stay and he starts his comic anatomy lesson again— “The right lung consists of three parts….”

A neat ending to a sentimental story that might have come out of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bobèeme? Chekhov had read Murger, as well as Daudet and Maupassant. But look once more at the middle of the story, to the talk of “living like an educated man” and to the crucial moment when she goes off to sit for the painter—the point at which the story has to “turn.” The girl comes to life and snaps at “the things I have to put up with here.” Chekhov sees that a neat ending will not do. As he often said, the proper ending of a story is always the difficulty. It is solved here, as so often it is in his better work, by “returning” his fiction to real life. As she leaves we hear some unknown man shouting up the stairs of the rooming house: “Grigory! The samovar!”—the indifferent voice of everyday life outside the tale.

Does this story derive from an incident in Chekhov’s life as a medical student? It is impossible to say. He had often censured his two older brothers about their behavior to women. It does not match the only account of an early stormy love affair he is known to have had at this time. We know that his mother was eager for him to marry the daughter of the rich haberdasher Gavrilov, who employed Pavel, and that Chekhov rejected the notion with disgust. But a letter from Chekhov to a fellow journalist suggests there were other rumors about a friend of his sister’s:

Now about a fiancée and Hymen…. When I speak about a woman I like, I usually prolong the talk to nec plus ultra, to the Pillars of Hercules, a trait that has been mine since before my school days…. My she is a Jewess. Should a wealthy Jewess have enough courage to embrace Orthodox Christianity with its consequences—very well; if not, it’s not necessary. Besides we have already quarreled…. Vexed that religion is in her way, she breaks pencils on my desk and photographs—and this is characteristic. A terrible shrew. But … finis.

The fiancée, it is thought, was Dunya Efros, a friend of his sister’s. Very little is known for certain about the love affairs in Chekhov’s life and he himself said there had been very few.

More dangerous was his double life as struggling doctor and comic writer. Moscow was telling on his health. There was an exhausting winter when he covered the lengthy and sensational trial of a corrupt banker. In April 1886 he writes to Leykin, who has complained that he is late with his “copy” and getting lazy: “I am ill. Spitting of blood and weakness …”

The next year the family was alarmed. There was tuberculosis on his mother’s side of the family. He was to deny for years that he was tubercular, but it is a matter of common observation that consumptives, whether they are evading the knowledge of their disease or not, tend to conceal their fears by doubling the fervor of their imagination and especially their feverish yet detached appetite for living, seeing, feeling and (most noticeable in Chekhov) their denial of what is burning them.

Even though Chekhov pretended, or perhaps thought, that he had merely burst a blood vessel or had trouble with his spleen, it was clear that he needed to get away from his racketing life in Moscow and that he needed a long holiday in the country. Fortunately his brother Ivan had been appointed headmaster of a small school in Voskresensk, about thirty miles from the city. There he was acquainted with the Kiselev family, who had a large estate in the village of Bab-kino, now Istra. There was a hospital where Anton could work. The Kiselevs were a rich, hospitable and cultivated couple. The husband was the nephew of an ambassador, the wife was the daughter of the director of the Imperial Theater in Moscow. They loved the company of musicians, artists and writers. Mariya Kiseleva herself was a talented writer of children’s stories. There was a vacant “cottage” with large rooms which they willingly furnished and rented to the Chekhov family to stay through the spring and summer. For the first time in his life Anton was living on a landowner’s estate. The gardens of the big house were designed in “the English style.” There were hothouses. The grounds ran down to a fine river, noted for its excellent fishing, and one looked across to a splendid forest. In the cottage Chekhov had a room to himself where he could write from seven in the morning for three hours. Hearing he was a doctor, the local peasants streamed to his door for treatment. In the afternoons he went fishing with Mariya Kiseleva; in the evenings there were delightful parties at her mansion when they played charades and put on impromptu plays or listened to music. Izaak Levitan, a rising painter, was there, a man who loved practical jokes and disguises. He was recovering from one of his paranoid manias. He and Chekhov liked getting up “comic court trials.” One day Anton dressed up as a judge and tried Levitan for “evading military service, keeping an illegal distillery and running a pawnshop.” Chekhov listened to the bickerings of the Kiselev children at the card table and was soon making up stories about them and also about an unfortunate dog called Kashtanka, a memory of one of the wretched dogs who had run wild in Taganrog. These stories were despised by the critics, but one notices the excellent recording of children’s natures and talk and an imaginative power close to Kipling’s in Chekhov’s love of animals and birds. As a boy he had passed many hours in the bird market at Taganrog. The mystery of the seasonal migrations of birds excited his wonder all his life. Unlike Levitan, who was a sportsman, Chekhov always refused to shoot a bird.

In the next three years the Chekhov family spent their summers in this paradise. Anton became a close friend of the local doctor and indeed was put in charge of a small hospital when the doctor was away.

There is no doubt that Babkino transformed Chekhov’s writing and that his love of the sounds and sights of the country enlarged his powers. Babkino was to become the source and scene of The Cherry Orchard years later, and we notice too how quickly he became aware that the extravagant Kiselevs were heading for financial disaster. Mariya Kise-leva’s father was reckless in his theatrical enterprises.

For Chekhov the first fruits of Babkino were two remarkable stories, which were noticed at once in Petersburg. Both recall the manner of Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, his simple yet poetic observation of country life. The first is The Burbot (The Fish in Constance Garnett’s translation), a plain country comedy. Peasants working in the fields on a hot day drop tools and slink off to the river to catch a large fish which is hiding under water among the roots of a tree. One of the men is a hunchback and some are naked and up to their necks in water while the rest shout advice: “Pull him out by the gills, pull him out! … Poke him with your finger—you pig’s face! … Pull it by the lip.” The passion and confusion of country sport has seized the peasants. One fellow is nipped by the fish. The others are slapping gnats off their necks. The confusion increases. All work is forgotten. They have deserted the cattle, who run into the river to drink and make things worse. Presendy the master of the estate comes down to find out what is going on. The beauty of it is that the master is dressed in his Persian dressing gown, carrying a newspaper (one of Chekhov’s incidental touches that tell us much about the landowner’s idle life). He calls up the coachman to help, but that fails. So, with dignity, the master gets his clothes off and jumps naked into the pool to show the yokels he knows the trick. Skillfully he pulls the fish out at once. It is an enormous fish, a ten-pounder. He displays it on the flat of his hand. Then, suddenly, the fish jumps into the air and dives back into the stream for good. That is all, but the tale of the master’s comeuppance will be told and improved upon for years. It will become a local legend: Chekhov has caught the confusion on a memorable hot day forever.

The other story of the new Chekhov is The Huntsman. This is more subtle in its psychological and social observation. Yegor is a handsome peasant loner, a privileged gamekeeper, vain of his looks and his instinctive shooting skills. He has been raised to the status of the indispensable steward at the big house: boasts that he eats “landowner’s food.” We see him “ambling along the road” by the woods. Presendy the young peasant wife whom he has deserted and rarely troubles to visit timidly calls out to him. She sees he has shot a grouse. She knows he will not come to the village to see her. Why? Is it true that he has taken up with another girl? He has always despised women and their ties. He is a “wild man.”

“You could have called in just once,” she says.

“What for?” he asks. His freedom cannot be “taken.” She says she has “worn her eyes out” waiting for him. She has not seen him for a year and even then he had been drunk and had beaten her.

“Waiting—what for?” he says.

She replies, “Not to do anything, of course, but it is your household, after all…. Just to see how everything is…. You are the head.”

She sits down at a distance, talking to him. They have been married for twelve years. “In church,” she says. “Not freely,” he says. He tells her she’s no more than a peasant working in the fields, living in dirt, that she wears bast shoes and her back is bent. And he stands by his superiority, his fame as a huntsman. He’s in the money. He is no longer a peasant. He’s free. If they were to take his gun away he’d easily take to horse dealing. “Once that free spirit’s got into a man there’s no winkling it out,” he says. He does not admit or deny that he has built a hut for another girl. He gives his wife a ruble and goes off. The end of the story? No. What is the last sight of a loved man like? Once more Chekhov is the collector of moments “that tell,” as if continuing human life is made of them:

Pale and still, she stands there like a statue, and her eyes devour every stride he takes. But now the red of his shirt merges with the dark of his trousers, his strides become invisible, his dog cannot be distinguished from his boots. Only his little cap can be seen then…. Suddenly Yegor turns off sharply … into the scrub and his cap disappears among the green. “Goodbye, Yegor Vlasych!” whispers Pelageya and rises on tiptoe to try and catch a last glimpse of his little white cap.

This year was dramatic for Chekhov. The Huntsman appeared in Petersburg in 1885, not in Leykin’s humorous journal but in a superior publication, The Petersburg Gazette. Chekhov, who had been despised by serious critics, was acclaimed. He was at the point when a young writer becomes more than “promising” to elders. He received a long letter from Dmitry Grigorovich, an established novelist of the older generation, who noted Chekhov’s innate sense of form and his “feeling for the plastic.” He said Chekhov had “real talent… a talent which sets you far above other writers of the younger generation.” Chekhov would be guilty of “a grievous moral sin” if he did not live up to these hopes. This was in March 1886. Chekhov respected but did not admire the work of Grigorovich, but he was grateful. He confesses, too fulsomely perhaps,

If I have a gift which one ought to respect I confess before the pure candour of your heart that hitherto I have not respected it…. In the course of the five years that I have been knocking about from one newspaper office to another … I soon got used to looking down upon my work…. This is the first reason. The second is that I am a doctor, and am up to my ears in medical work.

He admits his attitude to his work has been foolish and casual.

I don’t remember a single story over which I have spent more than twenty-four hours…. [I am] working against time.

He says nothing about the cheap journalism he was writing at the same time.

Earlier, in the autumn of 1885, Leykin advised Chekhov that the time had come for meeting the crucially important literary society of Petersburg, the capital of Russian literature. Chekhov said that he could not afford even the fare: the family eats up all his money, which is “as short as cats’ tears.” He had to pay for the running of his Moscow house, he owed rent for the summer cottage at Babkino; the sacred Christmas and Easter festivals always ruined him and, in any case, money always ran through his fingers.

A few months later he gave in, defying the dangerous December climate, and went with Leykin to meet the man who was effectively to change his life: Aleksey Suvorin, the millionaire publisher and owner of New Time (Novoe Vrem-ya), the most conservative and important newspaper in Russia, the only one that could stand comparison with the great papers of Europe. He had had his eye on Chekhov’s better stories; he would pay twice the rate Leykin paid him. Suvorin wanted the exclusive rights to Chekhov’s work, but on that Chekhov would not agree. Suvorin gave way.