These were Anton’s challenges. Why did he write so much in these years? To keep the family afloat and sailing toward calmer seas. And we know that Nikolay, meanwhile, didn’t even let his anxious mother know of his whereabouts, and we know that when he did show up, he might be drunk. What could Nikolay do? Just what Anton had been doing.
3. They respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts.
Having had to pay off Nikolay’s debts to the merchant, he had the perfect right to press his bootheel on Nikolay’s toes.
4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.
Was Chekhov less merciful here to his brother than he tried to be to his dissolute characters? Perhaps, but this is a family intervention and a matter more personal than art. Anton conveyed understanding of Nikolay’s character not in artistic fashion but through expressions of care. There were specific things Nikolay could do better.
Anton was not telling Nikolay “Be like me” or “Follow my lead.” He was asserting, rather, that in the interests of independence and dignity such behavior needed to be set in stone. He believed, for now, that it was possible for Nikolay to come back to his better self. He was writing to an equal—a wavering equal who had the capacity to right himself.
5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,” or “I have become second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false….
Don’t be pathetic, Nikolay! So much of Chekhov’s character, like his art, shows restraint. It pained him to see Alexander and Nikolay letting go.
6. They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P., ecstasy over the first person they happen to meet at the Salon de Varietes, being renowned in the taverns…. If they do a pennyworth, they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred rubles’ worth, and do not brag of having the entry where others are not admitted…. The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement…. Even Krylov has said that an empty barrel echoes more loudly than a full one.
Chekhov was himself having to be leery of the thrill of getting to know (and be known by) celebrities. To his family, he did indeed exult about meeting the famous writers in Petersburg, but he did not otherwise namedrop. I would guess he believed that it was good for the family to realize that he was becoming known and that his being in the public eye was another reason they should all behave.
7. If they have a talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity…. They are proud of their talent15 and so they do not go out carousing with trade-school employees or Skvortsov’s guests, realizing that their calling lies in exerting an uplifting influence on them, not in living with them. Besides, they are fastidious.
By now, if I were Nikolay reading this letter, my head would be hanging. Maybe I would also become defensive: “What’s wrong with Skvortsov’s guests?!” I think Anton knew Nikolay would review this letter more than once, and that even if he read it and felt hurt, Nikolay was intelligent and sensitive, and he would get it, as Anton’s plan of action was clear, and the points were specific. Nikolay had “talent,” that rare valuable gift that “cultured people” must respect and honor in themselves.
8. They develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct….16 to endure her logic and never stray from her. What’s the point of it all? People with good breeding17 are not as coarse as that. What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow or horse sweat, [Soviet edition deletion] not the kind of intelligence that expresses itself in the ability to stage a fake pregnancy and tirelessly reel off lies. They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood, not a [Soviet edition deletion]. They do not swill vodka at all hours of the day and night, do not sniff at cupboards, for they are not pigs and know they are not. They drink only when they are free, on occasion…. For they want mens sana in corpore sano.
I imagine that Nikolay, who has been dead now for more than a hundred and thirty years, squirms every time someone reads this letter.
And so on. This is what cultured people are like. In order to be cultured and not to stand below the level of your surroundings it is not enough to have read “The Pickwick Papers” and learnt a monologue from “Faust.” It is not enough to hail a cab and drive off to Yakimanka Street if all you’re going to do is bolt out again a week later.
Chekhov identified one of Nikolay’s patterns: Return home, be at loose ends, and then flee.
What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will…. Every hour is precious for it…. Come to us, smash the vodka bottle, lie down and read…. Turgenev, if you like, whom you have not read…. You must drop your [Soviet edition deletion] vanity, you are not a child… you will soon be thirty. It is time! I expect you…. We all expect you….
Yours,
A. Chekhov
Now what? This is an important letter because it worked?
No, it didn’t work. Nikolay stayed away, except, as far as the record shows, for a visit to Babkino for a spell this summer and next summer. Nikolay did not produce much more with his rare artistic talent.
Is it possible that Chekhov’s letter to Nikolay closed a door between them? Had it been too much? Was it simply too late?
This is the last surviving letter Chekhov ever wrote to Nikolay.
Nikolay died in 1889, at thirty-one.
*
Chekhov’s second story for Suvorin and New Times, “The Witch,” takes an exciting turn. On the night of a snowstorm, the sexton Savely believes that his restless, sexually frustrated wife is somehow luring men to their remote cabin.
The wife tells her jealous husband: “ ‘When father was alive and living here, all sorts of people used to come to him to be cured of the ague: from the village, and the hamlets, and the Armenian settlement. They came almost every day, and no one called them devils. But if anyone once a year comes in bad weather to warm himself, you wonder at it, you silly, and take all sorts of notions into your head at once.’ ” The sexton has the self-torturing assuredness of all jealous people, but he tops off that characteristic with a bent for superstition:
“It’s not for nothing the postman is lost! Blast my eyes if the postman isn’t looking for you! Oh, the devil is a good hand at his work; he is a fine one to help! He will turn him around and around and bring him here. I know, I see! You can’t conceal it, you devil’s bauble, you heathen wanton! As soon as the storm began I knew what you were up to.”
“Here’s a fool!” smiled his wife. “Why, do you suppose, you thick-head, that I make the storm?”
She calls him out on his suspicions. If she had such power, we know and she knows, Savely would be toast.