Chekhov Becomes Chekhov

Shiryaev is thinking or simply going into his natural mode as a farmer and businessman. He does not appreciate how difficult his son finds it to talk to him about this.

“You will have to make ten do,” he said. “Here, take it.”

The student thanked him. He ought to have asked him for something more, for clothes, for lecture fees, for books, but after an intent look at his father he decided not to pester him further.

How little we still know of Chekhov’s mother. But maybe we know something of Evgenia Chekhova from the narrator’s statement: “The mother, lacking in diplomacy and prudence, like all mothers, could not restrain herself […]” Chekhov was not interested in the “courage” of soldiers; here he shows us instead the reckless courage of mothers. She says:

“You ought to give him another six rubles, Yevgraf Ivanovich, for a pair of boots. Why, just see, how can he go to Moscow in such wrecks?”

“Let him take my old ones; they are still quite good.”

“He must have trousers, anyway; he is a disgrace to look at.”

It’s wonderful to Shiryaev that he immediately has a solution to the boot problem. But encountering his wife’s persistence, he realizes that they have conspired and are going to push for more than he has been willing to grant.

And immediately after that a storm-signal showed itself, at the sight of which all the family trembled.

In Russian, the “storm-signal” reads as “storm-petrel,” a storm bird—identified by sailors immediately preceding a storm.

This means that the family is used to this. Maybe all families recognize such indications. Shiryaev’s family has learned to cover their heads—everyone except, somehow, Shiryaev’s wife!

Shiryaev’s short, fat neck turned suddenly red as a beetroot. The color mounted slowly to his ears, from his ears to his temples, and by degrees suffused his whole face. Yevgraf Ivanovich shifted in his chair and unbuttoned his shirt-collar to save himself from choking. He was evidently struggling with the feeling that was mastering him. A deathlike silence followed. The children held their breath.

Fedosya Semyonovna, as though she did not grasp what was happening to her husband, went on:

“He is not a little boy now, you know; he is ashamed to go about without clothes.”

He knows he is getting the full truth from his wife, the whole story, that his son, this round-shouldered, bespectacled boy bound for a student’s life in Moscow, feels shortchanged by his carefully generous father!

Shiryaev suddenly jumped up, and with all his might flung down his fat pocket-book in the middle of the table, so that a hunk of bread flew off a plate. A revolting expression of anger, resentment, avarice—all mixed together—flamed on his face.

“Take everything!” he shouted in an unnatural voice; “plunder me! Take it all! Strangle me!”

Here is where Chekhov has most definitely become personal, though the adjective “revolting” is the only judgment he (or his narrator) has so far made. We see into the core of the father’s feelings.

He jumped up from the table, clutched at his head, and ran staggering about the room.

“Strip me to the last thread!” he shouted in a shrill voice. “Squeeze out the last drop! Rob me! Wring my neck!”

We can read Chekhov and not notice ourselves exposed on the page. (And by whom am I exposed? By the fuming Shiryaev, unfortunately.) And how is Chekhov himself exposed? Through the pain! He saw this sort of family encounter and knew its damage to everyone in the household.

There is also sympathy somewhere in this story for Shiryaev. It is not in this scene here. We with the children avert our eyes. We wait him out.

But Pyotr, for the first time in his life, cannot let it go:

The student flushed and dropped his eyes. He could not go on eating. Fedosya Semyonovna, who had not after twenty-five years grown used to her husband’s difficult character, shrank into herself and muttered something in self-defense. An expression of amazement and dull terror came into her wasted and birdlike face, which at all times looked dull and scared. The little boys and the elder daughter Varvara, a girl in her teens, with a pale ugly face, laid down their spoons and sat mute.

Poor Varvara! How will she ever escape this house?

Shiryaev, growing more and more ferocious, uttering words each more terrible than the one before, dashed up to the table and began shaking the notes out of his pocket-book.

Shiryaev only makes a bad situation worse.

“Take them!” he muttered, shaking all over. “You’ve eaten and drunk your fill, so here’s money for you too! I need nothing! Order yourself new boots and uniforms!”

The student turned pale and got up.

“Listen, papa,” he began, gasping for breath. “I… I beg you to end this, for…”

“Hold your tongue!” the father shouted at him, and so loudly that the spectacles fell off his nose; “hold your tongue!”

“I used… I used to be able to put up with such scenes, but… but now I have got out of the way of it. Do you understand? I have got out of the way of it!”

“Hold your tongue!” cried the father, and he stamped with his feet. “You must listen to what I say! I shall say what I like, and you hold your tongue. At your age I was earning my living, while you… Do you know what you cost me, you scoundrel? I’ll turn you out! Wastrel!”

How many teenaged children could dodge a parent’s accusation of financial dependence?… Well, Chekhov, for one.

There were lines that Chekhov could not bear seeing crossed. Papa has crossed the line and created agony all around. In this family dynamic, the explosions occur in an enclosed space that doesn’t seem to allow for escape or end.

“Yevgraf Ivanovich,” muttered Fedosya Semyonovna, moving her fingers nervously; “you know he… you know Petya…!”

“Hold your tongue!” Shiryaev shouted out to her, and tears actually came into his eyes from anger. “It is you who have spoilt them—you! It’s all your fault! He has no respect for us, does not say his prayers, and earns nothing! I am only one against the ten of you! I’ll turn you out of the house!”

The daughter Varvara gazed fixedly at her mother with her mouth open, moved her vacant-looking eyes to the window, turned pale, and, uttering a loud shriek, fell back in her chair. The father, with a curse and a wave of the hand, ran out into the yard.

This was how domestic scenes usually ended at the Shiryaevs’.

There are patterns in the family, and this is one of them: Father blows up and stalks out. It’s a bad but predictable outcome. Bad as that is, however, it can become worse, because Pyotr is his father’s son:

But on this occasion, unfortunately, Pyotr the student was carried away by overmastering anger. He was just as hasty and ill-tempered as his father and his grandfather the priest, who used to beat his parishioners about the head with a stick. Pale and clenching his fists, he went up to his mother and shouted in the very highest tenor note his voice could reach:

“These reproaches are loathsome! sickening to me! I want nothing from you! Nothing! I would rather die of hunger than eat another mouthful at your expense! Take your nasty money back! Take it!”

The mother huddled against the wall and waved her hands, as though it were not her son, but some phantom before her. “What have I done?” she wailed. “What?”

What the hell! The fighters blame the peacemaker. Every Adam must have his Eve to take the blame.

If Pyotr is the hero of the story, we’re stuck with him. But Chekhov’s stories don’t usually have conventional heroes or villains. Good people are prickly, bad people are charming, weak people are resilient, strong people are brittle.

Pyotr has no plan except to start walking out onto the steppe from the house. This is the first time we know the geography of the farm. The primary location has been a very particular “at home.” Pyotr’s escape is into the countryside. The fields are wet from the rain. As he walks through the familiar landscape, he imagines, as it occurs to all of us idiots who have ever stormed out of our houses, that he could just keep walking away forever:

Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to walk to Moscow on foot; to walk just as he was, with holes in his boots, without a cap, and without a farthing of money. When he had gone eighty miles his father, frightened and aghast, would overtake him, would begin begging him to turn back or take the money, but he would not even look at him, but would go on and on…. Bare forests would be followed by desolate fields, fields by forests again; soon the earth would be white with the first snow, and the streams would be coated with ice…. Somewhere near Kursk or near Serpuhovo, exhausted and dying of hunger, he would sink down and die. His corpse would be found, and there would be a paragraph in all the papers saying that a student called Shiryaev had died of hunger….

Though he notices details of the road and landscape, Pyotr’s mind is occupied with fantasies of dying on the journey north, of his father’s guilty conscience, of adventures with pilgrims, robbers, a beautiful rich young woman falling in love with him. Nearly to the train station, from where, apparently, he has been hoping to leave (but he has no money), he is shaken into the immediate moment:

“Look out!” He heard behind him a loud voice.

An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the neighborhood, drove past him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her, and smiled all over his face. And at once he caught himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping with his gloomy mood.

Chekhov seems to suggest that young Pyotr is able at this fragile moment to put together a series of thoughts that, I think, probably only Tolstoy or Chekhov himself could have been capable of:

Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do.

That is (and this was not the narrator so much as Chekhov, who had been thinking about this situation for at least ten years): “Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they may be, it’s hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are a secret.”

Next summer, in a letter to his cousin Georgy, Chekhov would write:

In addition, besides to your own family, don’t read my letters to anyone; private correspondence is a family secret with which nobody has any business.5

In such a personal story as this, Chekhov scarcely managed to disguise the secrets of his family.

While Pyotr has been superseded by the author in the previous moments, Pyotr is, I believe, capable of this next series of thoughts. It’s the immediate circumstances that rouse his thoughts. He has this neighbor-woman in mind, and he knows her situation. She has led him into these thoughts:

The father of the old lady who had just driven by, for instance, had for some offense lain for half his lifetime under the ban of the wrath of Tsar Nicholas I; her husband had been a gambler; of her four sons, not one had turned out well. One could imagine how many terrible scenes there must have been in her life, how many tears must have been shed. And yet the old lady seemed happy and satisfied, and she had answered his smile by smiling, too. The student thought of his comrades, who did not like talking about their families; he thought of his mother, who almost always lied when she had to speak of her husband and children….

And those really have been Pyotr’s thoughts, because they’re the thoughts that eventually prompt him to turn back. He doesn’t turn on his heel; he has too much pride for that. He walks until he knows he has to return. And he is braver now. He has survived the confrontation with his father and is able to steel himself a bit.

There is no description of Chekhov ever battling his father. Having seen his explosive brothers confront his father, he probably found a quieter, more effective way of getting around Pavel.

As he walked back he made up his mind at all costs to talk to his father, to explain to him, once and for all, that it was dreadful and oppressive to live with him.

He found perfect stillness in the house. His sister Varvara was lying behind a screen with a headache, moaning faintly. His mother, with a look of amazement and guilt upon her face, was sitting beside her on a box, mending Arhipka’s trousers. Yevgraf Ivanovich was pacing from one window to another, scowling at the weather. From his walk, from the way he cleared his throat, and even from the back of his head, it was evident he felt himself to blame.

“I suppose you have changed your mind about going today?” he asked.

It’s there, just there, that Chekhov creates a flash of sympathetic understanding of the father.

The student felt sorry for him, but immediately suppressing that feeling, he said:

“Listen… I must speak to you seriously… yes, seriously. I have always respected you, and… and have never brought myself to speak to you in such a tone, but your behavior… your last action…”

The father looked out of the window and did not speak. The student, as though considering his words, rubbed his forehead and went on in great excitement:

“Not a dinner or tea passes without your making an uproar. Your bread sticks in our throat… nothing is more bitter, more humiliating, than bread that sticks in one’s throat…. Though you are my father, no one, neither God nor nature, has given you the right to insult and humiliate us so horribly, to vent your ill-humor on the weak. You have worn my mother out and made a slave of her, my sister is hopelessly crushed, while I…”

“It’s not your business to teach me,” said his father.

Pyotr has again become Chekhov or Chekhov has become Pyotr:

“Yes, it is my business! You can quarrel with me as much as you like, but leave my mother in peace! I will not allow you to torment my mother!” the student went on, with flashing eyes. “You are spoiled because no one has yet dared to oppose you. They tremble and are mute toward you, but now that is over! Coarse, ill-bred man! You are coarse… do you understand? You are coarse, ill-humored, unfeeling. And the peasants can’t endure you!”

But Chekhov would not have said “the peasants” to his father, as it wouldn’t make sense. Perhaps “servants” would do, as in their present-day Moscow middle-class household, they had a cook and a maid.

We see that the conscience-ridden father has determined to accept some words of reproach—but not this many:

The student had by now lost his thread, and was not so much speaking as firing off detached words. Yevgraf Ivanovich listened in silence, as though stunned; but suddenly his neck turned crimson, the color crept up his face, and he made a movement.

“Hold your tongue!” he shouted.

“That’s right!” the son persisted; “you don’t like to hear the truth! Excellent! Very good! begin shouting! Excellent!”

Chekhov would not have mocked his father, probably.

“Hold your tongue, I tell you!” roared Yevgraf Ivanovich.

Fedosya Semyonovna appeared in the doorway, very pale, with an astonished face; she tried to say something, but she could not, and could only move her fingers.

“It’s all your fault!” Shiryaev shouted at her. “You have brought him up like this!”

“I don’t want to go on living in this house!” shouted the student, crying, and looking angrily at his mother. “I don’t want to live with you!”

Varvara uttered a shriek behind the screen and broke into loud sobs. With a wave of his hand, Shiryaev ran out of the house.

Again the father has stalked off!

The student went to his own room and quietly lay down. He lay till midnight without moving or opening his eyes. He felt neither anger nor shame, but a vague ache in his soul. He neither blamed his father nor pitied his mother, nor was he tormented by stings of conscience; he realized that every one in the house was feeling the same ache, and God only knew which was most to blame, which was suffering most….

Aren’t all unhappy families perhaps alike? Is Chekhov standing Tolstoy’s already famous epigraph from Anna Karenina on its head?

The misery that envelops a family in expectation of, during, and after such disputes, isn’t it always like so? “Despotism and lies so disfigured our childhood that it makes me sick and horrified to think of it,” Chekhov wrote his brother Alexander more than two years after writing this story. “Remember the disgust and horror we felt every time father made a scene at dinner because there was too much salt in the soup or called mother a fool.”6

Chekhov knew the characters’ agony. Meanwhile, the “sick and horrified” student Pyotr groans and bears it:

At midnight he woke the laborer, and told him to have the horse ready at five o’clock in the morning for him to drive to the station; he undressed and got into bed, but could not get to sleep. He heard how his father, still awake, paced slowly from window to window, sighing, till early morning. No one was asleep; they spoke rarely, and only in whispers. Twice his mother came to him behind the screen. Always with the same look of vacant wonder, she slowly made the cross over him, shaking nervously.

And here is Chekhov too—in his quiet sympathy for the mother, for his own mother or for all mothers married to tyrants. How much she has had to endure. Chekhov never justified his father, though in his teens he and his brothers and cousins learned to appreciate through meeting Pavel’s and Mitrofan’s father just how horrible their father’s and uncle’s lives must have been, and how moderate they as fathers were in comparison. Chekhov witnessed and experienced his own generation’s huge leap of improved behavior, of restraint, of education.

“Difficult People” concludes, as nearly all of Chekhov’s stories do, with life, damaged or wounded as it is, going on:

At five o’clock in the morning he said goodbye to them all affectionately, and even shed tears. As he passed his father’s room, he glanced in at the door. Yevgraf Ivanovich, who had not taken off his clothes or gone to bed, was standing by the window, drumming on the panes.

“Goodbye; I am going,” said his son.

“Goodbye… the money is on the round table…” his father answered, without turning around.

A cold, hateful rain was falling as the laborer drove him to the station. The sunflowers were drooping their heads still lower, and the grass seemed darker than ever.

Is it possible that Chekhov stood outside these characters, invented them from whole cloth, and didn’t know them from within?

“Difficult People” contains more power than any of his famous plays that involve family dramas. In this story, he caught lightning—and thunder—in a bottle. And yet, looking at the original version of this story, I was surprised to see how very much he cut out. There are clipped phrasings throughout; he neatly trimmed several descriptions. He cut the length by more than two pages, the bulk of that coming in three passages. The only significant change, however, resulting in “a softening,” as K. S. Overina puts it,7 occurs after Pyotr’s return to the house. In the midst of Pyotr and his father’s ferocious screaming, the mother, unseen by either, rushes between them and is “accidentally” struck by her husband’s fist between her neck and shoulder. She collapses to a chair and father and son turn away and retreat to opposite corners.8

Chekhov deleted this because… he never explained such decisions. I suspect that it was because Shiryaev would not have been forgivable. And who could have forgiven Pavel had anyone described such a scene in the Chekhov house?

*

Chekhov wrote several stories this month, and a few of them are substantial and worth noting. Two of them, not otherwise worth noting, “Oh, My Teeth” (“Akh, Zuby!,” October 9) and “Whining: A Letter from Far Away” (“Nyt’e: Pis’mo Izdaleka,” October 12), focus on toothaches, which had afflicted Chekhov in July and for which he had had to leave Babkino for treatment in Moscow.

When Chekhov sat at his desk in his book-lined study in Moscow and leaned over the paper to compose a new piece, he did not hunt for distant or special topics. We can hope that the toothache, anyway, was a memory and not a continuation from the summer. But the second tale about toothache made me wonder if it wasn’t Chekhov’s substitution for tuberculosis. He did not let himself “whine” about his tuberculosis, and for another eleven years denied to everyone that he even had it. The whining letter-writer narrator is in Siberia, where he is serving time for forgery (committed by his mistress). He writes, as Chekhov would, “I swear to you I’m healthy. That is to say, I’m not consumptive and I don’t cough […] The thought that there’s nowhere and nohow I would be cured [of the toothache] further increased my torment.”9 And in real life, there was nowhere and nohow Chekhov could be cured of tuberculosis. He didn’t mention his toothache again in the letters.

He had been making multiple trips this summer and fall, including on October 4, to a court to testify in a case concerning a peasant, and this may have inspired the setting of the Victor Hugo–like tale “In the Court” (“V Sude,” October 11), which is about a trial of a peasant who has murdered his wife. The peasant is thoroughly bewildered in this dulling, dispassionate, legal atmosphere: “What he met here was not at all what he could have expected. The charge of murder hung over him, and yet here he met with neither threatening faces nor indignant looks nor loud phrases about retribution nor sympathy for his extraordinary fate; not one of those who were judging him looked at him with interest or for long…. The dingy windows and walls, the voice of the secretary, the attitude of the prosecutor were all saturated with official indifference and produced an atmosphere of frigidity, as though the murderer were simply an official property, or as though he were not being judged by living men, but by some unseen machine, set going, goodness knows how or by whom….” A doctor, perhaps in the same role Chekhov had served, indifferently testifies. “The last to be examined was the district doctor who had made a postmortem on the old woman. He told the court all that he remembered of his report at the postmortem and all that he had succeeded in thinking of on his way to the court that morning.”10 The doctor is no clever hero. He is as flattened and dulled as the rest of those involved in the proceedings. His testimony does not clarify the details of the murder.

Chekhov rarely wrote neat stories with surprise endings, but this is one. The awkward soldier who has brought the peasant into the courtroom turns out to be the peasant’s son.

After a few other short pieces came another marriage story, “The Proposal: A Story for Young Ladies” (“Predlozhenie: Rasskaz dlya Devits,” October 23), a one-page skit about a business and marriage proposal in one: The son of a factory owner assures Princess Vera, “We will sell a million poods11 of fat a year! Let’s build a fat-rendering factory on our adjoining estates and go halfsies!”12

Why couldn’t Chekhov make his living as a doctor? He loved saying he was lazy; to make a ruble as a doctor in mid-1880s Moscow, he would have had to hustle and seek out more patients than he already had. He would have had to charge his friends and his friends’ acquaintances for his services. In “A Peculiar Man” (“Neobiknovenniy,” October 25), we meet the kind of client who could have driven Chekhov out of his medical career. This peculiar Kiryakov wants to find the cheapest midwife in town. Quibbling and fussing, he wears down Maria Petrovna until she agrees to his price. Later, having completed her midwifery, she remarks:

“Well now, thank God, there is one human being more in the world!”

“Yes, that’s agreeable,” said Kiryakov, preserving the wooden expression of his face, “though indeed, on the other hand, to have more children you must have more money. The baby is not born fed and clothed.”

A guilty expression comes into the mother’s face, as though she had brought a creature into the world without permission or through idle caprice. Kiryakov gets up with a sigh and walks with solid dignity out of the room.

“What a man, bless him!” says the midwife to the mother. “He’s so stern and does not smile.”

The mother tells her that he is always like that…. He is honest, fair, prudent, sensibly economical, but all that to such an exceptional degree that simple mortals feel suffocated by it. His relations have parted from him, the servants will not stay more than a month; they have no friends; his wife and children are always on tenterhooks from terror over every step they take. He does not shout at them nor beat them, his virtues are far more numerous than his defects, but when he goes out of the house they all feel better, and more at ease. Why it is so the woman herself cannot say.13

The put-upon exhausted midwife, having rendered her services to the wife, is so glad to be done with the peculiar man that when she realizes she has left without getting paid, she decides not to go back.

*

On October 7 Chekhov wrote Leykin to ask him to read Maria Kiseleva’s story; it was short and, granted, “a bit sentimental,” but if Leykin liked it, he could get away with paying her only six kopecks a line. She, as a budding writer, would save Leykin expenses. That was clever of Chekhov, but Leykin wrote back to say he thought her tale was indeed “sentimental” and “unhumorous”14 and rejected it. Chekhov did, however, help get it published in The Alarm Clock. Chekhov also wanted to complain to Leykin about not having received his fees from the Petersburg Gazette. “I don’t know how I lived through September and how now I can expect to live in expectation of the pay?”15 He wouldn’t write for them again until they paid him.

Leykin didn’t mind the Gazette’s financial sloppiness, however, if it meant Chekhov would write more regularly for Fragments. In his reply, Leykin advised Chekhov to avoid the Gazette; he could and should increase his contributions to Fragments and New Times. Leykin wasn’t satisfied with the writers or writing that Chekhov was trying to foist on him as replacements. Leykin remarked about Alexander: “Telling stories aloud he’s much better, sharper, more literary than when he writes; when for others it’s usually the opposite.”16

Chekhov felt desperate about money and so wrote desperately and jokingly to Schechtel on the 19th, including even a drawing of himself hanging by a hook. “If you are not touched by this artistic representation of my fate, you don’t have a heart, Franz Osipovich! As a matter of fact, the firm ‘Doctor A. P. Chekhov and Co.’ is now living through a financial crisis… If you don’t give me by the 1st 25–50 rubles in loan, you are a pitiless crocodile…”17 Chekhov’s requests for loans were usually heeded; he knew his recipients, and he was scrupulous about repaying.

He wrote Leykin again on October 23 and in entertaining, scattershot fashion told him about his visit to a mutual friend, the hard-drinking poet Palmin, and about his continued financial woes: “My health is better, but my pocket still has consumption.” By the next week, Khudekov, the editor and publisher of the Gazette, offered to pay Chekhov two kopecks more per line in 1887. Chekhov, never much of a negotiator, accepted.

Chekhov’s literary mentorship of Kiseleva, however, paid quick dividends. He wrote her on October 29 and jumped right in on the fate of the short stories she had sent him:

1) “Galoshes” lies on my table and will be put into circulation only after the New Year, in a shortened, corrected way. It’s necessary to flush from it the French smell, otherwise it will come out like an adaptation, and that is no good and unfitting, as a novice it’s always better to begin with the original. If your first story is “too busy,”18 all the following ones will be seen with prejudice.

2) The story about the madwoman, titled by me “Who’s Happier” is a very sweet, warm, and gracious story. Even the dog Leykin, not knowing anybody besides Turgenev and me, found that this story is “not-bad and literary.” (Not wanting to be the sole judge, I brought it for advice to Leykin and other old literary dogs.) The most successful place for me—Peterb Gazette, but alas! Because of the fee I broke off from that periodical (I’m demanding a raise). In Fragments it’s impossible to place, as it’s not humorous. The only thing remaining—wait for it in The Alarm Clock, where in its feuilleton-pages they publish “serious” studies (for example, my “Oysters”), which I did. So, your story will be published in The Alarm Clock. Thanks to the idiotic manner of journals to mix up signed things, belonging to “names,” that is, firms (Zlatovratsky, Nefedov, Chekhov and such representatives of the fall of contemporary literature), your story will be placed not in the near future. But for you this is indifferent, as the money can be had before publication.

[…] We need to talk over many things. So, I have to justify some corrections in your stories… For example in “Who’s Happiest?” the beginning is pretty bad… It’s a dramatic story, but you begin with “shooting himself” in a humorous tone. Then the “hysterical laughter” is a much too old effect… The simpler the movements the more plausible and sincere, and therefore better… In “Galoshes” there are many mistakes of the kind as “House No. 49.” In Moscow there is no numbering of addresses… Turning to the last story, by memory by the way, that Lentovsky is completely out of place. He is very much not as popular in Moscow as Aleksei Sergeevich, who for some reason loves him.

He concluded with terrific encouragement: “judging by this first experiment, it’s possible to guarantee that within 1–2 years you will be in a strong position.”19

This was the age of literary translation; Russians could read the latest French and English novels in the literary journals and foreign translated short stories in newspapers and magazines. Chekhov’s comic August story “The First-Class Passenger” was translated into Czech on October 27.20 Moravska Orlice probably did not pay him for it.

Meanwhile, Chekhov’s financial worries had led him into writing the most problematic and longest of all his stories this year, “Mire.” Chekhov was mired indeed in anxiety: Where was his money to support the family going to come from? Could he actually obtain it through marriage? He resolved the marriage problem, unfortunately, the way, perhaps, a fourteen-year-old boy would, by blaming and ridiculing an innocent person who had just been minding her own business.

I have given up trying not to squirm over “Mire”; it is squirm-worthy. It seems, however, to have made two of Chekhov’s keenest advocates, the translators and professors Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, whose collection of his letters is the single-best presentation of Chekhov’s biography, turn the argument upside down. They counter that those who condemn the story don’t understand it:

…“Mire,” to this day [is] one of Chekhov’s least understood works. Because the story featured a Jewish seductress and because it appeared in New Times, the prominent anti-government journalist Vukol Lavrov proclaimed it reactionary and racist. […] But a closer reading of this story within the context of Chekhov’s writing of 1886–88 shows that it was one of several works written during that period which examined, possibly under the impact of his broken engagement to Dunya Efros, the reactions of sensitive Russian Jews to the discrimination and repression with which they had to live. […] The wealthy and educated Susannah in “Mire,” unlike Sarah and Solomon [in Ivanov and The Steppe], does not have to contend with overt and crude anti-Semitism. But she constantly expects it just the same and her resentment finds its expression in a series of sexual conquests of young Russian noblemen; her promiscuity is the only way she has of asserting her own worth and of defying the hostility of the neighboring Russian gentry. Ironically, the two brothers [they are cousins] who are involved with her in the course of the story are not at all anti-Jewish, but they are nevertheless victimized by Susannah’s neurotic response to her predicament, which Chekhov depicted with remarkable understanding.21

Well, I love Chekhov, too. But when do we finally admit to the errors of even the people we revere? In public, Chekhov defended Jews and called out, for example his friend and editor Bilibin’s anti-Semitic newspaper column remarks. So many of Chekhov’s friends and literary and medical colleagues were Jews. No one who knew him ever accused him of being anti-Semitic. As far as we can tell from his actions in the world he never acted prejudicially against Jews. But publishing “Mire” was in itself an act, and the other stories with anti-Semitic statements in the author’s voice are also acts, and hence I squirm.

As Chekhov would have wanted, let’s face the problem straight on. And, in an impossible act of imagination, let’s try to read it as Dunya Efros could have, if she was looking for similarities and differences. She was not, as Susanna22 is, a rich daughter of a recently deceased distillery owner. Dunya was twenty-five; Susanna is twenty-seven. Dunya did not live in a grand house in the country. Dunya was a student in Moscow at the same women’s program at the university as Maria Chekhova. Her father was alive and a lawyer. Dunya did not steal IOUs from sexually susceptible estate owners or their relatives and silence them by seducing them. Dunya was well-educated and probably would have noticed that Susanna has much less in common with her than with Circe of The Odyssey, who welcomes Odysseus and his men on their journey homeward and turns all of them except Odysseus into dull-witted animals.

On the other hand, Susanna is and Dunya was Jewish and Chekhov’s attraction to Dunya confused him, just as the protagonist of “Mire,” Sokolsky, is attracted as if against his will to Susanna:

Nothing could be seen behind the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed, somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her voice, her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.23

Only in stages, because Susanna is a con artist, does she further reveal herself, both physically and mentally. She bewitches Sokolsky with various misdirections. Before he can do so, she condemns Jews, women, and marriage. He doesn’t understand his increasing attraction to her:

“You are a woman yourself, and such a woman-hater!”

“A woman…” smiled Susanna. “It’s not my fault that God has cast me into this mold, is it? I’m no more to blame for it than you are for having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for the choice of its case. I am very fond of myself, but when any one reminds me that I am a woman, I begin to hate myself. Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress. Wait for me in the drawing-room.”

The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw a deep breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which had begun to irritate his throat and to make him feel giddy.

“What a strange woman!” he thought, looking about him. “She talks fluently, but… far too much, and too freely. She must be neurotic.”

That’s as far as Sokolsky can go in his analysis of her; he’s no Chekhov, but in this story, Chekhov doesn’t quite seem himself, either. In a panic of confusion or guilt, heterosexual men of all ages label attractive women as crazy or “neurotic.” Chekhov has confusing or confused motives: one is to describe a literary type, a newfangled Circe, another is falling under the spell of Dunya Efros. Our author’s misogynistic and anti-Semitic vision results in Susanna:

There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish, except, perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau. The lieutenant looked around about him, and, shrugging his shoulders, thought of his strange, new acquaintance, of her free-and-easy manners, and her way of talking. But then the door opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady herself, in a long black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her figure looked as though it had been turned in a lathe. Now the lieutenant saw not only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a head black and as curly as lamb’s-wool. She did not attract him, though she did not strike him as ugly. He had a prejudice against un-Russian faces in general, and he considered, too, that the lady’s white face, the whiteness of which for some reason suggested the cloying scent of jasmine, did not go well with her little black curls and thick eyebrows; that her nose and ears were astoundingly white, as though they belonged to a corpse, or had been molded out of transparent wax. When she smiled she showed pale gums as well as her teeth, and he did not like that either.

But the joke is on Sokolsky. He will lose to her all the money that she owes him and he will borrow more money and lose that, too. In this, we are not getting to the mystery of Chekhov’s finances. But we are seeing Chekhov’s final insult to Dunya: her looks. He never let her forget that he found her “Jewish” features distinctive and unattractive.

This is the only contemporary photograph of Efros that has come to light:24

Dunya Efros.

Chekhov describes the guilty, dirty secret of Sokolsky and his equally bewitched cousin Kryukov:

Both of them felt, somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud. Yet they remembered it and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be pleasant to recall in old age.

On the day “Mire” was published, Dunya Efros paid Chekhov a call. To conclude his letter of October 29 to Maria Kiseleva, he confessed, “Mother and auntie are praying for me to marry a merchant’s daughter [that is, not Efros]. There was Efros just now. I angered her, telling her that a young Hebrew was not worth a groat; she was insulted and left.”25

Chekhov, one of the most decent literary figures I have ever come to know through books, behaved in this instance like a cad.

Did he have to insult her in person so that she would hate him for good, before she even read “Mire,” so that she could thank her lucky stars they didn’t end up together when she did read it? Or had she read it and, hurting, come over, and he felt himself obliged to show her he was indeed a beast and she was better off without him?

In Chekhov’s life and writings of these two years, there are confounding Jewish problems. The biographer Rayfield persuades me with his conclusion: “Dunya’s Jewishness was certainly instrumental in bringing her and Anton together and in sundering them. Like many southern Russians, Anton liked and admired Jews. Always a defender of Jews, he asked Bilibin why he used the word ‘yid’ three times in one letter? Yet he himself used the word ‘yid’ both neutrally and pejoratively and, like many southern Russians, Anton felt Jews to be a race apart […] ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew’ were categories in which he classified every new acquaintance, even though his utterances and his behavior make him, by the standards of the times, a judophile.”26

Characters throughout the fiction wrestle with forgiveness, and I hope we can all conclude our wrestling matches with him over his unfortunate expressions of anti-Semitism. Dunya Efros, the offended one herself, forgave him.

The two most informative works concerning the issue of anti-Semitism in Chekhov’s life and work are Chekhov i Evrei (Chekhov and the Jews) by Mark Ural’sky and “From Susanna to Sarra: Chekhov in 1886–1887” by Helena Tolstoy. In 1887 Efros married Efim Konovitser, one of Chekhov’s Jewish classmates and friends from Taganrog. Chekhov and Konovitser and Dunya continued being friends.

During World War I, Konovitser died, and after the Russian Revolution, Efros and her two children moved to Paris. In 1943, when she was eighty-two, she was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Treblinka and murdered in the Holocaust. Her son Nikolay survived and eventually visited the USSR in 1956 to hand over some Chekhov-related material. Nikolay Konovitser said that in his childhood he often saw Chekhov, who spoke to him about, among other things, writing: “You can write, so write!” When young Konovitser asked him what to write, Chekhov said, “Whatever you want, but especially what you see, and when you’re big, you’ll become a writer, but write every day.”27

*

After his embarrassing encounter with Efros on October 29, 1886, Chekhov went to the theater to watch a play. When he got home, the family was celebrating his parents’ thirty-second wedding anniversary.28

His last letter of the month was to Leykin, to whom he admitted his reluctance to lobby Suvorin for a review of a new novel by Leykin’s and Chekhov’s friend Palmin: “I will write to Suvorin about the review only if I’m writing him a business letter, writing à propos; otherwise, I’m not able to ask. People I know well, you, for example, or Bilibin, I can ask, but writing to people not connected with me in close acquaintance, about a favor, courtesy or service is blocked by my faintheartedness. In general asking for things I’m terribly shy, and so of course I don’t gain anything and I lose a lot. Maybe in the middle of November I’ll be in Peter and talk with Suvorin personally.”29

Leykin answered that he would come down to Moscow himself to see Chekhov. They had a lot to talk over, he said.

Chekhov got over his shyness and wrote Suvorin on November 6 to ask him if New Times could review Palmin’s book.

November 1886

…while Tolstoy is in literature it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even to be aware that one has done nothing and is doing nothing is not so terrible, since Tolstoy does enough for all. His work serves as the justification of all the hopes and anticipations built upon literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy stands firmly, his authority is immense, and while he lives, bad tastes in literature, banality of every kind, impudent or lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will remain far away, deep in the shade. His moral authority alone is capable of maintaining on a certain height the so-called literary moods and currents. Without him they would all be a shepherdless flock, or a hotch-potch in which it would be difficult to make out anything.

—Letter to a friend1

The Lodger” (“Zhilets,” November 1), is ironically titled, as the lodger is the put-upon husband of a woman who owns a lodging house. The house runs by her rules, so when the husband tries to command the servants, they ignore him. He thus starts on his way to being a drunk. “A Bad Night: Sketches” (“Nedobraya Noch’: Nabroski,” November 3) includes a terrifying description of a fire that burns down the neighboring village:

Having driven five or six versts, the lady sees something unusually monstrous, which not everyone ever sees even once in their life, and for the richest imagination is impossible to imagine. An enormous fire has the village ablaze. The field of vision is obscured in a mass of creeping blinding flames, into which, like into a fog, sink the huts, trees and the church. Bright almost sunlike light mixes with puffs of black smoke and frosty steam; gold tongues glide with greedy crackings, smiling and merrily winking, and lick the black frameworks. Red clouds and golden dust quickly sweep to the sky, and, as if to increase the illusion, agitated pigeons dive into these clouds. In the air is a strange mix of laughing sounds: horrific cracklings, rustling flames, resembling the rustle of a thousand birds’ wings, people’s voices, bleatings, mooings, the scraping of wheels. The church is fearsome. Flames burst out of its windows and clouds of thick smoke. The bell tower stands like in a black ogre in a mass of light and gold dust; it is already burned over, but the bells hang on, and it’s hard to understand what they’re holding onto.2

Chekhov’s narrator remarks, “Apparently misfortune attracts people.”

He had kept his own “misfortune” with Efros quiet and out of sight. In his letter to Leykin on November 6, as he had effectively extinguished any possibility of marriage, Chekhov opened with a joke, possibly because he was using wedding stationery that had the letter (Ч) for Chekhov stamped on it: “I’m going to get married.” He also wanted to tease Leykin, who was continually vexed by Chekhov’s resistance to dating his letters. In the twelve-volume Soviet edition of Chekhov’s letters, the editors often explain the various calculations they have made to provide possible or probable dates on the letters. The editors probably sympathized with Leykin’s repeated complaint and sighed here at Chekhov’s explanation:

In the last letter I purposely didn’t put the date on and made a bet with myself that you wouldn’t leave such an incident without attention. For me, the date on letters is a prejudice and excessive embellishment. I understand the date on payments, business articles and letters, on checks, receipts, and so on, but on a letter, which goes to the address in only one day, it can go without a date.3

On November 10, Chekhov published the skit “Kalkhas” (“Kalkhas”), which he would rewrite in 1887 as a one-man one-act, “Swansong.” A drunk fifty-eight-year-old actor delivers a monologue reviewing his life in the theater. Chekhov was now considering writing a full-length play.

“Dreams” (“Mechti,” November 15) may be the most famous of this month’s stories; it is, along with “Excellent People,” concerned with Tolstoyan ideas about the meaning and purpose of life. The dreamer is a man in his thirties who, having refused to give his name, has been arrested for vagrancy and is being escorted to a transport to Siberia. He impresses his escorts, who are as moved by his life story as most readers will be. When Chekhov composes Tolstoy-inspired stories, he is not dominated or oppressed by Tolstoy; I see Chekhov even more distinctly. In all the ways that the story is not written by Tolstoy, there Chekhov is. For instance, the dreamer tells of his previous experience in prison:

“… For four years I went about with my head shaved and fetters on my legs.”

“What for?”

“For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so, my mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into my master’s glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the storeroom, numbers of them; it was easy to make a mistake over them.”

The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:

“She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man’s soul is a slumbering forest! It may have been an accident, or maybe she could not endure the affront of seeing the master prefer another servant…. Perhaps she put it in on purpose, God knows! I was young then, and did not understand it all… now I remember that our master had taken another mistress and mamma was greatly disturbed. Our trial lasted nearly two years…. Mamma was condemned to penal servitude for twenty years, and I, on account of my youth, only to seven.”4

Chekhov stands out from Tolstoy in his assertion that “another man’s soul is a slumbering forest!” Tolstoy did not concede such ignorance; he saw into others’ souls. The tramp admits to his curious escorts that he has run away from prison. By not giving his name, he can’t be sent back to prison, only to a settlement in eastern Siberia.

And why is the story called “Dreams”?

The tramp muttered and looked, not at his listeners, but away into the distance. Naïve as his dreams were, they were uttered in such a genuine and heartfelt tone that it was difficult not to believe in them. The tramp’s little mouth was screwed up in a smile. His eyes and little nose and his whole face were fixed and blank with blissful anticipation of happiness in the distant future. The constables listened and looked at him gravely, not without sympathy. They, too, believed in his dreams.

“I am not afraid of Siberia,” the tramp went on muttering. “Siberia is just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as here. They are just as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only there is more freedom there and people are better off….”

In 1890, Chekhov would see Siberia for himself, as he traveled across its entire width to the Pacific prison island of Sakhalin.

But the tramp’s beautiful dreams of the life there, thousands of miles away from the mud through which they are walking to a local lockup, are made of smoke.

Whether [one of the escorts] envied the tramp’s transparent happiness, or whether he felt in his heart that dreams of happiness were out of keeping with the gray fog and the dirty brown mud—anyway, he looked sternly at the tramp and said:

“It’s all very well, to be sure, only you won’t reach those plenteous regions, brother. How could you? Before you’d gone two hundred miles you’d give up your soul to God. Just look what a weakling you are! Here you’ve hardly gone five miles and you can’t get your breath.”

Tolstoy may well have found a sober and profound conclusion to such a story, but he would not have popped the tramp’s bubble. Chekhov anyway does bring us to think about those pacifying, inspiring dreams that come to us in the most hopeless times. Dispirited for the moment, perhaps the tramp will dream another dream.

Chekhov enjoyed making fun of creative artists’ self-importance, including their need for peace and quiet. He needed it too! I will include a discussion of “Hush!” (November 15) in the next chapter, when he, writing on deadline as usual, would compose an additional tale of a writer working on deadline.

He had Leykin, the pestering deadline-reminder, as company in Moscow from November 16 to 19. Leykin stayed with the Chekhov family the last night before returning by train to Petersburg. What they did and talked about is unknown.

Though I enjoy seeing the connections between what Chekhov was writing and what was going on in his life, most enjoyable of all is simply rereading the stories again in the midst of a particular month. He would exclude “At the Mill” (“Na Mel’nitse,” November 17) from his Collected Works, which led to Constance Garnett’s overlooking it. Or maybe she read it and didn’t care for this tale about a terribly miserly, grumbling, kvetching miller. The miller’s mother comes to beg for a little money. The monks who are already there for the milling of their grain, and who themselves have been insulted by the miller for among other things having gone fishing in what he thinks of as his river, are appalled by the miller’s rudeness.

We can enjoy this story because we do not have suffer the miller’s inventive and relentless cynical abuse. One of the monks exclaims, “Holy Lord, there is nothing harder for me to obey than to come to the mill! It is real hell! Hell, truly hell!”5 I find myself thinking that at some point the miller will bend. But no, he has figured out the world, and he self-righteously abuses one and all for their offenses against him, against life, against his ideas of fairness. “It was evident that to scold or to swear was as much a habit with him, as the sucking of his pipe.”

As the miller’s mother appeals to him to help his brother, I wonder: Was this passage also about the desperate circumstances of Chekhov’s brother Alexander?

“Looking at him I’m terribly worried…. There’s nothing to eat, the children in tatters, he himself is ashamed to show his nose in the street, his trousers are all in holes and he has no boots…. All six of us sleep in one room. Such poverty, such poverty! Nothing worse can be imagined. I have come to ask you to help. Aleshenka, in consideration of an old woman, help Vasili…. Remember, he’s your brother!”

She compares the miller’s circumstances to his brother’s, just as, I imagine, Chekhov’s down-on-their-luck older brothers compared theirs to his miraculous success:

“He is poor, but you thank the Lord! The mill is your own, and you have kitchen-gardens and you trade in fish. The Lord has given you wisdom and exalted you above others, and bestowed on you plenty…. You are also alone…. But Vasya has four children, and I, accursed old thing, am a weight on his neck, and his wages are only seven rubles. How can he feed us all? Help us!…”

Though he himself was ever generous, the character Chekhov is closest to in this story is, of all people, the horrible miller.

His brother Alexander was in bad straits, and, like the miller’s brother Vasili, a drinker. Alexander did not have his mother Evgenia Chekhova living with him, but he did have a wife and three (not four) children, and Chekhov was actively trying to help Alexander get a job in the publishing world in Petersburg. Alexander was writing and sending pieces to Leykin again. Chekhov, sitting pretty in Moscow in the red house that looked like a chest of drawers, had to support the immediate family and also come up with money sometimes to bail out his brother in the provinces.

The mean miller, after his mother rues having come when he refuses her anything, nevertheless has had his hard heart touched for a second and almost gives her the money she would need. But his heart rehardens and he gives her instead a twenty-kopeck coin.

And why did Chekhov exclude from his Collected Works this incisive story, so much more powerful and moving than others he included? There’s no telling.

He did include “Excellent People” (“Khoroshie Lyudi,” November 22), an analytical portrait presented by an unnamed first-person narrator about two siblings, Vladimir, a well-to-do critic, and Vera, his doctor-sister. Vladimir “was a literary man all over when with an inspired face he laid a wreath on the coffin of some celebrity, or with a grave and solemn face collected signatures for some address; his passion for making the acquaintance of distinguished literary men, his faculty for finding talent even where it was absent, his perpetual enthusiasm, his pulse that went at one hundred and twenty a minute, his ignorance of life, the genuinely feminine flutter with which he threw himself into concerts and literary evenings for the benefit of destitute students, the way in which he gravitated toward the young—all this would have created for him the reputation of a writer even if he had not written his articles.”6

Vera, who lost her husband to typhus and attempted suicide after that tragedy, worships her brother:

She gave up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she were a prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colorless apathy, with bowed head and hanging hands. The only thing to which she was not completely indifferent, and which brought some brightness into the twilight of her life, was the presence of her brother, whom she loved. She loved him himself and his programme, she was full of reverence for his articles; and when she was asked what her brother was doing, she would answer in a subdued voice as though afraid of waking or distracting him: “He is writing….” Usually when he was at his work she used to sit beside him, her eyes fixed on his writing hand. She used at such moments to look like a sick animal warming itself in the sun….

Chekhov’s friends would observe such displays of reverence toward him from both his mother and sister.

The story also shows Chekhov’s scorn for know-nothing critics:

On the table near the writing hand there lay open a freshly cut volume of a thick magazine, containing a story of peasant life, signed with two initials. Vladimir Semyonich was enthusiastic; he thought the author was admirable in his handling of the subject, suggested Turgenev in his descriptions of nature, was truthful, and had an excellent knowledge of the life of the peasantry. The critic himself knew nothing of peasant life except from books and hearsay, but his feelings and his inner convictions forced him to believe the story. He foretold a brilliant future for the author, assured him he should await the conclusion of the story with great impatience, and so on.

Chekhov was calling nonsense on the predictive power of critics, even of the critics that had predicted grand things for him.

That very night, in the story, it seems to have dawned on Vera that what Vladimir does isn’t actually important at all. She asks him what he thinks about “nonresistance to evil,” and as he splutters, she seems to see the same smug thoughtlessness that the narrator sees. The ensuing discussions of this idea divide them. She is becoming, it seems, a Tolstoyan and she soon leaves her brother’s house. Not long after, Vladimir dies of an illness, soon to be forgotten by the literary community. “Excellent People” is a rehearsal for some of the famous plays Chekhov would write a decade later. Chekhov later shortened the version we know by more than three pages from the original in New Times, where he had titled the speech-heavy story “The Sister.” In revision, he snipped the lone mention of Tolstoy.7

Chekhov would continue wrestling with Tolstoy’s ideas until 1895, when he and the Grand Master of Literary Russia finally met in person at Tolstoy’s estate. Ideas and philosophies were not the men, and, with insight into each other’s character and appreciation of each other’s art, they loved each other and were friends to the end of the younger man’s life.

*

The Letopis’ (Chronology) of Chekhov’s life is ever helpful: letters and incidents in Chekhov’s life are noted and excerpted. For November 21, the editors quote a sentence from Chekhov’s letter of November 22 to Leykin, “Last night I accompanied a young lady in a cab and caught a cold.” They speculate that the “young lady” referred to was “probably” Dunya Efros.8

Had he intercepted her somewhere and abjectly apologized for having hurt her feelings? I hope so. Where did he take her? There is no explanation by the editors of how they made their guess. What do they know of Efros’s movements that the rest of us don’t? Are there any clues in the stories?… No. Any other references in this period to Efros?… No, not until January 17, 1887, at his name day party.

Also in that November 22 letter to Leykin was the news that Chekhov would arrive in Petersburg in several days. He didn’t mention that his sister Maria would join him on this late November, early December trip.

Maria and he and all the Chekhovs loved pets, and “The Incident” (“Sobytie,” November 24) is about the benefits of children having pets, in this instance a cat. “Domestic animals play a scarcely noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part in the education and life of children. Which of us does not remember powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkeys, mild old tabby cats, who forgave us when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonizing pain? I even fancy, sometimes, that the patience, the fidelity, the readiness to forgive, and the sincerity that are characteristic of our domestic animals have a far stronger and more definite effect on the mind of a child than the long exhortations of some dry, pale Karl Karlovich, or the misty expositions of a governess, trying to prove to children that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.”9 This story’s cat has kittens, which delight the children. Unfortunately, their uncle and his dog come over and “the incident” of the title is that the dog eats the unminded kittens.

“The Playwright” (“Dramaturge,” November 27) is a comic skit in which a doctor asks his patient, a playwright who drinks day and night, how and when he “writes.” His work, the playwright says, is very difficult; that is, he has others translate foreign plays for him, and he adds a few Russian touches.

Though Chekhov was tired of writing comic pieces, he was still very funny. One of his funniest stories is “The Orator” (“Orator,” November 29), about a young man named Zapoikin who is hired by acquaintances to speak at funerals: “He can speak […] in his sleep, on an empty stomach, dead drunk or in a high fever. His words flow smoothly and evenly, like water out of a pipe, and in abundance; there are far more moving words in his oratorical dictionary than there are beetles [cockroaches] in any restaurant.”10 He is brought to the funeral of a collegiate assessor and delivers fulsome words about another man, who, Zapoikin discovers, is at the funeral.

*

Chekhov and his sister arrived in Petersburg on November 26th, and they stayed with Leykin through the first two days of December. “Leykin always listed the price of things to try to show his guests how much he liked them,” remembered Mikhail Chekhov, “and how generously they were being treated. ‘Please eat this smoked fish; it cost two rubles and seventy-five kopecks a pound.’ ”11 They also dined at Maria Kiseleva’s sister’s home and visited the Hermitage. Chekhov wrote Kiseleva when he had returned to Moscow, “I was relaxing in Peter, that is, I roamed around the city all day, paying visits and listening to compliments, which my soul doesn’t tolerate.”12

December 1886

“Why don’t you write? One day, you will have blisters on your fingers, and you will become a writer. I will help you, if you wish. You should not wait for inspiration, but instead write every day. In about six years, you would be a good writer.”

—In conversation with a young writer1

Chekhov would have finished writing and sent off “The Trouble” (“Beda,” December 1) to Khudekov at the Petersburg Gazette before he and his sister Maria left for the capital on the 26th of November. Chekhov had personal reasons to work out his feelings about and remedies for alcoholism. In “The Trouble,” an office worker, Putokhin, has been on a five-day binge, and as he comes out of it, he is fired by his boss. He then fears the hurt and disappointment his loving wife will express when he gets home. He is so ashamed he wonders if he should blow his brains out. To his amazement and delight, his wife forgives him: “God willing, we’ll get through this trouble.”2 Her forgiveness reforms him, and now when he is out and sees drunks, he doesn’t laugh at them or judge them. Putokhin concludes: “The vice isn’t that we drink but that we don’t raise drunkards up.” And Chekhov, or his attentive narrator, adds: “Maybe he’s right.” As Chekhov believed at this time, to understand is to forgive.

Leykin wrote Chekhov on December 5 to ask him to send stories for the important year-end issue not later than December 21 and the New Year’s pieces not later than December 28.3 Chekhov probably didn’t need reminding. On December 8, in the Petersburg Gazette, he published “The Order,” which is about a writer working on deadline. (That same day he replied to Leykin and told him he had begun working on his Christmas-issue story for New Times, which story, after an unusual two-week struggle, became “On the Road.”)

Chekhov complained about deadlines and, thank goodness, wrote to deadline. What would he have written if he hadn’t had to? How many great works by Mozart and Chekhov would we be deprived of if they hadn’t needed to earn money? They were young and able, full of energy and genius, and if outside pressures nudged them to the table to compose, let us express our gratitude and appreciation for these deadline-inspired gems.

But Chekhov, though proud and self-critical of his work, didn’t see or didn’t like thinking of his stories as art. Writing at deadline does not inspire belief in one’s work as art or genius. It’s just got to be done. Chekhov was a pro.

In the middle of November he wrote a mocking story about a pretentious, overly precious writer who demands from his family awe and quiet, “Hush!” (“Tssst!” in Russian).

“Shattered, soul-weary, a sick load of misery on the heart… and then to sit down and write. And this is called life! How is it nobody has described the agonizing discord in the soul of a writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears at the word of command when his heart is light? I must be playful, coldly unconcerned, witty, but what if I am weighed down with misery, what if I am ill, or my child is dying or my wife in anguish!”

He says this, brandishing his fists and rolling his eyes….4

We are all unappreciated actors in the dramas of our lives. Chekhov is mocking Ivan, the writer, and also echoing his own complaints—minus the wife and child. At various times Leykin had heard all the rest from Chekhov, and Chekhov had heard absolutely all of it from Alexander. The protagonist is a prima donna:

[…] he goes into the bedroom and wakes his wife.

“Nadya,” he says, “I am sitting down to write…. Please don’t let anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying or cooks snoring…. See, too, that there’s tea and… steak or something…. You know that I can’t write without tea…. Tea is the one thing that gives me the energy for my work.”

Thinking of himself, he thinks of nobody else.

Ivan Yegorich throws himself back in his chair, and closing his eyes concentrates himself on his subject. He hears his wife shuffling about in her slippers and splitting shavings to heat the samovar.

She is hardly awake, that is apparent from the way the knife and the lid of the samovar keep dropping from her hands. Soon the hissing of the samovar and the spluttering of the frying meat reaches him.

His wife is still splitting shavings and rattling with the doors and blowers of the stove.

In his mockery, Chekhov is not twitting Alexander or his other writer-friends so much as himself:

Like a girl who has been presented with a costly fan, he spends a long time coquetting, grimacing, and posing to himself before he writes the title…. He presses his temples, he wriggles, and draws his legs up under his chair as though he were in pain, or half closes his eyes languidly like a cat on the sofa. At last, not without hesitation, he stretches out his hand toward the inkstand, and with an expression as though he were signing a death-warrant, writes the title….

Chekhov’s titles changed occasionally from their first appearance in magazines and journals to their second in books or in the Collected Works. But his primary advice about titles was simplicity: “Put as plain a title as possible—any that occurs to your mind—and nothing else.”5

He writes till four o’clock and would readily have written till six if his subject had not been exhausted. Coquetting and posing to himself and the inanimate objects about him, far from any indiscreet, critical eye, tyrannizing and domineering over the little anthill that fate has put in his power are the honey and the salt of his existence. And how different is this despot here at home from the humble, meek, dull-witted little man we are accustomed to see in the editor’s offices!

“I am so exhausted that I am afraid I shan’t sleep…” he says as he gets into bed. “Our work, this cursed, ungrateful hard labor, exhausts the soul even more than the body…. I had better take some bromide…. God knows, if it were not for my family I’d throw up the work…. To write to order! It is awful.”

It is awful. It is. And yet Chekhov knew just as well the harsher demands of a full-time doctor’s life. If he had had to earn his bread by medical work, he would have died even younger.

He sleeps till twelve or one o’clock in the day, sleeps a sound, healthy sleep…. Ah! how he would sleep, what dreams he would have, how he would spread himself if he were to become a well-known writer, an editor, or even a sub-editor!

This description would have nudged his brother Alexander; Chekhov was using his connections to help Alexander settle in Petersburg and get a sub-editor job at New Times.

“He has been writing all night,” whispers his wife with a scared expression on her face. “Sh!”

No one dares to speak or move or make a sound. His sleep is something sacred, and the culprit who offends against it will pay dearly for his fault.

“Hush!” floats over the flat. “Hush!”

Chekhov was acknowledging here the kind of respect he received in his own household. A friend, Zakhar Pichugin, remembered Chekhov’s mother as her son’s sentry:

I visited the Chekhov family. As I came in, I greeted the father of Anton Pavlovich, and heard in reply the words which he whispered in a mysterious tone, “Hush, please don’t make noise, Anton is working!”

“Yes, dear, our Anton is working,” Evgenia Yakovlevna the mother added, making a gesture indicating to the door of his room. I went further, Maria Pavlovna, his sister, told me in a subdued voice, “Anton is working now.”

In the next room, in a low voice, Nikolay Pavlovich told me, “Hello, my dear friend. You know, Anton is working now,” he whispered… Everyone was afraid to break the silence, and you could see that the members of the family had a great deal of respect for the creative process of the young writer.6

And in this bit from “Excellent People” we see what Chekhov would have considered ridiculous reverence:

One winter evening Vladimir Semyonich was sitting at his table writing a critical article for his newspaper: Vera Semyonovna was sitting beside him, staring as usual at his writing hand. The critic wrote rapidly, without erasures or corrections. The pen scratched and squeaked.7

And there, reflected in the glass of the window in front of which Chekhov was sitting, was himself, writing “without erasures or corrections” (usually). The biographer Ronald Hingley writes that Maria Chekhova said “she could always tell from his mood when he was in the throes of creation. ‘His way of walking and his voice changed, a sort of absent-mindedness appeared, and he often answered questions at random…. This continued until he began writing, when he became his old self again…’ ”8

Chekhov and the narrator of “Excellent People” disdain the critic, but Chekhov as usual sees himself even in the people he mocks. Just like Vladimir the critic, Chekhov was proud of the speed at which he wrote; he could focus in such a fashion that some of his short pieces could spin along in one continuous, uncorrected strip. “He is a strange writer,” said Tolstoy. “He throws words about as though at random, and yet everything in his writings is alive. And what great understanding! He never has any superfluous details, every one of them is either essential or beautiful.”9

“The Assignment” (“Zakaz,” December 8) is a comedy that describes the situation in which Chekhov wrote so many of his stories in these busy years. Here, the freelancer Pavel Sergeich needs to finish writing a story on deadline before he joins the informal party that his wife is hosting in the next room. He keeps getting interrupted by her or by the distracting conversations he overhears. He joins the party for a few minutes and then returns to his uninspired murder story. He is either focused enough or unengaged enough that the party’s activities do not intrude into the story.

“Pavel Sergeich!” they cried out in the living room. “Come here!”

Pavel Sergeich hopped up and ran to the ladies.

“Sing a duet with Michel!” said his wife. “You sing lead, and he’ll sing second.”

“Fine! Give the key!”

Pavel Sergeich waved his pen, on which still shone some ink, tapped his toe, and, making a passionate face, sang “Thoughtless Nights” with the student.

“Bravo!” he chortled, having finished singing and seizing the student by the waist. “You and I are such young men! I would sing another something but, the devil take it, I’ve got to write!”

“But toss it aside! It’s up to you!”

“No-no-no… I promised! And there’s no hiding! The story’s got to be ready today!”10

I imagine Chekhov imagining Leykin reading that line in the Petersburg Gazette. Leykin smiles, appreciative of the writer’s dedication, while Chekhov calls out, laughing, “See, see what I have to do to produce stories for you!”

Pavel Sergeich waved his hands, ran back into his study and resumed writing […]

“The Assignment” is light, but not fine, as Chekhov, who never seemed to miss a comic opportunity, did miss some here. The tale that Pavel Sergeich writes is neither comical nor coordinated with the atmosphere in which he writes it. Chekhov is interested in the comedy of the writer being distracted; what the writer writes, however, doesn’t reflect his distractions. Could Chekhov have written the story around a dead little piece he had thrown out? A translator11 calls it a “Halloween” story, perhaps because of the murder in Pavel’s tale. At the conclusion, the party is leaving the house for a pretty drive, which doesn’t fit the time when Chekhov was submitting the story, early December. There are no variants of “The Assignment.” When Chekhov was readying his collected works he wrote on the “clerical copy”: “N.B.: it will not go in the collected works.”

Though out of its seasonal place, “The Assignment” does fit the kind of activities that were going on around Chekhov in his house. Mikhail Chekhov believed that his older brother liked very much to have social activity going on while he wrote: “Anton drew inspiration from all the sounds and people and spent a lot of time at work in his study downstairs. He would sometimes take a break to come upstairs and joke or horse around with the rest of us. During the day when everybody was otherwise occupied and there were no visitors, he would often say to me, ‘Misha, play something, would you? I can’t write like this.’ I did play for him—sometimes for half an hour straight. I’d play songs from popular musicals and did it with as much frenetic zeal as a sanguine second-year university student could muster.”12 The biographer David Magarshack adds: “In the drawing room his sister’s friends used to gather almost every evening, playing the piano and singing, and Chekhov would occasionally interrupt his work and join them upstairs.”13

Chekhov’s friend Ignati Potapenko recalled that in these years, “When he was in the presence of guests he would repeatedly slip away to his study, write two or three lines in private, and then rejoin the company a few minutes later.”14

In the next two weeks of December, Chekhov described his franticness, his feeling of being lazy, his feeling of pressure while trying to write his Christmas story for New Times.

In the midst of that unusual struggle, he wrote three other pieces, including “A Work of Art” (“Proizvedenie Iskusstva,” December 13), a clever situation-comedy episode, and “Who Was to Blame?” (“Kto Vinovat?,” December 20) for Leykin’s Fragments, and “The Anniversary” (“Yubiley,” December 15) for Petersburg Gazette.

Chekhov was like any persistent, duty-bound freelancer: he knocked off the shorter pieces that he could while chipping away at the bigger and more lucrative assignment.

Leykin wrote him on December 11 that he liked “A Work of Art,” but that the censor made him take out two words, “Paradise” (the censor objected that there shouldn’t be a snake in Paradise, with which Adam and Eve would have agreed) and “obscene.”15 That is, a young man brings a doctor “a work of art” in appreciation from him and his mother for having saved his life. The antique candelabra features two naked women. He apologizes that it’s one of an incomplete pair of candelabras. The doctor knows he can’t show it in the office or at home. He gives it away to his lawyer. The lawyer gives it to an actor. The actor sells it to an antiques dealer, where it’s bought by the woman to “complete the set,” which she then sends to the doctor.

Chekhov continued his correspondence with Maria Kiseleva on December 13. He sent her the fateful story “Mire” with his letter and meanwhile defended himself from her teasing about his love life. He was paid 115 rubles for that story about a Jew, he told her, so “how after this not incline toward the Hebrew tribe?”16 I sure wish he hadn’t said that.

He added, because she had joshed him about his busy love life: “You cruelly insult me, reproaching me for Yashen’ka, Madame Sakharova and so on. Weren’t you informed that I long ago turned away from the world’s bustle, from earthly pleasures, and gave up everything but medicine and literature? A better-intentioned and more restrained person than I is hard to find in the world. I suppose that even the Archimandrite Veniam is a bigger sinner than I.”

Kiseleva would find other sins to charge him with in “Mire.”

*

He was definitely unhappy with his first Christmas-issue story for New Times, but he was perhaps the only person unhappy with it. On December 21, he wrote to Suvorin: “I began the yuletide story [“On the Road”] two weeks ago and haven’t at all finished it. An evil spirit has nudged me toward a theme with which I can’t cope. After two weeks I succeeded in getting acquainted with the theme and the story and now I don’t understand what’s good and what’s bad. Simply a disaster! Tomorrow, I hope, I’ll finish it and send it to you. You’ll receive it the 24th, at three o’clock. If you take a look at the story you’ll understand the effort with which it was written and excuse that I was late and didn’t keep my promise.”17

He kept his promise; on Christmas Day “On the Road” (“Na Puti”) was published. His brother Alexander read it and reported on the “sensation” that it had produced in Petersburg; while Alexander had been visiting the New Times offices, he had even been introduced around as “the author’s brother.” The young women office-workers there told him they had been delighted by Anton’s Christmas card.18

Chekhov sent his Christmas and New Year’s greetings with friendly jokes to Leykin and a request for an immediate payout for his December contributions to Fragments: “Excuse me that I’m breaking your law of bookkeeping, but… what am I to do?”19

The hero of “On the Road” (December 25) is even harder pressed than Chekhov was. The story’s play-like setting might remind us of “The Witch,” except instead of a posting station, we have a tavern, snowed in during a Christmas-season blizzard: “Something frantic and wrathful, but profoundly unhappy, seemed to be flinging itself about the tavern with the ferocity of a wild beast and trying to break in.” In a traveler’s room, Likharev, an idealistic but impoverished forty-two-year-old ex-landowner, and his eight-year-old daughter are waiting out the storm when a young woman landowner traveling with a sledge driver stops for refuge. Likharev is a widower whose charisma is infectious:

“I say this from hard, bitter experience: the proudest, most independent women, if I have succeeded in communicating to them my enthusiasm, have followed me without criticism, without question, and done anything I chose; I have turned a nun into a Nihilist who, as I heard afterward, shot a gendarme; my wife never left me for a minute in my wanderings, and like a weathercock changed her faith in step with my changing enthusiasms.”

As he converses with the young woman, his intellectual vitality revives:

“There, you see,” cried Likharev delighted, and he even stamped with his foot. “Oh dear! How glad I am that I have met you! Fate is kind to me, I am always meeting splendid people. Not a day passes but one makes acquaintance with somebody one would give one’s soul for. There are ever so many more good people than bad in this world. Here, see, for instance, how openly and from our hearts we have been talking as though we had known each other a hundred years. Sometimes, I assure you, one restrains oneself for ten years and holds one’s tongue, is reserved with one’s friends and one’s wife, and meets some cadet in a train and babbles one’s whole soul out to him. It is the first time I have the honor of seeing you, and yet I have confessed to you as I have never confessed in my life. Why is it?”20

Her reaction shows him that he has gone too far again:

Miss Ilovaisky got up slowly, took a step toward Likharev, and fixed her eyes upon his face. From the tears that glittered on his eyelashes, from his quivering, passionate voice, from the flush on his cheeks, it was clear to her that women were not a chance, not a simple subject of conversation. They were the object of his new enthusiasm, or, as he said himself, his new faith! For the first time in her life she saw a man carried away, fervently believing. With his gesticulations, with his flashing eyes he seemed to her mad, frantic, but there was a feeling of such beauty in the fire of his eyes, in his words, in all the movements of his huge body, that without noticing what she was doing she stood facing him as though rooted to the spot, and gazed into his face with delight.

He realizes he has bewitched her: “Whether his finely intuitive soul were really able to read that look, or whether his imagination deceived him, it suddenly began to seem to him that with another touch or two that girl would have forgiven him his failures, his age, his desolate position, and would have followed him without question or reasonings.” Likharev is unconsciously seductive the way Raissa in “The Witch” is, but he is a good man, and this is a Christmas story, and he deliberately sends the young woman on her way. Likharev is like Chekhov in this way, that he unintentionally attracted women who sensibly lost their heads over him.

As a medical student Chekhov himself had been swept off his feet by another of Likharev’s enthusiasms:

“When you set to work to study any science, what strikes you first of all is its beginning. I assure you there is nothing more attractive and grander, nothing is so staggering, nothing takes a man’s breath away like the beginning of any science. From the first five or six lectures you are soaring on wings of the brightest hopes, you already seem to yourself to be welcoming truth with open arms. And I gave myself up to science, heart and soul, passionately, as to the woman one loves. I was its slave; I found it the sun of my existence, and asked for no other.”

As a wayward and awkward postscript to this story, last year I was editing a collection of Chekhov’s love stories for an anthology. I included “On the Road,” as I had also fallen for Likharev. However, in the midst of the story, Chekhov includes a popular Russian Christmas carol that a group of children sing for the guests at the tavern. It goes like this:

Hi, you Little Russian lad,

Bring your sharp knife,

We will kill the Jew, we will kill him,

The son of tribulation…

Happy holidays and murder? It is not Chekhov’s fault, is it, that perversity and cruelty had made tormenting and murdering Jews a Christian custom? It’s not his fault, but he might, just might, have excised it from a Christmas story in a right-wing anti-Semitic newspaper. I cut it from the Dover anthology, and I, in a failure of scrupulousness, didn’t note the excision.

Chekhov’s Christmas story for Petersburg Gazette was “Vanka,” about a nine-year-old orphan apprenticed to a shoemaker in Moscow. Vanka writes his grandfather begging him to bring him back home. He complains: “They make me sleep in the vestibule, and when their brat cries, I don’t sleep at all, but have to rock the cradle. Dear Grandpapa, for Heaven’s sake, take me away from here, home to our village, I can’t bear this any more…. I bow to the ground to you, and will pray to God for ever and ever, take me from here or I shall die….”21 When he mails his heartsick letter, he carefully addresses it “To grandfather in the village.”

So that we don’t take Vanka for a simpleton, Chekhov adds: “Then he scratched his head, thought a little, and added: Konstantin Makarich. Glad that he had not been prevented from writing, he put on his cap and, without putting on his little greatcoat, ran out into the street as he was in his shirt…. The shopmen at the butcher’s, whom he had questioned the day before, told him that letters were put in post-boxes, and from the boxes were carried about all over the earth in mailcarts with drunken drivers and ringing bells. Vanka ran to the nearest post-box, and thrust the precious letter in the slit….”

Vanka mailing his letter to his grandfather.

Chekhov, meanwhile, had mailed off in the slit two comic pieces for Fragments’ Christmas issue, and no doubt they were better addressed than Vanka’s letter, as they were received and published on December 27. “The Person: A Bit of Philosophy” (“Chelovek: Nemnozhko Filosofii”) is about a philosopher of life who is seemingly above everything; however, when a beautiful woman orders him to bring her some water, he hops to and gets it. “Who Was She?” (“To Bila Ona?”) is a longer tale about an old coot who tells the young ladies a story of his long-ago “affair” in a haunted house. He disappoints them—revealing their hypocrisy—by telling them the mysterious woman was his wife. So he switches back and says no, it was his steward’s wife, which pleases them. I won’t mention the unpleasant remarks about Jews that the old man makes.22

Chekhov answered his brother Alexander’s complimentary December 26 letter sometime in the next few days. He in return was abrupt and scolding: he didn’t like Alexander’s new story and was annoyed that Alexander didn’t inform the Moscow family about his family’s new apartment in Petersburg and his new job at New Times:

You write me about your goose, about Tan’ka, about the fiancée without a profile, but you don’t say a word about your new place, about the new people and so on.

Right this minute write me everything from beginning to end, not leaving anything out and not reducing it. I’m waiting with impatience and I’m not writing to you until you send me a letter.

[…] Don’t sign the trifles by your full name. “Theme by Al. Chekhov.” What’s that for? You want to be ashamed?

That is, the Chekhov brothers were only to use pen names in Fragments.

*

We have reached the end of 1886. Did Chekhov take stock of what he had done? Or did he only feel it in his head and bones? Was he wondering when he could slow down? Did he assume, as other young people have, that he could keep burning through life, that if his family needed him for financial support and stability, then that’s just what he would have to keep doing? As a doctor, he recognized stress and exhaustion. He knew his own illnesses and afflictions. He could not keep going like this. He had to find a new way or other ways to bring in the money and ease the pace.

PART FOUR

Friends and “Enemies”

Having so thoroughly followed in Chekhov’s footsteps during 1886, I blinked and blanked at the prospects of the year ahead, as if I no longer knew any better than Chekhov did what was going to happen in 1887. Maybe this happens whenever we reread a long novel. We know what’s coming, but so immersed are we in the present-day of the novel that it feels as if we don’t have knowledge of the future. We hope, for example, that things will get better for Anna Karenina, that Elizabeth Bennet will have a chance to make up for her mistakes, or that Karl Ove will find peace and contentment. For Chekhov in 1887, I hope he gets some rest. (He will.) I hope he finds someone to fall in love with. (He won’t.) I hope his financial worries disappear. (Not quite.) I hope he somehow keeps writing great stories. (He will.) I hope he stays healthy. (Nope.) I hope there are no more anti-Semitic references or jokes. (I’m not sure. Wait, I just remembered Ivanov, his play. Ivanov’s put-upon wife is Jewish.)

I have a note from an earlier draft of this book that says, “in the second half of 1887 something happened, and Chekhov wasn’t interested in writing freshly about romantic relationships.”

What happened?

Chekhov, 1887.

January 1887

I was always amused when I heard conversations about Chekhov’s purported indifference, or about his cold-bloodedness, his apathy or homochromatism: I, for one, knew how brilliant and crafty this striking artist was under his modest exterior, who spent his entire lifetime mercilessly training and drilling just one pupil—himself.

—Dina Rubina1

New Year’s Day was spent at home in conversation with a young writer (only a year younger than Chekhov), Alexander Lazarev (pen name, Gruzinskiy), the journalist Vladimir Gilyarovskiy, and A. Kurepin, The Alarm Clock’s editor. Lazarev and Kurepin were keeping company with Chekhov for the first time (Lazarev had met him in March at the Alarm Clock office).2 The Letopis’ notes: “Conversations about Fragments, about N. A. Leykin, V. V. Bilibin, A. V. Nasonov. In an argument with Kurepin, Chekhov ‘showed that it’s necessary to well investigate the Tolstoyan theory of resistance to evil, but then it’s impossible to honestly speak for or against it…’ ”3 Tolstoy insisted that one must commit oneself to nonresistance to evil; Chekhov would show in various stories that he was attracted to the idea, or to the people who committed to that idea, but that for many reasons such nonresistance was impractical or constraining.

I’m guessing that the topic of Leykin occupied more of their time and most definitely more of their enjoyment. Leykin was one of those bosses who the people who work for them like to complain about. This New Year’s, when Leykin was in Petersburg or at his estate across the river from the capital, his ears, which seem to have been sensitively tuned to gossip, were probably burning. The young men would all have agreed that Leykin was exasperating and frustrating, nudgy and persistent. He published young writers, but he paid them a pittance.

Chekhov treated Lazarev like a little brother, encouraging him and teasing him and scolding him forward on his literary path. Lazarev wrote: “I sat at his place the whole long winter’s night until 12:00. The impression produced on me for this first meeting with Chekhov was unusual. I was shaken. Returning home I began remembering our conversations, Chekhov’s words, his laugh, his smile, and I didn’t sleep until morning.”4

What Chekhov knew of Lazarev’s previous writing is not stated, but Lazarev says that Chekhov recommended he “write something for New Times.” The biographer David Magarshack describes a joshing moment of that evening: “Chekhov said, pointing to the furniture, the aquarium and the piano: ‘It’s good to be a writer: literature has given me all that!’ And seeing how greatly impressed his visitor was, Chekhov laughed and explained that the piano was on hire and that part of the furniture Nikolay had received in payment for his illustrations in The Alarm Clock.”5

Lazarev and his friend, Nikolay Ezhov, revered their mentor.6 Ezhov remembered: “Chekhov treated me and Lazarev very warmly; he guided our work, gave advice, pointing out and underlining successes and mistakes, and all this he did with special Chekhovian simplicity and delicacy.”7

Chekhov received New Year’s greetings from Alexander in Petersburg, who passed along a remark Suvorin made in conversation to him and Bilibin and Golike: “Why does Anton Pavlovich write so much? It’s very very dangerous.”

Chekhov wrote to Bilibin and his uncle Mitrofan this New Year’s week, but these letters haven’t survived.

January’s stories seem dark and unhappy, even those that are comical.

In “New Year’s Torture” (“Novogodnyaya Pitka,” January 4), Chekhov writes, unusually, in the second person about making required New Year’s calls around Moscow: to the narrator’s wife’s rich but boring uncle; to a friend to whom they owe money; on the sly to a girlfriend; then to his wife’s brother’s; and finally to a drinking friend. The story begins: “You deck yourself out in a tailcoat, you put, if you have one, a Stanislaus [medal] on your neck, you spritz a handkerchief with cologne, twist up your moustache—and all this with such angry, fitful movements, as if you were dressing not yourself but your most vicious enemy.”8 At the end the narrator glumly returns to his shrewish wife. If you were to ask what this had to do with Chekhov’s life, I would shrug…. And then, I might point out that when Mikhail, the narrator, is at his brother-in-law Petya’s, Petya’s desperate pleas for a loan sound a lot like Chekhov’s: “Before the holidays, you understand, I spent all my money, and now I’m without a kopeck… It’s a disgusting situation… You’re my only hope… If you don’t give me 25 rubles, you’re stabbing me without a knife…”

“Champagne: A Wayfarer’s Story” (“Shampanskoe: Rasskaz Prokhodimtsa,” January 5), on the other hand, is humorless and despairing enough to make anyone groan. Garnett translates the word for the story’s narrator as “Wayfarer,” but “Bum” or “Transient” would be more in keeping with the narrator’s self-judgment:

Upon me, a native of the north, the steppe produced the effect of a deserted Tatar cemetery. In the summer the steppe with its solemn calm, the monotonous chur of the grasshoppers, the transparent moonlight from which one could not hide, reduced me to listless melancholy; and in the winter the irreproachable whiteness of the steppe, its cold distance, long nights, and howling wolves oppressed me like a heavy nightmare. There were several people living at the station: my wife and I, a deaf and scrofulous telegraph clerk, and three watchmen. My assistant, a young man who was in consumption, used to go for treatment to the town, where he stayed for months at a time, leaving his duties to me together with the right of pocketing his salary. I had no children, no cake would have tempted visitors to come and see me, and I could only visit other officials on the line, and that no oftener than once a month.9

During his and his wife’s quiet New Year’s celebration, she sees a spilled bottle as a bad omen. He wondered at the time, how could things get worse? “What further harm can you do a fish which has been caught and fried and served up with sauce?” The narrator remembers having the blues and reflects with a clarity and depth that it is unlikely he could muster, but that Chekhov certainly could and did express: “Melancholy thoughts haunted me still. Painful as it was to me, yet I remember I tried as it were to make my thoughts still gloomier and more melancholy. You know people who are vain and not very clever have moments when the consciousness that they are miserable affords them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their misery for their own entertainment. There was a great deal of truth in what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was absurd and conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant in my question: ‘What could happen worse?’ ” And he recounts how a seductive woman, his wife’s uncle’s young wife, arrived that New Year’s night. Chekhov knew this was a relentlessly despairing story. He moderated it not a wit: “Everything went head over heels to the devil. I remember a fearful, frantic whirlwind which sent me flying around like a feather. It lasted a long while, and swept from the face of the earth my wife and my aunt herself and my strength. From the little station in the steppe it has flung me, as you see, into this dark street.”

*

From January 4 to January 11, Chekhov occupied at least part of his time attending a medical conference in Moscow. He went to a talk given by Pavel Rozanov, at whose wedding he had been the best man the previous January. On January 8, Chekhov wrote Alexander to thank him for his New Year’s letter and to coax him, as soon as possible, to go to the offices of New Times and Petersburg Gazette and forward him the payments that he was due from them. He offered his brother a commission of 1/40th, a grand total of about five rubles.

The writer Lazarev met with Chekhov again on January 11; about this meeting Lazarev immediately wrote his friend Ezhov. The two friends’ visits with Chekhov were treasured by each and shared with each other at the time, so even today their accounts have a freshness and undusty believability: “Chekhov is a lovely guy. We talked and chatted a lot. He told me plenty of interesting things. Chekhov had a harsh school of life, was in a chorus, worked in a shop, froze in the cold and so on and so on. […] Chekhov terribly cursed Leykin, but says that one should feel sorry for him […] Chekhov is a most absolutely simple guy […] Chekhov says for anyone who wants to have an independent existence it’s necessary to work, work, and work.”10

The next day’s annual drunken Tatyana Day bash served as Chekhov’s excuse to Leykin about why he wouldn’t immediately be coming up with a new piece for Fragments. He would in fact give Leykin only fourteen pieces all year:11

My head has detached from my hand and refuses to create… The entire holidays, my brain has strained; I puffed and sniffed, a hundred times I sat down to write, but every time, from my “lively” pen, long things or sour ones, or nauseated ones poured out, which doesn’t go over for Fragments, and they were so bad, I decided not to send them to you so as not to embarrass my family name.12

He knew Leykin would scoff at his excuses, so he piled it on:

I didn’t send New Times a single story, to the Gazette some sort of 2 stories, and how on such dough I will live in February, God knows… You are generally a skeptic, and you don’t believe in human incapability, but I assure you by honest word, yesterday from morning to night, the whole day I toiled over a story for Fragments, lost the time, and lay down to sleep, not having written a page… Laziness or a lack of desire is out of the discussion… If you will be resentful and scold, you’ll be wrong. I’m guilty, but I deserve indulgence!

[…] The holidays in Moscow were loud. I didn’t have a single peaceful day: guests, doctors’ conference, long conversations, etc….

He recommended, by the way, that Leykin use work by Lazarev: “He’s quiet, like Bilibin, but through his quietness it’s sometimes possible to detect the man.” Chekhov knew already that Leykin didn’t appreciate his recommendations of writers to replace him, but he regularly tried anyway.

Now about a ticklish matter. […] Considering that I am beginning to lose my value as a constant, correct, and dependable employee for Fragments, in view of that, that even in the full swing of literary energy, I’m caused to miss up to 1–2 pieces in each month almost, it would be right to eliminate the extra ones. Right? Agree with me and make the fitting arrangement. I will work as before, trying not to miss a single week, but I can’t swear that cases of craziness won’t again be repeated.

He offered to go off the retainer and receive the freelancers’ usual per-line pay.

He was looking forward, he went on, to Leykin and his wife’s arrival on the 17th for Chekhov’s name day party at 1:00 in the afternoon. In the P.S. Chekhov suggested they work out a simpler line of communication regarding his submissions. Chekhov liked efficiency in telegraph messages; no use paying extra for needless words. He could write Leykin a telegram whenever he didn’t have that week’s submission with the simple unmistakable message: “No. Chekhov.”

Leykin, nettled, replied on the 14th that he and his wife would indeed arrive in Moscow on the 16th, and that he and Chekhov could continue the conversation on the 17th, but… “You write that you didn’t write over the holidays. But apparently you did write over the holidays for The Alarm Clock. […] I’ve already received 3–4 letters asking why Chekhonte’s not writing.” Leykin didn’t hesitate to call him out. How the devil did Leykin know about a pseudonymous piece in the Moscow humor magazine? As for the complaint letters Leykin received, Chekhov didn’t believe that.

*

The scenes in Chekhov’s stories sometimes seem as if they were staged in his head. One very particular place is animated by its sights and smells, and there are two or three characters who move about and talk. In “Frost” (“Moroz,” January 12), a garrulous and generous mayor and two of his guests recall, with some bit of pleasure, the misery of being young, poor, and cold: “I’ve a fur coat now, and at home I have a stove and rums and punches of all sorts. The frost means nothing to me now; I take no notice of it, I don’t care to know of it, but how it used to be in old days, Holy Mother! It’s dreadful to recall it! My memory is failing me with years and I have forgotten everything; my enemies, and my sins and troubles of all sorts—I forget them all, but the frost—ough! How I remember it!”

Nostalgia kicks in: “The governor and the mayor grew lively and good-humored, and, interrupting each other, began recalling their experiences. And the bishop told them how, when he was serving in Siberia, he had traveled in a sledge drawn by dogs; how one day, being drowsy, in a time of sharp frost he had fallen out of the sledge and been nearly frozen; when the Tunguses turned back and found him he was barely alive. Then, as by common agreement, the old men suddenly sank into silence, sat side by side, and mused.”

How much pleasure Chekhov, this young man full of redolent memories, had in recollection. How generous our Chekhov was to be imagining the happy reminiscences of old men. With whom did quiet, modest, young Chekhov most closely identify? The generous, gabby old mayor, who, seeing the suffering of the musicians at the town’s bitter-cold celebration, dismisses them hours early and treats them all to drinks.

*

One of the letters reproduced in nearly every selection of Chekhov’s letters is his spirited January 14 refutation of his friend and mentee Maria Kiseleva’s disappointed and moralistic criticisms of “Mire.” She had written in late December. His delayed response was unusual. His reply letters usually followed immediately, without much mulling over.

What had set him mulling was this:

Beginning with that piece you sent me, good Anton Pavlovich, I so so do not like it, despite that I am convinced that few will join with my opinion. It is written well—male readers are pitying themselves if their fate does not collide with someone like Susanna, which might unleash their licentiousness; women will in secret envy her, and a big part of the public will read it with interest and say: “This Chekhov writes in a lively way, what a fellow!”

Maybe the 115 rubles in pay please you, but13 I am personally chagrined that a writer of your caliber, i.e., not shortchanged by God, shows me nothing but a “manure pile.” The world is teeming with villains and villainesses and the impression they produce is not new; therefore, one is all the more grateful to a writer who, having led you through all the stench of the manure pile, will suddenly extract a pearl from it. You are not myopic, you are perfectly capable of finding this pearl, so why do we get only a manure pile? Give me that pearl, so that the filth of the surroundings may be effaced from my memory; I have a right to demand this of you. As for the others, the ones who are unable to find and to defend a human being among the quadruped animals—I’d just as soon not read them. Perhaps it might have been better to remain silent, but I could not resist an overpowering desire to give a piece of my mind to you and to your vile editors who allow you to wreck your talent with such equanimity. If I were your editor, I would have returned the story to you for your own good. No matter what you may say, the story is utterly disgusting! Leave such stories (such subjects) to hacks like Okreyts, Pince-nez, Aloe and tutti quanti mediocrities, who are poor in spirit and have been shortchanged by fate.

Give Kiseleva credit: she called out herself by her nickname Pince-nez as one of the “mediocrities.” She, further on in the letter, credited herself for valuing and having liked, on the other hand, “On the Road.” She understood that, a young woman losing her head over an idealistic man. She, the prim mother and author of children’s stories, had lost her head over Chekhov, I believe.

His reply to her letter is the story of their relationship and an example of how seriously and how deeply Chekhov contemplated art. Whatever literary or moral sins he had committed in “Mire,” the self-censorship that Kiseleva was advocating in her letter was a trap for any honest writer. Before arguing with her, he praised her short story, which though “uneven” was good enough for him to recommend for publication in New Times, whose editors she had maligned:

Your “Larka” is very nice, honored Maria Vladimirovna; there are roughnesses, but the conciseness and masculine manner of the story redeem everything. Not wishing to be the sole judge of your offspring, I am sending it to Suvorin, who is a very understanding man. His opinion I will let you know in due time. And now allow me to snap at your criticism.14 Even your praise of “On the Road” has not softened my anger as an author, and I hasten to avenge myself for “Mire.” Be on your guard, and catch hold of the back of a chair that you may not faint. Well, I begin….

One meets every critical article with a silent bow even if it is abusive and unjust—such is the literary etiquette. It is not the thing to answer, and all who do answer are justly blamed for excessive vanity. But since your criticism has the nature of “an evening conversation on the steps of the Babkino lodge” [… ]15 and as, without touching on the literary aspects of the story, it raises general questions of principle, I shall not be sinning against the etiquette if I allow myself to continue our conversation.

She invited his conversational response, so here it was. He started with her prudery. He pointed out that the great writers show both sides of life, the good and the bad. He reminded her that landscape painters have to show the defects of the landscape.

He refused her premise that there are purities. What is is. In chemistry as in human life:

In the first place, I, like you, do not like literature of the kind we are discussing. As a reader and “a private resident” I am glad to avoid it, but if you ask my honest and sincere opinion about it, I shall say that it is still an open question whether it has a right to exist, and no one has yet settled it [… 16]. Neither you nor I, nor all the critics in the world, have any trustworthy data that would give them the right to reject such literature. I do not know which are right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and, speaking generally, the ancients who were not afraid to rummage in the “muck heap,” but were morally far more stable than we are, or the modern writers, priggish on paper but coldly cynical in their souls and in life. I do not know which has bad taste—the Greeks who were not ashamed to describe love as it really is in beautiful nature, or the readers of Gaboriau, Marlitz, Pierre Bobo.17 Like the problems of nonresistance to evil, of free will, etc., this question can only be settled in the future. We can only refer to it, but are not competent to decide it. Reference to Turgenev and Tolstoy—who avoided the “muck heap”—does not throw light on the question. Their fastidiousness does not prove anything; why, before them there was a generation of writers who regarded as dirty not only accounts of “the dregs and scum,” but even descriptions of peasants and of officials below the rank of titular councillor. Besides, one period, however brilliant, does not entitle us to draw conclusions in favor of this or that literary tendency. Reference to the demoralizing effects of the literary tendency we are discussing does not decide the question, either. Everything in this world is relative and approximate. There are people who can be demoralized even by children’s books, and who read with particular pleasure the piquant passages in the Psalms and in Solomon’s Proverbs, while there are others who become only the purer from closer knowledge of the filthy side of life. Political and social writers, lawyers, and doctors who are initiated into all the mysteries of human sinfulness are not reputed to be immoral; realistic writers are often more moral than archimandrites. And, finally, no literature can outdo real life in its cynicism, a wine-glassful won’t make a man drunk when he has already emptied a barrel.

Most of us would throw in the towel by now and agree, saying, “Dear Anton, you’re absolutely right.” But Chekhov was piqued and anticipated that Kiseleva would not have conceded yet. He went on:

2. That the world swarms with “dregs and scum” is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect, and it would therefore be strange to see none but righteous ones on earth. But to think that the duty of literature is to unearth the pearl from the refuse heap means to reject literature itself. “Artistic” literature is only “art” in so far as it paints life as it really is. Its vocation is to be absolutely true and honest. To narrow down its function to the particular task of finding “pearls” is as deadly for it as it would be to make Levitan draw a tree without including the dirty bark and the yellow leaves. I agree that “pearls” are a good thing, but then a writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough he mustn’t turn back, and, however distasteful, he must conquer his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper correspondent out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to please his readers would describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?

To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.

He would say something like this again a few years later, but to Suvorin: “You abuse me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals and ideas, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horse-thieves, say: ‘Stealing horses is an evil.’ But that has been known for ages without my saying so. Let the jury judge them; it’s my job simply to show what sort of people they are. I write: you are dealing with horse-thieves, so let me tell you that they are not beggars but well-fed people, that they are people of a special cult, and that horse-stealing is not simply theft but a passion. Of course it would be pleasant to combine art with a sermon, but for me personally it is extremely difficult and almost impossible, owing to the conditions of technique. You see, to depict horse-thieves in seven hundred lines I must all the time speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit, otherwise, if I introduce subjectivity, the image becomes blurred and the story will not be as compact as all short stories ought to be. When I write, I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.”18

To Kiseleva, he continued:

3. Writers are the children of their age, and therefore, like everybody else, must submit to the external conditions of the life of the community. Thus, they must be perfectly decent. This is the only thing we have a right to ask of realistic writers. But you say nothing against the form and executions of “Mire.”… And so, I suppose I have been decent.

4. I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write. This is due to habit and the brevity of my work. And so when I express this or that opinion about literature, I do not take myself into account.

I would make a case for Chekhov here: He freed himself of “community standards” when he wrote. He did not fight or promote existing social mores. Those were entanglements that a social or political conscience would bring—and to write at speed and to write seriously he needed to eliminate obstacles: social or moral purposes. Nonetheless, his stories are usually and naturally very moral because he continuously communed with his conscience. He and his art shared a conscience. To our and Chekhov’s amazement, Kiseleva had advocated for censorship and questioned his editor’s judgment. She also begrudged him the money!

5. You write: “If I were the editor I would have returned this feuilleton to you for your own good.” Why not go further? Why not muzzle the editors themselves who publish such stories? Why not send a reprimand to the Headquarters of the Press Department for not suppressing immoral newspapers?

The fate of literature would be sad indeed if it were at the mercy of individual views. That is the first thing. Secondly, there is no police which could consider itself competent in literary matters. I agree that one can’t dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author’s own conscience. People have been trying to discover such a police since the creation of the world, but they have found nothing better.

Here you would like me to lose one hundred and fifteen rubles and be put to shame by the editor; others, your father among them, are delighted with the story. Some send insulting letters to Suvorin, pouring abuse on the paper and on me, etc. Who, then, is right? Who is the true judge?

But “Who is right?”… I’m going to stick my neck out on this one and assert regarding “Mire” that I’m right and a “true judge.” Even if we didn’t know Chekhov was trying to hurt Dunya Efros’s feelings with “Mire,” the story’s anti-Semitic basis makes it immoral and bad.19

6. You also write, “Leave such writing to spiritless and unlucky scribblers such as Okreyts, Pince-Nez, or Aloe.” Allah forgive you if you were sincere when you wrote those words! A condescending and contemptuous tone toward humble people simply because they are humble does no credit to the heart. In literature the lower ranks are as necessary as in the army—this is what the head says, and the heart ought to say still more.

Ough! I have wearied you with my drawn-out reflections. Had I known my criticism would turn out so long I would not have written it. Please forgive me!…

He had gone through a list of six points, to his own surprise, and then characteristically wound up apologizing for having written at such length.

Over the decades, every time I read Chekhov’s reply, I shook my head with annoyance at Kiseleva. Idiot! She’s thinks she’s bigger than her britches.… I haven’t enjoyed seeing my disapproval intersect with hers, because it means that either I, too, am getting bigger than my britches in regard to Chekhov or that the energy and power of his response had its roots in his own misgivings about the story’s anti-Semitism and mockery of Efros. That is, Kiseleva’s attack on the story may have missed its target (she doesn’t object to the anti-Semitism as such) but it touched a sore spot. The story wasn’t Chekhov at his best, and his heart had been in the wrong place. She provoked him, anyway, into spelling out some of his artistic principles.

Even as I am wincing over his deflections, he then pulled himself together and restored balance and made peace with Kiseleva with jokes and jokey immodesty. This Chekhov is Chekhov. This Chekhov is as mature as humankind will ever be.

We are coming. We wanted to leave on the fifth, but… we were held up by a medical congress. Then came St. Tatyana’s Day, and on the seventeenth we’re having a party: it’s “his” [that is, Chekhov’s] name day!! It will be a dazzling ball with all sorts of Jewesses, roast turkeys and Yashenkas. After the seventeenth we’ll fix a date for the Babkino trip.20

You have read my “On the Road.” Well, how do you like my courage? I write of “intellectual” subjects and am not afraid. In Petersburg I excite a regular furor. A short time ago I discoursed upon nonresistance to evil, and also surprised the public. On New Year’s Day all the papers presented me with a compliment, and in the December number of the Russkoye Bogatstvo, in which Tolstoy writes, there is an article thirty-two pages long by Obolenskiy titled “Chekhov and Korolenko.” The fellow goes into raptures over me and proves that I am more of an artist than Korolenko. He is probably talking rot, but, anyway, I am beginning to be conscious of one merit of mine: I am the only writer who, without ever publishing anything in the thick monthlies, has merely on the strength of writing newspaper rubbish won the attention of the lop-eared critics—there has been no instance of this before. […]

I have written a play on four sheets of paper.21 It will take fifteen to twenty minutes to act. […] It is much better to write small things than big ones: they are unpretentious and successful…. What more would you have? I wrote my play in an hour and five minutes. I began another, but have not finished it, for I have no time.22

He, this man with “no time,” was writing like gangbusters.

In Petersburg, Alexander, not being able to get to Moscow for his brother’s name day, wrote him beforehand and was full of beans, catching him up on literary matters at New Times, where Alexander was now working in the evenings as a sub-editor: For one thing, Grigorovich had come to the office and excitedly greeted Alexander, mistaking him for Anton. Alexander was amused and now teased Anton, “I’m the brother of that Chekhov, who and so on, in a word, his brother. Always and everywhere I’m introduced, recommended and known primarily under this title. My individuality has fallen away. Menelaus—the husband of the queen, and I—the brother of Anton.”23

On the day after his 27th birthday, Anton answered Alexander with his usual liveliness and teasing: thanking him, first off, for sending the money owed to him from the Petersburg periodicals. He had found himself almost out of money again and was again bewildered about where it all went, and groused—in a fashion of grousing he only shared with Alexander—about the labor of his writing: “Please tell me, dear heart, when shall I live like a human being, that is, work and not be out of pocket? At present I slave and am hard up, and I ruin my reputation by having to produce trash,”24 namely the short pieces for Fragments.

Anton was probably writing Alexander in the morning, as the party was set for 1:00 P.M., and he was anticipating and dreading Leykin’s arrival: “With a sinking heart I am waiting for Leykin. He will again wear me out. I am not getting along with this Quasimodo. I refused a raise and also refused punctual delivery of contributions, and he bombards me with tearful-pompous letters, accusing me of the shrinkage of subscriptions, perfidy, duplicity, and the like. He lies, saying that he receives letters from subscribers asking why Chekhonte does no writing. He is cross with you for not contributing.”

Anton asked Alexander about his work and greeted and congratulated his nephews. Chekhov was in good spirits, despite the money worries and the pending confrontation with Leykin. He concluded in a postscript: “Besides a wife—medicine—I also have literature—a lover, but I don’t mention her, since those living without laws will be destroyed without the law.” (This concluding phrase, says Donald Rayfield, mimicked their father Pavel.)25

Can we imagine that name-day party in the red Moscow house in midwinter? Chekhov wrote his uncle Mitrofan the next day that they had had a violin and zither (played by his maternal cousin Aleksei Dolzhenko). Among the other guests at the “crowded and merry” party26 were his brother Nikolay, Levitan, and Schechtel, the old poet Palmin and the forgiving Dunya Efros.

He thanked Mitrofan for the birthday letter and explained how busy he had been. Knowing what would most impress his uncle, he told him once again about his fame and financial success: “During the holidays I was so overwhelmed with work that on Mother’s name-day I was almost dropping with exhaustion. I must tell you that in Petersburg I am now the most fashionable writer. One can see that from papers and magazines, which at the end of 1886 were taken up with me, bandied my name about, and praised me beyond my deserts. The result of this growth of my literary reputation is that I get a number of orders and invitations—and this is followed by work at high pressure and exhaustion. My work is nervous, disturbing, and involving strain. It is public and responsible, which makes it doubly hard. Every newspaper report about me agitates both me and my family…. My stories are read at public recitations, wherever I go people point at me, I am overwhelmed with acquaintances, and so on, and so on. I have not a day of peace, and feel as though I were on thorns every moment.”27

He was unabashedly proud of the man who would become his best friend: “My good acquaintance Suvorin, the editor-publisher of the New Times, will publish Pushkin’s works on January 29 [the 50th anniversary of Pushkin’s death], at a fabulously cheap price—two rubles, postage included. […] Such things can be done only by such a great and wise man as Suvorin, for he spares nothing for literature.” Chekhov was not being sarcastic. “He has five book shops, a daily paper, a monthly, a tremendous publishing concern, a fortune of a million—and all this he gained by honest, sympathetic work. He comes from Voronezh, where he was a teacher in the country school.”28 He wanted Suvorin to be admired by Mitrofan and was laying out the reasons, concluding with one that would most resonate, the pay. For his Christmas story (“On the Road”), Chekhov (knowing his uncle’s skepticism), sent the receipt showing “I was paid 111 rubles.”

He told Mitrofan (and the extended family reading or hearing the letter) that he had given up writing the humorous stories. “I’m sending you my book [Motley Stories]—a collection of my unserious fluff, which I chose not so much for reading as for remembering the beginning of my literary work…. Those I like in my book I marked in the contents with a blue pencil. The rest don’t require attention.”

Chekhov was also in a philosophical mood. He seems to have seen his uncle as someone with whom it was worth discussing serious matters. Mitrofan’s son Volodya had apparently brought up the matter of excess letters in the Russian alphabet and the matter of insincerity or even irreverence in addressing people as “great” or “exalted.” Chekhov took a surprising but convincing opposing tack: “Peoples and history have the right to call their elect by whatever name they like, without fear of offending the greatness of God or of raising man to God. The point is that we extol not the man but his virtues, the divine principle which he succeeded in developing in himself to a high degree. […] In using these titles we do not lie, do not exaggerate, but express our ecstasy, as a mother does not lie when she says to her child: ‘My golden one!’ A sense of beauty speaks in us, and beauty does not suffer the common and banal; beauty permits us to make these comparisons, which Volodya can with his mind analyze into powder, but will understand them with his heart. […] The sense of beauty in man knows no bounds, no limitations. That is why the Russian prince may be called the ‘Lord of the World’; my friend Volodya also bears that name, for names are not given for merits but in honor and in memory of remarkable men who once lived. […] in extolling man, even to God, we do not sin against love but, on the contrary, express it.”

And then Chekhov sneaked in a principle that he tried to observe in his fiction: “Don’t belittle people, that’s the main thing. It’s better to say ‘my angel’ to a person than label him ‘an idiot,’ though a person more resembles an idiot than an angel.”29 Truly, there are many idiots in Chekhov’s stories, and some of them turn out to seem more like angels.

Leykin told Chekhov sometime during the visit to Moscow that he would be recommending Chekhov for membership in the prestigious Literary Fund. A week later Leykin wrote him that he and Bilibin would be voted on as members on February 2, and then, during the second week of Lent, Chekhov would be asked to come and read “something” to the assembled group.30 Sensing Chekhov’s eagerness to fly the coop, Leykin continued trying to keep him cooped. The thought of having to speak in public, however, would fluster Chekhov for weeks.

*

Chekhov was a do-gooder. He believed that we help others through generous acts and sympathy rather than through well-meaning advice and admonitions. “The Beggar” (“Nishchiy,” January 19) is a good and probably familiar story to most Chekhov readers: A drunken beggar is apparently reformed by taking on odd jobs that a lawyer has offered him. Although Chekhov had been on a kind of campaign against lying in 1886, he makes us think twice about its absolute prohibition when the lawyer, having detected the lies in the educated beggar’s sob-story, says, “You are poor and hungry, but that does not give you the right to lie so shamelessly!”31

But doesn’t it actually give him the right? The lawyer’s sense of justice is too harsh for Chekhov:

The beggar at first defended himself, protested with oaths, then he sank into silence and hung his head, overcome with shame.

“Sir!” he said, laying his hand on his heart, “I really was… lying! I am not a student and not a village schoolmaster. All that’s mere invention! I used to be in the Russian choir, and I was turned out of it for drunkenness. But what can I do? Believe me, in God’s name, I can’t get on without lying—when I tell the truth no one will give me anything. With the truth one may die of hunger and freeze without a night’s lodging! What you say is true, I understand that, but… what am I to do?”

Even the lawyer is won over by this argument, and he offers an alternative: payment for chopping wood. Chekhov was no pushover, though. He well understood the beggar’s laziness and lack of discipline—it was quite similar to Chekhov’s brother Nikolay’s. The beggar, anyway, agrees to the work:

It was evident from his demeanor that he had consented to go and chop wood, not because he was hungry and wanted to earn money, but simply from shame and amour propre, because he had been taken at his word. It was clear, too, that he was suffering from the effects of vodka, that he was unwell, and felt not the faintest inclination to work.

The lawyer hires him for monthly work. Eventually the lawyer moves away. Two years later he and the ex-beggar run into each other at the ticket window of a theater. The beggar is respectably dressed and has a real job. The proud lawyer learns now, however, the true story of the beggar’s remarkable conversion:

“I used to come to you to chop wood and she [the cook] would begin: ‘Ah, you drunkard! You God-forsaken man! And yet death does not take you!’ and then she would sit opposite me, lamenting, looking into my face and wailing: ‘You unlucky fellow! You have no gladness in this world, and in the next you will burn in hell, poor drunkard! You poor sorrowful creature!’ and she always went on in that style, you know. How often she upset herself, and how many tears she shed over me I can’t tell you. But what affected me most—she chopped the wood for me! Do you know, sir, I never chopped a single log for you—she did it all! How it was she saved me, how it was I changed, looking at her, and gave up drinking, I can’t explain. I only know that what she said and the noble way she behaved brought about a change in my soul, and I shall never forget it.”

I wonder if Chekhov had seen or was only hoping to see this change in his older brothers? Perhaps, he had decided, all the righteous scolding wouldn’t do as much for Alexander or Nikolay as a self-conversion inspired by someone’s unexpected kindness.

*

The heaviest of this month’s heavy stories, “Enemies” (“Vragi,” January 20), is Chekhov’s greatest and most disturbing story of the winter. Where did it come from? He had probably just finished “Enemies” on January 14 when he was responding to Kiseleva’s letter objecting to the contents of “Mire.”

Before I started to reread it again, what I remembered is…

… a doctor and his wife are grieving. Their young son, their lone child, has just died. They are devastated.

Someone arrives to ask for the doctor’s services.

The doctor explains the situation.

The someone, a landowner, understands but insists that his wife has a serious illness and requires help right away.

The doctor explains again why he can’t leave his wife right now.

The man insists, and threatens to report him for not doing his duty.

The estate is “not far,” he says and the miserable doctor gives in.

They get there and the landowner finds a letter from his wife that she has run away with her lover.

He is wretched and dramatic and wants sympathy, and the doctor blows up at him.

They say terrible things at each other.

The landowner sends the doctor home in his carriage.

Both of them are out of their minds with hatred of each other, which Chekhov directly points at and explains that both of them, in any other circumstances, would have been decent and sympathetic to the other.

My sympathy is not at all with the landowner: So what? His wife left him.

The doctor and his wife—the tragedy of their son’s death is the darkest of clouds that will never leave them. They will never recover. They will live but not recover.

The landowner? He has money. He’ll remarry and maybe to someone who loves him and he’ll think of himself as better off.

Now I’ll read it in Russian. Why? If I say, “to go as far as possible as I can into the story,” I would be skeptical of my claim. Will I really take in any more of it through Russian than I do in English?

And why focus on this story?

It’s not characteristic of Chekhov, is it?

It’s not uncharacteristic, how about that?

The anger, the fury, the disgusting hatred the enemies fling at each other—had Chekhov felt it or only witnessed it?

Before starting the Russian, I check the “Variants” page in the back of the volume and see that Chekhov made almost no changes in it after its initial publication. Just a few rephrasings…

I’ve now read the Russian. It is so full of surprises. I did not misrepresent the plot in my memory above, but the effects and surprises abound.

The first paragraph is two sentences, but they contain so much; they do what everyone who ever wrote a short story wants to do in the opening paragraph. It’s tempting to say the beginning is too polished. It’s the kind of beginning, it’s better to say, that everyone would want to be able to write. Like a story by Heinrich von Kleist: at the moment the story starts, you know the dramatic situation and the setting and the impending next action. (I will be quoting Constance Garnett’s translation rather than my herky-jerky reading of the Russian.)

Between nine and ten on a dark September evening the only son of the district doctor, Kirilov, a child of six, called Andrey, died of diphtheria. Just as the doctor’s wife sank on her knees by the dead child’s bedside and was overwhelmed by the first rush of despair there came a sharp ring at the bell in the entry.

I’ve already summarized the story, so let me just comment where surprises come up or there are interesting details I didn’t note. I didn’t remember, for instance, that Dr. Kirilov and the estate-owner Abogin have met once before. They’re in the dark of the house, however, and can’t see each other’s faces.

I forgot that when the doctor tells him his son has just now died, Abogin reacts like a human being:

“Is it possible!” whispered Abogin, stepping back a pace. “My God, at what an unlucky moment I have come! A wonderfully unhappy day… wonderfully. What a coincidence…. It’s as though it were on purpose!”

Abogin took hold of the door-handle and bowed his head. He was evidently hesitating and did not know what to do—whether to go away or to continue entreating the doctor.

“Listen,” he said fervently, catching hold of Kirilov’s sleeve. “I well understand your position! God is my witness that I am ashamed of attempting at such a moment to intrude on your attention, but what am I to do? Only think, to whom can I go? There is no other doctor here, you know. For God’s sake come! I am not asking you for myself…. I am not the patient!”

I hated Abogin in my memory, but there’s no reason to hate him now (or, as Chekhov would argue, ever). I understand his argument: he is asking a favor for someone else; he wouldn’t ask it for himself.

But Dr. Kirilov doesn’t take in Abogin’s words! He turns and walks away, first into the drawing room and then into the bedroom. Chekhov reveals in telling details the short recent history of the boy’s diphtheria.

Here in the bedroom reigned a dead silence. Everything to the smallest detail was eloquent of the storm that had been passed through, of exhaustion, and everything was at rest. A candle standing among a crowd of bottles, boxes, and pots on a stool and a big lamp on the chest of drawers threw a brilliant light over all the room.

Chekhov, like his hero Tolstoy, lays out very simple phrasings at the most dramatic moments: “On the bed near the window lay a boy with open eyes and a look of wonder on his face.” As I am reading it in Russian, I am not translating but reading; it flows, unrearranged, like this, “In bed, by lone window, lay boy with open eyes and amazed expression on his face.”32

Chekhov notes the smell of the room:

The bedclothes, the rags and bowls, the splashes of water on the floor, the little paint-brushes and spoons thrown down here and there, the white bottle of lime water, the very air, heavy and stifling—were all hushed and seemed plunged in repose.

But he discreetly (considerately) avoids letting us stare at the doctor’s wife.

Having fully described the death-room and the parents, Chekhov becomes lyrical. I had forgotten the editorializing, which doesn’t usually come up for comment when people write or talk about Chekhov. We assume that he is always letting the actions and events speak for themselves, which is an explicit credo of his writing-advice, but in this story and in other great stories, he occasionally steps forward to comment:

That repellent horror which is thought of when we speak of death was absent from the room. In the numbness of everything, in the mother’s attitude, in the indifference on the doctor’s face there was something that attracted and touched the heart, that subtle, almost elusive beauty of human sorrow which men will not for a long time learn to understand and describe, and which it seems only music can convey. There was a feeling of beauty, too, in the austere stillness. Kirilov and his wife were silent and not weeping, as though besides the bitterness of their loss they were conscious, too, of all the tragedy of their position; just as once their youth had passed away, so now together with this boy their right to have children had gone for ever to all eternity! The doctor was forty-four, his hair was gray and he looked like an old man; his faded and invalid wife was thirty-five. Andrey was not merely the only child, but also the last child.

I can imagine a criticism: Chekhov has set up the situation too neatly; the couple is in absolute despair. There is no possible consolation, no possible new baby to be had.

The doctor is forty-four and Chekhov will be forty-four when he dies. His wife Olga Knipper will be thirty-five when he dies. And they will have been childless. That’s just a coincidence. Anyway, the doctor here is not dying.

We find out that Kirilov has forgotten about Abogin, who is waiting for him. Abogin thinks Kirilov has been changing his clothes in order to come with him.

Kirilov is bewildered to discover Abogin is still there and tells him he certainly is not and won’t come with him. He can’t leave his wife. Because of the disease their servants have been sent away for a time, and if he left she would be alone.

Abogin is persistent. Kirilov tells him he knows it’s his legal duty to help him, but he just can’t. Abogin says he won’t hold him to his legal duty, but he is annoying in his manner and words. He ends his argument by saying: “You were just speaking of the death of your son. Who should understand my horror if not you?”

And now something happens that reverses Kirilov’s decision. Chekhov steps forward again to editorialize an interesting explanation that contains one of Chekhov’s rules of writing, which I have italicized:

Abogin’s voice quivered with emotion; that quiver and his tone were far more persuasive than his words. Abogin was sincere, but it was remarkable that whatever he said his words sounded stilted, soulless, and inappropriately flowery, and even seemed an outrage on the atmosphere of the doctor’s home and on the woman who was somewhere dying. He felt this himself, and so, afraid of not being understood, did his utmost to put softness and tenderness into his voice so that the sincerity of his tone might prevail if his words did not. As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial.

This should remind us that Chekhov is continually showing us conversations running on different tracks and why he is suspicious of speeches.

But maybe it also shows us some of his own medical experience. He was often run down and exhausted, suffering from minor complaints and also the more harrowing symptoms of tuberculosis. He had daily office hours, but he saw anyone who knocked at the door for medical care, and he did house calls when he had to. Perhaps he had noticed this too; after he had resolved not to go out, someone’s shaky voice or simple unaffected argument got to him and persuaded him to go.

Kirilov stood in silence. When Abogin uttered a few more phrases concerning the noble calling of a doctor, self-sacrifice, and so on, the doctor asked sullenly: “Is it far?”

“Something like eight or nine miles. I have capital horses, doctor! I give you my word of honor that I will get you there and back in an hour. Only one hour.”

These words had more effect on Kirilov than the appeals to humanity or the noble calling of the doctor. He thought a moment and said with a sigh: “Very well, let us go!”

Again, Chekhov has us think of those everyday appeals we all hear, but that what motivates us to comply is a surprise, even to us. As they set out in Abogin’s carriage toward his estate, Kirilov takes in the dark world, and the dark world takes in him. The two protagonists have not yet fully taken in each other, however; they have not seen each other in full light.

And why is this? What does this show us about how Chekhov was imagining and creating the story? It’s important that neither man quite sees the other as something besides a role: doctor and patient-advocate. There are only a few particular details they have picked up about each other:

It was dark out of doors, though lighter than in the entry. The tall, stooping figure of the doctor, with his long, narrow beard and aquiline nose, stood out distinctly in the darkness. Abogin’s big head and the little student’s cap that barely covered it could be seen now as well as his pale face. The scarf showed white only in front, behind it was hidden by his long hair.

I had forgotten there’s a driver; there is, and Abogin encourages him to drive as fast as possible.

Abogin, whose words are so annoying, manages to keep himself from talking most of the way.

But on that way, with few visual impressions, there are smells and sounds. It’s September: the riders can smell the “dampness and mushrooms.” Unusually in these years, Chekhov does not tie the events of this story to the time of year in which the story is being published, which is the middle of winter. On the other hand, Chekhov had attended that medical conference the week before he began writing the story and had listened to various speakers, including one about the difficult working conditions for doctors in Russia and the lack of accessible health care.33 Chekhov would have talked to more doctors than usual and heard work-life stories. “The life of a rural doctor in the 19th century was hard and unremitting, and required great physical and emotional stamina,” writes Dr. John Coope. “As Astrov [in Uncle Vanya] relates to Marina, the old nurse: ‘On my feet from morning to night with never a moment’s peace, and then lying under the bedclothes afraid of being dragged out to a patient. All the time we’ve known each other I haven’t had one day off.’ ”34

These characters take in the impressions each in his own way: “… the crows, awakened by the noise of the wheels, stirred among the foliage and uttered prolonged plaintive cries as though they knew the doctor’s son was dead and that Abogin’s wife was ill.”

When Abogin breaks the silence, we understand why he says it and why Kirilov would say nothing in reply:

“It’s an agonizing state! One never loves those who are near one so much as when one is in danger of losing them.”

Not because of Abogin’s words but because the carriage crosses a river does Kirilov come to—realizing he really should not have left his wife on her own.

But it’s too late. They’ve come too far to go back. They continue on their way through the dimness.

In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape….

Again, though separate from each other, unrealizing of the other, the same mood has descended on them. Or is it mostly Chekhov’s mood?

Abogin anticipates being crushed, while Kirilov already has been. Arriving at the house, Abogin says: “ ‘If anything happens… I shall not survive it.’ ”

They enter the quiet house:

Now the doctor and Abogin, who till then had been in darkness, could see each other clearly. The doctor was tall and stooped, was untidily dressed and not good-looking. There was an unpleasantly harsh, morose, and unfriendly look about his lips, thick as a negro’s, his aquiline nose, and listless, apathetic eyes. His unkempt head and sunken temples, the premature grayness of his long, narrow beard through which his chin was visible, the pale gray hue of his skin and his careless, uncouth manners—the harshness of all this was suggestive of years of poverty, of ill fortune, of weariness with life and with men. Looking at his frigid figure one could hardly believe that this man had a wife, that he was capable of weeping over his child.

We see why Abogin doesn’t fully sympathize with Kirilov’s tragedy: he can’t see the suffering of the doctor, which has been internalized. The doctor is someone he needs but is not quite fully realized as a person to him. On the flip side:

Abogin presented a very different appearance. He was a thick-set, sturdy-looking, fair man with a big head and large, soft features; he was elegantly dressed in the very latest fashion. In his carriage, his closely buttoned coat, his long hair, and his face there was a suggestion of something generous, leonine; he walked with his head erect and his chest squared, he spoke in an agreeable baritone, and there was a shade of refined almost feminine elegance in the manner in which he took off his scarf and smoothed his hair. Even his paleness and the childlike terror with which he looked up at the stairs as he took off his coat did not detract from his dignity nor diminish the air of sleekness, health, and aplomb which characterized his whole figure.

Kirilov perceives the vitality—the unattractive vitality of Abogin. Why should he have so much life? But he does! He has so much vitality and takes it for granted. It’s appalling! There is a limitation in this view, but under the circumstances it is too much to ask of Kirilov to appreciate Abogin as a complete human being.

The first time reading this story, or the first time coming back to it after a decade or two, a reader of Chekhov might not anticipate or remember what happens next—but Chekhov keeps us so much on our toes that we feel anything could happen. Abogin is prepared for one kind of tragedy: She has died! But the lack of bustle in the house seems to preclude that possibility.

“There is nobody and no sound,” he said going up the stairs. “There is no commotion. God grant all is well.”

He has the doctor wait in the fancy drawing room. (I wonder why he wouldn’t have the doctor rush up the stairs with him?) Kirilov, not letting himself think, takes in the details of the room. Eventually, “Somewhere far away in the adjoining rooms someone uttered a loud exclamation…” We don’t know and Kirilov doesn’t know what’s happened, but we know we’ll soon find out.

Five minutes later:

In the doorway stood Abogin, but he was not the same as when he had gone out. The look of sleekness and refined elegance had disappeared—his face, his hands, his attitude were contorted by a revolting expression of something between horror and agonizing physical pain. His nose, his lips, his moustache, all his features were moving and seemed trying to tear themselves from his face, his eyes looked as though they were laughing with agony….

Abogin took a heavy stride into the drawing room, bent forward, moaned, and shook his fists.

“She has deceived me,” he cried, with a strong emphasis on the second syllable of the verb. “Deceived me, gone away. She fell ill and sent me for the doctor only to run away with that clown Papchinsky! My God!”

And Abogin goes on and on, in naked agony before the doctor. He has been transformed by his grief—it is grief, though on a different order, almost anyone would say, from that of Kirilov. Chekhov does not say this. And of course we sympathize with Abogin, to a point. We sympathize as humans for someone genuinely suffering, but if we imagine being in Kirilov’s shoes, comparing griefs, Abogin’s would seem mockable.

Abogin took a heavy step toward the doctor, held out his soft white fists in his face, and shaking them went on yelling:

“Gone away! Deceived me! But why this deception? My God! My God! What need of this dirty, scoundrelly trick, this diabolical, snakish farce? What have I done to her? Gone away!”

Tears gushed from his eyes. He turned on one foot and began pacing up and down the drawing room. Now in his short coat, his fashionable narrow trousers which made his legs look disproportionately slim, with his big head and long mane he was extremely like a lion.

I had misread the story. Kirilov does not understand what Abogin has been saying. At the beginning of the story, Chekhov told us: “Kirilov listened and said nothing, as though he did not understand Russian.” He is in that state again.

A gleam of curiosity came into the apathetic face of the doctor. He got up and looked at Abogin.

“Excuse me, where is the patient?” he said.

“The patient! The patient!” cried Abogin, laughing, crying, and still brandishing his fists. “She is not ill, but accursed! The baseness! The vileness! The devil himself could not have imagined anything more loathsome! She sent me off that she might run away with a buffoon, a dull-witted clown, an Alphonse! Oh God, better she had died! I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!”

Now Kirilov gets it. Now it all sinks in. He should or could have just walked out the door back to the carriage. Maybe that is what Chekhov would have done. But Chekhov shows us why this man, about whom we know little beyond his strained life and the brand-new tragedy that marks the end of the rest of his life, instead makes a stand that brings about his loss of self-control:

The doctor drew himself up. His eyes blinked and filled with tears, his narrow beard began moving to right and to left together with his jaw.

“Allow me to ask what’s the meaning of this?” he asked, looking around him with curiosity. “My child is dead, my wife is in grief alone in the whole house…. I myself can scarcely stand up, I have not slept for three nights…. And here I am forced to play a part in some vulgar farce, to play the part of a stage property! I don’t… don’t understand it!”

But Abogin is not listening to him:

Abogin unclenched one fist, flung a crumpled note on the floor, and stamped on it as though it were an insect he wanted to crush.

“And I didn’t see, didn’t understand,” he said through his clenched teeth, brandishing one fist before his face with an expression as though someone had trodden on his corns. “I did not notice that he came every day! I did not notice that he came today in a closed carriage! What did he come in a closed carriage for? And I did not see it! Noodle!”

“I don’t understand…” muttered the doctor. “Why, what’s the meaning of it? Why, it’s an outrage on personal dignity, a mockery of human suffering! It’s incredible…. It’s the first time in my life I have had such an experience!”

With the dull surprise of a man who has only just realized that he has been bitterly insulted the doctor shrugged his shoulders, flung wide his arms, and not knowing what to do or to say sank helplessly into a chair.

Abogin, privileged, self-consumed, human, grieves for himself and doesn’t hear or perceive the man to whom he is pouring out his heart.

“If you have ceased to love me and love another—so be it; but why this deceit, why this vulgar, treacherous trick?” Abogin said in a tearful voice. “What is the object of it? And what is there to justify it? And what have I done to you? Listen, doctor,” he said hotly, going up to Kirilov. “You have been the involuntary witness of my misfortune and I am not going to conceal the truth from you. I swear that I loved the woman, loved her devotedly, like a slave! I have sacrificed everything for her; I have quarrelled with my own people, I have given up the service and music, I have forgiven her what I could not have forgiven my own mother or sister… I have never looked askance at her…. I have never gainsaid her in anything. Why this deception? I do not demand love, but why this loathsome duplicity? If she did not love me, why did she not say so openly, honestly, especially as she knows my views on the subject?…”

With tears in his eyes, trembling all over, Abogin opened his heart to the doctor with perfect sincerity. He spoke warmly, pressing both hands on his heart, exposing the secrets of his private life without the faintest hesitation, and even seemed to be glad that at last these secrets were no longer pent up in his breast.

Amazing! Abogin, in his grief, loses sight of Kirilov’s. Chekhov does something no other writer in the world would do: he admires Abogin’s “perfect sincerity.” Abogin has opened himself up: This is a quality. We understand why. But Chekhov also has us standing (now sitting) there in Kirilov’s shoes. Abogin’s confession is out of place. It is a burden on someone carrying his own burden. Chekhov reflects:

If he had talked in this way for an hour or two, and opened his heart, he would undoubtedly have felt better. Who knows, if the doctor had listened to him and had sympathized with him like a friend, he might perhaps, as often happens, have reconciled himself to his trouble without protest, without doing anything needless and absurd…. But what happened was quite different.

And as all professionals know, yes, if we do our duty, if we do not involve our own troubles with those sharing theirs with us, all will go more smoothly. We can dislike them later at our leisure, but not now, not now. Now we must suffer them and say and do the right things. If Kirilov could have viewed Abogin as a patient… But that’s unreasonable to ask of him, given his grief. And Abogin, taking for granted his rights as a patient, doesn’t understand why Kirilov can’t keep performing his role as doctor. He only sees him as a doctor.

While Abogin was speaking the outraged doctor perceptibly changed. The indifference and wonder on his face gradually gave way to an expression of bitter resentment, indignation, and anger. The features of his face became even harsher, coarser, and more unpleasant. When Abogin held out before his eyes the photograph of a young woman with a handsome face as cold and expressionless as a nun’s and asked him whether, looking at that face, one could conceive that it was capable of duplicity, the doctor suddenly flew out, and with flashing eyes said, rudely rapping out each word:

“What are you telling me all this for? I have no desire to hear it! I have no desire to!” he shouted and brought his fist down on the table. “I don’t want your vulgar secrets! Damnation take them! Don’t dare to tell me of such vulgar doings! Do you consider that I have not been insulted enough already? That I am a flunky whom you can insult without restraint? Is that it?”

Abogin staggered back from Kirilov and stared at him in amazement.

“Why did you bring me here?” the doctor went on, his beard quivering. “If you are so puffed up with good living that you go and get married and then act a farce like this, how do I come in? What have I to do with your love affairs? Leave me in peace! Go on squeezing money out of the poor in your gentlemanly way. Make a display of humane ideas, play (the doctor looked sideways at the violoncello case) play the bassoon and the trombone, grow as fat as capons, but don’t dare to insult personal dignity! If you cannot respect it, you might at least spare it your attention!”

Abogin is us, in our amazement at someone else’s blow-up—especially when the blow-up is directed at us:

“Excuse me, what does all this mean?” Abogin asked, flushing red.

“It means that it’s base and low to play with people like this! I am a doctor; you look upon doctors and people generally who work and don’t stink of perfume and prostitution as your menials and mauvais ton; well, you may look upon them so, but no one has given you the right to treat a man who is suffering as a stage property!”

“How dare you say that to me!” Abogin said quietly, and his face began working again, and this time unmistakably from anger.

“No, how dared you, knowing of my sorrow, bring me here to listen to these vulgarities!” shouted the doctor, and he again banged on the table with his fist. “Who has given you the right to make a mockery of another man’s sorrow?”

Chekhov won’t let me be settled in my complete sympathy with Kirilov, even though we understand his anger at and contempt for Abogin. Chekhov himself insisted on preserving his dignity as a man, as a doctor. He resented or mocked superiority in manner or treatment. But he also didn’t let himself blow up.

Is this why I find the story so compelling, so powerful? That it doesn’t let me sit in my justification of anger and hatred, as Kirilov does? Kirilov will hate this fool Abogin forever, perhaps, but there will be a feeling of shame, too, in his recollection. Chekhov won’t let me have complacency in my hatred. It will wear at me until, perhaps, it arrives at Chekhov’s level of understanding. All the same, understanding doesn’t mean sympathy. Abogin’s a plump, self-satisfied dope. His heart is broken, but he sees his undisguised grief as its own excuse. Why shouldn’t he wail and carry on? As Chekhov says, he would have eventually, probably, come around, and would have eventually, probably, weighed Kirilov’s grief and circumstances with his own. And he would have thought: “My God! Compared to him, I am very lucky. I can start over. I can find someone my family will love and respect. I will be free. I will have children.”

But Abogin won’t have time to do that, now that Kirilov has blown up at him.

“You have taken leave of your senses,” shouted Abogin. “It is ungenerous. I am intensely unhappy myself and… and…”

“Unhappy!” said the doctor, with a smile of contempt. “Don’t utter that word, it does not concern you. The spendthrift who cannot raise a loan calls himself unhappy, too. The capon, sluggish from overfeeding, is unhappy, too. Worthless people!”

“Sir, you forget yourself,” shrieked Abogin. “For saying things like that… people are thrashed! Do you understand?”

Abogin says everything wrong. He scarcely restrains himself. He is a “gentleman,” and suggests that Kirilov is a nobody, one of the “people,” someone Abogin feels he would have the right to “thrash.” He even seems to think much of himself for offering to pay Kirilov for his time, but that, too, is, as Kirilov feels, insulting.

Finally:

Abogin and the doctor stood face to face, and in their wrath continued flinging undeserved insults at each other.

So now I don’t understand my previous misunderstandings of the story. This standoff reminds me of the beginning of The Iliad, Achilles and Agamemnon, throwing their furious words at each other, ready to resort to swords. Homer understands both men and doesn’t let us pick sides: What’s terrible is that two men who are nominally on the same side would love to kill the other.

Chekhov explains:

I believe that never in their lives, even in delirium, had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both. The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

Chekhov even gives us the long perspective on their lives. They never did worse than what we have just witnessed. We understand why they fight in this ugly way. And somehow Chekhov realizes in this story, or shows us what he has before realized, about “the egoism of the unhappy.” And what an unhappy family he arose from.

But now to the ending. The doctor demands that Abogin send him back home, and Abogin orders that to be done, but he is so beside himself that he screams at and threatens the driver.

To my surprise (once again), Abogin, the bigger offender, shows Kirilov and us that he can pull himself together:

Abogin and the doctor remained in silence waiting for the carriage. The first regained his expression of sleekness and his refined elegance. He paced up and down the room, tossed his head elegantly, and was evidently meditating on something. His anger had not cooled, but he tried to appear not to notice his enemy…. The doctor stood, leaning with one hand on the edge of the table, and looked at Abogin with that profound and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt only to be found in the eyes of sorrow and indigence when they are confronted with well-nourished comfort and elegance.

Robust health! As a doctor, Kirilov sees and appreciates it—wasted on Abogin! And again, Chekhov argues about why the hatred and spite have been foolhardy:

All the way home the doctor thought not of his wife, nor of his Andrey, but of Abogin and the people in the house he had just left. His thoughts were unjust and inhumanly cruel. He condemned Abogin and his wife and Papchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued light among sweet perfumes, and all the way home he hated and despised them till his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning those people took shape in his mind.

Chekhov must have argued with someone about this. He must have known a doctor who had justified himself this way. This is a reaction story. Chekhov shows us that for his part he sympathizes with both sides, and that there were alternatives, and that our self-justifying hatreds cost us:

Time will pass and Kirilov’s sorrow will pass, but that conviction, unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain in the doctor’s mind to the grave.

Chekhov had multiple opportunities to revise this story. He did not. He tacked on the moral and left it there, forever.

*

I know of no classic Russian fiction so mocking of Germans as an episode in Crime and Punishment, where Dostoevsky delights in Marmeladov’s landlady’s grammatical and vocabulary errors:

“Listen to the owl!” Katerina Ivanovna whispered at once, her good-humor almost restored, “she meant to say he kept his hands in his pockets, but she said he put his hands in people’s pockets. (Cough-cough.) And have you noticed, Rodion Romanovich, that all these Petersburg foreigners, the Germans especially, are all stupider than we! Can you fancy anyone of us telling how ‘Karl from the chemist’s’ ‘pierced his heart from fear’ and that the idiot, instead of punishing the cabman, ‘clasped his hands and wept, and much begged.’ Ah, the fool! And you know she fancies it’s very touching and does not suspect how stupid she is!”35

Every time I read it, I blush for my clumsy, lousy Russian.

Chekhov was nicer. There are, however, a few mockings of “foreign” accents, including unfortunately of Jewish ones, and Chekhov regularly mocked his own incapacity with foreign languages, though he occasionally used common French, Latin, and German phrases. “The Good German” (“Dobriy Nemets,” January 24) is about Ivan Karlovich Schwei, a German immigrant with a good job in a steel mill who has married a poor Russian woman. He speaks like so: “Cabman, you good cabman! I love Russian peoples! You are a Russian man, my wife is a Russian man, and I am a Russian man.”36 Toiling away in Tver, he misses his wife in Moscow and returns home unannounced to see her and discovers a man in their bed. After writing an angry ungrammatical letter to her parents, he learns that his admirably frugal wife has rented out their former bedroom to a locksmith and his wife. Chekhov has fun with the German’s language, but Ivan Karlovich’s challenges with Russian have nothing to do with his honest mistake.

After that light fare, Chekhov ended his very dark January publications with “Darkness” (“Temnota,” January 26): A peasant begs a doctor to intervene for the peasant’s convict brother to get him released. The doctor can do nothing about that, which the peasant, dim and frustrated, has trouble understanding. “What right have I?” asks the exasperated doctor. “Am I a jailer or what? They brought him to the hospital for me to treat him, but I have as much right to let him out as I have to put you in prison, silly fellow!” As the story goes on to its hopeless end, all of Chekhov’s sympathy is directed to the convict’s brother, whose family suffers the relentless and incomprehensible rules of the Russian justice system.

Chekhov felt obliged on January 26 to write Leykin to thank him for the payment for “The Good German” and offer excuses again for not writing for Fragments. “My whole body is achy and weak. I need to work, but it’s not working, and everything I write is bad.”37 He had gone to the famous doctor Zakharin’s ninety-minute lecture on syphilis that day and standing there had exhausted him. “Concerning a trip to Petersburg the second week of Lent, I don’t know what to tell you.” He fretted that after forty or fifty lines of reading aloud at the Literary Fund ceremony his voice would become dry and hissy. Leykin shrugged at that but let him know that there would be a free round-trip ticket for him.

Chekhov also wrote to Alexander that day, sighing, “It’s probable we’ll see each other the second week of Lent. […] I’m sick, living boringly, but I’m starting to write lousily, or I’m tired and can’t follow Levitan’s example of turning the pictures upside down and averting my critical eye…”38

Alexander replied a few days later, telling him that he was constantly hearing praise about Anton, that, for example, “You have the divine spark in you and that they expect from you—what exactly they expect they don’t know, but they expect it.”39

At the end of the month, Chekhov, still anxious about the speech that Leykin expected him to make in Petersburg, wrote and requested Alexander to ask around and find out if it would be good after all for him to go ahead and do it.40 Fortunately, he never had to, as the event was canceled.

February 1887

Creativity—that state when ideas seem to organize themselves into a swift, tightly woven flow, with a feeling of gorgeous clarity and meaning emerging—seems to me physiologically distinctive, and I think if we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring. At such times, when I am writing, thoughts seem to organize themselves in spontaneous succession and to clothe themselves instantly in appropriate words. I feel I can bypass or transcend much of my own personality, my neuroses. It is at once not me and the innermost part of me, certainly the best part of me.

—Dr. Oliver Sacks, “The Creative Self”1

Chekhov’s money problems were not disappearing. At the beginning of February Anton was scolding Alexander about a missing ruble or two in the last dispatch.2

On February 2nd, both Alexander and Leykin wrote Chekhov to let him know he had been officially elected to the Literary Fund.

“Polinka” (“Polin’ka,” February 2) is one of Chekhov’s few love stories of 1887. It is a model of simple design. Polinka is a dressmaker who has recently left behind her admirer, the fabric shopman Nikolay Timofeich, for a student of medicine or law. She has come to the store to order materials she and her mother need for their clients’ dresses and to wonder about the cessation of Nikolay’s friendly visits. Because he is working, they must discuss their relationship while she shops:

“The black’s from eighty kopecks and the colored from two and a half rubles. I shall never come and see you again,” Nikolay Timofeich adds in an undertone.

“Why?”

“Why? It’s very simple. You must understand that yourself. Why should I distress myself? It’s a queer business! Do you suppose it’s a pleasure to me to see that student carrying on with you? I see it all and I understand. Ever since autumn he’s been hanging about you and you go for a walk with him almost every day; and when he is with you, you gaze at him as though he were an angel. You are in love with him; there’s no one to beat him in your eyes. Well, all right, then, it’s no good talking.”

Polinka remains dumb and moves her finger on the counter in embarrassment.

“I see it all,” the shopman goes on. “What inducement have I to come and see you? I’ve got some pride. It’s not everyone likes to play gooseberry. What was it you asked for?”

“Mamma told me to get a lot of things, but I’ve forgotten. I want some feather trimming, too.”

“What kind would you like?”3

Chekhov describes a situation that cannot be happily resolved. What Nikolay wants, he cannot have. What Polinka wants, Nikolay’s former regard and friendship, she cannot have. Neither wants to be miserable and both are, and we understand it perfectly and sympathize with both:

“I want… I want… size forty-eight centimetres. Only she wanted one, lined… with real whalebone… I must talk to you, Nikolay Timofeich. Come today!”

“Talk? What about? There’s nothing to talk about.”

“You are the only person who… cares about me, and I’ve no one to talk to but you.”

“These are not reed or steel, but real whalebone…. What is there for us to talk about? It’s no use talking…. You are going for a walk with him today, I suppose?”

“Yes; I… I am.”

“Then what’s the use of talking? Talk won’t help…. You are in love, aren’t you?”

“Yes…” Polinka whispers hesitatingly, and big tears gush from her eyes.

Though in tears during this painful interaction, Polinka will no doubt be happy when she takes her afternoon walk with the student.

There are no happy love stories in Chekhov’s fiction, but there are plenty of comic ones, and of them this is one of his most touching.

Pushkin, on the other hand, did write at least one happy love story (“The Amateur Peasant-Girl”), and the biggest publishing sensation of 1887 was Suvorin’s publishing company’s edition of Pushkin’s collected works. Even today, Pushkin’s works unapologetically include his unfinished works, marvelous drafts of what would have or could have been marvelous complete pieces. Pushkin really was lazy. More brilliant, an even greater writer of short fiction than Chekhov, but a hundred times lazier! The publication of this edition marked the fiftieth anniversary of his death from injuries that he sustained in a duel over his wife’s honor.

On the 3rd or 4th of February Anton wrote to ask Alexander to get him twenty copies of the Pushkin edition, as they had all been sold out in Moscow. But the publication was so popular that Alexander discovered Petersburg’s booksellers were also sold out. Chekhov would soon learn that not even Suvorin himself could get Chekhov any copies for now.

Having written a Fragments story, “Inadvertence,” Chekhov was proud of himself when he wrote Leykin on the 8th: “The whole day I was interrupted writing it, but all the same I wrote it…. I’m beginning to get back to normal and I’m working more regularly than in January.” It was the middle of winter, but, wrote Chekhov, “It smells of spring. You’ll soon leave for Tosna, but where I’ll be in summer is unknown to me.”

Why he didn’t want to return to Babkino and the Kiselevs’ estate is not clear, but when alternatives did not pan out, the family ended up there in May anyway.

*

How many drunks are there in Chekhov? No one, as far as I know, has counted, but they are not rare. In “Drunk” (“P’yanie,” February 9), a rich, self-loathing man and his lawyer are dining at a restaurant after a ball. The rich man asks rhetorically: “Why is it […] that people don’t invent some other pleasure besides drunkenness and debauchery?” He drunkenly insults the waitstaff, the musicians, and his companion. He wretchedly declares that he hates his wife:

“What for?”

“I don’t know myself! I’ve only been married two years. I married as you know for love, and now I hate her like a mortal enemy, like this parasite here, saving your presence. And there is no cause, no sort of cause! When she sits by me, eats, or says anything, my whole soul boils, I can scarcely restrain myself from being rude to her. It’s something one can’t describe. To leave her or tell her the truth is utterly impossible because it would be a scandal, and living with her is worse than hell for me. I can’t stay at home! I spend my days at business and in the restaurants and spend my nights in dissipation. Come, how is one to explain this hatred? She is not an ordinary woman, but handsome, clever, quiet.”4

That he hates his wife is not the cause of his wretchedness, seemingly, just a byproduct of it.

Nothing satisfies him. He goes on to admit that once he got the idea into his head that his wife married him for his money, he could not shake it: “I keep fancying I am being flattered for my money. I trust no one! I am a difficult man, my boy, very difficult!” He is proud of his obnoxiousness, and his pride is that he knows it and announces it. The most important thing about “Drunk” is that the director Josef Heifitz included two events from it in his superb 1960 film version of Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.”

Despite his unhappiness with Maria Kiseleva’s criticism of “Mire,” Chekhov followed through, as he said he would, in submitting her story “Larka-Gerkules” to Suvorin on February 10 for New Times. He was still humble, careful, and polite with Suvorin, which means they weren’t quite friends yet. He explained in apology about his own work that “All January I was sick, lazy and wrote nonsense.”5 He told him he was planning to go south at the end of March. “There, I think, the work will go with more liveliness.” He added that his friends and acquaintances were seeking out the Pushkin edition and so he had been asked by them to ask Suvorin about it. By the end of 1887, Chekhov would be writing Suvorin more directly and comfortably and amusingly.

He rather contorted himself when he wrote to old Grigorovich on February 12 about a story of Grigorovich’s that he had just read in the Petersburg Gazette, “Karelin’s Dream” (a reviewer had called it “irreproachable”).6 “Karelin’s Dream” was presented as a section of a novel, Petersburg of Past Time, but Grigorovich never completed the novel. There are no English translations of “Karelin’s Dream,” so (reminding myself that this is one of the reasons I learned Russian), I read the excerpt that Chekhov had read and began a makeshift translation.

Chekhov’s restrained, all-too-careful questioning observations on it suggest that Grigorovich’s pre-cinematic cinematic representations of Karelin’s dream made Chekhov wonder if he himself was representing dreams correctly. Because if what Grigorovich had written was right and true to actual dreams, then Chekhov’s dreams were not. The critic Gleb Struve notes that in the midst of “Karelin’s Dream,” “the reader almost forgets that all this is supposed to be happening in a dream.”7 In the letter, Chekhov ventured into a discussion of dreams, an area where his own representations, from which he demanded faithfulness to psychology and physiology, excelled.

Chekhov dashed off letters, but he didn’t dash off this one; he made himself copy it over from a rough, heavily edited draft.8 Chekhov dipped a toe in and then splashed about:

I have just read “Karelin’s Dream,” and I am very much interested to know how far the dream you describe really is a dream.9

The essence of Chekhov’s criticism is there: You call this a “dream,” but is it?

I think your description of the workings of the brain and of the general feeling of a person who is asleep is physiologically correct and remarkably artistic.

“Remarkably artistic” is his acknowledgment of Grigorovich’s effort to make it so. But Chekhov does not as a rule praise attempts to make writing look artistic. Grigorovich might have been vain, but I believe he would have understood this as criticism. Chekhov makes a plainer compliment: “the sensation of cold is given by you with remarkable subtlety.”

Maybe Chekhov was indicating this next passage, which to my mind is excessive and literary rather than “subtle”:

The wind increased and began tearing unbearably at my face. It was so cold, so unbearably cold, that it seemed all of the Arctic Ocean had moved from its place, moving and remaining there, somewhere beyond Vasilevsky Island. I finally came out from under the collar of my coat. In a moment, lifting my eyelids, I saw to my right the statue of Peter. The rider and the horse under him running so fast on the cliff, it seemed frozen in granite; the very cliff seemed to me frozen to the depth of its heart. On the outside of the statue, in the simple expanse with the covered bronze shell of the horse and rider, there was a thick layer of icy needles; on the outside, on the protruding parts of the statue, the bronze shone with a cold gloss […]

Chekhov was very much interested in an individual’s experience of dreaming, but he doesn’t assert rank or privilege over Grigorovich on the basis of his medical knowledge. Instead, he makes it very personal and as usual is very particular:

When at night the quilt falls off I begin to dream of huge slippery stones, of cold autumnal water, naked banks—and all this dim, misty, without a patch of blue sky; sad and dejected like one who has lost his way, I look at the stones and feel that for some reason I cannot avoid crossing a deep river; I see then small tugs that drag huge barges, floating beams…. All this is infinitely gray, damp, and dismal. When I run from the river I come across the fallen cemetery gates, funerals, my schoolteachers…. And all the time I am cold through and through with that oppressive nightmare-like cold which is impossible in waking life, and which is only felt by those who are asleep. The first pages of “Karelin’s Dream” vividly brought it to my memory—especially the first half of page five, where you speak of the cold and loneliness of the grave.

In “Karelin’s Dream,” Grigorovich muddies the actual dreamlike core of the dream. In contrast, to clarify the point for himself at least, Chekhov returns to unusually personal experiences:

One does dream of people, and always of unpleasant ones…. I, for instance, when I feel cold, always dream of my teacher of scripture, a learned priest of imposing appearance, who insulted my mother when I was a little boy; I dream of vindictive, implacable, intriguing people, smiling with spiteful glee—such as one can never see in waking life. The laughter at the carriage window is a characteristic symptom of Karelin’s nightmare. When in dreams one feels the presence of some evil will, the inevitable ruin brought about by some outside force, one always hears something like such laughter…. One dreams of people one loves, too, but they generally appear to suffer together with the dreamer.

Chekhov is now sharing something never elsewhere revealed about his personal and domestic life:

But when my body gets accustomed to the cold, or one of my family covers me up, the sensation of cold, of loneliness, and of an oppressive evil will, gradually disappears….

This midwinter, who came in and covered chilly Anton? Mama? Maria? Mikhail?

With the returning warmth I begin to feel that I walk on soft carpets or on grass, I see sunshine, women, children…. The pictures change gradually, but more rapidly than they do in waking life, so that on awaking it is difficult to remember the transitions from one scene to another.

He was laying bare the kinds of particular experiences he only usually described in fiction. Chekhov did not often describe his personal experiences in his letters with the precision that he used in the fiction.

Having ventured far into a critical discussion of Grigorovich’s story, he returned to humble mode:

Forgive me, I so like your story that I am ready to write you a dozen sheets, though I know I can tell you nothing new or good…. I restrain myself and am silent, fearing to bore you and to say something silly. I will say once more that your story is magnificent. […] Hard as I tried I could detect only two small blots, even those are rather farfetched! (1) the characteristics of the people interrupt the picture of the dream and give the impression of explanation notes, which in gardens botanists nail on trees and spoil the scenery;10 (2) at the beginning of the story the feeling of cold is soon blunted in the reader and becomes too usual, owing to the frequent repetition of the word “cold.”

There is nothing else I could find, and I feel that as one is always feeling the need of refreshing models, “Karelin’s Dream” is a splendid event in my existence as an author.

There is more feeling of apology in that sentence than praise. It’s as if the more Chekhov looked and wrote about the story, the less satisfactory it became.

In further apology and to assure Grigorovich that he was not asserting any superiority of artistic judgment, Chekhov defamed himself:

There is little good I can say about myself. I write not what I want to be writing, and I have not enough energy or solitude to write as you advised me…. There are many good subjects jostling in my head—and that is all. I am sustained by hopes of the future, and watch the present slip fruitlessly away.

Forgive this long letter, and accept the sincere good wishes of your devoted [signature]

Chekhov, the greater artist by a mile and a half, could only defer to Grigorovich on the basis of age and prestige. He would eventually resent the crouching that he was expected to do. Two years later he would write to Suvorin: “I am very fond of Grigorovich, but I do not believe that he really is anxious about me. He is a tendentious writer himself and only pretends to be an enemy of tendentiousness. I can’t help thinking that he is terrified of losing the respect of people he likes, hence his quite amazing insincerity.”11 The biographer David Magarshack notes that “Chekhov never really regarded Grigorovich as a major writer, and as time passed he got tired of being lectured by him. He certainly never accepted the generally held view that Grigorovich had ‘discovered’ him.”12

Grigorovich’s reply to this letter suggests he may well have been offended: “You praise particularly that which I least of all thought about when I wrote.” He continued, however, very interestingly: “A true portrayal of the process of dreaming as such and its impressions occupied me incomparably less than the idea of giving the outward and social picture of a certain milieu in Petersburg […] In our profession, is it not, however, often the case that that about which one bothers comes out weakest of all, while that which has been sung unconsciously, like a bird sings, comes off best? You must have experienced this yourself more than once.”13

A month later, Chekhov would visit Grigorovich in Petersburg, when it seemed Grigorovich might be on his deathbed. And then, this very summer, Chekhov emphatically dedicated his first book of “serious” stories to him.

*

On the evening of February 15, after a gathering with Schechtel and Nikolay at home, Chekhov and Lazarev went to vespers at the church of Christ the Savior, where, according to Lazarev, they heard miraculous singers. A couple of weeks later, Lazarev wrote Ezhov about their mentor’s habits and writing routine:

He has few acquaintances, he goes rarely to the theater, and constantly writes, writes, and writes! There’s not a day when he doesn’t write or continue writing something. Now he’s so proficient that he writes the Fragments stories straight on white and without errors. I saw it myself. Every time when I’ve gone to see him I’ve found him at work, every time without exception. This Chekhov is a great talent. Little reading (he doesn’t read magazines constantly, but occasionally glances at them), that is, the little reading replenishes him with enormous observations and talent, and then perseverance. (We think about them—Chekhov and Palmin—with envy, but they work so terribly much, ten times more than we do.) His family (father, mother, sister and, it seems, student-brother) are on his hands. He says that if for a month he didn’t hold a pen in his hand, he would be bankrupt, a person destroyed by poverty. […] He also hardly reads Fragments. He doesn’t read Leykin, and it seems not even his brother does, either. “You, I read,” he told me […] as his alternate at Fragments. “You should work, become my replacement. I’m not going to work for long!” […] He complained that new forces in humor are not appearing, though of course there are talented ones.14

The same day, Chekhov heard from his friend Bilibin, Leykin’s sub-editor, who, unlike Lazarev, wasn’t impressed at all, telling Chekhov that his pieces in Fragments were “unworthy of him.” Was this a general assessment? Chekhov hadn’t published anything in Fragments in weeks, ever since “The Good German.” A new story, “An Inadvertence,” had been at the Fragments office since February 10 but would not come out until February 21, and then Bilibin and Leykin would praise it.

Anton, impatient with his brother Alexander’s reticence, goaded him in a letter on the 19th or 20th: “How come you don’t describe your work? How do you spend your time in the evenings in the [New Times] editorial office?” On the 21st Alexander was happy to oblige, explaining, in the third person, that “From one in the afternoon to five he translates foreign newspapers, helps set up the issue, reads through the correspondents’ mail and plans the chronicle. At five he goes home to eat and, having quickly eaten, leaves home at 7 in order not to be late for various groups’ meetings, the reports of which he is charged with. From the meetings he goes again to the editorial office (making sometimes ten-page finishes), writes a report and until three in the morning makes corrections, revisions, and sorts and lays out the issue. At four in the morning, sometimes later, he returns home.”15 Anton replied a few days later that Alexander’s salary was too small and that he should ask Suvorin for more money.

“An Inadvertence” (“Neostorojhnost’,” February 21) is a perfect farce, which Bilibin, Leykin, and Tolstoy would praise and enjoy. A man comes home quite drunk from a christening and drinks, by accident, a squirreled away bottle of his sister-in-law’s paraffin, which she berates him for while he is the midst of believing that he’s going to die.

His New Times story this month (February 21) was “Verochka,” about a shy twenty-nine-year-old researcher, Ivan Alexeich Ognev: “Having been in the N—District from the early spring, and having been almost every day at the friendly Kuznetsovs’, Ivan Alexeich had become as much at home with the old man, his daughter [Verochka], and the servants as though they were his own people; he had grown familiar with the whole house to the smallest detail, with the cozy verandah, the windings of the avenues, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the bath-house; but as soon as he was out of the gate all this would be changed to memory and would lose its meaning as reality for ever, and in a year or two all these dear images would grow as dim in his consciousness as stories he had read or things he had imagined.”16

Do we learn something from this next passage, seemingly personally related by the otherwise inconspicuous narrator, about feminine aspects that particularly attracted Chekhov?

Girls who are dreamy and spend whole days lying down, lazily reading whatever they come across, who are bored and melancholy, are usually careless in their dress. To those of them who have been endowed by nature with taste and an instinct of beauty, the slight carelessness adds a special charm. When Ognev later on remembered her, he could not picture pretty Verochka except in a full blouse which was crumpled in deep folds at the belt and yet did not touch her waist; without her hair done up high and a curl that had come loose from it on her forehead; without the knitted red shawl with ball fringe at the edge which hung disconsolately on Vera’s shoulders in the evenings, like a flag on a windless day, and in the daytime lay about, crushed up, in the hall near the men’s hats or on a box in the dining-room, where the old cat did not hesitate to sleep on it. This shawl and the folds of her blouse suggested a feeling of freedom and laziness, of good-nature and sitting at home. Perhaps because Vera attracted Ognev he saw in every frill and button something warm, naïve, cozy, something nice and poetical, just what is lacking in cold, insincere women that have no instinct for beauty.

I think we are hearing Chekhov’s opinion here, not just Ognev’s naïve, unconscious perceptions.

Who those “cold, insincere women” Chekhov had in mind, however, is a mystery.

Ognev is not in love with the sweet provincial Kuznetsov daughter, who is in love with him and who, at his imminent departure, declares herself.

“I… love you!”

These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera, and got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.

[…]

Telling him of her love, Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and passionately, but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would have liked to; he felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and regret that a good girl should be distressed on his account. Whether he was affected by generalizations from reading or by the insuperable habit of looking at things objectively, which so often hinders people from living, but Vera’s ecstasies and suffering struck him as affected, not to be taken seriously, and at the same time rebellious feeling whispered to him that all he was hearing and seeing now, from the point of view of nature and personal happiness, was more important than any statistics and books and truths…. And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not understand exactly where he was in fault.

After second thoughts, objective Ognev almost decides to marry her:

He looked for Vera’s footprints on the road, and could not believe that the girl who had so attracted him had just declared her love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly “refused” her. For the first time in his life it was his lot to learn by experience how little that a man does depends on his own will, and to suffer in his own person the feelings of a decent kindly man who has against his will caused his neighbor cruel, undeserved anguish.

Chekhov knew how love stories usually go. His brother-in-detachment Ognev also knows. And even if it’s not the ultimate love story, the absolutely mutually satisfying love story it should be, isn’t almost enough enough?

His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as though he had lost something very precious, something very near and dear which he could never find again. He felt that with Vera a part of his youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which he had passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.

Chekhov then suddenly gives us the present tense; for Ognev this story has long ended: “And Ivan Alexeich remembers that he went back again.” What he remembers only brings him more shame: that is, he remembers that he walked around the outside of her house and then retreated.

That might be our metaphor for Chekhov’s relationship with Dunya Efros.

*

Chekhov was dependable for providing periodicals with Lent stories. In “Shrove Tuesday” (“Nakanune Posta,” February 25), the last day before Lent, a family, having shared the last non-Lenten meal, is tired, stuffed, but the mother tells the father to go tutor their frustrated son, who has to prepare for the next day’s lessons.

“Are you working?” asks Pavel Vassilich, sitting down to the table and yawning. “Yes, my boy…. We have enjoyed ourselves, slept, and eaten pancakes, and tomorrow comes Lenten fare, repentance, and going to work. Every period of time has its limits. Why are your eyes so red? Are you sick of learning your lessons? To be sure, after pancakes, lessons are nasty to swallow. That’s about it.”

Because it’s the last night before Lent, “Faces and gestures betray the sloth and repletion that comes when the stomach is full, and yet one must go on eating.” The story concludes: “No one is hungry, everyone’s stomach is overfull, but yet they must eat.”

For Chekhov, Shrove Tuesday was a comic holiday.

How did the Chekhov family celebrate it? There is nothing in the chronicle of his life that indicates a special get-together, but the stories last year and this suggest they were a happily satiated time in the Chekhov household.

*

Chekhov wrote Leykin a casual, wandering letter on February 25, as he had responsibly sent Fragments “A Defenseless Creature” (“Bezzashchitnoe Sushchestvo”) the day before for the next issue (February 28). He asked about Motley Stories. “How’s my book doing?”17 He mentioned that at the end of March he would be going south, alone, for a month. He was being hopeful, as he did not have the funds to do so and didn’t know how he would get them.

A couple of days later, Leykin replied that as for Motley Stories, nobody’s books were selling except the Pushkin edition by Suvorin. He suggested that Chekhov get Suvorin to publicize the book in New Times.

On February 27, Leykin wrote Chekhov about his previous story for Fragments, “An Inadvertence,” which was “superb,” but that “Verochka” (in New Times) was “an unsuccessful little thing.” (Alexander, in Petersburg with Leykin, wrote to say “Verochka” was being praised.)18 “Your short stories succeed better,” Leykin wrote, by which he meant the very short ones for Fragments and the Petersburg Gazette. “I’m not the only one saying this…. On Tuesday I was at Mikhnevich’s […] and there were many writing brothers there, and a conversation came up about you, and they all said the same.”19