Chekhov on the other hand was eating well and would have enjoyed being exiled to Petersburg. He was seemingly only socializing and writing. He made friends fast. He met a new lifelong friend Ivan Leont’ev (his pen name was Shcheglov) on December 9. Within fifteen minutes, Leont’ev recalled, “I was already conversing from the heart with Chekhov, just as if with someone I had known for ten years.”4 By the time they said goodbye that first night, “he was calling me ‘Jean’ and I was calling him ‘Antoine.’ ”
A day or two later, and within a half-hour of meeting sixty-three-year-old Aleksei Pleshcheev, the famous poet “was fully taken captive,” remembered Leont’ev, as “Chekhov quickly went into his customary philosophical-humorous mood. If someone had happened to glance in at Pleshcheev’s room then, he would have thought that two close old friends were chatting.”5
Chekhov showed Leont’ev “The Kiss” (“Potseluy”) on December 13 before submitting it to New Times, where it was published December 15. The story concerns an officer in a brigade in the countryside. Leont’ev had been an artillery captain in the late 1870s, and Chekhov wanted to know if he had got the military details right. He had.
Unusually, the time-setting of the beginning of the story, May 20, does not correspond to the issue date of “The Kiss.” Chekhov, perhaps, had had this one up his sleeve for a while or, possibly, he had freed himself of the obligation to write to the season. A reserve artillery brigade is out in the field near a remote village doing maneuvers one evening when the officers are invited by a servant to go have tea at the local estate. The officers grumble, because they had this experience the year before, being invited to an estate, but then having to spend all night listening to their host’s “anecdotes of his glorious past.”
But this landowner is different:
The General shook hands with everyone, made his apologies, and smiled, but it was evident by his face that he was by no means so delighted as their last year’s count, and that he had invited the officers simply because, in his opinion, it was a social obligation to do so. And the officers themselves, as they walked up the softly carpeted stairs, as they listened to him, felt that they had been invited to this house simply because it would have been awkward not to invite them; and at the sight of the footmen, who hastened to light the lamps in the entrance below and in the anteroom above, they began to feel as though they had brought uneasiness and discomfort into the house with them. In a house in which two sisters and their children, brothers, and neighbors were gathered together, probably on account of some family festivity, or event, how could the presence of nineteen unknown officers possibly be welcome?6
Another way that “The Kiss” is unusual is that Chekhov has decided to fill it with a lot of people. His principle for at least the last couple of years has been simplicity and limitations… two people, three, rarely more than four. Maybe Ivanov had changed his orientation about that. Or he was newly confident or eager to experiment: If Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Gogol and Pushkin could fill their pages with crowds, why couldn’t he?
“Gentlemen, there are so many of you that it is impossible to introduce you all!” said the General in a loud voice, trying to sound very cheerful. “Make each other’s acquaintance, gentlemen, without any ceremony!”
The officers—some with very serious and even stern faces, others with forced smiles, and all feeling extremely awkward—somehow made their bows and sat down to tea.
The most ill at ease of them all was Ryabovich—a little officer in spectacles, with sloping shoulders, and whiskers like a lynx’s. While some of his comrades assumed a serious expression, while others wore forced smiles, his face, his lynx-like whiskers, and spectacles seemed to say: “I am the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade!” […]
In an another unusual move, Chekhov has held off any appearance or indication of the story’s hero, until now, about four pages in. And what an unlikely hero of what the title promises to be a romantic story!
We observe the scene with the shy man’s eyes and Chekhov’s understanding:
Von Rabbek and his family skillfully drew the officers into the discussion, and meanwhile kept a sharp lookout over their glasses and mouths, to see whether all of them were drinking, whether all had enough sugar, why some one was not eating cakes or not drinking brandy. And the longer Ryabovich watched and listened, the more he was attracted by this insincere but splendidly disciplined family.
This is a story where nothing is going to happen, except by accident.
The piano struck up; the melancholy strains of a valse floated out of the wide open windows, and every one, for some reason, remembered that it was spring, a May evening. Everyone was conscious of the fragrance of roses, of lilac, and of the young leaves of the poplar.
(Was it Chekhov’s imagination that, having conjured the sounds of the piano, set off the chain of thoughts that reminded him, too, that in the story it is May, not December?)
Dancing began…. Ryabovich stood near the door among those who were not dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm around the waist of a respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the sight of all take a girl he did not know around the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the consciousness that he was timid, that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers, had deeply mortified him, but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, looking at his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful.
And now Chekhov has activated our suspicions about how the story could unfold.
When the host leads a couple of officers to the billiards room, Ryabovich tags along. He watches, grows bored, is ignored, and decides to go back and observe the dancing. He gets lost:
[…] he found himself in a little dark room which he had not seen on his way to the billiard-room. After standing there a little while, he resolutely opened the first door that met his eyes and walked into an absolutely dark room. Straight in front could be seen the crack in the doorway through which there was a gleam of vivid light; from the other side of the door came the muffled sound of a melancholy mazurka. Here, too, as in the drawing room, the windows were wide open and there was a smell of poplars, lilac and roses….
So many smells! Characters’ perception of flower-scents is often in Chekhov associated with sex:
Ryabovich stood still in hesitation…. At that moment, to his surprise, he heard hurried footsteps and the rustling of a dress, a breathless feminine voice whispered “At last!” And two soft, fragrant, unmistakably feminine arms were clasped about his neck; a warm cheek was pressed to his cheek, and simultaneously there was the sound of a kiss. But at once the bestower of the kiss uttered a faint shriek and skipped back from him, as it seemed to Ryabovich, with aversion. He, too, almost shrieked and rushed toward the gleam of light at the door….
At first, having returned to the drawing room, he is embarrassed. And then, realizing no one is looking at him or thinking of him, Chekhov gives him the gift of fulfillment:
[…] as he became convinced that people were dancing and talking as calmly as ever, he gave himself up entirely to the new sensation which he had never experienced before in his life. Something strange was happening to him…. His neck, around which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops, and the more he rubbed the place the more distinct was the chilly sensation; all over, from head to foot, he was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger…. He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to laugh aloud…. He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an “undistinguished appearance” (that was how his appearance had been described by some ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard). When Von Rabbek’s wife happened to pass by him, he gave her such a broad and friendly smile that she stood still and looked at him inquiringly.