The Peasants has one of Chekhov’s most casual beginnings and like so many of his finest stories is the tale of a journey, of departure and return, by which the leading characters are changed. A poor Moscow waiter in a luxury restaurant is dismissed from his job because of an accident. He has dropped a plate of ham and peas as he rushes it to a customer. Ill and desperate, he takes his wife, Olga, and his daughter, Sasha, to stay with their relations, who live in a filthy hut infested by flies in an isolated village. When they arrive all their relatives are out at work in the fields except for an unwashed and pathetic little girl who stands by the stove. Near her is a white cat.
“Puss, puss,” Sasha called to her cat. “Puss!”
“She can’t hear,” said the little girl. “She has gone deaf.”
“How is that?”
“She was beaten.”
The visitors wait in the street until the family comes back from work. When they come, the story gradually develops into a year’s chronicle of their lives as seen mainly through the eyes of the waiter’s wife, Olga, a naive peasant woman whose strength lies in the humble religious intimations we have already read of in The Student. Her religion may be literal and trite, but she knows the spell of archaic biblical words and has trained her daughter to use them and to be an echo of herself. In the course of a dreadful and riotous year she will awe her savage and quarreling relations. We shall see the quarrels, the young hurting the old, the ragged children huddled on the stove with their savage grandmother. We shall see a wife beaten, a young woman stripped naked. The village will catch fire and the men, drunk on vodka, scream for water; the children hope their neighbors will be burned to death; the geese, as savage as the people, seize the opportunity to raid the gardens; doves turn red as they fly over the flames of the burning huts; the tax collector comes round to collect arrears and goes off with the sacred samovars, the only treasure peasant women have. When the disaster is over we shall have a glimpse of the gentry and their sons and daughters in church on Sunday, and the waiter’s daughter will copy her mother’s singsong voice, saying,
“God lives in the church. Men have lamps and candles but God has little green and red and blue lamps, like little eyes. At night God walks about the church and with Him the Holy Mother of God and Saint Nicolai, thud, thud, thud….”
When the end of the world comes the church itself will be carried to heaven. The myth silences the family crowded in the hut. Olga cries, not only because of the legend but also from pride in her daughter’s telling of it.
We notice, throughout The Peasants, Chekhov’s genius for seeing events as they strike his people differently, and above all his ear for the changing of sounds. When the village crops are on fire he gives us the confusion, but it is Olga who “makes it true” for us when we see her rushing out to save her daughter.
The terrible year of crowded events, in which the intruders are hated by their relatives, reaches a climax in the winter. The waiter dies after being cupped by the village tailor, a Jew who serves as a kind of doctor. In the spring, Olga and her daughter leave the village to go back on foot to Moscow. They are reduced to the condition of beggars. We see Olga and Sasha look back as they leave this hell, thinking how terrible the people were, worse than beasts, spending their lives stealing from each other, fighting. Yet, Olga reflects,
they were human beings, they suffered and wept like human beings, and there was nothing in their lives for which one could not find excuse…. And now she felt sorry for all these people, painfully so, and as she walked on she kept looking back at the huts.
That “looking back,” so casual, so impelled, is the perfect touch of nature. That is how we shall remember her. And Chekhov—a man who knows his art—will presendy repeat the “looking back.” Some miles further on Olga will pass. another woman and, “looking back,” will remember that she had met this woman in Moscow, perhaps as a cook to a rich family. The second “look back” brings home to Olga that she has no job and is herself now a beggar. Passing a grand house she sings out in a beggar’s whine:
“Good Christian folk, give alms, for Christ’s sake, that God’s blessing may be upon you, and that your parents may be in the Kingdom of Heaven in peace eternal.”
And her daughter joins in, copying the voice of her mother, Again, agony is made real to us by hearing its echo.
The Peasants was a sensation when it was published. Chekhov’s mastery was recognized by all the critics. The censor had cut out a page at the end. We notice that he will not stand for any hostile criticism of the police or tax collectors. The simple Olga reflects that if the peasants brutalize one another,
they had none to whom they could look for help…. the paltriest little clerk or official treated the peasants as though they were tramps, and addressed even the village elders and church wardens as inferiors, and considered they had a right to do so. And, indeed, can any sort of help or good example be given by mercenary, greedy, depraved, and idle persons who only visit the village in order to insult, to despoil, and to terrorize? Olga remembered the pitiful, humiliated look of the old people when in the winter [one of them] had been taken to be flogged.
Two years later, as we shall see in In the Ravine, Chekhov will be far more radical in his attack on authority.
Did no one notice the effect of this frantic activity on his health? In March 1897 he dined with Suvorin at the Hermitage, where there was a convention of theater workers. Just before the dinner, blood started pouring from his mouth and over his short beard. The doctor rushed him to a clinic and discovered—as Chekhov himself pointed out—that the hemorrhage came from his right lung. He was kept at the clinic for more than two weeks and to Suvorin he made a literary joke: “The author of “Ward No. 6’ has been moved from Ward No. 16 to Ward No. 14.”
He was plagued by visitors, he said, who came to see him two at a time, each one begging him not to speak and at the same time pestering him with questions. The worst was Tolstoy, who did not stop talking about himself for four hours. The incurable egotist said he had given up writing Resurrection and had started a long book, clearing up, once and for all, the question of Art. An addict of documentation, he said he had so far read sixty books on the subject. Tolstoy’s thinking is not new, Chekhov wrote; wise men have always sung this song in a variety of tunes.
Old men have always been prone to see the end of the world, and have always declared that morality was degenerating to the uttermost point, and that Art was growing shallow and wearing thin, that people were growing feebler….
Mellifluous and tactless, Tolstoy talked about life after death:
He holds that all of us (people and animals) will live in a principle (reason, love), the essence and purpose of which is a mystery to us. To me this principle or force presents itself as a formless jelly-like mass…. my individuality … will be fused with this mass—such immortality I don’t need, I don’t understand it.