“I like your house immensely!” he said, setting his spectacles straight.
The General’s wife smiled and said that the house had belonged to her father; then she asked whether his parents were living, whether he had long been in the army, why he was so thin, and so on…. After receiving answers to her questions, she went on, and after his conversation with her his smiles were more friendly than ever, and he thought he was surrounded by splendid people….
Are we in a Pushkin story? Or in a Tolstoy novel?
Ryabovich is sensible and it takes him only a little while to solve the situational part of the mystery of the kiss. During the dinner he then tries but cannot figure which of the women it was who accidentally kissed him. The family bids the officers goodbye.
In bed in a hut that he shares with two other officers, Ryabovich wonders more who she is. But it’s who he now is that matters:
Ryabovich pulled the bedclothes over his head, curled himself up in bed, and tried to gather together the floating images in his mind and to combine them into one whole. But nothing came of it. He soon fell asleep, and his last thought was that someone had caressed him and made him happy—that something extraordinary, foolish, but joyful and delightful, had come into his life. The thought did not leave him even in his sleep.
Everybody has an imagination. As the brigade sets out the next day, Chekhov shows us what Ryabovich can manage with his:
When it was moving along the road by the granaries, Ryabovich looked at the house on the right. The blinds were down in all the windows. Evidently the household was still asleep. The one who had kissed Ryabovich the day before was asleep, too. He tried to imagine her asleep. The wide-open windows of the bedroom, the green branches peeping in, the morning freshness, the scent of the poplars, lilac, and roses, the bed, a chair, and on it the skirts that had rustled the day before, the little slippers, the little watch on the table—all this he pictured to himself clearly and distinctly, but the features of the face, the sweet sleepy smile, just what was characteristic and important, slipped through his imagination like quicksilver through the fingers.
He is uninterested in and bored by what he actually sees around him as the brigade slowly moves on. He has seen it all before. But he has never paid attention to his imagination like this, apparently:
At first when the brigade was setting off on the march he tried to persuade himself that the incident of the kiss could only be interesting as a mysterious little adventure, that it was in reality trivial, and to think of it seriously, to say the least of it, was stupid; but now he bade farewell to logic and gave himself up to dreams…. At one moment he imagined himself in Von Rabbek’s drawing room beside a girl who was like the young lady in lilac and the fair girl in black; then he would close his eyes and see himself with another, entirely unknown girl, whose features were very vague. In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned on her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with his wife, children….
What is imagination? Is it simply making pleasing pictures? Why is it hard to maintain it and fix it as precisely as a fiction writer can?
“Brakes on!” the word of command rang out every time they went downhill.
He, too, shouted “Brakes on!” and was afraid this shout would disturb his reverie and bring him back to reality….
But now that Ryabovich has started this pleasing exercise of his imagination, it’s hard to stop! As Chekhov knows:
As they passed by some landowner’s estate Ryabovich looked over the fence into the garden. A long avenue, straight as a ruler, strewn with yellow sand and bordered with young birch-trees, met his eyes…. With the eagerness of a man given up to dreaming, he pictured to himself little feminine feet tripping along yellow sand, and quite unexpectedly had a clear vision in his imagination of the girl who had kissed him and whom he had succeeded in picturing to himself the evening before at supper. This image remained in his brain and did not desert him again.
And the gift of imagination, is it also a mixed blessing?
“All I am dreaming about now which seems to me so impossible and unearthly is really quite an ordinary thing,” thought Ryabovich, looking at the clouds of dust racing after the general’s carriage. “It’s all very ordinary, and everyone goes through it…. That general, for instance, has once been in love; now he is married and has children. Captain Vahter, too, is married and beloved, though the nape of his neck is very red and ugly and he has no waist…. Salmanov is coarse and very Tatar, but he has had a love affair that has ended in marriage…. I am the same as every one else, and I, too, shall have the same experience as every one else, sooner or later….”
And the thought that he was an ordinary person, and that his life was ordinary, delighted him and gave him courage. He pictured her and his happiness as he pleased, and put no rein on his imagination.
And the difference between what we have in our imagination and what we can describe to others—that’s the challenge and disappointment of art, the disappointment for Chekhov in what he had intended in Ivanov and what many others saw.
That evening…
[…] Ryabovich, whose head was confused from dreaming all day long, drank and said nothing. After three glasses he got a little drunk, felt weak, and had an irresistible desire to impart his new sensations to his comrades.
“A strange thing happened to me at those Von Rabbeks’,” he began, trying to put an indifferent and ironical tone into his voice. “You know I went into the billiard-room….”
He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence…. In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning. Listening to him, Lobytko, who was a great liar and consequently believed no one, looked at him sceptically and laughed. Merzlyakov twitched his eyebrows and, without removing his eyes from the Vyestnik Evropi, said:
“That’s an odd thing! How strange!… throws herself on a man’s neck, without addressing him by name…. She must be some sort of hysterical neurotic.”
No, no, no. The story is all spoiled in front of those other men. Ryabovich, possessed by and possessing imagination, feels the disappointment of an artist.7 But he restores it, privately, to himself:
In the evenings when his comrades began talking of love and women, he would listen, and draw up closer; and he wore the expression of a soldier when he hears the description of a battle in which he has taken part. And on the evenings when the officers, out on the spree with the setter—Lobytko—at their head, made Don Juan excursions to the “suburb,” and Ryabovich took part in such excursions, he always was sad, felt profoundly guilty, and inwardly begged her forgiveness….