Forty Stories (4 page)

By deliberately cutting away the dead wood, by reducing his characters only to the essential, and by creating a mood of profound
uneasiness and disquiet, Chekhov prepared the stage for a story which is at once tragic and exceedingly comic. The comedy comes from the invention of a wandering lay brother who blunders upon the corpse and is frightened out of his wits, so frightened indeed that he dare not continue his journey in the dark unless one of the guardians accompanies him. (The lay brother may be a projection of Chekhov himself.) So Chekhov tells a story which seems at first sight to have only a remote connection with the scene he had described in the letter to Leikin, but afterward we come to realize that he has in effect told almost the same story, only now it is stripped to the bone. “The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical.”

“A Dead Body” in its final form becomes a wrily amusing fable, but not all Chekhov’s stories are amusing. “Heartache” lives up to its title, and “Vanka” is a heart-rending study of a child caught in a trap. Chekhov had a horror of cruelty, a horror closely connected with his conviction that violence and lies were sins against the Holy of Holies. Confronted by cruelty in any form, he would leap to the defense of the victim. The thought of convicts languishing forgotten on the island of Sakhalin tormented him so much that in 1890 he abandoned his medical practice and set off to make a tour of inspection of the prison camps, hoping in this way to call attention to their sufferings. He was thirty years old, but after Tolstoy he was the most famous living Russian writer. Honors had been showered on him. He had won the Pushkin Prize, and everywhere he went he was pointed out as the writer who would endure when most of the others were forgotten. He was already ill with tuberculosis when he went to the Far East, and he may have known he was signing his death warrant.

Chekhov had almost no interest in social problems; he did not go to the Far East to test any social theories, and he kept apart from the radicalism of his age. He had no messianic belief in the healing power of flames or firing squads, and he loathed the
thought of a revolution overwhelming Russia. For most of his working life his greatest friend was his publisher, Alexey Suvorin, a former serf who had raised himself by intelligence and business sense to a commanding position in the world of publishing, owning newspapers, magazines, and printing houses. Suvorin had “a devilish literary scent”; he had been the friend and publisher of Dostoyevsky; he knew everybody of importance, and he remained oddly humble. Chekhov liked him as a man in spite of his reactionary sympathies, and went on liking him until they quarreled over the Dreyfus case. Chekhov could not understand why anyone should defend those who cruelly abused Dreyfus, and Suvorin could not understand why Chekhov could be so foolish as to defend a lost cause.

It would seem that all the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century were defending lost causes. The cause which Chekhov defended was perhaps the most precarious of all, for he defended the ordinary humors and frailties of ordinary men. He rarely wrote about exceptional people. His men and women are of the earth, earthy, and usually they desire nothing more than to be left in peace. There are no Fyodor Karamazovs saturated with hate, no Anna Kareninas endlessly communing with their consciences; there are no violent intrigues, almost no dramas. There is life endlessly renewing itself, the bright rings of a tree, and there is the figure of a man walking in majesty down a lonely road.

Tolstoy said that Chekhov would have been a better writer if he had not been so good a doctor. Chekhov himself regarded his medical training as the salvation of himself as a writer, for medicine gave him an intimate contact with people he would otherwise never have known. Even when, after his return from the Far East, he settled down on a small country estate at Melikhovo with the surviving members of his family, he was
unable to escape from medicine. He built a clinic and attended the peasants from miles around, usually forgetting to charge them any fees. He threw himself into a plan for building more clinics in Moscow. 1891, the year of the great famine, found him traveling in western Europe, but immediately on his return to Russia, when he realized the extent of the suffering in the famine-stricken provinces, he was away again, organizing relief, pouring his time, his money, and his affection on those who were suffering wherever he found them. There was something in him of the dedicated priest. He was continually coughing up blood, continually wracked by hemorrhoids, but he accounted his sufferings a small price to pay for the honor of being a human being shaped in the likeness of God. It was a phrase which was often on his lips, and often encountered in his stories.

He was changing a little. He had grown a full beard, and there was a grayness about his face which sometimes startled his friends. Two heavy vertical lines of worry appeared on his forehead. But the humor shone through, and his eyes crinkled with amusement, and his deep voice, very soft and musical and curiously veiled with hoarseness, would explode in ringing laughter whenever he heard or told a good story. He was as gregarious as ever, inviting hordes of friends to stay with him on the estate, taking part in charades, and playing practical jokes; and then he would be off again, traveling from village to village in a broken-down carriage, curing bodies and healing souls, driving himself so furiously that, as he once complained, he had become a kind of cupboard which was falling apart.

There was gaiety in Chekhov always, but there was also despair—the despair of a man who could no longer conceal from himself the knowledge that he was dying at an absurdly early age. The intensity of his despair was equaled only by the intensity of his gaiety.

Among the surviving fragments of Chekhov’s notebooks there are some lines of a play he once contemplated on the life of Solomon. He speaks about the play very briefly in his letters, but
whether it was to be a full-length play or simply a monologue is never made clear, and perhaps Chekhov himself never really knew. All we have is the fragment which seems to have been written in his heart’s blood on one of those long nights when he suffered from insomnia and gave himself up to despair. He wrote:

Nowhere else in Chekhov’s notebooks is there any passage comparable with this in its fierce elegiac beauty. It is a passage of sustained eloquence, the words ringing like iron on stone, and though the subject is the futility of life on earth, the prose moves
with a kind of urgency which is itself a denial of futility. Writing this, Chekhov is like a man hurled back by the horror he has seen, but a moment later he catches his breath and sings a song in honor of the dying world. He is writing about himself, his own vision and his own fears, and he is himself the “mere workman” who wearies himself unendurably by carrying marble to the Temple.

Here and there in Chekhov’s notebooks we find equally disturbing fragments. Usually they are short and spare, and seem to have been dashed off at night in the intervals of nightmares. “Perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster,” he wrote once. On another page he wrote: “Russia is an enormous plain over which wander mischievous men,” a statement which is harmless enough until we remember that he also wrote in a letter to a friend: “I am a sort of Potemkin who appears from the depths of devastation.” There was savagery in him, and he knew it. He was far from being the gentle ironist. Like Dostoyevsky, he was one of those who believe that man is a mystery which needs to be solved “even if you pass your entire life solving it.” “I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man,” Dostoyevsky wrote, and there is little doubt that Chekhov occupied himself with the mystery for the same reason.

The “Solomon” fragment stands alone in the notebooks, but that peculiar tone, that ringing elegiac music soaring triumphantly over the chasms of futility, can be heard again in many of his stories. We hear it at the end of “Gusev,” where an old soldier dies at sea and his body is tossed overboard with hardly more ceremony than if he were a dead fish, and suddenly Chekhov summons a full orcestra to describe the perfect majesty of sunset as it impassively offers its benediction on the dead soldier. It is a passage very close in feeling and texture to the concluding words of Melville’s
Billy Budd
, written in the same year. Such passages are marked by an intensity which betrays the author’s deepest feelings, and usually they come at the very
end of a story with a sudden flowering into another and more permanent world, into another dispensation of time altogether. When Billy Budd is lifted into the rosy dawn light, he is utterly transformed, and his death is an intimation of immortality: he becomes the accomplice of the serene and beautiful heavens. So it is with the dead soldier in Chekhov’s story, as the indifferent heavens gaze down on him.

We know how the story “Gusev” came to him from a wonderful letter he wrote on his return from the Far East:

In this extraordinary letter written to his friend Suvorin, a man whom Lenin later characterized as “the running dog of the Tzar,” Chekhov came closer than ever again to defining his ultimate beliefs. His attitude toward life was poetic and practical, as a child is poetic and practical, but at the same time he spoke with a strange authority which came from his vast knowledge of suffering. Sometimes he seems to be talking like those old peasants who sit round the campfires in his stories, but his voice remained young and vibrant to the end.

His last years were spent at Yalta in the white house he built facing the sea. He had mellowed a little, and the stories tended to become longer and slower, as though he took even greater enjoyment in mulling them over, sipping them like wine. Now at last he could afford to write without any sense of being dogged by time. For fifteen years he had been dreaming of writing “The Bishop,” and in March 1901 he began writing it, but it was not finished until a year later. It is one of the most autobiographical of his stories, though he liked to say that it came about after he had seen a photograph of a certain Bishop Mikhail Gribanovsky in a bookshop in Yalta. He bought the picture, made a few discreet inquiries about the bishop’s life, and sat down to write the story. But in fact the photograph was no more than the catalytic agent. In the portrait of the dying bishop he painted himself.

“The Bishop,” “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” and “The Bride” were all written in Yalta. There is no falling off of
strength: there is the same calm, the same mastery, the same flickering gaiety. But what is especially noticeable is that the language has been stripped bare of ornaments: in those last stories he writes close to the bone.

Once in “Gusev” Chekhov spoke of “the huge bull without eyes,” the ultimate horror, the symbol of all that was confused and terrible and final in life. Unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, he showed no rage, no presumptuousness: he would confront the evil calmly, gaily, refusing to be overwhelmed by it, remembering always that his first task was to celebrate life, celebrating it all the more fervently because so little life remained in him.