*
Anton wrote Alexander a Christmas-day letter with the usual greetings and jokes. And could Alexander pick up his latest payment?: “I don’t have any money.”16 He asked him to also buy for Anna some cookies from a Polish shop near Nevsky Prospect (“with my money”). He followed up two days later with a line-count on his stories for the Petersburg Gazette and the total fee. “Add it to the New Times fee and send it to me. […] The family and I need to eat.” The Soviet editors say that this last phrase parodied Chekhov’s father.17
On December 27, Chekhov wrote a New Year’s greeting to Leykin that contained apologies and excuses: “I am guilty before you up to my throat and sincerely recognize that. I gave you a promise, there were topics, but I couldn’t write them. Up to Christmas I didn’t sit down to write as I thought you didn’t especially need my stories. I remembered that in the editorial office at my promise to send you Christmas stories, you answered me, in front of Bilibin, somewhat inconclusively and indeterminately. Receiving your letter during the holidays, I sat down to write and wrote something so nonsensical that I was ashamed to send it. You write that it’s all the same to you what the story is, but I don’t share this view. […] In any case, this time don’t be angry and put yourself in my situation. […] In my immobility with which I work for you, for the Creator’s sake, don’t look for bad intent, don’t think that I’m shirking Fragments. No, no! Fragments is my christening font and you are my godfather.”18
He was absolutely shirking Fragments, though he and his “godfather” remained for years in occasional and friendly contact.
*
He had completed three stories for New Times this month, the last, “A Story without a Title,” was published on New Year’s Day, 1888. He wrote it, apparently, after his return from Petersburg. Had he been saving the idea of it since his trip to Holy Mountains? Or was it inspired by a joke he had heard or told? When Lazarev was visiting at Christmastime, Chekhov read “A Story without a Title” aloud to him and Ivan Chekhov.
It begins soberly, seemingly a historical Christian religious tale. If we had been listening outside the door, we might have wondered whose work it was:
In the fifth century, just as now, the sun rose every morning and every evening retired to rest. In the morning, when the first rays kissed the dew, the earth revived, the air was filled with the sounds of rapture and hope; while in the evening the same earth subsided into silence and plunged into gloomy darkness. One day was like another, one night like another. From time to time a storm-cloud raced up and there was the angry rumble of thunder, or a negligent star fell out of the sky, or a pale monk ran to tell the brotherhood that not far from the monastery he had seen a tiger—and that was all, and then each day was like the next.
The Father Superior of these monks is an organ master and a marvelously moving sermonist:
If he were moved to anger or abandoned himself to intense joy, or began speaking of something terrible or grand, then a passionate inspiration took possession of him, tears came into his flashing eyes, his face flushed, and his voice thundered, and as the monks listened to him they felt that their souls were spell-bound by his inspiration; at such marvelous, splendid moments his power over them was boundless, and if he had bidden his elders fling themselves into the sea, they would all, every one of them, have hastened to carry out his wishes.
The only such person Chekhov would have known about, or felt the similar affect of, was Tolstoy:
His music, his voice, his poetry in which he glorified God, the heavens and the earth, were a continual source of joy to the monks. It sometimes happened that through the monotony of their lives they grew weary of the trees, the flowers, the spring, the autumn, their ears were tired of the sound of the sea, and the song of the birds seemed tedious to them, but the talents of their Father Superior were as necessary to them as their daily bread.
The monks are in heavenly dull Eden:
Dozens of years passed by, and every day was like every other day, every night was like every other night. Except the birds and the wild beasts, not one soul appeared near the monastery. The nearest human habitation was far away, and to reach it from the monastery, or to reach the monastery from it, meant a journey of over seventy miles across the desert. Only men who despised life, who had renounced it, and who came to the monastery as to the grave, ventured to cross the desert.
A visitor arrives. He scolds them for isolating themselves from the hellish town. Why aren’t they there in the town trying to save lost souls?
The Father Superior… yes, this is now sounding like a long joke… is awakened by the visitor’s message and decides to go and do God’s work. He is gone three months and when he returns he is so shaken he can’t even speak to his anxious monks. After a week of silence he addresses them, furiously denouncing the vice and sin he has witnessed:
The old man, growing more and more incensed and weeping with wrath, went on to describe what he had seen. On a table in the midst of the revelers, he said, stood a sinful, half-naked woman. It was hard to imagine or to find in nature anything more lovely and fascinating. This reptile, young, long-haired, dark-skinned, with black eyes and full lips, shameless and insolent, showed her snow-white teeth and smiled as though to say: “Look how shameless, how beautiful I am.” Silk and brocade fell in lovely folds from her shoulders, but her beauty would not hide itself under her clothes, but eagerly thrust itself through the folds, like the young grass through the ground in spring. The shameless woman drank wine, sang songs, and abandoned herself to anyone who wanted her.
Then the old man, wrathfully brandishing his arms, described the horse-races, the bull-fights, the theaters, the artists’ studios where they painted naked women or molded them of clay. He spoke with inspiration, with sonorous beauty, as though he were playing on unseen chords, while the monks, petrified, greedily drank in his words and gasped with rapture….
Even if we clever listeners can guess now how the story ends, there is, as in all elaborate comic stories, pleasure in having our expectations fulfilled.
There is no dialogue. Did Chekhov read it with a special voice or voices? Did he pause when Lazarev and Ivan, his brother, laughed? Or did he, as he usually preferred, read it deadpan? It would have taken him about fifteen minutes to read it all the way through. The story concludes: “After describing all the charms of the devil, the beauty of evil, and the fascinating grace of the dreadful female form, the old man cursed the devil, turned and shut himself up in his cell…. When he came out of his cell in the morning there was not a monk left in the monastery; they had all fled to the town.” As Lazarev recounts the evening’s reading, it seems as if Chekhov immediately had his youngest brother Mikhail run the manuscript to the station to send it on the overnight train to New Times.
The Chekhov family liked parties. There are no details, however, about how he and his parents and siblings celebrated New Year’s Eve, 1887.
Conclusion
Chekhov: “Do you know for how many years I shall be read? Seven.”
“Why seven?” I asked.
“Seven and a half, then.”
—Conversation with a fellow writer1
In the years 1886 and 1887, in full command of his literary powers, Chekhov had written more short stories in total than he would in the rest of his productive life. But by 1888 he was no longer amazed or enlivened by his literary activity and success. The giddiness had worn off. “Before, I wrote the way a bird sings,” he told Grigoriy Petrov. “I sit down and write. I don’t think about how or about what. It went all by itself. I could write whenever it pleased me. Writing a sketch, a story, a skit, it didn’t cost me any trouble. Like a little lamb or colt let loose into the open, I hopped, cavorted, kicked, wagged my tail, shook my head funnily. It was fun to me and from the outside it must have appeared very funny. I myself sometimes take up the old stories, read them and laugh. I think, ‘I wrote like that.’ ”2