The lady gets ready to leave. She thinks about secretly slipping money into his pocket but then goes off on her sleigh. She has been dangerously under his spell.
Not only in her heart but even in her spine she felt that behind her stood an infinitely unhappy man, lost and outcast.
Likharyov watches her settle into her sleigh and drive off.
She looked back at Likharyov as though she wanted to say something to him. He ran up to her but she said nothing to him, she only looked at him through her long eyelashes with little specks of snow on them.
That is all.
The Kiselevs admired the story. They saw that it would make a remarkable one-act play, but they knew the censor would never allow the sight of a gentlewoman spending the night at a remote inn, however innocently, with a man she did not know. That scene must go. Chekhov saw a full-length play in the traveler’s past, and On the Road is the source of his first long play, Ivanov. Likharyov is now Ivanov. We see him on his estate, married to a Jewish wife, who has been disinherited by her rich parents and who is now dying. His bailiff has been robbing him for years and he is ruined: worse—while waiting for his wife to the he has taken up with an “advanced” young girl, whom he plans to marry. The only objection to the marriage comes from a Dr. Lvov, who is disgusted by Ivanov’s cynicism and publicly denounces him. But Ivanov is also trapped by his dishonest bailiff, who is perpetrating a fraud, and his master has been too weak to sack him. The question is: Will Ivanov be base enough, fool enough and weak enough to marry the young girl the moment the unloved wife dies?
The play made an impression in St. Petersburg chiefly because it was played by rhetorical actors of the old school, who stormed through it, treating it as a melodrama, for at the end Ivanov is driven to shoot himself on the morning of his wedding day: they turned Ivanov into a villain and Dr. Lvov into his righteous judge. Suvorin thought they were right, and indeed at first glance we shall more than half agree with him, but in his letters to Suvorin, Chekhov gives a far more interesting and convincing account of his intentions. Ivanov, he says, was not a monster:
His past is beautiful…. There is not, or there hardly is, a single Russian gendeman or University man who does not boast of his past. The present is always worse than the past. Why? Because Russian excitability has one specific characteristic: it is quickly followed by exhaustion…. [He feels] only an indefinite feeling of guilt. It is a Russian feeling. Whether there is a death or illness in his family, whether he owes money or lends it, a Russian always feels guilty…. [Ivanov says:] “My thoughts are in a tangle, my soul is in bondage to a sort of sloth, and I am incapable of understanding myself.” … To exhaustion, boredom, and the feeling of guilt add one more enemy: loneliness.
The case against Ivanov is made by the young puritanic Dr. Lvov. Is Lvov right? Chekhov replies to Suvorin that the doctor
is the type of an honest, straightforward, hotheaded, but narrow and uncompromising man…. Anything like breadth of outlook or spontaneous feeling is foreign to Lvov. He is cliché incarnate, bigotry on two feet … he judges everything prejudicially. He worships those who shout, “Make way for honest labor!” Those who don’t are scoundrels and exploiters…. When he reads [Turgenev’s] Rudin he just has to ask himself “Is Rudin a scoundrel or not?” … Lvov is honest. … If need be, he will bomb a carriage, slap a school inspector’s face…. He never feels conscience pangs—it is his mission as “an honest toiler” to destroy “the powers of darkness.”
What about Ivanov’s dying wife? She loves him so long as he is excited, because his enthusiasm is brilliant and he is as heated as Lvov is. But when Ivanov grows misty to her she cannot understand him and will soon turn on him. The young girl to whom Ivanov turns is the latest example of the “educated woman.” What attracts her is the duty of rescuing Ivanov from his depression and putting him on his feet and making him happy.
The most interesting critical comment on Ivanov will be found in Ronald Hingley’s book on Chekhov. Hingley turned to a Russian source, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s History of the Russian Intelligentsia, which says that, as a doctor, Chekhov was making a medical study of Ivanovo “neurasthenia”; the play is “a medical tragedy.”
There are burly, ignoble and shameless characters in the play, especially the bailiff, Borkin, who has cynically exploited Ivanov’s weaknesses. Like other landowners, Ivanov is always in debt. Borkin, who has robbed him, invites him to recoup by swindling. He suggests, for example, that Ivanov should buy the opposite bank of the river, beyond the boundary of his estate. This will give him the right to dam the river and build a mill, which will bankrupt the factories below the dam. The owners will have to bribe him handsomely to prevent the scheme. (Everyone knows what Borkin once bought up herds of cattle during an epidemic, insured them, then infected them and collected the insurance.) When Lvov calls Ivanov a scoundrel, it is either fatal to his tottering brain or stimulates him to a new paroxysm, and in shooting himself, he sentences himself.
Chapter Five
Although Suvorin had freed Chekhov from the need to live as a facile popular hack, Chekhov’s emergence was not sudden. Life in Moscow was expensive and the demands of what he called his “abnormal family,” of which he had appointed himself the head, were heavy and Moscow was bad for his health. His two younger brothers were settling into decent jobs; his sister was dedicated to her teaching career, but Nikolay had given up painting and become a drunken vagrant. In a famous letter Chekhov became a kind of Dr. Lvov, lectured Nikolay item by item on the behavior one must follow if one was to be regarded as a “cultured man.” Alexander, the eldest of the brothers, who had introduced Chekhov to the comic magazines, had given up writing and had drifted into a minor job as a customs official, which he soon lost, and was living in careless squalor with a common-law wife in St. Petersburg. Early in March 1887 Chekhov found an hysterical telegram from Alexander saying there was a typhus epidemic and that he and his wife were dying of it, and begging Anton to save them. Anton himself had had a hemorrhage recently but he traveled third class in the train, coughing over the bad cigarettes he smoked, and arrived to find Alexander perfectly well but hysterical in a filthy flat. Only his wife was ill, and not with typhus. Anton treated her and she recovered. Alexander was in fact even deeper in drink than Nikolay and was chasing another woman. He had the nerve to demand that Anton take his children off his hands and look after them in Moscow.
In any crisis Chekhov’s instinct was to get away. He was in any case an instinctive nomad. He went to see Suvorin. He told him that he wanted to go to the south, to the scene of his childhood, and write a novel. Suvorin at once advanced the money. Chekhov was to pass through detestable Taganrog, but he was returning not to the memories of his father’s shop, where he had been abandoned as a schoolboy, but to his genial uncle Mitrofan and the nearby country of the Donets steppe, where he would be free and happy. We are alarmed to hear that he had the idea of making this place the background of a topical novel on the theme of the wave of child suicides that was sweeping across Russia. He wrote:
Russian life bashes the Russian till you have to scrape him off the floor, like a twenty-ton rock. In Western Europe people perish because life is too crowded and close; in Russia they perish because it is too spacious….
That spaciousness he was now seeking in the steppe. It strikes us that he would be making one of those returns to the source of his imagination in childhood which have so often revived the gifts of harassed writers. Chekhov split Suvorin’s money, leaving half to his sister for the family, and in April 1887 set off by train.