In the whole district there have only been two decent, civilized people—you and I. But ten years or so of this contemptible parochial existence have dragged us down.
And then suddenly he turns to the attack and says to Uncle Vanya: “Give me back what you took.” (He has detected that Uncle Vanya has stolen a bottle of morphia from his medicine chest.)
If you really must put an end to yourself why don’t you go to the woods and shoot yourself diere. But do give me back my morphia or else there will be talk and suspicion or people might think I have given it to you…. It’ll be quite enough to have to do your post mortem.
In the end we shall see Uncle Vanya and Sonya alone, doing the farm accounts while the impoverished landowner Telegin rambles on about the past and plays his guitar. Less happily, for it is too pretty and too touching, Sonya says: We shall hear the angels, we shall see the heavens covered with stars like diamonds. We shall see all earthly evils, all our sufferings, vanish in the flood of mercy which will fill the whole world, and our life will become peaceful, gentle, sweet as a caress. I believe it…. We shall rest.
Chapter Sixteen
In 1899 the Academy of Sciences celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Pushkin by admitting writers as Honorary Members. Tolstoy and Chekhov were among the first to be honored (in January 1900) by this very conservative society of scholars. Chekhov was skeptical, in two minds about the scholarly embrace, and joked about the honor. It meant that he could not be arrested, would not have to get a special passport for foreign travel and would be free of the supervision of customs officials. He signed letters to his friends as “Academicus, Hereditary Honorary Academician.” And he wrote to a friend that he was pleased, but
I shall be even more gratified when I lose that tide as the result of some misunderstanding. And a misunderstanding is bound to occur, because the learned Academicians are very much afraid that we shall shock them.
Two years later he resigned when Gorky’s membership in the Academy was revoked.
Meanwhile he was writing In the Ravine for Gorky’s Marxist paper Life. What astonishes us is that this long, richly crowded story—it runs to fifteen thousand words—should have come from him when his disease was worsening. He deepens his portraits of people, he absents himself and becomes them and lets them speak in their voices as they live out their passions.
In The Peasants he evoked a village which had not changed for centuries. In the new story the corruption comes from contact with the intruding factories. The story opens with what seems to be one of his jokes:
The village of Ukleyevo lay in a ravine so that only the belfry and the chimneys of the calico-printing factories could be seen from the high road and the railway-station. When travelers asked what village this was, they were told: “That’s the village where the deacon ate all the caviare at the funeral.”
No joke at all. The young novelist Bunin told Chekhov later on that he knew of the grotesque incident and had seen the place. We expect a story like this to be a study done in stark black and white; in fact it subtly evokes the inconsequent yet decisive and sudden passions of its people. Those who worked in the factories could afford to eat and simply glutted themselves. The rest took their chances, stole or crowded round the back door of the local grocer’s store and begged. On many days the village lay invisible under a chemical mist which rose from the stream that had been poisoned by the factories. Fever was endemic. The factory owners had bribed the police to do nothing about the contamination. Tsybukin, the owner of the village store, is a dishonest trader who sells everything from provisions such as bad meat and poor-quality vodka to cattle, pigs and hides. He even manages to sell peasant women’s bonnets for export as fashionable wear. Yet he has also the character and habits of a patriarch. His second wife—not from the village—has made a half-charitable man of him.
As soon as she was installed … everything in the house brightened up, as though the windows had been newly glazed…. the tables were covered with snow-white cloths. … at dinner, instead of eating from a common bowl, each person had a plate.
The new wife is the soul of simple charity, and the old man astonishes everyone by allowing her to feed the beggars who crowd round the store at night. He has shrewdly married off one of his sons, who is deaf, to a domineering shrew called Aksinya. She is a frightening money-minded sensual predator. Now he finds a wife for his second son, Anisim, a gaudy, excitable fellow who has bettered himself by becoming a police detective. Tsybukin has charitably found a poor waif from a nearby town for him, a charwoman’s daughter called Lipa, a child who has only just reached the legal age for marriage. The decisive theme of the story is Aksinya’s jealous hatred of Lipa. At Lipa’s wedding to Anisim, Aksinya throws herself into the orgy of drinking, guzzling and dancing, and dominates the wedding:
Aksinya had naïve gray eyes which rarely blinked and a naïve smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snake-like. Dressed all in green except for the yellow bodice, smiling, she looked like a viper stretching itself, head uplifted, in the young rye, as it watches someone go past in the spring.
Anisim, the bridegroom detective, is a plausible liar, an exhibitionist, creating rumor and alarm. He boasts that he can spot stolen goods instantly anywhere and claims that the rise in crime is due to the decline of religious belief; he himself privately denies the existence of God. We shall soon see that he is passing false coinage and, in this, is the slave of a bigger crook than himself. A few weeks after the marriage the village will learn that he has been caught, tried and given penal servitude. As a patriarch defending his family, Tsybukin tries to get Anisim released by bribing the prison governor, offering him “a silver glass stand with a spout,” inscribed with the words “The soul knows its right measure,” and he is naïve enough to be surprised that the traditional remedy fails. Tsybukin will be worried for the rest of his life about the difficulty of deciding what coinage is genuine and what is false, not only in trade but in the heart. We see all this through the voices and general mind of the village: the people are at first proud of Anisim and even defend him for a time. Then they will forget him, as indeed his young wife, Lipa, does once she has borne his son. The child is her total delight—and old Tsybukin’s also. She cannot stop watching the baby in his cradle. She often bows to him and says, “Good day, Nikifor Anisimych!” And then she rushes at him and kisses him and says the same thing again when she leaves the room. To her mother, who has come to work in the family kitchen, she often remarks: “Why do I love him so much, mamma? Why do I feel sorry for him? … Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb. … I love him like a real person…..”
Tsybukin’s delight is marred by his worry about having accepted some of Anisim’s false coins. He confesses his complicity to Varvara, his charitable wife, and naïvely, to calm him, she tells him to make his will and to make the baby his heir.
We come to a scene of horror. Aksinya is jealous of Lipa because a piece of land, which she covets, has been willed to Lipa’s child. One day Aksinya finds Lipa washing clothes in a tub of boiling water, screams that Lipa is the wife of a convict and throws a pail of boiling water over the baby, shouting, “You stole my land: now take that!” She rushes out into the garden shouting out to the gaping crowd, who have heard the screams, that Tsybukin is a bandit who has a store of false coins, and she starts pulling the clothes off the washing line and stamps on them. “What a wild woman!” the crowd says in admiration of the scene. “She has gone mad.” It is perfect that her frightened, doltish husband comes out and picks up the washing and pegs it back on the line—a classic example of Chekhov’s skill at “making it true” by anticlimax. Lipa takes the scalded baby to a hospital many miles away, and there it dies.