Tiring of that fancy, Gusev’s fevered mind drifts to precise visions of his home, and he sees his little daughter come out on her sleigh wearing big felt boots, and then, in terror, he sees
a huge bull’s head without eyes, and the horse and sledge are not driving along, but are whirling round and round in a cloud of smoke. But still he was glad he had seen his own folks.
Pavel grouses about the injustices that have been done to him and boasts of how clever he had been in tricking officials into thinking he is a man of superior class. “I am a living protest,” he says. Pavel carries on with his sneers and his rage. He is going back to Russia to defy everyone: “That is what one can call life.” It is Pavel who dies next. Days later Gusev dies. Orderlies wrap up the bodies in a sailcloth and manhandle these human parcels. We see Gusev’s body somersaulting into the sea.
Here the imagination of Chekhov himself breaks into the story, which has become a poetic allegory. We remember that he had allowed the boy’s imagination to take over scenes in The Steppe. Now Chekhov becomes the dead body of Gusev hitting the sea when he is buried.
After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he began moving more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though he were hesitating…. Then he was met by a shoal of the fish called harbour pilots…. After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.
At the very end of the story Chekhov turns our eyes away to the relieving presence of the evening sky, to evening clouds changing shape and color as the sun sinks. One will take the shape of a lion, another a triumphal arch, a third cruelly like a pair of scissors. More strangely, there is a moment when a cold green light shoots across the sky at the day’s beginning and again at its end—an earthly yet strangely unearthly message of birth and death, a signaclass="underline" Nature is “other.”
At first reading the underwater scene seems to be an escape into the bizarre and breaks with the tone of the story: perhaps it was introduced because Chekhov himself, during his voyage home, could not resist swimming! He was tied to the ship by a rope, in the shark-infested Indian Ocean. On second thoughts we see that the whole story is a visionary meditation on the helpless “holiness of the human body,” and we see also that the incident is entirely written in the same key as the talk of Pavel and Gusev: they are sick, they are delirious. Pavel’s boastings of his political wrongs and his angry conviction of his superiority are as much fantasy as is Gusev’s peasant vision of the bull’s head and his belief that a fish can make a hole in the ship and that the winds are breaking out of walls to which they are chained. Chekhov’s imagination seems to be transforming and allaying his own fears in his race with death. The realist is for the moment a Symbolist.
The more lasting influence of Sakhalin was that the convicts and settlers had given him an intimate and grimmer knowledge of peasant life in Russia—where 80 percent of the population were peasants. Peasant Wives is plainly a Sakhalin story. Crime grows out of the family quarrels of the peasants, quarrels of greed, jealousy and adultery in which the women, especially, brood on the killings they urge the men to do. Their talk tells all.
The married Varvara is sleeping with the priest’s son for half a ruble a time, but she tells another woman:
“[It’s] better to be struck dead by thunder than live like this. I’m young and strong and I’ve a filthy crooked hunchback for a husband, worse than Dyudya himself, curse him! When I was a girl, I hadn’t bread to eat, or a shoe to my foot, and to get away from that wretchedness I was tempted by Alyoshka’s money, and got caught like a fish in a net, and I’d rather have a viper for my bedfellow than that scurvy Alyoshka…. You work like a horse and never hear a kind word…. I’d rather beg my bread, or throw myself into the well.”
The two women lie down to sleep in the yard and talk about young Mashenka, who poisoned her husband and died in jail.
“I’d make away with my Alyoshka and never regret it,” Varvara says softly.
“You talk nonsense, God forgive you.”
Varvara whispers: “Let us get rid of Dyudya and Alyoshka.”
“God would chastise us.”
“Well, let Him.”
So thoughts of murder creep into the next day. The sunrise lights up the crosses in the churchyard and the next moment the sun is flashing on the windows, the sheep have got loose and peasant women are shouting at the shepherd, who is playing his pipes and pauses to crack his whip. What had been a woman’s raw and short confession in Sakhalin Chekhov has domesticated in the working life of any Russian day. Mashenka had poisoned her husband after he had thrashed her with a bridle. He had walked with her in the chain gang after her trial. Their forgotten life comes to us as we listen to the two women’s whispering.
Another story whose roots can be traced to Sakhalin is the extraordinary, violent Murder, written four years later in 1895, in which we find a wretched, religious hypocrite—a character who recalls the peasant hypocrite Iudushka, who appears in Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family.
While Chekhov was still working on and off on the Sakhalin book—and indeed while he continued his research for it—he was writing stories to “keep my family from starving”; to pay off the debts he had run into in his travels. He continued to run after two hares—literature and what had become social medicine. There was famine among the peasants in many provinces, and he put down his pen to collect subscriptions for its relief, and went to the scene. In The Wife, a story that has been underrated by many critics, there is an account of a landowner being forced by his wife against his will to collect relief. He drives wildly by sleigh through the stricken villages and achieves nothing beyond a night of gluttony.
Before Sakhalin Chekhov had been strangely carried away by Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. Now he begins to change his mind about Tolstoy:
Something in me protests…. reason and justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat. War is an evil and legal justice is an evil; but it does not follow that I ought to wear bark shoes and sleep on the stove with the labourer and so on…. But that is not the point, it is not a matter of pro and con; the thing is that … Tolstoy has passed for me, he is not in my soul, and he has departed from me, saying: “I leave this your house empty.” I am untenanted. I am sick of theorising of all sorts…. Patients in a fever do not want food, but they do want something, and that vague craving they express as “longing for something sour….” I, too, want something sour. … I notice the same mood in others. … It is as if they had been in love, had fallen out of love … and now were looking for some new distraction…. Natural science is performing miracles now.
Natural science! In The Duel we see the conflict between Tolstoy’s Christian ethic and Darwinism and a reply to the accusation that Chekhov had evaded the crucial Russian demand for a statement of his “convictions.” In his letters he calls The Duel a novel. It is not episodic and haphazard like the discarded Stories of the Lives of My Friends, but a long, carefully designed piece of work held together by a central conflict of ideas sustained to the end and rooted in the interplay of the characters and the influences of the scene. It is one of his most sustained yet various and discreetly ordered fictions. It seems to have been provoked by a meeting with a German zoologist, a strong Darwinian and a dogmatic believer in the survival of the fittest. In the story Chekhov describes a zoologist, Von Koren, who happens to be staying briefly at a Caucasian seaside resort before setting out on a scientific expedition to the Bering Strait.