Chekhov Becomes Chekhov

Grigorovich’s biographer observes that “The tone of the letter is very much de haut en bas.”34 The praise is as condescending as it is lavish:

While reading you, I continually advised Suvorin and Burenin to follow my example. They listened to me and now, like me, they do not doubt that you have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation.

By the time Grigorovich wrote this, Suvorin had already, since the beginning of January, signed Chekhov on to write for New Times. So Grigorovich was shouldering aside the man who more obviously decided that Chekhov should have carte blanche and had actually given it to him.

I am not a journalist nor a publisher. I can be useful to you only as one of your readers. If I speak of your talent, I speak out of conviction. I am almost sixty-five [he had just turned sixty-four], but I still feel so much love for literature and follow its success with so much ardor and rejoice when I find in it something living and gifted, that I cannot refrain—as you see—from holding out both hands to you.

Grigorovich sounds like another one of Chekhov’s comic windbags.

But this is by no means all. Here is what I wish to add. By virtue of the varied attributes of your undoubted talent—the precise truth of your internal analysis, your mastery of description (the snowstorm, the night, the background in “Agafya” etc.35), the plasticity of your feelings which in a few lines projects a complete picture (the clouds above the setting sun “like ashes over dying coals,” etc.)—I am convinced that you are destined to create some admirable and truly artistic works. And you will be guilty of a great moral sin if you do not live up to these hopes. All that is needed is esteem for the talent which so rarely falls to one’s lot. Cease to write hurriedly.

I am trying to imagine Chekhov’s face as he read and reread this paragraph. Is it expressing “two contradictory feelings” as Andrey Andreyich’s did in “The Requiem”? Chekhov smiles as it is dawning on him that famous people are reading him and talking about him. But there is also a grimace at being prematurely reproached. Though Chekhov would scold his brother Alexander using some of Grigorovich’s very ideas about responsibility to one’s talent, Chekhov would write to his brother as an equal and not as a prince to a pauper. And Chekhov, at this time a speedy genius, would later, when he was slower, refute Grigorovich about speed; that is, Chekhov would assert that speedy writing is a good thing, all things being equal: “Potapenko is an extraordinary man. He can write 16 pages a day without a single correction. Once he earned 1,100 rubles in five days. In my opinion, writing at a terrific speed is not, as Grigorovich thinks, a blemish but a special gift.”36

Grigorovich goes on:

I do not know what your financial situation is. If it is poor, it would be better for you to go hungry, as we did in our day, and save your impressions for a mature, finished work, written not in one sitting, but during the happy hours of inspiration.

Hmph! Two things: (1) Grigorovich had some idea of Chekhov’s financial situation and knew the young man needed the money; (2) Grigorovich remembered himself as one of those “inspired” artists who in the midst of maturing their masterpieces dined on air and rocks. If Grigorovich had included a check for a thousand rubles, we could forgive him for his presumption.

It gets worse:

One such work will be valued a hundred times higher than a hundred fine stories scattered among the newspapers at various times. In one leap you will reach the goal and will gain the notice of cultivated people and then all the reading public.

One thing I have learned in my research for this book is that Chekhov, that is, Antosha Chekhonte, appearing weekly in Fragments and the Petersburg Gazette, already had an immense “reading public.” Was that public “cultivated”? No. But among his readers was Tolstoy himself, who appreciated Chekhov’s comic sensibility as one of the rarest of artistic gifts. Grigorovich sniffed:

Why is it that you often have motifs with pornographical nuances at the basis of your tales? Truthfulness and realism not only do not exclude refinement but even gain from it.

Was Grigorovich scandalized by “The Witch”? Was he offended by Agafya’s passion for the big lunk Savka? Though a notorious womanizer, Grigorovich was, as regards literature, a prude. Some of the heat and power of Chekhov’s arguments about art and its acceptable subjects (that is, there is nothing unclean in nature) are going to redound in January 1887 on the head of one of his proteges, Maria Kiseleva, rather than back on Grigorovich’s noggin, where they would have bounced off anyway.

You have such a powerful sense of form and a feeling for the plastic, that you have no special need, for example, to speak about dirty feet with turned-in toenails or a clerk’s navel. These details add exactly nothing to the artistic beauty of a description and only spoil the impression among readers of taste. Have the generosity to forgive such observations, for I resolved to make them only because I sincerely believe in your talent and with all my soul desire its fullest development.

How Chekhov must have cringed at the phrase “readers of taste”! And yet… Grigorovich was in the high-end literary game, and his words were flattering and his practical advice as to publishing was, Chekhov decided, worth heeding:

Several days ago I was told that you are publishing a book of tales. If it is to appear under the pseudonym of CHE-KHON-TE, I beg you earnestly to telegraph the publishers to print it under your real name. After your recent stories in New Times and the success of “The Huntsman” [1885], the book will also have great success. It would be agreeable to have some assurance that you are not angry over my remarks, but that you accept them in the spirit that I write—not as an authority but out of the simplicity of an old heart.

If Chekhov forgave Grigorovich his presumption, why can’t I? Chekhov was young, modest, generous, and respectful. Maybe Grigorovich was right about some things. The old man had ridden in a lot of rodeos. Grigorovich was trying to be nice and was. The biographer Donald Rayfield has a theory: “Wary of his own father for twenty years, Anton responded with trusting affection to the father figures of Russian literature. Great writers—Leskov, Grigorovich and, later, Tolstoy—and self-made patriarchs like Suvorin aroused filial devotion in Anton.”37

Chekhov, humble and cowed, but not at all filial, replied on March 28:

Your letter, my kind, fervently beloved bringer of good tidings, struck me like a flash of lightning. I almost burst into tears, I was overwhelmed, and now I feel it has left a deep trace in my soul! May God show the same tender kindness to you in your age as you have shown me in my youth! I can find neither words nor deeds to thank you. You know with what eyes ordinary people look at the elect such as you, and so you can judge what your letter means for my self-esteem. It is better than any diploma, and for a writer who is just beginning it is payment both for the present and the future. I am almost dazed. I have no power to judge whether I deserve this high reward. I only repeat that it has overwhelmed me.38

He never wrote another letter as humble and deferential as this one. He would defer to Suvorin for the first year or so of their working relationship, but he would not bow this far. Notice, if possible, that there is scarcely a piece of correspondence that Chekhov ever wrote that does not contain a joke. There are no jokes in this long, humble, grateful letter. In the next paragraph Chekhov even sniffed back pretentiously and did dirt on his friends and relatives who did know that Chekhov as an author was the real deal. The photostatic reproduction of the first page of this letter shows it is handwritten neatly, well-spaced, with no cross-outs—suggesting that Chekhov recopied it from a draft:39

If I have a gift which one ought to respect, I confess before the pure candor of your heart that hitherto I have not respected it. I felt that I had a gift, but I had got into the habit of thinking that it was insignificant. Purely external causes are sufficient to make one unjust to oneself, suspicious, and morbidly sensitive. And as I realize now I have always had plenty of such causes. All my friends and relatives have always taken a condescending tone to my writing, and never ceased urging me in a friendly way not to give up real work for the sake of scribbling. I have hundreds of friends in Moscow, and among them a dozen or two writers, but I cannot recall a single one who reads me or considers me an artist. In Moscow there is a so-called Literary Circle: talented people and mediocrities of all ages and colors gather once a week in a private room of a restaurant and exercise their tongues. If I went there and read them a single passage of your letter, they would laugh in my face. In the course of the five years that I have been knocking about from one newspaper office to another I have had time to assimilate the general view of my literary insignificance. I soon got used to looking down upon my work, and so it has gone from bad to worse. That is the first reason. The second is that I am a doctor, and am up to my ears in medical work, so that the proverb about trying to catch two hares has given to no one more sleepless nights than me.

But… but… but! Upon reflection, for the rest of his life, Chekhov concluded again and again in his letters and conversations that the medical duties did not block him in his literary endeavors and only made him a better writer.

I am writing all this to you in order to excuse this grievous sin a little before you. Hitherto my attitude to my literary work has been frivolous, heedless, casual. I don’t remember a single story over which I have spent more than twenty-four hours, and “The Huntsman,” which you liked, I wrote in the bathing-shed! I wrote my stories as reporters write their notes about fires, mechanically, half-unconsciously, taking no thought of the reader or myself…. I wrote and did all I could not to waste upon the story the scenes and images dear to me which—God knows why—I have treasured and kept carefully hidden.

Don’t we already see those “carefully hidden” “scenes and images” in Chekhov’s nature passages? I think so. And he had experienced as all fruitful artists do that the more images he created, the more images he discovered.

The first impulse to self-criticism was given me by a very kind and, to the best of my belief, sincere letter from Suvorin. I began to think of writing something decent, but I still had no faith in my being any good as a writer. And then, unexpected and undreamed of, came your letter. Forgive the comparison: it had on me the effect of a Governor’s order to clear out of the town within twenty-four hours—i.e., I suddenly felt an imperative need to hurry, to make haste and get out of where I have stuck….

Chekhov was certainly documenting that Suvorin was there first, and also, I admit, validating Grigorovich’s claim that he guided Chekhov to the path of “literature”:

I agree with you in everything. When I saw “The Witch” in print I felt myself the cynicism of the points to which you call my attention. They would not have been there had I written this story in three or four days instead of in one.

And yet, given a dozen years and various publications of the story, Chekhov scarcely modified “The Witch” a hair.

I shall put an end to working against time, but cannot do so just yet.40… It is impossible to get out of the rut I have gotten into. I have nothing against going hungry, as I have done in the past, but it is not a question of myself.

I sincerely hope that Grigorovich woke up at that phrase—that young Dr. Chekhov was supporting not just himself but others. (I think of “A Nightmare,” the story Chekhov published the very next day and so must have finished that very week, before receiving Grigorovich’s letter, about the contempt and disgust a government official feels for the nearly starving priest who at tea bewilderingly squirrels away the offered cookies.)

Meanwhile, Chekhov humbly went on:

…I give to literature my spare time, two or three hours a day and a bit of the night, that is, time which is of no use except for short things. In the summer, when I have more time and have fewer expenses, I will start on some serious work.

I cannot put my real name on the book because it is too late: the design for the cover [of Motley Tales] is ready and the book printed. Many of my Petersburg friends advised me, even before you did, not to spoil the book by a pseudonym, but I did not listen to them, probably out of vanity. I dislike my book very much. It’s a hotch-potch, a disorderly medley of the poor stuff I wrote as a student, plucked by the censor and by the editors of comic papers. I am sure that many people will be disappointed when they read it. Had I known that I had readers and that you were watching me, I would not have published this book.

Chekhov was insincere here. After Motley Stories came out this spring, he would himself note to his uncle the many tales that he especially valued,41 and finally, in 1899, he would include most of them in his rather selective Collected Works. On the other hand, Grigorovich’s advice did lead him to ask Leykin on March 31 to add his real name to his pseudonym on the title page. And so it was.

I rest all my hopes on the future. I am only twenty-six. Perhaps I shall succeed in doing something, though time flies fast.

Forgive my long letter and do not blame a man because, for the first time in his life, he has made bold to treat himself to the pleasure of writing to Grigorovich.

Those and the following were the kinds of phrases that Chekhov was trying to purge from his everyday speech and thought:

Send me your photograph, if possible.42 I am so overwhelmed with your kindness that I feel as though I should like to write a whole ream to you. God grant you health and happiness, and believe in the sincerity of your deeply respectful and grateful

A. Chekhov.

*

On March 29 Chekhov published three pieces: “A Lot of Paper,” a series of serious reports, each with a “happy news” ending, similar to network TV news stories today; “The Rook,” a dialogue between an “I” and a bird, who moralizes in a manner that Chekhov usually shunned: “I’ve lived 376 years and I never once saw rooks fight among themselves and kill each other, but you don’t remember a year in which there wasn’t a war”;43 and the excellent “A Nightmare” (referred to, above, in Chekhov’s reply to Grigorovich), about a young, privileged government official who is sent to a town in the provinces, where he is disgusted by a young, desperate, slovenly priest:

By now Kunin almost hated Father Yakov. The man, his pitiful, grotesque figure in the long crumpled robe, his womanish face, his manner of officiating, his way of life and his formal restrained respectfulness, wounded the tiny relic of religious feeling which was stored away in a warm corner of Kunin’s heart together with his nurse’s other fairy tales. The coldness and lack of attention with which Father Yakov had met Kunin’s warm and sincere interest in what was the priest’s own work was hard for the former’s vanity to endure….44

The government official recommends that Father Yakov be fired, and only then he finds out the selfless priest’s desperate financial circumstances.

Chekhov knew the faults of shoddy workers, but he was a very conscientious defender of those engaged in social work; if they were teachers, doctors, and priests working for the government or church, they were most usually poorly paid. Though I pointed out in “The Rook” Chekhov’s customary reluctance to speak out directly on social issues, in “A Nightmare,” Chekhov’s narrator is so disheartened by the incomprehending official’s lack of imagination concerning the overburdened priest that he ends the story with a blunt point: “So had begun and had ended a sincere effort to be of public service on the part of a well-intentioned but unreflecting and over-comfortable person.”45

Finally, to close out his extraordinary month of fiction, Chekhov wrote “On the River” (“Na Reke”), subtitled “Spring Pictures” (March 31), an essay-like story about people on a bridge watching the river-ice break apart while adventurous peasants are floating down on a raft. Their tricky navigation of the river is blocked by a footbridge that a factory owner has laid across it for his workers. Frustrated, the peasants have to take apart the raft and walk it around.

Though Chekhov had been looking forward to spring, writes Dr. John Coope, he “connected the melting of the river with his renewed bleeding.”46 This was one of the times of the year where Chekhov’s tuberculosis especially manifested itself.

PART TWO

“Hymns of Praise”

Chekhov’s world had changed forever. He was being recognized and celebrated as an emerging literary star in a most literary Russia. His work was continually being evaluated. In the glare of attention, he could have granted himself allowances and abandoned his commitments to Fragments and the Petersburg Gazette. He could have closed the door to his medical practice. Easing up, however, would have left his financially dependent family floundering. Who would support them? He had to keep going with his overwhelming schedule and, if possible, increase his output. He accepted that he would have to work in haste, but he would demand of himself an increased artistic rigor.

He saw this year and next as an opportunity to write full speed ahead, trusting himself to “avoid subjectivity” and tell simple stories of complex people. When he was suffering from tubercular symptoms, his pace slowed, but he labored on. One immediate result this spring was the most extraordinary evocation in literature of the art of writing, more particularly of composing “hymns of praise,” in the short story “Easter Eve.”

April 1886

Don’t invent sufferings you have not experienced, and don’t paint pictures you have not seen…

—Letter to his brother Alexander1

On April 2, Grigorovich answered Chekhov’s letter, the “sincerity” of which had gratified the old man. “You’re doing excellently that you flee from and don’t waste images and pictures that are especially dear to you…. think up a good plan (an architectural structure of the story is the important thing)—and in summer start with God to work. If your personal talent is not in line with a novella or novel, write short stories, but work them over into refinement. With only ‘A Sportsman’s Sketches’ Turgenev would have made himself a great name!”2

On April 4, Chekhov wrote Bilibin: “You write that my last two stories in the Pete Gaz are weak…” These would have been “On the River” and “Spring.” He took Bilibin’s critiques, as he took everyone’s, in stride, even outdoing them in their criticism. Chekhov said the next ones would be even weaker. He explained, “I wore myself out.” But then he turned to anti-Semitism, using it and reproaching its use. “As for the good women about whom you asked, I hasten to maintain that there are so many of them in Moscow. Just now my sister had a whole bouquet, and I melted like a Jew before gold… By the way: in the last ‘Fragments of Petersburg Life’ [a gossipy culture section, the Moscow installments of which Chekhov usually wrote] there were three swipes you took at Jews. Why’s that?”3

Considering that Chekhov occasionally used loaded words and stereotypes about Jews and in fact had just done so in this letter, this scolding is surprising, and Bilibin could have asked in return: What about you? Chekhov then returned to one of his special topics with Bilibin and asked about the date of Bilibin’s wedding and told him that “During St. Thomas week [the week beginning the Sunday after Easter] I will be a best man for two: a doctor and an artist.”

But Chekhov was not well. With springtime he was coughing up blood. “Chekhov suffered from ill health most of his adult life,” writes Dr. Richard Carter, “and the year he graduated from medical school [1884] he experienced the first of many episodes of hemoptysis, a harbinger of an early death. For several years he suffered recurrent bouts of fever, productive cough, and chest pain that kept him awake many nights. In retrospect, this was most likely from tuberculous bronchiectasis…. However, Chekhov often complained about less serious ailments such as hemorrhoids, diarrhea, constipation, heart palpitations, muscular twitching, migraine headaches, and phlebitis. He was nonchalant and minimized the nature of his more serious lung disease…”4

He usually had symptoms twice a year. When friends queried him, he soberly or jokingly fended them off: “I am not going to have any treatment. I shall drink mineral waters and quinine, but I shall not allow myself to be examined,” he wrote to a concerned Suvorin in 1891.5 Lest we non-medical people feel too bewildered by Chekhov’s long denial of his own tuberculosis, Dr. John Coope explains:

Only someone with little experience of sick doctors would be surprised to find such an attitude in someone whose chosen pursuit is the treatment of illness. There is a great, almost impassable gulf between being in professional charge of illness and being a patient. In part this is due to knowing the limits as well as the advantages of treatment, but perhaps even more to an unwillingness to relinquish control over the management of one’s everyday life to others.6

He only admitted to having tuberculosis in 1897. Suvorin visited him in the hospital that spring:

“To calm patients,” [Chekhov] said, “we say when they have a cough it is gastric and when they have a hemorrhage it is a burst vein. But gastric coughs do not exist and coughed up blood definitely comes from the lungs. Blood is coming from my right lung as it did in the case of my brother, and another of my tuberculosis relatives. The doctors try and tell me, as a doctor, that it is a gastric hemorrhage. I listen to them but don’t take any notice. I know I have tuberculosis.”7

*

April was much slower for Chekhov as far as literary production went; he published only six stories, one of them the soon-to-be very popular story called “Grisha” (“Grisha,” April 5), about a two-year-eight-month-old toddler who goes out for a walk with his nursemaid. Grisha takes in a lot of sights, and fortunately for the nursemaid can’t communicate them all to his mother: “When he reached home, Grisha explained to mamma, the walls, and his crib where he had been and what he had seen. He told it less with his tongue than with his hands and his face; he showed how the sun had shone, how the horses had trotted, how the terrible oven had gaped at him, and how the cook had drunk.”8 Chekhov credited Bilibin with the idea for this story.

By April 6, it was time to scold Alexander about the debts that Nikolay and he had rung up. Anton had apparently heard from Alexander about it, but he had a multi-pointed argument ready. By Point 3, Anton was mocking Alexander’s trying to weasel out of payments:

You say: “They burn, cut, trample and suck.” That is, they demand payment of debts? My dear fellow, but one must pay debts! One must at whatever cost, even to little Armenians, even at the price of starving. If university men and writers see suffering in paying debts, what about the rest? I wonder. But the whole point is in the principle…. Anyhow, why contract debts? Forgive me this silly question, but I vow this is not a sermon. One could, surely, do without debts. I judge by myself; I have on my shoulders a family which is much bigger than yours, and provisions in Moscow are ten times dearer than in your place. For your house you pay as much as I do for the piano. I dress no better than you…. The whole trouble is in expenses and purchases you have no right to make and with which you should long since have dispensed: Nestle’s flour, a superfluous servant, and so on. When husband and wife have no money they do not keep a servant—that is a practical rule. […] The magistrate has sentenced me to pay 105 rubles, the debt which you and Nikolay made at Semenov’s shop. […] During the summer holidays I’ll squeeze myself somehow. I and the family will spend fifty rubles a month, and there will be no debts. […]

(5) Why do you write so little? How disgusting! […] All the stories you sent me for Leykin smell strongly of idleness. […] Respect yourself, for the love of Christ; don’t give your hands liberty when your brain is lazy! Write no more than two stories a week, shorten them, polish them. Work should be work. Don’t invent sufferings you have not experienced, and don’t paint pictures you have not seen—for a lie in a story is much more boring than a lie in conversation….

Remember every minute that your pen and your talent you will need in the future more than you do now, so don’t profane them…9

He echoed Grigorovich’s warning to him, translated into brotherly scolding:

[…] Literature has been no labor to you, but most surely it is labor. Were you a decent man, were you to sit at a story (of 150 or 200 lines) for five or seven days, what a result there would be! You would not recognize yourself in your lines, just as you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror…. Consider, you are not piled up with pressing work, and therefore you can work on one little thing for several evenings. Is it profitable? Count. With great minuteness you could write five or seven stories a month, which would make about a hundred rubles; and now, though you write a great deal, you don’t make fifty. […]

Leykin is out of fashion now. I have taken his place. In Petersburg I am now in great fashion, and I do wish you were not straggling behind. […]

[…] Do remember, now: work on your stories. I can judge by experience. Write. Write to Mother. […]

He encouraged Alexander to hold onto his job until the fall, and then he would use his connections to help him get editorial work in Petersburg.

Chekhov also wrote Leykin on April 6, but about Motley Stories, over which they were still negotiating the final contents and the number of copies to be printed. Chekhov admitted to Leykin that he was in poor health:

Spitting of blood and weakness. I am not writing anything…. If I don’t sit down to write tomorrow, you must forgive me—I shall not send you a story for the Easter number. I ought to go to the South but I have no money.

[…] I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues. I am inclined to think it is not so much my lungs as my throat that is at fault…. I have no fever.

Leykin replied with annoyance about Chekhov not allowing “A Nightmare” and his New Times stories to be included in the collection.

In “Love” (“Lyubov’,” April 7), the narrator has a writing experience that makes me wonder how often Chekhov enjoyed such a feeling himself: “I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of one’s study and communes with one’s own daydreams while the spring night looks in at one’s window.”10 Coughing blood, Chekhov was not feeling such leisurely pleasure just now.

On April 11, Chekhov wrote his uncle Mitrofan, who was more of a father figure than Chekhov’s own father, Mitrofan’s brother. Letters to Mitrofan, down in Taganrog, were always newsy and informative, with Chekhov knowing that Mitrofan would share the news with relatives this Easter season:

Forgive me that it’s been so long I haven’t written you. You yourself write a lot, and so you understand a person who writes from sunrise to sunset: there’s no time! When there’s a free minute, you try to give over to reading or something else. Yes, speaking sincerely, I don’t understand writing to dear, close people which you write by obligation, but not in a moment of a good mood, when you’re not afraid of sincerity or the reason of the letter.11

He recalled Mitrofan’s visit the past winter and caught him up on family news and health (though not about his own), including that he had just treated his maternal aunt and his brother Ivan: “Having a doctor in the house—a big comfort!”12

My writing is a full-time activity, undertaken with order. I’m already working on the big Petersburg newspaper—in New Times, where they pay me 12 kopecks a line. Last night I received from this newspaper for 3 not-big stories, appearing in three issues, 232 rubles. A miracle! I simply with my own eyes don’t believe it. But the little Petersburg Gazette gives me 100 rubles a month for 4 stories.

In letters to his uncle, he often gave the kinds of financial details that would satisfy the curiosity of a fond, proud relative and businessperson:

Mama is very happy that Ivan has got a job in a state school in Moscow, where he will be his own boss. He has a government apartment with five rooms. Servants, firewood, and lighting are also all paid for by the state … Papa is delighted that Ivan has bought himself a peaked cap with a cockade, and has ordered a professional morning frock-coat with bright buttons.

Nikolay is working very hard now, but has trouble with his eyes. […]

What a pity you can’t also be with us for Easter! We’ll have plenty to break the fast with. We would sing together, as we will on our return from the midnight service.

The bells have just rung at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.13

Maybe it’s not a lie to suggest to one’s uncle that one’s immediate family is doing great, just great!

*

For publication in New Times on the eve of Easter, April 13, Chekhov wrote “Easter Eve.”

Mikhail Chekhov remembered their childhood in Taganrog: “We were not allowed to miss a single Saturday-night vigil or Sunday liturgy, which explains why Anton exhibited such a thorough knowledge of church services in his story ‘Easter Eve’ and others.”14

Despite the physical abuse with which their father enforced their church and choral attendance and participation, Chekhov loved Easter and church bells. He respected respectable priests and monks. He knew the Bible, he appreciated unselfishness. He shed trappings that did not seem to him to have a moral or practical basis, and he wouldn’t lie and pretend to believe what he didn’t believe, but he was a model of someone ever striving toward moral behavior.

Chekhov wrote so many great stories that it’s easy for even some of us fervent admirers to have overlooked or never even read dozens of gems. “Easter Eve” is one that I had completely forgotten until I started reading for this biography.

It begins:

I was standing on the bank of the River Goltva, waiting for the ferry-boat from the other side.

Is the “I” of Chekhov’s first-person narrated stories ever himself?… The story will point toward the idea that the narrator’s experience is only important to the extent that it is a reliable source of observation and judgment about the meaning of someone else’s experience. Chekhov insisted that the subjects of the stories were not himself and tried to make sure in circumstantial details that they were not, and yet he, like this narrator, was a good traveler and evoked the pleasures and weariness of travel as well as anyone. The narrator describes the flooded stream and the night sky:

The world was lighted by the stars, which were scattered thickly all over the sky. I don’t remember ever seeing so many stars. Literally one could not have put a finger in between them.

So simple! We are indeed in the narrator’s shoes looking up at the sky and lifting our hand and pointing our index finger. How does a writer present perspective? Chekhov does it this way, sometimes. He engages the reader’s physical imagination. And such an imagination also shifts to look before him.

The sky was reflected in the water; the stars were bathing in its dark depths and trembling with the quivering eddies.

The narrator remains nameless throughout the story, because, as Chekhov might say, the narrator knows who he is. He now realizes he has company on the riverbank, and he asks the unnamed peasant about the ferry. The peasant says the ferry is due, but he himself is not waiting for it. The peasant is there to watch the light and fireworks across the way at the monastery. The peasant calls out through the darkness to the ferryman, the monk Ieronim.

The first peal of the bell is heard, followed by a celebratory cannon shot. How Chekhov savored the bells of Easter! He tomcatted for them every year. Donald Rayfield writes: “During his adult life, right up until his death, Chekhov would rarely spend an Easter night in bed; instead he would wander the streets, listening to the church bells.”15

Before the vibrations of the first peal of the bell had time to die away in the air a second sounded, after it at once a third, and the darkness was filled with an unbroken quivering clamor.

For a while, there is no sign or sight of Ieronim, and the narrator is impatient.

[…] but behold at last, staring into the dark distance, I saw the outline of something very much like a gibbet. It was the long-expected ferry. It moved toward us with such deliberation that if it had not been that its lines grew gradually more definite, one might have supposed that it was standing still or moving to the other bank.

How have I never noticed before how active Chekhov makes our imagination? He creates our perspective so efficiently: those lines growing “gradually more definite.” The ferry arrives and Ieronim, unlike a bus driver, apologizes:

“Why have you been so long?” I asked jumping upon the ferry.

“Forgive me, for Christ’s sake,” Ieronim answered gently. […]

Chekhov has immediately inclined us in Ieronim’s favor, though we are taking in the story from the narrator’s perspective. Chekhov has us rely on the narrator’s observations to reveal not the narrator’s inner life but that of the person he is observing.

And off the narrator and Ieronim go, floating slowly toward the monastery.

The core of the story, we’ll discover, happens now, not at the destination that they can see lit up by barrels of burning tar, but here during the seemingly casual conversation between Ieronim and the narrator. A firework shoots off.

“How beautiful!” I said.

“Beautiful beyond words!” sighed Ieronim. “Such a night, sir! Another time one would pay no attention to the fireworks, but today one rejoices in every vanity. Where do you come from?”

I told him where I came from.

Chekhov is suggesting where the narrator comes from doesn’t matter and/or the narrator knows, so why state it? The idle conversation leads to what the narrator thinks at first is an idle question:

“To be sure… a joyful day today….” Ieronim went on in a weak sighing tenor like the voice of a convalescent. “The sky is rejoicing and the earth and what is under the earth. All the creatures are keeping holiday. Only tell me kind sir, why, even in the time of great rejoicing, a man cannot forget his sorrows?”

Reading that question in the midst of being steeped in Chekhov’s life, I conclude: This is one of Chekhov’s own recurring questions, but it doesn’t, at first, interest the narrator.

I fancied that this unexpected question was to draw me into one of those endless religious conversations which bored and idle monks are so fond of. I was not disposed to talk much, and so I only asked:

“What sorrows have you, father?”

“As a rule only the same as all men, kind sir, but today a special sorrow has happened in the monastery: at mass, during the reading of the Bible, the monk and deacon Nikolay died.”

“Well, it’s God’s will!” I said, falling into the monastic tone. “We must all die. To my mind, you ought to rejoice indeed…. They say if anyone dies at Easter he goes straight to the kingdom of heaven.”

“That’s true.”

The “idle” chat, we see, is the narrator’s, not humble Ieronim’s. The narrator replies without feeling, or rather trying to undermine feeling. But Ieronim is in one of those moods or states where the heart is open and the tongue is free:

[…] “The Holy Scripture points clearly to the vanity of sorrow and so does reflection,” said Ieronim, breaking the silence, “but why does the heart grieve and refuse to listen to reason? Why does one want to weep bitterly?”

The narrator does not try to answer. Ieronim’s sincerity has humbled him.

Ieronim shrugged his shoulders, turned to me and said quickly:

“If I died, or anyone else, it would not be worth notice perhaps; but, you see, Nikolay is dead! No one else but Nikolay! Indeed, it’s hard to believe that he is no more! I stand here on my ferry-boat and every minute I keep fancying that he will lift up his voice from the bank. He always used to come to the bank and call to me that I might not be afraid on the ferry. He used to get up from his bed at night on purpose for that. He was a kind soul. My God! how kindly and gracious! Many a mother is not so good to her child as Nikolay was to me! Lord, save his soul!”

The narrator’s silence—having been moved to silence, to humility, in the presence of actual, sincere grief—is ours too, with tears perhaps as well.

Ieronim took hold of the rope, but turned to me again at once.

“And such a lofty intelligence, your honor,” he said in a vibrating voice. “Such a sweet and harmonious tongue! Just as they will sing immediately at early matins: ‘Oh lovely! Oh sweet is Thy Voice!’ Besides all other human qualities, he had, too, an extraordinary gift!”

“What gift?” I asked.

There we are—as is the narrator—quietly entranced by this wonderful man and interested in all he can tell us.

The monk scrutinized me, and as though he had convinced himself that he could trust me with a secret, he laughed good-humoredly.

“He had a gift for writing hymns of praise,” he said. “It was a marvel, sir; you couldn’t call it anything else! You would be amazed if I tell you about it. Our Father Archimandrite comes from Moscow, the Father Sub-Prior studied at the Kazan academy, we have wise monks and elders, but, would you believe it, no one could write them; while Nikolay, a simple monk, a deacon, had not studied anywhere, and had not even any outer appearance of it, but he wrote them! A marvel! A real marvel!” Ieronim clasped his hands and, completely forgetting the rope, went on eagerly:

“The Father Sub-Prior has great difficulty in composing sermons; when he wrote the history of the monastery he worried all the brotherhood and drove a dozen times to town, while Nikolay wrote canticles! Hymns of praise! That’s a very different thing from a sermon or a history!”

“Is it difficult to write them?” I asked.

“There’s great difficulty!” Ieronim wagged his head. “You can do nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift. The monks who don’t understand argue that you only need to know the life of the saint for whom you are writing the hymn, and to make it harmonize with the other hymns of praise. But that’s a mistake, sir. Of course, anyone who writes canticles must know the life of the saint to perfection, to the least trivial detail. To be sure, one must make them harmonize with the other canticles and know where to begin and what to write about. […] but the lives of the saints and conformity with the others is not what matters; what matters is the beauty and sweetness of it. Everything must be harmonious, brief, and complete. There must be in every line softness, graciousness, and tenderness; not one word should be harsh or rough or unsuitable. It must be written so that the worshipper may rejoice at heart and weep, while his mind is stirred and he is thrown into a tremor. […]”

I keep stopping in the midst of this paragraph with the realization that the very best biography that I could write of Chekhov would be such a canticle. I would know the life of St. Anton “to perfection, to the least trivial detail” (including all the unsaintly jokes and his sexual follies). In sum: “conformity with the others is not what matters; what matters is the beauty and sweetness of it. Everything must be harmonious, brief, and complete.”

But my second thought and realization is this: that these qualities of canticles describe Chekhov’s own principles of writing. The qualities of Monk Nikolay’s writings are Chekhov’s. (Chekhov later told Suvorin: “I know how to speak briefly on important subjects. It is odd but I have contracted a sort of mania for brevity. Everything I read, whether written by myself or someone else, seems to me to be too long.”16) Is it a coincidence that the great canticle-artist shares Chekhov’s talented but wayward brother’s name? Chekhov saw the good in his sin-laden brother, but the good is actually what we, from our distance, perceive in Chekhov himself:

“To think that a man should find words like those! Such a power is a gift from God! For brevity he packs many thoughts into one phrase, and how smooth and complete it all is! […] ‘Light-radiating!’ There is no such word in conversation or in books, but you see he invented it, he found it in his mind! Apart from the smoothness and grandeur of language, sir, every line must be beautified in every way, there must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world. And every exclamation ought to be put so as to be smooth and easy for the ear. ‘Rejoice, thou flower of heavenly growth!’ comes in the hymn to Nikolay the Wonder-worker. It’s not simply ‘heavenly flower,’ but ‘flower of heavenly growth.’ It’s smoother so and sweet to the ear. That was just as Nikolay wrote it! Exactly like that! I can’t tell you how he used to write!”

The narrator is moved, but for now he thinks his destination is what’s important:

“Well, in that case it is a pity he is dead,” I said; “but let us get on, father, or we shall be late.”

The narrator asks if the hymns have been published, and Ieronim explains that no one at the monastery was interested. Ieronim was Nikolay’s primary audience:

“What did he write them for?”

“Chiefly for his own comfort. Of all the brotherhood, I was the only one who read his hymns. I used to go to him in secret, that no one else might know of it, and he was glad that I took an interest in them. He would embrace me, stroke my head, speak to me in caressing words as to a little child. He would shut his cell, make me sit down beside him, and begin to read….”

Ieronim left the rope and came up to me.

“We were dear friends in a way,” he whispered, looking at me with shining eyes. “Where he went I would go. If I were not there he would miss me. And he cared more for me than for anyone, and all because I used to weep over his hymns. It makes me sad to remember. Now I feel just like an orphan or a widow. You know, in our monastery they are all good people, kind and pious, but… there is no one with softness and refinement, they are just like peasants. They all speak loudly, and tramp heavily when they walk; they are noisy, they clear their throats, but Nikolay always talked softly, caressingly, and if he noticed that anyone was asleep or praying he would slip by like a fly or a gnat. His face was tender, compassionate….”

Father Nikolay’s qualities are Chekhov’s—but Chekhov would not have wanted us to conclude that. Still, we know Chekhov did indeed respect and admire refinement of behavior, and unlike his older brothers he could resist stomping around and bothering others.

Ieronim asks the narrator to be sure to appreciate the Easter hymn, as tonight he has to continue running the ferry. None of the other monks are coming to relieve him. The narrator reaches the muddy shore and surveys the festivities outside and inside the monastery.

He goes and listens to the choir, yet in the midst of the crowd, he has sympathetic pangs for Ieronim:

I looked at the faces; they all had a lively expression of triumph, but not one was listening to what was being sung and taking it in, and not one was “holding his breath.” Why was not Ieronim released? I could fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending forward and hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase. All this that glided by the ears of the people standing by me he would have eagerly drunk in with his delicately sensitive soul, and would have been spell-bound to ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there would not have been a man happier than he in all the church. Now he was plying to and fro over the dark river and grieving for his dead friend and brother.

The narrator attempts to find where “dead Nikolay, the unknown canticle writer,” is lying. He is unable to do so and decides, after all, it’s better he hasn’t.

God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I should have lost the picture my imagination paints for me now. I imagine the lovable poetical figure solitary and not understood, who went out at nights to call to Ieronim over the water, and filled his hymns with flowers, stars, and sunbeams, as a pale timid man with soft mild melancholy features. His eyes must have shone, not only with intelligence, but with kindly tenderness and that hardly restrained childlike enthusiasm which I could hear in Ieronim’s voice when he quoted to me passages from the hymns.

In the early light of dawn, the narrator and a merchant’s wife and a peasant ride back across the river with Ieronim. The narrator couldn’t find the deceased Nikolay, but he can now see Ieronim:

He was a tall narrow-shouldered man of five-and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed listless-looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard. He had an extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.

They don’t chat much this time.

We floated across, disturbing on the way the lazily rising mist. Everyone was silent. Ieronim worked mechanically with one hand. He slowly passed his mild lustreless eyes over us; then his glance rested on the rosy face of a young merchant’s wife with black eyebrows, who was standing on the ferry beside me silently shrinking from the mist that wrapped her about. He did not take his eyes off her face all the way.

There was little that was masculine in that prolonged gaze. It seemed to me that Ieronim was looking in the woman’s face for the soft and tender features of his dead friend.

The end. Again and again, Chekhov’s dearest characters realize their connections to and dependence on others.

*

From Moscow on the actual Easter Eve, Chekhov wrote to Leykin: “The day has gone merrily. Last night I went to the Kremlin to listen to the bells, walking by the churches; I returned home at 2, drank and sang with two opera basses, whom I found in the Kremlin and fetched home to talk… One of the basses excellently imitated an archdeacon. I listened to Grand Vespers in the Church of Christ the Savior and so on.”17

Then he fended off Leykin’s criticism of his spending: “You ask me what I am doing with my money. I don’t lead a dissipated life, I don’t walk about dressed like a dandy. I have no debts, and I don’t even have to keep my mistresses (Fragments and love I get gratis), but nevertheless I have only 40 rubles left from the 312 I received from you and Suvorin before Easter, out of which I shall have to pay 20 tomorrow. Goodness only knows where my money goes.”18

Chekhov and Leykin did not see eye to eye on the physical well-being that one needed for writing. In a letter that has been lost, but of which we know something of the contents through Leykin’s reply on April 13, Chekhov had reproached Leykin for reproaching him, Chekhov, for being lazy. “I reproached you for laziness,” wrote Leykin, “not concerning work; you write a lot; but concerning writing letters. Of course you lazily write letters. And I can’t believe that it’s possible to get sick from such work as ours. I write more than you; for sixteen years I have been writing every day without taking a breath, but if I get sick, I get sick not from work but from colds, from overeating […] You say further on, ‘By god, someday I’ll have to describe you.’ Write it. I’ll be glad. I’ll even put it in Fragments.”19 It’s not clear how or if Chekhov ever characterized Leykin in a story.

A week later, he and Leykin were squabbling over the contents of Motley Stories. “As for ‘A Nightmare,’ ” declared Chekhov, “I again stand on it not suiting the book. The stories are so motley, but if side by side with ‘Swedish Match’ you present ‘A Nightmare,’ you’ll get a motley from which you’ll sicken. No, my pigeon, spit on ‘A Nightmare!’ ”20 Perhaps as a concession, Chekhov told Leykin he was intending to write something for Fragments.

In most Chekhov biographies, Leykin comes off as the crooked editor and publisher that all of us writers have in mind as blocking or exploiting our genius. But however much Chekhov defamed and mocked him, however much we naturally side with our hero and hold in contempt anyone or anything hampering his literary development, Leykin is my favorite supporting character.

Nineteen years older than Chekhov, Leykin was of peasant stock. As a provincial boy he was apprenticed to a shop owner in St. Petersburg, where he was also enrolled in a school. “He had written, by his own account, more than 20,000 short stories and sketches, and called himself ‘a man of letters’ with great pride,” writes Mikhail Chekhov.21 According to Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, Leykin’s humorous writings, which the Chekhov brothers had grown up reading, were primarily about Russian merchants and their domestic lives, but the fiction’s “wide popularity with less-literate readers rapidly dwindled at the beginning of the 20th century.”22

Leykin had been a literary father to the three eldest Chekhov boys. Mikhail Chekhov, who did not work for him, described him: “He was short, broad-shouldered, lame in one leg, and eccentric.”23 Because he was unattractive and had a bad leg, Chekhov and Alexander would refer to him as “Quasimodo.”

Nikolay Leykin.

Earlier in their relationship, Chekhov could and did explain the difficulties he had crafting comic stories to size. Though a proud professional, Chekhov always had an artist’s sense of proportion, and he sought space and the allowance for his own discretion about topics. Even at the age of twenty-three, Chekhov had stood up for himself to Leykin:

I must confess that an imposed limit “from here to there” does cause me a great deal of trouble. It is not always easy to accept such a limitation. For instance, you do not want any stories of over a hundred lines, and you may have a good reason for it. Now, I get a subject for a story and sit down to write it, but the thought of one hundred and no more interferes with my writing from the very start. I condense as much as I can and keep cutting it down, sometimes (as my literary sense warns me) to the detriment of my subject and, (above all) to the story’s form. Having strained and compressed it, I begin to count the lines, and having counted 100, 120, 140 (I never wrote more than that for Fragments) I begin to get frightened and I don’t send it. Very often I have to rewrite the ending of the story in a hurry and send you something I should not ordinarily have liked to send you. As soon as I get over the fourth page of small note-paper I begin to be assailed by doubts…. I should therefore like to ask you to increase the length of my stories to 120 lines. I am sure I shall not avail myself of this concession too frequently, but the knowledge that I have been granted it will save me a lot of worry.

Leykin replied: “While I rely on you not to misuse it, I willingly give you my blessing on 120, 140, and even 150 lines, only please send me something without fail for every issue of the magazine.”24

The biographer David Magarshack well narrates the pair’s evolving and yet fraying relationship. By October 1885, Magarshack explains, Chekhov “had already made up his mind to cut adrift from Leykin”:

The only thing that stopped him was his fear of insecurity: he could always get an advance from Leykin and he was sure of his monthly check. […] Leykin, too, realized that unless he found a market for Chekhov’s longer stories, Chekhov would sooner or later find one himself and quite possibly give up writing for Fragments. He therefore had a talk to Sergey Khudekov, the owner and editor of the Petersburg Gazette, to which he was a regular contributor himself, and arranged with him to publish a weekly story by Chekhov. “I have had an offer from Khudekov for you. Would you be willing to write each Monday a story for the Petersburg Gazette? But having agreed to write every Monday, you must not let the paper down and must send your story punctually every Saturday. You will paid seven kopecks a line.” Chekhov […] was overjoyed at the offer. […] “I shall be glad to write for the Petersburg Gazette, and I promise to be as punctual as possible.”25

The biographer Ronald Hingley adds that “however much Chekhov might from time to time rail against Khudekov and his [Petersburg Gazette], the plain fact is that they freed him from a double tyranny exercised by Leykin: the compulsion to be funny.”26

Freedom! Chekhov’s opportunity to stretch himself led to greater artistic development. After five years, writing for Fragments had become a chore. In 1885 he kept up with his new deadlines for the Petersburg Gazette but occasionally played hooky from Fragments. Leykin took this badly: “I was very angry indeed about your failure to send me your stories regularly. Two of your stories have been published in the Petersburg Gazette and I was half minded to stop their publication and I was sorry I ever recommended you there. I am still sorry I did it, because I am sure that now you will be even less punctual with your contributions because of the Petersburg Gazette. I must always have one of your stories in reserve—remember that. It’s the only way I can make sure that you won’t leave me in the lurch, especially in the summer months when it is so confoundedly difficult to get contributors to send in their stories in time.”27

If we could only see their testy but close relationship the way Chekhov would have in a short story. In such a story, for all of Leykin’s orneriness, despite his bad leg, despite his suspicions that Chekhov was shirking his magazine in deference to the others, he would become a sympathetic if comic character. Leykin naturally wanted the professional and most excellent Chekhov to keep writing for him.

Biographer Magarshack, impatient to get Leykin off the stage, writes, inaccurately, that Chekhov “summed up his final opinion of Leykin in a letter to Suvorin in November 1888: ‘Leykin is a good-natured and harmless man, but a bourgeois to the marrow of his bones. If he goes to see someone or says something, there is always something at the back of his mind…. A fox is always in fear for his life, and so is he. A subtle diplomatist!… In his letters to me he always warns me, frightens me, advises me, reveals all sorts of secrets to me. Poor limping martyr! He could have lived happily for the rest of his life, but some evil genius doesn’t let him.’ ”28 Chekhov didn’t have a “final opinion” of Leykin. Summing up and disposing of a friend wasn’t his style as a writer or a man. They continued to correspond and meet until 1900. Leykin died in 1906.

*

In “Ladies” (“Damy,” April 19), a school district director tries to be generous to a teacher who has lost his voice; he cannot, however, defeat the “ladies,” who push for a particular handsome but vapid young man to take the suitable job the director has found for, and more or less promised to, the disabled teacher. The story’s setup and resolution seem to have been based on a joke or an offhand word about the influence of “ladies” on government appointments. Their patronage can overwhelm even a conscientious official.

In “Strong Impressions” (“Sil’nye Oshchushcheniya,” April 21), members of a jury who are having to spend the night together “decided that before going to sleep, each one of them should ransack among his memories and tell something that had happened to him. Man’s life is brief, but yet there is no man who cannot boast that there have been terrible moments in his past.” This is not as common a setup for a story in Chekhov’s work as for his French contemporary Guy de Maupassant’s, but proceeding this way enabled Chekhov to provide a casual first-person speaking voice courtesy of “a foppishly dressed, fat little man.” The little man’s memory returns to what perhaps was Chekhov’s present, or at least the present of those of Chekhov’s friends who were marrying left and right: “I was not more than twenty-two or twenty-three when I fell head over ears in love with my present wife and made her an offer. Now I could with pleasure thrash myself for my early marriage, but at the time, I don’t know what would have become of me if Natasha had refused me. My love was absolutely the real thing, just as it is described in novels—frantic, passionate, and so on.”29 He recalls a philosophical argument with a lawyer friend at the time of his engagement about the persuasiveness of a “talented” speaker:

“As I listen to an orator I may perhaps grow sentimental and weep, but my fundamental conviction, based for the most part on unmistakable evidence and fact, is not changed in the least. My lawyer maintained that I was young and foolish and that I was talking childish nonsense. In his opinion, for one thing, an obvious fact becomes still more obvious through light being thrown upon it by conscientious, well-informed people; for another, talent is an elemental force, a hurricane capable of turning even stones to dust, let alone such trifles as the convictions of artisans and merchants of the second guild. […] One simple mortal by the power of the word turns thousands of convinced savages to Christianity […] All history consists of similar examples, and in life they are met with at every turn; and so it is bound to be, or the intelligent and talented man would have no superiority over the stupid and incompetent. […]

“ ‘Take you, for example,’ said the lawyer. ‘You are convinced at this moment that your fiancée is an angel and that there is not a man in the whole town happier than you. But I tell you: ten or twenty minutes would be enough for me to make you sit down to this table and write to your fiancée, breaking off your engagement. […]’ ”

And it was! The “little man” did write that letter.

He reflects: “What my friend said was not new, it was what everyone has known for ages, and the whole venom lay not in what he said, but in the damnable form he put it in.” The storyteller mailed the fateful letter; the lawyer, having won the argument, immediately counter-argued for the future happiness of his friend’s marriage. When the storyteller then broke down in despair over what he had just done, the lawyer explained that he himself had misaddressed the envelope on purpose so that it would be lost.

It’s a clever story about, among other things, storytelling, persuasion, the fragility and ephemeral nature of romantic love, about fallibility. And what about Chekhov’s broken engagement? Would he rue its dissolution? How the devil was he to know what the right thing to do was? About marrying Efros there were persuasive arguments for (love, settling down, dowry) and against (feisty antagonism, “cultural” differences).

Meanwhile, here the jury members are, deciding the fate of a murderer, based on arguments of talented lawyers. When the last member of the jury asks the others to think now at midnight about the thoughts of the murderer whose fate they are weighing, they don’t like realizing how vulnerable they are to the strong impressions the trial lawyers have left on them.

*

On April 24, Chekhov set out for Petersburg to see Leykin about Motley Stories; he arrived the next morning. Rosamund Bartlett notes that “The fact that Chekhov wrote so few letters during his St. Petersburg visits says a lot about the frenetic social life he led there; it also means we actually know comparatively little about what he actually got up to.”30 But on his first day of two weeks there this spring, Chekhov, “within 5 hours after arrival,” filled in a lot of details in a giddy account to his brother Mikhail:

Coming and staying in the furnished rooms of the merchant Oleynichikov (the corner of Nevsky and Pushkin), I washed up, put on my new coat, new pants, and sharp shoes and traveled for 15 kopecks on the Troitsky Alley to the editorial office of Fragments. There the office manager greeted me as her fiancé of the future, and she began to pour out her soul, calling Leykin a burdened person and I his favorite employee… From the editorial office to the printer Golike was no distance. But I didn’t find Golike so I went over to Bilibin’s. His fiancée opened the door to me with a lesson in her hands (she, Misha, is in two departments!), and was very glad to see me. I shuffled my new shoes and asked: “How is your health?” But later… Having drunk at I. Grek’s a glass of tea that was strong as tar, I went with him to stroll along the Neva, i.e., not with the tea, not with the tar, but with Bilibin. On the Neva we went in a boat, which made an impression on me. Off the boat we took ourselves to Dominico’s, where for 60 kopecks we ate pie, drank a glass and a cup of coffee… But that’s not all! You’ll be amazed!

From Dominico’s I went to the Petersburg Gazette.

From Pet Gaz I went to New Times, where I met with Suvorin. He received me very graciously and even gave me his hand. […]

From Suv I went to the office […]. The office manager Leont’eva, paying out the money to me, was quite not-bad. I gave her, Misha, my hand and tomorrow I will go to her to change my address… From the office I went to the office of Volkov and sent you a hundred (100) rubles […]. From Volkov I went along Nevsky to my place on Pushkin and lay down to sleep… O wonders and miracles! In five hours I did so much! Who would have predicted that from an outhouse would come such a genius?

This “such a genius” line was a Chekhov family standard, originating when Anton had arrived in Moscow to rejoin his family at nineteen. Donald Rayfield recounts it this way: “Aleksandr had brought home Fiodor as a kitten who had been abandoned in a freezing latrine. Anton was much comforted when Fiodor stretched out on his lap and to this cat he first addressed an expression he applied to himself and his brothers: ‘Who would have thought that such genius would come out of an earth closet?’ ”31 After this, mock praise of one’s own or another’s cleverness would prompt this remark by the Chekhov brothers.32 Fedor Timofeich’s name and personality would characterize the subsequently famous cat in Christmas 1887’s story “Kashtanka.” In closing, Chekhov appended a greeting to “Dunechka [Dunya Efros], Sirusichka [?] and the other laxative weaknesses.”33 Not flattering to Efros, but a mention all the same. In Petersburg, free of medical duties and immediate responsibilities to the family, Chekhov could socialize and be primarily a writer, but Efros was in his thoughts.

As Bartlett points out, though, the socializing also freed him, for the most part, from letter-writing. In the next two weeks he wrote only three letters, two of them notes, including one to his sister, in which he sent greetings again to Efros (“with the long nose”) and announcing, “I got married.” The editors of the Soviet edition note that this fib was followed by an excision from the letter.34

“About Women” (“O Zhenshchinakh,”35 April 26) satirizes men’s arrogance and condescension. The only good thing about women, the buffoon essayist-narrator declares, is that they give birth to men.

May 1886

Day and night I’m obsessed by one recurring thought: I must write, I must write, I must write…. The moment I finish a tale, I must, for some reason, write another one, then a third, and after the third, a fourth one… I’m writing nonstop, like a traveler switching horses midway, and I can’t do otherwise.

—Trigorin, The Seagull1

May started with Chekhov still in Petersburg. He would be on the move throughout the month, and perhaps coincidentally the ten stories that he would publish in May are not especially grounded or vital, except for the last one, “The Boredom of Life.”

Moving chronologically through Chekhov’s year, reading his letters and translating portions of them, I notice patterns. He writes frequently to this person or that, but then there is a new friend I have not been familiar with, or there appears the beginning of a relationship I have known about, or there is an unusual tone. I notice that in busy May there are not very many letters and only a couple that now seem of significance. Because he was good at keeping up his correspondence, was there an anxiety he felt as he rushed about and the communications from friends were being forwarded after him?… He expressed longing to get away from his Moscow medical duties and regain his bearings at Babkino, where, although he would have office hours every day to treat the local peasants, he could also wander in the woods hunting mushrooms or sit on the riverbank fishing.

On May 3 he and Bilibin took a steamer from Petersburg to Leykin’s estate on the left tributary of the Neva.2 It seems to have been a day trip. By May 6, Motley Stories was in print and at least available to Chekhov; he signed one for the printer Golike and gave another to Leykin.3 He wrote to his sister the same day, teasing her and Dunya Efros again about his having gotten married.

*

In “A Gentleman Friend” (“Znakomyi Muzhchina,” May 3), a kept woman who is down on her luck tries to entice a Jewish dentist, but she loses her nerve—and a tooth. She is undaunted and by that night finds a new man. Also published in Fragments on May 3, “A Fairy Tale: Dedicated to the Idiot Who Brags about His Contributions to the Newspaper” (“Skazka: Posvyashchaetsya Balbesu, Khvastayushchemu svoim Sotrudnichestvom v Gazetakh”) is a skit in which a fly boasts that he writes for the newspapers. The other bugs challenge him to prove it. He shows them a newspaper and all its fly-speck punctuation.

Perhaps thinking of his friend Bilibin’s honeymoon in Finland, Chekhov wrote “A Happy Man” (“Chastlivchik,” May 5), which is about a groom on his honeymoon who gets out of the train at a station-stop to have a smoke. Back on board, the cheerful groom boasts to fellow passengers about his happiness. They soon help him realize that at the station he must have accidentally got on this train, which is going the opposite direction to the one he was on. Chekhov could not, it seems, figure out which way to go about his own marriage.

He worked especially diligently on his stories for Suvorin. “The Privy Councillor” (“Taynyy Sovetnik,” May 6), however, is one of his least ambitious or impressive New Times stories. The adolescent narrator’s uncle, the privy councillor, is a big shot short on cash, and comes to his sister’s to summer while he works remotely. The uncle has Chekhov’s ability to focus on the paperwork in front of him:

For days together he sat in his own room working, in spite of the flies and the heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting as though glued to his table produced upon us the effect of an inexplicable conjuring trick. To us idlers, knowing nothing of systematic work, his industry seemed simply miraculous. Getting up at nine, he sat down to his table, and did not leave it till dinner-time; after dinner he set to work again, and went on till late at night. Whenever I peeped through the keyhole I invariably saw the same thing: my uncle sitting at the table working.

And what the narrator as a boy witnesses is what Chekhov’s family saw of him. He was systematic. He showed them how to get a lot of work done. But it is doubtful whether Chekhov was as carefree as the merry privy councillor; also, while Chekhov appreciated fine scents, he was no dandy:

The work consisted in his writing with one hand while he turned over the leaves of a book with the other, and, strange to say, he kept moving all over—swinging his leg as though it were a pendulum, whistling, and nodding his head in time. He had an extremely careless and frivolous expression all the while, as though he were not working, but playing at noughts and crosses. I always saw him wearing a smart short jacket and a jauntily tied cravat, and he always smelt, even through the keyhole, of delicate feminine perfumery. He only left his room for dinner, but he ate little.4

The uncle (nameless in the story) uses his little bit of idle time to flirt with the bailiff’s wife, with whom the young narrator’s tutor is also in love. The narrator’s mother, tired of the disruptions at her well-ordered estate, finally gives the uncle money to go away and summer at his usual place abroad.

*

Chekhov took the May 8 train from Petersburg to Moscow and arrived the next day. The family apartment had been given up and they were staying at Babkino until they found a new place in the fall. He stayed the night on the Arbat at his brother Ivan’s school-issued apartment.

He wrote Alexander on the 10th about Petersburg:

The time I spent there was great. I couldn’t have gotten closer to Suvorin and Grigorovich. There are so many details that I can’t pass them along in a letter, and so I’ll tell them to you when we meet.5

He had commenced an intimacy already, not quite a friendship, with Suvorin and Grigorovich. What details did Anton relate to Alexander as they sat together later this summer at Babkino? In the next paragraph, he critiqued Alexander’s latest story:

“The City of the Future” will become an artistic production only by the following conditions: 1) the absence of prolix wordy politico-socialistic-economic features; 2) continuous objectivity; 3) correctness in describing people and objects; 4) special brevity; 5) boldness and originality; fleeing from stereotypes; 6) heart.

In letters, Chekhov often resorted to list-making, which makes me wonder if it was a habit he had developed as a student or from writing prescriptions for patients.

In my opinion, a true description of nature must be very brief and possess the character of relevance. Commonplaces such as “the sinking sun, bathing in the waves of the darkening sea, sheds a light of purple gold,” and so forth, or “the swallows, flying over the surface of the sea, twittered merrily”—such commonplaces must be excluded. In descriptions of nature one ought to seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such a way that when you close your eyes after reading you see a picture. For example, you will get the effect of a moonlit night if you write that a glow like a light from a star flashed from the broken bottle on the milldam, and the round, black shadow of a dog or wolf appeared, etc. Nature becomes animated if you are not squeamish about employing comparisons about its phenomena with human activities, etc.6

He was thinking of the nature-descriptions in his own recent stories, particularly “The Wolf,” as he wrote that.

Details are also the thing in the sphere of psychology. God preserve us from generalizations. Best of all, avoid depicting the hero’s state of mind; you ought to try to make it clear from the hero’s actions. It is not necessary to portray many active figures. The center of gravity should be two persons—he and she.

He was making plain to himself, to Alexander, and to us the sharp focus and method he had been using in his fiction. And we and Alexander nod and agree, Oh, sure, it’s not complicated… if you are a super-focused self-disciplined genius!

A short piece for Fragments came out on May 10, “A Literary Table of Ranks” (“Literaturnaya Tabel’ o Rangakh”), atop of which list are Tolstoy and Goncharov. The purpose of the skit, however, according to the Soviet editors, was to name and exclude S. Okreyts, the reactionary editor of Luch (The Ray), who Chekhov had been making the butt of jokes for a few years, including nicknaming him Judophobe Judophobovich.7 While Chekhov himself made Jewish jokes, he did not suffer writers who were seriously anti-Semitic.

On May 11 or 12 he went to join his family, including wayward Nikolay, in Babkino,8 where the family had rented a furnished cottage for the first time the previous summer from an artistic and aristocratic family, the Kiselevs. Chekhov could unwind and the extended family and a wide range of friends could gather as time and opportunity allowed. Chekhov had described his first impressions of their situation to Leykin the year before:

The country house is situated on the steep bank of a river. It is a very picturesque spot. Below is the river, famed for its fish; on the other side of the river is a huge forest; and there are woods on this side of it. Near the cottage are hot-houses, flowerbeds, etc. I love to be in the country at the beginning of May. It is so jolly to watch the buds opening on the trees and to listen to the first songs of the nightingales. There are no houses near the estate, and we shall be completely alone. Kiselev and his wife, Begichev, the former opera tenor Vladislavlev, Markevich’s ghost, and my family—that is all. The month of May is excellent for fishing, especially crucian carp and tench, that is, pond fish, and there are ponds on the estate.9

Babkino

He would spend happy hours in the woods and on the river and at the ponds. In May of 1885, he further described the estate’s attractions to his brother Mikhail:

At last I have taken off my heavy waders, my hands no longer smell of fish, and I can sit down to write to you. It is six o’clock in the morning now. Our people are asleep. It is extraordinarily quiet all around. Only from time to time is the silence broken by the twittering of the birds and by the scratching of the mouse behind the wallpaper. I am writing these lines sitting before the large square window of my room. From time to time I glance through it. An extraordinary enchanting and lovely landscape stretches before my eyes: the little stream, the distant woods, a corner of the Kiselev house….

*

The most sentimental story Chekhov ever wrote might be “A Day in the Country” (“Den’ za Gorodom,” May 19), about an old man educating children about nature: “there is no secret in Nature which baffles him. He knows everything. Thus, for example, he knows the names of all the wild flowers, animals, and stones. He knows what herbs cure diseases, he has no difficulty in telling the age of a horse or a cow. Looking at the sunset, at the moon, or the birds, he can tell what sort of weather it will be next day. And indeed, it is not only Terenty who is so wise. Silanty Silich, the innkeeper, the market-gardener, the shepherd, and all the villagers, generally speaking, know as much as he does. These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.” Though the depictions of the folk seem too good to be true, Terenty does remark, rather beautifully: “ ‘The nightingale is a singing-bird, without sin. He has had a voice given him in his throat, to praise God and gladden the heart of man. It’s a sin to disturb him.’ ”

Chekhov excluded “A Day in the Country” from his Collected Works as well as the next four he wrote, an unusual streak of what he later judged to be unworthy stories. And while I wonder occasionally at his exclusions, I will save my disagreement with him only over the last one of the month.

“In a Pension” (“V Pansione,” May 24) is about a teacher who, wanting a raise, butters up his woman boss while denying the beauty of a beautiful seventeen-year-old student, about whom the boss says: “You won’t find a better nose in all of Russia.” The only nose Chekhov regularly remarked upon was Dunya Efros’s. He may have seen her in Moscow, as he was there on May 20 before returning on May 24 to Babkino and his family.

Reviews of Motley Stories were appearing.

After Leykin wrote and asked him to “push himself” and send him some pieces, he replied on May 24 with excuses so weak that he seemed to hope Leykin would become disgusted and fire him.

I’m guilty before you: I’m working poorly for Fragments. Now I’m working poorly for everywhere. What happened with me, I don’t know. Probably the prophet with the praises turned my head… But if you believe in the evil eye, I can in justification say “Jinxed!” Mostly these trips to Peter always act on me badly. I get off track and for a long time can’t get the intoxication from my head… I will be lazy until June 1, and then I give you my word to work.10

But, right now, this week, he had been writing the excellent “The Boredom of Life.” He was also, he explained in his next letter to Leykin on May 27, seeing patients:

The post bell’s ringing… Someone’s gone… I run out to see… A guest has come, but I continue writing. […]

I have a lot of sick patients. Rickety children and old ones with rashes. There’s a 75-year-old woman with erysipelas on her hand; I’m afraid I’ll have dealings with erysipelas of the tissue. There will be abscesses, but cutting into an old woman is frightful…

In response to the May 24 letter, Leykin suggested that Chekhov think up or “steal” themes for Nikolay to illustrate.

“At a Summer Villa” (“Na Dache,” May 25) is one of his humor stories where he seems to have worked out the plot before writing it. When Chekhov was writing his best or most seriously-minded stories, they seem to have formed in front of his mind and pen as he wrote. “At a Summer Villa” is clever enough that there is an amusing short film of it in Russian.11 The wife wants to clean up the dacha, their summer cabin, but her lazy husband and studious younger brother are in the way, so she sends each a love note from a mysterious young woman who wants to meet them the next afternoon. The husband and brother show up at the same spot and are angry with each other for being in the way. At dinner that evening, the wife/sister laughs and tells the grumpy pair, who have been stood up, what she did to trick them.

In “Nothing to Do: A Dacha Story” (“Ot Nechego Delat’,” May 26), Chekhov imagines married life with a lazy, wanton woman. Nikolay, a lawyer, catches his children’s tutor Vanya, a nineteen-year-old engineering student, kissing his wife. Vanya runs off in fright and the husband mocks his thirty-three-year-old wife,” ‘You should not turn a boy’s head, old dear. You shouldn’t, you know. He is a nice, kind boy.’ ”12 Nikolay finds Vanya and teases him that Vanya will now have to provide for his wife and pay child support. If Vanya refuses, they will have to duel. Having tormented him, Nikolay returns home to scold his wife again for idly seducing Vanya. Nikolay goes for a stroll, the sights and sounds of which Chekhov, happily ensconced at Babkino, would not have had to invent, only describe: “When evening came and twilight shrouded the earth, the lawyer went for another walk. It was a glorious evening. The trees were sleeping and looked as though no storm could wake them from their young springtime slumber. The drowsy stars looked down on the earth. Frogs croaked and an owl screeched somewhere behind the garden. The short, jerky whistles of a nightingale’s song could be heard from afar.”13

Nikolay encounters Vanya again. Vanya, feeling guilty, accepts the terms for dueling. Nikolay immediately laughs it off, tells Vanya that his wife is not worth it, and he and the young man take a friendly walk.

On May 31, he published his second story of the month in New Times, “The Boredom of Life” (“Skuka Zhizni”). Before doing the research on this book, I had never read it, and because Constance Garnett had not translated it, or as far as I knew neither had anyone else, I read it in Russian. With each new paragraph, I felt I was making a major literary find for the English-reading world. I would translate it! It’s a fateful, moving and great novel in only 4,000 words (about ten pages of this book you’re reading).

Now is an appropriate time to talk about translating versus reading.

What’s Chekhov like in Russian?

I described it once as Chekhov being just a little funnier. You can hear Chekhov’s smile. You can hear his particular voice, the tuning as clear as a bell.

But if your Russian isn’t completely fluent, or you’re not a compulsive reader, maybe reading him in translation doesn’t matter, or it’s a trade-off. For me, reading Chekhov in English, I get speed at the expense of revelation. I read more freshly in Russian, because it’s hard. I continually have to dig out words and phrases, and the images develop slowly but deeply. Unfortunately, in Russian I also step into an occasional hole and get distracted by my stumbling. There’s a key word I’m missing! Do I stop or do I wait until I see that word again? But maybe the story turns on that particular word? After I finished one pass through of a translation of “The Boredom of Life,” which I might compare to one feed-through of a color-spray printer (there! the blue is down, next comes magenta, then yellow), I discovered a preexisting translation, disguisedly entitled “Taedium Vitae”; April FitzLyon and Kyril Zinovieff’s translation is better than what I was doing, and so I’ll quote from it rather than from my motley one.

In “The Boredom of Life” (I’ll keep my title), Anna Mikhailovna Lebedeva, an estate-owner, has given up on life because her teenaged daughter has died. “As soon as someone consciously begins to question the point of existence—in no matter what way—and feels an acute need to look beyond the grave, then neither sacrifices nor fasting, nor knocking about from place to place will satisfy him. But, fortunately for Anna Mikhailovna, just as she arrived at Zhenino, fate brought her face to face with an occurrence which made her forget about old age and the nearness of death for a long time.”14

Her cook burns himself with boiling water and she treats him. She realizes she is good at nursing and always has been, and she dedicates herself to treating the local peasants. She had affairs when her daughter was little (“doctors had been numbered among her lovers, and she had learned a bit from them”), and her husband left her.

Chekhov is fascinated by her, an untrained but devoted healer: “The greater the suffering of the patient and the dirtier and more disgusting his ailment, the sweeter her work seemed to her.” But he is also leery of her messianism:

She adored her patients. Sentiment suggested that they were her saviors, but reason made her want to see them not as individual personalities, not as peasants, but as something abstract—the people!

Through a revived correspondence with her husband, she reconciles with him. He is a general stationed somewhere in the south, and he retires and comes to her at the Zhenino estate. He is bored with life and full of aches and pains. He notices that she has given up meat. He is curious but skeptical about her treating the peasants, as she is not a doctor, and he hates what he judges to be the peasants’ ingratitude. He knows he’s cranky and hates himself for it. He and Anna won’t or can’t talk about their daughter.

It was only in the evenings, when darkness filled the rooms and a cricket chirped despondently behind the stove, that this awkwardness disappeared. They sat side by side in silence, and on those occasions it was just as if their souls were whispering about the thing that neither of them could bring themselves to say aloud.

Insufferably irritable with the household servants and the peasants, the husband revives in the spring and becomes outwardly religious; he has a mass said for his daughter, and he attends church regularly. Dr. Chekhov diagnoses him for us: “It was a paroxysm of elderly grief, but the old man imagined that a reaction, a radical change was taking place in him.” Indeed, his religious fervor disappears and he goes in instead for his more characteristic carping at the peasants who are still coming for his wife’s treatment. They become so offended that they begin staying away.

Anna complains at him for this and he explains, crankily but from Chekhov’s point of view as a medical professional rightly, that they’re better off seeing real doctors: “ ‘In my opinion, you’ll do much more good to a sick man if you shove him off roughly to see a doctor than if you treat him yourself.’ ”

The unhappy old man repeatedly gives clear voice to Chekhov’s own opinions:

“Alexander of Macedon was a great man, but there’s no need to go and make a song and dance about it, and it’s the same with the Russian people—it’s a great people, but it doesn’t follow that you can’t tell it the truth to its face. You can’t make a lap-dog of the people. These [peasants] are human-beings just like you and me, with the same shortcomings, and therefore you shouldn’t worship them, nor coddle them, but you should teach them, reform them… inspire them…”

When Anna suggests that they themselves can learn “how to work” from the peasants, he blows up. Hasn’t he worked hard and endured so much as a soldier and general?

“Perhaps you’ll tell me, I can learn how to suffer from that people of yours? Of course, it isn’t as if I ever suffered! I lost my own daughter… the only thing that still tied me to life in this damned old age! And I haven’t suffered!”

At this sudden memory of their daughter the old people all at once began to weep and to wipe their eyes with their table-napkins.

They cry and talk about their daughter and begin sharing Anna’s bed. He is still grumbly, but they relax and she completely halts seeing patients. He tempts his vegetarian wife with some delicious fish, and she succumbs, and for the next few months they laze around, doing little but planning elaborate dishes: “The old people gave themselves up to gustatory sensations.” He can’t read for long stretches, as he never did so. He putters, she sags. One day in early fall, he has eaten too much, feels heartburn and hopelessness and asks Anna if she still has her medicines. He goes to the cabinet and helps himself, and comes back to bed and never wakes up. She does not investigate his death (not wanting to know, it seems, if he had only taken the wrong drug). The story ends with Anna’s resolution to join a monastery.

Chekhov not only didn’t choose to put “The Boredom of Life” in his Collected Works, but noted on it to not put it in.15 I believe that there’s a story behind this story, but what? Chekhov wrote it after arriving at Babkino this summer. The setting of the story, Zhenino, part-rhymes with Babkino, so I am going to make the undaring suggestion that Chekhov had Babkino in mind.16 My pet theory, which means there is no evidence for or against it, is that there were details in it that even in 1899 were too close to some living person’s experiences. Perhaps the old couple were based on friends or relatives of the Babkino estate owners, Chekhov’s friends the Kiselevs.

June 1886

What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest reticence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. It isn’t that they didn’t think about these things, and to good effect, but to talk about such things seemed to them pretentious, presumptuous.

—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago1

Leykin pinched pennies, and the Chekhovs did not, though Anton continually strove to keep the family finances in the black. In a letter at the beginning of June, Leykin wondered: “You write: No money. Lordy! Where do you put your money? It seems I live on even less than you do.”2

Chekhov taunted Leykin a few days later, in a postscript to his brother Nikolay’s letter: “You ask where I spend my money? On women!!!!”3 This, Leykin knew, was not so.

There is a copy of Motley Stories dated and dedicated to Chekhov’s father Pavel on June 2, 1886: “To the deeply respected Pavel Egorovich from the loving and faithful author.” We know from Pavel’s children’s letters and memoirs that Pavel read newspapers and “French novels” and Nikolay Leskov’s short stories.4 There is no record of Pavel’s response to his son’s writings.

Meanwhile, Bilibin was forwarding reviews of the book to Chekhov, who did not pretend not to read them, but, having read them, he disdained them. A few years later he would remark in a letter to a fellow writer:

And as regards the word “art,” I fear it as merchants’ wives fear a Sodom rain of brimstone. When people talk to me of the artistic and the anti-artistic, of that which is theatric and non-theatric, of tendency, realism, etc., I become confused, consent irresolutely, and answer with platitudinous half-truths that are not worth a penny. I divide all literary works into two classes: those that I like and those that I do not like. I have no other criterion, and if you were to ask me why I like Shakespeare and dislike Zlatovratsky, I should be unable to answer. Perhaps in time, when I become wiser, I shall acquire a criterion, but meanwhile, all this talk about “artistry” only tires me and seems to me only the continuation of the same scholastic discourses with which people wearied themselves in the Middle Ages.5

Chekhov really disliked high-faluting art discussion.

*

His first story in June, “Romance with Double-Bass” (“Roman s Kontrabasom,” June 7), is a farce unlike his usual comic stories. It’s a professionally polished comedy, with all the pluses and minuses of that. A minus for me is that there seem to be no incidentally personal details of the moment. A musician and a woman separately have their clothes stolen while swimming. She hides in his music case, which is discovered by the double-bassist’s fellow musicians, who heft it with them to her engagement party, where, upon the case’s opening, she is literally completely exposed. Meanwhile, the bass player Pitsikatoff “put on his top-hat, swung the double-bass onto his back and padded off toward the bushes. Naked, with his musical instrument slung over his shoulders, he resembled some ancient mythological demigod.” As in a fairy tale, he remains forever naked under a bridge. The clever plot makes me wonder if Chekhov was fed the idea from a friend or a brother and wrote it up. The short British 1974 movie of the story, starring John Cleese, is fully in the story’s spirit.

In the same issue of Fragments, he had the skit “List of People Having the Right to Travel Free on the Russian Railroad.” Chekhov did not have this “right,” but his friend Schechtel did, and on June 8 he followed up his late May letter to Schechtel to encourage him again to hop on a train and come up to Babkino. The letter is the best kind of invitation to a friend—insistent yet funny. He lists all the reasons why Schechtel should come: fishing, swimming, the grass, the air, the birds; and of course painting (their mutual friend the landscape master Levitan was already there painting and so was Nikolay Chekhov). He himself was dashing off numerous skits and stories, but he told Schechtel he felt “lazy.”

On June 15 Dunya Efros wrote the first of two surviving letters from her to Chekhov. “Dear Anton Pavlovich. You, perhaps, are amazed at my letter, but I am unable to find another way to find out everything that is going on with you, how you’re doing. I sent three letters to your sister and not one reply. What this signifies I decidedly don’t know. Couldn’t you get her to write me, or maybe, not be too lazy to write me yourself…”6

Chekhov replied, lazy or not, but what he said is unknown, except as what can be guessed from her reply on June 27.

*

He didn’t write a story for New Times this month, but he indeed came through for Leykin, as promised. His other stories were for the Petersburg Gazette. In “Fears” (“Strakhi,” June 16) the narrator relates three instances in his life where he had been scared out of his wits:

“It’s stupid!” I said to myself. “That phenomenon is only terrible because I don’t understand it; everything we don’t understand is mysterious.”7

The narrator eventually concludes that “cowardice was stronger than common sense.”

Chekhov on the other hand wasn’t too cowardly to write to Dunya Efros at this time, though his letter has disappeared. He went to Moscow at some point and returned by June 23.

The biographer Magarshack concludes that Babkino “had a most beneficial effect on Chekhov’s health, chiefly owing to the regular life he led there. He usually got up at seven o’clock and immediately sat down at his improvised desk (the bottom part of a big sewing machine from which the treadle had been removed) and wrote his stories, raising his eyes from time to time to have a look at the magnificent view through the large, square window, as though drawing inspiration from it. His room was sparsely furnished: a small bed covered with a striped blanket, a tall wardrobe at the bottom of the bed by the window, a bedside table with a candle in a cheap candlestick, a washbasin, and on the wall above the head of the bed a pair of chemist’s scales in which he weighed out the medicines for the patients who flocked to him from all over the countryside. […] His surgery hours were from ten to one o’clock. At one o’clock he usually had lunch and then went for a walk in the woods. After tea he sat down to his writing again. In the afternoon he would fish or have a game of croquet, which would sometimes go on till after nightfall, when they would stick lighted candles near the [wickets]. At eight o’clock he had dinner, after which they all went to spend the evenings with the Kiselevs…. Vladislavlev would sing the latest songs… (Chekhov’s favorite piece of music was Chopin’s Nocturne in G major and during his last years in Yalta he would often ask a visiting pianist to play it to him.)”8

Mikhail Chekhov’s drawing of Chekhov’s room at Babkino

Mikhail Chekhov’s copy of Levitan’s sketch of the prospect by the main Kiselev house.

A simple story without consequential events, and seemingly set near Babkino, is “The Chemist’s Wife” (“Aptekarsha,” June 21). One early morning after a party, an officer and a military doctor temporarily stationed in the area idly think about how to go about seducing the drugstore owner’s wife. They have the usual or typical male arrogance about their right to do so, and as bachelors the usual or typical contempt for husbands:

“The pharmacist is asleep. And his wife is asleep, too. She is a pretty woman, Obtyosov.”

“I saw her. I liked her very much…. Tell me, doctor, can she possibly love that jawbone of an ass? Can she?”

“No, most likely she does not love him,” sighed the doctor, speaking as though he were sorry for the chemist. “The little woman is asleep behind the window, Obtyosov, what? Tossing with the heat, her little mouth half open… and one little foot hanging out of bed. I bet that fool the chemist doesn’t realise what a lucky fellow he is…. No doubt he sees no difference between a woman and a bottle of carbolic!”9

She, for her part, is listless, unsatisfied, and happens to be awake next to her snoozing husband and seems to have overheard them. When they ring, she throws on a dress and slippers and hustles to the shop door.

They don’t have much of a plan besides chatting her up. They ask for throat lozenges, then soda powder, then seltzer, all to maintain her company. The doctor knows enough to ask for an alcoholic chemical mixture, and she fetches it for them to add to their seltzer:

“What a flirt you are, though!” the doctor laughed softly, looking slyly at her from under his brows. “Your eyes seem to be firing shot: piff-paff! I congratulate you: you’ve conquered! We are vanquished!”

The chemist’s wife looked at their ruddy faces, listened to their chatter, and soon she, too, grew quite lively. Oh, she felt so gay! She entered into the conversation, she laughed, flirted, and even, after repeated requests from the customers, drank two ounces of wine.

They linger and kiss her hand farewell. She scolds them, but she is excited: “She ran quickly into the bedroom and sat down in the same place. She saw the doctor and the officer, on coming out of the shop, walk lazily away a distance of twenty paces; then they stopped and began whispering together. What about? Her heart throbbed, there was a pulsing in her temples, and why she did not know…. Her heart beat violently as though those two whispering outside were deciding her fate.”

By the time the officer works up his nerve and returns to ring at the shop, the bell awakens the chemist, who gets up, irritated with his wife for not answering it. He serves the dismayed officer, and returns to the bedroom:

“How unhappy I am!” said the chemist’s wife, looking angrily at her husband, who was undressing quickly to get into bed again. “Oh, how unhappy I am!” she repeated, suddenly melting into bitter tears. “And nobody knows, nobody knows….”

We know!

These young, attractive, lonely, bored women populate Chekhov’s fictional world. The chemist’s wife might be, in that world, a cousin of “The Witch,” stuck in the boonies (probably in the neighborhood of Babkino) with a dull, unappreciative husband.

“Not Wanted” (“Lishnie Lyudi,” June 23), on the other hand, is about an unappreciated husband, a lawyer who takes the train two or three times a week to the dacha community where his wife and son are spending the summer. We learn from his fellow traveler at the station that the trips there and back to the city are “all petty expenditure not worth considering, but, mind you, in the course of the summer it will run up to some two hundred rubles. Of course, to be in the lap of Nature is worth any money—I don’t dispute it… idyllic and all the rest of it; but of course, with the salary an official gets, as you know yourself, every farthing has to be considered.”10 Chekhov was never free from worry about money, even in “idyllic” Babkino. The lawyer is grouchy from all the inconveniences of the journey. As the title of the story indicates, his wife, occupied with friends putting on amateur plays and musical performances, doesn’t actually need him, and he himself is impatient with his son, who needs looking after.

“A Serious Step” (“Ser’eznyi Shag,” June 28) is about a father who is irritated with his wife’s permissiveness in regard to their daughter, who is being courted and who, in the course of the story, seems to have been proposed to:

“This is a serious step,” Aleksei Borisich thinks to himself. “One can’t just decide willy-nilly… one has to seriously… from all sides…”11

While awaiting his daughter’s explanation of her situation, he continues to grumble to himself: “One has to look at it… from all sides, to chat, discuss… the holy sacrament of marriage, one can’t just approach it with frivolity.” But his wife and daughter don’t ever get around to discussing the engagement with him. They are happy and after all so is he.

It seems that every time Chekhov contemplated marriage this year, he found reasons not to proceed. But why not go ahead and take that “serious step”? Dunya Efros, however, seems to have had enough for now of his waffling.

Chekhov was writing few letters this month, probably because friends and family were with him, including Alexander and Nikolay, in whose interest he wrote to Leykin on June 24:

I’m lazy as before. The Devil knows where the energy goes… There’s almost no money, the weather is more often bad than good, and the soul is foul, and a day doesn’t come without mental troubles. I continually find foul news and surprises so that I’m even afraid of receiving letters. […]

[Alexander] was blind, but now he is […] able to see. Nikolay is finishing a charming drawing, which he’s sending tomorrow. The drawing’s excellent. A talented person, but… vous comprenez, a bad workman.

[…] In June I’m not coming: family obligations… As for July I can’t say anything positive. I’m not fishing for now. There are a lot of mushrooms, though their growth is hindered by the outrageously cold nights.12

Chekhov, after following up on the prescription he had given Leykin’s wife in April, warned Leykin off prescribing the peasants an irritating treatment made from roots: “Why do so if there’s castor oil?” It seems that like Anna in “The Boredom of Life,” Leykin had taken to treating the local peasants. Castor oil, anyway, couldn’t do any harm.

On June 27, Efros again wrote to Chekhov: “I offer you, Anton Pavlovich, sincere thanks for your letter and that you so quickly wrote me back… I’m completely in agreement with you that you’re happier there than here [she was at a dacha community]. You have Mashenka or Yaden’ka, on whom you make various experiments and whose stupidity makes everyone laugh at her. You put on various extravaganzas for fun, and there’s nothing like that here…. I was thinking about a rich fiancée for you, Anton Pavlovich, even before receiving your letter. There’s the daughter of a Moscow merchant here, not bad, quite tubby (your taste) and quite stupid (also an advantage). She yearns to escape the guardianship of her mother, of whom she’s terribly ashamed. Once she even drank a bucket and a half of vinegar to make herself pale and scare her mother. She told us that herself. It seems to me that you’ll like her—there’s a lot of money.”13

Efros was hurt and trying to sting him back.

But they weren’t through.

*

Meanwhile, there was Maria Kiseleva, probably thirteen years Chekhov’s senior.14 She was the aristocratic daughter of a playwright, Begichev, who was the director of the Imperial Theaters, and she was the wife of the owner of Babkino, Aleksei Kiselev. As a mother of two, she was an aspiring children’s book author; Chekhov, as editor and volunteer agent, would help her publish some of her stories.

The Chekhovs came from a long line of serfs, while the Kiselevs were aristocrats. Both families, however, were theatrical and musical and for three summers they seem to have for the most part enjoyed each other’s company. All were cultured and educated, and to Kiseleva’s credit, she sought out the genius Chekhov’s free literary guidance. Kiseleva’s letters to him reveal her as a prim, proud, educated, cultured person. Chekhov was patient with her and encouraged her and they became close enough friends that they could have serious arguments about literature.

July 1886

“If your friend truly wants to write, he should write and let nothing get into his way. He should submit to newspapers and magazines without caring whether they accept them or not. One good short story a year will not make him a writer, any more than hammering one nail into a piece of wood each year will make him a carpenter.”

—In conversation1

Chekhov was in Babkino for most of the month, with two short trips away. By the end of June, it seems, he had refocused and found all his literary senses engaged again.

“The Chorus Girl” (“Khoristka,” July 5) is about a wife harassing the chorus girl that her husband has been seeing. The wife, with an angry and pitiful sob story, shakes the young woman down for all of her gifted jewelry, even though the husband has only treated her to a few trinkets.

“I ask you for the things! Give me the things! I am crying…. I am humiliating myself…. If you like I will go down on my knees! If you wish it!”

Pasha shrieked with horror and waved her hands. She felt that this pale, beautiful lady who expressed herself so grandly, as though she were on the stage, really might go down on her knees to her, simply from pride, from grandeur, to exalt herself and humiliate the chorus girl.2

The cowardly husband, hiding behind Pasha’s bedroom door, is impressed by his wife’s having bullied the young woman. When his wife has left, he tells off Pasha:

“My God! She, a lady, so proud, so pure…. She was ready to go down on her knees to… to this wench! And I’ve brought her to this! I’ve allowed it!”

He clutched his head in his hands and moaned.

Chekhov fiddled with many phrasings in this story after its original publication in Fragments. It remains however a bitter comedy hinging on the hypocrisy of the wrathful, contemptuous wife, who blames the chorus girl more than her husband, and the self-pitying husband, who also after all blames the chorus girl. With each new insult our sympathy sharpens for Pasha.3

Leykin wrote Chekhov on July 5 explaining how sales of Chekhov’s book were going. As if resigned, Leykin sighed: “But how soon can books with the title ‘Motley Stories’ pay off? […] I make glib titles for my books—and they pay off in 7–8 months. If your book pays off in a year, praise God. Accept that besides that, in summer no books come out.”4

Whatever routine Chekhov had reinstituted for his writing, it was broken up when on July 7 he was asked by a judicial investigator to fill in for his colleague Dr. S. P. Uspensky, who had helped train him, and perform an autopsy several miles away. He set out the next day.5

Chekhov supplied Leykin with the humor piece “A Glossary of Terms for Young Ladies” (“Slovotolkovatel’ dlya Barishen’ ”) for the July 12 issue, the same day that the first-rate “The Schoolmaster” (“Uchitel’ ”) came out in New Times. Sysoev the schoolmaster is dying; everyone sees it. He denies his condition to himself and others.

Just before the factory manager’s house, where the festivity was to take place, he had a little mishap. He was taken with a violent fit of coughing…. He was so shaken by it that the cap flew off his head and the stick dropped out of his hand; and when the school inspector and the teachers, hearing his cough, ran out of the house, he was sitting on the bottom step, bathed in perspiration.6

There is an end-of-school-year banquet with speeches, and Sysoev can’t help himself from acting obnoxiously. Only one beleaguered colleague openly states the connection between Sysoev’s illness and behavior:

“He won’t leave off,” Lyapunov went on, snorting angrily. “He takes advantage of his position as an invalid and worries us all to death. Well, sir, I am not going to consider your being ill.”

“Let my illness alone!” cried Sysoev, angrily. “What is it to do with you? They all keep repeating it at me: illness! illness! illness!… As though I need your sympathy! Besides, where have you picked up the notion that I am ill? I was ill before the examinations, that’s true, but now I have completely recovered, there is nothing left of it but weakness.”

And as the banquet continues, everyone, as if in a dream, ignores his horrible behavior; their failure to note his angry complaining in itself confuses him and dimly, frighteningly awakens in him the awareness that he is in fact about to die. His sense of taste is off; food is unpleasant. He gives a surly, embittered speech:

He several times referred to certain enemies of his, tried to drop hints, repeated himself, coughed, and flourished his fingers unbecomingly. At last he was exhausted and in a perspiration, and he began talking jerkily, in a low voice as though to himself, and finished his speech not quite coherently: “And so I propose the health of Bruni, that is Adolf Andreyich, who is here, among us… generally speaking… you understand…”

When he finished everyone gave a faint sigh, as though someone had sprinkled cold water and cleared the air. Bruni alone apparently had no unpleasant feeling. Beaming and rolling his sentimental eyes, the German shook Sysoev’s hand with feeling and was again as friendly as a dog.

Chekhov himself had to lie about or disguise his own tuberculosis, though friends regularly noticed his symptoms and coughing fits.

After the German owner of the factory-school lauds Sysoev to the skies, the praises from all come raining down:

And all present at the dinner began as one man talking of Sysoev’s extraordinary talent. And as though a dam had been burst, there followed a flood of sincere, enthusiastic words such as men do not utter when they are restrained by prudent and cautious sobriety. Sysoev’s speech and his intolerable temper and the horrid, spiteful expression on his face were all forgotten. Everyone talked freely, even the shy and silent new teachers, poverty-stricken, down-trodden youths who never spoke to the inspector without addressing him as “your honor.” It was clear that in his own circle Sysoev was a person of consequence.

Having been accustomed to success and praise for the fourteen years that he had been schoolmaster, he listened with indifference to the noisy enthusiasm of his admirers.

This indifference cracks, however, when the factory boss concludes the round of praises:

“In response to your words I ought to tell you that… Fyodor Lukich’s family will be provided for and that a sum of money was placed in the bank a month ago for that object.”

Sysoev looked enquiringly at the German, at his colleagues, as though unable to understand why his family should be provided for and not he himself. And at once on all the faces, in all the motionless eyes bent upon him, he read not the sympathy, not the commiseration which he could not endure, but something else, something soft, tender, but at the same time intensely sinister, like a terrible truth, something which in one instant turned him cold all over and filled his soul with unutterable despair. With a pale, distorted face he suddenly jumped up and clutched at his head. For a quarter of a minute he stood like that, stared with horror at a fixed point before him as though he saw the swiftly coming death of which Bruni was speaking, then sat down and burst into tears.

Chekhov himself shuddered to think of a roomful of pitying well-wishers with “motionless eyes bent upon him.”

No one ever saw Chekhov weep, but they would have seen him mortified while being lauded at the premiere of The Cherry Orchard, just six months before his death in 1904: “Chekhov found himself compelled to take the stage and remain standing at length, weak and coughing, to be celebrated. He was presented with such gifts as an antique laurel wreath, […] adorned with portraits of actors and students”; he had to listen to speeches of gratitude from the theater group that “owed so much to Chekhov’s ‘talent,’ ‘tender heart,’ and ‘pure soul’ that Chekhov should consider it his own. Endless bombast arrived in telegrams from all over Russia. Chekhov, who had mocked such sententiousness all his writing life, could only submit to being its object.”7

When Sysoev gets home, he tries to restore his faith in his recovery. Meanwhile, “the district doctor was sitting in the next room and telling his wife in a whisper that a man ought not to have been allowed to go out to dinner who had not in all probability more than a week to live.”

Chekhov later touched up this story, even more than he had “The Chorus Girl”; he excised paragraphs and an entire scene after Sysoev’s breakdown at the banquet, wherein Lyapunov catches up with him and profusely apologizes.

Commentator after commentator point out how little revising Chekhov did after publication. This occurrence of editing was unusual, and yet in each of these July stories that he later edited, he did not change the tone or feeling, as he had in “A Little Joke.”

“A Troublesome Visitor” (“Bespokoinyi Gost’ ”) came out in the middle of July, when Chekhov had happy and untroublesome visitors at Babkino. He was even trying to get Leykin to come for a stay. The nightmarish story’s troublesome visitor, on the other hand, is a hunter who has stopped in bad weather at a forester’s hut. The forester is skittish and declares: “I am not afraid of wolves or bears, or wild beasts of any sort, but I am afraid of man. You can save yourself from beasts with a gun or some other weapon, but you have no means of saving yourself from a wicked man.”8 As they sit in uneasy company with each other, they hear a cry for help, but the forester refuses to investigate.

The hunter and the forester fell to listening with their eyes fixed on the window. Through the noise of the forest they could hear sounds such as the strained ear can always distinguish in every storm, so that it was difficult to make out whether people were calling for help or whether the wind was wailing in the chimney. But the wind tore at the roof, tapped at the paper on the window, and brought a distinct shout of “Help!”

The hunter can’t persuade the forester to go out with him to look, so he goes himself. Minutes later he returns, having encountered a woman who had run into difficulties with her cart. The hunter is now doubly contemptuous of his host and at the same time becomes suspicious and menacing:

“You must have money to be afraid of people! A man who is poor is not likely to be afraid….”

“For those words you will answer before God,” Artyom said hoarsely from the stove. “I have no money.”

“I dare say! Scoundrels always have money…. Why are you afraid of people, then? So you must have! I’d like to take and rob you for spite, to teach you a lesson!…”

Disgusted with the timid forester, the threatening hunter leaves the hut, and the forester bolts the door. The story ends here, but Dostoevsky (to bring in an expert on nightmares) would have kept it going toward a violent or dramatic resolution.

Chekhov published only two more pieces this month, both of them quite moralistic. “A Rare Bird” (July 19) is a twenty-line tale, published under the Latin title “Rara Avis,” wherein a crime novelist asks a detective to show him various types of criminals, which the detective finds easy, but when the novelist wants to see a few good “ideal and honest” folks for contrast, the detective is stumped.

“Other People’s Misfortune” (“Chuzhaya Beda,” July 28) is an unusually simple tale: a rich conservative expresses his contempt for a down-on-their-luck traditional family, whose estate he and his wife are buying:

“Of course I’m sorry for them, but it’s their own fault. Who forced them to mortgage their estate? Why have they neglected it so? We really oughtn’t to feel sorry for them…. He’s probably a drunkard and a gambler—did you see his mug?—and she is a woman of fashion and a spendthrift. I know these characters!”

“How do you know them, Styopa?”

“I know!…”9

Not only are we cheap with financial charity, suggests Chekhov, we’re cheap with our moral charity. Sympathetic understanding is a moral exercise, and morally flabby Styopa doesn’t do that kind of exercise.

On July 20, Dr. Chekhov traveled to Moscow to get a toothache treated and at the end of the month went to Zvenigorod to cover duties for his colleague, Dr. Uspensky. He spent a few days there, but was back in Babkino by the 28th, whence he wrote the actress Elizaveta Sakharova a warm letter. She was getting married and had asked Chekhov to be her “best man.” He couldn’t help his family friend with that request, but he passed along some news about having just seen her aunt in Zvenigorod and shared a pleasant recollection of when she had hung out with him and Levitan, who was at Babkino now: “His talent grows not by the day but by the hour. Nikolay works little. My sister lives and is well. Misha [Mikhail Chekhov] is in love and philosophizes, and so on and so forth…”

On July 30, he wrote defensively, apologetically, evasively to Leykin: “Thank you for the letter, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich! Thank you that it’s not curses, as I expected….” He had had a bad few days, sick for one thing, the toothache for another, and his cursed hemorrhoids:

I wanted to write lying down, but this trick doesn’t suit me, and even more that together with the bumps the general situation was revolting. Five days ago I went Zvenigorod to substitute for a short time for my colleague, the district doctor, where I was busy up to my neck and sick. That’s all… Now: why didn’t I write you that there wouldn’t be stories? The reason why I didn’t write is that with each hour I didn’t lose the hope of sitting down and writing a story… There was not a telegraph office in Voskresensk….

I’m still sick. My soul’s mood is disgusting, and there’s no money (in July I didn’t work anywhere), and domestic circumstances are not joyful… The weather is crummy.10

He had invited Leykin to come to Babkino, but Leykin, feeling slighted, didn’t come because he said he didn’t have the proper directions. Chekhov gave him directions now and reminded Leykin that even though he hadn’t received the request for those directions about how to get to Babkino, it would have been very easy and he could’ve asked anybody once he got to Voskresensk.

August 1886

You complain that my heroes are gloomy,—alas! that’s not my fault. This happens apart from my will, and when I write it does not seem to me that I am writing gloomily; in any case, as I work I am always in excellent spirits. It has been observed that gloomy, melancholy people always write cheerfully, while those who enjoy life put their depression into their writings.

—To a fellow writer1

August was a light month again for writing letters—there were, it seems, three, though only one has survived—but he wrote half a dozen stories, including one of his greatest love stories.

All of the stories except the last touch on or focus on marriage. As far as anyone knows, he saw nothing of Dunya Efros this month, but she was, evidently, on his mind. In August’s first story, retitled from “Ty i Vy” (“You [informal] and You [formal],” August 4) to “Women Make Trouble” by Avrahm Yarmolinsky in The Unknown Chekhov, a foolish peasant gives rambling testimony about a hooligan who drank and hit everyone in the vicinity, including the hooligan’s wife. The peasant, confirming for us that he is a blockhead, blames the innocent wife.

Chekhov leaves no doubt that husbands are, as a category, beasts. “The Husband” (“Muzh,” August 9) is about the self-justifying cruelty of a jealous husband who hates seeing his wife enjoy dancing with some visiting regimental soldiers. It’s not that Shalikov’s wife hasn’t been swept off her feet; she has! But so have all the other provincial women:

The ladies felt as though they were on wings. Intoxicated by the dancing, the music, and the clank of spurs, they threw themselves heart and soul into making the acquaintance of their new partners, and quite forgot their old civilian friends. Their fathers and husbands, forced temporarily into the background, crowded around the meagre refreshment table in the entrance hall. All these government cashiers, secretaries, clerks, and superintendents—stale, sickly looking, clumsy figures—were perfectly well aware of their inferiority. They did not even enter the ball-room, but contented themselves with watching their wives and daughters in the distance dancing with the accomplished and graceful officers.2

And this husband, instead of resigning himself to the husbands’ and fathers’ inevitable position, becomes riled: “It was not jealousy he was feeling. He was ill-humored—first, because the room was taken up with dancing and there was nowhere he could play a game of cards; secondly, because he could not endure the sound of wind instruments; and, thirdly, because he fancied the officers treated the civilians somewhat too casually and disdainfully. But what above everything revolted him and moved him to indignation was the expression of happiness on his wife’s face.”

That last phrase puts me in mind of stories by D. H. Lawrence, who would one day mock Chekhov as “a willy wet-leg,”3 but who also so well describes aspects of marital spite of the sort that Chekhov depicts in this story. The husband despises his wife:

Not only her face but her whole figure was expressive of beatitude…. The tax-collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire to jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had forgotten herself, that life was by no means so delightful as she fancied now in her excitement….

“You wait; I’ll teach you to smile so blissfully,” he muttered. “You are not a boarding-school miss, you are not a girl. An old fright ought to realise she is a fright!”

When that mazurka ends, Shalikov steps in with the order that his wife go home with him:

Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed all over: she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly looking, ill-humored, ordinary husband.

When she balks, Shalikov swears he will make a scene if she doesn’t cooperate. Chekhov’s keen reading of Shalikov’s selfish, resentful impulses shows he hates Shalikov even more than Shalikov’s wife does:

The tax-collector walked behind his wife, and watching her downcast, sorrowful, humiliated little figure, he recalled the look of beatitude which had so irritated him at the club, and the consciousness that the beatitude was gone filled his soul with triumph. He was pleased and satisfied, and at the same time he felt the lack of something; he would have liked to go back to the club and make every one feel dreary and miserable, so that all might know how stale and worthless life is when you walk along the streets in the dark and hear the slush of the mud under your feet, and when you know that you will wake up next morning with nothing to look forward to but vodka and cards. Oh, how awful it is!

The superb next story, “A Misfortune” (“Neschast’e,” August 16), which Chekhov wrote for New Times, has perhaps made wives and girlfriends blush for themselves and caused lovelorn men, me for instance, to groan with recognition. There are love stories and there are love stories. There are no serious love stories that end happily in Chekhov.

Chekhov’s understanding of fidelity and sexuality were completely different from Tolstoy’s. Chekhov understood sexuality without typical contemporary prejudices. He knew physiology and accepted the sexual drive as part of our human nature. He was not wanton himself and lived long enough with his illness to see his own sexual drive diminish.

He understood restraint and advised his recklessly horny brother Nikolay to restrain himself sexually. He thought, in fact, that artists needed to conserve their amorousness.

Even so, Chekhov was a very attractive man and quite susceptible to attractive, educated, lively women. He had girlfriends, affairs, flirtations. He was a tough read for his female friends, and women went after him and taunted and teased him, but only at the end, nearing forty, like his hero Gurov in “The Lady with the Dog,” did he fall head over heels in love.

“A Misfortune” is nearly as sublime, just as unresolved, as that late wonderful much more famous story.

So is love a misfortune? Is it a misfortune that we fall in love with someone who is already in a relationship? Is it a misfortune that even though we are in a relationship, we are still vulnerable to falling in love with someone else? Why are we so vulnerable?

Those are not necessarily Chekhov’s questions.

There are, however, other questions in this story that he and his characters seem to pose:

1) Why should love make us ashamed of ourselves?

2) Why does love make us lie to ourselves?

3) If the love has been declared and accepted, why wait?

“A Misfortune” is not a new Anna Karenina but a variation upon it; Chekhov later joked to Suvorin: “To make a fortune, to escape the abyss of petty worries and fears, I have only one choice, an immoral one, to marry into wealth or to say that I wrote Anna Karenina.”4

A married woman and mother is played up to by “a friend.”

She pretends she does not like or accept her friend’s attention.

It’s obvious, on the other hand, that no matter what she says, she enjoys, luxuriates in, and cultivates his attention.

The “she” in “A Misfortune,” Sofya Petrovna Lubyantsev, as a cultured twenty-five-year-old in 1886, would have read Anna Karenina as a teenager. She would have known, too, that such affairs happen, and that they are full of risks. However, she has an image of herself that she means to maintain: She’s “proper.” That means she would not participate in such a love affair.

Unlike Anna Karenina, we readers are seeing the situation as a comedy. Sofya and Ilyin don’t think their situation is funny, but we do. We know that they will have an affair at least. They do not know this.

The story takes place in a dacha community outside St. Petersburg or Moscow. It begins:

Sofya Petrovna, the wife of Lubyantsev the notary, a handsome young woman of five-and-twenty, was walking slowly along a track that had been cleared in the wood, with Ilyin, a lawyer who was spending the summer in the neighborhood. It was five o’clock in the evening. Feathery-white masses of cloud stood overhead; patches of bright blue sky peeped out between them. The clouds stood motionless, as though they had caught in the tops of the tall old pine-trees. It was still and sultry.

Farther on, the track was crossed by a low railway embankment on which a sentinel with a gun was for some reason pacing up and down. Just beyond the embankment there was a large white church with six domes and a rusty roof.5

Why these place-details? Chekhov is so efficient at introducing characters and placing them in a particular environment at a particular time. He paints the picture the characters feel themselves in. We are observers within the scene and the attention or point of view is one that is right beside Sofya or perhaps her own. She may well see herself the way we do: young, attractive, conscious of a potentially awkward situation that she overconfidently believes herself capable of remedying.

“I did not expect to meet you here,” said Sofya Petrovna, looking at the ground and prodding at the last year’s leaves with the tip of her parasol, “and now I am glad we have met. I want to speak to you seriously and once for all. I beg you, Ivan Mikhalovich, if you really love and respect me, please make an end of this pursuit of me! You follow me about like a shadow, you are continually looking at me not in a nice way, wooing me,6 writing me strange letters, and… and I don’t know where it’s all going to end! Why, what can come of it?”

Ilyin said nothing. Sofya Petrovna walked on a few steps and continued:

“And this complete transformation in you all came about in the course of two or three weeks, after five years’ friendship. I don’t know you, Ivan Mikhalovich!”

(And all at once, in the midst of revising this book, I realize that Sofya Petrovna is the embodiment of Maria Kiseleva. Their motherly, wifely condescension and propriety line up neatly. Chekhov, I believe, imagined the prim thirty-nine-year-old Kiseleva in an awkward position she may have faced a dozen years before.) Sofya is telling Ilyin a story that he knows better than she. She has thought this through and has been marveling at it to herself. She truly does not understand his transformation. She also doesn’t understand, as we outsiders do, that she is most certainly taking pleasure in the experience.

Though the story is primarily from her point of view, we learn to analyze her words (and her hesitations, indicated by Chekhov’s ellipses) and her behavior from how Ilyin responds to them.

Sofya Petrovna stole a glance at her companion. Screwing up his eyes, he was looking intently at the fluffy clouds. His face looked angry, ill-humored, and preoccupied, like that of a man in pain forced to listen to nonsense.

“I wonder you don’t see it yourself,” Madame Lubyantsev went on, shrugging her shoulders. “You ought to realize that it’s not a very nice part you are playing. I am married; I love and respect my husband…. I have a daughter…. Can you think all that means nothing? Besides, as an old friend you know my attitude to family life and my views as to the sanctity of marriage.”

Ilyin cleared his throat angrily and heaved a sigh.

“Sanctity of marriage…” he muttered. “Oh, Lord!”

Ilyin is no Don Juan (and neither was Chekhov). She too is reading his behavior and, because he’s no Don Juan, there is no explanation for it. Why now? He’s known her for years. It doesn’t make sense. She declares:

“Yes, yes…. I love my husband, I respect him; and in any case I value the peace of my home. I would rather let myself be killed than be a cause of unhappiness to Andrey and his daughter…. And I beg you, Ivan Mikhalovich, for God’s sake, leave me in peace! Let us be as good, true friends as we used to be, and give up these sighs and groans, which really don’t suit you. It’s settled and over! Not a word more about it. Let us talk of something else.”

We recognize her behavior; we know she is saying the right things, the things she should say as a decent woman of her time. She is trying to be understanding and sympathetic. These things happen, and it’s just too bad for him. She thinks of herself as generous and kind.

Sofya Petrovna again stole a glance at Ilyin’s face. Ilyin was looking up; he was pale, and was angrily biting his quivering lips. She could not understand why he was angry and why he was indignant, but his pallor touched her.

She is experienced enough to know that he in fact wants to seduce her, but his behavior is not conforming, it seems, to suaveness. He is a wreck. She is seeing and Chekhov is showing us what love looks like. It’s not happy or blissful. It’s misery. What a misfortune!

“Don’t be angry; let us be friends,” she said affectionately. “Agreed? Here’s my hand.”

Ilyin took her plump little hand in both of his, squeezed it, and slowly raised it to his lips.

“I am not a schoolboy,” he muttered. “I am not in the least tempted by friendship with the woman I love.”

“Enough, enough! It’s settled and done with. We have reached the seat; let us sit down.”

Sofya Petrovna’s soul was filled with a sweet sense of relief: the most difficult and delicate thing had been said, the painful question was settled and done with. Now she could breathe freely and look Ilyin straight in the face.

Why won’t he behave himself and come to reason? How can he not allow for right and wrong as the overriding principle? But she, to her own satisfaction, and to the world’s approval (anyone could have watched this scene and excused her of vacillation or from any wrongdoing), has relaxed, and Chekhov swings his sensory camera out away from her; he has something of his own to note:

She looked at him, and the egoistic feeling of the superiority of the woman over the man who loves her, agreeably flattered her. It pleased her to see this huge, strong man, with his manly, angry face and his big black beard—clever, cultivated, and, people said, talented—sit down obediently beside her and bow his head dejectedly. For two or three minutes they sat without speaking.

This woman is not Dunya Efros or a chorus girl or the bored wife of a druggist or a witch. She is educated and, she thinks, worldly. All those other women, however, would see right through her. Will Sofya look back at this moment in embarrassment or joy? Both? She will eventually analyze her feelings the way that Chekhov has.

“Nothing is settled or done with,” began Ilyin. “You repeat copy-book maxims to me. ‘I love and respect my husband… the sanctity of marriage….’ I know all that without your help, and I could tell you more, too. I tell you truthfully and honestly that I consider the way I am behaving as criminal and immoral. What more can one say than that? But what’s the good of saying what everybody knows? Instead of feeding nightingales with paltry words, you had much better tell me what I am to do.”

“I’ve told you already—go away.”

“As you know perfectly well, I have gone away five times, and every time I turned back on the way. I can show you my through tickets—I’ve kept them all. I have not will enough to run away from you! I am struggling. I am struggling horribly; but what the devil am I good for if I have no backbone, if I am weak, cowardly! I can’t struggle with Nature! Do you understand? I cannot! I run away from here, and she holds on to me and pulls me back. Contemptible, loathsome weakness!”

Ilyin flushed crimson, got up, and walked up and down by the seat.

Things have gone way past where Sofya is comfortable. And she, as a decent woman, realizes she is now in new territory. She did not foresee this part. She has had control, but she does not have it now.

“I feel as cross as a dog,” he muttered, clenching his fists. “I hate and despise myself! My God! like some depraved schoolboy, I am wooing another man’s wife, writing idiotic letters, degrading myself… ugh!”

Ilyin clutched at his head, groaned, and sat down. “And then your insincerity!” he went on bitterly. “If you do dislike my disgusting behavior, why have you come here? What drew you here? In my letters I only ask you for a direct, definite answer—yes or no; but instead of a direct answer, you contrive every day these ‘chance’ meetings with me and regale me with copy-book maxims!”

How can someone in love say angry, accusatory things to the person they’re in love with—and yet be persuasive? Love is forcing realizations on Ilyin. He is broken. But he is broken by love, and the broken pieces can almost instantly reglue themselves.

Madame Lubyantsev was frightened and flushed. She suddenly felt the awkwardness which a decent woman feels when she is accidentally discovered undressed.

“You seem to suspect I am playing with you,” she muttered. “I have always given you a direct answer, and… only today I’ve begged you…”

“Ough! as though one begged in such cases! If you were to say straight out ‘Get away,’ I should have been gone long ago; but you’ve never said that. You’ve never once given me a direct answer. Strange indecision! Yes, indeed; either you are playing with me, or else…”

Or else what? Or else she’s in fact in love with him?

Ilyin leaned his head on his fists without finishing. Sofya Petrovna began going over in her own mind the way she had behaved from beginning to end. She remembered that not only in her actions, but even in her secret thoughts, she had always been opposed to Ilyin’s wooing; but yet she felt there was a grain of truth in the lawyer’s words. But not knowing exactly what the truth was, she could not find answers to make to Ilyin’s complaint, however hard she thought. It was awkward to be silent, and, shrugging her shoulders, she said:

“So I am to blame, it appears.”

“I don’t blame you for your insincerity,” sighed Ilyin. “I did not mean that when I spoke of it…. Your insincerity is natural and in the order of things. If people agreed together and suddenly became sincere, everything would go to the devil.”

And Chekhov had certainly run himself into this wall: What if people didn’t lie?… If we didn’t flinch and deceive others and ourselves, would there be chaos?

Sofya Petrovna was in no mood for philosophical reflections, but she was glad of a chance to change the conversation, and asked:

“But why?”

“Because only savage women and animals are sincere. Once civilization has introduced a demand for such comforts as, for instance, feminine virtue, sincerity is out of place….”

She is where she really never could have imagined. Ilyin’s suffering has brought him to an experiential wisdom that she has not achieved. Until now, to her this has all been a happily interesting adventure. And it’s still interesting, but she wants to get this situation back under control.

Ilyin jabbed his stick angrily into the sand. Madame Lubyantsev listened to him and liked his conversation, though a great deal of it she did not understand. What gratified her most was that she, an ordinary woman, was talked to by a talented man on “intellectual” subjects; it afforded her great pleasure, too, to watch the working of his mobile, young face, which was still pale and angry. She failed to understand a great deal that he said, but what was clear to her in his words was the attractive boldness with which the modern man without hesitation or doubt decides great questions and draws conclusive deductions.

She suddenly realized that she was admiring him, and was alarmed.

The verb admire here is “lyubuetsya.” Its root is lyub-, love. She’s looking at him with too much attention. She has never seen anything like it.

“Forgive me, but I don’t understand,” she said hurriedly. “What makes you talk of insincerity? I repeat my request again: be my good, true friend; let me alone! I beg you most earnestly!”

She’s offended by his calling out her “insincerity,” because as far as she can remember, she has been sincere. But Ilyin is deeply connected to his feelings. Socially his feelings are wrong. He is tormented. He already knows that this relationship is a piece of bad luck.

And now perhaps we can accept the appropriateness of the story’s title. We are in the realm of Greek myths rather than Anna Karenina. Sofya is overwhelmed by a force that she hasn’t expected.

“Very good; I’ll try again,” sighed Ilyin. “Glad to do my best…. Only I doubt whether anything will come of my efforts. Either I shall put a bullet through my brains or take to drink in an idiotic way. I shall come to a bad end! There’s a limit to everything—to struggles with Nature, too. Tell me, how can one struggle against madness? If you drink wine, how are you to struggle against intoxication? What am I to do if your image has grown into my soul, and day and night stands persistently before my eyes, like that pine there at this moment? Come, tell me, what hard and difficult thing can I do to get free from this abominable, miserable condition, in which all my thoughts, desires, and dreams are no longer my own, but belong to some demon who has taken possession of me? I love you, love you so much that I am completely thrown out of gear; I’ve given up my work and all who are dear to me; I’ve forgotten my God! I’ve never been in love like this in my life.”

While she has tried to remain in social mode, he has crashed ashore and has the words to describe what he is actually feeling. And it is fascinating to her and terrible! And we and Chekhov are happy, amused. Ilyin couldn’t have expressed himself better—though it fits no model of proper pronouncement of feelings.

Sofya Petrovna, who had not expected such a turn to their conversation, drew away from Ilyin and looked into his face in dismay. Tears came into his eyes, his lips were quivering, and there was an imploring, hungry expression in his face.

“I love you!” he muttered, bringing his eyes near her big, frightened eyes. “You are so beautiful! I am in agony now, but I swear I would sit here all my life, suffering and looking in your eyes. But… be silent, I implore you!”

Sofya Petrovna, feeling utterly disconcerted, tried to think as quickly as possible of something to say to stop him. “I’ll go away,” she decided, but before she had time to make a movement to get up, Ilyin was on his knees before her…. He was clasping her knees, gazing into her face and speaking passionately, hotly, eloquently. In her terror and confusion she did not hear his words; for some reason now, at this dangerous moment, while her knees were being agreeably squeezed and felt as though they were in a warm bath, she was trying, with a sort of angry spite, to interpret her own sensations. She was angry that instead of brimming over with protesting virtue, she was entirely overwhelmed with weakness, apathy, and emptiness, like a drunken man utterly reckless; only at the bottom of her soul a remote bit of herself was malignantly taunting her: “Why don’t you go? Is this as it should be? Yes?”

Oh, how can we not sympathize with her? And how can we not admire Chekhov describing her sensations—her knees in a warm bath! Only a doctor could get away with that. Tolstoy brings us readers close to Anna Karenina in so many ways—but not quite to that spot.

Seeking for some explanation, she could not understand how it was she did not pull away the hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and why, like Ilyin, she hastily glanced to right and to left to see whether anyone was looking. The clouds and the pines stood motionless, looking at them severely, like old ushers seeing mischief, but bribed not to tell the school authorities. The sentry stood like a post on the embankment and seemed to be looking at the seat.

“Let him look,” thought Sofya Petrovna.

“But… but listen,” she said at last, with despair in her voice. “What can come of this? What will be the end of this?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he whispered, waving off the disagreeable questions.

He has finally persuaded her of his feelings, and she has had to admit to herself that she has feelings, those feelings.

They heard the hoarse, discordant whistle of the train. This cold, irrelevant sound from the everyday world of prose made Sofya Petrovna rouse herself.

“I can’t stay… it’s time I was at home,” she said, getting up quickly. “The train is coming in… Andrey is coming by it! He will want his dinner.”

The train tooted for Agafya in March, and it toots here in August for Sofya.

Sofya Petrovna turned toward the embankment with a burning face. The engine slowly crawled by, then came the carriages. It was not the local train, as she had supposed, but a goods train. The trucks filed by against the background of the white church in a long string like the days of a man’s life, and it seemed as though it would never end.

Chekhov has taken one step, maybe two, outside of the story with that simile. I don’t believe Sofya or Ilyin are thinking about timelessness or the end of time. Chekhov is reminding us, though not them, because they would not or could not listen, that this is the most excruciating and probably exciting moment of their lives, and it, too, will end. Their love affair, which is their whole world at this moment, will disappear eventually, as will everything else. Chekhov may be the oldest twenty-six-year-old who ever lived.

How the rest of the story goes, you’ll have to read and see.

…But now that I’ve shown my hand that I believe Chekhov mischievously embodied his family’s hostess and his friend Maria Kiseleva in Sofya, I have to admit that there is no hint of any affair between her and Chekhov. Even Donald Rayfield, a biographer who in Michael C. Finke’s opinion sees liaisons everywhere, does not detect anything between them.7 But as we will see in letters between Chekhov and Kiseleva, there was repeated contentious discussion between them about the propriety of depicting sexuality in literature.

*

If you’re a teacher or editor, how dismayed should you be by your students’ or relatives’ grammatical or mechanical carelessness in writing? How offended are you or ought you to be about the faulty punctuation of a friend, parent, or spouse?

Chekhov, writes Ronald Hingley, “had been taught to read and write by his mother, whose own spelling and punctuation were rudimentary.”8 Chekhov did not mock his mother to others. Apparently among family he could tease her. His brother Mikhail remembers that “she never used punctuation and would start her letters with lines like: ‘Antosha on the shelf in the pantry,’ and Anton would poke gentle fun at her, replying, ‘After a long search, no Antosha was found on the pantry shelf.’ ”9

In “A Pink Stocking” (“Rozovyi Chulok”) published the same day as “A Misfortune” (August 16), a piggish husband, bored with the steady rain, idly glances at a letter that his wife has been writing and is mortified by the lack of punctuation and absence of thought:

“Well, this is beyond anything!” he mutters, as he finishes reading the letter and flings the sheets on the table, “It’s positively incredible!”

“What’s the matter?” asks Lidochka, flustered.

“What’s the matter! You’ve covered six pages, wasted a good two hours scribbling, and there’s nothing in it at all! If there were one tiny idea! One reads on and on, and one’s brain is as muddled as though one were deciphering the Chinese wriggles on tea chests! Ough!”

“Yes, that’s true, Vanya,…” says Lidochka, reddening. “I wrote it carelessly….”

“Queer sort of carelessness! In a careless letter there is some meaning and style—there is sense in it—while yours… excuse me, but I don’t know what to call it! It’s absolute twaddle! There are words and sentences, but not the slightest sense in them. Your whole letter is exactly like the conversation of two boys: ‘We had pancakes today! And we had a soldier come to see us!’ You say the same thing over and over again! You drag it out, repeat yourself…. The wretched ideas dance about like devils: There’s no making out where anything begins, where anything ends…. How can you write like that?”

“If I had been writing carefully,” Lidochka says in self-defense, “then there would not have been mistakes….”

“Oh, I’m not talking about mistakes! The awful grammatical howlers! There’s not a line that’s not a personal insult to grammar! No stops nor commas—and the spelling… brrr! ‘Earth’ has an a in it!! And the writing! It’s desperate! I’m not joking, Lida…. I’m surprised and appalled at your letter…. You mustn’t be angry, darling, but, really, I had no idea you were such a duffer at grammar…. And yet you belong to a cultivated, well-educated circle: you are the wife of a University man, and the daughter of a general! Tell me, did you ever go to school?”

There will be no moral to this comic story, except that it reminds me of how jerky we teachers can be with our students… and with family!

“You know, Lidochka, it really is awful!” says Somov, suddenly halting in front of her and looking into her face with horror. “You are a mother… do you understand? A mother! How can you teach your children if you know nothing yourself? You have a good brain, but what’s the use of it if you have never mastered the very rudiments of knowledge? There—never mind about knowledge… the children will get that at school, but, you know, you are very shaky on the moral side too! You sometimes use such language that it makes my ears tingle!”

Somov shrugs his shoulders again, wraps himself in the folds of his dressing-gown and continues his pacing…. He feels vexed and injured, and at the same time sorry for Lidochka, who does not protest, but merely blinks…. Both feel oppressed and miserable…. Absorbed in their woes, they do not notice how time is passing and the dinner hour is approaching.

The condescending Somov, having had his fill of carping, repents and decides he would rather his wife be as she is (she “who never pokes her nose into anything, does not understand so much, and never obtrudes her criticism”) than an educated woman. Perhaps only here do we detect the couple’s similarity to Chekhov’s parents. Pavel was a fussy scold, and Evgenia was less educated than he.

Chekhov’s lone surviving letter of the month was to Leykin, who had poked his nose into this very story. And just as in the story, there was terrible weather at Babkino: “rain, rain, rain… wind, cold and dark clouds.”10

Chekhov had, as usual, to apologize for his lack of contributions to Fragments:

I didn’t send a story for the last issue as, sincerely and honestly speaking, I didn’t have topics. I thought and thought and thought up nothing, and I didn’t want to send nonsense and it’s boring. So I got the word of Agafopod [Alexander], who was staying with us, that he was required to send you a story and communicate to you that I wouldn’t be sending anything to this issue.

He told Leykin about the family’s new rental in Moscow on Sadovaya and its price, 650 rubles a year. “If my sister’s to be believed, it’s good.” He asked Leykin to loan him seventy rubles so he could pay for the two months’ rent—and as usual Leykin immediately came through.

He concluded by kidding Leykin about how his editing resulted in an unintended tiny benefit for him, the writer:

You lengthened the end of “A Pink Stocking.” I am not opposed to receiving the extra 8 kopecks for the extra line, but in my opinion, “the man” didn’t go well at the end… The conversation goes only about the women… However, it’s all the same…

*

Chekhov kept trying to imagine marital situations. In “Martyrs” (“Stradal’tsy,” August 18), the wife is a hypochondriac who loves imagining herself dying:

Lizochka draws a mental picture of her own death, how her mother, her husband, her cousin Varya with her husband, her relations, the admirers of her “talent” press around her death bed, as she whispers her last farewell. All are weeping. Then when she is dead they dress her, interestingly pale and dark-haired, in a pink dress (it suits her) and lay her in a very expensive coffin on gold legs, full of flowers. There is a smell of incense, the candles splutter. Her husband never leaves the coffin, while the admirers of her talent cannot take their eyes off her, and say: “As though living! She is lovely in her coffin!” The whole town is talking of the life cut short so prematurely. But now they are carrying her to the church. The bearers are Ivan Petrovich, Adolf Ivanich, Varya’s husband, Nikolay Semyonich, and the black-eyed student who had taught her to drink lemon squash with brandy. It’s only a pity there’s no music playing. After the burial service comes the leave-taking. The church is full of sobs, they bring the lid with tassels, and… Lizochka is shut off from the light of day for ever, there is the sound of hammering nails. Knock, knock, knock.

Lizochka shudders and opens her eyes.11

Chekhov lets readers recognize that she is perfectly fine, at most suffering an upset stomach. The doting husband, however, is sincerely anxious. Patiently having been taken care of for two days and two nights, she awakens, ready for rehearsals, as good and prima donnish as ever, and he is finally able to return to work. Because this is a slight and comic story, it will be no surprise to readers that when he gets to the office, he discovers that he is sick; his boss sends him home.

Sometime in the midst of or just after writing “Martyrs,” Chekhov wrote to Bilibin, his chosen expert and confidant concerning marriage, for advice. All that is known of this letter is Bilibin’s reply at the end of the month.

I keep expecting more of Bilibin. I expect him to have been more appreciative of the amazing quality of the stories Chekhov was cooking up. Instead, there was the shrugging acknowledgment of them or, occasionally, as now, criticism—here of “A Misfortune”: “My wife asked me to ask you if you weren’t describing yourself in the perspective of Ilyin. […] She also says that it’s impossible to write belles-lettres from a ‘medical point of view.’ ” Bilibin felt that the story’s husband was “a caricature,” and that the protagonists “did not arouse sympathy.” Bilibin did not like the story’s “one-sided direction.” He cursed to the Devil all that “poetic side of love.” As for Chekhov’s request for advice about marriage, he seemed to discourage it: a married man, wrote Bilibin, accommodates the wife; an unmarried man accommodates literature.12 (The accommodating Bilibin would leave his wife for another woman a few years later.)

During the last week of August, Leykin wrote Chekhov to complain that Chekhov must not have read the lousy stories that Alexander had sent for the magazine: “It’s not possible to replace your presence in Fragments with them.”13

Chekhov seems to have submitted the story “Talent” at this time. Bilibin would inform Chekhov that it was too long to run in Fragments’ final August issue. And though it wasn’t published until September 6, it has relevance now concerning Chekhov’s contemplations about marriage. The protagonist, a young, lazy, dissipated painter, is leaving the dacha he has been renting all summer from a widow. Only he hasn’t paid her for some time, and the widow’s daughter, who worships him, regrets his departure. As if echoing Bilibin’s self-serving wisdom, Yegor tells her:

“I cannot marry.”

“Why not?” Katya asked softly.

“Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is out of the question. An artist must be free.”

“But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvich?”

“I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general…. Famous authors and painters have never married.”14

Yegor and his artist friends believe in their pending fame, and so infatuated Katya does, too.

His fancy pictured how he would become great. He could not imagine his future works but he could see distinctly how the papers would talk of him, how the shops would sell his photographs, with what envy his friends would look after him. He tried to picture himself in a magnificent drawing room surrounded by pretty and adoring women; but the picture was misty, vague, as he had never in his life seen a drawing room. The pretty and adoring women were not a success either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not even one respectable girl. People who know nothing about life usually picture life from books, but Yegor Savvich knew no books, either. He had tried to read Gogol, but had fallen asleep on the second page.

If Chekhov was mocking anybody besides himself and his friend Isaac Levitan, who would indeed experience fame, he was mocking his “talented” brother Nikolay:

To listen to them it would seem they had the future, fame, money, in their hands. And it never occurred to either of them that time was passing, that every day life was nearing its close, that they had lived at other people’s expense a great deal and nothing yet was accomplished; that they were all bound by the inexorable law by which of a hundred promising beginners only two or three rise to any position and all the others draw blanks in the lottery, perish playing the part of flesh for the cannon…. They were gay and happy, and looked the future boldly in the face!

Besides marriage, it seems that fame and celebrity were on Chekhov’s mind. Some little time preceding Chekhov’s exchange of correspondence with Bilibin, Chekhov, the most famous young literary star in Russia, wrote “The First-Class Passenger” (“Passazhir 1-go Klassa,” August 23). On the train, two men strike up a post-dinner conversation. One begins:

“… The question that is occupying my mind at the moment, sir, is exactly what is to be understood by the word fame or celebrity. What do you think? Pushkin called fame a bright patch on a ragged garment; we all understand it as Pushkin does—that is, more or less subjectively—but no one has yet given a clear, logical definition of the word…. I would give a good deal for such a definition!”

He goes on:

“[…] I must tell you, sir, that when I was younger I strove after celebrity with every fiber of my being. To be popular was my craze, so to speak. For the sake of it I studied, worked, sat up at night, neglected my meals. And I fancy, as far as I can judge without partiality, I had all the natural gifts for attaining it. To begin with, I am an engineer by profession. In the course of my life I have built in Russia some two dozen magnificent bridges, I have laid aqueducts for three towns; I have worked in Russia, in England, in Belgium…. Secondly, I am the author of several special treatises in my own line. […] I will not fatigue your attention by enumerating my works and my merits, I will only say that I have done far more than some celebrities. And yet here I am in my old age, I am getting ready for my coffin, so to say, and I am as celebrated as that black dog yonder running on the embankment.”

The engineer recounts that he thought he had been about to achieve fame many years before when he had finished a bridge in a provincial town, but at the opening day ceremonies, he was outshone by his untalented actress girlfriend. The story ends with the listener asking the engineer if he has heard of him—just as famous in his way—and the engineer hasn’t. They laugh.

Chekhov thought his own recent fame was undeserved. To his amazement, it would only get bigger and bigger.

PART THREE

At Home with Family and Fame

Leaving Babkino in early September and returning to Moscow was like returning to school after a summer vacation. Their previous apartment had been too noisy1 and so Chekhov’s sister Maria had found the family a house to rent on the then quiet Kudrinskaya-Sadovaya Street. Chekhov’s father Pavel, contributing to the family welfare, had tried to deliver the first two months’ rent (some of the money arriving as a loan from Leykin), but there was an obstacle set up by the landlord that delayed the family’s entry until the furniture arrived.

Drawing by Mikhail Chekhov of the house at the time.

Chekhov probably saw the new lodgings for the first time on September 7. He would note that the neatly stacked red house “looks like a chest of drawers.”2 Fortunately, this Sadovaya “Garden Ring” house remains standing on a busy, noisy boulevard across the street from the Moscow Zoo. We visitors can enter the present-day house-museum on the ground floor and walk through Chekhov’s study and bedroom. Bookcases line the study’s walls. He saw patients there and wrote. When and where Chekhov did his reading is hard to tell, because nobody describes him reading and Chekhov’s recorded remarks on his prodigious reading are scarce.3 We know he pored over his medical books and kept up with and would help support medical journals. He seems to have read every literary author of consequence and read enough to be familiar with those who weren’t of consequence, and he only occasionally made fun of young men, usually men like Nikolay and his younger brothers, who hadn’t read the classics. We also know he had stamina and in later years could read, for example, Resurrection, an 1899 novel by Tolstoy, in one sitting. “On the foundation of the volumes he had inherited from his dead friend Popudoglo,” writes the biographer Ernest Simmons, “he had begun to build a substantial library. He haunted the secondhand bookshops and his purchases were extremely varied—mostly Russian belles-lettres, but also some foreign works, sets of magazines, and quantities of travel books, memoirs, collections of letters, and reference works. For the most part it was a working library, and the well-thumbed appearance of some of the volumes testified to their frequent use by Chekhov in his writing.”4

The ground floor also had the kitchen and bedrooms for the cook and a maid (these aren’t part of the museum tour). The Chekhovs were scraping by, regularly out of money, but they were middle-class now and had servants.

The spiral staircase leading to the second floor, where his sister and parents had bedrooms, is still visible in the museum, but I seem to remember climbing enclosed stairs to the second-floor exhibits. In Chekhov’s time, a wolf-skin, a gift to the family from someone, as the Chekhovs do not seem to have been wolf-hunters, hung halfway up the spiral stairs. There was a “dining room, the drawing room and a spare room with a lantern. The drawing room had a piano, an aquarium and a large unfinished painting by Nikolay of a sempstress asleep over her work at daybreak.”5

His younger brother Mikhail remembered: “Anton coughed particularly violently during the period that we lived on Kudrinskaya-Sadovaya from the fall of 1886 to the spring of 1890. […] My responsibility before bed was to light the lamp in Anton’s bedroom because he often woke up and did not like to be in the dark. Only a thin partition separated our rooms, and we used to talk through it whenever we were unable to sleep in the middle of the night. It was through that wall that I was able to hear how bad his cough was.”6

I appreciate Mikhail reminding us about his brother’s health. Chekhov was so active and efficient and had an extraordinary capacity for work, but this was despite the tuberculosis that continually weakened him. I wonder, though, if Mikhail did not overestimate his brother’s pleasure in the constant social activities:

Anton could not be alone during that period, and as I mentioned before, our house was always filled with young people playing the piano, joking, and laughing upstairs. He would write at his desk downstairs, energized by the noise. He always shared our fun and thrived on the excitement.7

There is some evidence in Chekhov’s letters this coming year that a little more peace and quiet would have been appreciated.

September 1886

…though they hadn’t met, OF COURSE Chekhov wrote under his influence, was responding to Tolstoy in everything he wrote. I mean, to be a writer in the late 1880s meant, no exaggeration: “This is a response to Tolstoy.”

—Michael A. Denner, editor, Tolstoy Studies Journal1

The eight short stories Chekhov published this September are not, for the most part, among his best, except for one terribly grim tale published September 8, “The Dependents.” I puzzled over its Russian title: Nakhlebniki. There in the middle of it, apparently its root, is khleb, bread. “Dependents” seems a neutral word, but the agitated and painful story feels not at all neutral. The best definition for nakhlebniki I found that reflects the story is “Freeloaders.”

Chekhov adored animals and agonized when he witnessed cruelty. He understood harsh words as originating in frustration and despair. Some of Chekhov’s friends and relatives deemed some of his stories from these years as verging on Tolstoyan, which none of them ever suggested was a compliment. I would deem this story Tolstoyan, but only descriptively, not negatively, and as a way to distinguish the master from his literary pupil.

An impoverished old man of seventy awakens and says his prayers and sweeps up and sets the samovar to boil. It becomes ready:

“Oh, you’ve started humming!” grumbled Zotov. “Hum away then, and bad luck to you!”

At that point the old man appropriately recalled that, in the preceding night, he had dreamed of a stove, and to dream of a stove is a sign of sorrow.

Dreams and omens were the only things left that could rouse him to reflection; and on this occasion he plunged with a special zest into the considerations of the questions: What the samovar was humming for? and what sorrow was foretold by the stove? The dream seemed to come true from the first. Zotov rinsed out his teapot and was about to make his tea, when he found there was not one teaspoonful left in the box.2

Zotov is a homeowner, an artisan, not (he grumbles to himself) a peasant for whom such an impoverished existence might be more acceptable.

He curses his affectionate, scrawny dog Lyska, and surveys his other (indeed) dependent, the bony unnamed horse as she emerges from her decrepit shed. Zotov is a master of sarcasm:

“Plague take you,” Zotov went on. “Shall I ever see the last of you, you jail-bird Pharaohs!… I wager you want your breakfast!” he jeered, twisting his angry face into a contemptuous smile. “By all means, this minute! A priceless steed like you must have your fill of the best oats! Pray begin! This minute! And I have something to give to the magnificent, valuable dog! If a precious dog like you does not care for bread, you can have meat.”

Chekhov tells us nothing to explain Zotov’s tone. We wait dumbly, as curious as Zotov’s animals. And now the outburst comes that clarifies almost everything:

“I am not obliged to feed you, you loafers! I am not some millionaire for you to eat me out of house and home! I have nothing to eat myself, you cursed carcasses, the cholera take you! I get no pleasure or profit out of you; nothing but trouble and ruin. Why don’t you give up the ghost? Are you such personages that even death won’t take you? You can live, damn you! but I don’t want to feed you! I have had enough of you! I don’t want to!”

To our surprise and their perplexity, he orders them out of his yard. They don’t go far:

When he had driven out his dependents he felt calmer, and began sweeping the yard. From time to time he peeped out into the street: the horse and the dog were standing like posts by the fence, looking dejectedly toward the gate.

“Try how you can do without me,” muttered the old man, feeling as though a weight of anger were being lifted from his heart. “Let somebody else look after you now! I am stingy and ill-tempered…. It’s nasty living with me, so you try living with other people…. Yes….”

But why should his anger dissipate? What are we learning about psychology here?

The freeloaders have accused him of being difficult! Of depriving them!

Here is where I, raised on the milk of Tolstoy’s psychology, see a distinction between Tolstoy and Chekhov. Tolstoy would have gone softer on the protagonist; Zotov would not have been so harsh. But I think Chekhov takes us into a realm of psychology that Tolstoy perhaps could not. Tolstoy’s own supernatural sympathy toward animals would have bent his resolve. Chekhov, however, maintains Zotov’s backbone and allows the animals to remain confused.

Zotov curses them again but allows their return to his yard before he goes off to visit a friend in his friend’s “little general shop,” the sort of shop Chekhov’s father had run. They talk about the weather and share his friend’s tea. But the awkwardness of asking for loans!… How well Chekhov knew this. Within a week of publishing this story and having moved into his new Moscow digs, he would have to pawn his gold watch to pay off a debt. Keeping his dependents, the Chekhov family, financially stable was a constant in these years.

But what else could Chekhov do? Who else could support his family?

“I have a favor to ask of you, Mark Ivanich,” he began, after the sixth glass, drumming on the counter with his fingers. “If you would just be so kind as to give me a gallon of oats again today….”

From behind the big tea-chest behind which Mark Ivanich was sitting came the sound of a deep sigh.

“Do be so good,” Zotov went on; “never mind tea—don’t give it me today, but let me have some oats…. I am ashamed to ask you, I have wearied you with my poverty, but the horse is hungry.”

Let’s all of us give a cheer for the continually mocked Leykin. Whenever Chekhov was as desperate as poor Zotov, Leykin advanced him rubles.

“I can give it you,” sighed the friend—“why not? But why the devil do you keep those carcasses?—tfoo!—Tell me that, please. It would be all right if it were a useful horse, but—tfoo!—one is ashamed to look at it…. And the dog’s nothing but a skeleton! Why the devil do you keep them?”

“What am I to do with them?”

“You know. Take them to Ignat the slaughterer—that is all there is to do. They ought to have been there long ago. It’s the proper place for them.”

“To be sure, that is so!… I dare say!…”

“You live like a beggar and keep animals,” the friend went on. “I don’t grudge the oats…. God bless you. But as to the future, brother… I can’t afford to give regularly every day! There is no end to your poverty! One gives and gives, and one doesn’t know when there will be an end to it all.”

Chekhov would eventually see “an end” to his family’s tight finances. They weren’t this poor. We don’t want our favorite artists to be desperate for money and have to crank out stories or paintings to pay the rent, but so it happens. Chekhov’s older brothers had set out on their independent lives only to have to retreat again and again to their family, which was led in spirit and money-making by Chekhov.

Mark Ivanich points out that Zotov, if he’s going to persist living himself, is going to have to move somewhere. Zotov has a distant almost-relative who is bound to inherit his property and he says he can go to her. They decide he should leave that very day:

“I’ll go at once! When I get there, I shall say: Take my house, but keep me and treat me with respect. It’s your duty! If you don’t care to, then there is neither my house, nor my blessing for you! Goodbye, Ivanich!”

And, the gate of his yard unfastened, he sets out, his belongings in hand, determined to walk the “eight or nine miles” to her.

He had not gone a mile into the country when he heard steps behind him. He looked around and angrily clasped his hands. The horse and Lyska, with their heads drooping and their tails between their legs, were quietly walking after him.

“Go back!” he waved to them.

They stopped, looked at one another, looked at him. He went on, they followed him. Then he stopped and began ruminating. It was impossible to go to his great-niece Glasha, whom he hardly knew, with these creatures; he did not want to go back and shut them up, and, indeed, he could not shut them up, because the gate was no use.

“To die of hunger in the shed,” thought Zotov. “Hadn’t I really better take them to Ignat?”

If you have a weak spot for animals, do not read the concluding paragraphs of “The Dependents.”

If Chekhov’s master Tolstoy had written the story, the end would not be as devastating and tearful or maybe as sublime.

*

The other stories he published this month?

The most significant and least trivial is “A Trivial Incident” (“Pustoy Sluchay,” September 20), in which Chekhov again wrestles with the conflicting feelings about getting married. The male narrator is out hunting with an impoverished hereditary “prince,” of which sort of princes there were many, especially in Russian literature.

A watchman tells them they are forbidden to shoot in this particular forest. He mentions the woman landowner’s name. The prince, surprised, excuses himself to the narrator:

“I used to know her at one time, but… it’s rather awkward for me to go to her. Besides, I am in shabby clothes…. You go, you don’t know her…. It’s more suitable for you to go.”

The prince had been, possibly, according to the gossip that the narrator has heard, engaged or nearly so to her.

The narrator is fascinated by this humble and humbled man: “Apparently he was in that mood of irritation and sadness when women weep quietly for no reason, and men feel a craving to complain of themselves, of life, of God….”

Though deeply in debt (as Chekhov feared becoming), the prince held onto his last shred of honesty:

“I tell you frankly I have had the chance once in my life of getting rich if I had told a lie, a lie to myself and one woman… and one other person whom I know would have forgiven me for lying; I should have put into my pocket a million. But I could not. I hadn’t the pluck!”

The narrator goes to this very woman’s house to ask for her permission to hunt, which she refuses, despite the narrator’s dropping the prince’s name. She even remarks, reflecting Chekhov’s own thinking about hunting at the time: “ ‘And, besides, what pleasure is there in shooting birds? What’s it for? Are they in your way?’ ”

The narrator, as is common in Chekhov’s stories, is for the most part inconspicuous, an observer rather than a protagonist. When he notices that she is distracted by the sight of the prince outside talking to her groundskeeper, he reflects on Chekhov’s favorite grievance of these years:

I looked at her and at the prince who could not tell a lie once in his life, and I felt angry and bitter against truth and falsehood, which play such an elemental part in the personal happiness of men.

Why do our social lives depend on lies?

On second thought she sends after the narrator to grant them permission.

On second thought Chekhov seems to have resolved, as straitened as his finances were, to give marriage with Dunya Efros a pass.

A piece that I did not number among his “stories” is a micro-play published later the same week as he published “A Trivial Incident”; it’s titled “Drama” (“Drama,” September 25):

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Pappy, having 11 unmarried daughters.

Young Man.

Coat-tails.

Young man (waving his hand and saying: “I don’t care! Two deaths won’t happen, but one will!” and goes into the study to Pappy). Ivan Ivanych! Let me ask for the hand of your youngest daughter Varvara!

Pappy (lowering his eyes and acting coy). I’m very pleased, but… she’s still so young… so inexperienced… As to that… you want to deprive me of… my peace… (tears increase) the support of my old age.

Young man (quickly). In that case… I don’t dare insist… (Bows and wants to leave.)

Pappy (reaching out and grabbing him by the coat-tails). Stop! I’m glad! Happy! My benefactor!

Coat-tails. (mournfully) Trrrr… 3

No one from the Efros family tried to catch Chekhov by the coat-tails.

*

Chekhov did not go for impressive or enticing titles. He preferred the undersell. The last story of the month was “A Trifle from Life” (“Zhiteyskaya Meloch’,” September 29) and is truly not a major work. (You’re forgiven if you mix up its title with “A Trivial Incident,” published all of nine days before.) I will summarize it only to give evidence of Chekhov’s continued dismay about lying.

A self-satisfied bachelor, an Anna Karenina–style Vronsky-lite, is having an affair with a woman who has an eight-year-old. While the bachelor awaits the return of the woman, he chats with the boy, who tells him about his life in the house, about secretly seeing his father, who loves him; the bachelor-lover, having sworn to the boy complete confidence in that secret, instead rats him out. Chekhov describes the trusting boy’s reaction: “Alyosha sat down in the corner and told [his sister] Sonia with horror how he had been deceived. He was trembling, stammering, and crying. It was the first time in his life that he had been brought into such coarse contact with lying; till then he had not known that there are in the world, besides sweet pears, pies, and expensive watches, a great many things for which the language of children has no expression.”4

*

Chekhov continually veered from annoyance to guilt in his relationship with Leykin. He had moved on in his literary career, though Leykin made him feel he still owed contributions to Fragments. Besides Leykin, though, there don’t seem to have been other friends from whom he could expect loans. As long as Chekhov needed emergency short-term loans, he would have to contribute pieces.

His September 20 letter to Leykin was newsy, friendly, and a little anxious. Chekhov liked the family’s new place after the commotion of setting it up. On the other hand, now he was out of money; he had pawned his watch and gold coins: “What a terribly stupid situation!” he exclaimed. He pointedly didn’t ask Leykin for another loan. He wrote that he was mostly sitting at home, recovering from having treated cholera patients, and occasionally going to watch plays at the theater, where he had free tickets. Making an effort to be chatty, he asked after Leykin’s getaway house and family and pets, and he told Leykin he was awaiting a letter from him.5

He may have been surprised by Leykin’s pertinent next letter on September 27: “Why are you always sick? […] Doctor, heal thyself.”6 Leykin would not have twitted his writer had he known he had tuberculosis.

Chekhov answered on September 30, complaining about nonpayment from the Petersburg Gazette, and asking for Leykin’s intervention both for the payments and for a pay raise: “Put in a good word about the raise, and you’ll agree that it’s insulting in old age to write for 7 kopecks!” Whether it was Leykin’s persuasive word or not, Chekhov’s rate per line at the Gazette went up to 10 kopecks a line, and Leykin agreed to give him another 15 rubles per month from Fragments.7 He was famous indeed but barely managing the family’s rent and expenses. “Nikolay yesterday and for the past few days was seriously and dangerously ill,” he wrote. “An unexpected amount of bleeding vomit appeared, which just barely stopped. He’s thin in the manner of typhus… It’s terrible how much trouble I’ve experienced these days, and there’s still no money…” He imagined or feared that he would give up writing to go work as a government doctor: “It’s probable all the music will end, I spitting, waving my hand, and running away to the district for service.” As for his own illnesses, about which Leykin had teased him: “My health is better. It’s necessary to radically change my life, but it’s not easy. I have 3 sins on my conscience that give me no peace: 1) I smoke, 2) I sometimes drink and 3) I don’t know languages.”

On this date, he had just finished or was just about to finish one of his most extraordinary stories about family life, “Difficult People.”

*

Late this September, Chekhov continued his literary mentorship of Maria Kiseleva, but now through long letters. As always with women he corresponded with, Chekhov was both teasing and direct.8

On September 21, he wrote to Kiseleva about his “dreary” writer’s life: “In order to have the right to be by myself in my room, and not with guests, I hurried off to sit over my writing.”9 He mocked his fame: “It is not much fun to be a great writer. To begin with, it’s a dreary life. Work from morning till night and not much to show for it. Money is as scarce as cats’ tears.”10 He said, explaining his financial woes, that he wasn’t getting paid for some of his literary contributions until October.

I don’t know how it is with Zola and Shchedrin, but in my flat it is cold and smoky…. They give me cigarettes, as before, on holidays only. Impossible cigarettes! Hard, damp, sausage-like. Before I begin to smoke I light the lamp, dry the cigarette over it, and only then I begin on it; the lamp smokes, the cigarette splutters and turns brown, I burn my fingers… it is enough to make one shoot oneself!

Unlike for most of his other correspondents, who were not trying to train themselves to be writers, he explained the range of work he was doing: “I’m writing a play for Korsh (hm!), a story for Russian Thought, stories for N Times, Peterb Gaz, Fragments, Alarm Clock and other organs. I write a lot and for a long time, but I rush like a madman: I start one thing without finishing another… I still haven’t allowed my doctor’s sign to be put up, but I still have to treat them! Brrr… I’m afraid of typhus!”11

He wasn’t advertising for more patients; he had enough unpaid medical work as it was.

I am more or less ill, and am gradually turning into a dried dragon-fly. […]

I go about as festive as though it were my birthday, but to judge from the critical glances of the lady cashier at The Alarm Clock, I am not dressed in the height of fashion, and my clothes are not brand-new. I go in buses, not in cabs.

But being a writer has its good points. In the first place, my book, I hear, is going rather well; secondly, in October I shall have money; thirdly, I am beginning to reap laurels: at the refreshment bars people point at me with their fingers, they pay me little attentions and treat me to sandwiches. Korsh caught me in his theater and straight away presented me with a free pass. […] My medical colleagues sigh when they meet me, begin to talk of literature and assure me that they are sick of medicine. And so on….12

[…] To your question given to my sister: Did I marry? I answer no, I’m proud of that. I’m superior to marriage!13

He was laughing and joking it off, all those weeks of real indecision about marrying Efros. He went on, friendly, personal, lively:

Now about our mutual acquaintances… Mom and Dad are alive and well. Alexander lives in Moscow. Kokosha [Nikolay] is there where he was before Babkino. Ivan prospers at the school. Ma-Pa [Chekhov’s nickname for his sister, Maria Pavlovna] sees the long-nosed Efros […]

His sister did indeed see Efros, but how and when he and Efros saw each other this fall is unknown, except for one particular nasty occasion that we’ll get to at the end of October. He added more random news about acquaintances and, watching his hand, his pen, and his sheet of paper, observed: “The end of the letter is approaching.” Having concluded with greetings to Kiseleva’s family and a glance toward next year at Babkino, we find the letter, still under his hand, not yet over:

Scarcely had I finished this letter than the bell rang and… I saw the genius Levitan. Zhul cap, French outfit, elegant look… He went two times to Aida, once to Rusalka, ordered frames, almost sold some pictures… He says that it’s misery, misery and misery…

“God knows what I would give to spend only 2 days at Babkino!” he cries, probably forgetting how he was moaning in the last days there.

Chekhov felt free in his correspondence with Kiseleva, and though at least a dozen years younger than she, he moved into the role she had asked of him, to help her develop as a writer. By the early 1890s, there was “a whole horde of young literary hopefuls who constantly sent Chekhov their efforts for advice and approval.”14 For the next year Kiseleva and then a pair of young male humor writers would be his unofficial students. Kiseleva, though, could sometimes seem like one of those students who thinks she is smarter than her teacher.

On September 29, Chekhov wrote his first literary advice letter to her.15 He tried to tread lightly, praising one of her stories: “I can say, in general and roughly speaking, that from a literary point of view it is stylishly written, lively, and succinct.”16 But as he prepared at his desk for a serious discussion of her story, he found himself drawn in to make a list of what was wrong and what she needed to do:

Of course, there is no need to assure you that I’m very glad to be your literary-agent, retailer, and guide. This duty flatters my vanity and fulfilling it will be as easy as carrying a pail for you when you return from fishing. If you have to know my conditions, take these:

1) Write as much as possible! Write, write, write… until your fingers are broken. (The main thing in life—penmanship!) Write more, having in view not so much the intelligent development of the big parts as much as the details, so that at first a fair half of your skits, due to your being unaccustomed to the “small press,” will be rejected. As for receiving rejections, I am not going to deceive you, be hypocritical or lie—I give you my word. But don’t let the rejections bother you. Even if half will receive rejections, then the work will be more profitable than the Bohemian’s in Children’s Recreation. But as for self-esteem… I don’t know about you, but I’ve been used to it a long time.

2) Write on various themes, funny and tearful, good and bad. Do stories, sketches, jokes, witticisms, puns, and so on and so forth.

3) Adaptations from foreign work—the thing is fully legal, but only in the case if your sins against the 8th Commandment don’t poke you in your eyes… (For “Galoshes” you’re going to Hell after the 22nd of January!) Flee from popular subjects. As stupid as our editors are, exposing their ignorance of Parisian literature, especially Maupassant’s, is not easy work.

4) Write in one sitting, with full belief in your pen. Honestly, I’m not speaking hypocritically: eight-tenths of the writers of the “small press” in comparison with you are shoemakers and losers.

5) Brevity is recognized in the small press as the first virtue. The best measure would be to work on stationery (the same as that which I’m writing on). As soon as you get 8–10 pages, like so—stop! And the stationery is easier to send… Those are all my conditions.

He told her he was treating Nikolay—“He’s seriously sick (stomach bleeds, tormenting him to the Devil)”—and his thoughts were straying toward an ultimate conclusion:

When I’m being serious, it seems to me that people expressing revulsion from death are not being logical. As much as I understand the order of things, life is made up only of terrors, squabbling, and stupidities, all mixed up and in alternation… 17

Even as we remind ourselves of his and Nikolay’s tuberculosis, this was a big dose of advice and news for his friend Kiseleva. She would not have assumed the Chekhov brothers had tuberculosis, but she and his other friends would have seen evidence of it.

As for Chekhov’s literary advice, what she had wanted (what most of us writers want, usually) was apparently only admiration.18 The return letter came from her husband Aleksei rather than from her. Kiselev told Chekhov he agreed with Chekhov’s suggestions and that his wife would try to follow his guidance.

October 1886

…in short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because—because—I don’t know why! At all events, remember that your failings are considered flaws only by myself (altogether unimportant flaws), and I am very often mistaken. Perhaps you are right and not I…. It happens that I have been mistaken quite often, and I have held other opinions than those I have just expressed. On occasion my criticism has proved worthless.

—To a fellow writer1

Chekhov began the month still under the stress of insufficient funds. But his first story of October let loose feelings and insights never before so painfully dramatized by him about family life; and then his last story of the month closed down with a slam any possibility of marriage with Dunya Efros.

“Difficult People” (“Tyajhelye Lyudi”), published October 7, is most definitely not about Chekhov’s family—or so he seemed to want to assert. If he had imagined we would or could suspect it was a depiction of his own family, he wouldn’t have written it or published it. Despite superficial discrepancies between the fictional family and Chekhov’s, it is obvious he knew difficult families from the inside out.

“Difficult” is the right word, but the word in Russian, tyazhelye, has the connotation of weight, heaviness. “Burdensome People” might be more accurate, but “Difficult” is good enough.

Chekhov right away distinguishes the father from his own father, as if to insist to family and friends, “This is NOT our family.” The father is a landowner, seemingly from the steppe near Taganrog, and he is not, as Pavel Chekhov was, a bankrupted Taganrog merchant.

There are only two children who figure in the story, and the oldest is the daughter. There are three younger children, but they have no role to play except as a cowering chorus of witnesses.

In small contrast, in Chekhov’s family there were six children, the lone girl being the second youngest.

In the story, the son Pyotr expects money from his father to support him at the university, because he knows his father can afford it; he knows his father very well, however, and how difficult he is going to be about the money anyway.

Chekhov figured out early on, as a teenager, that if he wanted money, he had to go earn his own. He knew never to rely on Pavel.

The memoir about Anton by Mikhail Chekhov, the fifth son and last child, is very good and interesting, but he is discreet about family troubles.

The characters in Chekhov’s stories usually do not have siblings, or the stories don’t mention them. Chekhov continually simplified his stories’ situations and sharply limited the number of characters. “You’ve got to start right off with the merchant’s daughter and then concentrate entirely on her,” Chekhov would later write to a budding writer who had sent him her stories. “Throw out Verochka, throw out the Greek girls, throw them all out except the doctor and the merchant’s offspring.”2 We hardly notice the younger siblings in “Difficult People.”

As “Difficult People” opens, the father is not in a good mood. Yevgraf Ivanovich Shiryaev has a “small farm” of 300 acres, which sounds like a lot, but all farmers are vulnerable to Nature’s caprices:

“What weather!” he said. “It’s not weather, but a curse laid upon us. It’s raining again!”3

No one answers him, and he does not seem to expect anyone to do so.

He grumbled on, while his family sat waiting at table for him to have finished washing his hands before beginning dinner. Fedosya Semyonovna, his wife, his son Pyotr, a student, his eldest daughter Varvara, and three small boys, had been sitting waiting a long time. The boys—Kolka, Vanka, and Arhipka—grubby, snub-nosed little fellows with chubby faces and tousled hair that wanted cutting, moved their chairs impatiently, while their elders sat without stirring, and apparently did not care whether they ate their dinner or waited….

Nothing begins until Father is ready. He enjoys his power, the way a priest, professor, or tsar might enjoy his power to keep his subjects waiting:

As though trying their patience, Shiryaev deliberately dried his hands, deliberately said his prayer, and sat down to the table without hurrying himself. Cabbage-soup was served immediately. The sound of carpenters’ axes (Shiryaev was having a new barn built) and the laughter of Fomka, their laborer, teasing the turkey, floated in from the courtyard.

They’re not poor. Shiryaev complains about the weather, but he has the confidence of someone who sees that he has made a success of his life. (We cannot see Pavel Chekhov sharing such a feeling, though Pavel’s greatest success was being the father of Anton, who was writing this story; Anton could have been his pride and joy, though we don’t know that Pavel ever did puff with pride over him. Rather, several years later Pavel puffed with pride over who he himself was: “I am the father of famous children. I must in no way be embarrassed or humble myself before anyone.”)4

Chekhov introduces us to the protagonist, Pyotr. He is “round-shouldered” and wears glasses. Perhaps the round shoulders suggest he is not a farmer or likely to become one. (Chekhov’s closest brother Nikolay wore glasses and was slight of build compared to Anton.)

Pyotr and his mother have resolved on taking action about something: he “kept exchanging glances with his mother as he ate his dinner.” Pyotr loses heart, re-resolves, and at the end of dinner “cleared his throat resolutely” and said:

“I ought to go tonight by the evening train. I ought to have gone before; I have missed a fortnight as it is. The lectures begin on the first of September.”

As a student he has stayed at home longer than he meant to or expected to. What’s the big deal? Why has he had to work up his courage to make this announcement?

“Well, go,” Shiryaev assented; “why are you lingering on here? Pack up and go, and good luck to you.”

A minute passed in silence.

We know now that Shiryaev is not thinking sentimentally about this. He has already cut himself off from his son. His son has his life, he has his. He either pretends not to understand what the announcement means and what his son needs, or it doesn’t occur to him.

“He must have money for the journey, Yevgraf Ivanovich,” the mother observed in a low voice.

“Money? To be sure, you can’t go without money. Take it at once, since you need it. You could have had it long ago!”

So they’re at fault already, Shiryaev asserts, for not having asked for it. Why hadn’t they just asked? Why are they making a big deal of it?

But we know something is up. We feel the tension. Nothing is easy with Shiryaev. Son and mother have prepped for this conversation. Shiryaev has not prepared. He can act on a whim, like a king on his throne. He is ready to listen and grant, or not grant, requests.

The student heaved a faint sigh and looked with relief at his mother. Deliberately Shiryaev took a pocket-book out of his coat-pocket and put on his spectacles.

“How much do you want?” he asked.

“The fare to Moscow is eleven rubles forty-two kopecks….”

“Ah, money, money!” sighed the father. (He always sighed when he saw money, even when he was receiving it.) “Here are twelve rubles for you. You will have change out of that which will be of use to you on the journey.”

“Thank you.”

After waiting a little, the student said:

“I did not get lessons quite at first last year. I don’t know how it will be this year; most likely it will take me a little time to find work. I ought to ask you for fifteen rubles for my lodging and dinner.”

Shiryaev thought a little and heaved a sigh.