Old Laptev has two sons, who are crippled by their wealth. The younger plays the fool in self-defense and goes mad; the elder makes a loveless marriage with a genteel and pious provincial girl who has married him for his money and middle-class security. The marriage is disappointing at first, but she grows fonder of her husband as the story progresses. Before his marriage he had vague “artistic” interests. He had had a mistress but now dreads the “inconvenience” of meeting her in Moscow, although he hankers after her. The mistress is said to have been drawn from the noisy Kun-dasova, the independent Bohemian friend of Suvorin and Chekhov, whom they called the “astronomer.” (She had worked in an observatory.) In the story she turns up in Moscow, cheerfully hard up, and she gets a living by giving piano lessons. She is on good terms with Yartsev, a Bohemian polyglot and writer who lives precariously by his wits.
Three Years has been called Chekhov’s “Hymn to Moscow,” and if that is so, it is Yartsev who shouts it out at the top of his voice. Unlike the colorless Laptev, he has imagination and is one of Chekhov’s Gogolian eccentrics. In a cab ride through the beautiful Moscow parks Yartsev’s fantasies run wild at the sight of the famous sunsets. Villages are on fire, he cries out, hordes of Asiatic savages are pouring in.
One of them, a terrible old man with a bloodstained face all scorched from the fire, binds to his saddle a young girl with a white Russian face, and the girl looks sorrowful, understanding…. A huge wild boar, frantic with terror, rushed through the village…. And the girl tied to the saddle was still looking.
The chronicle rambles on in its year-to-year tour of middle-class gentility, sexual frustration, familial worry and second-rate tastes. There is a small scene, absurd yet sympathetic, when the older Laptev brother is seen going in for Art and taking his wife to buy a picture at an art exhibition. With an air she poses and looks at the pictures “as her husband did, through her open fist or an opera glass.” She then drifts into a daydream and imagines herself walking through the countryside the artist has depicted. When she goes home she is angry about the vulgar pictures her husband has bought and all the knickknacks he has collected. At the end of the story we shall see her daring to wake up and venturing on flirtations with her husband’s friends. One is reminded of the chronicles of petit bourgeois ups and downs, of puzzled shames and resignations, in English and French novels of the period.
If Chekhov’s alacrity is dimmed by the duties of this long chronicle, it revives in An Anna on the Neck, written in the same year. This is set in the provinces. We see an eighteen-year-old girl forced to marry a pompous official of fifty-two because her father has ruined the family by heavy drinking. Anna is glad to get away from her sordid home and she will become as dominant and predatory as the grander lady in Ariadne; but what will remain in our minds is the guilt of the father as he says good-bye at the railway station when the honeymoon couple go off:
Anna leaned out of the window towards him and he whispered something to her, enveloping her in stale wine-fumes, blowing into her ear—it was impossible to understand what he was saying—and making the sign of the cross over her face and breast and hands…. Anna’s brothers, Petya and Andryusha, schoolboys, tugged at his coat from behind and whispered in embarrassment. “Papa, stop it … Don’t Papa.”
When the train moved, Anna saw her father running a little way after it, staggering and splashing wine out of his glass, and saw how pathetic and kind and guilty he looked.
“Hurrah!” he shouted.
That “Hurrah!” will haunt us with its absurdity and pathos; the crushed girl is entitled to her shameless and successful revenge. It will be at the unloved husband’s expense.
Chapter Twelve
By the spring of 1895 Chekhov had been three years at Melikhovo and had contrived to make his responsibilities as a son, a concerned landowner, a doctor and restless writer interlock. As for money, it was always short. In Russia, he says, the smallest success in farming is gained only at the price of a cruel struggle with nature: “You have to take the axe and scythe yourself.” Still, his copse has grown a yard taller and “will make capital for my heirs, who will call me an ass, for heirs are never satisfied.” We reflect on his secret bad health: at the heart of that concern is his responsibility to his parents and his sister. But for her devotion to him his sister might well have married.
In this year, 1895, his writing was interrupted by a conference of doctors in the province. They inspected hospitals. Then Chekhov turned to building a new school; the old one was dark, poorly furnished and not fit for teachers or children. Chekhov, helped by his sister, drew up plans, dealt with the contractors about bricks, mortar and timber, and pressed for higher pay for the wretched schoolteachers. In January and February 1897 Chekhov helped to conduct the national census of that year. He had to traipse from one peasant hut to another, knocking his head on the low doorways, carrying “detestable inkpots,” wearing an official badge, and carrying a portfolio into which the census forms did not fit.
When they turned from Chekhov’s life at Melikhovo during this period to the story The House with the Mezzanine, his readers were at first astonished to see that he seemed to be attacking everything he believed in. How was it possible that the builder of schools, libraries, the advocate of better hospitals, the practical worker in popular education could ridicule a young educated woman who is giving her life to these practical and enlightened causes? She is no idle do-gooder who forgets to attack the root of the matter—the government official who is the source of the corruption of the province. When the story begins we see at once that Chekhov has been careful to unself himself by turning the narrative over to a narrator unlike himself: an idle landscape painter. To get away from his host, a local landowner, whose conversation is tedious, the painter wanders about the idyllic countryside and discovers a charming little house owned by a pleasant old lady and her two good-looking daughters. One is a public-spirited teacher, the other an idle girl of seventeen who sits about reading. Antagonism arises between him and the teacher. He is soon arguing that her attempts to enlighten the peasants are futile, that education, libraries, even medical centers are useless. The misery, the very ignorance of the peasants, arises from back-breaking physical labor. (The liberal editor of Russian Thought, Vukol Lavrov, had heard this argument from Chekhov himself.) The elder sister is domineering. She is nevertheless excellent in argument as she fights back. What use is landscape painting? And she makes one deadly point: the painter’s landscapes lack an indispensable element—they have no people in them. Her temper and no doubt her jealousy are aroused when she sees the painter and her sister falling in love. Drastically and secretly she packs the young girl away to stay with distant relations, the end of the affair that has not even had a farewell kiss.
If landscape with its indifference to people pervades the debate in The House with the Mezzanine, it has little place in the theme of fierce class conflict in My Life, one of Chekhov’s longest and most vigorous stories. In its freedom from the episodic weakness of Three Tears it has the elaborate and sustained design of a short novel. It clearly derives from Chekhov’s experience in building schools and working with the common run of manual laborers: the carpenters, roofers and painters, and also with the peasants, whom he has now intimately observed. Again, he had been reading Zola’s studies of class conflict, and although he rejected Zola’s forced afflatus and his spells of orgiastic sexual symbolism, he admired his careful social realism. What gives My Life its special force is that his own imagination has been refreshed once more by a return to the scenes of his boyhood in Taganrog. His early conflict with his father, old Pavel, has been brought forward and reconsidered in the light of ideas closer to experience in our own century. The father, who had been a bankrupt shopkeeper, now reappears as a provincial architect, still believing that he is filled “with the divine fire,” who builds ugly and pretentious houses. The real Pavel—whom we had seen in the story Difficult People and who ruled by beating his sons—is now succeeded by a fictional father who strikes his son in the face and hits him with his umbrella. But the father is more than half romantic in his pretensions: he has given his son and daughter affected names, Misail and Cleopatra, suited to grown children who have been brought up to marry into the genteel families of the town.