Chekhov: A Biography

Chapter Four

Chekhov’s friends were, like himself, liberals. They were appalled that he had gone over to a man notorious for his reactionary politics. How could he be so self-seeking as to give himself to the enemy? Chekhov declared that his independence was guaranteed, but for years his earnest friends were skeptical. They were even more astonished when they saw the relationship between the twenty-six-year-old writer and the rich entrepreneur in his fifties become a close friendship, and saw the older man become the attentive pupil of the younger. Both men came from the volatile south. The self-made Suvorin had started life as a humble schoolteacher. He had moved on to buying a dying provincial newspaper at the time of the Russo-Turkish War and had transformed it by getting direct vivid dispatches from the front which exposed the grievances of the officers and men. The paper became popular with the powerful military interests at once. Suvorin had been arrested for publishing unauthorized reports and had been sent to prison for a few months. On his release he took advantage of the railway age, founded New Time and saw that it was distributed at every railway station in Russia. He got the monopoly of the bookstalls and, astonishingly, started the publication of cheap editions of the Russian classics. He was an eager autodidact. He himself had tried to write novels, but seeing more money in the theater, he had turned to it and had a small success with popular plays simply because he could afford to buy the most successful actors and actresses. He had read, and met, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and—surprising in a conservative—had taken the trouble to meet and read Cher-nyshevsky, the revolutionary socialist and author of the notorious What Is to Be Done? which was the bible of the radicals. The author had been sent to prison and then exiled for a long term in Siberia.

There is commonly an element of naivete in the character of self-made men. In the long friendship between Suvorin and Chekhov, Suvorin is the earnest, hospitable man of the world, Chekhov is the bright young teacher. Chekhov stayed with Suvorin in Petersburg and, in time, traveled with him all over Europe and stayed with him and his family in his villa in the Crimea. The friendship, generous on Suvorin’s part, did not decline until, in old age, Suvorin in one of his anti-Semitic fits attacked Dreyfus and Zola.

Chekhov is one of the outstanding natural letter writers in Russian literature and his long correspondence with Suvorin is forthright, amusing and, above all, revealing. Suvorin’s replies have most unfortunately been lost. It was to Suvorin that Chekhov wrote the often quoted utterance which displays his pride:

What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try to write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests’ hands, worshipping the ideas of others and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance—write about this young man who squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and who, one fine morning, finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave but that of a real human being.

Very early Suvorin is concerned because his young genius is splitting his life in two as a doctor and a writer. Chekhov replies:

You advise me not to hunt after two hares and not to think of medical work. I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense. … I feel more confident and more satisfied with myself when I reflect that I have two professions…. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress…. There is no discipline in me.

Suvorin had a rather solemn interest in intellectual problems. For example, he complains that in The Horse Thieves Chekhov had not taken sides and solved the problem. Chekhov replies:

You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and Yevgeny Onegin not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely because all the problems are correctly stated in them.

Suvorin protests that this looks like indifference to good and evil. Isn’t horse stealing wrong? Chekhov replies there is no need for him to say horse stealing is wrong: everyone has known that for ages. His job is simply to say what these people are like.

These people are not beggars, but well-fed people with their own vocation—horse stealing for them isn’t just stealing, it’s a passion.

To depict a horse stealer in seven hundred lines is partly a matter of technique. A writer must unself himself and “must speak and think in their tone and must feel as a fellow-spirit, otherwise the images will become blurred.”

Suvorin certainly freed Chekhov from Leykin and journalism by paying him highly, but this did not immediately break Chekhov of the habit of writing too much. Petersburg readers had a taste for erotic stories, which would not have been publishable in Moscow. In The Witch the impotent, superstitious and jealous sexton of a lonely country church has come to believe that his wife has invoked the blizzard that rages round his filthy hut. She has put a lamp in the window in order to lure the mail drivers to her bed. We see in her the brooding of frustrated sexuality. The drivers indeed arrive and the impotent husband gloats on their indifference to her: the men are simply lost and are afraid of being too late for the mail train. Not a Chekhovian joke: Chekhov has created unmistakably the sullenness of desire and the determination of the men to ignore an easy seduction.

In Agafya Chekhov seems to be rewriting The Huntsman, but here the man is simply a handsome layabout peasant who refuses to work and lies in the woods all day. Village women who are under his sexual spell bring him food. How is sexual feeling evoked? Partly from the conniving innocence of the landscape, the peasants’ scanty talk and the gaze of the girl to whom the layabout gives vodka. We know also that she must get away quickly before her husband comes in by the train that will soon be signaled. We watch the signal light change from red to green. She overstays her time. Chekhov makes it clear what has gone on between the layabout and the girl by the remarkable account of her flight across the field to face her husband:

She moved in zigzags, then she moved her feet up and down without going forward, bending her knees and stretching out her hands, then she staggered back. When she had gone another hundred paces she looked around once more and sat down.

The defect of the story is that the narrator is outside it, but at least he sees that flight. The idle peasant does not even look. Finally, defiantly, she jumps up again to face her husband, knowing that he will beat her. There is the story: the willful idleness of love, the physical sight of making up the mind to face the price. If Chekhov is a master of moods they are almost always enacted.

Two stories are exercises in the manner of Maupassant’s The Necklace—a subject which has exercised many short-story writers, including Henry James. In An Upheaval we see a young au pair girl coming into her bedroom and catching her employer’s wife rummaging in her drawer; the excuse of the lady is that her jewelry has been stolen. The girl is indignant and decides to leave the house at once. One of Chekhov’s grim family luncheons follows. Privately the husband begs the girl to stay and, in the end, even goes down on his knees and confesses that he has sold his wife’s jewelry. “If you go,” he says to the girl, “there won’t be a human face left in the house.” The containing theme is that this pretentious bourgeois family have created “a life of lies,” and the girl leaves.

The Chorus Girl is a variation on the same theme: an hysterical wife knows an actress is her husband’s mistress and goes to the girl’s flat begging her to hand over the jewelry her husband has given her. The family is ruined. The girl says that all the husband has given her are a few cheap trinkets and, shocked that a lady should go down on her knees and beg, she throws the cheap stuff other men have given her at the wife, who goes off in triumph. The husband, hiding in the next room, comes out storming because he is shamed by the sight of his wife begging to such a creature, and he breaks with her. We notice the care with which Chekhov avoids the neat ending. The story must be returned to the inexplicable continuing human experience. The girl is left weeping and crying:

She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.

Two stories of this period are far more important: Easter Eve and Art. They take us back, no doubt, to scenes of Chekhov’s childhood, but there is a new musical element in his art— “the necessary tune” in the head that prompts the act of writing. In Easter Eve the anonymous narrator is on the riverbank waiting for the ferryman to take him across to an Easter celebration. A peasant shouts and is answered, not by a man but by the hoarse slow peal of a bell “as from the thickest string of a double bass.” Then the sound of a cannon shot rolls over the fields “behind me” and before the first peal has died away, a second and a third. Presendy a humble monk comes across in the ferry. He is sad. Why? “Even in the time of great rejoicing, a man cannot forget his sorrows.” His sorrow is that a monk called Nikolay has died, a simple unlettered man with a genius for composing hymns of praise. The heart of the story lies in the account of how traditional canticles must be put together. The monk says:

“Anyone who writes canticles must know the life of the saint to perfection, to the least trivial detail [and] one must make them harmonize with the other canticles and know where to begin and what to write about…. The first line must always begin with the ‘angel.’ … what matters is the beauty and sweetness of it…. For brevity [the composer] packs many thoughts into one phrase…. there must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun … and every exclamation ought to be put so as to be smooth and easy for the ear. … It is not simply ‘heavenly flower,’ but ‘flowers of heavenly growth.’”

Is the artist, then, a sort of monk? Far from it, as we see in the other Easter story, Art. At Easter the villagers have the tradition of building what they call a Jordan, which will stand on the ice in the middle of their frozen river. They are craftsmen. They know how to carve out the clumsy object, which combines a lectern with an enormous cross that can be seen rising above the village roofs. Before he starts work the artist looks on, curses the villagers and goes off to get drunk. His task is to glorify the grotesque object, but he cannot be found until the last minute, when he is very drunk. What has he been doing? He has been preparing his colors. He has been patiently making them out of beetroot leaves and onion skin, and he starts furiously yet carefully to paint. The rudimentary Jordan becomes a shaft of dazzling light and now the unmanageable man gazes with humility at his creation.

A fable, of course, but notice that everything in the village festival is there and that the narrative has been given the necessary fever by being written in the present tense. It is said that Chekhov used his hard-drinking, playacting and paranoid friend, the painter Levitan, for his model in this story.

We have already been struck by the fact that the so-called connoisseur of moods is almost invariably concerned with the métier, the trades and professions of his characters, whether they are peasants, workmen, doctors, lawyers or landowners. What does occupation do to a man’s nature? In The Kiss, the one long story he wrote in his 1887 summer at Babkino, there is an extraordinary example of Chekhov’s power of absorbing the mystique of an occupation yet avoiding tedious documentation. At Babkino a brigade of artillery was stationed. It was not difficult to note the characteristics of officers and men, to catch their work, their duties, their talk in the mess, the difference between their preoccupations on the march, their care for their equipment; their “mystique” is another matter. Chekhov had read Tolstoy and Lermontov and already knows that an army is a migrant culture. He may have been told the incident of the story by a general he had met at the Kiselevs, but it would have lost all perspective if he had not, by a mixture of observation and meiosis, put a regiment on duty plainly before us as human beings.

The story opens lightly with a party. The retired General Von Rabbek, local lord of the manor, has invited the officers to it. They are keen, of course, to meet the ladies. There are drinks and there is dancing. The soldiers throw themselves into the fun—all except Staff Captain Ryabovich. He can’t dance or play billiards; he is a short ugly fellow who wears spectacles and has lynxlike whiskers and is shut up in himself. He wanders about with gloomy curiosity over the grand house, walks into a room, which is in darkness. Suddenly he has an experience that will haunt him for years. A girl rushes into the dark room, cries out “At last!,” kisses him, then gives a scream and runs away. She has mistaken him for someone else. The ugly, shy little staff captain is transformed. He feels suddenly proud. He struts back to the ballroom and tries to guess, by a perfume or a voice, who the girl was. He fails to find out, and from now on we see a life of fantasy beginning.

The evening comes to an end. The soldiers leave and take a shortcut through the woods to their billets, shouting and laughing. No doubt, says Chekhov, they were wondering whether they would someday have a mansion like the general’s and whether they would be rich enough to have fine gardens and woods like these. But Ryabovich is lost in his obsession. The stars are out and their reflection trembles, dissolves and forms again in the stream he crosses, just as the misleading kiss reflects in his life. He hears—as so often occurs in Chekhov’s landscape—“the plaintive cry of drowsy snipe” and “a nightingale in full song,” and one of the vulgar soldiers says, “How about that! … the little rascal doesn’t give a damn!” Here we notice one of the differences between Turgenev and Chekhov: in Chekhov the sights and sounds of nature are seen and heard by people. In Turgenev they are seen and heard by the detached author for their own beautiful sake. When distant lights shine through the trees, for example, Ryabovich thinks the lights know his secret. Back at the billet he is brought instantly down to earth. The batman is reporting to the commander: “Darling’s foot was injured at yesterday’s re-shoeing, sir. The vet put on clay and vinegar.”

The next day the brigade moves off with its guns and Ryabovich is split between his daydreams and his full efficiency as an automatic soldier. As the brigade rumbles down the road the military life “makes sense” to Ryabovich, perhaps the only thing that does make sense! He knows that the rumbling procession of guns has to be led by a vanguard of four men with drawn sabers, that after them come the “singers”—like torchbearers in a funeral procession:

[Ryabovich] has known for ages why a sturdy bombardier rides alongside the officer at the head of each battery and why he is given a special name…. [he] knows that the horses on the left, on which the riders are mounted, have one name and those on the right another…. Behind the driver come the two wheel-horses. On one of them sits a rider with yesterday’s dust on his back and a clumsy, very funny-looking piece of wood on his right leg; Ryabovich knows the purpose of this piece of wood and does not find it funny. Every single rider brandishes his whip mechanically and from time to time gives a shout.

The gun carriage itself is ugly and absurd: it has teapots and soldiers’ packs hanging all over it.

Bringing up the rear is the baggage train, and striding thoughtfully beside it, drooping his long-eared head, is a highly sympathetic character: the donkey, Magar, imported from Turkey by one of the battery commanders.

At midday—and how long and monotonous Russian days are; in them daydreams drag on, are interrupted and start again—the brigade general drives down the column in his barouche and shouts something that no one grasps. Ryabovich and others gallop up to him. “Any sick?” asks the general from his barouche and tells Ryabovich his breech-ings look slack. Such is military servitude.

Eventually the brigade returns from its exercises to its base near the manor house. Locked in his daydreams, Ryabovich cannot resist making a secret trip alone across the river, through the woods, for a closer look at the house. He knows his dream of finding the girl is futile. The whole world, the whole of life, strikes the ugly Ryabovich as an unintelligible joke directed against himself It seems likely, given his dullness and the routine of military life, that his isolation will be lasting. He will be locked in himself.

As an innovator in the writing of short stories, especially in his mastery of nostalgia and mood, Chekhov knew that his great predecessors were novelists who had addressed themselves to questions like the emergence of Russia from its prolonged medieval condition. The patrician Turgenev had made his stand for the liberation of the serfs and the example of Western civilization. Dostoyevsky had been sent to Siberia for his part in an alleged revolutionary conspiracy but had ended in denouncing the Western socialist idea and its materialism. Tolstoy, after his conversion, had turned to simple Bible teaching and to the doctrine of nonresistance to evil by force. There was now a new radical generation who were growing up as Russia became, to some degree, industrialized. In the older generation one was judged by one’s “convictions”; in Chekhov’s by one’s “tendency.” There is a letter to the elderly poet Aleksey Pleshcheyev, who had in his time been sent to prison in Siberia, in which Chekhov describes his stand:

I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines and insist on seeing me as necessarily a liberal or a conservative. I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence, whatever form they may take…. Pharisaism, stupidity and tyranny reign not only in shopkeepers’ homes and in lock-ups alone: I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation. … I regard trade-marks and labels as prejudicial. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom—freedom from force and falsehood….

Here it is important to look at a story called On the Road and a play, Ivanov, which derives from it, which were written in one of Chekhov’s summers at Babkino. In both, the disastrous history of an educated man’s search for “convictions” are dramatically examined. On the Road is one of the Chekhov’s finest dramatic stories. It is true that it brings to mind an encounter towards the end of Turgenev’s Rudin—perhaps modeled in part on Bakunin. Like Rudin, Chekhov’s hero, Likharyov, is one of those torrential talking egoists, the old-style “superfluous man,” but now updated. He is a young ruined landowner who has given up his estate, and we see him traveling with his tiny daughter and stopping at a rough roadside inn. A gentlewoman is sheltering there too. She has been on a round of visits to friends in the province. Instantly he pours out a nonstop confession, the history of his changing “convictions,” his sins, his unforgivable behavior to his dead wife. Chekhov notes, “To an educated Russian his past is always beautiful, his present a tale of calamity.” Likharyov tells her he has gone from faith in God to faith in the Sciences, chemistry, zoology. He has been, in politics, a Slavophile, a nihilist, to the point of shooting a gendarme. He had once converted a nun to nihilism; he boasts of his success with women. During these changes of mind and fortune his wife had never left his side. “A noble sublime slavery,” he says. “… the highest meaning of woman’s life.” Now she is dead. Only once does he pause: his tiny daughter has been put to rest wrapped in a blanket on the floor and the exhausted child calls out, “He won’t let me sleep with his talking.” He soothes the child and the night passes. In the morning he goes on again. What is he going to do? He has made a decision. He is traveling to Siberia to work in a coal mine.

The lady gets ready to leave. She thinks about secretly slipping money into his pocket but then goes off on her sleigh. She has been dangerously under his spell.

Not only in her heart but even in her spine she felt that behind her stood an infinitely unhappy man, lost and outcast.

Likharyov watches her settle into her sleigh and drive off.

She looked back at Likharyov as though she wanted to say something to him. He ran up to her but she said nothing to him, she only looked at him through her long eyelashes with little specks of snow on them.

That is all.

The Kiselevs admired the story. They saw that it would make a remarkable one-act play, but they knew the censor would never allow the sight of a gentlewoman spending the night at a remote inn, however innocently, with a man she did not know. That scene must go. Chekhov saw a full-length play in the traveler’s past, and On the Road is the source of his first long play, Ivanov. Likharyov is now Ivanov. We see him on his estate, married to a Jewish wife, who has been disinherited by her rich parents and who is now dying. His bailiff has been robbing him for years and he is ruined: worse—while waiting for his wife to the he has taken up with an “advanced” young girl, whom he plans to marry. The only objection to the marriage comes from a Dr. Lvov, who is disgusted by Ivanov’s cynicism and publicly denounces him. But Ivanov is also trapped by his dishonest bailiff, who is perpetrating a fraud, and his master has been too weak to sack him. The question is: Will Ivanov be base enough, fool enough and weak enough to marry the young girl the moment the unloved wife dies?

The play made an impression in St. Petersburg chiefly because it was played by rhetorical actors of the old school, who stormed through it, treating it as a melodrama, for at the end Ivanov is driven to shoot himself on the morning of his wedding day: they turned Ivanov into a villain and Dr. Lvov into his righteous judge. Suvorin thought they were right, and indeed at first glance we shall more than half agree with him, but in his letters to Suvorin, Chekhov gives a far more interesting and convincing account of his intentions. Ivanov, he says, was not a monster:

His past is beautiful…. There is not, or there hardly is, a single Russian gendeman or University man who does not boast of his past. The present is always worse than the past. Why? Because Russian excitability has one specific characteristic: it is quickly followed by exhaustion…. [He feels] only an indefinite feeling of guilt. It is a Russian feeling. Whether there is a death or illness in his family, whether he owes money or lends it, a Russian always feels guilty…. [Ivanov says:] “My thoughts are in a tangle, my soul is in bondage to a sort of sloth, and I am incapable of understanding myself.” … To exhaustion, boredom, and the feeling of guilt add one more enemy: loneliness.

The case against Ivanov is made by the young puritanic Dr. Lvov. Is Lvov right? Chekhov replies to Suvorin that the doctor

is the type of an honest, straightforward, hotheaded, but narrow and uncompromising man…. Anything like breadth of outlook or spontaneous feeling is foreign to Lvov. He is cliché incarnate, bigotry on two feet … he judges everything prejudicially. He worships those who shout, “Make way for honest labor!” Those who don’t are scoundrels and exploiters…. When he reads [Turgenev’s] Rudin he just has to ask himself “Is Rudin a scoundrel or not?” … Lvov is honest. … If need be, he will bomb a carriage, slap a school inspector’s face…. He never feels conscience pangs—it is his mission as “an honest toiler” to destroy “the powers of darkness.”

What about Ivanov’s dying wife? She loves him so long as he is excited, because his enthusiasm is brilliant and he is as heated as Lvov is. But when Ivanov grows misty to her she cannot understand him and will soon turn on him. The young girl to whom Ivanov turns is the latest example of the “educated woman.” What attracts her is the duty of rescuing Ivanov from his depression and putting him on his feet and making him happy.

The most interesting critical comment on Ivanov will be found in Ronald Hingley’s book on Chekhov. Hingley turned to a Russian source, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s History of the Russian Intelligentsia, which says that, as a doctor, Chekhov was making a medical study of Ivanovo “neurasthenia”; the play is “a medical tragedy.”

There are burly, ignoble and shameless characters in the play, especially the bailiff, Borkin, who has cynically exploited Ivanov’s weaknesses. Like other landowners, Ivanov is always in debt. Borkin, who has robbed him, invites him to recoup by swindling. He suggests, for example, that Ivanov should buy the opposite bank of the river, beyond the boundary of his estate. This will give him the right to dam the river and build a mill, which will bankrupt the factories below the dam. The owners will have to bribe him handsomely to prevent the scheme. (Everyone knows what Borkin once bought up herds of cattle during an epidemic, insured them, then infected them and collected the insurance.) When Lvov calls Ivanov a scoundrel, it is either fatal to his tottering brain or stimulates him to a new paroxysm, and in shooting himself, he sentences himself.