Chekhov Becomes Chekhov

Leykin was apparently sincerely baffled by Chekhov’s success as a “serious” writer. “In subsequent years, with the spread of Chekhov’s fame, note Heim and Karlinsky, Leykin repeatedly claimed to have been the first to discern his talent. But, as his published diaries demonstrate, he was actually incapable of appreciating Chekhov’s mature work and, like many Russians in his day, admired the early humorous sketches […] while being quite baffled by The Seagull and ‘The Lady with the Dog.’ ”20

Though Chekhov was modest about his talent, he knew he was at least among the first rank of young Russian fiction writers. The writer Vladimir Korolenko was the one peer that Chekhov rated higher than himself. Chekhov did not note the date they met and neither did Korolenko. Writing his memoirs, Korolenko placed the date “at the end of 1886,” but “the exact date escapes my memory.” Scholars figured out it had to be sometime in February 1887. The two young literary stars, who had already admired each other’s work from afar, hit it off. Korolenko recalled: “Thinking back to the first time we met in his living room, I see Chekhov’s mother, who always sat by his side.”21

Chekhov told Korolenko that he wanted to write a play, and, in an interesting lack of nerve, or perhaps simply imagining that having a writing partner would make the task less daunting, “suggested writing it together (in Nizhni Novgorod): ‘We will work together. Let’s write a play. In four acts. In two weeks.’ Korolenko refused: ‘No, Anton Pavlovich. I can’t chase after you. You’ll write a play alone, and you’ll come still to Nizhni.’ ”22 Korolenko was right, and Chekhov would follow through on his own and in less than two weeks in September would write a four-act play.

March 1887

Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and—was it Aphet? All Ham could see was that his father was a drunkard; he completely disregarded the fact that Noah was a genius, that he had built the Ark and saved the world. Writers must avoid imitating Ham. Mull that one over for a while. […] I do dare remind you of justice, which is more precious for an objective writer than air.

—Letter to a young writer1

Chekhov believed in nightmares and hallucinations, but not in ghosts. “A Bad Business” (“Nedobroe Delo,” March 2) creates as eerie an atmosphere as a nightmare. The story begins:

“Who goes there?”

No answer. The watchman sees nothing, but through the roar of the wind and the trees distinctly hears someone walking along the avenue ahead of him. A March night, cloudy and foggy, envelops the earth, and it seems to the watchman that the earth, the sky, and he himself with his thoughts are all merged together into something vast and impenetrably black. He can only grope his way.2

Now that I have read Grigorovich’s pseudo-dream story, it occurs to me that this story, though realistic, is more actually dreamlike than Grigorovich’s. When I read it a few years ago in Russian, I found myself more deeply spooked than when I was breezing through it in English. It’s as if I was groping through the same apprehension as the watchman. Chekhov resorts again to the present tense, which perhaps lends itself to the narration of scary stories:

The watchman stops for a minute to light his pipe. He stoops down behind the traveler’s back and lights several matches. The gleam of the first match lights up for one instant a bit of the avenue on the right, a white tombstone with an angel, and a dark cross; the light of the second match, flaring up brightly and extinguished by the wind, flashes like lightning on the left side, and from the darkness nothing stands out but the angle of some sort of trellis; the third match throws light to right and to left, revealing the white tombstone, the dark cross, and the trellis around a child’s grave.

The “traveler” is in fact a lookout for a gang of thieves. But while still in the disguise of darkness he is all too candid and truthful:

“Our doings are wicked, our thoughts are deceitful! Sins, sins! My soul accursed, ever covetous, my belly greedy and lustful! I have angered the Lord and there is no salvation for me in this world and the next. I am deep in sins like a worm in the earth.”

He is also a wickedly teasing philosopher: “ ‘There are pilgrims of different sorts. There are the real ones who are God-fearing men and watch over their own souls, and there are such as stray about the graveyard at night and are a delight to the devils… Ye-es! There’s one who is a pilgrim could give you a crack on the pate with an axe if he liked and knock the breath out of you.’ ”

With that, the watchman has a renewed sense of apprehension. And his apprehension only increases as the one thief holds him to prevent him from raising an alarm while the other thieves ransack the church.

*

On March 2, Petya Kravtsov, knowing Chekhov had been under the weather, invited him to stay with his family in the village of Rogozin Ravine, the “best air” to be found in the Crimea and Caucasus.3 Chekhov had been Petya’s tutor in Taganrog when the Chekhov family, fleeing creditors, left him behind and relocated to Moscow in 1876. As a teenager, Chekhov had spent a few summers there in the countryside with Petya’s family.

This was yet another reason to go south. But how to pay for it?

*

In “Home” (“Doma,” March 7), Chekhov seems to elude any attempt by me to link the story to his life. Bykovsky, a weary prosecutor and the recently widowed father of a seven-year-old son, comes home to an annoyed governess; she complains that the boy, Seryozha, has been smoking cigarettes: “ ‘When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice.’ ”4 Yes, Chekhov had been a tutor, but of course he wasn’t a lawyer, he was never widowed, and he had no children. But… otherwise… let’s see. Chekhov had once been a child and seemed to understand childhood and children at a psychological depth reached by few writers. Bykovsky is amused by the thought of his little boy smoking, but he realizes he has a responsibility to the governess. The trouble is: he doesn’t really know his son, much less children. He is used to thinking about law and its consequences; now he “remembered the head-master of the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion. This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.”

Chekhov was a smoker. It was a “vice,” and Chekhov knew he should have avoided it. He was in a period of weighing the benefits versus the drawbacks of punishment. Punish drinkers? He didn’t think that worked. Bykovsky, meanwhile, ponders the situation:

The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled and their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very often the punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime itself. The living organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself, growing accustomed and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise man would be bound to feel at every moment what an irrational basis there often is underlying his rational activity, and how little of established truth and certainty there is even in work so responsible and so terrible in its effects as that of the teacher, of the lawyer, of the writer….

Before he has prepared himself, the governess sends Seryozha to him. He scolds the boy with harsh words but little feeling:

“I am very, very much displeased with you! You used to be a good boy, but now I see you are spoiled and have become a bad one.”

Yevgeny Petrovich smoothed down Seryozha’s collar and thought:

“What more am I to say to him!”

“Yes, it’s not right,” he continued. “I did not expect it of you. In the first place, you ought not to take tobacco that does not belong to you. Every person has only the right to make use of his own property; if he takes anyone else’s… he is a bad man!” (“I am not saying the right thing!” thought Yevgeny Petrovich.) “For instance, Natalya Semyonovna has a box with her clothes in it. That’s her box, and we—that is, you and I—dare not touch it, as it is not ours. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ve got toy horses and pictures…. I don’t take them, do I? Perhaps I might like to take them, but… they are not mine, but yours!”

“Take them if you like!” said Seryozha, raising his eyebrows. “Please don’t hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is mine, but I don’t mind…. Let it stay.”

The prosecutor realizes he cannot even explain law to his son. But he continues to try, desperately seeking the proper level. He returns to the smoking topic, one perfectly in accord with Chekhov’s views:

“Though I smoke it does not follow that you may. I smoke and know that it is stupid, I blame myself and don’t like myself for it.” (“A clever teacher, I am!” he thought.) “Tobacco is very bad for the health, and anyone who smokes dies earlier than he should. It’s particularly bad for boys like you to smoke. Your chest is weak, you haven’t reached your full strength yet, and smoking leads to consumption and other illness in weak people. Uncle Ignat died of consumption, you know. If he hadn’t smoked, perhaps he would have lived till now.”

Seryozha looked pensively at the lamp, touched the lamp-shade with his finger, and heaved a sigh.

“Uncle Ignat played the violin splendidly!” he said. “His violin is at the Grigoryevs’ now.”

Seryozha leaned his elbows on the edge of the table again, and sank into thought.

True enough about smoking and Chekhov’s own consumption (tuberculosis), but the father thinks he has still not connected with Seryozha. But, just as Tolstoy showed the depths of thought and feeling in Anna Karenina’s nine-year-old son Seryozha, Chekhov shows us his younger Seryozha’s, whose actual thoughts Chekhov insists he can only guess at:

His white face wore a fixed expression, as though he were listening or following a train of thought of his own; distress and something like fear came into his big staring eyes. He was most likely thinking now of death, which had so lately carried off his mother and Uncle Ignat. Death carries mothers and uncles off to the other world, while their children and violins remain upon the earth. The dead live somewhere in the sky beside the stars, and look down from there upon the earth. Can they endure the parting?

Most assuredly, Chekhov describes what the contemplative boy now does, which is draw pictures and chatter:

“Cook was chopping up cabbage today and she cut her finger,” he said, drawing a little house and moving his eyebrows. “She gave such a scream that we were all frightened and ran into the kitchen. Stupid thing! Natalya Semyonovna told her to dip her finger in cold water, but she sucked it… And how could she put a dirty finger in her mouth! That’s not proper, you know, papa!”

Then he went on to describe how, while they were having dinner, a man with a hurdy-gurdy had come into the yard with a little girl, who had danced and sung to the music.

Chekhov puts us not in Seryozha’s but in the father’s shoes:

“He has his own train of thought!” thought the prosecutor. “He has a little world of his own in his head, and he has his own ideas of what is important and unimportant. To gain possession of his attention, it’s not enough to imitate his language, one must also be able to think in the way he does. He would understand me perfectly if I really were sorry for the loss of the tobacco, if I felt injured and cried…. That’s why no one can take the place of a mother in bringing up a child, because she can feel, cry, and laugh together with the child. One can do nothing by logic and morality. What more shall I say to him? What?”

This story is Bykovsky’s reckoning: “ ‘[…] in school and in court, of course, all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at home; here one has to do with people whom one loves beyond everything, and love is exacting and complicates the question. If this boy were not my son, but my pupil, or a prisoner on his trial, I should not be so cowardly, and my thoughts would not be racing all over the place!’ ”

Is Chekhov offering a “moral of the story,” or is this only Bykovsky’s?… The story is not over. It goes on continuously marvelously and surprisingly. But, I’ll answer before proceeding: it is Chekhov’s moral: “all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at home.” All the hardest questions are easy to answer if they don’t actually involve ourselves and our loved ones. This is a theme in one story after another. Chekhov already knew it; Bykovsky is only understanding it at this instant.

In Babkino, Chekhov occasionally made pictures and stories for Maria Kiseleva’s children. This child Seryozha’s pictures, however, are an artifact of the boy’s imagination that puzzle the father:

Yevgeny Petrovich sat down to the table and pulled one of Seryozha’s drawings to him. In it there was a house with a crooked roof, and smoke which came out of the chimney like a flash of lightning in zigzags up to the very edge of the paper; beside the house stood a soldier with dots for eyes and a bayonet that looked like the figure 4.

“A man can’t be taller than a house,” said the prosecutor.

We don’t groan too much over Yevgeny’s misplay here; he’s a father learning on the job.

Seryozha got on his knee, and moved about for some time to get comfortably settled there.

“No, papa!” he said, looking at his drawing. “If you were to draw the soldier small you would not see his eyes.”

How often our loved ones reveal themselves, and how often instead of appreciating the revelation we strive to get them to cover themselves back up. Papa wonders:

Ought he to argue with him? From daily observation of his son the prosecutor had become convinced that children, like savages, have their own artistic standpoints and requirements peculiar to them, beyond the grasp of grown-up people.

Chekhov shoulders Papa aside now and opens the floor to the rest of us:

Had he been attentively observed, Seryozha might have struck a grown-up person as abnormal. He thought it possible and reasonable to draw men taller than houses, and to represent in pencil, not only objects, but even his sensations. Thus he would depict the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke like spherical blurs, a whistle in the form of a spiral thread…. To his mind sound was closely connected with form and color, so that when he painted letters he invariably painted the letter L yellow, M red, A black, and so on.

Papa hasn’t “attentively observed” Seryozha. But someone like Chekhov, our scientist-writer, has. He noticed those amazing depictions, described as synesthesia, one manifestation of which is associating sounds to numbers or letters or particular colors.

Papa is puzzled, in new territory as a parent. The next moment is as intimate as he might have ever been with his son:

The prosecutor felt the child’s breathing on his face, he was continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a warm soft feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha’s jacket.

He looked at the boy’s big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though from those wide pupils there looked out at him his mother and his wife and everything that he had ever loved.

And still this remarkable, heartbreaking story is not over. Chekhov’s genius renews and renews. After the prosecutor repents to himself over having thought of punishing the boy, he means to send the boy to bed, but Seryozha objects, insisting on a story.

And here in the final two pages of “Home,” following Papa’s random, rambling improvisation, we might learn more about how Chekhov wrote his stories than from his claim to Korolenko that he could create a new story from the most random item, an ashtray:5

Yevgeny Petrovich on his free evenings was in the habit of telling Seryozha stories. Like most people engaged in practical affairs, he did not know a single poem by heart, and could not remember a single fairy tale, so he had to improvise. As a rule he began with the stereotyped: “In a certain country, in a certain kingdom,” then he heaped up all kinds of innocent nonsense and had no notion as he told the beginning how the story would go on, and how it would end. Scenes, characters, and situations were taken at random, impromptu, and the plot and the moral came of itself as it were, with no plan on the part of the storyteller.

Had Chekhov “planned” this very story he was writing? I don’t think so, though he scarcely changed a word of it in its many republishings. I think he discovered depths in “Home” as he composed it. He had written to Alexander on February 22 or 23 that the story was “very ‘clever’ (vumniy6) but not very smart.” It’s clever all right:

Seryozha was very fond of this improvisation, and the prosecutor noticed that the simpler and the less ingenious the plot, the stronger the impression it made on the child.

Chekhov had noticed this, too.

“Listen,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “Once upon a time, in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived an old, very old emperor with a long gray beard, and… and with great gray moustaches like this. Well, he lived in a glass palace which sparkled and glittered in the sun, like a great piece of clear ice. The palace, my boy, stood in a huge garden, in which there grew oranges, you know… bergamots, cherries… tulips, roses, and lilies-of-the-valley were in flower in it, and birds of different colors sang there…. Yes…. On the trees there hung little glass bells, and, when the wind blew, they rang so sweetly that one was never tired of hearing them. Glass gives a softer, tenderer note than metals…. Well, what next? There were fountains in the garden…. Do you remember you saw a fountain at Auntie Sonya’s summer villa? Well, there were fountains just like that in the emperor’s garden, only ever so much bigger, and the jets of water reached to the top of the highest poplar.”

What’s happened for Papa and I believe what happened hundreds and hundreds of times for Chekhov is that he conjured up for himself one flash after another of connections and associations. Not fancy, but clear, visual connections between the imagination and memory. Like dreams.

Yevgeny Petrovich thought a moment, and went on:

“The old emperor had an only son and heir of his kingdom—a boy as little as you. He was a good boy. He was never naughty, he went to bed early, he never touched anything on the table, and altogether he was a sensible boy. He had only one fault, he used to smoke….”

Seryozha listened attentively, and looked into his father’s eyes without blinking.

The prosecutor went on, thinking: “What next?”

I think Papa, having noticed Seryozha’s raptness, experiences a moment of selfconsciousness. Now how does he end this nonsense? Like other stymied storytellers, he decides death is a fitting conclusion:

He spun out a long rigmarole, and ended like this:

“The emperor’s son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and died when he was twenty. His infirm and sick old father was left without anyone to help him. There was no one to govern the kingdom and defend the palace. Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed the palace, and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor little bells in the garden…. That’s what happened.”

This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovich as absurd and naïve, but the whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a sinking voice:

“I am not going to smoke any more….”

When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and down the room and smiled to himself.

“They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,” he meditated. “It may be so, but that’s no comfort. It’s not the right way, all the same…. Why must morality and truth never be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments, sweetened and gilded like pills? It’s not normal…. It’s falsification… deception… tricks….”

He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to make a “speech,” of the general public who absorb history only from legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables, novels, poems.

“Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this foolish habit since the days of Adam… though, indeed, perhaps it is all natural, and ought to be so…. There are many deceptions and delusions in nature that serve a purpose.”

Amen.

*

On March 8, Chekhov got on the train to St. Petersburg to see his brother Alexander and his publisher Suvorin. Alexander had beckoned him there via telegram to treat him for typhus, his presumed “dangerous illness.” Chekhov’s consolation was reading Anna Karenina on the unusually long, slow, crowded ride north, arriving on March 9.

Petersburg was in the midst of a typhus epidemic, and once Chekhov arrived at his brother’s, he discovered that Alexander was symptomless but that his wife Anna had typhus. Petersburg gave Chekhov the impression of being “a city of death.” After spending the first night in Alexander’s crowded apartment, Chekhov accepted a medical colleague’s invitation to stay at his house.

Besides fear of typhus, money worries were more than usual preying on Chekhov, and his next three stories were about characters desperately seeking money. “The Lottery Ticket” (“Viigrishniy Bilet,” March 9) is a trick story. The first sentence provides the conventional fiction setup information:

Ivan Dmitrich, a middle-class man who lived with his family on an income of twelve hundred a year and was very well satisfied with his lot, sat down on the sofa after supper and began reading the newspaper.7

A real story by Chekhov seems alive, because, as in “Home,” it was alive as he created it. He didn’t have to be alert to work through “The Lottery Ticket.” He could’ve handed off the idea to Alexander or any of his mentees and have had them do it. As soon as Ivan and his wife Masha start daydreaming about winning the lottery on the ticket Masha holds, they begin hating each other with a passion they haven’t until now realized: “And he looked at his wife, not with a smile now, but with hatred. She glanced at him, too, and also with hatred and anger. She had her own daydreams, her own plans, her own reflections; she understood perfectly well what her husband’s dreams were. She knew who would be the first to try to grab her winnings.” The ticket doesn’t win, however, but the couple maintains their newfound hatred.

The next story, “Too Early!” (“Rano!” March 16), is slight, but Chekhov was imaginatively engaged in picturing it to himself, daydreaming himself out of the city. The present tense in this story allows Chekhov to paint the setting’s picture as his painter-friends might have:

In Semyon’s pothouse […] two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter. He has at one time been employed in a nail factory, has been turned off for drunkenness and idleness, and now lives upon his old wife, who begs for alms. He is thin and weak, with a mangy-looking little beard, speaks with a hissing sound, and after every word twitches the right side of his face and jerkily shrugs his right shoulder. The other, Ignat Ryabov, a sturdy, broad-shouldered peasant who never does anything and is everlastingly silent, is sitting in the corner under a big string of bread rings. The door, opening inward, throws a thick shadow upon him, so that Slyunka and Semyon the publican can see nothing but his patched knees, his long fleshy nose, and a big tuft of hair which has escaped from the thick uncombed tangle covering his head. Semyon, a sickly little man, with a pale face and a long sinewy neck, stands behind his counter, looks mournfully at the string of bread rings, and coughs meekly.

The two idlers, who “haven’t got a ruble,” try to badger Semyon to give them back the gun that Slyunka pawned with him so they can hunt birds. He refuses and they grumble and wander outside into the muddy winter. They, like Chekhov, see signs of spring. The author conjures up a beautiful scene for them and himself: “The sun has set and left behind it a red streak like the glow of a fire, scattered here and there with clouds; there is no catching the colors of those clouds: their edges are red, but they themselves are one minute gray, at the next lilac, at the next ashen.” Slyunka and Ryabov wouldn’t have needed the gun anyway; it’s “too early!” for snipe.

*

On the 10th, Chekhov dined with Leykin and then went to see the printer Golike. From a hotel room he wrote home: “Alexander is in fact perfectly well. All that had happened was that he imagined he was ill, became depressed and frightened, and that’s why he sent that telegram. Anna Ivanovna actually does have typhoid fever, but not very severely. I consulted with the other doctor. We agreed to treat her according to my regime. […] The typhoid fever that is raging throughout Petersburg at the moment is a particularly virulent form. The commissionaire at Leykin’s offices, a tall, thin old man whom you may remember, Masha, died of it yesterday.”8

On March 11, he treated for tuberculosis the dying mother of an office worker at Fragments. He was “hanging between the heavens and earth,” he wrote to his sister Maria on the 11th or early on the 12th. He was sending her ten rubles but asked her to spend as little as possible. He didn’t know yet when he was coming back, but probably by the 15th. Alexander, he reported, was well but low-spirited. He tossed in a greeting, of sorts, to Dunya, “Homage to the Nose with Efros,”9 and Maria’s friend Yashenka.

In the next day or two, almost as anxious at the moment about money as about typhus, he wrote his friend Schechtel, who had connections with the railroad, telling him he just had to go south, and could Schechtel get him a free round-trip ticket to Taganrog?10 “Everywhere I am made much of, but no one has the bright idea of handing me one or two thousand rubles.”11 He didn’t ask Schechtel for a loan but mentioned: “Right now I am sitting in the boring hotel room about to make a clean copy of a finished story.” The editors of the Soviet edition of the letters say that “probably” that story was “Too Early!” which would be published in the Petersburg Gazette on the 16th. “An Encounter” would come out on the 18th in New Times.

Both “Early!” and “An Encounter” are about needing money; this letter is about needing money. Because he didn’t ask Schechtel for a loan, that means, I think, he might have been expecting that Suvorin would give him the loan or advance on the night of the 12th. Chekhov could have written “Too Early!” in one sitting; it’s short, simple, uninvolving. Probably Chekhov was rewriting “An Encounter.” Garnett did not translate “An Encounter,” so I found the story in the Russian edition, which includes a reproduction of a manuscript draft page of the first page of the story (there are very few handwritten manuscripts of Chekhov’s creative work). The page has a lot of cross-outs. There are a great number of differences between the manuscript and the published copy. So it must have been “An Encounter” that he was making “a clean copy of”; otherwise, why would he revise a completely finished story? Most likely the draft, which, unusually, survived, is the first draft, and the published story is the second draft. He was already in Petersburg and he could have walked the second draft to the office, greeted his weary but mostly well brother, handed him the story, and New Times printed it from that.

Let’s imagine encountering the fresh final draft of “An Encounter” (March 18), one of his best stories so far this year, a few days ahead of the date of publication, and definitely in the week of its writing.12 I imagine Chekhov, pen in hand, deadline looming, financial needs pressing, anxiously looking around: “Yefrem Denisov anxiously looked around.” First sentence, done. Chekhov was thirsty, he was achy: “He was tormented by thirst and he ached all over.”

In the third sentence, Chekhov mentions the hero’s horse, who is also suffering. “His horse, who had not eaten for a long time and was miserable with the heat, drooped his head sadly.”

As I imagine Chekhov imagining this story, there’s the hero, Yefrem Denisov, but the other living creature also has to live. This characterization of the horse is not how Tolstoy would do it, but Tolstoy would also do it. Chekhov characteristically sees and feels his way into a scene.

He concludes the first paragraph: “The forest, a green monster, climbed up a terraced hill, and seemed endless.” This is so simple, so childlike a perception, but to notice such things, to feel the vitality of the world, is a childlike and artistic perspective.

And now the explanation of the situation, after the scene-setting: “Yefrem was traveling about to collect money for the building of a church to replace the one that had burned down in his native village in the province of Kursk.” Chekhov further and clearly explains Yefrem’s humble quest, and then his naturally despairing feeling: “Yefrem did not know where he was, and the forest, which swallowed the road, held out no promise of a settlement nearby.”

Chekhov describes the woods and the smell of the air.

Did he naturally turn on all his senses as he wrote? He suggested, in a letter the following winter, that taking in the smell of an imagined scene was what he strove to do: “I am writing a steppe story. I am writing, but I don’t get the smell of hay…”13 He was like a hungry hunter entering and proceeding through an alien forest. All his senses were up and attentive in expectation and wariness.

This is when the crook suddenly appears, voice first. Yefrem has been looking, seemingly, with attention into the woods. Someone addressing a passing stranger without first making himself seen means he is someone to be leery of.

Now Yefrem takes him in: “Close to the road, his head propped on an anthill, lay a lanky peasant of about thirty wearing a cotton shirt and tight citified trousers tucked into reddish boots. Near his head was a cap that went with some uniform, now so faded that its original color could only be guessed from the spot that had once flaunted a cockade.”

Yefrem makes conversation, addressing the odd-faced stranger as “Fellow Christian,” and asking how far to the next village. Though the stranger may have served in the military, he speaks uneducatedly: “ ‘Not so far. Maloye ain’t no more’n three or four miles from here.’ ”

They exchange names. The crook is Kuzma. We don’t yet know he’s a crook, but one of his first questions makes one suspicious: “ ‘You’re collecting for a church?’ ”

And when Yefrem explains that the church burned down, Kuzma says exactly the thing to put anyone on the alert: “ ‘How did that happen?’ ”

Yefrem tells the unhappy but fateful story.

“Kuzma strode alongside and listened. He was sober”—This is, I assume, Yefrem’s steady, clear-eyed perception of Kuzma and not Chekhov telling us from narrative omniscience. A drunk man is one kind of a menace, a sober man another. Anyway,

He was sober, but he walked as though he were drunk, waving his arms and tramping now beside the cart, now in front of it…

“And what do you get out of it? They pay you wages?” he asked.

“What wages? I am traveling for the salvation of my soul, the community sent me…”

“So you’re traveling for nothing?”

“Who’s to pay me wages? The community sent me, you know—they’ll harvest my crops, sow the rye, pay the taxes for me… So it’s not for nothing!”

“And how do you eat?”

“I beg my bread.”

Yefrem grows leerier. He is surprised that Kuzma has no immediate appreciation of the idea of someone going out into the world to serve his community.

And Kuzma inquired further, what would happen to the horse and the money if Yefrem himself died, where would people put their contributions if the box were suddenly filled, and what if the bottom of the box fell out, and so on.

Does Kuzma purposefully give himself away? Or is he, as suggested by the epigraph, just a “savage predatory animal”?

Yefrem, getting no chance to answer all these questions, merely panted and stared at his fellow traveler in wonder.

Yefrem and Kuzma spend the night in the village, where Kuzma has chatted up the locals, and in the morning the old man sees that the money is gone. Kuzma returns to their shared quarters and feigns outrage when Yefrem accuses him. Yefrem, perhaps from having dealt with such criminals before, says, “Fine, then you didn’t steal it.”

Kuzma can’t stand that Yefrem accepts his denial. He pesters Yefrem as they go on their way. But Yefrem won’t rise to the bait and Kuzma angrily throws the remaining money at him and says it was all a joke. He explains away the missing money and excuses himself for it. Then, guiltily, Kuzma asks how he can make up for it, and Yefrem tells him to go back and confess to the priest, and then send the money when he has it to Yefrem’s village for the church. Kuzma seems to enjoy the thought of having an opportunity to make up for his theft, but as soon as they get to the next village, he is completely himself again, a charismatic lying cheat.

In 1899, a dozen years after composing “An Encounter,” having passed it over for inclusion in any of his collections, Chekhov remembered the story and considered it for the collected edition, but he decided not to try to revise it. Even shortly after it was published this month, he said he didn’t like it.

How can I disagree so often with Chekhov’s assessments of his stories? Lazarev wrote to Ezhov that Chekhov thought the story “Home” was “bad. It stretches out (too much).” As for “An Encounter,” which Lazarev called (rightly) “a beautiful story,” he confided to his pal that “Chekhov doesn’t like it, that is, partly and correctly in that he doesn’t and I don’t like the moral attached to the end. That ought not to be. A moral ought not to be ‘expressed,’ but if it’s there ought to be unnoticed.”14

The story ends:

At noon, when the cart stopped at Telibeyevo, Kuzma disappeared in the pothouse. Yefrem rested for about two hours and all that time Kuzma stayed in the pothouse. One could hear him swearing in there and bragging, pounding the bar with his fist, and the drunken peasants jeering at him. And when Yefrem was leaving Telibeyevo, a brawl had started in the pothouse, and Kuzma was shrilly threatening someone and shouting that he would send for the police.

The moral is… don’t start fights in Telibeyevo bars? I and readers of the Collected Works must not be seeing the moral ending Lazarev and Chekhov saw.15

*

What seems to have completely sealed Chekhov’s devotion to Suvorin was spending several hours with him on the evening of March 12. Suvorin asked him to put together a collection of his New Times stories for publication as a book. The rich, fond, and generous editor gave Chekhov an advance on his pay for his continued contributions to New Times, so that Chekhov could definitely make his long-desired spring trip to Taganrog.

Chekhov wrote home again on the 13th. Money problems solved, he had a whole new mood:

I’m hereby informing you that I’m alive and well and I haven’t contracted typhus. At first I was depressed, as I was bored and feared an impoverished future, but now I feel positive and in character. Surprises rain on my head: 1) the whole time it’s been spring weather, and only being without a coat has prevented me from wandering about, 2) everywhere I’m greeted here with open arms, 3) Suvorin, speaking like a Jew, loaned me money (a secret: 300 rubles) and asked me to send him material for a book edition of my New Times stories. The book will be published by the summer, under conditions quite beneficial for me. And so on. […] I’m going to the south on the 31st or earlier.16

On the 14th, Chekhov visited Grigorovich, who seemed to him to be dying: “The old man kissed me on the forehead, hugged me, began crying […]” Chekhov sat by the writer’s bedside for two and a half hours and found himself “cursing the whole time my worthless medicine.” He only left when Grigorovich’s own doctor arrived.17

Chekhov departed for Moscow the next day.

Between the train ride home from Petersburg and the 18th, Chekhov selected and edited sixteen of his New Times stories18 for the collection that Suvorin had just solicited. Quick and efficient, Chekhov suggested the format and layout that he had seen in Suvorin’s edition of Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories had become popular in literary Russia. Unlike Poe, Chekhov couldn’t think up a good title, so he suggested “My Stories” or “Stories.”19 Alexander, now in good standing with Suvorin, would be the supervising editor. There were eventually nineteen stories in this collection, In the Twilight; it included three stories from the Petersburg Gazette.20

*

On March 17, safe and sound in Moscow, Chekhov wrote to Maria Kiseleva about his trip. He had talked to a textbook publisher in Petersburg about her children’s book, which he now encouraged her to publish as soon as possible. As for himself, he had received that “big advance” from Suvorin. Chekhov, not one to crow, actually crowed: “Petersburg recognizes only one writer right now: me!”21

He told her also, on the other hand: “I went there with a frightened imagination; on the way, I encountered two coffins.” Death was everywhere he went. He saw children dying in agony from croup. Dispirited, he remarked, “True, one could start drinking. However, they say everything is usable in belle lettres.” Indeed. By March 21, Chekhov had finished the 1,850-word “Typhus” and sent it to the Petersburg Gazette, where it was published on March 23. Several years later, he would tell Yelena Shavrova, one of his young writing mentees, “For myself, I stand by the following rule: I write about sickness only when it forms part of the characters or adds color to them. I am afraid of frightening people with diseases.”22

It seems that Chekhov was able to communicate all the reasons anyone could have to be sensibly frightened of typhus. I began translating “Typhus” (“Tif”) at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.23 Sentence 1: “Young Lieutenant Klimov was riding in the smoking car on the post train from Petersburg to Moscow.” Chekhov had just been on this train. Klimov is coming down with typhus but doesn’t realize it. He becomes cranky and discombobulated. A fellow passenger, an old man, a “foreigner,” smokes a stinky pipe. Klimov “daydreamed about how good it would be to rip the raspy pipe from his hand, toss it under the stuffed seat, and drive the Finn away into another car. ‘Disgusting people these Finns… and Greeks!’ he thought. ‘Absolutely worthless, good for nothing, rotten people, they’re only taking up space on the planet. What use are they?’ ”

And the thought of Finns and Greeks produced something like nausea throughout his entire body. For comparison, he wanted to think about the French and Italians, but the memory of those people somehow only evoked images of organ-grinders, naked women, and the foreign oleographs that hung over the dresser at his aunt’s house.

Chekhov reminds us that such reflexive Dostoevskian prejudices say nothing about Finns, Greeks, the French, or Italians. Expressed prejudices such as these by Klimov are signs of weakness and confusion. They’re ranklings inspired by weariness and sickness:

The officer didn’t feel right at all. His arms and legs somehow didn’t fit on the seat, despite the whole seat being available; his mouth was dry and sticky, and his head was filled with a heavy fog. His thoughts, it seemed, roamed not only through his mind but out beyond his skull, among the seats and the people shrouded in the nighttime haze. Through his head-sludge, as if it were in a dream, he heard a murmur of voices, the knocking of wheels, the clomping of doors. Bells, the conductor’s whistling, passengers rushing along the platform, resounded more often than usual. Time passed swiftly, unnoticeably, and so it seemed as if the train was stopping at a new station every minute, and metallic voices floated into the carriage.

Chekhov gives us such a keen, fine description of physical discomfort and mental derangement. Upon arrival in Moscow, Klimov makes his way home to the apartment that he shares with his aunt and younger sister, who is studying to become a teacher, just as Maria Chekhova was.

When Katya greeted him, she had in her hands a notebook and a pencil, and he recalled that she was preparing for her teacher’s exam. Not answering their questions or greetings, only gasping from the heat, he aimlessly passed through all the rooms and, reaching his bed, fell onto his pillow. The Finn, the red coat, the woman with the white teeth, the stink of the frying meat, and the blinking spots occupied his consciousness, and he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t hear the excited voices.

Chekhov knew the long train ride and the tedium firsthand; he knew the various illnesses from medical literature and practice.

Awakening, he saw he was in his bed, undressed; he saw the carafe with the water and Pavel, but none of this made him either cooler, more relaxed, or more comfortable. As before, his legs and arms would not settle down. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he heard the sobbing of the Finn’s pipe. Near the bed, a black-bearded doctor was fussing about and bumping Pavel with his broad back.

He has a bad few days. “As in the train, at home time flew by astoundingly fast… In the bedroom, daylight every now and then turned into dusk.”

Finally:

When Klimov awoke from oblivion, there was not a soul in his bedroom. The morning sun slid through the window beneath the lowered curtain, and a trembling ray of light, thin and airy like a blade, played on the carafe. There was the clatter of wheels—this meant there was no longer snow outside. The lieutenant looked at the light, the familiar furniture, at the door, and the first thing he did was laugh. His chest and belly shook with tickling laughter from the sweetness, the happiness. His whole being, from his head to his toes, was overpowered by unlimited happiness and joy of life, which probably the first human felt when he became conscious and saw the world.

Unfortunately, his typhus infected his sister and she has died. How often had Chekhov witnessed such tragedies? Every time he saw Yanova, her family’s tragedy, which he as the fussing doctor had not been able to prevent, would have come to mind.

The infector survives his family:

Only a week later, when he was in his robe and supported by Pavel, and when he went to the window and looked out at the cloudy spring sky and was hearing the unpleasant banging of the old railway that ran past, did his heart seize up from pain; he began to cry and he leaned his forehead on the window-frame.

“How unhappy I am!” he moaned. “God, how unhappy!”

And joy gave way to mundane tedium and the feeling of irreversible loss.

*

With a happier and healthier family in Moscow than poor Klimov’s, Chekhov wrote warmly to Suvorin on March 18 to update him on Grigorovich’s health. Striking while the iron was hot, he was sending a list of sixteen stories for the book that Suvorin would publish this summer; meanwhile, he said, he would be trying to write the Easter story to send soon.

Anton followed up in a letter to Alexander on March 19, his first point being that his brother was an ass for not updating them on his family’s health. The letter was full of jokes and banter and directions about the book, which Alexander would be in charge of overseeing. “Size and font and so on—just like ‘Unusual Stories’ by Poe.” He still wanted the simple title, and he set up an order of presentation of the stories. He told his brother which ones to take out if there were too many (“An Incident,” “In the Court,” “A Trivial Incident”) and if more were needed, which ones they might include. He provided the text of an advertisement for his Motley Stories to be printed on the book cover.

He was in happy high-efficiency mode as he prepared for departure and freedom. He wrote to Maria Kiseleva and Leykin on March 21. For Kiseleva, he advised her about royalties and explained the tricks that publishers used so that their authors would not have the right to republish elsewhere. But keep in mind, he said, that publishers take all the risk, so authors should be grateful: “After all, a bad sparrow in hand is better than a paradise bird in paradise.”24 He teased her, as if in revenge for her criticisms of “Mire”: “Ach! In summer, reading a critic on your book, I will feel happy! As I will be gloating and maliciously rubbing my hands!” His teasing was funny and fast. She had teased him about a gift Dunya Efros had given him, which means that Efros was continuing to socialize with him. Most important, as Kiseleva’s unpaid agent, he had an update on “Larka,” Kiseleva’s story that he had submitted for her to New Times: Suvorin hadn’t read it yet. Also, Chekhov’s colleague with typhus had asked him to visit: “I’m not going!” (How would Chekhov have borne infecting his sister or mother!)

He wrote Leykin to tell him, among other things, that he had sent “Typhus” to the Petersburg Gazette. “I’m really leaving the 31st.”25 He asked Leykin to write him when he was down south, but he warned that he wouldn’t answer him. “I’ll describe for you in detail my trip, which in all probability will turn out strange and wild.” He kept trying to suggest to Leykin that their publishing relationship was essentially over but that their friendship should be fine, please!

He wrote to his Taganrog cousin Georgy Chekhov with his arrival time on April 4, but he asked him to keep it secret. On March 25 and 27 he reminded Alexander about keeping their mother informed about the health of his family; she was worried about Alexander’s children. Anton told him the typhus that Anna, Alexander’s wife, had would show its effects for one to two months. Alexander responded that Anna had been in the hospital; her typhus was less bad but she had a cough and was spitting more. But he also joked: “All the work on your book has been laid on me. [I’ll fix] places I don’t like and redo in my way the style corrections…”26

Chekhov wrote Leykin again on March 28 to give him fair warning again: “In the south I’ll be trying to write less. That means I’ll write little things from which the good half I’ll send you.” He encouraged Leykin to do better advertising for Motley Stories. Leykin denied any fault in promoting the book, however, insisting again that the only thing readers wanted then was Surovin’s Pushkin edition.27 In fact, Leykin had only placed one advertisement for Motley Stories, nearly ten months before. Was Leykin dishonest, as the Chekhov brothers complained, or just cagey? Why should Leykin, after all, help promote his star who was leaving him?

Chekhov was certainly bolting from his domestic life; in “Everyday Troubles”28 (“Zhiteyskie Nevzrody,” March 28), he describes the atmosphere of a noisy apartment: a bellowing wife with a toothache; a conservatory student banging out a piece by Liszt on the piano upstairs; a medical student next door pacing the floor while memorizing information. Amid the continual distractions, the hero focuses on doing his accounting for future earnings. Finally, he cracks. The story concludes, “In the morning they brought him to the hospital.”29

“In Passion Week” (“Na Strastnoy Nedele,” March 30) Chekhov tells in the first-person present tense the experiences of an eight-year-old, Fedya, going to confession during Lent. He and Chekhov notice signs of spring: “The roads are all covered with brownish slush, in which future paths are already beginning to show; the roofs and sidewalks are dry; the fresh young green is piercing through the rotting grass of last year, under the fences. In the gutters there is the merry gurgling and foaming of dirty water, in which the sunbeams do not disdain to bathe. Chips, straws, the husks of sunflower seeds are carried rapidly along in the water, whirling around and sticking in the dirty foam. Where, where are those chips swimming to? It may well be that from the gutter they may pass into the river, from the river into the sea, and from the sea into the ocean. I try to imagine to myself that long terrible journey, but my fancy stops short before reaching the sea.”30 The boy’s imagination about the journey fails him; Chekhov’s imagination also failed to picture what his “long terrible journey” to Taganrog and the steppe would actually be like.

The precocious eight-year-old, meanwhile, wears guilt like a heavy coat (as probably Chekhov did, too), though we see that he is actually sinless: “The Mother of God and the beloved disciple of Jesus Christ, depicted in profile, gaze in silence at the insufferable agony and do not observe my presence; I feel that to them I am alien, superfluous, unnoticed, that I can be no help to them by word or deed, that I am a loathsome, dishonest boy, only capable of mischief, rudeness, and tale-bearing. I think of all the people I know, and they all seem to me petty, stupid, and wicked, and incapable of bringing one drop of relief to that intolerable sorrow which I now behold.”

Having seen a woman ahead confessed and forgiven, the boy thinks to himself: “But how happy the man must be who has the right to forgive sins!” The unbelieving but forgiving Chekhov would have been this kind of happy man. Before the boy has his turn to confess, he has a scuffle with the local bully. After confession, he feels clean and duly reverent. The next day in church, he notices “the lady I saw yesterday looks lovely. She is wearing a light blue dress, and a big sparkling brooch in the shape of a horse-shoe. I admire her, and think that, when I am grown-up, I will certainly marry a woman like that, but remembering that getting married is shameful, I leave off thinking about it, and go into the choir […]”

Chekhov saw no shame in marrying, but he put it off himself until he was forty-one years old.

Leykin on the 29th suggested to Chekhov that his story “The Cat” (retitled “Spring”) would be better at half the length. Was Leykin baiting Chekhov or just being a good editor? It wasn’t published for another four weeks. On the 30th, Chekhov wrote back to tell Leykin the story was “at his disposal.” Chekhov’s other editors almost never suggested or demanded changes in his stories.

Meanwhile, in the offices of New Times, Alexander and Suvorin were discussing Chekhov’s collection of stories. Alexander wished Anton a peaceful journey.31 During the last two days of March, before his departure southward, Chekhov was hurrying to finish his Easter story, “The Letter,” for New Times.32

PART FIVE

To the South and Back

The sun had risen, but whether it was dancing or not Torchakov did not see. He remained silent all the way home, thinking and keeping his eyes fixed on the horse’s black tail. For some unknown reason he felt overcome by depression, and not a trace of the holiday gladness was left in his heart.

—Chekhov, “The Cossack”1

Chekhov was to be disappointed by what he found in Taganrog. He hadn’t realized how much his own perspective had changed after living in Moscow for nearly eight years. In letters and in his stories during this time, he mocked his hometown: its pace, the people, and their customs. “Threading my way through the New Bazaar, I became aware of how dirty, drab, empty, lazy, and illiterate is Taganrog,” he wrote his family shortly after his arrival for Easter weekend. “There isn’t a single grammatical signboard and there is even a ‘Rushian Inn’; the streets are deserted; the dumb faces of the dock-workers are smugly satisfied; the dandies are arrayed in long overcoats and caps. All this thrust before the eyes is so disheartening that even Moscow with its grime and typhus seems attractive.”2

He was happier if less comfortable while visiting with friends on the southern steppe. In later years Taganrog’s cultural development became one of Chekhov’s charitable social projects; he funded the city’s libraries and hospitals. The return north in mid-May, however, did not bring him peace of mind. Except for a few trips to Moscow and performing medical duties nearby, he was with his family at Babkino for the entire summer. He was fulfilling his obligations of supplying short stories to New Times and the Petersburg Gazette, but he was not settling down. Marriage with Dunya Efros still crossed his mind. By September, his spirits were lower than they had ever been.

April 1887

“What is there to teach? There is nothing to teach. Sit down and write.”

—“The Letter”

While on the road, Chekhov wanted and had a light month of writing; it was Holy Season, and the first three pieces he published, “A Mystery” (“Tayna,” April 11), “The Cossack” (“Kazak,” April 13), and “The Letter” (“Pis’mo,” April 18), were appropriately religiously themed for the periodicals. Only “The Letter” inspired him to sublimity.

By April 1, Chekhov had sent “The Letter” to Suvorin. On April 2, Lazarev accompanied Chekhov to Moscow’s Kursky terminal, where Chekhov boarded the train headed south. Usually he did not date his letters, but he now recounted this leg of the trip to his family with, sometimes, hour by hour notations. For the next several weeks, he reported the events and his movements in a “diary” for the family’s entertainment. He was glad to share his impressions with his “Gentle readers and devout listeners.”1

He began writing his sister while on the train on April 3. He wrote that he hadn’t had an envelope, so sent a postcard at 4:50 in the morning from Orel (“I’m drinking coffee that tastes like smoked whitefish”);2 he wasn’t able to mail the first installment of the diary until April 7, the day after he arrived in Taganrog.

He wrote one unhappy short story on the way, but in his letters his observations of life on the train and out the window were relaxed, amusing and happy. On April 4 the train was on familiar territory:

…Twelve o’clock. Lovely weather. There is a scent of the steppe and one hears the birds sing. I see my old friends the ravens flying over the steppe.

The barrows, the water-towers, the buildings—everything is familiar and well-remembered. At the station I have a helping of remarkably good and rich sorrel soup. Then I walk along the platform. Young ladies. At an upper window at the far end of the station sits a young girl (or a married lady, goodness knows which) in a white blouse, beautiful and languid. I look at her, she looks at me…. I put on my glasses, she does the same…. Oh, lovely vision! I caught a catarrh of the heart and continued my journey. The weather is devilishly, revoltingly fine. Little Russians, oxen, ravens, white huts, rivers, the line of the Donets railway with one telegraph wire, daughters of landowners and farmers, red dogs, the trees—it all flits by like a dream…. It is hot. The inspector begins to bore me. The rissoles and pies, half of which I have not gotten through, begin to smell […].3

On the 6th, he was in Taganrog for Good Friday, but he was disappointed by his homecoming; he wrote his family on April 7:

It gives one the impression of Herculaneum and Pompeii; there are no people, and instead of mummies there are sleepy drishpaks [Garnett’s footnote: “Uneducated young men in the jargon of Taganrog”] and melon-shaped heads. All the houses look flattened out, and as though they had long needed replastering, the roofs want painting, the shutters are closed….

At eight o’clock in the evening my uncle [Mitrofan], his family, Irina, the dogs, the rats that live in the storeroom, the rabbits were fast asleep. There was nothing for it but to go to bed, too. I sleep on the drawing room sofa. The sofa has not increased in length, and is as short as it was before, and so when I go to bed I have either to stick up my legs in an unseemly way or to let them hang down to the floor. I think of Procrustes and his bed. I cover myself with a pink quilt, stiff and stuffy, which becomes intolerably obnoxious at night when the stoves lit by Irina make their presence felt. A Yakov Andreyevich [a nickname for a chamber pot] is a fond but unattainable dream. Only two persons permit themselves this luxury in Taganrog: the mayor and Alferaki. All the rest must either pee in bed or take a trip to God’s outdoors.4 […]

He had a sore on his leg and diarrhea: “There is no end to my ailments. The biblical saying that in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children is being fulfilled so far as I am concerned, for my children are my stories, and I cannot bear to think of them now. The very idea of writing is repugnant to me.”

Chekhov caught up on mail; he read letters from Leykin, who wrote from his estate near Petersburg: “We had a houseguest last week […] and she kept asking me about you. I told her what kind of person you are: how tall, skin color, how fat. Come to Tosna in June and we’ll show her to you, and we’ll show you to her. Why not? Maybe…”5

Leykin hadn’t guessed how sour Chekhov was feeling about marriage. Chekhov replied on April 7, sour mostly on Taganrog:

Stark Asia! All around there’s such Asia that I can’t believe my eyes. Sixty thousand inhabitants busy themselves exclusively with eating, drinking, procreating, and they have no other interests, none at all. Wherever you go there are Easter cakes, eggs, local wine, infants, but no newspapers, no books…. The site of the city is in every respect magnificent, the climate glorious, the fruits of the earth abound, but the people are devilishly apathetic. […]

On Saturday I am going to Novocherkassk, where I act as best man at the wedding of a wealthy Cossack girl. […]6

Chekhov received a letter from his father written April 7, the first such correspondence from Pavel that exists in this period. With Chekhov out of town, perhaps the actual father of the family felt the need to take charge. Pavel knew that payment for his son’s latest publications was due from Petersburg, but it still hadn’t arrived. The family had spent Easter alone: “It was boring without you.”7

But Chekhov himself was already bored in Taganrog. He wrote his parents and siblings over April 10–11:

Frightfully dull. It is cold and gray…. During all my stay in Taganrog I could only do justice to the following things: remarkably good ring-rolls sold at the market, the Santurninsky wine, fresh caviar, excellent crabs and uncle’s genuine hospitality. Everything else is poor and not to be envied. The young ladies here are not bad, but it takes some time to get used to them. They are abrupt in their movements, frivolous in their attitude to men, run away from their parents with actors, laugh loudly, easily fall in love, whistle to dogs, drink wine, etc. […]

The devil only knows what I haven’t spent a night on: on beds with bugs, on sofas, settees, boxes. Last night I spent in a long and narrow parlor on a sofa under a looking-glass….8

On the 11th, Chekhov wrote his sister to tell her that the delay in their receiving his payment had been Alexander’s fault: “Between you and me: I’m afraid he’s sick or drinking.” As usual in his letters to Maria, he sent acknowledgments to Dunya Efros.

Chekhov’s heart and soul seem to have not been fully engaged in the comic “A Mystery” (April 11), which he had dispatched to Leykin on March 31: An official is perplexed by a mysterious guest signature that doesn’t seem to belong to any of his yearly party attendees. After taking up spiritualism whole hog, the official then finds out his priest likes to sign guestbooks with his former nonreligious name.

Chekhov had written “The Cossack” (“Kazak,” April 13) while on the train south; the steppe, viewed dreamily and beautifully, was just outside the window: “The sun had not yet risen, but the east was all tinged with red and gold and had dissipated the haze which usually, in the early morning, screens the blue of the sky from the eyes. It was quiet…. The birds were hardly yet awake…. The corncrake uttered its clear note, and far away above a little tumulus, a sleepy kite floated, heavily flapping its wings, and no other living creature could be seen all over the steppe.”9 Chekhov loved Easter and so does his young newlywed hero: “Torchakov drove on and thought that there was no better nor happier holiday than the Feast of Christ’s Resurrection.” The plot, however, is solemn and its moral as heavy as lead. Torchakov’s young wife won’t let her husband give a sick Cossack any of their whole and pretty Easter cake. For once, the religious stories of Tolstoy did not inspire but instead dampened Chekhov. Torchakov gives in to his wife’s fussy lack of charitableness but then repents and feels tortured:

“I can’t get that Cossack out of my head, do what you will!” he said to his wife. “He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if God meant to try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a Cossack? It does happen, you know. It’s bad, Lizaveta; we were unkind to the man!”

This leads to the newlyweds’ first but definitely not last fight:

Maxim got up from the table and began reproaching his young wife for hard-heartedness and stupidity. She, getting angry too, answered his reproaches with reproaches, burst into tears, and went away into their bedroom, declaring she would go home to her father’s.

This was the first matrimonial squabble that had happened in the Torchakovs’ married life. He walked about the yard till the evening, picturing his wife’s face, and it seemed to him now spiteful and ugly. And as though to torment him the Cossack haunted his brain, and Maxim seemed to see now his sick eyes, now his unsteady walk.

“Ah, we were unkind to the man,” he muttered.

When the day ends without Maxim able to find the Cossack to whom he wanted to make up for his unkindness, “he was overcome by an insufferable depression such as he had never felt before.”

Feeling so dreary, and being angry with his wife, he got drunk, as he had sometimes done before he was married. In his drunkenness he used bad language and shouted to his wife that she had a spiteful, ugly face, and that next day he would send her packing to her father’s. On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to sober himself, and got drunk again.

And with that his downfall began.

His horses, cows, sheep, and hives disappeared one by one from the yard; Maxim was more and more often drunk, debts mounted up, he felt an aversion for his wife. Maxim put down all his misfortunes to the fact that he had an unkind wife, and above all, that God was angry with him on account of the sick Cossack.

Lizaveta saw their ruin, but who was to blame for it she did not understand.

So their despairing, miserable story ends. But there is a bigger story than theirs. Chekhov himself had enjoyed the pretty sunrise over the steppe, and, unlike Lizaveta, his narrator doesn’t begrudge sharing it: “In the east the first rays of the rising sun shone out, cutting their way through the feathery clouds, and the song of the lark was heard in the sky. Now not one but three kites were hovering over the steppe at a respectful distance from one another. Grasshoppers began churring in the young grass.” This is Chekhov’s odd Thomas Hardy-like moment, where the world shines in its glory while the abject humans crawl across it.

But what stories was Chekhov writing now that he was bouncing around the environs of Taganrog? In the next letter to his family, he stated again, as he had last week, that his offspring were his creative works: “My children aren’t Yegor or Little Vladimir,” he wrote his family, “but stories and tales, about which I’m unable to think… To write disgusts me.”10 He was restless and unhappily unproductive. He was wondering if his long multi-day letters hadn’t gone astray: “I’ve sent you twice 16pp of diary and I’m amazed that you still haven’t received it.”

To Leykin he wrote a letter on the 17th explaining or excusing himself in list-form for not writing to him (or thereby for Fragments) because of how sick he was feeling; among his other afflictions were hemorrhoids, coughing, a bad leg. He also diagnosed and questioned Leykin’s doctor’s remedies for Leykin and offered his own medical advice, qualified only by “Such is my opinion.”11

On the 18th of April, he was on the road to his friends on the steppe at Rogozin Ravine and on the 19th sent the next installment of his diary-letter.

On the 18th, Surovin published Chekhov’s “The Letter” (“Pis’mo,” then known as “Laypeople”), which the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky read through “twice in a row” and loved. This story led to these Russian titans meeting in October of 1889 and their friendship.

Here’s the first paragraph:

The clerical superintendent of the district, His Reverence Father Fyodor Orlov, a handsome, well-nourished man of fifty, grave and important as he always was, with an habitual expression of dignity that never left his face, was walking to and fro in his little drawing room, extremely exhausted, and thinking intensely about the same thing: “When would his visitor go?”

Besides the marvelous immediate characterization of Father Orlov, there’s the excitement of the suspenseful situation: wishing one’s visitor would leave.

The thought worried him and did not leave him for a minute. The visitor, Father Anastasy, the priest of one of the villages near the town, had come to him three hours before on some very unpleasant and dreary business of his own, had stayed on and on, was now sitting in the corner at a little round table with his elbow on a thick account book, and apparently had no thought of going, though it was getting on for nine o’clock in the evening.

I wonder if either of Chekhov’s new friends Lazarev and Ezhov reading the next paragraph wouldn’t have tried to keep it in mind the next time they dropped in on Chekhov:

Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie. But Father Anastasy perceived it clearly, and realized that his presence was burdensome and inappropriate, that His Reverence, who had taken an early morning service in the night and a long mass at midday, was exhausted and longing for repose; every minute he was meaning to get up and go, but he did not get up, he sat on as though he were waiting for something.

The third and final character arrives, the deacon Liubimov, and this is where I will begin a summary of the middle of the story, and save the end for further quotations, commentary, and revelations of Chekhov’s moral bearings.

The deacon has family problems—a wayward son—and can confide the problem to Father Orlov in a way that the latter can give counsel in a tried-and-true fashion. It’s Lent, and the deacon’s son is violating the fast…. But that’s not all! Liubimov’s son has been living with a married woman for three years, and they socialize as if they are indeed married! They have not produced any children, he says, at which Father Anastasy most inappropriately remarks:

“I suppose they have been living in chastity!” chuckled Father Anastasy, coughing huskily. “There are children, Father Deacon—there are, but they don’t keep them at home! They send them to the Foundling! He-he-he!…” Anastasy went on coughing till he choked.

“His Reverence” tells Anastasy to butt out, and the deacon continues his story. We don’t know if Anastasy’s comment is true; it’s ignored as if it is true or too cynical to bother refuting. Orlov, we learn from Chekhov, is not an impartial judge of Liubimov’s son Pyotr. He has known Pyotr since he was a noisy, difficult boy who avoided church “and had been given to raising delicate and insoluble questions with a peculiarly provoking zest.”

I would suggest Pyotr had something in common with the Taganrog Chekhov boys, except for one little turn: as a boy he “had taken up a contemptuous and critical attitude to fishing, a pursuit to which both His Reverence and the deacon were greatly addicted.” The story’s author was addicted to fishing as well. We see Chekhov “switching up”—personally identifying in different aspects with characters very different from himself and disassociating from characters otherwise similar.12

This story is a play that we are watching with the comic genius who wrote it. Chekhov glances here and over there and now again over here. He knows what each character is thinking and feeling, but for the most part he has the confidence in us that we can figure out—with his occasional comments and from the dialogue—the hearts and minds of these three men.

The deacon begs His Reverence to direct the composition of the letter to his wayward son. Though the deacon is neither clever nor calculating, he knows how to persuade Orlov:

“Father Fyodor!” said the deacon, putting his head on one side and pressing his hand to his heart. “I am an uneducated slow-witted man, while the Lord has vouchsafed you judgment and wisdom. You know everything and understand everything. You can master anything, while I don’t know how to put my words together sensibly. Be generous. Instruct me how to write the letter. Teach me what to say and how to say it….”

“What is there to teach? There is nothing to teach. Sit down and write.”

And maybe here, in Father Fyodor, we see Chekhov’s own matter-of-fact reflex: The secret to writing is to sit down and write. That’s all there is to it! But we and the deacon know that some people are masterfully bold writers, and for the rest of us it’s not easy to write a reproachful letter to someone we adore.

“Oh, do me the favor, Father Fyodor! I beseech you! I know he will be frightened and will attend to your letter, because, you see, you are a cultivated man, too. Do be so good! I’ll sit down, and you’ll dictate to me. It will be a sin to write tomorrow, but now would be the very time; my mind would be set at rest.”

His Reverence looked at the deacon’s imploring face, thought of the disagreeable Pyotr, and consented to dictate. He made the deacon sit down to his table and began.

The deacon and Father Anastasy exult over the letter’s fiery excellence and leave His Reverence to a well-earned nap.

The scene changes, even seemingly to Chekhov’s relief and pleasure. Chekhov, we know, loved the Easter season.

As is always the case on Easter Eve, it was dark in the street, but the whole sky was sparkling with bright luminous stars. There was a scent of spring and holiday in the soft still air.

“How long was he dictating?” the deacon said admiringly. “Ten minutes, not more! It would have taken someone else a month to compose such a letter. Eh! What a mind! Such a mind that I don’t know what to call it! It’s a marvel! It’s really a marvel!”

Yes, “a marvel,” and even Anastasy agrees and heaps on the praise of His Reverence. The deacon continues to exult, as if his problem with Pyotr has been solved:

The deacon laughed gaily and loudly. Since the letter had been written to Pyotr he had become serene and more cheerful. The consciousness of having performed his duty as a father and his faith in the power of the letter had brought back his mirthfulness and good-humor.

“It’s a splendid letter, only you know I wouldn’t send it, Father Deacon. Let him alone.”

“What?” said the deacon, disconcerted.

“Why… Don’t send it, deacon! What’s the sense of it? Suppose you send it; he reads it, and… and what then? You’ll only upset him. Forgive him. Let him alone!”

I think even some of us readers are surprised by Father Anastasy’s advice. And maybe it’s the surprise of a simply stated moral opinion in the face of logical arguments to the contrary that most effectively convinces us (and eventually the deacon) that he’s right.

The deacon looked in surprise at Anastasy’s dark face, at his unbuttoned cassock, which looked in the dusk like wings, and shrugged his shoulders.

“How can I forgive him like that?” he asked. “Why I shall have to answer for him to God!”

“Even so, forgive him all the same. Really! And God will forgive you for your kindness to him.”

“But he is my son, isn’t he? Ought I not to teach him?”

“Teach him? Of course—why not? You can teach him, but why call him a heathen? It will hurt his feelings, you know, deacon….”

They arrive at the deacon’s “little house with three windows.” We learn the deacon is a widower living with his invalid sister.

Father Anastasy went in with him. Seeing his table already laid with Easter cakes and red eggs, he began weeping for some reason, probably thinking of his own home, and to turn these tears into a jest, he at once laughed huskily.

“Yes, we shall soon be breaking the fast,” he said. “Yes… it wouldn’t come amiss, deacon, to have a little glass now. Can we? I’ll drink it so that the old lady does not hear,” he whispered, glancing sideways toward the door.

Without a word the deacon moved a decanter and wineglass toward him.

Chekhov reminds us that Father Anastasy has his own problems, and that his drinking is connected to the disappointment and shame of his life. And to get a drink, he’s cagey.

The deacon reads the letter aloud, admiring it once again.

Anastasy, despite his dissipation and need to get drunk, reasserts his advice, but even more inspiringly:

“Do you know, deacon, don’t send it!” said Anastasy, pouring himself out a second glass of vodka as though unconsciously. “Forgive him, let him alone! I am telling you… what I really think. If his own father can’t forgive him, who will forgive him? And so he’ll live without forgiveness. Think, deacon: there will be plenty to chastise him without you, but you should look out for some who will show mercy to your son! I’ll… I’ll… have just one more. The last, old man…. Just sit down and write straight off to him, ‘I forgive you Pyotr!’ He will understa-and! He will fe-el it! I understand it from myself, you see old man… deacon, I mean. When I lived like other people, I hadn’t much to trouble about, but now since I lost the image and semblance, there is only one thing I care about, that good people should forgive me. And remember, too, it’s not the righteous but sinners we must forgive. Why should you forgive your old woman if she is not sinful? No, you must forgive a man when he is a sad sight to look at… yes!”

As great as Tolstoy is, even greater an artist than Chekhov (both Chekhov and I would say), I can’t help feeling that Tolstoy writing this story would give in to me and to himself—and let us have a sentimental hero. Only Chekhov can resist this big opportunity for sentimentality. In Tolstoy’s story, Anastasy would not be getting drunk.

Anastasy leaned his head on his fist and sank into thought.

“It’s a terrible thing, deacon,” he sighed, evidently struggling with the desire to take another glass—“a terrible thing! In sin my mother bore me, in sin I have lived, in sin I shall die…. God forgive me, a sinner! I have gone astray, deacon! There is no salvation for me! And it’s not as though I had gone astray in my life, but in old age—at death’s door… I…”

The old man, with a hopeless gesture, drank off another glass, then got up and moved to another seat.

And now the burden of decision about the letter rests on the deacon’s soft shoulders.

The deacon, still keeping the letter in his hand, was walking up and down the room. He was thinking of his son. Displeasure, distress, and anxiety no longer troubled him; all that had gone into the letter. Now he was simply picturing Pyotr; he imagined his face, he thought of the past years when his son used to come to stay with him for the holidays. His thoughts were only of what was good, warm, touching, of which one might think for a whole lifetime without wearying. Longing for his son, he read the letter through once more and looked questioningly at Anastasy.

Rereading this, I get tears in my eyes, as I’ll bet Tchaikovsky did too: “His thoughts were only of what was good, warm, touching, of which one might think for a whole lifetime without wearying. Longing for his son […]”! How can we not finally love the deacon? But will he or won’t he heed Anastasy’s advice?

“Don’t send it,” said the latter, with a wave of his hand.

And again, while revealing to me my own sentimental impulses, Chekhov won’t let readers mush up the story. The deacon is obedient; he admires His Reverence. He has committed to sending the letter.

Just as with the Greek gods, however, the gift of the letter cannot be ungifted, but there can be conditions and qualifiers attached that completely alter its quality:

The deacon took an envelope from the table, but before putting the letter into it he sat down to the table, smiled, and added on his own account at the bottom of the letter:

“They have sent us a new inspector. He’s much friskier than the old one. He’s a great one for dancing and talking, and there’s nothing he can’t do, so that all the Govorovsky girls are crazy over him. Our military chief, Kostyrev, will soon get the sack too, they say. High time he did!” And very well pleased, without the faintest idea that with this postscript he had completely spoiled the stern letter, the deacon addressed the envelope and laid it in the most conspicuous place on the table.

Chekhov made the Psychology of Forgiveness the god of this story.

*

On the road on April 20 to a wedding in Zverevo, Chekhov wrote a note to Alexander: “I’m alive and well. […] Why don’t you write?”13

In these two years, Chekhov was so productive that he only very rarely looked back at old work and recycled it. With a new title and revisions, probably submitted to the Petersburg Gazette before he left Moscow, “Boa Constrictor and Rabbit” (“Udav i Krolik,” April 20) is a story he wrote for Fragments (“The Behavior of Husbands” [“K Svedeniyu Muzhei”]) that had been blocked by a censor in January of 1886 and been given up on by Leykin. An old Don Juan advises his listener how to lead a husband into preparing his wife to be seducible: “According to this method, if you’re trying to seduce a man’s wife, you should keep as far away from her as possible. […] It’s all a matter of hypnosis. She must not see you but feel you, just as a rabbit feels the gaze of the boa constrictor.”14 The speaker’s cynical, knowing voice, it seems to me, is Chekhov’s brother Nikolay’s or their friend Levitan’s; part of the seduction, in any case, depends on the wife beginning to study herself in the mirror with the eye of a head over heels admirer.

On the 23rd, Chekhov wrote his sister from Zverevo to assure her he would be writing a lot about his visit to the Kravtsovs’ in Novocherkassk. Their brother Ivan wrote Chekhov on this date that “The Letter” was so popular that the issue of New Times it was in was unavailable to buy, even from Suvorin’s own bookshops.15 Though Chekhov had been having a terrible time trying to write fiction, on the 24th he mailed to the Petersburg Gazette the exciting, seemingly un-Chekhovlike murder story “An Adventure.” On the 25th, he wrote up his adventures about the previous day’s event in Zverevo: “A real Cossack wedding with music, feminine bleating, and revolting drunkenness…. The bride is sixteen. They were married in the cathedral. I acted as best man, and was dressed in somebody else’s evening suit with fearfully wide trousers, and not a single stud on my shirt. In Moscow such a best man would have been kicked out, but here I looked smarter than anyone.”16

I saw lots of rich prospective brides. An enormous choice, but I was so drunk all the time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles. Owing to my drunken condition, probably, the local girls found I was witty and “sarcastical.” The girls here are absolute sheep: if one gets up to leave a room, the others follow after. The boldest and “smartest” of them, who wanted to show that she was not unaware of subtle niceties of behavior and the social graces, kept tapping me on the arm with her fan and saying, “You bad boy!” though she kept on darting timid glances at me all the time. I taught her to repeat to the local cavaliers, “How naïve you are!”

[…] I have many themes in mind for New Times but the heat is such that even letter-writing is a chore.17

At Zverevo I shall have to wait from nine in the evening till five in the morning. Last time I spent the night there in a second-class railway-carriage on the siding. I went out of the carriage in the night [for a pee]18 and outside I found veritable marvels: the moon, the limitless steppe, the barrows, the wilderness; deathly stillness, and the carriages and the railway lines sharply standing out from the dusk. It seemed as though the world were dead…. It was a picture one would not forget for ages and ages.

*

Chekhov’s “Spring: Monologue Scene” (“Vesnoy,” April 25), the monologue of a cat, had been at Fragments for a month, but after Leykin abridged it, as he had asked Chekhov’s permission to do, he held it and renamed it “Spring” to conform to the season. Leykin cut, as far the Collected Works editors can figure, specific references to Moscow, as the original piece had been written for Moscow’s Alarm Clock. It reads simply and clearly, with no evidence of abridgment: In the early morning, a young gray cat with a big scratch on his nose speaks on a variety of topics, but the first one is love: “Here before you is the happiest of mortals! Oh, love! O, sweet moments! Oh, when I am dead and they take me by the tail and fling me in the garbage pit, even then I won’t forget the first encounter beside the toppled barrel. I won’t forget the glance of her sharp eyes, her velvety, furry tail. For one twitch of that graceful unearthly tail, I’m ready to reject the whole world.”19

I was tempted to put Chekhov into the cat’s shoes (or paws), but there seems no particular connection and necessarily no immediate connection to his adventures in Taganrog or on the steppe, as he had written the story more than a month before. In his letters, Chekhov did not share news of any liaisons this trip, but perhaps that was only because most of the letters were to his sister or entire family.

While in Taganrog the previous week, Chekhov sent “The Critic” (“Kritik,” April 27) to the Petersburg Gazette. There had probably never been a story about a critic who is sympathetic, much less a hero. And there still isn’t one. There are two critics in “The Critic”: At the buffet of a theater, a drama-loving priest and a newspaper man drink, argue, get drunk, and on principal cut down to size any actor the other appreciates.

From April 26 to May 6 Chekhov was in Ragozin Ravine.

While there he had his eye on his return north; he wrote to Maria on the 29th. She and their mother and eventually the whole family were heading for Babkino before Anton would get back.

Alexander wrote that Suvorin wanted to put Anton on a 200-ruble-a-month retainer, twice as much as Leykin had paid him in 1886.20

Chekhov wrote the whole family on the 30th: “The evening is warm. There are storm-clouds about, and so one cannot see a thing. The air is close and there is a smell of grass.”21

I am staying in Ragozin Ravine at K.’s. There is a small house with a thatched roof, and barns made of flat stone. There are three rooms, with earthen floors, crooked ceilings, and windows that lift up and down instead of opening outward. […] The first necessaries [outhouses] are conspicuous by their absence, and one has in all weathers to slip out to the ravine, and one is warned to make sure there is not a viper or some other creature under the bushes. […]

Now about food. In the morning there is tea, eggs, ham and bacon fat. At midday, soup with goose, roast goose with pickled sloes, or a turkey, roast chicken, milk pudding, and sour milk. No vodka or pepper allowed. At five o’clock they make on a camp fire in the wood a porridge of millet and bacon fat. In the evening there is tea, ham, and all that has been left over from dinner.

The entertainments are: shooting bustards, making bonfires, going to Ivanovka, shooting at a mark, setting the dogs at one another, preparing gunpowder paste for fireworks, talking politics, building turrets of stone, etc. […]

…The coal mines are not far off. Tomorrow morning early I am going on a one-horse droshky to Ivanovka (twenty-three versts) to fetch my letters from the post.

…We eat turkeys’ eggs. Turkeys lay eggs in the wood on last year’s leaves. They kill hens, geese, pigs, etc., by shooting here. The shooting is incessant.

Chekhov, far from finding peace and quiet, also detailed the agonized state of his hemorrhoids.

May 1887

I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not one to be impressed with peasant virtues. I acquired my belief in progress when still a child; I couldn’t help believing in it, because the difference between the period when they flogged me and the period when they stopped flogging me was enormous…. Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat.

—Letter to a friend1

While Chekhov was still at Ragozin Ravine, his brother Alexander wrote him a postcard on the 1st of May in Latin to disguise and hide his news from any eavesdroppers: Suvorin’s son Vladimir had killed himself. Chekhov seems to have received this postcard on May 5.

On May 4, Chekhov received two peeved letters from Leykin, to which he replied the next day, as usual leading off with an excuse about why he hadn’t written anything for Fragments lately: “You’re mad at me at my silence for nothing. I’d be glad to write, but there’s no postal service.” He was leaving now for Holy Mountains for three or four days. He asked, with more courage than the son in “Difficult People,” for a loan of 200–300 rubles.

Mikhail Chekhov informed his brother, “Everybody reads your diary with pleasure.” When their friends read sections of it aloud, “there were many laughs.”2 That had to be just what Chekhov intended to happen when his family received his long letters.

He had sent off to New Times at the end of April “An Adventure: A Driver’s Story” (“Proisshestvie: Rasskaz Yamshchika,” May 4), which, like all of Chekhov’s stories of murder, is especially shocking. Murders don’t happen in Chekhov… except when they do.

Unusually, the story is told in the first person by someone of a lower educational class than Chekhov. No one thinks of Chekhov as an experimentalist, maybe because his experiments are too subtle for the likes of us. To tell this story, Chekhov probably figured out in a moment’s flash of inspiration that the third person wouldn’t do. For all the knowledge the story depends on, the tale has to be told by an intelligent, perceptive but not highly cultured person:

To tell the truth, all our family have a great taste for vodka. I can read and write, I served for six years at a tobacconist’s in the town, and I can talk to any educated gentleman, and can use very fine language, but, it is perfectly true, sir, as I read in a book, that vodka is the blood of Satan. Through vodka my face has darkened. And there is nothing seemly about me, and here, as you may see, sir, I am a cab-driver like an ignorant, uneducated peasant.3

The narrator’s father needed his children to accompany him to keep him awake after his bouts of drinking. On this fateful adventure, he brought the narrator’s little sister. His drunken bragging in an inn about the money he has on him leads to him being pursued on the wooded road by robbers. Before the robbers arrive, he gives his daughter the money and instructs her to hide, and then, if there’s more trouble, to run home. Perhaps because Chekhov thought a hero should not tell her own tale, the heroine’s older brother tells the tale of the traumatized and heroic seven-or eight-year-old Anyutka. The story has a neatness and finish that is unusual in Chekhov’s fiction, perhaps because of its being presented as a spoken tale that has been repeated many times.

Fleeing after witnessing her father’s torture, Anyutka finds her way to a forester’s cabin. A seemingly kindly mother listens to the girl’s story and promises to help her get home in the morning.

The woman took the money, and put Anyutka to sleep on the stove where at the time the brooms were drying. And on the same stove, on the brooms, the forester’s daughter, a girl as small as our Anyutka, was asleep. And Anyutka used to tell us afterward that there was such a scent from the brooms, they smelt of honey!

How comfortable or uncomfortable sleeping on brooms is, Chekhov doesn’t say. During his month in the south, traveling here and there, he often slept uncomfortably. The detail of the honey-scent surprises the narrator and pleases Chekhov and us. Chekhov continually makes us aware of our senses pulling in impressions, even if, seemingly, they have nothing to do with the plot of the story. But it’s our senses that give us the atmosphere, our awareness of imagining an absolutely particular place.

Anyutka lay down, but she could not get to sleep, she kept crying quietly; she was sorry for Father, and terrified. But, sir, an hour or two passed, and she saw those very three robbers who had tortured Father walk into the hut; and the one in the crimson shirt, with big jaws, their leader, went up to the woman and said:

“Well, wife, we have simply murdered a man for nothing. Today we killed a man at dinner-time, we killed him all right, but not a farthing did we find.”

So this fellow in the crimson shirt turned out to be the forester, the woman’s husband.

“The man’s dead for nothing,” said his ragged companions. “In vain we have taken a sin on our souls.”

The forester’s wife looked at all three and laughed.

“What are you laughing at, silly?”

“I am laughing because I haven’t murdered anyone, and I have not taken any sin on my soul, but I have found the money.”

Through Anyutka’s telling and her brother’s retelling of her clever escape (“For all she was so simple, she thought of something that, I must say, not many an educated man would have thought of”), it feels almost like a fairy tale. But this is enough summary. I won’t tell the rest.

*

While in Slavyansk, on his way to Holy Mountains, Chekhov ran into Alexandra Selivanova, whom he had tutored when he was in high school in Taganrog. Small world! “She was happy, she works in some kind of factory school, dressed luxuriously and produced a very positive impression.”4 He wrote to her later, “I remember the impression you made on me in Slavyansk (I wanted to throw myself under the train).” She did not, however, inspire him to write any love stories.

In sights, sounds and smells, he sketched his impressions in his letter-diary for his family:

I came to Slavyansk on a dark evening. The cabmen refuse to take me to the Holy Mountains at night and advise me to spend the night at Slavyansk, which I did very willingly, for I felt broken and lame with pain…. The town is something like Gogol’s Mirgorod; there is a hairdresser and a watchmaker, so that one may hope that in another thousand years there will be a telephone. The walls and fences are pasted with the advertisements of a menagerie…. On green and dusty streets walk pigs, cows, and other domestic creatures. The houses look cordial and friendly, rather like kindly grandmothers; the pavements are soft, the streets are wide, there is a smell of lilac and acacia in the air; from the distance come the singing of a nightingale, the croaking of frogs, barking, and sounds of a harmonium, of a woman screeching…. I stopped in Kulikov’s hotel, where I took a room for seventy-five kopecks.

After sleeping on wooden sofas and washtubs [Maybe the bed of brooms from “An Adventure” was a dream image?] it was a voluptuous sight to see a bed with a mattress, a washstand…. Fragrant breezes came in at the wide-open window and green branches thrust themselves in. It was a glorious morning. It was a holiday (May 6th) and the bells were ringing in the cathedral. People were coming out from mass. I saw police officers, justices of the peace, military superintendents, and other principalities and powers come out of the church. I bought two kopecks’ worth of sunflower seeds, and hired for six rubles a carriage on springs to take me to the Holy Mountains and back (in two days’ time). I drove out of the town through little streets literally drowned in the green of cherry, apricot, and apple trees. The birds sang unceasingly. Little Russians whom I met took off their caps, taking me probably for Turgenev; my driver jumped every minute off the box to put the harness to rights, or to crack his whip at the boys who ran after the carriage…. There were strings of pilgrims along the road. On all sides there were white hills, big and small. The horizon was bluish-white, the rye was tall, oak copses were met with here and there—the only things lacking were crocodiles and rattlesnakes.

I came to the Holy Mountains at twelve o’clock.

He wrote the family about his two days at this holiday gathering, and this account from his travels is one of the rare instances where he gives as vivid a description in his correspondence as in his fiction:

It is a remarkably beautiful and unique place. The monastery stands on the bank of the river Donets at the foot of a huge white rock covered with gardens, oaks, and ancient pines crowded together and overhanging, one above another. It seems as if the trees had not enough room on the rock, and as if some force were driving them upward…. The pines literally hang in the air and look as though they might fall any minute. Cuckoos and nightingales sing night and day.

The monks, very pleasant people, gave me a very unpleasant room with a pancake-like mattress. I spent two nights at the monastery and gathered a mass of impressions. While I was there some fifteen thousand pilgrims assembled because of St. Nicolas’ Day; eight-ninths of them were old women. I did not know before that there were so many old women in the world; had I known, I would have shot myself long ago. About the monks, my acquaintance with them and how I gave medical advice to the monks and the old women, I will write to [New Times] and tell you when we meet. The services are endless: at midnight they ring for matins, at five for early mass, at nine for late mass, at three for the song of praise, at five for vespers, at six for the special prayers. Before every service one hears in the corridors the weeping sound of a bell, and a monk runs along crying in the voice of a creditor who implores his debtor to pay him at least five kopecks for a ruble:

“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us! Please come to matins!”

It is awkward to stay in one’s room, and so one gets up and goes out. I have chosen a spot on the bank of the Donets, where I sit during all the services. I have bought an ikon for Auntie [his mother’s sister]. The food is provided gratis by the monastery for all the fifteen thousand: cabbage soup with dried fresh-water fish and porridge. Both are good, and so is the rye bread. The church bells are wonderful. The choir is not up to much. I took part in a religious procession on boats.5

In July he would write up this scene again in “Uprooted: An Incident from My Travels” (“Perekati-Pole”). As the subtitle indicates, the story is told in the first person and begins “on my way back from evening service.”6

Comparing Chekhov’s letter to Chekhov’s fictional representation, I retreat from trying to figure out which is better: his voice in the letter is looser, funnier; the narrator of “Uprooted” is more grounded and focused. Through these two voices, Chekhov gives us a fascinating picture of this cultural event:

More than ten thousand people flocked to the Holy Mountains for the festivals of St. John the Divine and St. Nikolay the wonder-worker. Not only the hostel buildings, but even the bakehouse, the tailoring room, the carpenter’s shop, the carriage house, were filled to overflowing…. Those who had arrived toward night clustered like flies in autumn, by the walls, around the wells in the yard, or in the narrow passages of the hostel, waiting to be shown a resting-place for the night. The lay brothers, young and old, were in an incessant movement, with no rest or hope of being relieved. By day or late at night they produced the same impression of men hastening somewhere and agitated by something, yet, in spite of their extreme exhaustion, their faces remained full of courage and kindly welcome, their voices friendly, their movements rapid. […] Watching them during the course of twenty-four hours, I found it hard to imagine when these black moving figures sat down and when they slept.

The biggest difference, of course, is that in the letter to his family Chekhov had to be out in front, speaking as himself, maintaining his family’s impression of him as their joking guide. Here, his narrator wants us to focus not on himself but on appreciating the overlooked, overwhelmed but kindly priests.

In dreams and in fiction, Chekhov went straight at what caught his attention. “Unlocking the little padlock on my door,” writes the narrator of “Uprooted,” “I was always, whether I wanted to or not, obliged to look at the picture that hung on the doorpost on a level with my face. This picture with the title, ‘A Meditation on Death,’ depicted a monk on his knees, gazing at a coffin and at a skeleton laying in it. Behind the man’s back stood another skeleton, somewhat more solid and carrying a scythe.”

The story then becomes about the Jewish convert who a priest has asked the narrator to share his room with. The hunting out of “Jewish” characteristics was, as Donald Rayfield has noted, a reflex Chekhov had developed growing up in Taganrog.7

He was a young man of two-and-twenty, with a round and pleasing face, dark childlike eyes, dressed like a townsman in gray cheap clothes, and as one could judge from his complexion and narrow shoulders, not used to manual labor. He was of a very indefinite type; one could take him neither for a student nor for a man in trade, still less for a workman. But looking at his attractive face and childlike friendly eyes, I was unwilling to believe he was one of those vagabond impostors with whom every conventual establishment where they give food and lodging is flooded, and who give themselves out as divinity students, expelled for standing up for justice, or for church singers who have lost their voice…. There was something characteristic, typical, very familiar in his face, but what exactly, I could not remember nor make out.[…]

In his language, too, there was something typical that had a very great deal in common with what was characteristic in his face, but what it was exactly I still could not decide. […]

“You know I am a convert.”

“You mean?”

“I am a Jew baptized…. Only lately I have embraced orthodoxy.”

Now I understood what I had before been utterly unable to understand from his face: his thick lips, and his way of twitching up the right corner of his mouth and his right eyebrow, when he was talking, and that peculiar oily brilliance of his eyes which is only found in Jews. I understood, too, his phraseology…. From further conversation I learned that his name was Alexander Ivanich, and had in the past been Isaac, that he was a native of the Mogilev province, and that he had come to the Holy Mountains from Novocherkassk, where he had adopted the orthodox faith.

In spite of his prejudices, the narrator is fascinated by the convert’s story:

“From early childhood I cherished a love for learning,” he began in a tone which suggested he was not speaking of himself, but of some great man of the past. “My parents were poor Hebrews; they exist by buying and selling in a small way; they live like beggars, you know, in filth. In fact, all the people there are poor and superstitious; they don’t like education, because education, very naturally, turns a man away from religion…. They are fearful fanatics…. Nothing would induce my parents to let me be educated, and they wanted me to take to trade, too, and to know nothing but the Talmud…. But you will agree, it is not everyone who can spend his whole life struggling for a crust of bread, wallowing in filth, and mumbling the Talmud. At times officers and country gentlemen would put up at papa’s inn, and they used to talk a great deal of things which in those days I had never dreamed of; and, of course, it was alluring and moved me to envy. I used to cry and entreat them to send me to school, but they taught me to read Hebrew and nothing more. Once I found a Russian newspaper, and took it home with me to make a kite of it. I was beaten for it, though I couldn’t read Russian. Of course, fanaticism is inevitable, for every people instinctively strives to preserve its nationality, but I did not know that then and was very indignant….”

Chekhov himself was a convert, educated away from his faith into a belief in Science and Progress, and Alexander Ivanich’s experiences in his family were not so different from Chekhov’s as a boy under the hand and fist of Pavel. This declaration by Alexander Ivanich is not a pretext for anti-Semitism but for “freedom from lies,” from superstition. Chekhov had nothing against an intellectually curious teenager rebelling against the law of the father.

Alexander Ivanich goes on and on about his life and travails, with the narrator at various times noting his “Semitic” characteristics. And Chekhov, having allowed his narrator to make Alexander Ivanich a distinctly foreign entity, has his own artistic counterweights kicking in. Alexander Ivanich is afflicted with Chekhov’s own troubles. After a mining accident, says Alexander, “the doctors there said I should go into consumption. I always have a cough now and a pain in my chest. And my psychic condition is terrible…. When I am alone in a room I feel overcome with terror.”

There is no serious character, it seems, who does not have a dose of Chekhov’s own mind or body.

The narrator, however, is suspicious of conversion. He doesn’t buy Alexander Ivanich’s rationalization of it: “There was nothing for it but to accept the idea that my companion had been impelled to change his religion by the same restless spirit that had flung him like a chip of wood from town to town, and that he, using the generally accepted formula, called the craving for enlightenment. […] Picking out his phrases, he seemed to be trying to put together the forces of his conviction and to smother with them the uneasiness of his soul, and to prove to himself that in giving up the religion of his fathers he had done nothing dreadful or peculiar, but had acted as a thinking man free from prejudice, and that therefore he could boldly remain in a room all alone with his conscience. He was trying to convince himself, and with his eyes besought my assistance.”

The narrator isn’t sympathetic to Alexander Ivanich, but I think we are. And so was Chekhov, who was never smug about his atheism.

The narrator’s conscience, as dawn comes on and they lie down to sleep, is awakened, and he muses: “some hundreds of such homeless wanderers were waiting for the morning, and further away, if one could picture to oneself the whole of Russia, a vast multitude of such uprooted creatures was pacing at that moment along highroads and side-tracks, seeking something better, or were waiting for the dawn, asleep in wayside inns and little taverns, or on the grass under the open sky…. As I fell asleep I imagined how amazed and perhaps even overjoyed all these people would have been if reasoning and words could be found to prove to them that their life was as little in need of justification as any other.”

On either side of the presentation of Alexander Ivanich is the narrator’s recollection of his glorious time in Holy Mountains:

When I woke up my companion was not in the room. It was sunny and there was a murmur of the crowds through the window. Going out, I learned that mass was over and that the procession had set off for the Hermitage some time before. The people were wandering in crowds upon the river bank […] One boat with rugs on the seats was destined for the clergy and the singers, the other without rugs for the public. When the procession was returning I found myself among the elect who had succeeded in squeezing themselves into the second. […] The singing of the Easter hymns, the ringing of the bells, the splash of the oars in the water, the calls of the birds, all mingled in the air into something tender and harmonious. […]

The narrator is intercepted by Alexander Ivanich, who then tags along with him. The insecure convert should distinctly remind us of Chekhov himself, as he, Alexander Ivanich, starts describing “how hard it was to eradicate in the boy the habitual tendency to evil and superstition, to make him think honestly and independently, to instill into him true religion, the ideas of personal dignity, of freedom, and so on.”

*

On his way back to Taganrog from Holy Mountains on May 8, Chekhov, without the company of the fictional Alexander Ivanich, waited six hours for a train. One benefit this trip had been giving him was the luxury of not having to make efficient use of his time. Had there been Wi-Fi and email, he could have read at the train station this note from his sister:

We’re all doing well. There’s money and we’re soon going to the dacha [at the Kiselevs’]. We’re expecting you as soon as possible; we’re bored without you. The only unpleasantness is poor Alexander; his whole family is sick again. Anna Ivanovna, you know, is in the hospital, Annushka is also in the hospital, little Kolya is sick with catarrh of the intestines, and little Antosha [Anton’s namesake one-year-old nephew] has a rash and a further something, I don’t remember—last night we got a telegram. We were getting ready to send mother, but Alexander took in some sort of nurse. […]

Everyone reads your diary with pleasure. A few days ago Maria Vladimirovna and Aleksei Sergeevich [the Kiselevs] were here, and they read excerpts from your diary; there was a lot of laughter. Write when you come back. On May 10 we’re going to Babkino. Be well.

P.S. Don’t forget about the money, darling.

Levitan’s on the Volga. We’re bored, come as soon as possible from Marfa Ivanovna; we will be glad.8

For his last week in the south, May 9–15, he was based in Taganrog at his uncle’s, but he also ventured out of town to see friends.

*

“The Examining Magistrate” (“Sledovatel’,” May 11) is one of the stories that could fairly be called Maupassantian. Guy de Maupassant is, of all of Chekhov’s contemporaries, the one to whom he is most often compared, if just for quality and quantity of short stories.9 They both had periods where they wrote as fast as journalists. I was about to summarize the story, but again the opening sets up the situation better than I can describe it:

A district doctor and an examining magistrate were driving one fine spring day to an inquest. The examining magistrate, a man of five and thirty, looked dreamily at the horses and said:

“There is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature; and even in everyday life, doctor, one must often come upon phenomena which are absolutely incapable of explanation. I know, for instance, of several strange, mysterious deaths, the cause of which only spiritualists and mystics will undertake to explain; a clear-headed man can only lift up his hands in perplexity. For example, I know of a highly cultured lady who foretold her own death and died without any apparent reason on the very day she had predicted. She said that she would die on a certain day, and she did die.”

The rest of the story is about how the examining magistrate, under the curious and careful questions of the doctor, further unfolds the details. Maupassant couldn’t have written it better. Anyone who has read dozens of stories by each author would know it’s a Chekhov story, however, because… No, except for a description of a “Russian” face, I wouldn’t be able to tell.

Perhaps “The Examining Magistrate” is also less characteristic of Chekhov in that he had to have worked out the plot before he wrote it: the cautious revelation of a medical mystery.

Chekhov’s medical school classmate doctor Grigory Rossolimo remembered what a good listener Chekhov was with his patients: “Chekhov did not go to work as an average medical student. He collected the elements of the case history together with surprising ease and accuracy. But it was where one had to touch on the ordinary life of the patient, uncovering its intimate details, about how the illness developed into its present state that Chekhov seemed to bowl along effortlessly without forcing himself, in contrast to many students and even doctors who find it difficult to relate to the vivid statements emerging from the unique circumstances of patients’ lives.”10

*

On May 14, Chekhov wrote to Leykin: “I got your letter [of April 24] today, dear Nikolay Aleksandrovich! It’s so hot and stuffy that I have no strength to write, but I have to write because tomorrow, the 15th, I’m returning to Moscow, and on the evening of the 17th I’ll already be in Voskresensk at the dacha.”11 He thanked Leykin for the offer of a puppy from Leykin’s dog’s litter and would come and pick it up. “There were so many impressions and so much material,” Chekhov explained, “that I’m not regretting that I’ve spent a month and a half on the trip.” Unfortunately, he was completely broke, “without a kopeck.” Could he get a loan? Could Leykin send forty rubles to him at Voskresensk? And, finally, he had to postpone his visit to Leykin’s estate until he wrote two or three stories for New Times. He would try to get there by June 10.

Chekhov arrived in Moscow on the 17th and arranged seeing his friend Schechtel, from whom he hoped to get a small loan, before he got on the train to Babkino on the 18th.

*

“Aborigines” (“Obivateli,” May 18) was the first story he wrote about his time in Taganrog, though he didn’t name it Taganrog as such (“in a town in one of the southern provinces”). A Polish officer, the invalid Ivan Lyashkevsky, “who has at some time or other been wounded in the head,” hysterically rants to his German architect companion (Chekhov was meeting with his “German” architect friend Schechtel on the very day of the story’s publication):

“Extraordinary people, I tell you,” grumbled Lyashkevsky, looking angrily at the native [townsperson outside], “here he has sat down on the bench, and so he will sit, damn the fellow, with his hands folded till evening. They do absolutely nothing. The wastrels and loafers! It would be all right, you scoundrel, if you had money lying in the bank, or had a farm of your own where others would be working for you, but here you have not a penny to your name, you eat the bread of others, you are in debt all around, and you starve your family—devil take you! […]”

[…] Lyashkevsky is gradually roused to fury, and gets so excited that he actually foams at the mouth. He speaks with a Polish accent, rapping out each syllable venomously, till at last the little bags under his eyes swell, and he abandons the Russian “scoundrels, blackguards, and rascals,” and rolling his eyes, begins pouring out a shower of Polish oaths, coughing from his efforts. “Lazy dogs, race of curs. May the devil take them!”

It’s impossible to associate Chekhov with the Pole’s further furious denunciations of Taganrog’s citizens, except that just a month before on his arrival in Taganrog, Chekhov had expressed himself similarly, only slightly more mildly (“Passing through the New Market, I could see how filthy, empty, lazy, illiterate and uninteresting Taganrog is”12). In life and letters, Chekhov didn’t let himself go like Lyashkevsky, that is, in the manner of his father and older brothers. Yet the author so well understood and described the anger and frustration of sick people that in the midst of this story we discount the denunciations that the suffering Lyashkevsky makes, most of which criticisms Chekhov wholly agreed with at the time, and sympathize only with his German friend and the inoffensive natives.

*

Ensconced at Babkino with his family, where it was unusually and uncomfortably cold, Chekhov was writing “Happiness” for New Times. “I am sitting in my autumn coat trying to produce a Saturday story, but my brains seem to be able to disgorge nothing but icicles,”13 he wrote Leykin on May 22. He was answering Leykin’s letter that was full of complaints about why when Chekhov was down south he had written for Petersburg Gazette but not for Fragments. “Your anger will turn,” Chekhov predicted, “when you find my letter from Taganrog. You’re an amazingly ungracious and cruel person! You reproach me that I, wandering through the south, didn’t write anything for Fragments.”14 It was true that he had written those six stories for the Gazette, but the family had needed the money!

Even with his sore, hurt-feelings complaints, Leykin repeated his invitation to Chekhov to visit his summer house.

On May 25, Alexander wrote from the New Times office to greet Anton after his trip. Alexander updated him on his wife’s health and on the state of the book; he asked Anton to let him include “The Examining Magistrate” in order to get the number to twenty stories. Also, couldn’t Anton modify the title of the book? “In the Twilight” seemed too dark and bleak. And, as if to avoid being overheard in a crowded room, mentioned about Suvorin: “He is distressed about the revolver business [his son’s suicide].”

Within the next week, Anton wrote back from Babkino, shrugging off the story-count: “If it’s not twenty stories, the readers won’t die.” (In reply Alexander explained that with the increased size of the book, by including that twentieth story, the volume would bypass censorship.) Chekhov justified the title and meanwhile mentioned remedies for Alexander’s wife’s post-typhus symptoms: “Milk and more milk” and various specific drops of elixirs. He would be in Petersburg on June 8–10 and then onto Leykin’s unless his legs were bothering him.

June 1887

During his work on the topic “General Larionov’s Rout of Zhloba’s Cavalry Corps,” the young historian had decided to compile a maximally precise, inasmuch as was possible, hourly account of the activity of both commanders during the month of June 20th. Many of Solovyov’s colleagues regarded that work as deliberately unachievable, so suggested for starters he write down his own hourly life in June (during the previous year, for example) and then later set his sights on events seventy-six years in the past.

—Eugene Vodolazkin, Solovyov and Larionov1

On June 1, “Volodya” appeared in the Petersburg Gazette. As I read it, I winced and gasped, wondering how Chekhov, after Aleksei Suvorin’s son Volodya had just died of suicide, could have published a story about a fragile seventeen-year-old named Volodya who kills himself. What was Chekhov, who was ever considerate, ever conscious, thinking? How could this story possibly have consoled a grieving father?

Suvorin had poured out his heart in his diary back on May 2 about his twenty-two-year-old son’s suicide. “Yesterday Volodya shot himself,” he begins. “I never was able to anticipate anything; this is my misery, my curse. I noticed that on the previous day he was somewhat especially sad after dinner, and I wanted to ask him about it, but I didn’t.”2

On May 4, Suvorin’s New Times newspaper published an account of the suicide. At 11:00 A.M. on May 1, Vladimir (Volodya) ate breakfast with his family, “was merry and lively.” He went out in his student uniform but returned shortly after and went to his room and ten or fifteen minutes later shot himself in the heart.3 Volodya left a note, blaming no one and explaining that life had become uninteresting and that existence in the other world would be incomparably more attractive; because of his religious convictions it had taken him a long time to decide on suicide. He had studied at the university only one year, but the second semester he had failed, “and this,” added the New Times article, “it is said, made a strong impression on him.” Indeed, after Suvorin’s own death, Volodya’s older brother, Aleksei Alekseevich Suvorin, would blame their father for Volodya’s tardy return to school one fall, which resulted in his failure and thus his suicide.4

Volodya’s mother Anna Ivanovna had died fourteen years before, shot in the head by her lover, who then killed himself. In his diary of May 2, Suvorin reviews that connection and describes her death.

What Suvorin wrote or told Chekhov about the tragedy is unknown, but by May 5 Chekhov had heard from Alexander about Volodya Suvorin’s death. What condolences Chekhov wrote or expressed to Suvorin is also unknown. Perhaps, I ignorantly speculated, Chekhov’s story was intended to show Suvorin his son’s possible state of mind? But even that would be presumptuous and tactless. It was too soon!

To summarize: Chekhov’s Volodya is plain and unhappy, a failure at school, embarrassed by his widowed mother, who sponges off a rich distant relative. At the relative’s house, he becomes infatuated with a plain but sexy thirty-year-old married woman. Her flirtation leads them to an embarrassing sexual encounter (“Then it seemed to Volodya that the room, Nyuta, the sunrise and himself—all melted together in one sensation of acute, extraordinary, incredible bliss, for which one might give up one’s whole life and face eternal torments…. But half a minute passed and all that vanished. Volodya saw only a fat, plain face, distorted by an expression of repulsion, and he himself suddenly felt a loathing for what had happened”), and his shame over failing at his exams and his anger at his mother’s lack of shame at being a sponging relative results in Chekhov imagining a suicide to its conclusion:

Volodya put the muzzle of the revolver to his mouth, felt something like a trigger or spring, and pressed it with his finger…. Then felt something else projecting, and once more pressed it. Taking the muzzle out of his mouth, he wiped it with the lapel of his coat, looked at the lock. He had never in his life taken a weapon in his hand before….

“I believe one ought to raise this…” he reflected. “Yes, it seems so.”

[…] Volodya put the muzzle in his mouth again, pressed it with his teeth, and pressed something with his fingers. There was a sound of a shot…. Something hit Volodya in the back of his head with terrible violence, and he fell on the table with his face downward among the bottles and glasses. Then he saw his father, as in Mentone, in a top-hat with a wide black band on it, wearing mourning for some lady, suddenly seize him by both hands, and they fell headlong into a very deep, dark pit.

Then everything was blurred and vanished.

What did the grieving Suvorin think? What did Chekhov hope to awaken in Suvorin or in himself with this terribly vividly imagined suicide?

The answer is less than a misfire. If Suvorin did indeed read “Volodya” in the Petersburg Gazette, he wouldn’t have blinked. The story as published on June 1, 1887, is subtitled, “His First Love,” and ends with Volodya’s angry denunciation of his mother while they are riding in a coach from the relative’s estate to the station. Volodya shoots off his mouth but does not shoot himself. There are many reasons Chekhov provides for why Volodya behaves so rudely to his mother: “dirty memories, a sleepless night, the Little Russian outfit with a bustle” that his mother wears, “exclusion, a remorseful conscience—all this came together in him as a heavy dark anger.” He is furious with his poor mother, whom he doesn’t love, which declaration embarrasses her in front of the driver. The story ends, with her declaring, “He can hear everything!”5

It wasn’t until three years later, when Chekhov was preparing a volume of stories titled Gloomy People, that he substantially revised “Volodya” and developed it to its most gloomy of conclusions.

*

Chekhov wrote to thank Leykin on June 4 for the loan of forty rubles and to arrange for his trip to Leykin’s summer place at Lake Ladoga. The weather continued to be lousy at Babkino. Chekhov often kvetched at Leykin about Leykin’s kvetching: “You write that if while I’d been traveling in the south I’d sent you the stories that were published in the Gazette, I wouldn’t have received any less and they would’ve been in the spirit of the magazine! Oh, come on!”6

He also wrote to his younger brother Ivan to see if Ivan would join him on his trip to Leykin’s. He started one more letter that day to Schechtel and continued it the next, mostly about being busy with writing at chilly Babkino and hoping to cross paths with him in Petersburg in a few days. In the Soviet edition there is a footnote explaining that some words to Schechtel had been crossed out. The inveterate researcher (and biographer) Donald Rayfield deciphered the censored sentence: “In Babkino there’s still nobody to screw. So much work that there’s no time even for a quiet fart.”7

Chekhov had been busily writing, making up for the lull during his spring adventure. On June 6 “Happiness” (“Schast’e”), a story full of the south, appeared. In the early morning on the steppe, there are two shepherds and an overseer; more notably, though, are the sheep themselves, whose brains, perhaps to their surprise, Chekhov glances into:

The sheep were asleep. Against the gray background of the dawn, already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky, the silhouettes of sheep that were not asleep could be seen here and there; they stood with drooping heads, thinking. Their thoughts, tedious and oppressive, called forth by images of nothing but the broad steppe and the sky, the days and the nights, probably weighed upon them themselves, crushing them into apathy; and, standing there as though rooted to the earth, they noticed neither the presence of a stranger nor the uneasiness of the dogs.8

When the eager and superstitious old shepherd and the dispassionate, well-read overseer reach a standstill in their conversation about their surroundings and memories, Chekhov meditates: “In the bluish distance where the furthest visible hillock melted into the mist nothing was stirring; the ancient barrows, once watch-mounds and tombs, which rose here and there above the horizon and the boundless steppe had a sullen and deathlike look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence; another thousand years would pass, myriads of men would die, while they would still stand as they had stood, with no regret for the dead nor interest in the living, and no soul would ever know why they stood there, and what secret of the steppes was hidden under them.”

After the overseer rides away, Chekhov muses: “The old shepherd and Sanka stood with their crooks on opposite sides of the flock, stood without stirring, like fakirs at their prayers, absorbed in thought. They did not heed each other; each of them was living in his own life. The sheep were pondering, too.”

Alexander wrote on June 14 to say that “Happiness” was being praised all around: “I’m convinced that you yourself were a sheep when you experienced and described all those sheepy feelings.”9

There had been bad weather at Babkino for a while, and on June 8 “Bad Weather” (“Nenast’e”), a dacha story, came out in the Petersburg Gazette: “Big raindrops were pattering on the dark windows. It was one of those disgusting summer holiday rains which, when they have begun, last a long time—for weeks, till the frozen holiday maker grows used to it, and sinks into complete apathy. It was cold; there was a feeling of raw, unpleasant dampness.”10 A good, kind young wife and her mother worry about her husband, who, working in the city, insists that he can’t be at the dacha in rainy weather; when his innocent wife goes to the city to relieve him of his boredom, she learns he hasn’t been to their apartment in days. She realizes he has been deceiving them and returns miserably to the dacha; but the weather changes, and he shows up and tells them an elaborate story about his whereabouts; she and her mother believe him (that dirty liar!) and are relieved.

Before Chekhov could set out on June 8 to stay with Leykin at Lake Ladoga, he was asked by Dr. Uspensky to fill in for him, just as he had last year, at the Zvenigorod District Hospital for a few days from June 13 on. Chekhov wrote Leykin the next day to tell him he was sorry, but he probably had to substitute for a medical colleague. Besides which, he was sick, the family was sick, and the fish weren’t biting. “If I don’t come, curse, but don’t get angry. I think that you understand my situation and, being in my situation, you wouldn’t do otherwise.”11

Leykin seemed to think that Chekhov was happy to have an excuse not to come, and instead of replying went silent.

*

“A Play” (“Drama,” June 13), one of Tolstoy’s favorite stories,12 is about an imperious woman author who forces her work and herself upon a leery critic: “I will not venture to call myself an authoress, but… still I have added my little quota… I have published at different times three stories for children.”13 Chekhov gave Madame Murashkin the same literary background as Maria Kiseleva, which his friend would have taken as amusing, as she and Chekhov had once exchanged just as absurd a drama in miniature as that which Murashkin reads at the critic.14 Chekhov and Kiseleva would also have shared a laugh here:

“You see… (the lady cast down her eyes and turned redder) I know your talents… your views, Pavel Vassilyevich, and I have been longing to learn your opinion, or more exactly… to ask your advice. I must tell you I have perpetrated a play, my firstborn—pardon pour l’expression!—and before sending it to the Censor I should like above all things to have your opinion on it.”

Nervously, with the flutter of a captured bird, the lady fumbled in her skirt and drew out a fat manuscript.

Pavel wants her to leave it, but she is too clever for him and insists on giving him a sample, just a half-hour’s worth… before dumping the whole heap over him. As the hours pass, he begins daydreaming and dozing:

Like a man condemned to be executed and convinced of the impossibility of a reprieve, Pavel Vassilyevich gave up expecting the end, abandoned all hope, and simply tried to prevent his eyes from closing, and to retain an expression of attention on his face…. The future when the lady would finish her play and depart seemed to him so remote that he did not even think of it.

“Trooo—too—too—too…” the lady’s voice sounded in his ears. “Troo—too—too… sh—sh—sh—sh…”

The ending cannot be summarized.

Chekhov had been able to get back to producing stories, but except for “Happiness,” which he and his readers particularly enjoyed, he doesn’t seem to have been fully activated or inspired. “One of Many” (“Odin iz Mnogikh,” June 15) is another dacha story. “The father of the family” (otherwise unnamed), who works in the city and commutes back and forth to the dacha, wants to shoot himself for weariness and irritation over all the petty errands his family demands of him. “What am I living for? For what?”15 he demands of his friend. Having detailed the items he’s asked to pick up for family, friends, acquaintances, and his wife, he rants: “You’re the husband, but the word ‘husband’ in translation to a lady’s language means a wimp, an idiot, and voiceless beast on whom you’re able to ride and burden, as much as she likes, not fearing intervention by the animal welfare society.” Now that he has got it all off his chest, the father of the family asks for his friend’s sympathy. The friend sympathizes… and asks him if he could just do him one little favor.

*

Anton cursed out Alexander in his letter of June 16, because Alexander, editing In the Twilight, had monkeyed with the galleys’ dedication to Grigorovich. Chekhov was touchy or anxious and didn’t catch that Alexander had been joking. Anton congratulated his brother on his debut story the week before in New Times, but wondered why he wouldn’t take a serious subject. He wrote Alexander again on June 21 to explain that Anna’s poor health would or could continue for a while because of the typhus. And then more jokes and insults. His postscript: “In 50 years you can publish this letter in ‘Old Russia.’ ”

Right about now Chekhov seems to have developed a worry that the contents of his letters were going too far afield. In his very next letter, two days later, to his cousin Georgy, he declared unusually seriously: “besides to your own family, don’t read my letters to anyone; private correspondence is a family secret with which nobody has any business.”16 Letters were where Chekhov could cut loose and clown around, and thus were private, to be shared only with the particular people he had in mind while writing them; this in itself distinguishes his letters from his fiction. But here we are, minding his business, joining a happy world of Chekhov correspondence readers. The best essay I have encountered about reading Chekhov’s collected letters is by the Russian-Israeli novelist Dina Rubina. She explains her and our attraction to the personal Chekhov:

I was ten years old, and was not yet aware that reading other people’s correspondence was boring […] I simply read everything, one letter after another, skipping over things that I didn’t understand, circling languidly over the marvelous images in them, returning over and over to things I found funny—and there were so many […]. Circling like a goat tied to a stake who eats the grass within his reach, gathering sustenance, I entered the world of Chekhov’s friends, relatives, correspondents, and lovers, making it my own. I was intoxicated by the intonation of his voice, which was something unique unto itself, unlike any other person or thing I knew, conveying dignity, irony, warmth, and at the same time a remarkably serious attitude toward life.

I often tried to picture him as he was when he wrote these letters: his slightly slanting handwriting unfurling in long lines, one following after another… I pictured him reaching the end of a page; without looking, he reaches for his ink blotter and rolls it across the damp lines in an accustomed gesture before turning to the next page…

I hereby attest: long before I began writing short stories, I knew everything about the life of this writer—not in the sense of dates, but in the most precise sense—his moods, his tastes, the life of his heart.17

*

In “First Aid”18 (“Skoraya Pomoshch’,” June 22) the title is ironic, as Chekhov describes peasants trying to bring back to his senses an old drunk man they rescued from a river. A grand lady decides that he was drowning and orders her coachman to intervene with “rubbing” and artificial respiration. This intervention kills the man. Perhaps Chekhov intended this story as a public service announcement: Don’t do this!

Chekhov was private but liked bustle, and he continually asked friends to visit and no one ever complained of him as a host. On June 27 or 28 he cajoled Lazarev to come to Babkino, the sooner the better. He would send the coachman Aleksei to pick him up: “You’ll recognize him by 1) stupidity 2) a distracted look and 3) a NT [New Times] I’ll tell him to hold in his hand.”19 He asked Lazarev to bring various sausages from Moscow. Instead of Lazarev, two of Chekhov’s cousins arrived at Babkino on June 28.

In “An Unpleasant Story” (“Nepryatnaya Istoriya,” June 29), the philandering protagonist Zhirkov learns that different cultures have different customs. In the rain he arrives at a house for a rendezvous with his married lover, but when the maid answers the door, she mentions that the master has just returned home. “At the word ‘master’ Zhirkov made a step back from the door, and in a moment faintheartedness covered him, a pure boyish terror, which even brave people experience when they unexpectedly bump into the possibility of meeting a husband.”20 He flees, but his driver has left. It’s pouring, so he returns to get help from the maid, but this time the husband answers the door.

Zhirkov panics and lies to the husband, who is thoroughly French and unfamiliar with Russian customs, that he is a messenger from the dressmaker. Just then, his mistress enters the room and expresses her delight to see him. “Oh, I see! Probably you’re scared of Jacques?” she laughs. Her husband thinks nothing of her boyfriend’s visit, and Zhirkov spends the night with her.

By the end of June, Chekhov wasn’t mentioning the bad weather anymore. Perhaps he was able to fish again. “His hobbies were also silent,” recalled Vassily Maklakov. “First and foremost was fishing. He used to lie down, having a nap on the grass of a riverbank, and wait for the fish in complete silence…. You should have seen him—so childish and happy—when he caught his fish. He cried out, ‘Hurray, hurray!’ He was very happy and joyful as if he had just won a lottery or bet.”21

July 1887

You express disappointment that your story is uninteresting. Let me tell you that if only one of your five stories has the power to entertain the reader, you may thank God for that. It is not the writing of uninteresting attempts that is terrible, but it is terrible when one feels it a boring task to write, and hateful tedium….

—To a young writer1

This was the Chekhov family’s last summer at Babkino. The two families had apparently continued to enjoy one another’s company, and usually the Kiselevs managed not to step on the plebian Chekhovs’ toes. Maria Kiseleva’s younger sister Natalia Gubareva was married to a Russian senator, who would in 1890 attempt to help advocate through government channels for Chekhov’s travel to Sakhalin Island. Gubareva recalled visiting her sister “quite often” this summer. At gatherings, she remembered, “Chekhov was making such funny jokes we could not stop laughing. Everyone was laughing except for him.”2 This was characteristic of him as an artist: amusing others while maintaining a poker-face.

The topic of marriage had settled back into being only a comedy. In “A Transgression” (“Bezzakonie,” July 4), a guilt-ridden husband, finding a baby on the doorstep of his dacha, believes it is the baby he has in fact fathered with his wife’s former maid.

He was numb with terror, anger, and shame… What was he to do now? What would his wife say if she found out? What would his colleagues at the office say? His Excellency would be sure to dig him in the ribs, guffaw, and say: “I congratulate you!… He-he-he! Though your beard is gray, your heart is gay…. You are a rogue, Semyon Erastovich!” The whole colony of summer visitors would know his secret now, and probably the respectable mothers of families would shut their doors to him. Such incidents always get into the papers, and the humble name of Miguev would be published all over Russia….3

He finds out only after he has confessed his transgression to his wife that the baby he found is that of a visiting woman he has had nothing to do with.

“From the Diary of a Violent-Tempered Man” (“Iz Zapisok Vspil’chivogo Cheloveka,” July 5) is a joke on Chekhov himself. Ever mild, ever restrained, Chekhov’s narrator, having been roped into a romance and consequently marriage, is—to no one’s in the summer community’s knowledge, because there is absolutely no outward indication of it—dangerously “violent-tempered.”

When the duty of walking arm-in-arm with a lady falls to my lot, for some reason or other I always feel like a peg with a heavy cloak hanging on it. Nadenka (or Varenka), between ourselves, of an ardent temperament (her grandfather was an Armenian), has a peculiar art of throwing her whole weight on one’s arm and clinging to one’s side like a leech. And so we walk along.4

When he tries to escape the social scene, he is blocked:

Varenka’s maman, Varenka herself, and the variegated young ladies surround me, and declare that I cannot possibly go, because I promised yesterday to dine with them and go to the woods to look for mushrooms. I bow and sit down again. My soul is boiling with rage, and I feel that in another moment I may not be able to answer for myself, that there may be an explosion, but gentlemanly feeling and the fear of committing a breach of good manners compels me to obey the ladies. And I obey them.

No matter his stony indifference, Varenka and the other females see in his manner the sadness of unrequited love:

“Nicolas,” sighs Nadenka [the narrator continually varies her unknown name], and her nose begins to turn red, “Nicolas, I see you are trying to avoid being open with me…. You seem to wish to punish me by your silence. Your feeling is not returned, and you wish to suffer in silence, in solitude… it is too awful, Nicolas!” she cries impulsively seizing my hand, and I see her nose beginning to swell. “What would you say if the girl you love were to offer you her eternal friendship?”

I mutter something incoherent, for I really can’t think what to say to her.

In the first place, I’m not in love with any girl at all; in the second, what could I possibly want her eternal friendship for? and, thirdly, I have a violent temper.

Chekhov, being a professional writer with an eye on the calendar as well as a scientist, plays a future-events card: “Next morning. Typical holiday weather. Temperature below freezing, a cutting wind, rain, mud, and a smell of naphthalene, because my maman has taken all her wraps out of her trunks. A devilish morning! It is the 7th of August, 1887, the date of the solar eclipse. I may here remark that at the time of an eclipse every one of us may, without special astronomical knowledge, be of the greatest service. Thus, for example, anyone of us can (1) take the measurement of the diameters of the sun and the moon; (2) sketch the corona of the sun; (3) take the temperature; (4) take observations of plants and animals during the eclipse; (5) note down his own impressions, and so on.”

This summer’s eclipse was indeed a special event, and for the educated Russian community it was promoted as such. This was the first published of Chekhov’s four stories that concern or mention the eclipse.

The narrator means to clarify matters with the ridiculous Varenka: “To begin with, I will tell her that she is mistaken in supposing that I am in love with her. That’s a thing one does not say to a lady as a rule, though. To tell a lady that one’s not in love with her, is almost as rude as to tell an author he can’t write.” The violent-tempered man concludes his tale on the day of his wedding: “To lead a violent, desperate man to the altar is as unwise as to thrust one’s hand into the cage of a ferocious tiger.”

Similarly Chekhov didn’t want to marry, but impulses stronger than he, as unstoppable as the eclipse, seem to have been pressing on him.

While they were both at Babkino, crossing paths seemingly every day between the two domiciles, he wrote Maria Kiseleva about his “A Transgression”: “If my Agniya’s language doesn’t sustain itself, it still gives a most definite impression […]. The story is not bad and is worth a thousand ‘Stray Bullets’ [the title of Kiseleva’s story]. […] A stray shot through the temple helps toothache and love. Such a bullet gives a particular impression.”5

Their flirtatious yet testy friendship continued as he critiqued Kiseleva’s stories up and down, and she had the confidence to criticize his.

Chekhov went to Moscow on July 8. Leykin had not written him since Chekhov wrote that he probably wouldn’t be visiting him at Lake Ladoga. Chekhov spent a week in Moscow before returning to Babkino, but what he did, besides meet up with his friend Lazarev, is not recorded. He didn’t like Moscow in the summer; a dozen years later, he wrote his future wife: “It is impossible to live worse or more disgustingly than the Muscovites live in summer. The only amusements are provided by the Aquarium and the farces, and in the streets everybody is suffocated by the smoke from the asphalt.”6

While he was in Moscow, he wrote to Alexander about In the Twilight. What was the hold-up? Could Alexander get him the money for his July 14 New Times story (“Uprooted”)? In reply, Alexander told him, “The book is completely ready and was sent to Suvorin at his dacha for him to determine the price. For two weeks there’s been no answer.”7 Once Alexander had an answer, the cover could be printed. Neither brother mentioned the reason for Suvorin’s withdrawal from society and business, Volodya’s suicide.

Chekhov and Lazarev took the train to Babkino on July 15. Lazarev was all ears, raptly taking in Chekhov’s description of the first chapter of “a novel” that Chekhov had commenced: “Imagine a quiet railroad station on the steppe, not far from the estate of a general’s widow. A bright evening. The train arrives at the platform with two steam-engines. Then, standing at the station for five minutes, one train goes on with one engine, but the other moves little by little to the platform with one cargo wagon. The wagon stops. It opens. In the wagon is a coffin containing the only son of the general’s widow.”8

Chekhov showed him his notebook and advised him “to get one like it.” (Lazarev, living in 2022, would have ordered one on his phone the first second Chekhov glanced out the window.) Lazarev writes: “the little book was in miniature size; I remember it was handmade, out of writing paper; in it were very finely handwritten themes, witty thoughts, aphorisms, things that came to Chekhov’s head. One remark was about the special barks of red dogs—‘all red dogs bark as tenors’—I soon found this on the last pages of [1888’s] ‘The Steppe.’ ”9

Lazarev remembered from his first Babkino visit that “at the time, two-three times a week, Chekhov was strictly connected to magazine-newspaper work, but in his free hours he had a reception time for sick ones, and the surrounding peasants came to Chekhov for advice. He treated them for free.”10

Chekhov was anxious about his impending book, and he was anxious about Leykin, to whom he wrote again on July 17: “Where are you, and what’s with you, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich? I positively don’t know how to explain your continued silence in answer to my last letter. It’s one of these three: either you’ve gone away, you’re sick, or you’re angry. If you went to Finland, it’s been long since you were due to return; if you were sick, I would have found out about that from Bilibin. Apparently you’re angry. If so, for what? I hope that the reasons of my not coming, laid out in my last letter (which you received by June 12), were valid enough and could not be the reason of your silence…. Why are you angry? I await your answer, and meanwhile I wish you health and I bow to your family.”11 In a postscript he said he had sent a story for Fragments to Bilibin. This was his usual peace offering, a new story.

He wasn’t accustomed to Leykin’s silence.

On July 22, Leykin answered that, yes, he was mad because Chekhov hadn’t come to Lake Ladoga.12 And it turned out Leykin didn’t like Chekhov sending the new story to Bilibin rather than to him.13

Despite their wrangling, Chekhov had a better father-son relationship with Leykin than he had with his own father, who Chekhov continued to prefer not to mention. But Pavel, like a nightmare, seemingly infused himself into Chekhov’s dissipated, infuriating characters. “A Father” (“Otets,” July 20) is about a leech whose three sons and daughter are so good and considerate that they never scold him for being a lying drunk; they support him and give him money whenever he comes begging for it. He shows up at the summer villa where his son Boris is staying to shake him down for money… and a beer. (Despite his other weaknesses, Pavel Chekhov was not a drinker.)

The father is conscious of and even amazed by what a disgusting creature he has been:

“I blackguarded you poor children for all I was worth. I abused you, and complained that you had abandoned me. I wanted, you see, to […] pose as an unhappy father. It’s my way, you know, when I want to screen my vices I throw all the blame on my innocent children. I can’t tell lies and hide things from you, Borenka. I came to see you as proud as a peacock, but when I saw your gentleness and kind heart, my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and it upset my conscience completely.”

“Hush, father, let’s talk of something else.”

“Mother of God, what children I have,” the old man went on, not heeding his son. “What wealth God has bestowed on me. Such children ought not to have had a black sheep like me for a father, but a real man with soul and feeling! I am not worthy of you!”14

There’s no evidence that Pavel ever expressed himself this way and admitted his failings to his children. Chekhov, I suspect, searched for his father’s conscience, and gave voice to it in the hopes that it did in fact exist.

What terrific children the wretched father has, though:

“You are all pure gold, you and Grisha and Sasha and Sonya. I worry you, torment you, disgrace you, rob you, and all my life I have not heard one word of reproach from you, you have never given me one cross look. It would be all very well if I had been a decent father to you—but as it is! You have had nothing from me but harm. I am a bad, dissipated man…. Now, thank God, I am quieter and I have no strength of will, but in old days when you were little I had determination, will. Whatever I said or did I always thought it was right. Sometimes I’d come home from the club at night, drunk and ill-humored, and scold at your poor mother for spending money. The whole night I would be railing at her, and think it the right thing too; you would get up in the morning and go to school, while I’d still be venting my temper upon her. Heavens! I did torture her, poor martyr! When you came back from school and I was asleep you didn’t dare to have dinner till I got up. At dinner again there would be a flare up. I daresay you remember. I wish no one such a father; God sent me to you for a trial. Yes, for a trial! Hold out, children, to the end! Honor thy father and thy days shall be long. Perhaps for your noble conduct God will grant you long life. […]”

“The Father” by P. Pinkievich.

The father brings one of his sons home, where he lives with a shrew. It could be that his wife, the children’s mother, has died of mistreatment and woe. He shows off in front of the shrew and taunts the son for thinking he’s better than his old man. The father is proud of his children, because he has done everything to make himself loathsome, but they hang in there with him.

In “A Happy Ending” (“Khoroshiy Konets,” July 25) a fifty-two-year-old passenger train guard (who describes himself as “a strict, respectable, practical man,” just as sixty-two-year-old Pavel Chekhov would have described himself) goes to a matchmaker; he wants to settle down. Noting the matchmaker’s pleasing plumpness and money-making talent, he pitches for the matchmaker herself. If Chekhov himself was still weighing marriage, it was as a joke.

At the end of July Alexander sent his brother the cover of In the Twilight, noting, however, that the publication date was still up in the air.15

Title page of In the Twilight.

August 1887

“Why write,”—he wondered—“about a man getting into a submarine and going to the North Pole to reconcile himself with the world, while his beloved at that moment throws herself with a hysterical shriek from the belfry? All this is untrue and does not happen in reality. One must write about simple things: how Peter Semionovich married Marie Ivanovna.”

—In conversation with a fellow writer1

On August 3, In the Twilight was advertised as published by Suvorin’s New Times press. It wasn’t available to buy, however, for another three days,2 and Chekhov himself would not even see a copy for another couple of weeks. Suvorin had told Alexander to hold onto Chekhov’s copies until he, Suvorin, returned to Petersburg.

Sometime early this month, Chekhov invited Lazarev to return to Babkino: “Come as soon as you receive this letter.” He gave him a list of groceries to bring: “1 pound of pork sausage, 5 lemons, 4 heads of cabbage.”3 (Lazarev wasn’t able to deliver until the 20th.)

I thought I was going to notice that now, by the end of a dull, rainy, cool summer, Chekhov had lost creative steam. I wanted to point out evidence that the stories were not drawing him out. Because I knew his full-length play, Ivanov, was on the horizon, I wanted to show that while he was professional enough to write, he had reached a plateau and needed to find something else, a new genre, a new challenge.

Instead, as I reread “In the Coach-House” (“V Sarae,” August 3) I decided that Chekhov was just as creative and ingenious as ever. Why had I doubted him? What I’ve learned is that Chekhov wrote so many gems that I took them for granted and couldn’t keep track of them all. The story is about servants of a grand house discussing the suicide of a married father, a “gentleman.” But before we know or realize any of that, Chekhov presents the coach-house as a kind of stage set: the light, the darkness, the people, the smell:

It was between nine and ten o’clock in the evening. Stepan the coachman, Mihailo the house-porter, Alyoshka the coachman’s grandson, who had come up from the village to stay with his grandfather, and Nikandr, an old man of seventy, who used to come into the yard every evening to sell salt herrings, were sitting around a lantern in the big coach-house, playing “kings.” Through the wide-open door could be seen the whole yard, the big house, where the master’s family lived, the gates, the cellars, and the porter’s lodge. It was all shrouded in the darkness of night, and only the four windows of one of the lodges which was let were brightly lit up. The shadows of the coaches and sledges with their shafts tipped upward stretched from the walls to the doors, quivering and cutting across the shadows cast by the lantern and the players…. On the other side of the thin partition that divided the coach-house from the stable were the horses. There was a scent of hay, and a disagreeable smell of salt herrings coming from old Nikandr.

Once Chekhov has the scene vibrant to all his senses, he can move the story in seemingly any direction. Only in the midst of the card game do we learn of the incident in the “big house.”

“It’s a nasty business,” said the porter, sitting down to the cards again. “I have just let the doctors out. They have not extracted it.”

“How could they? Just think, they would have to pick open the brains. If there is a bullet in the head, of what use are doctors?”

“He is lying unconscious,” the porter went on. “He is bound to die. Alyoshka, don’t look at the cards, you little puppy, or I will pull your ears! Yes, I let the doctors out, and the father and mother in…. They have only just arrived. Such crying and wailing, Lord preserve us! They say he is the only son…. It’s a grief!”

Was Volodya Suvorin’s suicide in Chekhov’s thoughts? A month ago Chekhov had teased Maria Kiseleva about her story “Stray Bullets” and putting a gun to one’s head. We have noticed Chekhov continually joking about wanting to shoot himself in despair, and it has happened in this story. But instead of relating it in a context that was familiar to him as a doctor and a friend, he tells it from the point of view of the servants.

The porter sums up the suicide for his companions:

“I have orders to go to the police station tomorrow,” said the porter. “There will be an inquiry… But what do I know about it? I saw nothing of it. He called me this morning, gave me a letter, and said: ‘Put it in the letter-box for me.’ And his eyes were red with crying. His wife and children were not at home. They had gone out for a walk. So when I had gone with the letter, he put a bullet into his forehead from a revolver. When I came back his cook was wailing for the whole yard to hear.”

“It’s a great sin,” said the fish-hawker in a husky voice, and he shook his head, “a great sin!”

They agree on that judgment, and they speculate on the suicide’s reasoning:

“From too much learning,” said the porter, taking a trick; “his wits outstripped his wisdom. Sometimes he would sit writing papers all night…. Play, peasant!… But he was a nice gentleman. And so white skinned, black-haired and tall!… He was a good lodger.”

“It seems the fair sex is at the bottom of it,” said the coachman, slapping the nine of trumps on the king of diamonds. “It seems he was fond of another man’s wife and disliked his own; it does happen.”

With Maria Kiseleva in mind, Chekhov could have written this as a lesson: If she was going to attempt to write about suicide, and if someone shoots himself in the head, then this is what happens. Grief overwhelms the family and the terror of death infects others. The old man remembers the old days:

“It was the same thing at our lady’s,” he said, pulling his cap on further. “We were serfs in those days; the younger son of our mistress, the General’s lady, shot himself through the mouth with a pistol, from too much learning, too. It seems that by law such have to be buried outside the cemetery, without priests, without a requiem service; but to save disgrace our lady, you know, bribed the police and the doctors, and they gave her a paper to say her son had done it when delirious, not knowing what he was doing. You can do anything with money. So he had a funeral with priests and every honor, the music played, and he was buried in the church; for the deceased General had built that church with his own money, and all his family were buried there. Only this is what happened, friends. One month passed, and then another, and it was all right. In the third month they informed the General’s lady that the watchmen had come from that same church. What did they want? They were brought to her, they fell at her feet. ‘We can’t go on serving, your excellency,’ they said. ‘Look out for other watchmen and graciously dismiss us.’ ‘What for?’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘we can’t possibly; your son howls under the church all night.’ ”

We see in the prohibition of burying suicides in the church cemetery the natural birth of a ghost story. As the account of that incident goes on, the men and the boy get the creeps; the boy becomes almost hysterical with fear. “The General’s lady” eventually believed various testimonials about the howling and she ordered that her son be reburied outside the cemetery.

The old man tells of an intriguing custom concerning the lone exception to the prohibition against praying for the souls of those who have committed suicide:

“There is only one day in the year when one may pray for such people: the Saturday before Trinity…. You mustn’t give alms to beggars for their sake, it is a sin, but you may feed the birds for the rest of their souls.”4

Chekhov knows eerie and what it is to be spooked:

“The man was living and is dead!” said the coachman, looking toward the windows where shadows were still flitting to and fro. “Only this morning he was walking about the yard, and now he is lying dead.”

“The time will come and we shall die too,” said the porter, walking away with the fish-hawker, and at once they both vanished from sight in the darkness.

Chekhov has us and himself stand at a respectful distance from the family’s grief. This may as well be the Suvorin family:

The coachman, and Alyoshka after him, somewhat timidly went up to the lighted windows. A very pale lady with large tear-stained eyes, and a fine-looking gray-headed man were moving two card-tables into the middle of the room, probably with the intention of laying the dead man upon them, and on the green cloth of the table numbers could still be seen written in chalk. The cook who had run about the yard wailing in the morning was now standing on a chair, stretching up to try and cover the looking glass with a towel.

“Grandfather, what are they doing?” asked Alyoshka in a whisper.

“They are just going to lay him on the tables,” answered his grandfather. “Let us go, child, it is bedtime.”

There is more grieving and more howling by the parents. After the card game resumes, the terrified Alyoshka falls asleep, has a nightmare, but wakes up to comforting daylight.

*

“Who would’ve thought that out of an outhouse would come such a genius?”5 Chekhov wrote Alexander, repeating that family joke-line. He had last used it in his correspondence to refer to himself. Now it was Alexander’s turn at geniushood:

Your last story, “At the Lighthouse,” is beautiful and miraculous. Probably you stole it from some great writer. I read it through myself, then asked Mikhail to read it aloud, then I gave it to Masha to read, and in all cases, I was convinced that in this lighthouse you had outdone yourself. A blinding spark in the darkness of ignorance! A smart word after 30 stupid years. I’m in ecstasy, so I’m writing so that you wouldn’t be long expecting my letter… (lazy!).

He went through a list of the characters with praise and criticism: “Olya is not at all successful, like all of your women. You sure don’t know women!”

But Chekhov was otherwise enthusiastic and encouraging, assuring Alexander that with a dozen such high-quality stories, he would have a book of stories himself. Chekhov meanwhile wondered where his In the Twilight was. Had it been published or not?

Having expressed himself kindly and intimately, he concluded, as Alexander would have thought proper, with insults: “I bow to all your people, but not to you. You are not a genius, and there is nothing in common between us.”

*

Chekhov had two more solar eclipse stories up his sleeve. He played one, “The Intruders: An Eyewitness Account” (“Zloumyshlenniki: Rasskaz Ochevidtsev,” August 8) in Fragments, and “Before the Eclipse: Snippets from the Spectacle” (“Pered Zatmeium: Otryvok iz Feerii,” August 9) in Alarm Clock, one and two days after the actual eclipse, which Chekhov himself wanted to witness but couldn’t, as a dense cloud-cover intervened. “The darkness, very formidable, continued a minute,” he later wrote Leykin.6

“The Intruders” are scientists who have appeared out of nowhere in a provincial town; the eyewitness is a poorly educated townsman who suspiciously scrutinizes them as they sit to a meal in a grubby tavern and make plans, sometimes in French, which the eyewitness doesn’t understand. They talk about the next morning, when they would like the waiter to have tea ready for them that doesn’t have flies or cockroaches in it.

“Are you aware of what’s happening tomorrow morning?” one intruder asks the waiter.

“Not at all,” he replies.

“Well! Tomorrow morning you will be struck and amazed.”7

The townspeople watch as the next morning the scientist-observers set up their table outside the tavern and lay out their charts and papers and telescopes.

Suddenly the sun disappears and the night begins “and where the day went, no one knows.” The citizens and the animals, there at the town square for market day, panic.

When daylight returns, the intruders (perhaps Austrians, the eyewitness wonders) pack up and leave, who knows where.

“Before the Eclipse,” on the other hand, is in the format of a dialogue between the sun and the moon, “sitting on the horizon and drinking a beer.” They part after several exchanges, agreeing if they’re too drunk to perform the eclipse in August that they’ll cover themselves with clouds.8

“Zinochka” (“Zinochka,” August 10) is another Maupassant-like tale: a group of hunters, resting one evening, have been telling various rounds of stories (which we don’t get to read) until one suggests a new topic:

“It is nothing much to be loved; the ladies are created for the purpose of loving us men. But, tell me, has any one of you fellows been hated—passionately, furiously hated? Has any one of you watched the ecstasies of hatred? Eh?”9

He is met by silence, so he proceeds and recalls that as a bratty child, he tattled on his young governess, who was having a romance with his older brother. Chekhov was aware of fashions and cliches in storytelling, and he regularly scolded his brother Alexander for not noticing which were worn-out topics and where there might be room for discovery. “The ecstasies of hatred” was a clever and original topic.

It looks and sounds like a love story:

“At the edge of the pond, between the thick stumps of two old willows, stood my elder brother, Sasha […]. He looked toward Zinochka as she approached him, and his whole figure was lighted up by an expression of happiness as though by sunshine. And Zinochka, as though she were being driven into the Cave of Dogs, and were being forced to breathe carbonic acid gas, walked toward him, scarcely able to move one leg before the other, breathing hard, with her head thrown back.10… To judge from appearances she was going to a rendezvous for the first time in her life. But at last she reached him…. For half a minute they gazed at each other in silence, as though they could not believe their eyes. Thereupon some force seemed to shove Zinochka; she laid her hands on Sasha’s shoulders and let her head droop upon his waistcoat. Sasha laughed, muttered something incoherent, and with the clumsiness of a man head over ears in love, laid both hands on Zinochka’s face. […]”

This appreciation of Sasha and Zinochka’s joyful encounter makes me hope Chekhov had experienced such a moment for himself and not just as a bystander. The hunter recalls himself taunting her and his brother with his secret knowledge and how he exploited her fear of his tattling by refusing to do his schoolwork. He was overwhelmed by his power. After he nearly spilled the beans in front of his mother, the tormented Zinochka gave up trying to propitiate little Petya.

“At our evening lessons that day I noticed a striking change in Zinochka’s face. It looked sterner, colder, as it were, more like marble, while her eyes gazed strangely straight into my face, and I give you my word of honor I have never seen such terrible, annihilating eyes, even in hounds when they overtake the wolf. I understood their expression perfectly, when in the middle of a lesson she suddenly clenched her teeth and hissed through them:

“ ‘I hate you! Oh, you vile, loathsome creature, if you knew how I hate you, how I detest your cropped head, your vulgar, prominent ears!’ ”

He eventually ratted her out, which led to his mother firing her. But Chekhov surprises us:

“Zinochka soon afterward became my brother’s wife. She is the Zinaida Nikolaevna whom you know. The next time I met her I was already an ensign. In spite of all her efforts she could not recognize the hated Petya in the ensign with his moustache, but still she did not treat me quite like a relation…. And even now, in spite of my good-humored baldness, meek corpulence, and unassuming air, she still looks askance at me, and feels put out when I go to see my brother. Hatred it seems can no more be forgotten than love….”

Did Chekhov have anyone in mind? Was there a woman who hated him or was it someone he hated?… As Chekhov did not cultivate his hatreds of individual people, it’s more likely he had seen rather than experienced the feeling.

*

Chekhov wrote Leykin on August 11 to try once again to explain their missed connections and miscommunications: the mail didn’t come every day to Voskresensk and hence to Babkino; he had sent the story to Bilibin because he didn’t know where Leykin was. As for safe, non-debatable topics, the weather was lousy; there had not been a sunny week. But then Chekhov got back to his usual mode with Leykin. He defended Gruzinskiy (Lazarev) for complaining about Leykin’s shortening one of Lazarev’s pieces: “If you take the editorial right to correct and not insert pieces, why not recognize the correspondent’s right to protest?”11

As for In the Twilight, “Judging by the ad in [New Times], my Suvorin book came out 9 days ago, but I haven’t heard anything about it, even though Alexander oversees the publication.”

Chekhov was tactful and polite, usually, but not now. He asked, “Speak frankly: Aren’t you sick of editing Fragments yet? If I were in your place, I would toss it all to hell, put my money in a side pocket and go on an around-the-world cruise. […] Life is short.”

Leykin was sharp and would have recognized that Chekhov was baiting him. He wasn’t going anywhere, and he would continue using any tricks he could to keep Chekhov from leaving him.

Chekhov would return to Moscow in early September, but for now he was occupied. He wrote his friend Schechtel: “I’m dreaming of winter, as I’m sick of summer. For me, after all, summer began April 1.” His letters to Schechtel were invariably easy-breezy: “Find me a fiancée.”12 In a postscript, he noted a distraction: “I’ve gone mad on mushrooms. I wander in the woods for days, looking under my feet. I shall have to give it up, for this pleasure is interfering with my work.”13

Another distraction was wanting to see his book, finally. “Goose!” he wrote Alexander. “If you believe the Monday book ads, my book came out 9 days back already. Not a word or a peep about it.”14

*

In “The Doctor” (“Doktor,” August 17) the protagonist-doctor wants a confession from the mother of a dying nine-year-old boy that he is not the boy’s father. There is no hope for the boy, who has a brain tumor.

The boy is dreamy and passive, possibly hallucinating.

“Misha, does your head ache?” he asked.

Misha answered, not at once: “Yes. I keep dreaming.”

“What do you dream?”

“All sorts of things….”15

The doctor has been paying the mother for support of the boy, as have two other men. He asks her, at this crucial time, to confess that she knows the boy is not his. She insists the boy is his. He argues: “A father’s rights to the boy are equally shared with me by Petrov and Kurovsky the lawyer, who still make you an allowance for their son’s education, just as I do! Yes, indeed! I know all that quite well! I forgive your lying in the past, what does it matter? But now when you have grown older, at this moment when the boy is dying, your lying stifles me!”

He is cracking, but she, grieving over her son’s impending death, is not. He only wants her to tell him the truth. Chekhov doesn’t tell us that the doctor is correct in his surmise, only that the doctor is sure she is lying. But there is no way for him to know and he is frustrated with his powerlessness. The story concludes with him uttering to himself on his way home: “What a pity that I don’t know how to speak! I haven’t the gift of persuading and convincing. It’s evident she does not understand me since she lies! It’s evident! How can I make her see? How?”

*

Lazarev returned to Babkino on August 20, and Chekhov wrote Leykin on August 21 to continue trying to mediate between his friend and Leykin. Chekhov explained that he had read a couple of lines of Leykin’s complaints to Lazarev and that Lazarev had been amazed to learn he had offended Leykin. He invited Leykin to come to Babkino. He added: “Well, I burden the end of this letter with requests”—could Leykin place an announcement of In the Twilight in Fragments?… And, one more thing, could he have an advance, please? He apologized that Leykin hadn’t received a copy of In the Twilight. “I’m not sending you my new book, as I don’t have it.”16 As always, Leykin came through with the money; he printed an advertisement for In the Twilight and also had Bilibin write a review.

Meanwhile, Lazarev would describe Chekhov writing a story “all day” at Babkino; “finishing it, he turned to me with the request: ‘Read “The Siren,” A. S.! Did I leave out a word or comma? Is there any drivel? By the way, this is a record, the story was written without a single cross-out.’ ”17 The comical “The Siren” (“Sirena,” August 24) is about hungry judges awaiting one judge to finish writing his dissent. To pass the time, the others discuss, most distractingly, instances of “real appetite.”18 For example, “The richest odor is that of young onions when they just begin to get golden-brown, you know, and when the rascals fill the house with their sizzling.”

Amid the lusty discussion, the dissenting judge finds it hard to concentrate and, unlike Chekhov in the story’s errorless composition, keeps making mistakes, forcing him to start over.

The secretary, “a short man with sidewhiskers growing close to his ears and a sugary expression on his face,” is the sweetest siren of all:

He was so carried away that, like a nightingale singing, he heard only his own voice. “The meat pie must make your mouth water, it must lie there before you, naked, shameless, a temptation! You wink at it, you cut off a sizable slice, and you let your fingers just play over it, this way, out of excess of feeling. You eat, the butter drips from it like tears, and the filling is fat, juicy, rich, with eggs, giblets, onions…”

His quiet seductive voice sends one judge after another fleeing for a restaurant. The secretary reaches the end of the imagined meal:

“Yes, my friend,” the secretary continued. “And while you are sipping your brandy, it’s not a bad thing to smoke a cigar, and you blow rings, and you begin to fancy that you are a generalissimo, or better still, you are married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and all day long she is floating under your windows in a kind of pool with goldfish in it. She floats there, and you call to her: ‘Darling, come and give me a kiss.’ ”

The presiding judge finally flees too, tossing aside his work.

This is a variation on Chekhov’s writer-on-deadline story from December 1886, “The Order.” But it’s better, neater, funnier. It would’ve made an appropriate gift for Leykin and Fragments, but Chekhov had sent it to the Petersburg Gazette. And, as noted by Lazarev, it was “written without a single cross-out.”

As a counterweight to that farce, Chekhov followed with “The Pipe” (“Svirel’,” August 29). Sitting at his desk at Babkino, Chekhov took one step into his imagination and conjured up this dreamlike scene:

Meliton Shishkin, a bailiff from the Dementyev farm, exhausted by the sultry heat of the fir-wood and covered with spiders’ webs and pine-needles, made his way with his gun to the edge of the wood. His Damka—a mongrel between a yard dog and a setter—an extremely thin bitch heavy with young, trailed after her master with her wet tail between her legs, doing all she could to avoid pricking her nose. It was a dull, overcast morning. Big drops dripped from the bracken and from the trees that were wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell of decay from the dampness of the wood.19

Meliton’s senses, though weary, are awake, as are Damka’s.

There were birch-trees ahead of him where the wood ended, and between their stems and branches he could see the misty distance. Beyond the birch-trees someone was playing on a shepherd’s rustic pipe. The player produced no more than five or six notes, dragged them out languidly with no attempt at forming a tune, and yet there was something harsh and extremely dreary in the sound of the piping.

And so we follow the sound of the pipe and discover the piper, an old shepherd.

Meliton, a bailiff, is chatty, but the shepherd is not.

“What weather! God help us!” he said, and he turned his head from side to side. “Folk have not carried the oats yet, and the rain seems as though it had been taken on for good, God bless it.”

The shepherd looked at the sky, from which a drizzling rain was falling, at the wood, at the bailiff’s wet clothes, pondered, and said nothing.

“The whole summer has been the same,” sighed Meliton. “A bad business for the peasants and no pleasure for the gentry.”

This was Chekhov’s dreary-weather summer at Babkino.

The shepherd offers no comfort. He sees the environmental destruction at the end of the 19th century that everyone ever since has been shocked to witness:

“It’s a wonder,” he said, “what has become of them all! I remember twenty years ago there used to be geese here, and cranes and ducks and grouse—clouds and clouds of them! The gentry used to meet together for shooting, and one heard nothing but pouf-pouf-pouf! pouf-pouf-pouf! There was no end to the woodcocks, the snipe, and the little teals, and the water-snipe were as common as starlings, or let us say sparrows—lots and lots of them! And what has become of them all? We don’t even see the birds of prey. The eagles, the hawks, and the owls have all gone…. There are fewer of every sort of wild beast, too. Nowadays, brother, even the wolf and the fox have grown rare, let alone the bear or the otter. And you know in old days there were even elks! For forty years I have been observing the works of God from year to year, and it is my opinion that everything is going the same way.”

“What way?”

“To the bad, young man. To ruin, we must suppose… The time has come for God’s world to perish.”

The shepherd is undauntingly pessimistic. No matter the creature, the shepherd shakes his head and foresees its destruction:

A silence followed. Meliton sank into thought, with his eyes fixed on one spot. He wanted to think of some one part of nature as yet untouched by the all-embracing ruin.

The shepherd, though he has started off to mind the cattle, brings up a recent event and then begins tooting away on his pipe!

“Did you have an eclipse or not?” the shepherd called from the bushes.

“Yes, we had,” answered Meliton.

“Ah! Folks are complaining all about that there was one. It shows there is disorder even in the heavens! It’s not for nothing…. Hey-hey-hey! Hey!”

Driving his herd together to the edge of the wood, the shepherd leaned against the birch-tree, looked up at the sky, without haste took his pipe from his bosom and began playing. As before, he played mechanically and took no more than five or six notes; as though the pipe had come into his hands for the first time, the sounds floated from it uncertainly, with no regularity, not blending into a tune, but to Meliton, brooding on the destruction of the world, there was a sound in it of something very depressing and revolting which he would much rather not have heard. The highest, shrillest notes, which quivered and broke, seemed to be weeping disconsolately, as though the pipe were sick and frightened, while the lowest notes for some reason reminded him of the mist, the dejected trees, the gray sky. Such music seemed in keeping with the weather, the old man, and his sayings.

Chekhov drives the story on, the tension now being: When will a hint of hope appear? And Chekhov resists the demands of the genre, the demands of everyday conversation…. No, there’s no hope!

*

Lazarev remembered an episode at Babkino from that summer. There is no telling whether it was during his July visit or now, at the end of August: “One late evening, near midnight,” writes Lazarev, “when Chekhov and I were about to go to bed, Maria Pavlovna returned in tears from the Kiselev house, and had scarcely entered the room when she went into hysterics. We got frightened and began giving her water and some kind of drops to help.”

“But what’s wrong with you, Masha? What’s wrong with you?” Chekhov kept asking.

“I can’t… I can’t… Aleksei Sergeevich…”

“What about Aleksei Sergeevich?”

“What he says!”

With difficulty getting to the mystery, it came out that he had made a terrible statement. Amid bitter tears, Maria Pavlovna said that Aleksei Sergeevich Kiselev, distracted from a game of patience, for some reason brought up the ambition of the children of peasants and the cook to study, to go to school, and with outrage said that the government was inclined to allow them to do so instead of driving them away from schools and institutes… Kiselev said this sharply and rudely to the finish. In order to emphasize all the charm of this outburst by the head of a highly cultured family, it’s necessary to remember that Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf of Chertkov and that if Kiselev even in the smallest point didn’t know this circumstance, he could not but know that the origins of the Chekhovs were in the peasantry.

Hearing his sister out, Chekhov shrugged his shoulders and said with annoyance: “And you wanted to listen to this idiot!” […] In Chekhov’s peaceful stories, in his even-keeled letters, sometimes for some reason, a sharp hatred flared up, uncharacteristic of his temperament. This is when Chekhov touches upon the rudeness and savagery of “cultured people.”20

Yet he forgave the Kiselevs and they remained friends.

September 1887

You ask me what life is? It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known.

—Letter to his wife, April 20, 19041

Chekhov got to Moscow on September 2, and he wrote Leykin to thank him for the loan. He also wanted to clarify his role with Fragments, offering to write one or two stories a month; but it was time for new writers. He insisted that this arrangement would be fine, as Lazarev and Ezhov were already replacing him.2

He wrote Alexander a short note on September 3 to let him know where to send the next payment from New Times. Alexander wrote him a long letter on September 5, explaining, among other things, the delay in In the Twilight, ten copies of which were finally being sent to him that day. More important, he was responding to a depressed letter from Anton. This despairing letter has not survived. Alexander declared his sympathy:

You write that you’re all alone, there’s no one to speak with, no one to write to […] I repeat once more that I feel for you. You take on massive work, and I well understand that you’re tired. […] There’s one thing I don’t understand in your letter: the complaint that you hear and read lies and lies […] You need to live and not work. You have overworked. The south inspired you and spurred you, but it didn’t satisfy you.3

Alexander declined his brother’s suggestion that he be his posthumous biographer and encouraged Anton to move to Petersburg and write his stories there. And he reminded Anton that Suvorin wanted to pay him 200 rubles a month to write for New Times. Anton could leave their parents behind. Finally, “I should call you the basest of pessimists if I agreed with your phrase: ‘My youth has been wasted.’ ”4 Alexander described his own disappointed feelings of being cut out of serious editorial responsibility at New Times, and his own depressed feelings that had led to his reluctance to write Anton. Alexander knew quite well that he himself was dissipated and actually lazy, and perhaps that Anton’s self-reproach was thus an even bigger reproach upon him.

Chekhov continually suggested to his brother and other correspondents that he was naturally lazy, that it wasn’t in his character to be busy and hard-working. What was their excuse? Or was he reminding them (and us) that laziness can be a deep characteristic, yet allows, at times, exceptional effort?

On September 7 or 8 Anton replied with extra thanks for all the work Alexander had done on the book and continued their discussion of literary matters, including how to get along with Suvorin and shake up New Times.

With copies of In the Twilight finally in hand, Chekhov sent one on September 9 to the family’s landlord, Yakov Korneev: “Instead of paying you for the apartment, I send you a volume of my excrement…. for rooms, alas!, I’ll pay you in a hundred years.” The Soviet editors explain, just in case the volume’s readers have humor-deficiency-syndrome: “Joke. Chekhov paid 650 rubles a year for the apartment in the Korneev home.”5

He confessed to Leykin on September 11 that he had been depressed: “For the last three weeks I gave myself up cravenly to a fit of melancholy. I lost all interest in life, my pen dropped out of my hand; in a word, ‘nerves,’ which you refuse to recognize. I was so disturbed mentally that I simply could not bring myself to sit down to work. There are all sorts of reasons for it: the bad weather, some family trouble, lack of money, moving into town from the country, etc.”6 He asked, by the way, about how Bilibin was doing.

Bilibin, working away at Fragments, and having just reviewed In the Twilight, wrote with exasperation to Chekhov on September 12. “In many letters you assail me because I write the wrong thing in the wrong way. That, obviously, is a misunderstanding. What do you want from me and what do you expect? I do what I can, and my literary conscience is at peace. Not everybody can be word-artists. I—I’m a craftsman, and in this there’s nothing shameful. […] I myself with full right might reproach you, blaming you for burying your talent, but I don’t do this.”7

Chekhov had been keen on Bilibin but, as with all his male friends, he joked coarsely to him. Bilibin seems to have been resistant or uncomfortable with that, never joking back in a similar manner. And he didn’t like Chekhov’s prodding him to write better. What was Bilibin protesting except, I’m not as good as you, Anton Chekhov!

Who was?

*

In “An Avenger” (“Mstitel’,” September 12), “Shortly after finding his wife in flagrante delicto Fyodor Fyodorovich Sigaev was standing in Schmuck and Co.’s, the gunsmiths, selecting a suitable revolver. His countenance expressed wrath, grief, and unalterable determination.” This is a Fragments comedy. The atmosphere is as authentic as a vaudeville stage-set. Sigaev’s “unalterable determination” means that it will be altered. The shopman is a chatty foil, “a sprightly little Frenchified figure with rounded belly and white waistcoat.” Sigaev is daunted by the price of a Smith & Wesson, and increasingly distracted by various thoughts about the proper form of vengeance:

His imagination pictured how he would blow out their brains, how blood would flow in streams over the rug and the parquet, how the traitress’s legs would twitch in her last agony…. But that was not enough for his indignant soul. The picture of blood, wailing, and horror did not satisfy him. He must think of something more terrible.

“I know! I’ll kill myself and him,” he thought, “but I’ll leave her alive. Let her pine away from the stings of conscience and the contempt of all surrounding her. For a sensitive nature like hers that will be far more agonizing than death.”

And he imagined his own funeral: he, the injured husband, lies in his coffin with a gentle smile on his lips, and she, pale, tortured by remorse, follows the coffin like a Niobe, not knowing where to hide herself to escape from the withering, contemptuous looks cast upon her by the indignant crowd.

He suffers finally from the awkwardness of changing his mind and having wasted the shopman’s time. He instead buys a quail net.

Chekhov in the midst of his own despair and depression, mocked self-pity; such feelings eventually, usually, resulted in the consolation of buying oneself “a quail net.” He had sent the story to Leykin on September 7, and perhaps, like “The Siren,” he wrote it in one dash, without corrections. He liked it enough a dozen years later to include it in his Collected Works. It’s pretty funny.

*

He wrote to Maria Kiseleva on September 13 in his usual jocular way, responding to her concern and sympathy for his low mood. What could he tell her? Chekhov looked at his desk and started there, opening with “I have a new lamp,” which news he had conveyed at closing two days before to Leykin (“I bought (or, truer, I was given) a new room lamp”), “but all the rest is boring, gray and old.”8 After a couple of lines, he paused, mentally, though his pen went on: “There are no new thoughts, but the old things are tangled in my head and resemble worms in a green box that have been in the heat for five days. What’s to write about? That I’m moneyless and deaf? You already know that.” What didn’t she know? He told her he had been reading reviews of In the Twilight and “cannot at all understand: are they praising me or complaining about my lost soul? ‘Talent! Talent! But nonetheless the Lord rest his soul’—such is the implication of the reviews.”

By the way, he went on newsily, “I’ve been twice at Korsh’s theater and both times Korsh asked me to write him a play.” Chekhov shrugged: “But of course I won’t write plays.” He mentioned a small publisher who would pay him a token sum and collect some of his old stories for a book. Dunya Efros had been over today, “in a new hat.” As for the cat Fedor Timofeich, he “comes home to eat; all the rest of the time he strolls the roofs and dreamily looks at the sky. Apparently he came to the realization that life is without purpose.” He had sent a couple of Kiseleva’s joke-pieces to Leykin; in the meantime he greeted her family and told her everyone at the Chekhov house was well. He wound up, “The boredom is oppressive. Ought I get married?”

Joke, joke, joke. But Chekhov was still thinking about marriage… with Efros. He was always joking! But actually, in a week he would start writing a full-length play, Ivanov, and whatever Kiseleva’s answer, he did not soon get married, and in three months the cat Fedor Timofeich would costar in a long story about a dog, “Kashtanka.”

He seems to have got over the doldrums, but “The Post” (“Pochta,” September 14) provides evidence of what those doldrums feel like. As usual, I try to sum up, but the neatest, quickest situational summary is Chekhov’s own:

It was three o’clock in the night. The postman, ready to set off, in his cap and his coat, with a rusty sword in his hand, was standing near the door, waiting for the driver to finish putting the mail bags into the cart which had just been brought around with three horses. The sleepy postmaster sat at his table, which was like a counter; he was filling up a form and saying:

“My nephew, the student, wants to go to the station at once. So look here, Ignatyev, let him get into the mail cart and take him with you to the station: though it is against the regulations to take people with the mail, what’s one to do? It’s better for him to drive with you free than for me to hire horses for him.”9

The scene becomes alive only once the journey begins, as Chekhov peers into the darkness and listens for the sounds and sniffs the air:

The big bell clanged something to the little bells, the little bells gave it a friendly answer. The cart squeaked, moved. The big bell lamented, the little bells laughed. Standing up in his seat the driver lashed the restless tracehorse twice, and the cart rumbled with a hollow sound along the dusty road. The little town was asleep. Houses and trees stood black on each side of the broad street, and not a light was to be seen. Narrow clouds stretched here and there over the star-spangled sky, and where the dawn would soon be coming there was a narrow crescent moon; but neither the stars, of which there were many, nor the half-moon, which looked white, lighted up the night air. It was cold and damp, and there was a smell of autumn.

For the driver and the postman, the beauty of the sky and the adventure of being out on a dark fall night are too routine to be remarkable, but for the young student, everything is amusing and exciting:

It was the first time in his life that he had driven by night in a mail cart, and the shaking he had just been through, the postman’s having been thrown out, and the pain in his own back struck him as interesting adventures. He lighted a cigarette and said with a laugh:

“Why you know, you might break your neck like that! I very nearly flew out, and I didn’t even notice you had been thrown out. I can fancy what it is like driving in autumn!”

The postman did not speak.

“Have you been going with the post for long?” the student asked.

“Eleven years.”

“Oho; every day?”

“Yes, every day. I take this post and drive back again at once. Why?”

Making the journey every day, he must have had a good many interesting adventures in eleven years. On bright summer and gloomy autumn nights, or in winter when a ferocious snowstorm whirled howling around the mail cart, it must have been hard to avoid feeling frightened and uncanny. No doubt more than once the horses had bolted, the mail cart had stuck in the mud, they had been attacked by highwaymen, or had lost their way in the blizzard….

“I can fancy what adventures you must have had in eleven years!” said the student. “I expect it must be terrible driving?”

He said this and expected that the postman would tell him something, but the latter preserved a sullen silence and retreated into his collar.

The student’s spirits are light. He can’t imagine, however, anyone’s spirits ever dampening or that his own excitement would not prove infectious. He receives the postman’s brutal simple comeuppance:

“How fond you are of talking, upon my word!” he said. “Can’t you keep quiet when you are traveling?”

Here’s what Chekhov can do: simultaneously have us sympathize with the young man and completely understand the grouchy postman.

The sensitive student has been knocked into a grim mood. Chekhov makes us conscious of what has happened, but the boy doesn’t know: “The chill of the morning and the surliness of the postman gradually infected the student. He looked apathetically at the country around him, waited for the warmth of the sun, and thought of nothing but how dreadful and horrible it must be for the poor trees and the grass to endure the cold nights.”

Just before they arrive at the station, we realize that the postman has been wrestling with his feelings of discourtesy. He explains:

“It’s against the regulations to take anyone with the post….” the postman said unexpectedly. “It’s not allowed! And since it is not allowed, people have no business… to get in…. Yes. It makes no difference to me, it’s true, only I don’t like it, and I don’t wish it.”

Chekhov doesn’t allow us to simplify our conclusions about postmen or even about age versus youth. The violation of regulations has rankled the postman, and two people have been made unhappy. Chekhov concludes with questions, ones that the sore, put-out student isn’t asking about the postman, but that we can: “With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn nights?”

In a different mood, Chekhov describes the comically chaotic wedding-day preparations by a bride’s parents in “The Wedding” (“Svadba,” September 21). Chekhov seems to have taken in all the details from the weddings he attended during his trip in the spring; he describes the confusion of the elaborate but necessary marriage customs. When he himself finally married fourteen years later, he avoided absolutely all of it.

On or about September 21, Chekhov began writing the four-act Ivanov. Two weeks later, he had a complete draft, and in November it was staged. Probably he finished writing “The Runaway” (“Beglets,” September 28) first. Chekhov had so far not mentioned any medical work since his return to Moscow from the summer house on September 2. The story is told for the most part from the point of view of seven-year-old Pashka, whose mother has led him on a long walk to a regional hospital clinic. (The age of most of the children, primarily boys, in the short stories these two years has been in the range of six to ten.) The presiding doctor is overwhelmed and sarcastic: