Lectures on Russian literature

No. 69 Tyutki

A plural noun applied by the gruff Prince to the young scatterbrains, with connotations of fatuousness and foppery. It does not really suit Vronski whom Kitty's father seems to have in mind here; Vronski may be vain and frivolous but he is also ambitious, intelligent, and persevering. Readers will note the curious echo of this fancy word in the name of the hairdresser ("Tyutkin coiffeur") whose sign Anna reads with a roaming eye on the day of her death while driving through the streets of Moscow (p. 885); she is struck by the absurd contrast of "Tyutkin," a Russian comedy name, with the stiff French epithet

"coiffeur," and for a second reflects she might amuse Vronski by making a joke of this (p.66).

No. 70 Corps of pages

Pazbeski ego imperatorskogo velichestva korpus (His Imperial Majesty's Corps of Pages), a military school for the sons of noblemen in old Russia, founded 1802, reformed 1865 (p.68).

No. 71 Chateau des Fleurs, can-can

Allusion to a night restaurant with vaudeville performances on a stage. "The notorious can-can ... is only a quadrille danced by gross people" (Allen Dodworth in Dancing and its Relations to Education and Social Life, London, 1885) (p.69).

No. 72 The station

The Nikolaevski or Peterburgski railway station in the north-central part of Moscow. The line was built by the government in 1843-1851. A fast train covered the distance between Petersburg and Moscow (about 400 miles) in twenty hours in 1862

and in thirteen hours in 1892. Leaving Petersburg around 8 p.m., Anna arrived in Moscow a little after 11 a.m. the following day (p.70).

No. 73 Ah, your Serenity

An inferior—servant, clerk, or tradesman—would address a titled person (prince or count) as "your Serenity," vashe siyatel'stvo (German "Dur-chlaucht"). The use which Prince Oblonski (who is a siyatel'stvo in his own right, of course) makes of the term in greeting Count Vronski is playfully patronizing: he mimics an elderly attendant stopping a young scapegrace in his tracks, or—as more precisely, perhaps—acts the staid family man speaking to a flighty bachelor (p.70).

No. 74 Honi soit qui mal y pense

The motto of the Order of the Garter, "Shame to him who thinks evil of it," as pronounced by Edward the Third in 1348

when rebuking the mirth of some noblemen over a lady's fallen garter (p.70).

No. 75 Diva

This Italian word ("the divine one") was applied to celebrated singers (e.g., la diva Patti); by 1870, in France and elsewhere, the term was often used in reference to flashy ladies of the variety stage; but here I think a respectable singer or actress is implied. This diva, reflected and multiplied, takes part in Oblonski's dream—the dream from which he awakes Friday at 8

a.m., February 11 (p. 4). Here, on page 71 Oblonski and Vronski talk of the supper to be given in her honor next day, Sunday, February 13. On page 77 Oblonski talks about her ("the new singer") with Countess Vronski at the station, that same Saturday morning, February 12. Finally, on page 90, he tells his family, at 9:30 p.m. the same Saturday, that Vronski has just 142

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called to inquire about the dinner they are to give next day to a celebrity from abroad. It seems that Tolstoy could not quite make up his mind whether the occasion was to be formal or frivolous (p.71).

It should be noted that at the end of part five, the appearance of a famous singer (the diva Patti, this time she is named) occurs in a critical passage of Anna's romance with Vronski.

No. 76 Through the frosty haze one could distinguish a number of railway workers, wearing short sheepskin coats and felt snowboots, in the act of stepping across the rails of the curving tracks

Here commences a sequence of subtle moves on Tolstoy's part aiming at bringing about a gruesome accident and, simultaneously, adducing the impressions from which later a crucial nightmare seen both by Anna and Vronski will be formed. The poor visibility among the frosty vapors is connected with various muffled-up figures such as these railway workers and, a little further, the muffled-up, frost-covered engine driver. The death of the railway guard which Tolstoy is preparing occurs on page 77: "a guard . . . too much muffled up against the severe frost had not heard a train backing [the optical haze becomes an auditory one] and had been crushed." Vronski views the mangled body (p.77) and he (and possibly Anna) has also noticed a peasant with a bag over his shoulder emerge from the train (p.72)—a visual impression that will breed. The theme of "iron" (which is beaten and crushed in the subsequent nightmare) is also introduced here in terms of a station platform vibrating under a great weight (p.71).

No. 77 The locomotive came rolling by

In the famous photograph (1869) of the first two transcontinental trains meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah, the engine of the Central Pacific (building from San Francisco eastward) is seen to have a great flaring funnel stack, while the engine of the Union Pacific (building from Omaha westward) sports but a straight slender stack topped by a spark-arrester. Both types of chimneys were used on Russian locomotives. According to Collignon's Chemins de Fer Russes (Paris, 1868), the seven and a half meters long locomotive, with wheels oOOo, of the fast train connecting Petersburg and Moscow had a straight funnel two and a third meters high, i.e., exceeding by thirty centimeters the diameter of its driving wheels whose action is so vigorously described by Tolstoy (p.72).

No. 78 This lady's appearance . . .

It is not necessary for the reader to look at Anna with Vronski's eyes, but for those who are anxious to appreciate all the details of Tolstoy's art, it is necessary to realize clearly what he meant his heroine to look like. Anna was rather stout but her carriage was wonderfully graceful, her step singularly light. Her face was beautiful, fresh, and full of animation. She had curly black hair that was apt to come awry, and gray eyes glistening darkly in the shadow of thick lashes. Her glance could light up with an enchanting glow or assume a serious and woeful expression. Her unpainted lips were a vivid red. She had plump arms, slender wrists and tiny hands. Her handshake was vigorous, her motions rapid. Everything about her was elegant, charming and real (p.73).

No. 79 Oblonski! Here!

Two men of fashion, close friends or messmates, might call each other by their surnames, or even by their titles—count, prince, baron—reserving first names or nicknames for special occasions. When Vronski calls to Steve "Oblonski!" he is using an incomparably more intimate form of address than if he had shouted out Stepan Arkadyevich's name and patronymic (p.74).

No. 80 Vous filez le parfait amour. Tant mieux, mon cher

You are engrossed in perfect love-making. So much the better, my dear

(p.75).

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No. 81 Unusual color, unusual event

There is of course no actual connection between the two, but the repetition is characteristic of Tolstoy's style with its rejection of false elegancies and its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense. Cp. the somewhat similar clash of "unhasting" and "hastily" some fifty pages further on. The station master's cap was of a bright red color (p.76).

No. 82 Bobrishchevs

We may infer that they were giving this particular ball (p.86).

No. 83 Anna's dress

Perusal of an article on "Paris fashions for February" in the London Illustrated News, 1872, reveals that whereas toilettes de promenade just touched the ground, an evening dress had a long square-cut train. Velvet was most fashionable, and for a ball a lady would wear a robe princesse of black velvet over a skirt of faille, edged with chantilly lace, and a tuft of flowers in the hair (p.93).

No. 84 Waltz

Sergey Tolstoy, in the series of notes already mentioned (see note 63), describes the order of dances at a ball of the type described here: "The ball would start with a light waltz, then there would come four quadrilles, then a mazurka with various figures. . . . The final dance would be a cotillion . . . with such figures as grand-rond, chaine, etc., and with interpolated dances — waltz, galop, mazurka."

Dodworth in his book (Dancing, 1885) lists as many as two hundred and fifty figures in the "Cotillion or German." The grand-rond is described under Nr. 63 as: "Gentlemen select gentlemen; ladies select ladies; a grand round is formed, the gentlemen joining hands on one side of the circle, the ladies on the other; the figure is begun by turning to the left; then the conductor who holds his lady by the right hand, advances, leaving the other [dancers] and cuts through the middle of the round . . . [then] he turns to the left with all the gentlemen while his partner turns to the right with all the ladies, continuing down the side of the room, thus forming two lines facing. When the last two have passed out [!] the two lines advance, each gentleman dancing with opposite lady." Various "chains" —double, uninterrupted, etc. —can be left to the reader's imagination (p.95).

No. 85 People's theatre

According to a note in Maude's translation, a people's theatre (or more exactly a privately financed theatre—Moscow having only State theatres at that time) was initiated "at the Moscow Exhibition of 1872" (p.95).

No. 86 She had refused five partners

She had also refused Lyovin a few days before. The whole ball (with its wonderful break [p.95] "the music stopped") is subtly emblematic of Kitty's mood and situation (p.97).

No. 87 . . . Enchanting [was] the firm-fleshed neck with its row of pearls [zhemchug] . . . enchanting [her] animation

[ozhivlenie] but there was something terrifying [uzhasnoe] and cruel [zhestokoe] about her charm This "zh" repetition (phonetically coinciding with "s" in "pleasure"—the buzzing ominous quality of her beauty—is artistically followed up in the penultimate paragraph of the chapter: "... the uncontrollable [neuderzhimy], quivering

[drozhashchi] glow of her eyes and smile burned [obzhog] him. . . ." (pp.98-99).

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No. 88 Dance leader

"The conductor [or "leader"] should exercise constant watchfulness and be ever on the alert to urge the tardy, prompt the slow, awake the inattentive, signal those occupying the floor too long, superintend the preparatory formation of the figure, see that each dancer is on the proper side of his partner, and, if simultaneous movement is required, give the signal for that movement to commence etc. He is thus compelled to fulfill the duties of a 'whipper-in,' as well as those of conductor, instructor, and superintendent." Toned down by the social position and expert dancing of the people involved in the present ball, this was more or less Korsunski's function (p.99).

No. 89 There is some gentleman, Nikolay Dmitrich

Nikolay's lowly mistress uses the first name and abridged patronymic as a respectful wife would in a petty bourgeois household (p. 101).

When Dolly, in speaking of her husband calls him by his first name and patronymic, she is doing something else: she chooses the most formal and neutral manner of reference to him to stress the estrangement.

No. 90 And the birches, and our schoolroom

With keen nostalgic tenderness recalling the rooms in the ancestral manor, where as boys he and his brother used to have lessons with a tutor or a governess (p. 107).

No. 91 Gypsies

Night restaurants had Gypsy (Tzygan) entertainers who sang and danced. Good-looking female Gypsy performers were extremely popular with Russian rakes (p. 108).

No. 92 His low-slung carpet sleigh

A type of rustic comfortable sleigh which looked as if it consisted of a rug on runners (p. 109).

No. 93 Heated

Lyovin's manor house was heated by means of wood-burning Dutch stoves, a stove per room, and there were double windows with wads of cotton wool between the panes (p.112).

No. 94 Tyndall

John Tyndall (1820-1893), author of Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863 and later editions). This was the first popular exposition of the mechanical theory of heat which in the early sixties had not reached the text books (p. 113).

No. 95 Third hell

The three Russian station bells had already become in the seventies a national institution. The first bell, a quarter of an hour before departure, introduced the idea of a journey to the would-be passenger's mind ; the second, ten minutes later, suggested the project might be realized; immediately after the third, the train whistled and glided away (p. 118).

No. 96 Car

Roughly speaking, two notions of night-traveling comfort were dividing the world in the last third of the century: the Pullman system in America, which favored curtained sections and which rushed sleeping passengers feet foremost to their 145

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destination; and the Mann system in Europe, which had them speed sidewise in compartments; but in 1872, a first-class car (euphemistically called sleeping-car by Tolstoy) of the night express between Moscow and Petersburg was a very primitive affair still wavering between a vague Pullman tendency and Colonel Mann's "boudoir" scheme. It had a lateral corridor, it had water closets, it had stoves burning wood; but it also had open-end platforms which Tolstoy calls "porches"

(krylechki), the vestibule housing not having yet been invented. Hence the snow driving in through the end doors when conductors and stove-tenders passed from car to car. Night accommodations were draughty sections, semi-partitioned off from the passage, and it is evident from Tolstoy's description that six passengers shared one section (instead of the four in sleeping compartments of a later day). The six ladies in the "sleeping" section reclined in fauteuils, three facing three, with just enough space between opposite fauteuils to permit the extension of footrests. As late as 1892, Karl Baedeker speaks of first-class cars on that particular line as having fauteuils which can be transformed into beds at night but he gives no details of the metamorphosis, and anyway, in 1872, the simulacrum of full-length repose did not include any bedding. To comprehend certain important aspects of Anna's night journey, the reader should clearly visualize the following arrangement: Tolstoy indiscriminately calls the plush seats in the section either "little divans" or "fauteuils"; and both terms are right since, on each side of the section, the divan was divided into three armchairs. Anna sits facing north, in the right-hand (south-east) window corner, and she can see the left-hand windows, across the passage. On her left she has her maid Annushka (who this time travels with her in the same section, and not second-class, as she had on her journey to Moscow) and on the other side, further west, there is a stout lady, who being closest to the passage on the left-hand side of the section, experiences the greatest discomfort from heat and cold. Directly opposite Anna, an old invalid lady is making the best she can of the sleeping arrangements; there are two other ladies in the seats opposite to Anna, and with these she exchanges a few words (p. 118).

No. 97 Small traveling lantern

This was, in 1872, a very primitive gadget, with a candle

inside, a reflector, and a metallic handle that could be fixed

to the arm of a railway fauteuil at the reader's elbow (p.

118).

No. 98 The stove-heater

Here is a further set of impressions going back to the

muffled-up guard who got crushed ("someone being torn

part") and going forward to Anna's suicide (the blinding

wall, the "sinking"). The wretched stove-heater seems to

somnolent Anna to be gnawing at something in the wall,

and this will be twisted into the groping and crushing

motion of the disgusting dwarf in her later nightmare (p.

118).

No. 99 A stop

The station is Bologoe, midway between Moscow and St.

Petersburg. In the 1870s this was a twenty-minute stop in

the small hours for some bleak refreshments (see also note Nabokov's sketch of the sleeping car in which Anna rode from 72) (p. 120).

Moscow to St. Petersburg.

No. 100 Round hat

In 1850, there appeared a hard hat with a low crown designed by William Bowler, an English hatter, and this was the original model of the bowler, or derby—its American name stemming from the fact that the Earl of Derby wore a gray bowler with a black band to the English races. It was generally adopted in the seventies.

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Karenin's ears should be noted as the third item in the series of the "wrong things" which underscore Anna's mood (p. 123).

No. 101 Panslavist

Promoter of a spiritual and political union of all Slavs (Serbs, Bulgarians, etc.), with Russia at its head (p.128).

No. 102 Put [Seryozha] to bed

The time is around 9 p.m. (see end of paragraph). For some reason Seryozha has been put to bed earlier than usual (see above where "around ten" is mentioned as his bedtime—a singularly late one for a child of eight) (p.131).

No. 103 Due de Lille's Poesie des Enfers

Possibly a disguised allusion on Tolstoy's part to the French writer Count Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de L'Isle Adam (1840-1889). Tolstoy invented the title, "The Poesie of Hades," (p. 132).

No. 104 Vronski's teeth

In the course of the novel, Tolstoy refers several times to Vronski's splendid regular teeth, sploshnye zuby, which make a smooth solid ivory front when he smiles; but before he disappears from the pages of the novel in part eight, his creator, punishing Vronski in his brilliant physique, inflicts upon him a marvelously described toothache (p. 137).

No. 105 A special note on the game of tennis

At the end of chapter 22 of part six, Dolly Oblonski watches

Vronski, Anna, and two male guests play tennis. This is July

1875 and the tennis they are playing on the Vronski

country estate is the modern game, which a Major

Wingfield introduced in England in 1873. It was an

immediate success and was played in Russia and in this

country as early as 1875. In England, tennis is often called

lawn tennis because at first it was played on croquet lawns,

hard or turfy, and also in order to distinguish it from the

ancient game of tennis, played in special tennis halls and

called sometimes court-tennis. Court-tennis is mentioned

both by Shakespeare and Cervantes. Ancient kings played

it, stamping and panting in resounding halls. But this (lawn

tennis), I repeat, is our modern game. You will notice

Tolstoy's neat description: the players divided into two

teams of two stood on opposite sides of a tightly drawn net

with gilt poles (I like the gilt—an echo of the game's royal

origin and genteel resurrection) on the nicely rolled

croquet-ground. The various personal tricks of playing are

described. Vronski and his partner Sviazhski played a good

game and played it very earnestly: keeping a sharp eye on

the ball as it came their way and without haste or delay

Nabokov's drawing of a tennis costume such as Anna wore in

her game with Vronski

they ran nimbly up to it, waited for the rebound, and neatly

hit it back—most of the shots were more or less lobs I'm

afraid. Anna's partner, a young man called Veslovski, whom Lyovin had thrown out of his house a couple of weeks before, played worse than the others. Now comes a nice detail: the men with the ladies' permission took their coats off and played in their shirt sleeves. Dolly found the whole performance unnatural—grown-up people running after a ball like children.

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Vronski is a great admirer of English ways and fads, and the tennis illustrates this. Incidentally, the game was much tamer in the seventies than it is today. A man's service was a stiff pat, with the racquet held vertically at eye level; a lady's sevice was a feeble underhand stroke.

No. 106 A special note on the question of religion

The people in the book belong to the Russian church, the so-called Greek Orthodox—or more correctly Greek Catholic—

Church, which separated from the Roman communion a thousand years ago. When we first meet one of the minor characters in the book, Countess Lidia, she is interested in the union of the two churches and so is the pietist lady Madame Stahl affecting Christian devotion, whose influence Kitty soon gets rid of at Soden. But as I say, the main faith in the book is the Greek Catholic creed. The Shcherbatskis, Dolly, Kitty, their parents, are shown combining the traditional ritual with a kind of natural, old-fashioned, easy-going faith which Tolstoy approved of, for in the seventies when Tolstoy was writing this novel he had not evolved yet his fierce contempt for church ritual. The marriage ceremony for Kitty and Lyovin, and the priests, are described sympathetically. It is at his marriage that Lyovin, who had not gone to church for years and had considered himself an atheist, feels the first pangs of faith birth, then doubt again—but at the end of the book we leave him in a state of bewildered grace, with Tolstoy gently pushing him into the Tolstoyan sect.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1884-1886)

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces : the longing for privacy and the urge to go places : introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values. To take a simple example: the university scholar—and by scholar I mean professors and students alike—the university scholar may present sometimes both sides. He may be a bookworm and he may be what is called a joiner—and the bookworm and the joiner may fight within one man. A student who gets or wishes to get prizes for acquired knowledge may also desire, or be expected to desire, prizes for what is called leadership. Different temperaments make different decisions, of course, and there are minds in which the inner world persistently triumphs over the outer one, and vice versa. But we must take into account the very fact of a struggle going on or liable to go on between the two versions of man in one man — introversion and extroversion. I have known students who in the pursuit of the inner life, in the ardent pursuit of knowledge, of a favorite subject had to clap their hands to their ears in order to shut out the booming surf of dormitory life; but at the same time they would be full of a gregarious desire to join in the fun, to go to the party or to the meeting, to give up the book for the band.

From this state of affairs there is really not a very far cry to the problems of writers like Tolstoy in whom the artist struggled with the preacher; the great introvert with the robust extrovert. Tolstoy surely realized that in him as in many writers there did go on the personal struggle between creative solitude and the urge to associate with all mankind — the battle between the book and band. In Tolstoyan terms, in the symbols of Tolstoyan later philosopy after he finished Anna Karenin, creative solitude became synonymous with sin: it was egoism, it was the pampering of one's self and therefore a sin. Conversely, the idea of all mankind was in Tolstoyan terms the idea of God : God is in men and God is universal love.

And Tolstoy advocated the loss of one's personality in this universal God-Love. He suggested, in other words, that in the personal struggle between the godless artist and the godly man the latter should better win if the synthetic man wishes to be happy.

We must retain a lucid vision of these spiritual facts in order to appreciate the philosophy of the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Ivan is of course the Russian for John, and John in Hebrew means God is Good, God is Gracious. I know it's not easy for non-Russian-speaking people to pronounce the patronymic Ilych, which of course means the son of Ilya, the Russian version of the name Elias or Elijah, which incidentally means in Hebrew, Jehovah is God. Ilya is a very common Russian name, pronounced very much like the French il y a; and Ilyich is pronounced Ill-Itch—the ills and itches of mortal life.

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Now comes my first point : this is really the story not of Ivan's Death but the story of Ivan's Life. The physical death described in the story is part of mortal Life, it is merely the last phase of mortality. According to Tolstoy, mortal man, personal man, individual man, physical man, goes his physical way to nature's garbage can; according to Tolstoy, spiritual man returns to the cloudless region of universal God-Love, an abode of neutral bliss so dear to Oriental mystics. The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since a bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into new Life—Life with a capital L.

My second point is that this story was written in March 1886, at a time when Tolstoy was nearly sixty and had firmly established the Tolstoyan fact that writing masterpieces of fiction was a sin. He had firmly made up his mind that if he would write anything, after the great sins of his middle years, War and Peace and Anna Karenin, it would be only in the way of simple tales for the people, for peasants, for school children, pious educational fables, moralistic fairy tales, that kind of thing. Here and there in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" there is a half-hearted attempt to proceed with this trend, and we shall find samples of a pseudo-fable style here and there in the story. But on the whole it is the artist who takes over. This story is Tolstoy's most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement.

Thanks to the fact that Guerney has so admirably translated the thing I shall have the opportunity at last to discuss Tolstoy's style. Tolstoy's style is a marvelously complicated, ponderous instrument.

You may have seen, you must have seen, some of those awful text books written not by educators but by educationalists—

by people who talk about books instead of talking within books. You may have been told by them that the chief aim of a great writer, and indeed the main clue to his greatness, is "simplicity." Traitors, not teachers. In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases—probably recollections from more tenderyears of schooling—as "his style is simple" or "his style is clear and simple" or "his style is beautiful and simple" or "his style is quite beautiful and simple." But remember that "simplicity" is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple.

One peculiar feature of Tolstoy's style is what I shall term the "groping purist." In describing a meditation, emotion, or tangible object, Tolstoy follows the contours of the thought, the emotion, or the object until he is perfectly satisfied with his re-creation, his rendering. This involves what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy's meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words.

Another feature of his style is his manner of weaving striking details into the story, the freshness of the descriptions of physical states. Nobody in the eighties in Russia wrote like that. The story was a forerunner of Russian modernism just before the dull and conventional Soviet era. If there is the fable noted, there is too a tender, poetical intonation here and there, and there is the tense mental monologue, the stream of consciousness technique that he had already invented for the description of Anna's last journey.

A conspicuous feature of the structure is that Ivan is dead when the story starts. However, there is little contrast between the dead body and the existence of the people who discuss his death and view his body, since from Tolstoy's point of view their existence is not life but a living death. We discover at the very beginning one of the many thematic lines of the story, the pattern of trivialities, the automatic mechanism, the unfeeling vulgarity of the bureaucratic middle-class city life in which so recently Ivan himself had participated. Ivan's civil service colleagues think of how his death will affect their careers: "So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilyich's death the first thought of each of the gentlemen in those chambers was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances.

" 'I'll be sure to get Shtabel's place or Vinnikov's,' thought Fyodor Vas-ilievich. T was promised that long ago, and the promotion means an extra eight hundred rubles a year for me besides the allowance.'

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'Now I must apply for my brother-in-law's transfer from Kaluga,' thought Peter Ivanovich. 'My wife will be very glad, and then she won't be able to say that I never do anything for her relatives.' "

Note the way the first conversation has gone but this selfishness after all is a very normal and humble human trait because Tolstoy is an artist, above castigation of morals—note, I say, the way the conversation about Ivan's death then slips into a piece of innocent kidding when the self-seeking thoughts have ended. After the seven introductory pages of chapter 1, Ivan Ilyich, as it were, is revived, is made to live his whole life again, in thought, and then he is made to revert, physically, to the state depicted in the first chapter (for death and bad life are synonymous) and spiritually to pass into the state so beautifully adumbrated in the last chapter (for there is no death once this business of physical existence is over).

Egotism, falsity, hypocrisy, and above all automatism are the most important moments of life. This automatism puts people on the level of inanimate objects—and this is why inanimate objects also go into action and become characters in the story. Not symbols of this or that character, not attributes as in Gogol's work, but acting agents on a par with the human characters.

Let us take the scene between Ivan's widow Praskovya and Ivan's best friend Peter. "Peter Ivanovich sighed still more deeply and despondently, and Praskovya Fyodorovna pressed his arm gratefully. When they reached the drawing room, upholstered in pink cretonne and lighted by a dim lamp, they sat down at the table—she on a sofa and Peter Ivanovich on a low, soft ottoman, the springs of which yielded spasmodically under his weight. Praskovya Fyodorovna had been on the point of warning him to take another seat, but felt that such a warning was out of keeping with her present condition and so changed her mind. As he sat down on the ottoman Peter Ivanovich recalled how Ivan Ilyich had arranged this room and had consulted him regarding this pink cretonne with green leaves. The whole room was full of furniture and knickknacks, and on her way to the sofa the lace of the widow's black shawl caught on the carved edge of the table. Peter Ivanovich rose to detach it, and the springs of the ottomon, relieved of his weight, rose also and gave him a bounce. The widow began detaching her shawl herself, and Peter Ivanovich again sat down, suppressing the rebellious springs of the ottoman under him. But the widow had not quite freed herself, and Peter Ivanovich got up again, and again the ottomon rebelled and even creaked. When this was all over she took out a clean cambric handkerchief and began to weep. . . . 'You may smoke,' she said in a magnanimous yet crushed voice, and turned to discuss with Sokolov the price of the plot for the grave. . . .

' T look after everything myself,' she told Peter Ivanovich, shifting the albums that lay on the table; and noticing that the table was endangered by his cigarette ash, she immediately passed him an ash tray. ..."

As Ivan, with Tolstoy's assistance, revises his life, he sees that the culmination of his happiness in that Life (before he fell ill, never to recover) was when he got a nice fat official position and rented an expensive bourgeois apartment for himself and his family. I use the word bourgeois in the philistine sense, not in a class sense. I mean the kind of apartment that would strike the conventional mind in the eighties as moderately luxurious, with all kinds of knickknacks and ornaments. Today, of course, a philistine might dream of glass and steel, videos or radios disguised as book shelves and dumb pieces of furniture.

I said that this was the peak of Ivan's philistine happiness, but it was upon this peak that death pounced upon him. In falling from a stepladder when he was hanging a curtain, he had fatally injured his left kidney (this is my diagnosis—the result was probably cancer of the kidney); but Tolstoy, who disliked doctors and medicine in general, deliberately confuses matters by alluding to various other possibilities—floating kidney, some stomach ailment, even appendicitis, which could hardly have been in the left side as mentioned several times. Ivan makes later a wry joke that he was mortally wounded when storming the curtain, as if it were a fortress.

From now on nature, in the disguise of physical disintegration, enters the picture and destroys the automatism of conventional life. Chapter 2 had begun with the phrase, "Ivan's life had been most simple and most ordinary—and therefore most terrible." It was terrible because it had been automatic, trite, hypocritical—animal survival and childish contentment. Nature now introduces an extraordinary change. Nature to Ivan is uncomfortable, filthy, indecent. One of the props of Ivan's conventional life was propriety, superficial decency, elegant and neat surfaces of life, decorum. These are 150

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gone now. But nature comes in not only as the villain of the piece: it also has its good. Very good and sweet side. This leads us to the next theme, of Gerasim.

Tolstoy, as the consistent dualist he was, draws a contrast between the conventional, artificial, false, intrinsically vulgar, superficially elegant city life and the life of nature personified here by Gerasim, a clean, calm, blue-eyed young peasant, one of the lowly servants in the house, doing the most repellant jobs—but performing them with angelic indifference. He personifies the natural goodness in Tolstoy's scheme of things and he is thus closer to God. He appears here first as the embodiment of swift, soft-walking but vigorous nature. Gerasim understands and pities the dying Ivan but he pities him lucidly and dispassionately.

"Gerasim did it all easily, willingly, simply, and with a good nature that touched Ivan Ilyich. Health, strength, and vitality in other people were offensive to him, but Gerasim's strength and vitality did not mortify but soothed him.

"What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he only need keep quiet and undergo treatment and then the results would be very good.

. . . He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position. Only Gerasim recognized and pitied him, and so Ivan Ilyich felt at ease only with him. . . . Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case and did not consider it necessary to disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master. Once when Ivan Ilyich was sending him away he even said straight out: 'We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?' — expressing the fact that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came."

The final theme may be summed up in Ivan Ilyich's question: What if my whole life has been wrong? For the first time in his life he feels pity for others. Then comes the resemblance to the fairy tale pathos of the Beast and Beauty ending, to the magic of metamorphosis, the magic of return tickets to princedoms and faith as rewards for spiritual reform.

"Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole, and there at the bottom was a light. . . .

'Yes, it was all not the right thing,' he said to himself, 'but that doesn't matter. It can be so. But what is the right thing?' he asked himself, and suddenly grew quiet.

"This occurred at the end of the third day, two hours before his death. Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bedside. . . .

"At that very moment Ivan Ilyich fell through and caught sight of the light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not been what it should have been, this could still be rectified. He asked himself: 'What is the right thing?' and grew still, listening. Then he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes, looked at his son, and felt sorry for him.

His wife came up to him, and he glanced at her. She was gazing at him open-mouthed, with undried tears on her nose and cheeks and a despairing look on her face. He felt sorry for her, too.

"'Yes, I'm making them wretched,' he thought. 'They're sorry, but it will be better for them when I die.' He wished to say this but had not the strength to utter it. 'Besides, why speak? I must act,' he thought. With a look at his wife, he indicated his son and said: 'Take him away—sorry for him—sorry for you, too — ' He tried to add: 'Forgive me,' but said 'Forego—' and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand.

"And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them : release them and free himself from these sufferings. 'How good and how simple!' he thought. . . .

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"He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?' There was no fear because he could not find death.

"In place of death there was light. " 'So that's what it is!' he suddenly exclaimed aloud. 'What joy!'

To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.

'It's all over!' said someone near him. "He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

'Death is all over,' he said to himself. 'It's no more.' "He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died."

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ANTON CHEKHOV (1860-1904)

Nabokov's assignment list for his lectures on Chekhov.

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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov's grandfather had been a serf but for 3,500 rubles had bought his own and his family's freedom.

His father was a petty merchant who lost his money in the 1870s, whereupon the whole family went to live in Moscow while Anton Pavlovich remained behind in Taganrog (Southeast Russia) to finish high-school. He supported himself by his own work. After finishing school, in the autumn of 1879 he too went to Moscow and entered the university.

Chekhov's first stories were written in order to ease the poverty endured by his family.

He studied medicine and after graduating from the Moscow university became an assistant of the district doctor in a small provincial town. It was there that he began to accumulate his wealth of subtle observations of the peasants who came to his hospital in search of medical assistance, of the army officers (for a battery was stationed in the little town—you will find some of these army men in The Three Sisters), and of those innumerable characters typical of provincial Russia of his time whom he recreated later in his short stories. But at this period he wrote mostly humoristic little bits which he signed with different pen-names, reserving his true signature for medical articles. The little humoristic bits of writing were published in various dailies, often belonging to violently antagonistic political groups.

Chekhov himself never took part in political movements, not because he was indifferent to the plight of the simple people under the old regime, but because he did not feel political activity to be his predestined path: he too was serving his people, but in a different way. He believed that the first thing needed was justice, and all his life he raised his voice against every kind of injustice; but he did it as a writer. Chekhov was in the first place an individualist and an artist. He was therefore no easy "joiner" of parties: his protest against existing injustice and brutality came in his individual way. Usually critics who write about Chekhov repeat that they are quite unable to understand what induced him, in 1890, to undertake a dangerous and fatiguing trip to Sakhalin Island to study the life of those sentenced to terms of penal servitude there.*

His first two collections of short stories— Speckled Stories and In the Twilight—appeared in 1886 and 1887 and were immediately acclaimed by the reading public. From that time on he belonged among the leading writers, could publish his stories in the best periodicals, and was able to abandon his medical career and give all his time to literature. He soon bought a small estate near Moscow where all his family could live. The years spent there belong among the happiest. He thoroughly enjoyed his own independence, the comforts he was able to provide for his aging parents, fresh air, work in his own garden, visits from numerous friends. The Chekhov family seems to have been full of fun, full of jokes: fun and laughter were the main feature of their life.

"Not only was Chekhov eager to turn everything green, to plant trees and flowers, to make the soil fruitful, he was always eager to create something new in life. With all his life-confirming, dynamic, inexhaustibly active nature, he gave himself up not merely to describing life but to transforming it, to building it up. He would bustle about the building of Moscow's first People's Home, with a library, reading room, auditorium, and theatre; he would see about getting Moscow a clinic for skin diseases; with the help of the painter Ilya Repin he would organize a Museum of Painting and Fine Arts in Taganrog; he would initiate the building of Crimea's first biological station; he would collect books for the schools on the Pacific island of Sakhalin and ship them there in large consignments; he would build three schools for peasant children, not far from Moscow, one after the other, and at the same time a belfry and a fire department for the peasants. Later, when he moved to the Crimea, he built a fourth school there. And, generally, any construction work fascinated him, for in his opinion such activity always increased the sum total of man's happiness. He wrote to Gorki: 'If every man did what he could on his little bit of soil, how marvelous our world would be!'

"In his notebook he made this entry: 'The Turk digs a well for the salvation of his soul. It would be good if each of us left after him a school, a well, or something of the kind so that our life would not pass into eternity without leaving any trace behind.' This activity often demanded much hard labor of him. When, for instance, he was building the schools, he himself had all the fuss and bother of dealing with the laborers, bricklayers, stove-installers, and carpenters; he bought all the building material himself down to the tiles and doors for the stoves, and he personally supervised the construction work.

*

At the beginning of this lecture, VN interpolated passages from Kornei Chukovski's "Friend Chekhov," Atlantic Monthly, 140 (September 1947), 84-90. Ed.

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"Or take his work as a doctor. During the cholera epidemic he worked all alone as a district doctor; without any assistant he took care of twenty-five villages. And take the help he gave to the starving during the years when the harvest failed. He had many years of practice as a doctor, chiefly among the peasants of the Moscow suburbs. According to his sister, Maria Pavlovna, who helped him as a trained nurse, he 'treated more than a thousand sick peasants a year at his home, gratis, and he supplied them all with medicines.' " A whole book could be written about his work in Yalta as a member of the Board of Guardians for the Visiting Sick. "He burdened himself to such an extent that he was practically the entire institution in himself. Many tubercular people came to Yalta at that time, without a copper in their pockets, and they came all the way from Odessa, Kishinev, and Kharkov just because they had heard that Chekhov was living in Yalta. 'Chekhov will fix us up. Chekhov will arrange lodging for us, and a dining room, and treatment' (Chukovski)."

This great kindness pervades Chekhov's literary work, but it is not a matter of program, or of literary message with him, but simply the natural coloration of his talent. And he was adored by all his readers, which practically means by all Russia, for in the late years of his life his fame was very great indeed. "Without this phenomenal sociability of his, without his constant readiness to hobnob with anyone at all, to sing with singers and to get drunk with drunkards; without that burning interest in the lives, habits, conversations, and occupations of hundreds and thousands of people, he would hardly have been able to create that colossal, encyclopedically detailed Russian world of the 1880s and 1890s which goes by the name of Chekhov's Short Stories."

" 'Do you know how I write my short stories?' he said to Korolenko, the radical journalist and short-story writer, when the latter had just made his acquaintance. 'Here's how!'

"'He glanced at his table,' Korolenko tells us, 'took up the first object that met his eye—it happened to be an ash tray—

placed it before me and said: 'If you want it, you'll have a story to-morrow. It will be called "The Ash Tray." ' "

And it seemed to Korolenko right then and there that a magical transformation of that ash tray was taking place: "Certain indefinite situations, adventures which had not yet found concrete form, were already beginning to crystallize about the ash tray."

Chekhov's health which had never been strong (and which had suffered in consequence of the hardships of his trip to Sakhalin) soon made it imperative for him to seek a milder climate than that of the Moscow region. He had tuberculosis.

He went away, first to France, but then settled down in Yalta, in the Crimea, where he bought a country-house with an orchard. The Crimea in general, and Yalta in particular, are very beautiful places, with a comparatively mild climate. There Chekhov lived from the late eighties to almost the very end, leaving Yalta but rarely to visit Moscow.

The famous Moscow Art Theatre, founded in the nineties by two amateurs—one an amateur performer Stanislavski, the other a man of letters Nemirovich-Danchenko—who both were endowed with an extraordinary talent for stage-management, was famous before it began the production of Chekhov's plays, but it is nevertheless true that this theatre truly "found itself" and reached a new height of artistic perfection through Chekhov's plays which it made famous.

"Chaika," the Seagull, became a symbol of the theatre: a stylized reproduction of a seagull came to stay on the theatre's curtain and programs. The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters all became triumphs for the theatre as well as for the author. Mortally sick with consumption, Chekhov would appear for the first performance, listen to the passionate acclaim of the audience, enjoy the success of his play, and then, sicker than ever, return to his Yalta retirement. His wife, Miss Knipper, one of the leading, I can even say the leading actress of the theatre, came sometimes to him in the Crimea on short visits. It was not a happy marriage.

In 1904 a very sick man, he thus put in an appearance at the first performance of The Cherry Orchard. He had not been expected by the public and his appearance provoked thunderous applause. Then he was feted by the elite of Moscow's intelligentsia. There were endless speeches. He was so weak from sickness and it was so perceptible that cries arose in the audience, "Sit down, sit down. . . . Let Anton Pavlovich be seated."

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Soon after he made his last trip in search of cure, this time to Badenweiler in the German Black Forest. When he got there he had exactly three more weeks to live. On the 2nd of July, 1904, he died far from his family and friends, amidst strangers, in a strange town.

A difference exists between a real artist like Chekhov and a didactic one like Gorki, one of those naive and nervous Russian intellectuals who thought that a little patience and kindness with the miserable, half savage, unfathomable Russian peasant would do the trick. One may compare Chekhov's story "The New Villa."

A rich engineer has built a house for himself and his wife; there is a garden, a fountain, a glass ball, but no arable land—the purpose is fresh air and relaxation. A couple of his horses, splendid, sleek, healthy, snow-white beasts, fascinatingly alike, are led by the coachman to the blacksmith.

"Swans, real swans," says the latter, contemplating them with sacred awe.

An old peasant comes up. "Well," he says with a cunning and ironic smile, "white they are, but what of it? If my two horses were stuffed with oats, they would be quite as sleek. I'd like to see those two put to plow and whipped up."

Now, in a didactic story, especially in one with good ideas and purposes, this sentence would be the voice of wisdom, and the old peasant who so simply and deeply expresses the idea of a modus of life regulating existence would be shown further on as a good fine old man, the symbol of the peasant class consciousness as a rising class, etc. What does Chekhov do? Very probably he did not notice himself that he had put into the old peasant's mind a truth sacred to the radicals of his day. What interested him was that it was true to life, true to the character of the man as a character and not as a symbol —

a man who spoke so not because he was wise but because he was always trying to be unpleasant, to spoil other people's pleasures: he hated the white horses, the fat handsome coachman; he was himself a lonely man, a widower, his life was dull (he could not work because of an illness that he called either "gryz' " (hernia) or "glisty" (worms). He got his money from his son who worked in a candy-shop in a big town, and all day long he wandered about idly and if he met a peasant bringing home a log or fishing, he would say, "That log is rotten" or "In this weather fish don't bite."

In other words, instead of making a character the medium of a lesson and instead of following up what would seem to Gorki, or to any Soviet author, a socialistic truth by making the rest of the man beautifully good (just as in an ordinary bourgeois story if you love your mother or your dog you cannot be a bad man), instead of this, Chekhov gives us a living human being without bothering about political messages or traditions of writing.* Incidentally, we might note that his wise men are usually bores, just as Polonius is.

The fundamental idea of Chekhov's best and worst characters seems to have been that until real moral and spiritual culture, physical fitness and wealth, come to the Russian masses, the efforts of the noblest and best-meaning intellectuals who build bridges and schools while the vodka pub is still there, will come to naught. His conclusion was that pure art, pure science, pure learning, being in no direct contact with the masses, will, in the long run, attain more than the clumsy and muddled attempts of benefactors. It is to be noted that Chekhov himself was a Russian intellectual of the Chekhovian type.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has, characters who can often be summed up by the quotation from his story "In the Cart": "How strange, she reflected, why does God give sweetness of nature, sad, nice, kind eyes, to weak, unhappy useless people — and why are they so attractive?" There is the old village messenger in the story "On Official Business" who tramps through the snow miles and miles on trifling and useless errands which he neither understands nor questions. There is that young man in "My Life" who left his comfortable home and became a

*

VN closes this section with a deleted paragraph: "To conclude: Chekhov together with Pushkin are the purest writers that Russia has produced in the sense of the complete harmony that their writings convey. I feel it was rather hard upon Gorki to have spoken of him in the same lecture, but the contrast between the two is extremely instructive. In the twenty-first century, when I hope Russia will be a sweeter country than it is just now, Gorki will be but a name in a textbook, but Chekhov will live as long as there are birchwoods and sunsets and the urge to write." Ed.

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miserable house-painter because he could not endure any longer the nauseating and cruel smugness of small-town life, symbolized for him by the dreadful straggling houses that his father the architect builds for the town. What author would have withstood the temptation of drawing the tragic parallel: father builds houses, son is doomed to paint them? But Chekhov does not so much as allude to this point, which if stressed would have put a pin through the story. There is in the story "The House with the Mezzanine" the frail young girl with a name unpronounceable in English, frail Misyus, shivering in her muslin frock in the autumn night and the "I" of the story putting his coat on her thin shoulders—and then her lighted window and then romance somehow fizzling out. There is the old peasant in "The New Villa" who misunderstands in the most atrocious way the futile and lukewarm kindness of an eccentric squire, but at the same time blesses him from all his heart; and when the master's doll-like pampered little girl bursts into tears as she feels the hostile attitude of the other villagers, he produces from his pocket a cucumber with crumbs sticking to it and thrusts it into her hand, saying to that pampered bourgeois child, "Now don't cry, lassy, or else Mummy will tell Daddy, and Daddy will give you a thrashing"

—which suggests the exact habits of his own life without having them stressed or explained. There is in the story "In the Cart" that village school mistress whose pathetic day-dreaming is broken by the accidents of a rough road and the vulgar though good-natured nickname by which the driver addresses her. And in his most astounding story "In the Ravine" there is the tender and simple young peasant mother Lipa whose naked red baby is murdered with one splash of boiling water by another woman. And how wonderful the preceding scene when the baby was still healthy and gay and the young mother played with it—would go to the door, return, respectfully bow to the child from afar, saying good-morning Mister Nikifor, and then would rush to it and hug it with a scream of love. And in the same wonderful tale there is the wretched peasant bum telling the girl of his wanderings over Russia. One day a gentleman, probably exiled from Moscow for his political views, meeting him somewhere on the Volga, and casting a glance at his rags and face, burst into tears and said aloud, so the peasant relates, "Alas," said the gentleman to me, "black is your bread, black is your life."

Chekhov was the first among writers to rely so much upon the undercurrents of suggestion to convey a definite meaning.

In the same story of Lipa and the child there is her husband, a certain swindler, who is condemned to hard labor. Before that, in the days when he was still successfully engaged in his shady business, he used to write letters home in a beautiful hand, not his own. He casually remarks one day that it is his good friend Samorodov who pens those letters for him. We never meet that friend of his ; but when the husband is condemned to hard labor, his letters come from Siberia in the same beautiful hand. That is all, but it is perfectly clear that the good Samorodov, whoever he was, had been his partner in crime and is now undergoing the same punishment.

A publisher once remarked to me that every writer had somewhere in him a certain numeral engraved, the exact number of pages which is the limit of any one book he would ever write. My number, I remember, was 385. Chekhov could never write a good long novel—he was a sprinter, not a stayer. He could not, it seems, hold long enough in focus the pattern of life that his genius perceived here and there: he could retain it in its patchy vividness just long enough to make a short story out of it, but it refused to keep bright and detailed as it should keep if it had to be turned into a long and sustained novel. His qualities as a playwright are merely his qualities as a writer of long short stories: the defects of his plays are the same that would have been obvious had he attempted to write full-bodied novels. Chekhov has been compared to the second-rate French writer Maupassant (called for some reason de Maupassant); and though this comparison is detrimental to Chekhov in the artistic sense, there is one feature common to both writers: they could not afford to be long-winded.

When Maupassant forced his pen to run a distance that far outreached his natural inclination and wrote such novels as Bel Ami {Sweet Friend) or Une Vie {A Woman's Life), they proved to be at the best a series of rudimental short stories more or less artificially blended, producing a kind of uneven impression with none of that inner current driving the theme along that is so natural to the style of such born novelists as Flaubert or Tolstoy. Except for one faux-pas in his youth, Chekhov never attempted to write a fat book. His longest pieces, such as "The Duel" or "Three Years," are still short stories.

Chekhov's books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness. There exist writers that sound like something between a titter and a yawn—many of these are professional humorists, for instance. There are others that are something between a chuckle and a sob—Dickens was one of these.

There is also that dreadful kind of humor that is consciously introduced by an author in order to give a purely technical relief after a good tragic scene—but this is a trick remote from true literature. Chekhov's humor belonged to none of these 157

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types ; it was purely Chekhovian. Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.

Russian critics have noted that Chekhov's style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial—the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crême-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. He was not a verbal inventor in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase; he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks. Chekhov does not mind, not because these matters are not important—for some writers they are naturally and very beautifully important when the right temperament is there—but Chekhov does not mind because his temperament is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness. Even a bit of bad grammar or a slack newspaperish sentence left him unconcerned.* The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud. The variety of his moods, the flicker of his charming wit, the deeply artistic economy of characterization, the vivid detail, and the fade-out of human life—all the peculiar Chekhovian features—are enhanced by being suffused and surrounded by a faintly iridescent verbal haziness.

His quiet and subtle humor pervades the grayness of the lives he creates. For the Russian philosophical or social-minded critic he was the unique exponent of a unique Russian type of character. It is rather difficult for me to explain what that type was or is, because it is all so linked up with the general psychological and social history of the Russian nineteenth century. It is not quite exact to say that Chekhov dealt in charming and ineffectual people. It is a little more true to say that his men and women are charming because they are ineffectual. But what really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the type of the Russian intellectual, the Russian idealist, a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets. Chekhov's intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of Utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worth while living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything —a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes —in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people—all through Chekhov's stories.

What rather irritated his politically minded critics was that nowhere does the author assign this type to any definite political party or give him any definite political program. But that is the whole point. Chekhov's inefficient idealists were neither terrorists, nor Social Democrats, nor budding Bolsheviks, nor any of the numberless members of numberless revolutionary parties in Russia. What mattered was that this typical Chekhovian hero was the unfortunate bearer of a vague but beautiful human truth, a burden which he could neither get rid of nor carry. What we see is a continuous stumble through all Chekhov's stories, but it is the stumble of a man who stumbles because he is staring at the stars. He is unhappy, that man, and he makes others unhappy; he loves not his brethren, not those nearest to him, but the remotest.

The plight of a negro in a distant land, of a Chinese coolie, of a workman in the remote Urals, affects him with a keener

*

VN first wrote "less concerned" and then continued with a passage worth preserving for its interest, though he deleted it: "less concerned than for instance Conrad was when (according to Ford Madox Ford) he tried to find a word of two syllables and a half—not merely two and not merely three, but exactly two and a half—which he felt was absolutely necessary to end a certain description. And being Conrad he was perfectly right, for that was the nature of his talent. Chekhov would have ended that sentence with an "out" or an "in" and never have noticed his ending — and Chekhov was a much greater writer than good old Conrad." Ed.

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pang of moral pain than the misfortunes of his neighbor or the troubles of his wife. Chekhov took a special artistic pleasure in fixing all the delicate varieties of that pre-war, pre-revolution type of Russian intellectual. Those men could dream; they could not rule. They broke their own lives and the lives of others, they were silly, weak, futile, hysterical; but Chekhov suggests, blessed be the country that could produce that particular type of man. They missed opportunities, they shunned action, they spent sleepless nights in planning worlds they could not build; but the mere fact of such men, full of such fervor, fire of abnegation, pureness of spirit, moral elevation, this mere fact of such men having lived and probably still living somewhere somehow in the ruthless and sordid Russia of to-day is a promise of better things to come for the world at large—for perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.

It is from this point of view that those who were equally interested in the misery of the Russian people and in the glory of Russian literature, it is from this point of view that they appreciated Chekhov. Though never concerned with providing a social or ethical message, Chekhov's genius almost involuntarily disclosed more of the blackest realities of hungry, puzzled, servile, angry peasant Russia than a multitude of other writers, such as Gorki for instance, who flaunted their social ideas in a procession of painted dummies. I shall go further and say that the person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of Russian literature and Russian life, and, which is far more important, the essentials of universal literary art. It was quite a game among Russians to divide their acquaintances into those who liked Chekhov and those who did not. Those who did not were not the right sort.

I heartily recommend taking as often as possible Chekhov's books (even in the translations they have suffered) and dreaming through them as they are intended to be dreamed through. In an age of ruddy Goliaths it is very useful to read about delicate Davids. Those bleak landscapes, the withered sallows along dismally muddy roads, the gray crows flapping across gray skies, the sudden whiff of some amazing recollection at a most ordinary corner—all this pathetic dimness, all this lovely weakness, all this Chekhovian dove-gray world is worth treasuring in the glare of those strong, self-sufficient worlds that are promised us by the worshippers of totalitarian states.

"The Lady with the Little Dog" (1899)

Chekhov comes into the story "The Lady with the Little

Dog" without knocking. There is no dilly-dallying. The very

first paragraph reveals the main character, the young fair-

haired lady followed by her white Spitz dog on the

waterfront of a Crimean resort, Yalta, on the Black Sea. And

immediately after, the male character Gurov appears. His

wife, whom he has left with the children in Moscow, is

vividly depicted: her solid frame, her thick black eyebrows,

and the way she had of calling herself "a woman who

thinks." One notes the magic of the trifles the author

collects—the wife's manner of dropping a certain mute

letter in spelling and her calling her husband by the longest

and fullest form of his name, both traits in combination

with the impressive dignity of her beetle-browed face and

rigid poise forming exactly the necessary impression. A

hard woman with the strong feminist and social ideas of

her time, but one whom her husband finds in his heart of

hearts to be narrow, dull-minded, and devoid of grace. The

natural transition is to Gurov's constant unfaithfulness to

her, to his general attitude toward women—"that inferior

race" is what he calls them, but without that inferior race

The opening page of Nabokov's lecture on "The Lady with the

he could not exist. It is hinted that these Russian romances

Little Dog."

were not altogether as light-winged as in the Paris of

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Maupassant. Complications and problems are unavoidable with those decent hesitating people of Moscow who are slow heavy starters but plunge into tedious difficulties when once they start going.

Then with the same neat and direct method of attack, with the bridging formula "and so . . .",* we slide back to the lady with the dog. Everything about her, even the way her hair was done, told him that she was bored. The spirit of adventure—

though he realized perfectly well that his attitude toward a lone woman in a fashionable sea town was based on vulgar stones, generally false —this spirit of adventure prompts him to call the little dog, which thus becomes a link between her and him. They are both in a public restaurant.

"He beckoned invitingly to the Spitz, and when the dog approached him, shook his finger at it. The Spitz growled; Gurov threatened it again.

"The lady glanced at him and at once dropped her eyes. 'He doesn't bite,' she said and blushed.

"'May I give him a bone?' he asked; and when she nodded he inquired affably, 'Have you been in Yalta long?'

" 'About five days.' "

They talk. The author has hinted already that Gurov was witty in the company of women; and instead of having the reader take it for granted (you know the old method of describing the talk as "brilliant" but giving no samples of the conversation), Chekhov makes him joke in a really attractive, winning way. "Bored, are you? An average citizen lives in . . . (here Chekhov lists the names of beautifully chosen, super-provincial towns) and is not bored, but when he arrives here on his vacation it is all boredom and dust. One could think he came from Grenada" (a name particularly appealing to the Russian imagination). The rest of their talk, for which this sidelight is richly sufficient, is conveyed indirectly. Now comes a first glimpse of Chekhov's own system of suggesting atmosphere by the most concise details of nature, "the sea was of a warm lilac hue with a golden path for the moon"; whoever has lived in Yalta knows how exactly this conveys the impression of a summer evening there. This first movement of the story ends with Gurov alone in his hotel room thinking of her as he goes to sleep and imagining her delicate weak-looking neck and her pretty gray eyes. It is to be noted that only now, through the medium of the hero's imagination, does Chekhov give a visible and definite form to the lady, features that fit in perfectly with her listless manner and expression of boredom already known to us.

"Getting into bed he recalled that she had been a schoolgirl only recently, doing lessons like his own daughter; he thought how much timidity and angularity there was still in her laugh and her manner of talking with a stranger. It must have been the first time in her life that she was alone in a setting in which she was followed, looked at, and spoken to for one secret purpose alone, which she could hardly fail to guess. He thought of her slim, delicate throat, her lovely gray eyes.

" 'There's something pathetic about her, though,' he thought, and dropped off."

The next movement (each of the four diminutive chapters or movements of which the story is composed is not more than four or five pages long), the next movement starts a week later with Gurov going to the pavilion and bringing the lady iced lemonade on a hot windy day, with the dust flying; and then in the evening when the sirocco subsides, they go on the pier to watch the incoming steamer. "The lady lost her lorgnette in the crowd," Chekhov notes shortly, and this being so casually worded, without any direct influence on the story—just a passing statement—somehow fits in with that helpless pathos already alluded to.

Then in her hotel room her awkwardness and tender angularity are delicately conveyed. They have become lovers. She was now sitting with her long hair hanging down on both sides of her face in the dejected pose of a sinner in some old picture.

*

VN follows with the deleted "or perhaps still better rendered in English by that 'Now' which begins a new paragraph in straightforward fairy tales." Ed.

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There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut himself a piece and began to eat unhurriedly. This realistic touch is again a typical Chekhov device.

She tells him about her existence in the remote town she comes from and Gurov is slightly bored by her naivete, confusion, and tears. It is only now that we learn her husband's name: von Dideritz—probably of German descent.

They roam about Yalta in the early morning mist. "At Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist; white clouds rested motionlessly on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, the crickets chirped, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and hollowly when we are no more. . . . Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings—the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky—thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.

"A man strolled up to them—probably a watchman—looked at them and walked away. And this detail, too, seemed so mysterious and beautiful. They saw a steamer arrive from Feodosia, its lights extinguished in the glow of dawn. 'There is dew on the grass,' said Anna Sergeievna, after a silence.

" 'Yes, it's time to go home.' "

Then several days pass and then she has to go back to her home town.

'Time for me, too, to go North,' thought Gurov as he returned after seeing her off."* And there the chapter ends.

The third movement plunges us straight into Gurov's life in Moscow. The richness of a gay Russian winter, his family affairs, the dinners at clubs and restaurants, all this is swiftly and vividly suggested. Then a page is devoted to a queer thing that has happened to him: he cannot forget the lady with the little dog. He has many friends, but the curious longing he has for talking about his adventure finds no outlet. When he happens to speak in a very general way of love and women, nobody guesses what he means, and only his wife moves her dark eyebrows and says: "Stop that fatuous posing; it does not suit you."

And now comes what in Chekhov's quiet stories may be called the climax. There is something that your average citizen calls romance and something he calls prose —though both are the meat of poetry for the artist. Such a contrast has already been hinted at by the slice of watermelon which Gurov crunched in a Yalta hotel room at a most romantic moment, sitting heavily and munching away. This contrast is beautifully followed up when at last Gurov blurts out to a friend late at night as they come out of the club : If you knew what a delightful woman I met in Yalta! His friend, a bureaucratic civil servant, got into his sleigh, the horses moved, but suddenly he turned and called back to Gurov. Yes? asked Gurov, evidently expecting some reaction to what he had just mentioned. By the way, said the man, you were quite right. That fish at the club was decidedly smelly.

This is a natural transition to the description of Gurov's new mood, his feeling that he lives among savages where cards and food are life. His family, his bank, the whole trend of his existence, everything seems futile, dull, and senseless. About Christmas he tells his wife he is going on a business trip to St. Petersburg, instead of which he travels to the remote Volga town where the lady lives.

Critics of Chekhov in the good old days when the mania for the civic problem flourished in Russia were incensed with his way of describing what they considered to be trivial unnecessary matters instead of thoroughly examining and solving the

*

In the margin VN adds for the benefit of his Cornell class, "From Florida back to Ithaca." Ed.

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problems of bourgeois marriage. For as soon as Gurov arrives in the early hours to that town and takes the best room at the local hotel, Chekhov, instead of describing his mood or intensifying his difficult moral position, gives what is artistic in the highest sense of the word: he notes the gray carpet, made of military cloth, and the inkstand, also gray with dust, with a horseman whose hand waves a hat and whose head is gone. That is all: it is nothing but it is everything in authentic literature. A feature in the same line is the phonetic transformation which the hotel porter imposes on the German name von Dideritz. Having learned the address Gurov goes there and looks at the house. Opposite was a long gray fence with nails sticking out. An unescap-able fence, Gurov says to himself, and here we get the concluding note in the rhythm of drabness and grayness already suggested by the carpet, the inkstand, the illiterate accent of the porter. The unexpected little turns and the lightness of the touches are what places Chekhov, above all Russian writers of fiction, on the level of Gogol and Tolstoy.

Presently he saw an old servant coming out with the familiar little white dog. He wanted to call it (by a kind of conditional reflex), but suddenly his heart began beating fast and in his excitement he could not remember the dog's name—another delightful touch. Later on he decides to go to the local theatre, where for the first time the operetta The Geisha is being given. In sixty words Chekhov paints a complete picture of a provincial theatre, not forgetting the town-governor who modestly hid in his box behind a plush curtain so that only his hands were visible. Then the lady appeared. And he realized quite clearly that now in the whole world there was none nearer and dearer and more important to him than this slight woman, lost in a small-town crowd, a woman perfectly unremarkable, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand. He saw her husband and remembered her qualifying him as a flunkey — he distinctly resembled one.

A remarkably fine scene follows when Gurov manages to talk to her, and then their mad swift walk up all kinds of staircases and corridors, and down again, and up again, amid people in the various uniforms of provincial officials. Neither does Chekhov forget "two schoolboys who smoked on the stairs and looked down at him and her."

" 'You must leave,' Anna Sergeievna went on in a whisper. 'Do you hear, Dmitri Dmitrich? I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy; I am unhappy now, and I never, never shall be happy, never! So don't make me suffer still more! I swear I'll come to Moscow. But now let us part. My dear, good, precious one, let us part!'

"She pressed his hand and walked rapidly downstairs, turning to look round at him, and from her eyes he could see that she really was unhappy. Gurov stood for a while, listening, then when all grew quiet, he found his coat and left the theatre."

The fourth and last little chapter gives the atmosphere of their secret meetings in Moscow. As soon as she would arrive she used to send a red-capped messenger to Gurov. One day he was on his way to her and his daughter was with him. She was going to school, in the same direction as he. Big damp snowflakes were slowly coming down.

The thermometer, Gurov was saying to his daughter, shows a few degrees above freezing point (actually 37° above, fahrenheit), but nevertheless snow is falling. The explanation is that this warmth applies only to the surface of the earth, while in the higher layers of the atmosphere the temperature is quite different.

And as he spoke and walked, he kept thinking that not a soul knew or would ever know about these secret meetings.

What puzzled him was that all the false part of his life, his bank, his club, his conversations, his social obligations—all this happened openly, while the real and interesting part was hidden.

"He had two lives : an open one, seen and known by all who needed to know it, full of conventional truth and conventional falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life that went on in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, combination of circumstances, everything that was of interest and importance to him, everything that was essential to him, everything about which he felt sincerely and did not deceive himself, everything that constituted the core of his life, was going on concealed from others; while all that was false, the shell in which he hid to cover the truth—his work at the bank for instance, his discussions at the club, his references to the 'inferior race,' his appearances at anniversary celebrations with his wife—all that went on in the open. Judging others by himself, he did not 162

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believe what he saw, and always fancied that every man led his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy as under cover of night. The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected."

The final scene is full of that pathos which has been suggested in the very beginning. They meet, she sobs, they feel that they are the closest of couples, the tenderest of friends, and he sees that his hair is getting a little gray and knows that only death will end their love.

"The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably already about to begin to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so much? He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man whom their imagination had created and whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they saw their mistake, they loved him nevertheless. And not one of them had been happy with him. In the past he had met women, come together with them, parted from them, but he had never once loved; it was anything you please, but not love. And only now when his head was gray he had fallen in love, really, truly—for the first time in his life."

They talk, they discuss their position, how to get rid of the necessity of this sordid secrecy, how to be together always. They find no solution and in the typical Chekhov way the tale fades out with no definite full-stop but with the natural motion of life.

"And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning."

All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written.

We will now repeat the different features that are typical for this and other Chekhov tales.

First: The story is told in the most natural way possible, not beside the after-dinner fireplace as with Turgenev or Maupassant but in the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice.

Second: Exact and rich characterization is attained by a careful selection and careful distribution of minute but striking features, with perfect contempt for the sustained description, repetition, and strong emphasis of ordinary authors. In this or that description one detail is chosen to illume the whole setting.

Third: There is no special moral to be drawn and no special message to be received. Compare this to the special delivery stories of Gorki or Thomas Mann.

Fourth : The story is based on a system of waves, on the shades of this or that mood. If in Gorki's world the molecules forming it are matter, here, in Chekhov, we get a world of waves instead of particles of matter, which, incidentally, is a nearer approach to the modern scientific understanding of the universe.

Fifth: The contrast of poetry and prose stressed here and there with such insight and humor is, in the long run, a contrast only for the heroes; in reality we feel, and this is again typical of authentic genius, that for Chekhov the lofty and the base are not different, that the slice of watermelon and the violet sea, and the hands of the town-governor, are essential points of the "beauty plus pity" of the world.

Sixth: The story does not really end, for as long as people are alive, there is no possible and definite conclusion to their troubles or hopes or dreams.

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Seventh: The storyteller seems to keep going out of his way to allude to trifles, every one of which in another type of story would mean a signpost denoting a turn in the action—for instance, the two boys at the theatre would be eavesdroppers, and rumors would spread, or the inkstand would mean a letter changing the course of the story; but just because these trifles are meaningless, they are all-important in giving the real atmosphere of this particular story.

"In the Gully" (1900)

The action of "In the Gully" (usually translated as "In the Ravine") takes place half-a-century ago—the story was written in 1900. The place, somewhere in Russia, is a village called Ukléyevo : kley sounds like clay and means "glue." The only thing to tell about the village was that one day at a wake "the old sexton saw among the side dishes some large-grained caviar and began eating it greedily; people nudged him, tugged at his sleeve, but he seemed petrified with enjoyment: felt nothing, and only went on eating. He ate up all the caviar, and there were some four pounds in the jar. And years had passed since then, the sexton had long since been dead, but the caviar was still remembered. Whether life was so poor here or people had not been clever enough to notice anything but that unimportant incident that had occurred ten years before, anyway the people had nothing else to tell about the village of Ukléyevo." Or, rather, there was nothing good to tell except this.

Here at least was a beam of fun, a smile, something human. All the rest was not only drab, it was also evil—a gray wasp nest of deception and injustice. "There were only two decent houses built of brick with iron roofs; one of them was occupied by the rural administration; in the other, a two-storied house just opposite the church, lived Grigori Petrovich Tsybukin, a merchant who hailed from Yepi-fan." Both of these houses were abodes of evil. Everything in the story, except the children and the child-wife Lipa, is going to be a succession of deceptions, a succession of masks.

Mask One: "Grigori kept a grocery, but that was only for the sake of appearances: in reality he dealt in vodka, cattle, hides, grain, and pigs; he traded in anything that came to hand, and when, for instance, magpies were wanted abroad for ladies'

hats, he made thirty kopeks on every brace of birds; he bought timber for felling, lent money at interest, and altogether was a resourceful old man." This Grigori will also undergo a very interesting metamorphosis in the course of the story.

Old Grigori has two sons, a deaf one around the house, married to what seems a pleasant, cheerful young woman but in reality a malicious devil of a woman; the other son is a detective in town, a bachelor as yet. You will notice that Grigori is immensely appreciative of his daughter-in-law Aksinia: we shall see why in a minute. Old Grigori, a widower, has married again, a new wife named Varvara (Barbara): "No sooner had she moved into a little room in the upper story than everything in the house seemed to brighten up as though new glass had been put into all the windows. The oil lamps burned brightly before the sacred pictures, the tables were covered with snow-white cloths, flowers flecked with red made their appearance in the windows and in the front garden, and at dinner, instead of eating from a single bowl, each person had a separate plate set for him." She also seems, at first, a good woman, a delightful woman, and, anyway, she has a kinder heart than the old man. "When on the eve of a fast or during the local church festival, which lasted three days, Grigori's store palmed off on the peasants tainted salt meat, smelling so strong it was hard to stand near the tub of it, and took scythes, caps, and their wives' kerchiefs in pledge from the drunken men; when the factory hands, stupefied with bad vodka, lay in the mud, and degradation seemed to hover thick like a fog in the air, then it was a kind of relief to think that up there in the house there was a quiet, neatly dressed woman who had nothing to do with salt meat or vodka. "

Grigori is a hard man, and though now in the lower middle class is of direct peasant descent—his father was probably a well-to-do peasant—and naturally he hates peasants. Now comes:

Mask Two : Under her gay appearance Aksinia is also hard and that is why old Grigori admires her so much. This pretty woman is a swindler: "Aksinia attended to the shop, and from the yard could be heard the clink of bottles and of money, her laughter and loud talk, and the angry voices of customers whom she had cheated, and at the same time it could be seen that the illicit sale of vodka was already going on in the shop. The deaf man sat in the shop, too, or walked about the street bareheaded, with his hands in his pockets looking absent-mindedly now at the log cabins, now at the sky overhead.

Six times a day they had tea; four times a day they sat down to meals. And in the evening they counted their takings, wrote them down, went to bed, and slept soundly."

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Now comes a transition to the calico-printing mills of the

place and to their owners. Let us call them collectively the

Khrymin family.

Mask Three (adultery): Aksinia not only deceives customers

in the store, she also deceives her husband with one of

those mill owners.

Mask Four: This is just a little mask, a kind of self-deception.

"A telephone was installed in the rural administration, too,

but it soon went out of order when it started to harbor

bedbugs and cockroaches. The district elder was

semiliterate and wrote every word in the official

documents with a capital. But when the telephone went

out of order he said: 'Yes, now we shall find it hard to be

without a telephone.' "

Mask Five: This refers to Grigori's elder son, the detective

Anisim. We are now deep in the deception theme of the

story. But Chekhov keeps back some important information

about Anisim: "The elder son, Anisim, came home very

rarely, only on great holidays, but he often sent by a

returning villager presents and letters written by someone

else in a very beautiful hand, always on a sheet of foolscap

The opening page of Nabokov's lecture on "In the Gully."

that looked like a formal petition. The letters were full of

expressions that Anisim never made use of in conversation: 'Dear papa and mamma, I send you a pound of orange pekoe tea for the satisfaction of your physical needs.' " There is a little mystery here that will be gradually cleared up, as in the

"someone else in a very beautiful hand."

It is curious that when he arrives home one day and there is something about him suggesting that he has been dismissed from the police force, nobody bothers about it. On the contrary, the occasion seems festive, encouraging ideas of marriage.

Says Varvara, Grigori's wife and Anisim's stepmother:

'How is this, my goodness!' she said. 'The lad's in his twenty-eighth year, and he is still strolling about a bachelor. . . .' From the adjacent room her soft, even speech continued to sound like a series of sighs. She began whispering with her husband and Aksinia, and their faces, too, assumed a sly and mysterious expression as though they are conspirators. It was decided to marry Anisim."

Child Theme : This is the transition to the main character of the story, the girl Lipa (pronounced Leepa). She was the daughter of a working widow, charwoman, and helped her mother in her various chores. "She was pale, thin, and frail, with soft, delicate features, tanned from working in the open air; a shy, melancholy smile always hovered about her face, and there was a childlike look in her eyes, trustful and curious. She was young, still a child, her bosom still scarcely perceptible, but she could be married because she had reached the legal age [eighteen]. She really was beautiful, and the only thing that might be thought unattractive was her big masculine hands which hung idle now like two big claws."

Mask Six: This refers to Varvara, who though pleasant enough, is but a hollow shell of superficial kindness beneath which there is nothing.

Thus Grigori's whole family is a masquerade of deceit.

Now comes Lipa, and with Lipa a new theme starts —the theme of trust, childish trust.

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The second chapter ends with another glimpse of Anisim. Everything about him is false: there is something very wrong, and he conceals it not too well. "After the visit of inspection the wedding day was fixed. Anisim kept walking about the rooms at home whistling, or suddenly remembering something, would fall to brooding and would look at the floor fixedly, silently, as though he would probe to the depths of the earth. He expressed neither pleasure that he was to be married, married so soon, the week of St. Thomas [after Easter], nor a desire to see his bride, but simply went on whistling through his teeth. And it was evident that he was only getting married because his father and stepmother wished him to, and because it was a country custom to marry off the son in order to have a woman to help in the house. When he went away he seemed in no haste, and behaved altogether not as he had done on previous visits; he was unusually jaunty and said the wrong things."

In the third chapter observe Aksinia's green and yellow print dress for the wedding of Anisim and Lipa. Chekhov is going to describe her consistently in the terms of a reptile. (A kind of rattlesnake is found in eastern Russia called the yellow belly.)

"The dressmakers were making for Varvara a brown dress with black lace and glass beads on it, and for Aksinia a light green dress with a yellow front, and a train." Although these dressmakers are described as belonging to the Flagellant Sect, this did not mean much by 1900—it did not mean that the members actually whipped themselves—it was just one of the numerous sects in Russia, as there are numerous sects in this country. Grigori even practices a deception on the two poor girls: "When the dressmakers had finished their work Grigori paid them not in money but in goods from the shop, and they went away depressed, carrying parcels of tallow candles and tins of sardines which they did not in the least need, and when they got out of the village into the open country they sat down on a hillock and cried."

"Anisim arrived three days before the wedding, rigged out in new togs from top to toe. He wore glistening rubbers, and instead of a tie a red metal cord with little balls hanging on it, and on his shoulders, loosely, its sleeves empty, hung a short overcoat, also new. After crossing himself sedately before the icon, he greeted his father and gave him ten silver rubles and ten half-rubles; to Varvara he gave as much, and to Aksinia twenty quarter-rubles. The chief charm of the present lay in the fact that all the coins, as though carefully matched, were new and glittered in the sun." These were counterfeit coins. An allusion is made to Samorodov, Anisim's friend and co-faker, a dark little man with the beautiful handwriting in which Anisim's letters home were written. It becomes gradually clear that Samorodov is the mastermind in this counterfeiting business, but Anisim tries hard to puff himself up, boasting of his wonderful powers of observation and of his talents as a detective. As a detective, and a mystic, he knows, however, that "anybody can steal but there is no place to hide stolen goods." A streak of curious mysticism runs through this strange character.

You will enjoy the delightful description of the wedding preparations and then of Anisim's mood in church during the wedding is worth noting. "Here he was being married, he had to take a wife for the sake of doing the proper thing, but he was not thinking of that now, he had somehow forgotten his wedding completely. Tears dimmed his eyes so that he could not see the icons, he felt heavy at heart; he prayed and besought God that the misfortunes that threatened him, that were ready to burst upon him tomorrow, if not today, might somehow pass him by as storm-clouds in time of drought bypass a village without yielding one drop of rain. [He knew how good detectives were, being one himself.] And so many sins were heaped up in the past, so many sins, and getting out of it all was so beyond hope that it seemed incongruous even to ask forgiveness. But he did ask forgiveness, and even gave a loud sob, but no one took any notice of that, since they supposed he had had a drop too much."

For a moment the child theme appears: "There was the sound of a fretful childish wail. 'Take me away from here, mamma darling!' 'Quiet there!' cried the priest."

Then a new character is introduced; Yelizarov (nicknamed Crutch), a carpenter and contractor. He is a childish person, very gentle and naive, and a little cracked. He and Lipa are both on the same level of meekness, simplicity, and trust —and he and she are real human beings despite their not having the cunning of the evil characters in the tale. Crutch, who seems vaguely to be endowed with second sight, might be trying intuitively to avert the disaster which the wedding itself will result in: " 'Anisim and you, my child, love one another, lead a godly life, little children, and the Heavenly Mother will not abandon you. . . . Children, children, children,' he muttered rapidly. 'Aksinia my dear, Varvara darling, let's all live in peace and harmony, my dear little hatchets. . . .' " He calls people by the pet names of his pet tools.

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Mask Eight : Yet another mask, another deception, relates to the elder of the rural district and his clerk, "who had served together for fourteen years, and who had during all that time never signed a single document for anybody or let a single person out of the office without deceiving him or doing him harm. [They] were sitting now side by side, both fat and replete, and it seemed as though they were so steeped in injustice and falsehood that even the skin of their faces was of a peculiar, thievish kind." "Steeped in falsehood" — this is one of the two main notes of the whole story.

You will notice the various details of the wedding: poor Anisim brooding over his predicament, over the doom that is closing upon him; the peasant woman who shouts outside "You've sucked the blood out of us, you monsters; a plague on you!"; and the wonderful description of Aksinia: "Aksinia had naive gray eyes which rarely blinked, and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snakelike; all in green, with the yellow front of her bodice and the smile on her lips, she looked like a viper that peers out of the young rye in the spring at the passers-by, stretching itself and lifting its head. The Khrymins were free in their behavior to her, and it was very noticeable that she had long been on intimate terms with the eldest of them. But her deaf husband saw nothing, he did not look at her; he sat with his legs crossed and ate nuts, cracking them with his teeth so loudly that it seemed he was shooting a pistol.

"But, behold, old Grigori himself walked into the middle of the room and waved his handkerchief as a sign that he, too, wanted to dance the Russian dance, and all over the house and from the crowd in the yard rose a hum of approbation:

"'It's himself has stepped out! Himself!'. . .

"It was kept up till late, till two o'clock in the morning. Anisim, staggering, went to take leave of the singers and musicians, and gave each of them a new half-ruble. His father, who was not staggering, but treading more heavily on one leg, saw his guests off, and said to each of them, 'The wedding has cost two thousand.'

"As the party was breaking up, someone took the Shikalova innkeeper's good overcoat instead of his own old one, and Anisim suddenly flew into a rage and began shouting: 'Stop, I'll find it at once; I know who stole it! Stop!'

He ran out into the street in pursuit of someone, but he was caught, brought back home, shoved, drunken, red with anger and drenched with sweat, into the room where the aunt was undressing Lipa, and there he and she were locked in."

After five days Anisim, who respects Varvara for being a decent woman, confesses to her that he may be arrested at any moment. When he leaves for town, we have the following beautiful description:

"When they drove up out of the gully Anisim kept looking back toward the village. It was a warm, bright day. The cattle were being driven out for the first time, and the peasant girls and women were walking by the herd in their holiday dresses. The brown bull bellowed, glad to be free, and pawed the ground with his forefeet. On all sides, above and below, the larks were singing. Anisim looked back at the graceful little white church—it had only lately been whitewashed—and he thought how he had been praying in it five days before; he looked back at the school with its green roof, at the little river in which he used to bathe and catch fish, and there was a stir of joy in his heart, and he wished that a wall might rise up from the ground and prevent him from going farther, and that he might be left with nothing but the past."

It is his last glimpse.

And now the delightful transformation that comes over Lipa. Anisim's conscience had not only weighed upon him but had been impersonated in him and had been a dreadful weight on Lipa although she knew nothing of his complicated life. Now he and his burden are removed and she is free.

"Wearing an old skirt, her feet bare and her sleeves tucked up to her shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a big tub of slops and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile it seemed as though she, too, were a lark."

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Now Chekhov is going to do something quite difficult from the author's point of view. He is going to take advantage of Lipa's silence being broken in order to have her, the silent one, the wordless one, now find words and bring out the facts that will lead to the disaster. She and Crutch are coming back from a long excursion on foot to a remote church, her mother is lagging behind, and Lipa says: "And now I am afraid of Aksinia. It's not that she does anything, she is always smiling, but sometimes she glances at the window, and her eyes are so angry and there is a greenish gleam in them—like the eyes of the sheep in the dark pen. The Juniors are leading her astray: 'Your old man,' they tell her, 'has a bit of land at Butyokino, a hundred acres,' they say, 'and there is sand and water there, so you, Aksinia,' they say, 'build a brickyard there and we will go shares in it.' Bricks now are twenty rubles the thousand, it's a profitable business. Yesterday at dinner Aksinia said to the old man: 'I want to build a brickyard at Butyokino; I'm going into the business on my own account.' She laughed as she said it. And Grigori Petrovich's face darkened, one could see he did not like it. 'As long as I live,' he said, 'the family must not break up, we must keep together.' She gave him a look and gritted her teeth. . . . Fritters were served, she would not eat them."

When they come to a boundary post, Crutch touches it to see that it is firm, an act in keeping with his character. At this point he, Lipa, and some girls who are collecting toadstools are representative of Chekhov's happy people, naive gentle people against a background of unhappiness and injustice. They meet people coming from the fair: "A cart would drive by stirring up the dust and behind it would run an unsold horse, and it seemed glad it had not been sold." There is a subtle emblematic connection here between Lipa and the happy "unsold" horse. Lipa's owner has disappeared. And another point, reflecting the child theme: "An old woman led a little boy in a big cap and big boots; the boy was tired out with the heat and the heavy boots which prevented him from bending his legs at the knees, but yet he blew a tin trumpet unceasingly with all his might. They had gone down the slope and turned into the street, but the trumpet could still be heard." Lipa sees and hears that little boy because she herself is going to have a baby. In the passage "Lipa and her mother who were born to poverty and prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except their frightened, gentle souls, may perhaps have fancied for a minute that in this vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives, they too counted for something," I recommend to your attention the words "their frightened, gentle souls." And notice too the beautiful little picture of the summer evening:

"At last they reached home. The mowers were sitting on the ground at the gates near the shop. As a rule the Ukleyevo peasants refused to work for Grigori, and he had to hire strangers, and now in the darkness it seemed as though there were men with long black beards sitting there. The shop was open, and through the doorway they could see the deaf man playing checkers with a boy. The mowers were singing softly, almost inaudibly, or were loudly demanding their wages for the previous day, but they were not paid for fear they should go away before tomorrow. Old Grigori, with his coat off, was sitting in his waistcoat with Aksinia under the birch-tree, drinking tea; a lighted lamp was on the table.

" 'I say, grandfather,' a mower called from outside the gates, as though teasing him, 'pay us half anyway! Hey, grandfather.'

"

On the next page Grigori realizes the silver rubles are false and gives them to Aksinia to throw away, but she uses them to pay the mowers. "You mischievous woman," cries Grigori, dumbfounded and alarmed. "Why did you marry me into this family?" Lipa asks her mother. There is a certain gap in time after chapter 5.

One of the most striking passages in the story occurs in chapter 6, when absolutely and divinely indifferent to what is happening around her (the deserved fate of her idiotic husband and the terrible snake-evil coming from Aksinia), absolutely and divinely indifferent to all this evil, Lipa is engrossed in her child and proceeds to promise her little pinched baby her own most vivid vision, her only knowledge of life. She tosses him up and down and in rhythm with the tossing says in singsong tones : "You will grow ever so big, ever so big. You will be a man, we shall work together! We shall wash floors together!" Just as her own most vivid childhood memories are linked up with washing floors. " 'Why do I love him so much, Mamen'ka? Why do I feel so sorry for him!' she went on in a quivering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. 'Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb, but I love him, I love him as if he were a real person. Here he can do nothing, he can't talk, and yet I always know what his darling eyes tell me he wants.' "

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This chapter ends with the news that Anisim is to get six years of hard labor in Siberia. Then a nice touch is added; says old Grigori:

" 'I am worried about the money. Do you remember before his wedding Anisim's bringing me some new rubles and half-rubles? One parcel I put away at the time, but the others I mixed with my own money. When my uncle Dmitri Filatych—the kingdom of Heaven be his—was alive, he used to go to Moscow and to the Crimea to buy goods. He had a wife, and this same wife, when he was away buying goods, used to take up with other men. They had half a dozen children. And when uncle was in his cups he would laugh and say, "I never can make out," he used to say, "which are my children and which are other people's." An easy-going disposition, to be sure; and now I can't tell which are genuine rubles and which are false ones. And they all seem false to me. ... I buy a ticket at the station, I give the man three rubles, and I keep fancying they are counterfeit. And I am frightened. I must be ill.' "

From that moment he is mentally deranged and is redeemed, in a sense.

"He opened the door and crooking his finger, beckoned to Lipa. She went up to him with the baby in her arms.

' 'If there is anything you want, Lipynka, you ask for it,' he said. 'And eat anything you like, we don't grudge it, so long as it does you good. . . .' He made the sign of the cross over the baby. 'And take care of my grandchild. My son is gone, but my grandson is left.'

"Tears rolled down his cheeks; he gave a sob and went away. Soon afterwards he went to bed and slept soundly after seven sleepless nights."

This was poor Lipa's happiest night —before the awful events that were to follow.

Grigori makes arrangements to give the land at Butyokino, which Aksinia wants for a brickyard, to his grandson. Aksinia is in a fury.

" 'Hey! Stepan,' she called to the deaf man, 'let us go home this minute! Let us go to my father and mother; I don't want to live with convicts. Get ready!'

"Clothes were hanging on lines stretched across the yard; she snatched off her petticoats and blouses still wet and flung them across the deaf man's stretched arms. Then in her fury she dashed about the yard where the linen hung, tore down all of it, and what was not hers she threw on the ground and trampled upon.

" 'Holy Saints, stop her,' moaned Varvara. 'What a woman! Give her Butyokino! Give it to her, for Christ's sake.' "

We come now to the climax.

"Aksinia ran into the kitchen where laundering was being done. Lipa was washing alone, the cook had gone to the river to rinse the clothes. Steam was rising from the trough and from the caldron near the stove, and the air in the kitchen was close and thick with vapor. On the floor was a heap of unwashed clothes, and Nikifor, kicking up his little red legs, lay on a bench near them, so that if he fell he should not hurt himself. Just as Aksinia went in Lipa took the former's shirt out of the heap and put it into the trough, and was just stretching out her hand to a big panlike dipper full of boiling water which was standing on the table.

'Give it here,' said Aksinia, looking at her with hatred, and snatching the shirt out of the trough; 'it is not your business to touch my linen! You are a convict's wife, and ought to know your place and who you are!'

"Lipa gazed at her in utter bewilderment; she did not understand, but suddenly she caught the look Aksinia turned upon the child, and at once she understood and went numb all over.

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'You've taken my land, so here you are!' Saying this Aksinia snatched up the dipper with the boiling water and splashed it over Nikifor.

Pages from Nabokov's teaching copy of "In the Gully."

"There followed a scream such as had never been heard before in Ukleyevo, and no one would have believed that a little weak creature like Lipa could scream like that. And it was suddenly quiet in the yard. Aksinia walked into the house in silence with the old naive smile on her lips. . . . The deaf man kept moving about the yard with his arms full of linen, then be began hanging it up again, silently, without haste. And until the cook came back from the river no one ventured into the kitchen to see what had happened there."

The enemy is destroyed, Aksinia smiles once more; automatically the land is hers now. The deaf man hanging up the linen again is a stroke of genius on Chekhov's part.

The child theme is continued when Lipa comes on foot the long long way back from the hospital. Her baby has died; she carries his little body wrapped in a blanket.

"Lipa went down the road, and before reaching the hamlet sat down by a small pond. A woman brought a horse to water but the horse would not drink. 'What more do you want?' the woman said to it softly, in perplexity. 'What more do you want?'

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"A boy in a red shirt, sitting at the water's edge, was washing his father's jack boots. And not another soul was in sight, either in the village or on the hill. 'Doesn't drink,' said Lipa, looking at the horse."

This little group should be noted. The boy, not her boy. All of it is emblematic of the simple family happiness that might have been hers. Notice the unobtrusive symbolism of Chekhov.

"Then the woman with the horse and the boy with the boots walked away, and there was no one left at all. The sun went to sleep, covering itself with a skeined cloth of gold, and long clouds, red and lilac, stretched across the sky, guarded its rest.

Somewhere far away a bittern boomed, a hollow, melancholy sound as that made by a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields, the nightingales were singing their heads off. The cuckoo kept reckoning someone's years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting and one could even make out the words: 'That's what you are! That's what you are!' What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once." Among European writers you may distinguish the bad one from the good one by the simple fact that the bad one has generally one nightingale at a time, as happens in conventional poetry, while the good one has several of them sing together, as they really do in nature.

The men Lipa meets on the road are probably bootleggers but Lipa sees them otherwise in the moonlight.

" 'Are you holy men?' Lipa asked the old man.

" 'No. We are from Firsanovo.'

" 'You looked at me just now and my heart was softened. [An almost Biblical intonation in the Russian text.] And the lad is so gentle. I thought you must be holy men.'

" 'Have you far to go?'

" 'To Ukleyevo.'

" 'Get in, we will give you a lift as far as Kuzmenki, then you go straight on and we turn off to the left.'

"Vavila [the young man] got into the cart with the barrel and the old man and Lipa got into the other. They moved at a walking pace, Vavila in front.

" 'My baby was in torment all day,' said Lipa. 'He looked at me with his little eyes and said nothing; he wanted to speak and could not. Lord God! Queen of Heaven! In my grief I kept falling down on the floor; I would be standing there and then I would fall down by the bedside. And tell me, grandfather, why should a little one be tormented before his death? When a grown-up person, a man or woman, is in torment, his sins are forgiven, but why a little one, when he has no sins? Why?'

" 'Who can tell?' answered the old man.

"They drove on for half an hour in silence.

" 'We can't know everything, how and why,' said the old man. 'A bird is given not four wings but two because it is able to fly with two; and so man is not permitted to know everything but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know in order to live, so much he knows.' . . .

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" 'Never mind,' he repeated. 'Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there is good and bad yet to come, there is everything to come. Great is mother Russia,' he said, and looked round on either side of him. 'I have been all over Russia, and I have seen everything in her, and you may believe my words, my dear. There will be good and there will be bad. I went as a messenger from my village to Siberia, and I have been to the Amur River and the Altay Mountains and I emigrated to Siberia; I worked the land there, then I got homesick for mother Russia and I came back to my native village. . . .And when I got home, as the saying is, there was neither stick nor stone; I had a wife, but I left her behind in Siberia, she was buried there. So I am a hired man now. And I tell you: since then I have had it good as well as bad. I do not want to die, my dear, I would be glad to live another twenty years; so there has been more of the good. And great is our mother Russia!' and again he gazed on either side and looked back. . . .

"When Lipa reached home the cattle had not yet been driven out; everyone was asleep. She sat down on the steps and waited. The old man was the first to come out; he understood what had happened from the first glance at her, and for a long time he could not utter a word, but only smacked his lips.

" 'Oh Lipa,' he said, 'you did not take care of my grandchild. . . .'

Varvara was awakened. She struck her hands together and broke into sobs, and immediately began laying out the baby.

" 'And he was such a pretty child . . .' she said. 'Oh dear, dear. . . . You had the one child, and you did not take enough care of him, you silly thing. '

In her innocence Lipa never thought of telling people it was Aksinia who had killed her baby. Apparently the family believed that Lipa had just been careless and had accidentally scalded the child by overturning a pot of hot water.

After the requiem service "Lipa waited at table, and the priest, lifting his fork on which there was a salted mushroom, said to her: 'Don't grieve for the babe. For such is the kingdom of Heaven.'

"And only when they had all left Lipa realized fully that there was no Nikifor and never would be, she realized it and broke into sobs. And she did not know what room to go into to sob, for she felt that now her child was dead there was no place for her in the house, that she had no reason to be there, that she was in the way; and the others felt it, too.

" 'Now what are you bellowing for?' Aksinia shouted, suddenly appearing in the doorway; because of the funeral she was dressed up in new clothes and had powdered her face. 'Shut up!'

"Lipa tried to stop but could not, and sobbed louder than ever.

" 'Do you hear?' shouted Aksinia, and stamped her foot in violent anger. 'Who is it I am speaking to? Get out of the house and don't set foot here again, you convict. Get out.'

" 'There, there, there,' the old man put in fussily. 'Aksinia, don't make such an outcry, my dear. . . . She is crying, it is only natural . . . her child is dead.

" 'It's only natural,' Aksinia mimicked him. 'Let her stay the night here, and don't let me see a trace of her tomorrow! "It's only natural" . . .' she mimicked him again, and, laughing, went into the shop."

Lipa has lost the frail link that connected her to the household and leaves the house for ever.

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In all cases, except Aksinia's, the truth gradually comes out.*

The mechanical quality of Varvara's virtues is nicely exemplified by the jams she keeps making; there is too much of it, it goes sugary and uneatable. We recall that poor Lipa had been so fond of it. The jam turned against Varvara.

The letters from Anisim still come in that beautiful hand—evidently his friend Samorodov is doing time with him in the mines of Siberia, so that here too the truth comes out. "I am ill here all the time; I am wretched, for Christ's sake help me!"

Old Grigori, half-crazy, wretched, unloved, is the most vivid representative here of truth coming into its own.

"One fine autumn day toward evening old Grigori was sitting near the church gates, with the collar of his fur coat turned up and nothing of him could be seen but his nose and the peak of his cap. At the other end of the long bench sat Yelizarov the contractor, and beside him Yakov the school watchman, a toothless old man of seventy. Crutch and the watchman were talking.

" 'Children ought to give food and drink to the old. . . . Honor thy father and mother . . .' Yakov was saying with irritation,

'while she, this woman [Aksinia] has turned her father-in-law out of his own house; the old man has neither food nor drink, where is he to go? He has not had a morsel these three days.'

" 'Three days!' said Crutch, amazed.

' 'Here he sits and does not say a word. He has grown feeble. And why be silent? He ought to prosecute her, they wouldn't praise her in court.'

" 'Who praised whom in court?' asked Crutch, who was hard of hearing.

" 'What?' from the watchman.

" 'The woman's all right,' said Crutch, 'she does her best. In their line of business they can't get on without that . . . without cheating, I mean. . . .'

" 'Kicked out of his own house!' Yakov went on with irritation. 'Save up and buy your own house, then turn people out of it!

She is a nice one, to be sure! A pla-ague!'

"Grigori listened and did not stir. . . .

" 'Whether it is your own house or others' it makes no difference so long as it is warm and the women don't scold . . .' said Crutch, and he laughed. 'When I was young I was very fond of my Nastasya. She was a quiet woman. And she used to be always at it: "Buy a house, Makarych! Buy a house, Makarych! Buy a horse, Makarych!" She was dying and yet she kept on saying, "Buy yourself a racing droshky, Makarych, so that you don't have to walk." And all I did was to buy her gingerbread.'

"'Her husband's deaf and stupid,' Yakov went on, not listening to Crutch; 'a regular fool, just like a goose. He can't understand anything. Hit a goose on the head with a stick and even then it does not understand.'

"Crutch got up to go home. Yakov also got up, and both of them went off together, still talking. When they had gone fifty paces old Grigori got up, too, and walked after them, stepping uncertainly as though on slippery ice."

*

VN prefaces this section by the following remark to his class : "There is again a time gap between chapters 8 and 9. You will observe the delightful Chekhovian detail when the Khrymins, one of whom, if not all, is or are on intimate terms with his wife have 'presented the deaf man with a gold watch, and he is constantly taking it out and putting it to his ear.' " Ed.

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In this last chapter the introduction of a new character in the toothless old watchman is another stroke of genius on the part of Chekhov, suggesting the continuity of existence, even though this is the conclusion of the story—but the story will go on with old and new characters, it will flow on as life flows on.

Note the synthesis at the end of this tale: "The village was already sinking in the dusk of evening and the sun only gleamed on the upper part of the road which ran wriggling like a snake up the slope." The brilliant, snakelike trail, an emblem of Aksinia, fades and vanishes in the serene bliss of the night. "Old women were coming back from the woods and children with them; they were bringing baskets of mushrooms. Peasant women and girls came in a crowd from the station where they had been loading the cars with bricks, whose red dust had settled upon their skin under their eyes. They were singing.

Ahead of them was Lipa, with her eyes turned toward the sky, she was singing in a high voice, carolling away as though exulting in the fact that at last the day was over and one might rest. Among the crowd, holding by the knot something tied up in a kerchief, breathless as usual, walked Praskovya, her mother, who still went out to work by the day.

"'Good evening, Makarych!' cried Lipa, seeing Crutch. 'Good evening, dear!'

"'Good evening, Lipynka,' cried Crutch delighted. 'Girls,

women, love the rich carpenter! Ho-ho! My little children,

my little children. (Crutch gave a sob.) My dear little

hatchets!' " Crutch is the not very efficient but on the

whole good spirit of the tale—in the dazed state he usually

lives in, he had spoken words of peace at the marriage, as if

trying, in vain, to avert the disaster.

Old Grigori dissolves in tears—a weak and silent King Lear.

"Crutch and Yakov passed and could still be heard talking

as they receded. Then old Grigori passed in their wake and

there was a sudden hush in the crowd. Lipa and Praskovya

dropped a little behind, and when the old man was abreast

of them Lipa bowed down low and said: 'Good evening,

Grigori Petrovich.' Her mother, too, bowed. The old man

stopped and, saying nothing, looked at the two; his lips

were quivering and his eyes full of tears. Lipa took out of

her mother's knotted bundle a piece of pie stuffed with

buckwheat and gave it to him. He took it and began eating.

"The sun had set by now: its glow died away on the upper

part of the road too. It was getting dark and cool. Lipa and

Praskovya walked on and for some time kept crossing

themselves."

Lipa is her old self, she dissolves in song, happy in the tiny

enclosure of her limited world, united with her dead baby

The final page of "In the Gully" in Nabokov's teaching copy.

in the coolness of nightfall—and innocently, unconsciously,

carrying to her God the pink dust of the bricks that are

making the fortune of Aksinia.

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Notes on The Seagull (1896)

In 1896 The Seagull (Chaika) was a complete failure at the Alexandrine Theatre in St. Petersburg, but at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 it was a tremendous success.

The first exposition—talk between two minor characters, the girl Masha and the village teacher Medvedenko—is thoroughly permeated by the manner and mood of the two. We learn about them and about the two major characters, the budding actress Nina Zarechny and the poet Treplev, who are arranging some amateur theatricals in the alley of the park:

"They are in love with each other and to-night their souls will unite in an effort to express one and the same artistic vision,"

says the teacher in the ornate style so typical of a Russian semi-intellectual. He has his reasons to allude to this, being in love too. Nevertheless, we must admit that this introduction is decidedly blunt. Chekhov, like Ibsen, was always eager to get done with the business of explaining as quickly as possible. Sorin, the flabby and good-natured landowner, drops by with Treplev, his nephew, who is nervous about the play he is staging. The workmen who have built the platform come and say, we are going for a dip. And meanwhile old Sorin has asked Masha to tell her father (who is his own employee on the estate) to have the dog kept quiet at night. Tell him yourself, she says, rebuffing him. The perfectly natural swing in the play, the association of odd little details which at the same time are perfectly true to life—this is where Chekhov's genius is disclosed.

In the second exposition Treplev talks to his uncle about his mother, the professional actress, who is jealous of the young lady who is going to act in his play. Nor can one even mention Duse in her presence. My goodness, just try, exclaims Treplev.

With another author the complete picture of the woman in this expository dialogue would be a dreadful piece of traditional technique, especially seeing that it is to her own brother that the young man is speaking; but by sheer force of talent Chekhov manages to pull it through. The details are all so amusing: she has seventy thousand in the bank, but if you ask her for a loan she starts crying. . . . Then he speaks of the routine theatre, of its smug household morals and of the new thing he wants to create; and he talks about himself, about his sense of inferiority because his mother is always surrounded by famous artists and writers. It is quite a long monologue. By a judiciously placed question he is further made to speak of Trigorin, his mother's friend, the author. Charm, talent, but—but somehow after Tolstoy and Zola one does not want to read Trigorin. Note the placing of Tolstoy and Zola on one level—typical for a young author like Treplev in those days, the late nineties.

Nina appears. She was afraid her father, a neighboring squire, would not let her come. Sorin goes to call the household, for the moon is rising and it is time to start Treplev's play. Note two typical Chekhov moves: first, Sorin sings a few bars of a Schubert song, then checks himself and tells with a laugh the nasty thing somebody once said about his singing voice; second, then when Nina and Treplev are left alone they kiss and immediately after she asks, "What's that tree there?" The answer, an elm. "Why is the tree so dark?" she goes on. These trifles disclose better than anything invented before Chekhov the wistful helplessness of human beings—the old man who made a mess of his life, the delicate girl who will never be happy.

The workmen come back. It is time to begin. Nina refers to her stage-fright emotion—she will have to be acting in front of Trigorin, the author of those wonderful short stories. "Dunno, haven't read them," Treplev says curtly. It has been pointed out by critics, who like noting such things, that while the elderly actress Arkadina is jealous of the amateur Nina who as yet is only dreaming of a stage career, her son, the unsuccessful and not very gifted young writer, is jealous of a really fine writer, Trigorin (incidentally, a kind of double of Chekhov the professional himself). The audience arrives. First Dorn, the old doctor, and the wife of Shamraev, the manager of Sorin's estate, who is an old flame of Dorn. Then Arkadina, Sorin, Trigorin, Masha, and Medvedenko flock in. Shamraev asks Arkadina about an old comic he used to applaud. "You keep asking me about antediluvian nobodies," she replies, rather testily.

Presently the curtain rises. There is a real moon and a view of the lake instead of a backdrop. Nina sitting on a stone makes a lyrical speech in a Maeterlinck style, mystically commonplace, obscurely trite. ("It is something in the decadent manner,"

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whispers Arkadina. "Mother!" says her son in pleading tones.) Nina goes on. The idea is that she is a spirit talking after all life has ceased on earth. The red eyes of the devil appear. Arkadina makes fun of it and Treplev loses his temper, shouts for the curtain, and goes away. The others rebuke her for having hurt her son. But she feels insulted herself—that bad-tempered, vain boy . . . wants to teach me what the theatre ought to be. . . . The subtle point is that though Treplev has a real desire to destroy the old forms of art, he has not the talent to invent new ones to take their place. Note what Chekhov does here. What other author would have dared to make his main character—a positive character, as they say, that is, one which is expected to win the audience's sympathy—who else would have dared to make him a minor poet, at the same time giving real talent to the least pleasant persons of the play, to the nasty self-sufficient actress and the egotistical, supercritical, emphatically professional writer?

Some singing is heard on the lake. Arkadina recalls the days when youth and gaiety filled the place. She regrets having hurt her son. Nina appears and Arkadina introduces her to Trigorin. "Oh, I always read you." Now comes a delightful little parody of Chekhov's own method of contrast between poetry and prose. "Yes, the setting was beautiful," says Trigorin, and adds after a pause, "That lake must be full of fish." And Nina is puzzled to learn that a man who, as she says, has experienced the delights of creative work, can be amused by angling.

Without any special connection (again a typical device with Chekhov and beautifully true to life), but evidently continuing the line of thought of his previous conversation, Shamraev recalls a certain funny incident in a theatre years ago. There is a pause after this when the joke falls flat and nobody laughs. Presently they disperse, with Sorin complaining without effect to Shamraev about the dog barking at night, Shamraev repeating an earlier anecdote about a church singer, and Medvedenko, the socialist-minded, needy village teacher, inquiring how much such a singer earns. The fact that the question is unanswered shocked many critics who required facts and figures from plays. I remember reading somewhere the solemn statement that a playwright must tell his audience quite clearly the income of his respective characters, for otherwise their moods and action cannot be understood in full. But Chekhov, the genius of the casual, attains in the harmonious interplay of these trivial remarks much greater heights than the ordinary slaves of cause and effect.

Dorn tells Treplev, who now appears again, that he liked his play —or what he heard of the play. He goes on expounding his own views about life, ideas, and art. Treplev, who was at first touched by his praise, now interrupts him twice. Where is Nina? He rushes away almost in tears. "Oh, youth, youth!" sighs the doctor. Masha retorts, "When people can't find anything else to say, they say, Oh youth, youth." She takes a pinch of snuff to the vast disgust of Dorn. Then she becomes suddenly hysterical and tells him she is desperately and hopelessly in love with Treplev. "Everybody is so nervous," the doctor repeats. "So very nervous. And everybody is in love. . . . This magic lake. But how can I help you, my poor child, how?"

So ends the first act, and we may well understand that the average audience in Chekhov's time, as well as the critics—

those priests of the average—were left rather irritated and puzzled. There has been no definite line of conflict. Or rather there have been several vague lines and a futility of conflict, for one cannot expect any special conflict from a quarrel between a quick-tempered but soft son and a quick-tempered but equally soft mother, each always regretting his or her hasty words. Nothing special further is suggested by Nina meeting Trigorin, and the romances of the other characters are blind alleys. Finishing the act with an obvious dead end seemed an insult to people eager for a good tussle. But notwithstanding the fact that Chekhov was still tied up by the very traditions he was flaunting (the rather flat expositions, for instance), what seemed nonsense and faults to the average critic are really the grain from which some day a really great drama will grow, for with all my fondness for Chekhov I cannot hide the fact that in spite of his authentic genius he did not create the perfect masterpiece. His achievement was that he showed the right way to escape the dungeon of deterministic causation, of cause and effect, and burst the bars holding the art of drama captive. What I hope of future playwrights is not that they will merely repeat the actual methods of Chekhov, for these belong to him, to his type of genius, and cannot be imitated, but that other methods tending with even more power to the same freedom of drama will be found and applied.

This said, let us turn to the next act and see what surprises it reserved for an irritated and puzzled audience.

Act II. A croquet lawn and part of the house and lake. Arkadina is giving Masha a few hints as to how a woman keeps fit.

From a chance remark we learn that she has been Trigorin's mistress for quite a while. Sorin comes, together with Nina 176

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who has the opportunity of being here because her father and stepmother have gone away for three days. A rambling conversation is set rolling about Treplev's low spirits, about Sorin's poor health.

masha. When he reads something aloud, his eyes burn and his face becomes pale. He has a beautiful sad voice and his manners are those of a poet.

(sorin reclining in a garden chair is heard snoring. ) [The contrast!] dr. dorn. Good night, baby. arkadina. Hello Peter! sorin.

Eh? What's that? (Sits up.) arkadina. You are sleeping? sorin. Not at all.

(A pause.) [Great master of pauses, Chekhov.] arkadina. You do nothing for your health—that's bad, brother. sorin. But I'd like to—only the doctor here is not interested. dr. dorn. What's the use of seeing a doctor at sixty. sorin. A man of sixty wants to live, too.

dr. dorn (testily). Oh, all right. Try something for the nerves. arkadina. I keep thinking that he ought to go to some German watering place. dr. dorn. Well. . . . Well, yes, he might go. And then he might not. arkadina. Do you see what he means? I don't. sorin. There is nothing to see. It is all perfectly clear.

That's the way it goes. The wrong audience may get the impression that the author is frittering away his precious twenty minutes, his second act, while conflict and climax are fretting in the wings. But it is quite all right. The author knows his business.

masha (gets up). Time for lunch, I think. (Moves indolently. ) My foot is asleep.

(Exit. )

Presently Shamraev turns up and is annoyed that his wife and Arkadina want to go to town when the horses are needed for the harvest. They quarrel; Shamraev loses his temper and refuses to manage the estate any longer. Can this be called a conflict? Well, there has been something leading up to it—that little thing about refusing to stop the dog barking at night—but really, really, says the smug critic, what parody is this?*

Here quite simply and with great aplomb Chekhov, the novator, reverts to the old old trick of having Nina, the heroine (who now remains alone on the stage) speaking her thoughts aloud. Well, she is a budding actress—but not even that can be an excuse. It is rather a flat little speech. She is puzzling over the fact that a famous actress weeps because she cannot have her own way and a famous writer spends the whole day fishing. Treplev comes back from hunting and throws a dead sea gull at Nina's feet. "I was a cad to kill this bird." Then he adds, "Soon I shall kill myself in the same way." Nina is cross with him: "These last few days you talk in symbols. This bird is apparently a symbol, too. ( She removes it onto a bench.) But excuse me, I am too simple; I don't understand symbols." (Note that this line of thought will have a very neat ending—Nina herself will turn out to be the live subject of this symbol, which she does not see and which Treplev applies wrongly.) Treplev raves at her for becoming cold and indifferent to him after the flop of his play. He refers to his own oafishness.

There is a faint hint at a Hamlet complex, which Chekhov suddenly turns inside out by Treplev applying another Hamlet motive to the figure of Trigorin, who stalks in with a book in his hands. "Words, words, words," Treplev shouts and exits.

Trigorin jots down in his book an observation about Masha: "Takes snuff, drinks strong liquors. . . . Always in black. The schoolteacher is in love with her." Chekhov himself kept such a notebook for jotting down characters that might come in handy. Trigorin tells Nina that he and Arkadina are, apparently, leaving (because of the quarrel with Shamraev). In reply to Nina, who thinks "it must be so wonderful to be a writer," Trigorin delivers a delightful speech, almost three pages long. It is so good and so typical for an author who finds a chance to talk about himself that the general aversion to long

*

Not even could a moralist note here the paradox, typical, one might say, of a decaying class : the employee bullying his master—for this was not typical of Russian country life: it is a mere incident based on such and such characters, who may crop up and who may not. (VN deleted marginal note. Ed.) 177

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monologues in the modern theatre is forgotten. All the details of his profession are remarkably well brought out: ". . . . Here I am, talking to you and I am moved, but at the same time I keep remembering that an unfinished long short story awaits me on my desk. I see, for instance, a cloud; I see it looks like a piano, and immediately I tell myself, I must use that in a story.

A passing cloud that had the form of a piano. Or, say, the garden smells of heliotrope. Straightway I collect it: a sickly sweet smell, widow blossom, must mention it when describing summer dusk. . . ." Or this bit: "When in the beginning of my career I used to have a new play staged, it always seemed to me that the dark spectators were opposed to me and that the blond spectators were coldly indifferent. ..." Or this: "Oh, yes, it is pleasant to write, while you write . . . but afterwards. . . .

The public reads and says: Yes, charming, talented. . . . Nice—but so inferior to Tosltoy; . . . yes, a beautiful story— but Turgenev is better." (This was Chekhov's own experience.)

Nina keeps telling him that she could readily undergo all such troubles and disappointments if she could have fame.

Trigorin glancing at the lake and taking in the air and the landscape, remarks that it is such a pity he must leave. She points out to him the house on the opposite bank where her mother had lived.

nina. I was born there. I spent all my life near that lake and know every little

island on it. trigorin. Yes, it's beautiful here. {Noticing the sea gull on the bench.) And what's that? nina. A sea gull. Treplev killed it. trigorin. A fine bird. Really, I don't want one bit to go. Look here, try and persuade Madame Arkadin to stay. (He proceeds to note something down in

his book.) nina. What are you writing? trigorin. Oh, nothing. . . . Just an idea. (He puts the book into his pocket. ) An idea for a short story: lake, house, girl loves lake, happy and free like a sea

gull. Man happens to pass, a glance, a whim, and the sea gull perishes.

(Pause) arkadina (from window). Hullo, where are you? trigorin. Coming! arkadina. We remain.

(He goes into the house)

(nina is left alone and broods awhile on the stage-front. ) nina. A dream. . . .

Curtain.

Now three things must be said about the ending of this second act. First of all, we have already noticed Chekhov's weak point: the featuring of young poetical women. Nina is slightly false. That last sigh over the footlights dates, and it dates just because it is not on the same level of perfect simplicity and natural reality as the rest of the things in the play. We are aware, certainly, that she is actressy and all that, but still it does not quite click. Trigorin says to Nina, among other things, that he rarely happens to meet young girls and that he is too far gone in life to imagine clearly the feelings of sweet eighteen, so that in his stories, he says, his young girls are generally not true to life. (We may add, something wrong about the mouth, as Sargent the painter used to say the family of his sitters invariably observed.) What Trigorin says may be curiously enough applied to Chekhov, the playwright; for in his short stories, as for instance "The House with the Mezzanine," or "The Lady with the Little Dog," the young women are wonderfully alive. But that's because he does not make them talk much. Here they talk, and the weak spot is felt: Chekhov was not a talkative writer. That's one thing.

Another thing to be remarked is this. To all appearances, and judging by his own subtle approach to the writer's trade, his power of observation, and so on, Trigorin is really a good writer. But somehow the notes he takes about the bird and the lake and the girl do not impress one as the making of a good story. At the same time, we already guess that the plot of the play will be exactly that story and no other. The technical interest is now centered on the point: will Chekhov manage to 178

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make a good story out of material which in Trigorin's notebook sounds a little trite. If he succeeds, then we were right in assuming that Trigorin is a fine writer who will succeed in making of a banal theme a fine story. And finally a third remark.

Just as Nina herself did not realize the real import of the symbol when Treplev brought the dead bird, so Trigorin does not realize that by remaining in the house near the lake he will become the hunter who kills the bird.

In other words, the end of the act is again obscure to the average audience because nothing can be expected yet. All that has really happened is that there has been a quarrel, a departure settled, a departure put off. The real interest lies in the very vagueness of the lines, and in artistic half-promises.

Act III, a week later. A dining room in Sorin's country house. Trigorin is breakfasting and Masha is telling him about herself so that "you, a writer, can make use of my life." From her very first words it transpires that Treplev has attempted to commit suicide but his wound is not serious.*

Apparently Masha's love for Treplev goes, for now she decides to marry the school teacher in order to forget Treplev. We learn further that Trigorin and Arkadina are about to leave for good now. A scene between Nina and Trigorin follows. She makes him a present, a medallion with, engraved, the title of one of his books and the number of a page and line. As Arkadina and Sorin come in, Nina hurriedly leaves, asking Trigorin to grant her a few minutes before he goes. But note, not a word of love has been spoken, and Trigorin is a little obtuse. As the play proceeds, Trigorin keeps muttering under his breath, trying to remember what was that line on that page. Are there any books of mine in this house? There are, in Sorin's study. He wanders off to find the required volume, which is the perfect way of getting him off the stage. Sorin and Arkadina discuss the reasons for Treplev's attempted suicide: jealousy, idleness, pride. . . . When he suggests she give him some money she starts crying, as her son has predicted she does in such cases. Sorin gets excited and has a fit of dizziness.

After Sorin is led away, Treplev and Arkadina talk. This is a slightly hysterical and not very convincing scene. First move : he suggests to his mother that she lend some money to Sorin and she retorts that she is an actress and not a banker. A pause.

Second move: he asks her to change the bandage on his head and as she does so very tenderly he reminds her of an act of great kindness which she once performed, but she does not remember. He tells how much he loves her but—and now the third move: why is she under the influence of that man? This makes her cross. He says that Trigorin's literature makes him sick; she retorts, you are an envious nonentity; they quarrel fiercely; Treplev starts crying; they make up again (forgive your sinful mother); he confesses he loves Nina but she does not love him; he cannot write any more, all hope is lost. The undulation of moods here is a little too obvious — it is rather a demonstration—the author putting the characters through their tricks. And there is a bad blunder directly afterwards. Trigorin comes in, turning the pages of the book, looking for the line, and then he reads, for the benefit of the audience: "Here it is: ' . . . if any time you need my life, just come and take it.' "

Now it is quite clear that what really would have happened is that Trigorin, hunting for the book in Sorin's study on the lower shelf and finding it, would, normally, crouch and there and then read the lines. As often happens, one mistake leads to another. The next sentence is very weak again. Trigorin thinking aloud: "Why do I seem to hear such sadness in the call of this pure young soul? why does my own heart sink so painfully?" This is definitely poor stuff, and a good writer like Trigorin would hardly indulge in such pathos. Chekhov was faced with the difficult task of making his author suddenly human, and he bungled it completely by making him climb up on stilts so that the spectators might see him better.

Trigorin tells his mistress very bluntly that he wants to remain and have a go at Nina. Arkadina falls on her knees and in a very well imagined speech pleads with him: My king, my beautiful god. . . . You are the last page of my life, etc. You are the best contemporary writer, you are Russia's only hope, etc. Trigorin explains to the audience that he has no will-power—

weak, slack, always obedient. Then she notices him writing something in his notebook. He says: "This morning I happened

*

Note that according to the rules, which I dislike so intensely, you cannot make a man kill himself between the acts, but you can make him make the attempt if he does not die; and vice-versa, you cannot have a man bungle his shot in the last act when he retires behind the scenes to make an end of it.

(VN in a deleted passage. Ed.)

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to hear a good expression—the pine grove of maidens. It may come in useful. . . . (He stretches himself.) Again railway carriages, stations, station-meals, cutlets, conversations. . . ."*

Shamraev who comes in to say that the carriage is ready speaks of an old actor he used to know. This is his being true to type, as in the first act, but a curious thing seems to have happened here. We have noted that Chekhov found a new device for making his characters live by giving them some silly joke or foolish observation or casual recollection instead of making the miser always talk of his gold and the doctors of their pills. But what happens now is that the thwarted goddess of determinism takes her revenge, and what seemed to be a delightful casual remark indirectly disclosing the nature of the speaker now becomes as unescapable and all-powerful a feature as the miser's stinginess. Trigorin's notebook, Arkadina's tears when money questions are raised, Shamraev's theatrical recollections—these become fixed labels as unpleasant as the recurring oddities in traditional plays—you know what I mean—some special gag which a character repeats throughout the play at the most unexpected or rather expected moments. This goes to show that Chekhov, though he almost managed to create a new and better kind of drama, was cunningly caught in his own snares. I have the definite impression that he would not have been caught by these conventions—by the very conventions he thought he had broken—if he had known a little more of the numerous forms they take. I have the impression that he had not studied the art of drama completely enough, had not studied a sufficient number of plays, was not critical enough about certain technical aspects of his medium.

During the bustle of departure (with Arkadina giving a ruble, then worth about fifty cents, for the three servants, and repeating that they should share it) Trigorin manages to have a few words with Nina. We find him very eloquent about her meekness, her angel-like purity, etc. She tells him she has decided to become an actress and to go to Moscow. They fix a date there and embrace. Curtain. There can be no question that though this act has a few good things in it, mainly in the wording, it is far below the two first ones.†

Act IV. Two years pass. Chekhov quietly sacrifices the ancient law of unity of time to secure unity of place, for in this last respect there is something quite natural in going over to next summer when Trigorin and Arkadina are expected to come again to stay with her brother in his country house.

A drawing room converted by Treplev into his den—lots of books. Masha and Medvedenko enter. They are married and have a child. Masha is concerned about Sorin, who is afraid to be alone. They refer to the skeleton of the theatre standing in the dark garden. Mrs. Shamraev, Masha's mother, suggests to Treplev that he be nicer to her daughter. Masha still loves him but now hopes that when her husband gets transferred to another place she will forget.

Incidentally we learn that Treplev writes for magazines. Old Sorin has his bed made here in Treplev's room. This is a very natural thing for a man suffering from asthma to want, a craving for some change—it must not be confused with the

"keeping on the stage" device. A delightful conversation ensues between the doctor, Sorin, and Medvedenko. (Arkadina has gone to the station to meet Trigorin.) For instance, the doctor alludes to his having spent some time and a lot of money in foreign countries. Then they speak of other things. There is a pause. Then Medvedenko speaks.

medvedenko. May I inquire, Doctor, what foreign town did you like best?

*

Note again, that just as in the demonstration of changing moods in the scene between mother and son, we get here the demonstration of the man reverting to the professional author—a little too obvious. There follows another demonstration: Shamraev . . . (VN in a deleted passage. Ed.)

†

Note very carefully, please, the queer revenge which I have just described [of the goddess of determinism]. There is always such a devil awaiting the unwary author just as he thinks he has succeeded. And most important, it is just now when from the point of tradition the author has come back to the fold and when something like a climax looms and the audience expects if not the obligatory scene (which would be too much to ask of Chekhov), at least some obligatory scene, (which queerly enough is much the same thing—what I mean is, such a scene that, though not consciously defined in the expectancy, is felt to be satisfying the "just what we wanted" when it comes—we may call it the satisfying scene), it is just at this moment that Chekhov is at his worst. (VN deleted passage. Ed.)

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dorn. Genoa.

treplev. Why Genoa—of all towns?

The doctor explains: just an impression, lives there seemed to meander and fuse—rather in the ways, he adds, as the world-soul in your play—by the way where is she now, that young actress? (A very natural transition.) Treplev tells Dorn about Nina. She had a love affair with Trigorin, had a baby, the baby died; she is not a good actress though quite a professional one by now, plays big parts but acts them coarsely, no taste, gasps, gesticulates. There are moments when one feels talent in some outcry of hers, as in the way she dies, but these are but moments.

Dorn inquires whether she has talent and Treplev answers that it is difficult to say. (Note that Nina is much in the same position as Treplev in their artistic achievements.) He goes on to tell that he has followed her from town to town wherever she played, but she never let him come near. Sometimes she writes. After Trigorin left her she has seemed a little wrong in the head. She signs her letters sea gull. (Note that Treplev has forgotten the connection.) He adds that she is here now, roams about, does not dare come, nor does she want anyone to speak to her.

sorin. She was a charming girl.

dorn. What's that?

sorin. I said she was a charming girl.

Then Arkadina comes back from the station with Trigorin. (Intertwined with these scenes we are shown the pitiful plight of Medvedenko whom his father-in-law bullies.) Trigorin and Treplev manage to shake hands. Trigorin has brought a copy of a monthly review from Moscow with a story by Treplev, and with the flippant geniality of a famous writer to a lesser star tells him that people are interested, find him mysterious.

Presently all of them but Treplev sit down to play a game of lotto as they always do on rainy evenings. Treplev to himself, looking through the monthly : "Trigorin has read his own stuff but has not even cut the pages of my story." We follow the lotto game, and this is a very typical and beautiful Chekhov scene. It seems that in order to attain the heights of his genius he must put his people at ease, make them feel at home, make them comfortable, though this does not preclude slight boredom, gloomy little thoughts, stirring recollections, etc. And though here again the characters are shown in their oddities or habits—Sorin again dozes, Trigorin talks of angling, Arkadina recalls her stage successes—this is much more naturally done than in the false dramatic background of the preceding act, because it is quite natural that in the same place, with the same people collected, two years later, the old tricks would be gently and rather pathetically repeated. It is hinted that critics have handled Treplev, the young author, very roughly. The numbers of the lotto are called out. Arkadina has never read a line of her son's stuff. Then they interrupt the game to go and have supper, all except Treplev, who remains brooding over his manuscripts. A monologue—it is so good that we do not mind the convention: "I have talked so much about new forms—and now I feel that little by little I myself slip into routine." (This may be applied—like most of the professional observations in the play—to Chekhov himself, in a way certainly, but only when he has lapses as in the previous act.) Treplev reads: " 'Her pale face framed by her dark hair.' That's rotten, that 'framed,' " he exclaims and strikes it out. "I shall begin with the hero being awakened by the sound of rain—and to hell with the rest. The description of the moonshine is much too long and elaborate. Trigorin has created his own tricks; for him it is easy. He will show the neck of a broken bottle glistening on a river-dam and the black shadow under the mill-wheel—that's all and the moonlight is ready; but with me it is all the 'tremulous light' and 'softly twinkling stars' and the distant sounds of a piano, which 'dissolved in the soft intoxicating night air.' It is horrible, awful. . . ." (Here we get, incidentally, a beautifully defined difference between Chekhov's art and that of his contemporaries.)

Next follows the meeting with Nina, which from the point of view of the traditional stage may be considered the main and what I called satisfying scene of the play. Actually it is very fine. Her way of talking is much more in Chekhov's line here, when he is no more concerned with depicting pure, eager, romantic maidens. She is tired, upset, unhappy, a jumble of 181

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recollections and details. She loves Trigorin still and ignores the tremendous emotion of Treplev, who tries for the last time to make her consent to stay with him. "I am a sea gull," she says without any special connection. "Now I'm mixing things up. You remember you once shot a sea gull? A man happened to pass, saw the bird, and killed it. Idea for a short story. No . .

. I'm getting mixed up again." "Stay a bit, I shall give you something to eat," says Treplev, clinging at a last straw. It is all very finely done. She refuses, speaks again of her love for Trigorin who has so grossly dropped her, then switches to the monologue of Treplev's play, in the beginning of the first act, and hurriedly departs. The end of the act is magnificent.

treplev (after a pause). Pity if somebody meets her in the garden and then tells mamma. It may distress mamma. [Note these are his last words, because now after coolly destroying his writings he opens the door on the right and goes out into an inner room, where presently he will shoot himself.]

dorn (struggling to push open the door on the left [against which a few moments ago treplev had moved an armchair so as not to he disturbed while talking to nina]). Queer. . . . The door seems locked. (At last he comes in and pushes away the armchair.) Hm. . . . Kind of a steeplechase. [The others too come back from supper] (arkadina, the shamraevs, masha, trigorin, the servant with the wine and beer. )

arkadina. Place it here. The beer is for Trigorin. We shall drink and go on with the game. Let us sit down. [Candles are lighted.] (shamraev leads trigorin toward a chest of drawers.)

shamraev. Look, here's the bird you asked me to stuff last summer.

trigorin. What bird? I don't remember. (Thinks it over.) No, really, I don't remember. (A shot is heard on the right. They all start.)

arkadina ( frightened). What was that?

dorn. I know. Something has probably exploded in that medicine chest of mine. Don't worry. ( He goes out and half a minute later [ while the rest are settling down to their game] comes back.) Yes, I was right. A bottle of ether has burst. (He hums) "Oh, maiden, again I am bound by your charms. . . ."

arkadina (as she sits down at the table). Ugh, it gave me a fright. It reminded me of that time when. . . . (She covers her face with her hands. ) It has made me quite faint.

dorn (perusing the review, to trigorin). A month or two ago there was an article here ... a letter from America . . . and I wanted to ask you . . . (He leads trigorin [gently] toward the front of the stage.) . . . because, you see, I am very much interested in the question. (In a slightly lower voice)— Will you, please, take Mrs. Arkadin to some other room? The fact is that her son had shot himself.

Curtain.

This is, I repeat, a remarkable ending. Note that the tradition of the backstage suicide is broken by the chief character concerned not realizing what has happened but imitating, as it were, the real reaction by recalling a former occasion. Note, too, that it is the doctor speaking, and so there is no need to call one in order to have the audience quite satisfied. Note, finally, that whereas before his unsuccessful suicide Treplev spoke of doing it, there has not been a single hint in the scene—and still it is perfectly and completely motivated.*

*

This final paragraph was deleted by VN. Ed.

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MAXIM GORKI (1868-1936)

A page from Nabokov's lecture on "On The Rafts,"

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maternal grandfather, Vasili Kashirin. It is a dismal story. The grandfather was a tyrannical brute; his two sons — Gorki's uncles—though terrified of their father, in turn terrorized and maltreated their wives and children. The atmosphere was that of never-ending abuse, senseless reproaches, brutal floggings, money-grabbing, and dreary supplications to God.

"Between the barracks and the gaol," says Gorki's biographer, Alexander Roskin, "amidst a sea of mud, stood rows of houses—dun-colored, green, white. And in every one of them, just as in the Kashirin household, people fought and squabbled because the pudding was burnt or the milk had curdled, in every one of them the same petty interests prevailed

—about pots and pans and samovars and pancakes—and in every one of them people just as religiously celebrated birthdays and commemorations days, guzzling until they were ready to burst and swilling like hogs."*

This was in Nizhni-Novgorod, and in the social milieu of the worst description—that of the meshchane, in status just above the peasants and on the lowest step of the middle class—a social milieu which had already lost the wholesome relation to the soil but had acquired nothing to fill the vacuum thus created, and therefore one that became a prey to the worst vices of the middle classes without their redeeming qualities.

Gorki's father had also had a dismal childhood but afterwards had grown into a fine kind man. He died when Gorki was four, and this was why his widowed mother had gone back to live with her dreadful family. The only happy memory of those days for Gorki was that of his grandmother, who in spite of her terrible surroundings carried in her a kind of happy optimism and a great kindness; only owing to her did the boy ever come to know that there could be happiness, indeed that life was happiness in spite of anything.

At the age of ten Gorki started working for a living. He was in turn an errand-boy in a shoe-store, a dishwasher on a steamboat, an apprentice draftsman, an icon-painter's apprentice, a rag-and-bone man, and a bird-catcher. Then he discovered books and began to read everything he could get hold of. At first he read indiscriminately, but very early he developed fine and sensitive feeling for real literature. He felt a passionate desire to study, but soon realized that he had no chance to be admitted to the university, for which he had gone to Kazan. In his complete destitution he was thrown upon the company of the bosyaki— Russian for bums—and made there invaluable observations which he later exploded like a bomb-shell in the face of the dumbfounded reading public of the capitals.

He had eventually to go to work again and served as assistant baker in a basement bakery, where the working day lasted fourteen hours. Soon he became associated with the revolutionary underground where he met more congenial people than the bakery workers. And he continued to read all he could—literature and science and books on social and medical subjects, anything he could get.

At the age of nineteen he attempted to kill himself. The wound was dangerous, but he recovered. The note found in his pocket began thus: "I lay the blame of my death on the German poet Heine, who invented toothache of the heart. . . ."

He tramped on foot all over Russia, to Moscow, and once there made straight for Tolstoy's house. Tolstoy was not at home, but the Countess invited him into the kitchen and treated him to coffee and rolls. She observed that a great number of bums kept coming to see her husband, to which Gorki politely agreed. Back in Nizhni he roomed with a couple of revolutionaries who had been exiled from Kazan because they had participated in student rioting. When the police received an order to arrest one of these and found that he had given them the slip, they arrested Gorki for questioning.

"What odd kind of a revolutionary are you?" said the Gendarme-general during the interrogation. "You write poems and the like. . . . When I let you out, you had better show that stuff of yours to Korolenko." After a month in prison, Gorki was released and, taking the policeman's advice, went to see Vladimir Korolenko. Korolenko was a very popular but quite second-rate writer, loved by the intelligentsia, suspected of revolutionary sympathies by the police—and a very kind man.

His criticism, however, was so severe that it frightened Gorki, who gave up writing for a long time and went to Rostov

*

From the Banks of the Volga, trans. D. L. Fromberg (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 11.

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where he worked for a while as a longshoreman. And it was not Korolenko, but a revolutionary named Alexander Kaluzhny, a chance acquaintance in Tiflis in the Caucasus, who helped Gorki to find his way in literature. Charmed by Gorki's vivid narrations of all he had witnessed on his endless tramps, Kaluzhny insisted that Gorki write it down in simple words, the same in which he used to tell it. And when a tale was written, the same man took it to the local newspaper and had it printed. They year was 1892, and Gorki was twenty-four.

Later, however, Korolenko proved a great help—not only with valuable advice, but also by finding Gorki a job at the office of a newspaper with which Korolenko was connected. During this year of journalism in Samara, Gorki devoted himself to work. He studied, he tried to perfect his style, poor man, and he regularly wrote stories which appeared in the paper. By the end of this year he became a well-known writer and received many offers from Volga region newspapers. He accepted an offer from Nizhni and returned to his native town. In his writings he stressed savagely the bitter truth of contemporary Russian life. And yet every line he wrote was permeated with his unconquerable faith in man. Strange though it sounds, this painter of the darkest sides of life, of the cruelest brutalities, was also the greatest optimist Russian literature produced.

His revolutionary bias was quite clear. It added to his popularity among the radical intelligentsia but it also made the police redouble their vigilance in respect to a person who had already for a long time figured on the lists of the suspect. He was soon arrested because a photograph of his with a line of dedication had been found in the lodgings of another man arrested for revolutionary activity, however he was shortly released in the absence of incriminating evidence. He returned to Nizhni again. The police kept an eye on him. Strange individuals were always hovering around the two-storied wooden house in which he lived. One of them would be sitting on a bench, making believe that he was idly surveying the sky.

Another would be leaning against a lamp post, ostensibly engrossed in the contents of a newspaper. The coachman of the cab drawn up near the front door also behaved strangely; he would readily agree to take Gorki, or any of his visitors, wherever they pleased, free of charge if need be. But he would never take another fare. All these men were merely police observers.

Gorki became engaged in philanthropic work. He organized a Christmas party for hundreds of the poorest children; opened a comfortable daytime shelter for the unemployed and homeless, with library and piano; started a movement for sending scrapbooks with pictures cut out of magazines to the village children. And also he began to take an active part in revolutionary work. Thus he smuggled a mimeograph for a secret press from St. Petersburg to the Nizhni-Novgorod revolutionary group. This was a serious offence. He was arrested and put in jail. He was a very sick man at the time.

Public opinion, which was a force not to be easily discarded in pre-revolutionary Russia, came out for Gorki in full strength.

Tolstoy came out to his defence, and a wave of protest swept through Russia. The Government was forced to yield to public opinion: Gorki was released from prison and confined in his own home instead. "Policemen were posted in his hall and in the kitchen. One of them would constantly intrude into his study," gushes the biographer. Yet a little further we find out that Gorki "settled down to his work, often writing until late at night" and also that he "happened to meet" a friend in the street and, undisturbed, to hold with him a talk about the imminence of revolution. Not such a terrible treatment, I would say. "The police and secret police were powerless to restrain him." (The Soviet police would have restrained him in a twinkle.) Alarmed, the Government ordered him to go and live at Arzamas, a sleepy little town in Southern Russia. "The reprisals against Gorki evoked a wrathful protest from Lenin," Mr. Roskin goes on. " 'One of Europe's foremost writers,'

wrote Lenin, 'whose only weapon is freedom of speech, is being banished by the autocratic government without trial.'

His sickness—consumption, as in Chekhov's case—had become worse during his imprisonment, and his friends, Tolstoy included, brought pressure to bear on the authorities. Gorki was allowed to go to the Crimea.

Earlier back in Arzamas, Gorki, under the very noses of the secret police, had participated actively in revolutionary activities.

He also wrote a play, The Philistines, which pictures the drab and stuffy milieu in which his own childhood had passed. It never became as famous as his next play, The Lower Depths. "While still in the Crimea, sitting one evening on the porch in the gathering dusk, Gorki had mused aloud about his new play: the hero is a former butler to a wealthy family whom the vicissitudes of life have brought to the poorhouse, from which he has never been able to extricate himself. The man's most 185

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treasured possession is the collar of a dress shirt—the one object that links him with his former life. The poorhouse is crowded, everybody there hates everyone else. But in the last act spring comes, the stage is flooded with sunlight and the inmates of the poorhouse leave their squalid dwelling and forget the hatred they bear for each other. . ." (Roskin, From the Banks of the Volga).

When The Lower Depths was finished, it amounted to more than this sketch suggests. Every character depicted is alive and offers an advantageous part to a good actor. It was the Moscow Art Theatre that gave it theatrical realization and, scoring with it a tremendous success, made the play familiar to everybody.

Perhaps it is appropriate at this juncture to say a few words about this amazing Theatre. Before it came into existence, the best theatrical food the Russian theatre-goer could obtain was largely confined to the Imperial companies of Petersburg and Moscow. These had at their disposal considerable means, sufficient to engage the best available talent, but the administration of these theatres was very conservative, which, in art, may often mean very stuffy, and the productions, at best, were on extremely conventional lines. For a really talented actor, however, there was no higher achievement than to

"make" the Imperial scene, for the private theatres were very poor and could not compete in any way with the Imperial ones.

When Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded their little Moscow Theatre, everything soon began to change.

From the rather hackneyed affair that the theatre had become, it began to pick its way again to what it should be: a temple of careful and genuine art. The Moscow Theatre was backed only by the private fortune of its founders and of a few of their friends, but it did not need elaborate funds. The basic idea that it embodied was to serve the Art, not for the purpose of gain or fame, but for the high purpose of artistic achievement. No part was considered more important than another, every detail was considered to be as worthy of attention as the very choice of the play. The best actors never declined the smallest parts which happened to be allotted them because their talents were best suited to make the greatest success of these parts. No play was performed until the stage-manager was sure that the very best results obtainable had been obtained in regard to artistic realization and perfection of every detail of the production—no matter how many rehearsals had taken place. Time was no object. The enthusiastic spirit of this high service animated every single member of the troupe; and if any other consideration became to him or her of greater importance than the search for artistic perfection, then he or she had no place in this theatrical community. Carried away by the profound artistic enthusiasm of its founders, living like one big family, the actors worked away at every one of the productions as if this were to be the one and only production in their lives. There was religious awe in their approach; there was moving self-sacrifice. And there also was amazing teamwork. For no actor was supposed to care more for his personal performance or success than for the general performance of the troupe, for the general success of the performance. No one was allowed to enter after the curtain went up. No applause was tolerated between acts.

So much for the spirit of the Theatre. As for the basic ideas which revolutionized the Russian theatre and transformed it from a mildly imitative sort of institution always ready to adopt foreign methods after they had been soundly established in foreign theatres, into a great artistic institution which soon became a pattern and an inspiration to foreign stage-managers, the main idea was this: the actor should dread above all the rigid techniques, the accepted methods, and should instead give all his attention and effort to an attempt at penetrating the soul of the theatrical type he was going to represent. In this attempt to give a convincing picture of dramatic type, the actor entrusted with the part would try for the period of training to live an imagined life which would be likely to suit the character in question; he would develop in real life mannerisms and intonations suitable for the occasion, so that when he was called upon to speak the words on the stage, these words would come to him as naturally as if he were the man himself and was speaking for himself by an entirely natural impulse.

Whatever may be said for or against the method, one thing is essential: whenever talented people approach art with the sole idea of serving it sincerely to the utmost measure of their ability, the result is always gratifying. Such was the case of the Moscow Theatre. Its success was tremendous. Lines formed days in advance to secure admission to the little hall; the most talented young people began to seek a chance to join the "Moscovites" in preference to the Imperial dramatic troupes. The Theatre soon developed several branches: the first, second, and third "workshops," which remained tightly 186

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associated with the parent institution, although each pushed out its artistic investigations in different directions. It also developed a special workshop in Hebrew, the Habima, in which the best producer as well as several actors were non-Jews and which achieved some amazing artistic results of its own.

One of the best actors of the Moscow Theatre was incidentally its founder and stage-director, and, I would almost add, its dictatorial head, Stanislavski, while Nemirovich remained a co-dictator and alternating stage-director.

The Theatre's outstanding successes were Chekhov's plays, Gorki's Lower Depths, and of course many other plays. But Chekhov's plays and Gorki's Lower Depths have never been removed from the lists and probably will forever be mainly connected with the name of the Theatre.

In the beginning of 1905—the year of the so-called First Revolution—the Government ordered soldiers to shoot at a large gathering of workmen who were marching with the peaceful object of presenting a petition to the Tsar. Later, it became known that the procession had in the first place been organized by a double agent, an agent provocateur, of the Government. There were a great number of people, including many children, deliberately killed in the shooting. Gorki wrote a vigorous appeal "To All Russian Citizens and to the Public Opinion of the Countries of Europe" denouncing the

"deliberate murders" and implicating the Tsar. Naturally—he was arrested.

This time protests against his arrest poured from all over Europe, from famous scientists, politicians, artists, and again the Government yielded and released him (imagine the Soviet government yielding to-day), after which he went to Moscow and openly helped prepare the Revolution, collecting funds for the purchase of arms and turning his apartment into an arsenal. Revolutionary students set up a rifle range in his lodgings and actively practised shooting.

When the Revolution failed, Gorki quietly slipped over the frontier and went to Germany, then to France, and then America.

In the United States he addressed meetings and continued to denounce the Russian government. He also wrote here his long novel, The Mother, a very second-rate production. From that time on, Gorki lived abroad, chiefly on Capri in Italy. He remained closely connected with the Russian revolutionary movement, attended revolutionary congresses abroad, and became a close friend of Lenin. In 1913 the Government proclaimed an amnesty and Gorki not only returned to Russia but published there, during the war, a big periodical of his own, Letopis' (The Chronicle).

After the Bolshevik Revolution in the fall of 1917, Gorki enjoyed considerable esteem with Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders. He also became the chief authority in literary matters. He used this authority with modesty and moderation, realizing that in many literary matters his scanty education did not allow him to impose good judgment. He also used his connections repeatedly to intercede for people who were persecuted by the new government. From 1921 to 1928 he lived again abroad, chiefly in Sorrento—partly on account of his failing health, partly because of political differences with the Soviets. In 1928 he was more or less ordered back. From 1928 to his death in 1936 he lived in Russia, edited several magazines, wrote several plays and stories, and continued to drink heavily as he had done most of his life. In June 1936 he became very ill and died in the comfortable dacha put to his use by the Soviet government. A good deal of evidence points to the fact that he died of poison administered to him by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police.

As a creative artist, Gorki is of little importance. But as a colorful phenomenon in the social structure of Russia he is not devoid of interest.

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"On the Rafts" (1895)

Let us select and examine a typical Gorki short story, for instance the one called "On the Rafts."* Consider the author's method of exposition. A certain Mitya and a certain Sergey are steering the raft across the wide and misty Volga. The owner of the raft, who is somewhere on the forward part, is heard yelling angrily, and the man Sergey mutters for the reader to hear: "Shout away! Here's your miserable devil of a son Mitya who could not break a straw across his knee and you put him to steer a raft; and then you yell so that all the river [and the reader] hears you. You were mean enough

[Sergey goes on to explain in monologue] not to take a second steersman [but make your son help me instead], so now you may shout as much as you like." These last words the author notes—and God knows how many authors have used this particular turn—these last words were growled out loud enough to be heard forward as if Sergey (the author adds) wished them to be heard (heard by the audience, we add, for this kind of exposition looks uncommonly like the opening scene of some old faded play with the valet and the maid dusting the furniture and talking about their masters).

Presently we learn from Sergey's sustained monologue that the father had first found a pretty wife for his son Mitya and then had made his daughter-in-law his mistress. Sergey, your healthy cynic, mocks poor moping Mitya and both talk at length in the rhetorical and false style which Gorki reserved for such occasions. Mitya explains that he is going to join a certain religious sect, and the depths of the good old Russian soul are forcibly conveyed to the reader. The scene shifts to the other end of the raft, and now the father is shown with his sweetheart Maria, his son's wife. He is the vigorous and colorful old man, a well-known figure in fiction. She, the alluring female, twists her body with the movement of that much quoted animal, the cat (lynx is a later variation), and leans toward her lover who proceeds to deliver a speech. We not only hear again the author's high-faluting tones, but almost see him stalking this way and that between his characters and giving them the cue. "I am a sinner, I know," the old father says. "Mitya my son is suffering I know, but is my own position a pleasant one?"—and so on. In both dialogues, the one between Mitya and Sergey, and the one between the father and Maria, the author is trying to make it all less improbable, is careful to make his characters say, as an old playwright would,

"we have talked about it more than once already," for otherwise the author might expect the reader to wonder why on earth it was necessary to place two couples on a raft in the middle of the Volga to make them talk of their conflicts. On the other hand, if the constant repetition of such conversation is accepted, one cannot help wondering whether the raft ever got anywhere. People do not talk very much when they steer in a fog across a wide and powerful river—but this, I suppose, is what is called stark realism.

Dawn breaks, and here is what Gorki manages to do in the way of nature description: "The emerald green fields along the Volga glittered with dew diamonds" (quite a jeweller's display). Meanwhile, on the raft the father suggests killing Mitya and "a mysterious charming smile plays on the woman's lips." Curtain.

We must note here that Gorki's schematic characters and the mechanical structure of the story are lined up with such dead forms as the fabliau or the moralité of medieval times. We must also note the low level of culture—what we call in Russia

"semi-intelligentsia"—which is disastrous in a writer whose essential nature is not vision and imagination (which can work wonders even if an author is not educated). But logical demonstration and a passion for reasoning require, to be successful, an intellectual scope which Gorki completely lacked. Feeling that he had to find some compensation for the poverty of his art and the chaos of his ideas, he always went after the striking subject, the contrast, the conflict, the violent and the harsh—and because what reviewers call "a powerful story" distracts the gentle reader from any true appreciation, Gorki made a strong exotic impression on his readers in Russia and then on his readers abroad. I have heard intelligent people maintain that the utterly false and sentimental story "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" is a masterpiece. These twenty-six miserable outcasts are working in an underground bakery, rough, coarse, foul-mouthed men surrounding with an almost religious adoration a young girl who comes every day for her bread—then fiercely insulting her when she is seduced by a soldier. This seemed something new, but a closer examination reveals that the story is as traditional and flat as the worst examples of the old school of sentimental and melodramatic writing. There is not a single live word in it, not a single

*

This sentence begins handwritten text on page 5 of a manuscript, beneath a deleted incomplete passage remarking Courtenay's description of Gorki's

"lurid cheap style." The preceding pages are not preserved. Ed.

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sentence that is not ready-made; it is all pink candy with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive. From here on there is but one step to so-called Soviet literature.

The conclusion of Nabokov's lecture on Gorki.

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Philistines and Philistinism

Nabokov's definition of "philistine."

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.

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A philistine is not likely to exist in a very primitive society although no doubt rudiments of philistinism may be found even there. We may imagine, for instance, a cannibal who would prefer the human head he eats to be artistically colored, just as the American philistine prefers his oranges to be painted orange, his salmon pink, and his whisky yellow. But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.