And up there I encounter a problem that all interpreters of literature face: If one activity is really actually another, does that hold true in all instances, or in just the ones I want to focus on? If sledding is sex, how is the narrator witnessing this, her solo ride? I don’t have a good answer for that, and maybe Chekhov has had a joke on me.
When Chekhov was writing the story, he had just remarked on March 4 to Leykin that “We’re having absolutely springy weather. How passionately I want to take up spring themes.”
The winter story becomes a spring story:
But now begins the spring-like month of March…. The sun becomes warmer. Our ice hill darkens, loses its shine and melts finally. We stop sledding. Poor Nadenka will never again hear those words, nobody ever pronounces them, just so the wind isn’t heard, and I begin packing up for Petersburg—for a long time, most probably forever.
What? Chekhov has told us nothing of the casual narrator’s life or plans. He is about to set out for Petersburg, but where has he been? Where are we?
Somehow, two days before my departure, I am sitting at sunset in the little garden beside the yard where Nadenka lives; this garden is separated by a high fence with nails…. It’s far too cold, there is still snow atop the manure, the trees seem dead, but it already smells of spring, and the crows, getting ready for their sleep, loudly caw. I go up to the fence and look a long time through a crack.
Aha! The literary device that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, the crack in the wall or fence:
I see how Nadenka goes out on the little porch and extends her sad, miserable gaze at the sky…. The spring wind blows straight into her pale, dejected face…. It reminds her of that wind that roared at us then on the hill, when she heard those four words, and her face becomes sad, sad and a tear crawls down her cheeks…. And the poor girl extends both her arms as if asking this wind to bring her those words once more. And I, having awaited the wind, say in an undertone:
“I love you, Nadya!”
Oh, my God, what’s going on with Nadenka! She screeches, smiles across her whole face, and extends her arms in greeting to the wind, joyful, happy, so beautiful.
So there we get something of the narrator’s pleasure in and justification for the joking declaration: It has made her so happy. And maybe she’s especially happy now that she knows it’s Nature, not he, making the declaration. Life loves her, Nature loves her.
And his trick has gone full circle, with no harm done! Right?
They have had their fun, their excitement. Sex (or sledding) has been only an enlivening experience.
And I go off to pack.
But what has he been doing there? Why has he been in Nadenka’s company? Is he a doctor doing district work? He has met her because she lives next door? Is there some unaccounted-for long-term friendship between families?
This was a long time ago. Now Nadenka is already married; they married her off, she herself married—it’s all the same, a secretary of trustees of the gentry, and now she already has three children. That we went sledding together at some time and how the wind brought to her the words “I love you, Nadenka,” is not forgotten; for her now this is the most happy, most touching and beautiful memory in her life.
But now for me, when I’ve become old, I still don’t understand why I said those words, what was I joking for….
So ends the version of the story as radically revised by Chekhov in 1899.
I believe both versions of the story reveal Chekhov’s guilt, his sympathy, his half-heartedness about his various affairs. According to the 1899 narrator, his and Nadenka’s relationship, whatever its precise physical nature, was harmless, in fact all to the good, because she has since then married and had kids. In 1886, the story ends with the narrator’s revelation that he is in fact Nadenka’s husband, that all the teasing and joking led to lawful matrimony. Even if the sledding was to various degrees a metaphor for sex, the story does not resound; it’s a light piece, unengaged with and distanced by Chekhov. In revising it, he heightened the sexual suggestiveness and made the piece less of a joke, though the joke was also his having been able to slip the innuendos past various censors; in the original, the narrator doesn’t understand what his joking declaration meant about his actual feelings, and that the joke is finally on him.
Perhaps Chekhov’s proposal to Efros had been a joke on himself as much as on her. In any case, she got over their confusing engagement sooner than he, as he was still spinning over it thirteen years later.
*
In “Agafya” (just so, “Agafya,” March 15), the protagonist is Savka, the handsome lazy village bum who attracts the local women, among them Agafya.
He could read and write, and very rarely drank, but as a workman this strong and healthy young man was not worth a farthing. A sluggish, overpowering sloth was mingled with the strength in his muscles, which were strong as cords…. His old mother begged alms at people’s windows and he himself lived like a bird of the air; he did not know in the morning what he would eat at midday. It was not that he was lacking in will, or energy, or feeling for his mother; it was simply that he felt no inclination for work and did not recognize the advantage of it…. His favorite attitude was one of concentrated immobility.
This is one of Chekhov’s model stories: graceful, quiet, inhabited by interesting, sympathetic, accidentally reckless people. This is the third of three first-person stories in a row, and in this one, a most Chekhovlike narrator sits back and watches and tries not to interfere in the action and in fact fails in his attempt to prevent any drama. Savka, who has even more women than he wants, as they cause him trouble with the village authorities, prefers on this evening the company of the learned unnamed narrator.
Our hooks with live bait on them had long been in the river, and we had nothing left to do but to abandon ourselves to repose, which Savka, who was never exhausted and always rested, loved so much.
And how much Chekhov enjoyed lazily fishing on the river, and how rarely he could do so in these years!
Knowing how fond Savka was of listening, I told him all I had learned about the landrail from sportsman’s books. From the landrail I passed imperceptibly to the migration of the birds. Savka listened attentively, looking at me without blinking, and smiling all the while with pleasure. […]
“It’s interesting,” said Savka. “Whatever one talks about it is always interesting. Take a bird now, or a man… or take this little stone; there’s something to learn about all of them… Ah, sir, if I had known you were coming I wouldn’t have told a woman to come here this evening… She asked to come today.”
Savka, in his relations with women, is similar to Chekhov’s brother Nikolay and somewhere on a continuum with Chekhov:
With all his soft-heartedness and good-nature, Savka despised women. He behaved carelessly, condescendingly with them, and even stooped to scornful laughter of their feelings for himself. God knows, perhaps this careless, contemptuous manner was one of the causes of his irresistible attraction for the village Dulcineas. He was handsome and well-built; in his eyes there was always a soft friendliness, even when he was looking at the women he so despised, but the fascination was not to be explained by merely external qualities.
I’m not sure what Chekhov means by “merely external qualities.” That is, Savka’s good looks? Chekhov himself was certainly good-looking.
Apart from his happy exterior and original manner, one must suppose that the touching position of Savka as an acknowledged failure and an unhappy exile from his own hut to the kitchen gardens also had an influence upon the women.
On the other hand, no one ever looked at Chekhov as “an acknowledged failure.” The narrator finds Savka fascinating and is amused that women have a pitying attraction for him. Anxious Agafya, having sneaked over to see Savka while her husband is at work on the train, sees her time dwindling while Savka chases a leery bird. She stays the night despite her husband’s return home, and in the morning, the narrator, pitying her, watches her fearful reencounter: