Forty Stories (2 page)

Chekhov was
l’homme moyen sensuel
raised to the level of genius. He worked prodigiously hard at his medical practice and over his stories and plays, but even at the moments of greatest tension good humor kept creeping in. Everything about him was phenomenal—his charm, his courage, his capacity for work, his thirst for experience—but what he prized most was his ordinary humanity. He enjoyed and often celebrated the animal pleasures of life, and he was something of a connoisseur of wine and women. He had his first sexual experience at thirteen, and this love affair was followed by countless others. The legend of the remote, detached analyst of the human soul with a faintly ironical smile dies hard, and is not yet dead. The Braz portrait and some of the later photographs showing him in the throes of consumption, white as a sheet, with his coat buttoned to the neck, have helped to give credence to the legend. But those who knew him best remember his stupendous gaiety.

Even today, nearly sixty years after his death, there are still a handful of people who can remember him. A Russian now living in New York remembers meeting him as a boy in Yalta. “Chekhov was always cracking jokes,” he said recently. “He was an actor, a clown. He would sweep off his pince-nez and gaze at you with a quizzical expression, telling you some perfectly impossible story with a straight face. He had a habit of walking with one arm curled round his back, pretending to be very old and tired, and very sad, and then he would straighten up and howl with laughter. In those days he was very ill, and his voice was the hoarse voice of a consumptive, but you soon forgot his illness. And what an actor he was! He could do the most extraordinary things with his pince-nez. He used them as actors use props. He was always sweeping them on and sweeping them off. He looked so young without them, and so old when they were on, that it was
like seeing two different people. He would look down on me from his immense height, and I had the feeling that all his attention, all his humor, all his kindness, were being given to me.”

In the hot summer of 1904 Chekhov, accompanied by his actress wife, arrived in the German watering place of Badenweiler. He was already dying, but he was in good spirits. He sent off gay messages to his friends, telling them how delighted he was with the small villa where he was staying, and how he was looking forward to a trip to Italy, a country he had loved ever since he had journeyed through it after his return from the Far East. And then after Italy there would be a leisurely cruise through the Mediterranean, and so to the Black Sea and his house in Yalta. At seven o’clock on the evening of July 1 the dinner bell rang, but for some reason neither Chekhov nor his wife heard it. A few minutes later, when they realized their mistake, Chekhov characteristically invented a story on the theme of the unheard dinner bell.

The story he told concerned a fashionable watering place full of fat, well-fed bankers and ruddy-faced Englishmen and Americans, all of them hurrying back to dinner from their sight-seeing expeditions in the country, all of them exuding animal vigor and thinking only of their stomachs. But when they arrived at the hotel, there was no dinner bell, for there was no supper—the cook had fled. Then, gaily and happily, Chekhov went on to describe all those pampered visitors as they confronted the awful fact that there would be no supper. He described their horror, their stratagems, their mounting impatience, and he told the story kindly, as he had told so many similar stories in the past. His wife sat curled up on a sofa, laughing as one comic invention followed on another. He died shortly after midnight, falling suddenly on his side, and it was observed that in death he looked very young, contented, and almost happy. Through the wide windows the wind brought the scent of new-mown hay, and later into the terrible stillness of the night there came, like a
messenger from another world, a huge black moth which burst into the room like a whirlwind and kept beating its wings madly against the electric lights.

The funeral took place a week later in Moscow. Gorky and others have related the strange circumstances of the funeral, usually with bitterness. They tell how the body arrived in Moscow in a freight train labeled with the words F
OR
O
YSTERS
in large letters, and how part of the crowd waiting for Chekhov followed the coffin of General Keller, who had been brought from Manchuria, and they were a little surprised that Chekhov was being buried with full military honors. When the confusion was straightened out, a sad little procession of about a hundred people accompanied Chekhov’s coffin to the Novodevichy Cemetery through the heat and dust of a Moscow summer. “I recall particularly two lawyers,” wrote Gorky. “They were both wearing new boots and spotted neckties, and I heard one of them discoursing on the intelligence of dogs and the other on the comforts of his country home and the beauty of the landscape all round it. Then there was a lady in a lilac dress with a lace-fringed umbrella who was trying to convince an old gentleman in large spectacles about the merits of the deceased. ‘Ah, he was so wonderfully charming, and so witty,’ she said, while the old gentleman coughed incredulously. At the head of the procession a big, fat policeman rode majestically on a fat white horse. It all seemed cruelly common and vulgar, and quite incompatible with the memory of a great and subtle artist.”

But was it so incompatible? Chekhov laughed gaily throughout his life, and he would have laughed at the human absurdities which accompanied his funeral. F
OR
O
YSTERS
would have pleased him, and it would have delighted him that he should have been mistaken for General Keller, and he would have listened entranced to all the inane conversations of the people following the coffin, and it would have rejoiced his heart to see the fat policeman on the fat horse. He would have swept off his pince-nez, thrown back his head, and hooted with joy when he
discovered that he was being buried next to “the Cossack widow Olga Kookaretnikov,” a name as improbable as any he invented in his stories. Chekhov loved the absurd, and he loved all the splendors and inanities of the human condition.

Chekhov was born on January 16, 1860, a year before the freeing of the serfs. He was the son of a man born into slavery, and would himself have been born a serf if it had not been that his grandfather, who managed the vast Chertkov estates, was able to buy his freedom for 3,500 rubles. Chekhov’s father was a heavy-set, deeply religious man, with a talent for painting icons and violin playing, who made his living as a grocer in the small seaport town of Taganrog. At home the father was gruff and unbending, a stern disciplinarian, loving his children but keeping at a distance from them. Chekhov’s mother was the daughter of a cloth merchant, a quiet, beautiful woman, very gentle with the six children, five boys and a girl, born of the marriage. She made all the children’s clothes, and she liked to tell them stories of the days when she traveled with her father in a carriage over the length and breadth of Russia. She had a deep feeling for the Russian countryside, and for people. Chekhov inherited from her his tenderness and sweetness of character, and from his father he inherited his artistic gifts and a formidable capacity for hard work and a kind of stubbornness which enabled him to overcome any obstacles in his path. He had his father’s forehead and eyes, and his mother’s mouth and chin. And they said that in his way of walking and talking he was most like his grandfather, the estate manager who pulled himself out of slavery.

In later years Chekhov would often talk of his childhood, which was neither happy nor unhappy, but curiously somber. Life revolved around the shop and the church. Outside the shop a sign announced in gold letters: “Tea, coffee, soap, sausage, and other colonial products are sold here.” The “colonial products”
referred to imports from Turkey—Turkish delight, halva, and dried currants—but in fact the shop sold very nearly every kind of grocery: herbs, dried fish, macaroni, olive oil, vodka, wine, beer, small packets of tea: everything in fact except livestock. Herring swam in barrels of pickling brine. In summer there were flies everywhere, and in winter it was strangely dark and menacing. As soon as he could walk Chekhov had to help out. He hated the long hours and the beatings he received from his father when he was inattentive, but it was in this dark and squalid room, with its overwhelming smell of fish, with strings of peppers and sweetmeats hanging from the roof, with the sacks of flour and meal crowding the wall, and the religious medallions sold to pilgrims glinting in the candlelight, that Chekhov came in contact with men and women of all classes, seeing them pass in an endless procession through the shop as later they were to pass through his stories. He came to know their faces, their smells, the way they dressed and quarreled and haggled and got drunk, and very early in his life, employing the defense mechanism of sensitive children everywhere, he learned to mimic them. Deeply impressed on his imagination were the faces and characters of two or three hundred Russian types.

There was a Greek colony in Taganrog, and for some reason he was sent to the local Greek school, where he learned Latin and ancient Greek, and modern Greek well enough to speak it, but he showed no particular brilliance in his studies. There was talk of sending him later to Athens University, but nothing came of it. Chekhov’s father seems to have had little business sense, and when the family finances became increasingly precarious, there occurred a marked change in the character of the shopkeeper. He became more obsequious to the Greek merchants and began writing begging letters to important dignitaries; and from being a father he became a toadying, wheedling shopkeeper with a reverence for uniforms and an incapacity to think of anything except money. With disgust and fury Chekhov watched his father decline into a kind of senility.

Meanwhile the boy was developing his gifts of mimicry and acting. One day, dressed as a beggar, he walked through the streets of Taganrog and entered the house of his uncle Mitrofan, who failed to penetrate his disguise and gave him three kopecks. This success elated him. Thereafter he began to think seriously of a life as an actor, or perhaps as a clown in one of the traveling circuses. He wrote sketches and plays and acted them out in a barn with his brothers and his sister, taking the part of a bishop or a pompous official or a bearded professor delivering a ludicrous and incomprehensible lecture. He adored false beards and mustaches, and he fell hopelessly in love with the stage when he was thirteen and attended a production of Offenbach’s
La Belle Hélène
at the local theater. He was also developing as a writer, and stories written when he was twelve show him already in full command of the Russian language, with a style as direct and simple as the works of his maturity. He edited the family magazine, which he characteristically called
The Stammerer.
Many of the stories and sketches written in his early teens were later reworked—“Surgery,” one of the most famous of his early stories, was a reworking of some clownish nonsense performed when he was scarcely more than ten years old, with Chekhov himself playing the role of a dentist extracting with a pair of tongs an enormous tooth, made of cork, from his brother’s mouth.

Many of Chekhov’s stories are quips, jokes,
boutades
, which can be traced back to the events of his childhood and the days when he was studying medicine. When the stories were printed in book form, he usually omitted the slighter anecdotes, but a surprisingly large amount of purely anecdotal material was retained, perhaps because these casual stories represented an important element in his character. He was happy in his impudence. He reveled in telling stories which are not very far removed from “shaggy dog” stories, and he especially enjoyed farce. He would tell a story about a visit to a graveyard, joking prodigiously, and while still laughing he would suddenly unfold a landscape where the laughter mysteriously changes, becomes
frozen, dies on a clap of thunder, but before the story was over he would be laughing again. The great comedians laugh
for the sake of
tragedy, and Chekhov was of their number. How he would have laughed at Charlie Chaplin!

True comedians can usually be recognized by their tragic air, but there was nothing in the least tragic about Chekhov’s life until he contracted tuberculosis. Though he raged against his father, and remembered with painful accuracy every whipping he received, his childhood was immensely satisfying. He grew up tall and straight, handsome and popular, with a gift for telling stories to admiring schoolboys and schoolgirls. He enjoyed a succession of love affairs, including one with the wife of a teacher, and he remembered later that these love affairs were all “happy and gay.” He was growing quickly, too quickly for his strength. Once he dived into the sea and cut his head on a rock, and the scar remained for the rest of his life. He was fifteen when he caught a chill while bathing, and peritonitis set in. For a few days his life was despaired of. A German doctor who attended him during his convalescence told him about a doctor’s life; and from wanting to be a clown he changed direction and determined to be a doctor. A few words from an obscure German doctor changed his whole life.

In the following year his father’s business, which had been failing for many years, suddenly collapsed, and the father fled to Moscow to escape a debtors’ prison. The two older brothers were already in Moscow before the collapse. Chekhov remained in Taganrog to finish his schooling. He was perfectly cheerful, and perhaps glad to be alone. Earning a pittance from tutoring, he sent every ruble he could spare to Moscow, and with the money went letters full of jokes to keep them amused. He made some extra money by capturing goldfinches and selling them in the market. Soon he was making money by selling short sketches to the newspapers. Long before he left school and enrolled in the faculty of medicine at Moscow University, his writing career had begun.

Most of the early sketches are lost, hidden in obscure newspapers under a baffling array of pseudonyms. He continued to write as a medical student, and he continued to invent more and more pseudonyms depending on his mood at the moment. A teacher in Taganrog had given him the name of Antosha Chekhonte, and this name with its variations (A. Ch-te, Anche, A. Chekhonte) was largely reserved for the stories which gave him the greatest pleasure. He signed lesser stories with sardonic descriptions of himself—Blockhead, A Man Without a Spleen, My Brother’s Brother, A Quick-Tempered Man, A Prosaic Poet, A Doctor Without Patients, Ulysses, Starling. About thirty pseudonyms are known, and there are perhaps thirty more which remain to be discovered. He was writing stories nearly every day to pay for his tuition fees and to provide for his family, which soon came to accept him as its perennial benefactor, and since Chekhov was the soul of generosity, he accepted the burden of providing for them with astonishing gaiety.