On one of them I recognize the handwriting of Mikhail [the philologist] and accidentally read a bit of a word: “passionat….”
Clearly she is going to meet the philologist and this is her last appeal to the professor to tell her if she is right or wrong. In his account of this meeting the professor is powerless to make up his mind. He evades.
The absence of what my colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her life!
All he can think of doing is to ask her to lunch. She recognizes the finality of his words and all he is able to think of saying is ‘Then, you won’t be at my funeral?”
He watches her leave the room. The great “name” is powerless as a human being. He knows she has gone for good and he writes: “I’ve seen her black dress for the last time…. Farewell, my treasure!”
Many critics thought this story as remorselessly objective as Tolstoy’s masterpiece Ivan Ilyich, about the great lawyer who knows he is dying. That resemblance is superficial. There were minor criticisms. His friend Pleshcheyev said the professor ought to have said more about Katya’s “husband.” Chekhov replied that
the professor could not write about Katya’s husband because [she herself] does not say anything about him; besides one of my hero’s chief characteristics is that he cares far too little about the inner life of those who surround him.
Many critics accused Chekhov of concealing, or at least being blind to, the unconscious erotic element in the relations of the old professor and Katya—a modern novelist would have made this central. Here Chekhov was indignant; if people, he wrote,
lose belief in the friendship, respect and boundless love which exist outside the sphere of sex, at least they should not attribute bad taste to me. If Katya were in love with an old man barely alive you must agree it would be a sexual perversion. … If there had been nothing more than this sexual perversion, would it have been worthwhile to write the story?
Some complained that he had not given the professor’s wife and daughter an inner life of their own, but Chekhov made the point that the egotistical professor was writing his own story and was absorbed in himself only and “had ceased to be sensitive to the family’s feelings.” In fact by masochistic indirection the professor has made us intimately aware of the family. Even in his anger about the “medievalism” of the mother and daughter we see that the professor is too self-centered to understand what is clear to us—that they are “ordinary human beings” who know their own minds, while he generalizes.
Of course the professor contains a good deal of Chekhov himself. The “lack of a central idea” haunted him as he wrote this intensely controlled story which projects so much of his own state of mind at this time. We notice how carefully his prose captures the professor’s academic manner and how he sustains a moral diagnosis without losing the natural grace of the artist. The story is like some stern gravestone which records the public figure and in which at the same time, between the engraved lines, we detect the fitful human being. Under the surface of Chekhov’s impressionism there is firm psychological architecture. After this story he will no longer be a moralizing Tolstoyan. As many critics have noticed, Chekhov is at the point of impasse. He has isolated himself.
Chapter Eight
SAKHALIN
Although friends of Chekhov had heard him say that he saw no difficulty in chasing two or even more hares at the same time, they were alarmed when, in 1890, the news leaked out that he was planning to travel across Russia and Asia to the Russian penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, Russia’s notorious Botany Bay in the Far East. The nomad had been reborn. When he asked Suvorin to back him, Suvorin refused. That hare, Suvorin said, had died more than a generation ago. Even the story of Manon Lescaut was dead. Chekhov’s duty was to literature, not to documentary investigation. And in any case, there was no trans-Siberian railway; the appalling land journey through barbarous country would kill him. Stirred by opposition and anxious to refute both his liberal and radical critics, who accused him of lacking “a general political idea,” Chekhov fought back.
Sakhalin can be useless and uninteresting only to a society which does not exile thousands of people to it…. we have sent millions of men to rot in prison, have destroyed them—casually without thinking, barbarously … have depraved them, have multiplied criminals, and the blame for all this we have thrown upon the gaolers and red-nosed superintendents. Now all educated Europe knows that it is not the superintendents that are to blame, but all of us…. The vaunted [political idealists of the] sixties did nothing for the sick and for prisoners, so breaking the chief commandment of Christian civilization.
When Mikhail Chekhov was asked what had put the idea into his brother’s head, he said it was an accident: Anton had happened to read a penal document lying about in an office. In Petersburg the gossip was that he wanted to go in order to recover from an unhappy love affair with a married woman, Lydia Avilova, a sentimental novelist. This is certainly untrue. After his death she wrote Chekhov in My Life, which has been shown to be a wishful illusion. More interestingly, when he had graduated as a doctor he had not written his dissertation, and the desire to make amends by writing a serious medical document that would qualify him was strong. Indeed on his return from Sakhalin he did submit a manuscript to the university, where it was at once rejected as unacademic.
There is no doubt that Chekhov felt he had the “duty of repaying my debt to medicine.” But it is very important also that ever since his boyhood he had been a passionate reader of the journeys of Przhevalsky, the greatest of Russian explorers, and had read Humboldt’s journey across the steppe and George Kennan’s famous expedition to Siberia. More intimately human are his words to a friend, the writer Ivan Shcheglov, who supposed, naturally, that Chekhov was going simply to observe and “get impressions.” Chekhov replied that he was going “simply to be able to live for half a year as I have not lived up to this time. Don’t expect anything from me.”
Suvorin gave in. Chekhov got his sister, his brother Alexander and friends to do exhaustive research for him in Petersburg. Among other responsibilities he had to see that his family had enough money to live on while he was away. He described his own state of excitement medically: “It’s a form of lunacy: Mania Sakhalinosa.”
He set off at last late in April 1890 on a four-thousand-mile journey that would last over three months. He had been spitting blood that winter. His sister and a few friends saw him off on the river steamer at Yaroslavl. He was equipped with a heavy leather coat and a short one, top boots, a bottle of cognac, a knife “useful for cutting sausages and killing tigers” and a revolver for protection against brigands—he never had to use it.