The finale of the story is so thronged with the conflicting voices of the people that the village itself—and not some orderly narrator—seems to be telling it out of the passions they all share.
We see Lipa’s long walk back from the hospital, alone on the empty country road, carrying the dead baby in her arms, too simple, too stunned, to be frightened or to grieve. Chekhov is at one with all who travel alone. Dusk has come: we see the moon rise, hear the mysterious cowlike call of the bittern, the mocking cries of the cuckoos and the operatic nightingales, the croaking of frogs, all indifferent to human misery. Lipa is not broken. What sustains the simple Lipa is a naïve question: “Where is the baby’s soul now?” She is at last given a lift by a couple of carters and asks them how long a soul remains on earth after death. The older carter says:
“Who can tell? Ask Vavila here, he has been to school. Now they teach them everything.” …
Vavila stopped the horse and only then answered: “Nine days. My uncle Kirilla died and his soul lived in our hut thirteen days after.”
“How do you know?”
“For thirteen days there was a knocking in the stove.”
“Yours is not the worst of sorrows,” the old man says. “Life is long, there will be good and bad to come, there will be everything. Great is Mother Russia.” And he tells her that he had been to Siberia and walked back, and his wife died there. “I have had good as well as bad. … I would be glad to live another twenty years, so there has been more of the good than the bad.” The young Gorky enormously admired this part of the story.
Lipa does not get back to Ukleyevo until sunrise and there she can cry at last. She realizes that she has no place in the house and Aksinya shouts at her: “What are you bellowing for?” At the funeral of the baby Aksinya is dressed up in new clothes and has powdered her face. The crowd of guests and priests eat as if they had not eaten for days and Lipa waits humbly at table. A detaiclass="underline"
The priest, lifting his fork on which there was a salted mushroom, said to her: “Grieve not for the babe, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Three years pass. The tragedy has been assimilated into village history. Aksinya has triumphed. After the funeral she has driven her rival, Lipa, out of the house, and Lipa goes to live with her mother and earns her living working in the brickfields with the crowd of village women. The avaricious Aksinya has bought land and virtually owns the brickfield. She has become rich as the mistress of one of the mill owners. Everyone is afraid of her. Even at the post office the postmaster jumps to his feet and says: “I humbly beg you to be seated, Aksinya Abramovna.” She also controls the shop and there is a rumor that she has driven Tsybukin out of the house and gives him nothing to eat. He spends his time sitting on a bench in the street, where he still fears to be caught for his connection with the false money. His frightened, muddle-minded wife can do nothing. The last we see of Lipa is in the evenings, marching home and singing with the crowd of workers from the brickfields. Like them she is “singing in a high voice … as though triumphant and ecstatic” because the long day is over and she can rest. We see her and her mother lagging behind in the crowd to bow to Tsybukin and give him a piece of pie before going on their way, and crossing themselves for a long time afterwards. Some people in the village are sorry for the old man; others say he deserved what has happened to him.
Powerful as the story is, it is all the more powerful for being a drama which is heard in the day-to-day voices of the people as they work in their poisoned valley and yet also talk out of their inherited imagination. How exactly Chekhov has caught Aksinya’s nature when he notes the naïveté of the face of this snakelike and ruthless woman: the naïveté of uncontrollable sexuality incited by the pursuit of money. In his maturity Chekhov goes to the inborn “nature” of his people, not to their merely observable idiosyncrasies. Who would have suspected that poverty would have given Lipa, the simple waif, an inborn will? How admirable it is that Chekhov accepts all contradictions. How much more remarkable that in a story so powerful in its drama, he has avoided all theatrical rhetoric but has let life tell its own tale.
The story was acclaimed by most critics and Gorky wrote a long ecstatic essay on it and made an important point:
Chekhov has been reproached with having no philosophy. The reproach is absurd…. Ever more often our ears can catch in his stories the melancholy but severe and deserved reproach that men do not know how to live, but at the same time, his sympathy with all men glows even brighter.
The Moscow Art Theater was still pressing Chekhov for a new play but he was too ill to go to Moscow to discuss it with them and persuaded them to bring their company to the Crimea to put on performances of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. Their success was sensational in Yalta and Sevastopol and there were exhausting festivities: the whole company swarmed in his new house. Olga for some time had been hinting at marriage. She found the gossip about their situation unpleasant. He calls her his sweet little actress, his wonderful Olga, the joy of his life, his delightful Knip-perschitz, but she is determined on marriage.
I am tired of the game of hide and seek. I cannot bear to watch your mother’s suffering. … It is awful. I feel as if I were between two fires at your place. Tell me what you think about it…. You never say anything—don’t always dismiss everything as a joke. I can’t help feeling you don’t love me any more.
He points out that most of the year, when she was playing in Moscow or on tour, they would be as much apart if they were married. But she insists. At last he gives in.
If you will give me your word that not a single soul in Moscow will know of our wedding until it is over, I will marry you on the day of my arrival if you like. For some reason I have a fearful dread of the ceremony, the congratulations and the champagne which one has to hold in one’s hand while smiling vaguely.
He had always hated being the center of public occasions; he loathed speeches. And, he told her, he had everything in order except one thing: his health. “Just as I’ll be alone in my grave, so in essence I shall live alone.”
He went to Moscow on May 11, 1901, and was examined by a famous consultant, who said his state had worsened and ordered him to go at once to a sanatorium in the distant province of Ufa, where patients took the koumiss cure: drinking the fermented milk of mares. The marriage took place in a Moscow church on May 25; neither his family nor Olga’s friends were told or invited. There were four witnesses: Olga’s uncle, and her brother, and two students. A few close friends were invited to a special luncheon, at which the bride and groom did not turn up. Chekhov and his wife went to see Olga’s mother briefly, then took the train to Nizhny Novgorod to see Gorky, who had been exiled there, and after that they went by boat to Ufa and on across the steppe by coach to the sanatorium.
He sent a telegram to his mother, asking for her blessing, and saying: “Everything will remain as before.”