Then he is disturbed when a religious maniac utters shrieks in the gallery, and we get our first sight of his private drama:
[A]s though in a dream or delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though his own mother, … whom he had not seen for nine years, or some old woman just like his mother, came up to him out of the crowd, and, after taking a palm branch from him, walked away looking at him all the while good-humouredly with a kind, joyful smile until she was lost in the crowd…. tears flowed down his face.
And then:
Someone close at hand was weeping, then someone else farther away, then others and still others, and then little by little the church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later, within five minutes, the nuns’ choir was singing; and no one was weeping and everything was as before.
After the service the bishop drives off in his carriage and we hear the changing sound of the horses’ hooves as they strike the sandy road. In the moonlight “the white walls, the white crosses on the tombs, the white birch-trees and black shadows, and the far-away moon in the sky exactly over the convent, seemed now living their own life, apart and incomprehensible, yet very near to man.” In the town an enterprising shopkeeper has just put in electric lighting, a wonder that attracts the crowd. Suddenly we find that Chekhov has played one of his dramatic tricks: the bishop arrives at his rooms at the monastery and finds that the woman who had smiled at him in the church was indeed his mother, a woman who had had nine children and forty grandchildren and who had suddenly taken it into her head to make the long journey from her village just for the sight of her famous son. We are at the heart of the drama: the relationship of a simple peasant mother with a famous son who has moved into a position of learning, power and sacredness, who has even been on foreign missions. She brings a naughty little niece with her and later we shall see the unawed child showing off and knocking a glass off the table where they are eating. (Amusing, but Chekhov is aware of the comic principle that accidents must happen twice and, later, to advance the story, the child knocks a saucer over before the meal is done.) The naughty child tells the bishop that his stomach is making a noise, and that his cousin Nikolay, a medical student, “cuts up dead people.” She is behaving badly with a purpose. Her father had died because he had a bad throat. Her chin begins quivering. She puts on the manner of a little peasant beggar and makes tears come to her eyes:
“Your holiness,” she said in a shrill voice … “uncle, mother and all of us are left very wretched…. Give us a little money, do be kind, Uncle darling.”
Suddenly after this meal the bishop is ill. Perhaps the fish he has eaten at dinner is the cause? He notices that his legs are numb and he cannot understand what he is standing on. At night he cannot sleep, for Sisoy, a rough servant-monk who is in the cell next door, mutters and snores loudly without a break. The bishop’s mind wanders over trivial incidents of his early years in his village, remembering priests who got drunk and saw green snakes, and the nephew of the priest whose task, at services, was to read out the names of the parishioners who were ill and who needed prayers for their souls. Memories of childhood and youth come back, “living, fair and joyful as in all likelihood it never had been.” Perhaps in the life to come, he thinks, we shall remember our “distant past, our life here, with the same feeling. Who knows?” In the morning he is roughly woken by Sisoy. From church to convent in his district the bishop travels throughout Holy Week, seeing supplicants, and on his return has to meet visitors. It irks him to hear his mother, who does not know how to talk to him, chattering away easily to Sisoy and others about goodness knows what, except that in every story she always begins with the words “Having had tea,” or “Having drunk tea,” as if she had done nothing but drink tea all her life.
Now the bishop is very ill. He has got typhoid, Sisoy tells him brutally, and the monk insists on rubbing his body with tallow. Doctors are called and the bishop knows for certain that he is dying.
“How good,” he thought. He has attained what he has longed for: “Insignificance.”
His simple mother sits with him and she has forgotten he is a bishop and now calls him “my darling son” and says, “Why are you like this? Answer.”
The night before Easter Sunday he is dead.
What happens in a little town like this one when a famous man dies? Nothing. On the morning of Easter Sunday, as always, the joyful bells clang, the birds sing, the spring air quivers; in the market square barrel organs play, the accordions are squeaking, the drunks are shouting. After midday people began driving in carriages up and down.
Notice the precision of that return to the normal habits of the town. Notice also that at the end of the story Chekhov returns to his inner theme. Like an ordinary person, the bishop is forgotten. Except by his mother,
who is living today with her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, [and] when she goes out at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the pasture, [she] begins talking of her children, her grandchildren, and says that she had a son a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed. And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.
Chapter Eighteen
As we have seen, Chekhov draws on his short stories for the important characters and themes of his plays. In the stories his people live under the directing authority of his prose and are not at the mercy of producer or actors—a matter which plagued him; he had his own strict interpretation of the difference between the tragic and the dramatic. He was always angered when he was defined as a master of “twilight moods.”
If we turn to Donald Rayfield’s excellent work Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, we find he says something decisive on Chekhov’s last plays and especially on The Three Sisters, the longest and greatest of them. Rayfield notes that the total effect is symphonic; the play moves as a symphony does from movement to movement as it gathers power. The theme of changing time is set at once by the striking of a clock that interrupts the chatter of the three sisters on a happy May morning. Olga, the eldest, who is twenty-eight, remembers:
It is exactly a year ago today since Father died—on the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina. It was very cold then and snowing … but now a year has gone by and we don’t mind talking about it. You are wearing your white dress again and you look radiant…. The clock struck twelve then too. I remember the band playing when they took Father to the cemetery and they fired a salute. He was a general and commanded a Brigade. All the same, not many people came.
That last flat sentence tells us something of importance about the isolation of the family. The girls are trapped in a dull provincial town, alien to their cultivated upbringing. They long to get back to the wonderful earlier life they had in Moscow. Their longing is revived by the arrival of a new artillery brigade in the town. Two or three of the officers have known the girls and their family in Moscow when the girls were young; the soldiers seem to be messengers of release.
Chekhov had turned to an early story, The Kiss, written when he was at Babkino and studied an artillery brigade stationed there, a story that has something of Tolstoy’s understanding of the ethos of military life. Chekhov understood that a regiment is a disciplined and migrant culture passing through a stationary society. He also understood that since the officers were under orders, they became uprooted and solitary daydreamers on their monotonous journeys, and that this gave them a bond with the daydreaming sisters. In their isolation the simple officers become amateur philosophers. They brood on large insoluble questions, their private longings and sentimentalities. Disciplined, they see undisciplined Russia: they speculate about the “good life.” Vershinin, the decent middle-aged commanding officer, has his private miseries: he is the victim of an unlucky marriage to a wife who is a suicidal neurotic, and who joins him at his postings. Messages come that his wife has once more taken poison and he has to drop everything to go and protect his children. (He could very well have been the young officer in The Kiss who was stamped for life by his failure to trace the girl who kissed him in the dark, and who became obsessed by his failure.) Tuzenbakh is a stolid baron who believes, in his simplicity, that manual labor is the solution to Russian evils! He dreams of leaving the army and establishing brickfields—a life that will appeal to the idealism of the youngest sister, Irina. His enemy is a pestering Captain Solyony, a querulous and jealous adolescent who has failed to grow up and has dreams of becoming a romantic Byronic figure like the duelist in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. He is looking for someone to fight. There is the old idle army doctor Chebutykin, a cynic who likes to fancy he had been the lover of the sisters’ mother in Moscow. Life is meaningless, he believes; he drinks too much, reads out stupid items from the papers and occasionally sings out lines from a silly song—“Tararaboomdeay.” There are parties, dances, flirtations; love affairs begin. Even Masha, who reads Pushkin aloud and who is married to a boring foolish schoolmaster from the town, will have a secret love affair with the worried Vershinin before the play is done.