When high summer came Chekhov went to stay at Suvorin’s house at Feodosiya in the Crimea. The journey to Sumy and then to Kharkov (he wrote to his sister) was dull, the Crimean steppe was as dull as the tundra, but he was enchanted by the ravines, they were superb, and he said they let his imagination work in tune with Gogol’s story A Terrible Vengeance. Then he was in Sevastopol and saw the blue sea. At Feodosiya Suvorin talked too much: the subject was a play, The Wood Demon, which he wanted to write in cooperation with Chekhov. Feodosiya was a grayish, dreary little town, but the bathing was wonderful. On to the estate of Ivan Konstantinovich Ayvazovsky, a well-known marine painter who “is a combination of a general and a bishop … and a naive grandfather and an Othello.” He was a vigorous seventy-five-year-old and claimed to have known Pushkin but had never read him. “Why should I read,” he said, “if I have my own opinions.” After that Chekhov went on a dirty little cargo steamer called Dir. The sea was rough. The ship stank and during the night narrowly escaped a collision. He was seasick. A terrible night. The crew said the incompetent fat captain would wreck the ship, and the following year he did. Chekhov went on to ugly Batum, “a café-chantant sort of town,” then on to Tiflis and Baku on the Caspian, “a rotten place,” appallingly hot and stinking of kerosene, but he did see at last the superb sight of the famous Georgian Military Road, a road of “unbroken poetry, a wonderful, fantastic story written by Demon in love with Tamara.”
Suvorin was repeating his warning not to hunt after two hares and urging Chekhov to give up medicine. Chekhov replied that if he did not have his medical work he doubted if he could give his leisure to literature. ‘There is no discipline in me.” The “clinical” concern continues in the elaborate, long The Birthday Party, which follows Tolstoy’s tedious habit of underlining what the characters speak with the very different thoughts they are harboring. Chekhov borrowed this manner because of his own obsession with what he called “lying,” and in The Birthday Party he seems to be novelizing and moralizing rather than telling. We see a wife, oppressed by pregnancy, becoming jealous of her husband’s habit of charming the ladies, and especially at his birthday party. The jealousy becomes a mania of dislike. He, too, has his hidden worry. Charming, all things to all men, he is nevertheless a bad-tempered judge, who is worried because his conduct at a trial is being challenged in the High Court. Chekhov follows the tension closely and begins well. The difficulty, he said, was to deal with the middle of the story, but here he is admirable. Nimbly he takes us through the wife’s touchiness and snobbery at the party. Out in the exquisite garden there is a scene (cleverly taken from the scything scene in Anna Karenina) in which the self-important judge takes the scythe out of a young lady’s hand and shows her how to use it as it should be used. And then, by a stroke of comic genius, the story “turns.” A boating party is arranged. The husband jumps into the boat, causing it to “lurch violendy,” and takes charge. After sitting through the picnic on an island, the wife excuses herself and goes home in a carriage. That night her labor starts.
As a doctor, Chekhov was very proud of this scene, in which he records the mingling of jealousy and pain in the emotions of the woman. Ladies who read the story told him that he had exactly caught the emotional and physical sensations, the unreason and exhaustion, a woman feels. In the end the baby is stillborn and the husband and wife are facing a fact that calls them to account. When he read the story Suvorin was naïve enough to complain that Chekhov had not ended the story with the court scene, which the judge had yet to face.
In the following summer Chekhov took his family to the Lintvaryovs’ estate once more. Nikolay had caught typhoid in Moscow and his tuberculosis was reaching its final stage. Anton nursed him day and night for weeks and was himself exhausted. He sent for Alexander—their quarrel had been made up—and then went off to stay with the Smagins once more to recover. He was no sooner there than a telegram came saying that Nikolay had died. After a terrible journey, changing trains at little junctions, Anton arrived in Sumy in time to join his brothers in carrying the body in an open coffin to the cemetery on the Ukrainian estate in the traditional manner of Ukrainian funerals. “We see people die,” he had once said, “but do not think of our own death.” He could not bear to stay at Sumy and did not know where to go or what to do.
“If there were faults in Nikolay’s character,” Anton said, “he has expiated them by his sufferings.” And to Suvorin: “There’s not a kopeck’s worth of poetry left in life.”
By chance an old school friend turned up: he was a cheerful fellow who had worked with Chekhov in The Alarm Clock days. They went off to the handsome city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, where they found a group of young actresses from the Maly Theater in Moscow, who were on tour, and their frivolity distracted Chekhov. He was in and out of cafés and their rooms day and night.
“I practically wore skirts myself,” he wrote to his brother Ivan, “and am living without thinking.” He had spent nearly all his money. The girls tried to keep him, but when they saw he was determined to leave they gave him a couple of neckties—one of his minor vanities—and he left alone for one more tiring journey to “abominable Yalta.”
Chapter Seven
Only writing, then, would purge his grief, but what would he write? He had wasted time at the Lintvaryovs. He started writing A Dreary Story, and it was to become one of the longest, strangest and most powerful and self-accusing stories of his “clinical” type. It is divided into six parts. The theme springs from a growing obsession which he had often discussed with Suvorin, and perhaps a chance meeting in Yalta brought it to a head. There was a colony of writers in the resort, and one morning Chekhov was stopped in the street by a bold young girl of fifteen who addressed him by name. She wanted him to read and criticize a tale she had written. Chekhov was one of the few writers who responded to such intrusions from women. He read the story, liked it and sent it to Suvorin, who published it. For a while he wrote, encouraging her, and then the acquaintance stopped.
But—to be addressed by a stranger by name in a strange town! He had found a subject: the price of fame is that one ceases in everyone’s eyes, even in one’s own, to be “an ordinary human being who knows he will die.” This is the preoccupation of the famous professor of medicine in A Dreary Story and indeed of Chekhov himself. (Moscow gossip said that the death of a professor in the medical school was the source. This seems to have been quite untrue.)
One is bound to think of A Dreary Story as a catharsis, even from the perversity of its tide. It is a tour de force and an exemplar of the rule “When in doubt a writer should increase the difficulty.” The twenty-nine-year-old Chekhov set himself the task of projecting himself into the intimate life of a learned man of sixty-two who has an incurable disease and knows he will soon die but has revealed nothing of this to his family and friends. He is a professor of medicine and celebrated throughout Russia and Europe. He is a member of all the Russian, and three European, universities. “All that and a great deal more,” he writes, “makes up what is called my ‘name.’” It is a matter of pride that his fame eclipses his life as an “ordinary human being.” We see him writing a day-to-day diary, in the present tense and in the first person, looking back with rigid pride on his distinguished career and in the manner of a doctor recording his symptoms. Dryly—if with some vanity—he sets out his physical condition: a bald, dingy wrinkled old man with false teeth, mouth turning down at one side when he talks or lectures. He is subject to attacks of tic douloureux, the sight of which must stir “in everyone the grim and impressive thought, Evidently that man will soon die.” His memory is going, his ideas now lack sequence; the simpler the subject he writes about, the more agonizing is the effort, and he feels more at ease writing a learned article than when composing a congratulatory letter or a memorandum. He notes that he writes better in German or English than in Russian. Intellectually he is devastating. He knows he is unrepen-tantly an egotist. He still retains the belief