“They are sure to be saved,” he says aloud, lighting a cigarette. “Human life,” he reflects, “is so artlessly constructed….” He compromises, when he arrives at the scene, by hiding in a field to watch.
How does Chekhov evoke the first sign of daylight? By a simple, strange detaiclass="underline" the deacon knows that daylight has come because he can at last see the white stick he is carrying.
The duel itself is amateurish. Von Koren has brought two young officers as seconds; they have never been present at a duel and bicker comically about the formalities. Is this the moment to propose a reconciliation? There is a doctor, who is careful to demand his fee. Layevsky is certain, as he stares at Von Koren, that the man intends to kill him. A second before Von Koren fires the deacon jumps up in the maize field and shouts and the shot faintly grazes Layevsky’s neck.
To later critics the final act of the story is spoiled by its moral ending in the Tolstoyan fashion, for the lovers forgive each other. This is, however, very convincing. Layevsky has had a fright and gets down seriously to work in order to pay his debts. He and his mistress move into a humbler house. We hear no more of the minor characters, who have played their part in the indispensable chorus. On second thoughts we see the end is open, even after the reconciliation, which embarrasses the two enemies. Layevsky eagerly goes to see his enemy off at the harbor. Von Koren is rowed out to the steamer that will take him on his expedition. The sea is very rough. Born to dramatize and moralize about his situation, Layevsky watches the boat driven back by the waves yet, in the end, strongly making progress. He thinks:
So it is in life … in the search for truth man makes two steps forward and one step back…. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last.
Chekhov took great trouble with the last lines of his stories. Here he is dryly dismissive:
It began to spot with rain.
The strength of The Duel lies in the ingenuity of its playlike architecture, in which the major characters make speeches and the minor characters act as a chorus. They are not a passive moralizing chorus—they incite the action. The Tatar onlookers watch almost in silence. To them the imbroglio is alien. If, as everyone has noticed, Tolstoy’s influence is still marked, Chekhov is more forgiving of Nadezhda’s sexual misdemeanor than Tolstoy is of the wife in The Kreutzer Sonata. Reserve rather than abstinence, pity rather than condemnation, are more characteristic of Chekhov.
While he was deep in the elaborate design of The Duel and still laboring over his documentary book on Sakhalin, he could rely on his virtuosity to write satirically of an adultery in The Grasshopper. It is very sternly a Tolstoyan story; indeed Tolstoy admired it as a parable on “the wages of sin.” We see a giddy young wife, married to a doctor who is dedicated to his profession, having a secret affair with a painter whom she has drawn to her silly “artistic” salon. She is soon disillusioned when the painter takes her to live among an art colony in the country. The painter drops her and she returns to her husband, a shy and saintly man, who pretends not to know. This, at the center of the story, is ingeniously managed. Accident intervenes: the doctor catches a fatal infection at his hospital and dies. The wife is frantic with remorse. How to convey her remorse at a deathbed? Here Chekhov, the doctor, is masterly. Her head is full of noises of the house as the doctors try to save her husband. She hears the monotonous striking of the clock, hour after hour, and the sound grows into a dull roar. She sinks into a doze on her bed.
She dreamed that the whole flat was filled from floor to ceiling with a huge piece of iron and that if they could only get the iron out they would all be light-hearted and happy. Waking she realized that it was not the iron but Dymov’s illness that was weighing on her.
Nature morte, port … she thought, sinking into forgetfulness again. Sport—Kurort … and what of Shrek? Shrek … trek—wreck…. And where are my friends now? …
Her lover, the fashionable painter, had the silly boring habit of making up nonsensical, rhyming words that used to amuse her: now they are part of her torture.
And again the iron was there.
How close to the images and sounds, frightening and then puerile, Chekhov comes.
Too close, in fact. Making up silly rhyming words was a mannerism of his friend the painter Levitan, who was enraged and threatened a libel action. He was a well-known fantasist and suicidal neurotic. However, the quarrel passed off.
Chapter Ten
In 1891 Chekhov was living under great strain. He was unable to take his family to the Lintvaryov estate in the Ukraine because the doctor-daughter of the family, the woman with the tumor on the brain, had died. Chekhov’s father, Pavel, had retired from his ill-paid job at the haberdashery warehouse and now plagued the home and raged against his wife. Chekhov did at last find a house for the summer months at Bogimovo, a huge mansion in which the family occupied only the top floor, but it was annoying that the rest of the house had been sublet. He was still grinding away at the now uncongenial and long documentary study of Sakhalin. He got up at five in the morning to toil on Sakhalin on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The rest of the week he worked on stories.
I dream of winning forty thousand [rubles], so as to cut myself off completely from writing, which I am sick of, to buy a little bit of land and live … in … seclusion.
And then comes news of famine in Nizhny Novgorod. The crops had failed and the peasants were killing their horses. He stopped writing and for months gave himself solely to the national appeal for funds to save the farmers. He traveled about begging money—helped by Suvorin—from the rich landowners and exhausted himself. By the winter he had a long bout of influenza; his secret illness was now attacking his stomach and bowels. It was clear that he could not stay in Moscow. He must get a house of his own in the country. In the early spring he heard of one in the village of Meli-khovo in the Serpukhov district, two hours away from Moscow by train. A painter was selling up and, typically, Chekhov was sure of the house before he saw it. It was more than a house. Five hundred and seventy-five acres of land went with it. The “son of a serf” was fulfilling a secret dream: he was setting up as a landowner himself with an estate! There was a park, a fruit garden, a long avenue of limes. Chekhov borrowed four thousand rubles from Suvorin and got a ten-year mortgage: the total cost was thirteen thousand rubles. If he had been in Germany, he said, he would certainly have been made a duke! The land was divided into two plots, one hundred acres being woodland and copse:
The barns and sheds have been recently built, and have a fairly presentable appearance. The poultry house is made in accordance with the latest deductions of science, the well has an iron pump. The whole place is shut off from the world by a fence in the style of a palisade.
The roof of the house was of corrugated iron, there was “a verandah, French windows, and so on,” but the house was “not sufficiently new, having outside a very stupid and naive appearance, and inside swarms with bugs and beetles.”
There was the indispensable pond full of carp and tench, and a stream. The family moved in and slaved for months at putting the house to rights. One amusing effect of the move was that old Pavel’s choleric temper calmed down. It was he, indeed, the real “son of a serf,” who at once gave himself the airs of an aristocratic landowner, who insisted on being called Master by the peasants and servants and restored dignity to the village by organizing the Easter singing at the church. The peasants were delighted to have a doctor in residence for the first time in their lives and Chekhov soon had a thousand patients trooping to the door. “A nice man,” one said. “He gives me medicine and doesn’t charge me anything.” Labor was cheap: “I begin to see the charms of capitalism,” Chekhov said.