The story’s original ironical title was “In Learned Society,” a phrase that does not occur in the story; Chekhov was annoyed when Suvorin referred to it as “Kashtanka” in its run-up to book publication. Chekhov understood that the multipart story, about 5,000 words divided into four chapters, would make an attractive book for children. In its original form, “In Learned Society” was not designated as a children’s story, but for the book he was pleased to modify it to make it more so. Several years later, having written another “children’s” tale, “Whitebrow,” he commented in a letter: “I lack the ability to write for children; I write for them once every ten years. I don’t like what is known as children’s literature; I don’t recognize its validity. Children should be given only what is suitable for adults as well…. It is better and more to the point to learn to choose the correct medicine and to prescribe the correct dosage than to try to dream up some special medicine just because the patient is a child.”13
It took four years for Suvorin to start moving on the book, however, as he doubted it would have much of a sale. The usually savvy publisher was quite wonderfully wrong; it was immediately popular in 1892 (Suvorin’s own children gawked with amazement at Chekhov when he visited their home; this was the man who had created such a wonder, and they had named their own pets after the story’s animals), and “Kashtanka” is still popular now. There are several editions in Russian in print. There are two full-length Russian-language cartoons of it as well as a good live-action Soviet-era feature available on YouTube. When I taught “Kashtanka” this past semester to my Brooklyn community college students, a young woman who had grown up in Haiti told me she had read the story already and that it was her little sister’s favorite. (She was referring to the out-of-print picture book, translated and slightly adapted by Ronald Meyer, and gorgeously illustrated by Gennady Spirin.)
Between its publication in New Times and the book’s publication, Chekhov divided the four chapters into seven and added a completely new episode that increased the length by twenty percent. As regards phrasing (or “dosage” as he put it in his metaphor about children’s literature), he changed the original’s only very slightly. In a scene wherein Kashtanka’s new owner, the clown, is rehearsing the goose to pull a string attached to a pistol, he goads the bird, “Now imagine: You have a passionately beloved wife. You return home from the club and find a friend with her.”14 Chekhov changed that situation to this: “Now imagine that you are a jeweler and you sell gold and diamonds. Imagine now that you go into your shop and find thieves in it.” It is the book’s only substantial rephrasing.
The greatest and most mysterious thing that happened to “In Learned Society” when it became “Kashtanka” is Chekhov’s addition of a new episode, one of the most eerie and affecting scenes in all of his many volumes of creative work: the death of the goose Ivan Ivanych. In the original, the goose is disabled by having been stepped on by a horse during one evening’s performance. He does not die, but his injury leads to the clown substituting Kashtanka (now “Auntie”) to take the goose’s place at the performance, which then brings the dog into the coincidental view of her former owner. In the revised version, Ivan Ivanych’s death is slow and painful, and the animals react with apprehension:
When the master left and carried the light out with him, the darkness started again. It was frightening to Auntie. The goose was not crying out, but she again began to feel that in the darkness there was a stranger standing there. Most terrible of all was that it was impossible to bite this stranger, as he was invisible and formless. For some reason she thought that tonight there had to be something very bad coming for sure. Fyodor Timofeyich was also very disturbed. Auntie heard how he fussed on his mattress, yawned, and shook his head.
Somewhere outside there was a knocking at a gate, and the pig grunted in the shed. Auntie began to whine, stretched out her front paws and laid her head on them. In the knocking of the gate, in the grunting of the pig, who for some reason was not sleeping, in the darkness and quiet, she felt something as miserable and frightening as Ivan Ivanych’s cry. Everything was upset and anxious, but why? Who was this stranger that couldn’t be seen?
In 1887 Chekhov still wasn’t expressing his apprehensions of that deathly “stranger” to his friends or family. By 1892, Kashtanka’s and his own fears became more and more conscious.
I discovered the answer or an answer to something my students had asked about: If Kashtanka was kicked, cursed, and harshly pranked by the joiner Luka Aleksandrych and his son Fedyushka, and was then happy in her new environment with the clown, why does she go back to them?
I didn’t have a good answer for my students or myself except that she’s a dog, and all of us know humans who willingly, if resignedly, go back into abusive relationships and jobs. As I crawled back and forth over the story to translate it for a dual-language edition, I finally gleaned the depth of the pleasure of Kashtanka’s life at the joiner’s: “She remembered Luka Aleksandrych, his son Fedyushka, the comfortable little spot under the workbench… She remembered that in the long winter evenings when the joiner was planing or reading the newspaper aloud, Fedyushka usually played with her…” I also realized that Kashtanka’s new life of fame and applause at the circus has not actually been fun; she is overwhelmed by the trumpeting of the elephant, the shock of the light, the roar of the crowd, and is unnerved by the music.
Fame for Chekhov was, perhaps, not all that pleasurable, either.
*
“A Lady’s Story” (“Rasskaz Gospojhi N. N.,” December 25) is an oddity. Told in the first person by a “lady,” it is, for one thing, not a Christmas story. It begins:
Nine years ago Pyotr Sergeyich, the deputy prosecutor, and I were riding toward evening in hay-making time to fetch the letters from the station.15
She remembers that on their storm-threatened ride to her estate, Pyotr declared his love for her. She lived with her father and brother.
When I went to bed I lighted a candle and threw my window wide open, and an undefined feeling took possession of my soul. I remembered that I was free and healthy, that I had rank and wealth, that I was beloved; above all, that I had rank and wealth, rank and wealth, my God! how nice that was!… Then, huddling up in bed at a touch of cold which reached me from the garden with the dew, I tried to discover whether I loved Pyotr Sergeyich or not,… and fell asleep unable to reach any conclusion.
Her reminiscing voice, from the very first phrase, is off-putting. She sounds like an actor reciting lines:
And what happened afterward? Why—nothing. […] I had rank and wealth, while he was poor, and he was not even a nobleman, but only the son of a deacon and a deputy public prosecutor; we both of us—I through my youth and he for some unknown reason—thought of that wall as very high and thick […]
We don’t know Pyotr, who worked for her now deceased father, but on the basis of her reminiscences, I believe he has dodged a bullet:
I thought of the past, and all at once my shoulders began quivering, my head dropped, and I began weeping bitterly. I felt unbearably sorry for myself and for this man, and passionately longed for what had passed away and what life refused us now. And now I did not think about rank and wealth.
I broke into loud sobs, pressing my temples, and muttered:
“My God! My God! My life is wasted!”
She uses the phrase “rank and wealth” (znatna i bogata) five times in the story. Perhaps someone of “rank and wealth” spoke this very phrase and it stuck in Chekhov’s craw.