Suvorin certainly freed Chekhov from Leykin and journalism by paying him highly, but this did not immediately break Chekhov of the habit of writing too much. Petersburg readers had a taste for erotic stories, which would not have been publishable in Moscow. In The Witch the impotent, superstitious and jealous sexton of a lonely country church has come to believe that his wife has invoked the blizzard that rages round his filthy hut. She has put a lamp in the window in order to lure the mail drivers to her bed. We see in her the brooding of frustrated sexuality. The drivers indeed arrive and the impotent husband gloats on their indifference to her: the men are simply lost and are afraid of being too late for the mail train. Not a Chekhovian joke: Chekhov has created unmistakably the sullenness of desire and the determination of the men to ignore an easy seduction.
In Agafya Chekhov seems to be rewriting The Huntsman, but here the man is simply a handsome layabout peasant who refuses to work and lies in the woods all day. Village women who are under his sexual spell bring him food. How is sexual feeling evoked? Partly from the conniving innocence of the landscape, the peasants’ scanty talk and the gaze of the girl to whom the layabout gives vodka. We know also that she must get away quickly before her husband comes in by the train that will soon be signaled. We watch the signal light change from red to green. She overstays her time. Chekhov makes it clear what has gone on between the layabout and the girl by the remarkable account of her flight across the field to face her husband:
She moved in zigzags, then she moved her feet up and down without going forward, bending her knees and stretching out her hands, then she staggered back. When she had gone another hundred paces she looked around once more and sat down.
The defect of the story is that the narrator is outside it, but at least he sees that flight. The idle peasant does not even look. Finally, defiantly, she jumps up again to face her husband, knowing that he will beat her. There is the story: the willful idleness of love, the physical sight of making up the mind to face the price. If Chekhov is a master of moods they are almost always enacted.
Two stories are exercises in the manner of Maupassant’s The Necklace—a subject which has exercised many short-story writers, including Henry James. In An Upheaval we see a young au pair girl coming into her bedroom and catching her employer’s wife rummaging in her drawer; the excuse of the lady is that her jewelry has been stolen. The girl is indignant and decides to leave the house at once. One of Chekhov’s grim family luncheons follows. Privately the husband begs the girl to stay and, in the end, even goes down on his knees and confesses that he has sold his wife’s jewelry. “If you go,” he says to the girl, “there won’t be a human face left in the house.” The containing theme is that this pretentious bourgeois family have created “a life of lies,” and the girl leaves.
The Chorus Girl is a variation on the same theme: an hysterical wife knows an actress is her husband’s mistress and goes to the girl’s flat begging her to hand over the jewelry her husband has given her. The family is ruined. The girl says that all the husband has given her are a few cheap trinkets and, shocked that a lady should go down on her knees and beg, she throws the cheap stuff other men have given her at the wife, who goes off in triumph. The husband, hiding in the next room, comes out storming because he is shamed by the sight of his wife begging to such a creature, and he breaks with her. We notice the care with which Chekhov avoids the neat ending. The story must be returned to the inexplicable continuing human experience. The girl is left weeping and crying:
She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.
Two stories of this period are far more important: Easter Eve and Art. They take us back, no doubt, to scenes of Chekhov’s childhood, but there is a new musical element in his art— “the necessary tune” in the head that prompts the act of writing. In Easter Eve the anonymous narrator is on the riverbank waiting for the ferryman to take him across to an Easter celebration. A peasant shouts and is answered, not by a man but by the hoarse slow peal of a bell “as from the thickest string of a double bass.” Then the sound of a cannon shot rolls over the fields “behind me” and before the first peal has died away, a second and a third. Presendy a humble monk comes across in the ferry. He is sad. Why? “Even in the time of great rejoicing, a man cannot forget his sorrows.” His sorrow is that a monk called Nikolay has died, a simple unlettered man with a genius for composing hymns of praise. The heart of the story lies in the account of how traditional canticles must be put together. The monk says:
“Anyone who writes canticles must know the life of the saint to perfection, to the least trivial detail [and] one must make them harmonize with the other canticles and know where to begin and what to write about…. The first line must always begin with the ‘angel.’ … what matters is the beauty and sweetness of it…. For brevity [the composer] packs many thoughts into one phrase…. there must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun … and every exclamation ought to be put so as to be smooth and easy for the ear. … It is not simply ‘heavenly flower,’ but ‘flowers of heavenly growth.’”
Is the artist, then, a sort of monk? Far from it, as we see in the other Easter story, Art. At Easter the villagers have the tradition of building what they call a Jordan, which will stand on the ice in the middle of their frozen river. They are craftsmen. They know how to carve out the clumsy object, which combines a lectern with an enormous cross that can be seen rising above the village roofs. Before he starts work the artist looks on, curses the villagers and goes off to get drunk. His task is to glorify the grotesque object, but he cannot be found until the last minute, when he is very drunk. What has he been doing? He has been preparing his colors. He has been patiently making them out of beetroot leaves and onion skin, and he starts furiously yet carefully to paint. The rudimentary Jordan becomes a shaft of dazzling light and now the unmanageable man gazes with humility at his creation.
A fable, of course, but notice that everything in the village festival is there and that the narrative has been given the necessary fever by being written in the present tense. It is said that Chekhov used his hard-drinking, playacting and paranoid friend, the painter Levitan, for his model in this story.
We have already been struck by the fact that the so-called connoisseur of moods is almost invariably concerned with the métier, the trades and professions of his characters, whether they are peasants, workmen, doctors, lawyers or landowners. What does occupation do to a man’s nature? In The Kiss, the one long story he wrote in his 1887 summer at Babkino, there is an extraordinary example of Chekhov’s power of absorbing the mystique of an occupation yet avoiding tedious documentation. At Babkino a brigade of artillery was stationed. It was not difficult to note the characteristics of officers and men, to catch their work, their duties, their talk in the mess, the difference between their preoccupations on the march, their care for their equipment; their “mystique” is another matter. Chekhov had read Tolstoy and Lermontov and already knows that an army is a migrant culture. He may have been told the incident of the story by a general he had met at the Kiselevs, but it would have lost all perspective if he had not, by a mixture of observation and meiosis, put a regiment on duty plainly before us as human beings.
The story opens lightly with a party. The retired General Von Rabbek, local lord of the manor, has invited the officers to it. They are keen, of course, to meet the ladies. There are drinks and there is dancing. The soldiers throw themselves into the fun—all except Staff Captain Ryabovich. He can’t dance or play billiards; he is a short ugly fellow who wears spectacles and has lynxlike whiskers and is shut up in himself. He wanders about with gloomy curiosity over the grand house, walks into a room, which is in darkness. Suddenly he has an experience that will haunt him for years. A girl rushes into the dark room, cries out “At last!,” kisses him, then gives a scream and runs away. She has mistaken him for someone else. The ugly, shy little staff captain is transformed. He feels suddenly proud. He struts back to the ballroom and tries to guess, by a perfume or a voice, who the girl was. He fails to find out, and from now on we see a life of fantasy beginning.