Though Chekhov and others would see this period of his life as being under Tolstoy’s influence, he was asserting something in direct opposition to the ambitions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: They were problem-solvers. They thought they could make out the world. Chekhov believed in many things, but he did not believe in his powers to comprehend human life. See it and describe it, like a doctor, like a psychologist, like a generous man, that he could do—but he was no prophet or visionary.
*
The knot that I can’t untie, but that I keep worrying over, is Chekhov’s relationship with Dunya Efros. He wrote in his usual jokey tone to Bilibin on March 11, and it seems to me he was creating his own comically unhappy and ill-matched “marriage” in contrast to Bilibin’s real one:
I’ve split from my fiancée to the farthest measure. Yesterday we saw each other, I spoke about devilish things (the devilish things we have in Moscow are modern furniture), I complained to her about being broke, but she told me that her brother-Jew drew a three-ruble note so perfectly that the illusion was complete: the cleaning woman picked it up and put it in her pocket. That’s all. I’m not going to write to you anything more about her.
Maybe you’re right saying that it’s too early for me to marry… I’m lightminded, despite that I’m only a year younger than you… I still at times dream of grammar schooclass="underline" an unlearned lesson and a fear that the teacher is going to call me out… Perhaps I’m a youth. […]25
And here, readers, we can squirm together, as Chekhov, commenting on Bilibin’s weakness as a humor writer, described a particular kind of lovemaking:
Your one fault—your softness […]. If you’re not afraid of the comparison, you as an essayist are similar to a lover to whom the woman says: “You do it tenderly… I need it rougher!” (À propos: a woman is just like a chicken—she loves to be beaten at the very moment.) You do it particularly tenderly…26
Well? Can we suppose that Chekhov and a lover had gone at it in a rough manner? We can wish Chekhov was as enlightened as we are in 2022 and that he would watch his language and behavior, but…! And here I also imagine Bilibin, who had been offended by the sexual suggestiveness of “The Witch,” blushing. “A Little Joke” would be published the next day. The sexuality in that story and the reference here suggest that lately, at least, Chekhov was thinking a lot about sex. That is, when he was not terrified of a doctor’s everyday danger: “In Moscow,” he told Bilibin, “typhus (spotted) is raging, taking off in a very short time six of my fellow graduates. I’m afraid! I’m not afraid of anything, but I’m afraid of this typhus… It’s as if there is something mysterious about it.”
*
On March 12, “A Little Joke” (“Shutochka”) was published in The Cricket in Moscow under the pen name “A Person without Means.” Was Chekhov purposefully hiding this story from his friends? Did he think the censors would nab it in Petersburg if he submitted it to Leykin for Fragments? He had published one story in The Cricket in January, and the next would be in September. It wasn’t his usual landing spot, but this was 1886, and he was firing off stories so quickly he later completely forgot some of them. This one he remembered and would substantially revise for the Collected Works.
“A Little Joke” is often anthologized in Russian and English; it is about a young couple sledding. I read it in Russian a few times before I started to imagine that there was more to Chekhov’s little joke than the narrator’s mischievous trick.
By medical, psychological, and literary reflex, Chekhov describes the physiological changes his characters go through. He’s being “objective.” What if one stands outside of the moral and subjective judgments and observes instead how people under stress or excitement breathe, move, and express themselves?
I’m going to quote from my own translation, rather than Constance Garnett’s perfectly good one, because my realizations about the story came in the midst of translating it from Russian. Chekhov starts some stories with a weather report, as if he needs to take one step into the setting: “A clear winter noontime…” and there he is, almost instantaneously, in its midst, able to look, hear, and smell around. He has made himself aware of his immediate surroundings. Grounded like so, he could then fly off for five or ten pages. At the end of this flight he has made a Story.
A clear winter noontime….27 A strong frost, it cracks, and Nadenka, who holds me by the arm, has silver frost covering the curls on her temples and the down on her upper lip. We stand atop a high hill. The sun is shining on the sloping surface as if on a mirror that extends from our feet to the ground below. A small sled, upholstered in bright red cloth, is beside us.
“Let’s go down, Nadezhda Petrovna!” I beg her. “Just once! I assure you that we’ll be safe and sound.”
A young man tries to persuade a young woman that they try something she fears is dangerous: “Just once!” But how can we tell he’s a young man? Is it his casualness, which is more apparent in the Russian? And how can we tell she’s a young woman? It’s a combination of her nickname, “Nadenka” for Nadezhda (“Hope”), her naïvete, and the “down on her upper lip” that the unnamed narrator notices that suggests she’s young:
But Nadenka is frightened. All that space from her little boots to the end of the icy hill seems terrifying to her, an immeasurably deep abyss. When I only suggest just sitting in the sled, her breath freezes and halts as she glances down; but what will happen if she risks flying into the abyss! She will die, she’ll go out of her mind.
“I beg you!” I say. “You don’t need to be frightened. Just understand, this is faintheartedness, cowardice!”
This is sledding down a hill, that’s all. Why is she so scared? And, as I reflect remembering what it was like to be a young man myself in the company of an attractive young woman, why is it so important to him that she take a ride with him? How big a thrill could sledding be to him, and if it’s such a big thrill, why doesn’t he, with a swagger, go himself, alone?
Nadenka finally gives in, and I see by her face she is setting out risking her life. I seat her shaking in the sled, pale, and I wrap my arm around her and together we descend into the abyss.
It’s just a sled-ride, isn’t it? Another word for abyss, bezdna in Russian, is “neverendingness.”
The sled flies like a bullet. The tearing air beats in our faces, roars, whistles in our ears, rips painfully, nips from spite, wants to tear our heads off our shoulders. From the wind pressure it’s an effort to breathe. It seems the devil himself has seized us in his paws and with a roar is dragging us into Hell. The surrounding objects slide into one long extended streak…. Here, here, one more moment and it seems—we’ll be destroyed!
“I love you, Nadya!” I say in an undertone.
The sled begins running quieter and quieter, the roar of the wind and the buzzing of the sled-runners is less terrifying, our breath comes back to life, and we finally get down. Nadenka is neither living nor dead. She’s pale, barely breathing…. I help her get up.
Quite an experience for young Nadenka! But there, not yet identified as such by Chekhov or the narrator, is the “little joke,” the narrator’s unconscious or perhaps calculated teasing declaration of love in the midst of their sensory overload. Did he mean it? Does he know?
“I’m not going another time for anything,” she says, looking at me with wide, terror-filled eyes. “Not for anything in the world! I nearly died!”