“Yes,” Vassilyev said, startled. “It’s very possible! I am naturally vain and fatuous. Well, explain it, if you believe in your power of reading faces! Half an hour ago I shot myself, and just now I am posing…. Explain that if you can.”
But why does Chekhov then let the nearly hysterical, possibly “posing” Vassilyev make what are actually Chekhov’s own philosophical musings? He won’t let us or his narrator “explain that.” We can’t; this is one of Chekhov’s assertions about human psychology, and is not a point of argument. At his most sincere and earnest, he puts his own words into the mouth of an actor, who may or may not be posing. This is for Chekhov’s sake—not to disguise his beliefs, but to test them, to try them out in a 20situation of someone experiencing the feelings.21
About the word “posing.” The verb in Russian is risovat’—to draw, to paint, and, figuratively, to portray. As I understand it, Chekhov is talking about the self-dramatizing impulse: I feel so bad I want to kill myself. Let me prove that feeling to the world—and do it! His good friend, the painter Isaac Levitan, was something of a poser himself, continually threatening suicide.22
This story’s inspiration was not of the immediate moment, but from an incident in early January 1886 involving an acquaintance of Chekhov’s, Pyotr Kicheev, an editor at The Alarm Clock, who shot himself, but the bullet was a dud, and a few days later Kicheev was making jokes.23 (Perhaps Kicheev recognized that event in this story and resented it; in any case, in late 1887 he reviewed and panned Chekhov’s Ivanov, a play that features a “successful” suicide.)
Vassilyev anticipates his wife’s funeral the next day. From his musings, it is not after all clear to me if Vassilyev is actually an actor or just an educated person who quotes Hamlet and happened to be included in General Lukhachev’s “theatricals.”
“Ah…. Do you remember how I pranced about like a needle, like an enthusiastic ass at those private theatricals when I was courting Zina? It was stupid, but it was good, it was fun…. The very memory of it brings back a whiff of spring…. And now! What a cruel change of scene! There is a subject for you! Only don’t you go in for writing ‘the diary of a suicide.’ That’s vulgar and conventional. You make something humorous of it.”
“Again you are… posing,” I said. “There’s nothing humorous in your position.”
“Nothing laughable? You say nothing laughable?” Vassilyev sat up, and tears glistened in his eyes. An expression of bitter distress came into his pale face. His chin quivered.
“You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives,” he said [as Chekhov indeed did laugh], “but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate has cheated me! I have been deceived as no bank depositor, no duped husband has ever been deceived! Only realize what an absurd fool I have been made! Last year before your eyes I did not know what to do with myself for happiness. And now before your eyes….”
Vassilyev’s head sank on the pillow and he laughed.
“Nothing more absurd and stupid than such a change could possibly be imagined. Chapter one: spring, love, honeymoon… honey, in fact; chapter two: looking for a job, the pawnshop, pallor, the chemist’s shop, and… tomorrow’s splashing through the mud to the graveyard.”
The narrator leaves Vassilyev to get medication from the chemist’s, and returns to find Vassilyev having torn his bandages off and unconscious. In the morning, after the funeral service, the narrator accompanies Vassilyev to and from the cemetery.
The story without an ending has a break in time: “Only one year has passed since that night.” The narrator is now hosting a lively gathering that includes Vassilyev and two young women. He interrupts Vassilyev to show him the story so far—the story is everything up to what we have just read:
Always condescending about my authorship, he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an armchair and begins upon it.
“Hang it all, what horrors,” he mutters with a smile.
I imagine Chekhov in his study having handed over a manuscript to an impatient friend or brother and watching its effects.
But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face becomes. At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner.
Chekhov is famous for the open-endedness of his stories—that they reflect the title of this story and have no end. The narrator, like Chekhov, doesn’t know how or if stories of actual human beings end, if not by death.
“How does it end?” I ask him.
“How does it end? H’m….”
He looks at the room, at me, at himself…. He sees his new fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and… sinking on a chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.
“Wasn’t I right when I told you it was all absurd? My God! I have had burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant’s back; the devil knows what I have suffered—no one could have suffered more, I think, and where are the traces? It’s astonishing. One would have thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated. And yet that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left, not a scrap. It’s as though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka. Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on a humorous end, my friend!”
The would-be suicide asks how can there be no evidence remaining of that long terrible night? So many suicides… and this one, interrupted and botched, shows him or us what? Suicide is folly? Pointless? That all such shows of dramatic grief ought to be discounted? He is not saying he’s lucky—but that the grief dissipates, as if mocking us. That is the disappointment. We can end our lives on a sincere, sane impulse, and yet if we accidentally survive, we find life quite satisfactory enough to keep participating in it.
Chekhov doesn’t think that any of these questions and reflections are funny and neither does the humor-writer narrator, who, like Chekhov, recognizes the limitations of a comic or tragic denouement.
And yet the narrator wants an ending, something to settle down upon, to conclude once and for all, to give him and his readers peace of mind:
“How will it end?” I ask myself aloud.
Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the drawing room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on that man’s account on that terrible night. It is as though I had lost something….
Chekhov won’t comfort us with an answer that isn’t there. He has described what has come to be recognized as Chekhovian—a story without an end. Feelings have been roused; reflections on fate have been stirred. Are such experiences a waste?
There is, perhaps, a latter-day reflection that shows that Chekhov believed that the unsettled ending is probably, because it doesn’t lie, the closest we can come to truth. In May 1888, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin, who by then was his most serious friend and correspondent concerning literary and philosophical topics:
It seems to me that the writer of fiction should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, etc. His business is but to describe those who have been speaking or thinking about God and pessimism, how, and under what circumstances. The artist should be, not the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased witness…. My business is merely to be talented, i.e., to be able to distinguish between important and unimportant statements, to be able to illuminate the characters and speak their language…. The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it. The mob think they know and understand everything; the more stupid they are, the wider, I think, do they conceive their horizon to be. And if an artist in whom the crowd has faith decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.24