Forty Stories (3 page)

He matured quickly, and his early full-length stories published in Moscow while he was struggling with the first year of his medical course have the gay, sardonic, impudent, passionately human quality of the stories he wrote in the last years of his life. There is always the sharp cutting edge, like the bright gleam of a plow breaking through the soil. There is always laughter, and the trace of melancholy. He sets his scenes in the cloudy afternoons, or in the evenings when the lights are coming up, or in the dead of night when his characters are warming themselves over a fire. After spending the day in the anatomy laboratory, he would spend his evenings writing about the quiet villages of southern Russia and the country estates where he sometimes spent his holidays during the last years of his schooling. Gaiety and impudence keep creeping in. “The Little Apples,” written in 1880, when he was twenty, describes a landlord and a farm bailiff who discover two young peasant lovers stealing apples in an orchard; to punish them the landlord makes the boy flog the girl and the girl flog the boy. The story is not
in the least sadistic. Chekhov is amused, and only a little horrified, for the young lovers can do no harm to each other, and the landlord is a grotesque vaudeville character blundering among the windfalls. “St. Peter’s Day,” written in the following year, is an excursion into the wilder shores of lunacy, with the author bubbling with good humor as he describes a perfectly ridiculous shooting party, where nothing happens as the hunters expect it to happen, and everyone is at odds with everyone else. “Green Scythe,” written in 1882, is a more serious matter, for though it deals with the lighthearted escapades of a group of young people staying on the estate of a Georgian princess of impeccable ancestry, Chekhov for the first time created characters in three dimensions: the bullying matriarchal princess, the young and beautiful Olya, and Lieutenant Yegorov are all completely credible, and these characters, or characters very similar to them, will appear again and again in his stories. There is a sense in which “Green Scythe” is the first of his stories of character, and in its background and development it is oddly similar to “The Bride,” the story Chekhov was writing in the last year of his life. Once more we see the bullying matriarch and the beautiful daughter and the young suitors vying for her hand, but now the chill of winter has set in, the gardens are fading, and there is very little laughter.

Chekhov put himself into “Green Scythe,” and indeed he put himself into most of his stories. He is present in a surprisingly large number of them, perhaps all the more present because he was so determined to be absent. He is the boy in the shop, the keeper of goldfinches, the peasant wandering across the plain, the family doctor, the dying bishop. We see him in his various disguises, and more often than not the disguise is transparent. Very few of the current translations of Chekhov give the stories in their proper order. Once they are printed in the order of development, we become aware of the autobiographical thread running through them. Far from being the neutral observer, Chekhov was a man who portrayed himself endlessly.

But while Chekhov is abundantly present in the stories, so that we can nearly always detect one person who wanders through the story like a representative of the author, taking the author’s part, he never insists upon himself. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy continually portrayed themselves and gave themselves the more important roles. Chekhov gives himself comparatively unimportant roles. Very often he is content to watch, delighting in the people of his invention, his wit blending with his profound sympathy for his fellow men, without rancor and without remorse, hating only obsequiousness and human indignity. Early in 1879 his brother Mikhail wrote a letter which he signed: “Your worthless and insignificant little brother.” In cold fury Chekhov replied: “Do you know where you should be conscious of your worthlessness? Before God, if you please, before the human intellect, beauty, and nature, but not before people. Among people one must be conscious of one’s human dignity. You are not a swindler, but an honest fellow! Then respect the honest fellow in yourself and remember that no honest man is ever insignificant.” So he wrote when he was nineteen, and nine years later he announced his credo to his friend the poet Alexey Pleshchev: “My Holy of Holies are the human body, health, intelligence, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom from violence and lying in whatever forms they may manifest themselves.” Against human indignity, and against those who would build walls around human freedom, he waged implacable war.

Mostly he waged war with weapons of laughter and mockery, with lighthearted rapier thrusts against the pomposity and silliness of officials. In 1883 he wrote over a hundred short descriptive pieces, most of them satirical, and nearly all of them directed against officialdom. Chekhov was inclined to regard uniforms as badges of servility. He had no patience with the government clerks who were always attempting to catch the eyes of their superiors in order to humble themselves publicly and perhaps receive a promotion if they bowed deeply enough, and in “Death
of a Government Clerk” he wrote the classic story of the fawning official in the presence of an exalted and godlike superior. We are not, of course, intended to believe the story. The poor wormlike clerk is no more credible than Gogol’s Ivan Yakovlevich, who found the nose of the Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov in a loaf of bread. “Death of a Government Clerk” is a grotesque and glorious parody until we reach the last word of the story, and then quite suddenly, with shattering effect, the life of this obscure clerk, whose one offense was that he sneezed at the wrong time, comes into sharp and final focus. It is a trick which Chekhov uses often. A paragraph, a phrase, a sentence, sometimes only a word, has the effect of raising the story to another plane, one which we had never suspected and could hardly have hoped for. With that word, that paragraph, Chekhov isolates a fragment of experience and casts such a blinding light on it that the rest of the story shines in its light.

Chekhov was a conscious artist from the beginning. It amused him to say that he wrote easily, but the evidence of the surviving manuscripts suggests that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising and amending, his quick mind working hurriedly to destroy any impression of speed. A few sketches and quips written in 1883 and 1884 when he was taking his final medical examinations seem to have been dashed off in a few minutes, but generally his stories are carefully worked over. “At the Post Office,” which has almost nothing to do with a post office, is a devilishly cunning evocation of an entire social landscape in two startling pages. There is not a word too many. Those odd and wonderful creatures attending the funeral feast are outrageously funny in the same way that the government clerk is funny: they are grotesque, but they are also desperately human. These stories written while he was studying at Moscow University are often dismissed as juvenilia, and until recently they were rarely included in collections of his works. But Chekhov was not a writer who developed in a normal tentative fashion. From “The Little Apples” onward we are aware of
a constant and steady power, and a mind already formed. The light does not flicker or flare up: it is strong from the beginning.

Yet sometimes it happened that he produced in a single year so many stories of great and undeniable brilliance that he gives the impression of a man tapping unsuspected sources of strength. 1885 was the
annus mirabilis
. In that year he produced at least four masterpieces—“The Huntsman,” “The Malefactor,” “A Dead Body,” and “Sergeant Prishibeyev.” “The Huntsman” simply tells the story of a meeting along a forest pathway of a man and the wife he had discarded long ago. The man is sketched in lightly. His shoulders, his red shirt, his patched trousers, the white cap perched jauntily on the back of his head—this is all we are told, but it is enough. The woman is sketched in even more lightly. She is a pale peasant woman of thirty with a sickle in her hand. In a few pages the whole absurd, lamentable history of these people is revealed: the indifference of the husband, the yearning of the wife, the infinite spaces which separate them even when they are standing together. The wife is intoxicated with joy at the sight of her husband. In describing her happiness, Chekhov adds the simple sentence which is like the moment of truth, illuminating all that has gone before and all that comes afterward—
Ashamed of her happiness, she hid her smiles with her hand
. It is with such simple means that he succeeds in conveying a whole character. He gives us no indication of what she looked like, or what she was wearing, or what gestures she made. The color of her eyes and her hair are never mentioned. He is utterly uninterested in all the details of her physical appearance; instead, he is able to suggest the quivering life within her, and her human grandeur. At the end the husband thrusts a crumpled ruble in her hand and wanders down the forest path until his white cap is lost among the green of the trees.

Chekhov uses an astonishing economy of means. It is the same in “The Malefactor,” where the peasant Denis Grigoryev is put on trial for stealing nuts from railroad ties to use as sinkers for his fishing lines. Clearly the peasant has endangered the lives
of hundread of people traveling on the trains. Chekhov tells the story without taking sides, amused by the confrontation of the baffled peasant and the armed might of justice, uninterested as always in the political implications of his stories. Gorky relates that a lawyer made a special visit to Chekhov to determine whether Denis Grigoryev was guilty or innocent in the eyes of his creator. The lawyer made a long speech about the necessity of punishing those who damaged state property and asked Chekhov what he would have done to the prisoner if he were the judge.

“I would have acquitted him,” Chekhov replied. “I would say to him: ‘You, Denis, have not yet ripened into a deliberate criminal. Go—and ripen!’ ”

In “Sergeant Prishibeyev” Chekhov described once and for all the type of the officious prosecutor. There is no malice in the story. He laughs quietly at the besotted sergeant who is always arresting people for infractions of the rules, but even that inane sergeant is given a human dimension. There is no cracking of the whip, no flicker of hatred. In the end the sergeant became a legend, his name repeated all over Russia whenever an officious policeman or magistrate appeared, for everyone had read the story and recognized the beast when he saw it.

We can very rarely pinpoint the precise origin of a Chekhov story. The incidents which made up the story derived from ancient memories, anecdotes told to him long ago and then forgotten, the face of a girl coming across a room, the way a man stepped out of a carriage on a busy street. Chekhov was perfectly aware that he wrote out of his memories. He said: “I can only write from my memories, and I have never written directly from nature. The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical.” We know some of the memories which were later shaped into stories, and it is instructive to observe what he took from them and what he left out.

“A Dead Body,” written in the late summer of 1885, clearly
derives from an incident which took place the previous year, when Chekhov had to conduct an autopsy in an open field near the city of Voskresensk. Here is the account he wrote the same day to his friend Nikolay Leikin:

Such is Chekhov’s account in a letter which is evidently written hurriedly, but with total recall and with a purely medical fascination for the details of death. The scene is crowded, and the characters are painted in swiftly. The pond, the village, the oak tree, the policeman with the tin badge and the crowds of villagers, the local doctor and the decrepit examining magistrate, would all, it would seem, find their proper place in any story he wrote about the dead body. But what did Chekhov do? He deliberately threw away all the superficially interesting details, and reduced the scene to its simplest proportions—the dead body and the two guardians. The autopsy took place in daylight; in the story it takes place in the dead of night. The oak tree remains, but the country road becomes a path along the edge of a forest. In fact there was very little mystery about the dead peasant. Deliberately in the story Chekhov creates a mystery—the appalling mystery of a dead body lying abandoned in a field.