ANTON CHEKHOV
A Russian Affair
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First published in The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896–1904, 2002
This selection published in Penguin Books 2007
Translation copyright © Ronald Wilks 1982, 1986, 2002
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196396-9
Contents
1 About Love
2 The House with the Mezzanine
3 A Visit to Friends
4 Ionych
5 The Lady with the Little Dog
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) was born in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 he went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. His most famous stories were written after his return from the convict island of Sakhalin, which he visited in 1890. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote very few stories during the last years of his life, devoting most of his time to a thorough revision of the stories, of which the first comprehensive edition was published in 1899–1901, and to the writing of his great plays. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre. He died of consumption in 1904.
About Love
They had delicious pies, crayfish and mutton chops for lunch, and during the meal Nikanor, the cook, came upstairs to inquire what the guests would like for dinner. He was a man of medium height, puffy-faced and with small eyes. He was so close-shaven his whiskers seemed to have been plucked out and not cut off with a razor.
Alyokhin told his guests that the beautiful Pelageya was in love with the cook. However, since he was a drunkard and a brawler, she didn’t want to marry him; but she did not object to ‘living’ with him, as they say. He was a very devout Christian, however, and his religious convictions would not allow him to ‘set up house’ with her. So he insisted on marriage and would not hear of anything else. He cursed her when he was drunk and even beat her. When he was like this, she would hide upstairs and sob, and then Alyokhin and his servants would not leave the house in case she needed protecting. They began to talk about love.
Alyokhin started: ‘What makes people fall in love and why couldn’t Pelageya fall for someone else, someone more suited to her mentally and physically, instead of that ugly-mug Nikanor (everyone round here calls him ugly-mug), since personal happiness is so important in love? It’s a mystery, and you can interpret it which way you like. Only one indisputable truth has been said about love up to now, that it’s a “tremendous mystery”, and everything else that’s been written or said about it has never provided an answer and is just a reformulation of problems that have always remained unsolved. One theory that might, on the face of it, explain one case, won’t explain a dozen others. Therefore, in my opinion, the best way is to treat each case individually, without making generalizations. In doctors’ jargon, you have to “isolate” each case.’
‘Absolutely true,’ Burkin said.
‘Decent Russians like ourselves have a passion for problems that have never been solved. Usually, love is poeticized, beautified with roses and nightingales, but we Russians have to flavour it with the “eternal problems” – and we choose the most boring ones at that.
‘When I was still studying in Moscow I had a “friend”, a dear lady who’d be wondering how much I’d allow her every month and how much a pound of beef was while I held her close. And we never stop asking ourselves questions when we love: is it honourable or dishonourable, clever or stupid, how will it all end, and so on. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know, but I do know that it cramps your style, doesn’t provide any satisfaction and gets on your nerves.’
It looked as if he wanted to tell us a story. It’s always the same with people living on their own – they have something that they are only too pleased to get off their chests. Bachelors living in town go to the public baths and restaurants just to talk to someone, and sometimes they tell the bath attendants or waiters some very interesting stories. Out in the country they normally pour out their hearts to their guests. Through the windows we could only see grey skies now and trees dripping with rain – in this kind of weather there was really nowhere to go and nothing else to do except listen to stories.
‘I’ve been living and farming in Sofino for quite a long time now – since I left university, in fact,’ Alyokhin began. ‘I was never brought up to do physical work and I’m an “armchair” type by inclination. When I first came to this estate they were up to their eyes in debts. But since my father had run up these debts partly through spending so much on my education, I decided to stay and work on the estate until the debts were paid off. That was my decision and I started working here – not without a certain degree of aversion, I must confess. The soil’s not very fertile round here, and to avoid farming at a loss you have to rely on serfs or hire farm labourers, which more or less comes to the same thing. Or else you have to run your own estate peasant-style, which means you yourself and all your family have to slave away in the fields. There’s no two ways about it. But then I didn’t have time for subtleties: I didn’t leave a square inch of soil unturned, I rounded up all the peasants and their wives from neighbouring villages and we all worked like mad. I did the ploughing, sowing and reaping myself, which was a terrible bore and it made me screw my face up in disgust, like the starving village cat forced to eat cucumbers in some kitchen garden. I was all aches and pains and I’d fall asleep standing up. From the very beginning I thought that I’d have no trouble at all combining this life of slavery with my cultural activities. All I had to do, so I thought, was keep to some settled routine. So I installed myself in the best rooms up here, had coffee and liqueurs after lunch and dinner, and took the European Herald with me to bed. But our parish priest, Father Ivan, turned up and polished off all my liqueurs at one sitting. And the European Herald ended up with his daughters, since during the summer, especially when we were harvesting, I never made it to my own bed but had to sleep in a barn, on a sledge, or in a woodman’s hut somewhere, so what time was there for reading? Gradually I moved downstairs, had meals with the servants – they were all that was left of my earlier life of luxury – the same servants who had waited on my father and whom I did not have the heart to dismiss.