The evening comes to an end. The soldiers leave and take a shortcut through the woods to their billets, shouting and laughing. No doubt, says Chekhov, they were wondering whether they would someday have a mansion like the general’s and whether they would be rich enough to have fine gardens and woods like these. But Ryabovich is lost in his obsession. The stars are out and their reflection trembles, dissolves and forms again in the stream he crosses, just as the misleading kiss reflects in his life. He hears—as so often occurs in Chekhov’s landscape—“the plaintive cry of drowsy snipe” and “a nightingale in full song,” and one of the vulgar soldiers says, “How about that! … the little rascal doesn’t give a damn!” Here we notice one of the differences between Turgenev and Chekhov: in Chekhov the sights and sounds of nature are seen and heard by people. In Turgenev they are seen and heard by the detached author for their own beautiful sake. When distant lights shine through the trees, for example, Ryabovich thinks the lights know his secret. Back at the billet he is brought instantly down to earth. The batman is reporting to the commander: “Darling’s foot was injured at yesterday’s re-shoeing, sir. The vet put on clay and vinegar.”
The next day the brigade moves off with its guns and Ryabovich is split between his daydreams and his full efficiency as an automatic soldier. As the brigade rumbles down the road the military life “makes sense” to Ryabovich, perhaps the only thing that does make sense! He knows that the rumbling procession of guns has to be led by a vanguard of four men with drawn sabers, that after them come the “singers”—like torchbearers in a funeral procession:
[Ryabovich] has known for ages why a sturdy bombardier rides alongside the officer at the head of each battery and why he is given a special name…. [he] knows that the horses on the left, on which the riders are mounted, have one name and those on the right another…. Behind the driver come the two wheel-horses. On one of them sits a rider with yesterday’s dust on his back and a clumsy, very funny-looking piece of wood on his right leg; Ryabovich knows the purpose of this piece of wood and does not find it funny. Every single rider brandishes his whip mechanically and from time to time gives a shout.
The gun carriage itself is ugly and absurd: it has teapots and soldiers’ packs hanging all over it.
Bringing up the rear is the baggage train, and striding thoughtfully beside it, drooping his long-eared head, is a highly sympathetic character: the donkey, Magar, imported from Turkey by one of the battery commanders.
At midday—and how long and monotonous Russian days are; in them daydreams drag on, are interrupted and start again—the brigade general drives down the column in his barouche and shouts something that no one grasps. Ryabovich and others gallop up to him. “Any sick?” asks the general from his barouche and tells Ryabovich his breech-ings look slack. Such is military servitude.
Eventually the brigade returns from its exercises to its base near the manor house. Locked in his daydreams, Ryabovich cannot resist making a secret trip alone across the river, through the woods, for a closer look at the house. He knows his dream of finding the girl is futile. The whole world, the whole of life, strikes the ugly Ryabovich as an unintelligible joke directed against himself It seems likely, given his dullness and the routine of military life, that his isolation will be lasting. He will be locked in himself.
As an innovator in the writing of short stories, especially in his mastery of nostalgia and mood, Chekhov knew that his great predecessors were novelists who had addressed themselves to questions like the emergence of Russia from its prolonged medieval condition. The patrician Turgenev had made his stand for the liberation of the serfs and the example of Western civilization. Dostoyevsky had been sent to Siberia for his part in an alleged revolutionary conspiracy but had ended in denouncing the Western socialist idea and its materialism. Tolstoy, after his conversion, had turned to simple Bible teaching and to the doctrine of nonresistance to evil by force. There was now a new radical generation who were growing up as Russia became, to some degree, industrialized. In the older generation one was judged by one’s “convictions”; in Chekhov’s by one’s “tendency.” There is a letter to the elderly poet Aleksey Pleshcheyev, who had in his time been sent to prison in Siberia, in which Chekhov describes his stand:
I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines and insist on seeing me as necessarily a liberal or a conservative. I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence, whatever form they may take…. Pharisaism, stupidity and tyranny reign not only in shopkeepers’ homes and in lock-ups alone: I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation. … I regard trade-marks and labels as prejudicial. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom—freedom from force and falsehood….
Here it is important to look at a story called On the Road and a play, Ivanov, which derives from it, which were written in one of Chekhov’s summers at Babkino. In both, the disastrous history of an educated man’s search for “convictions” are dramatically examined. On the Road is one of the Chekhov’s finest dramatic stories. It is true that it brings to mind an encounter towards the end of Turgenev’s Rudin—perhaps modeled in part on Bakunin. Like Rudin, Chekhov’s hero, Likharyov, is one of those torrential talking egoists, the old-style “superfluous man,” but now updated. He is a young ruined landowner who has given up his estate, and we see him traveling with his tiny daughter and stopping at a rough roadside inn. A gentlewoman is sheltering there too. She has been on a round of visits to friends in the province. Instantly he pours out a nonstop confession, the history of his changing “convictions,” his sins, his unforgivable behavior to his dead wife. Chekhov notes, “To an educated Russian his past is always beautiful, his present a tale of calamity.” Likharyov tells her he has gone from faith in God to faith in the Sciences, chemistry, zoology. He has been, in politics, a Slavophile, a nihilist, to the point of shooting a gendarme. He had once converted a nun to nihilism; he boasts of his success with women. During these changes of mind and fortune his wife had never left his side. “A noble sublime slavery,” he says. “… the highest meaning of woman’s life.” Now she is dead. Only once does he pause: his tiny daughter has been put to rest wrapped in a blanket on the floor and the exhausted child calls out, “He won’t let me sleep with his talking.” He soothes the child and the night passes. In the morning he goes on again. What is he going to do? He has made a decision. He is traveling to Siberia to work in a coal mine.