Malahin (usually referred to as “the old man”) has to metaphorically grease the wheels to get the train moving:
“God be my judge, I have reckoned it and even jotted it down in a notebook; we have wasted thirty-four hours standing still on the journey. If you go on like this, either the cattle will die, or they won’t pay me two rubles for the meat when I do get there. It’s not traveling, but ruination.”
The guard raises his eyebrows and sighs with an air that seems to say: “All that is unhappily true!” The engine-driver sits silent, dreamily looking at the cap. From their faces one can see that they have a secret thought in common, which they do not utter, not because they want to conceal it, but because such thoughts are much better expressed by signs than by words. And the old man understands. He feels in his pocket, takes out a ten-ruble note, and without preliminary words, without any change in the tone of his voice or the expression of his face, but with the confidence and directness with which probably only Russians give and take bribes, he gives the guard the note. The latter takes it, folds it in four, and without undue haste puts it in his pocket. After that all three go out of the room, and waking the sleeping guard on the way, go on to the platform.
(The story was too long to fit into the space in that Saturday’s literary section of New Times, so its conclusion, when Malahin’s cattle’s journey ends, followed three days later.)26
At last the bullocks are sold to a dealer. Malahin hires drovers. The cattle are divided into herds, ten in each, and driven to the other end of the town. The bullocks, exhausted, go with drooping heads through the noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and last time in their lives. The tattered drovers walk after them, their heads drooping, too. They are bored…. Now and then some drover starts out of his brooding, remembers that there are cattle in front of him entrusted to his charge, and to show that he is doing his duty brings a stick down full swing on a bullock’s back. The bullock staggers with the pain, runs forward a dozen paces, and looks about him as though he were ashamed at being beaten before people.
Having read only this one story, the Russian literary world would have had to sit up straight and wonder, “Who’s this Chekhov? Whatever outhouse he emerged from, he’s a genius!” Titled “Cold Blood” in Russian, “The Cattle-Dealers” “won an accolade from the Petersburg Society for the Protection of Animals.”27
*
From the end of October to November 19, Chekhov attended four rehearsals of Ivanov.28 An actor remembered his presence at one: “I saw a mechanical toy moving across the floor at me, and I noticed Anton Pavlovich walking toward us. The other actors told me later that all of Chekhov’s pockets were packed with mechanical toys. Anton Pavlovich explained, apologizing, that he was a doctor, and that earlier that day he had some children among his patients, and that they stuffed his pockets with toys. ‘Look at this! I have too many toys…’ ” Alexandra Glama-Mesherskaya, who played Sarra, says that during rehearsals, Chekhov “never interrupted the director’s work. He never made a single remark on the actors at all. I never saw a more humble author in my life.”29
November 1887
To the question of what he would do, if he became rich, Chekhov answered with perfect seriousness: “I would write the tiniest possible stories…”
—Reminiscences1
Trust the action, not the words. In the first week of November, Chekhov and his brother Alexander began giving out copies of Innocent Speeches to friends and family.2 It was a well-designed, good-looking volume, in Chekhov’s opinion,3 and full of funny stories that had enjoyed a wide audience. A book’s publication has been known to soften an author’s view of it.
Cover of Innocent Speeches.
At Korsh’s request, he went to the theater on November 2 to answer the actors’ questions about Ivanov, and the next night he watched a rehearsal. He wrote to Leykin on November 4: “Forgive me, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich, that for so long I didn’t answer your letter. My play, of the highest expectations—that it be simple!—has so taken me and tormented me that I lost the ability to orient the time, it knocked me off my legs, and probably I’ll soon become a psycho. Writing it was not hard, but putting it on demands not only expenditures on cabs and time, but so much nervous work.”4 He complained, in a comically outraged list, about his unhappiness with Moscow, actors, Korsh, the women in Korsh’s troupe. He had wanted to take his play back, so he said, but Korsh wouldn’t let him.
Maria Kiseleva, having received his invitation to the premiere performance, wrote him on November 4: “I’m worried for you and imagine—if the play is liked and they call you up—how you will bow. Your forelock will fall on your head… Will you be embarrassed? I’m already embarrassed to death, though I desire that you are often and much called up…”5 Kiseleva’s attraction to Chekhov seems beyond latent to me. Virginia Llewellyn Smith writes that Kiseleva “took a vicarious interest in Chekhov’s flirtations. In a letter to Chekhov of 1887 [Nov. 4] she wrote: ‘The other day I dreamt of you as Dunya’s bridegroom. Your face was sad and you admitted that you didn’t want to marry, but Mama Efros commanded it… they dragged you both to the synagogue, and I was so sorry I wept…’; but, Kiseleva added, had it been real, she would have laughed and said: ‘He got what was coming to him! Serves him right!’ Chekhov in her opinion had carried the flirtation far enough to warrant Dunya’s having some claim on him: but he had not intended to commit himself to her.”6
*
The only story Chekhov published this month was “Expensive Lessons” (“Dorogie Uroki,” November 9), which is about a dull, self-deceiving twenty-six-year-old who decides he should learn French (“For a cultivated man to be ignorant of foreign languages is a great inconvenience. Vorotov became acutely conscious of it when, after taking his degree, he began upon a piece of research work”);7 Chekhov liked to make fun of himself for not knowing foreign languages. A young and pretty French-Russian woman comes to Vorotov’s house, expecting to teach a child; she agrees to teach the man, because, like Chekhov, she needs the money:
“French grammar has twenty-six letters. The first letter is called A, the second B…”
“Excuse me,” Vorotov interrupted, smiling. “I must warn you, mademoiselle, that you must change your method a little in my case. You see, I know Russian, Greek, and Latin well…. I’ve studied comparative philology, and I think we might omit Margot [a textbook] and pass straight to reading some author.”
And he explained to the French girl how grown-up people learn languages.
“A friend of mine,” he said, “wanting to learn modern languages, laid before him the French, German, and Latin gospels, and read them side by side, carefully analyzing each word, and would you believe it, he attained his object in less than a year. Let us do the same. We’ll take some author and read him.”
The French girl looked at him in perplexity. Evidently the suggestion seemed to her very naïve and ridiculous. If this strange proposal had been made to her by a child, she would certainly have been angry and have scolded it, but as he was a grown-up man and very stout and she could not scold him, she only shrugged her shoulders hardly perceptibly and said:
“As you please.”
Some of us who have tried to learn a new language after leaving school will recognize ourselves in Vorotov.
With a good-natured smile, breathing hard, he spent a quarter of an hour over the word “Mémoires,” and as much over the word de, and this wearied the young lady. She answered his questions languidly, grew confused, and evidently did not understand her pupil well, and did not attempt to understand him. Vorotov asked her questions, and at the same time kept looking at her fair hair and thinking: