The narrator asks if the hymns have been published, and Ieronim explains that no one at the monastery was interested. Ieronim was Nikolay’s primary audience:
“What did he write them for?”
“Chiefly for his own comfort. Of all the brotherhood, I was the only one who read his hymns. I used to go to him in secret, that no one else might know of it, and he was glad that I took an interest in them. He would embrace me, stroke my head, speak to me in caressing words as to a little child. He would shut his cell, make me sit down beside him, and begin to read….”
Ieronim left the rope and came up to me.
“We were dear friends in a way,” he whispered, looking at me with shining eyes. “Where he went I would go. If I were not there he would miss me. And he cared more for me than for anyone, and all because I used to weep over his hymns. It makes me sad to remember. Now I feel just like an orphan or a widow. You know, in our monastery they are all good people, kind and pious, but… there is no one with softness and refinement, they are just like peasants. They all speak loudly, and tramp heavily when they walk; they are noisy, they clear their throats, but Nikolay always talked softly, caressingly, and if he noticed that anyone was asleep or praying he would slip by like a fly or a gnat. His face was tender, compassionate….”
Father Nikolay’s qualities are Chekhov’s—but Chekhov would not have wanted us to conclude that. Still, we know Chekhov did indeed respect and admire refinement of behavior, and unlike his older brothers he could resist stomping around and bothering others.
Ieronim asks the narrator to be sure to appreciate the Easter hymn, as tonight he has to continue running the ferry. None of the other monks are coming to relieve him. The narrator reaches the muddy shore and surveys the festivities outside and inside the monastery.
He goes and listens to the choir, yet in the midst of the crowd, he has sympathetic pangs for Ieronim:
I looked at the faces; they all had a lively expression of triumph, but not one was listening to what was being sung and taking it in, and not one was “holding his breath.” Why was not Ieronim released? I could fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending forward and hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase. All this that glided by the ears of the people standing by me he would have eagerly drunk in with his delicately sensitive soul, and would have been spell-bound to ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there would not have been a man happier than he in all the church. Now he was plying to and fro over the dark river and grieving for his dead friend and brother.
The narrator attempts to find where “dead Nikolay, the unknown canticle writer,” is lying. He is unable to do so and decides, after all, it’s better he hasn’t.
God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I should have lost the picture my imagination paints for me now. I imagine the lovable poetical figure solitary and not understood, who went out at nights to call to Ieronim over the water, and filled his hymns with flowers, stars, and sunbeams, as a pale timid man with soft mild melancholy features. His eyes must have shone, not only with intelligence, but with kindly tenderness and that hardly restrained childlike enthusiasm which I could hear in Ieronim’s voice when he quoted to me passages from the hymns.
In the early light of dawn, the narrator and a merchant’s wife and a peasant ride back across the river with Ieronim. The narrator couldn’t find the deceased Nikolay, but he can now see Ieronim:
He was a tall narrow-shouldered man of five-and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed listless-looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard. He had an extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.
They don’t chat much this time.
We floated across, disturbing on the way the lazily rising mist. Everyone was silent. Ieronim worked mechanically with one hand. He slowly passed his mild lustreless eyes over us; then his glance rested on the rosy face of a young merchant’s wife with black eyebrows, who was standing on the ferry beside me silently shrinking from the mist that wrapped her about. He did not take his eyes off her face all the way.
There was little that was masculine in that prolonged gaze. It seemed to me that Ieronim was looking in the woman’s face for the soft and tender features of his dead friend.
The end. Again and again, Chekhov’s dearest characters realize their connections to and dependence on others.
*
From Moscow on the actual Easter Eve, Chekhov wrote to Leykin: “The day has gone merrily. Last night I went to the Kremlin to listen to the bells, walking by the churches; I returned home at 2, drank and sang with two opera basses, whom I found in the Kremlin and fetched home to talk… One of the basses excellently imitated an archdeacon. I listened to Grand Vespers in the Church of Christ the Savior and so on.”17
Then he fended off Leykin’s criticism of his spending: “You ask me what I am doing with my money. I don’t lead a dissipated life, I don’t walk about dressed like a dandy. I have no debts, and I don’t even have to keep my mistresses (Fragments and love I get gratis), but nevertheless I have only 40 rubles left from the 312 I received from you and Suvorin before Easter, out of which I shall have to pay 20 tomorrow. Goodness only knows where my money goes.”18
Chekhov and Leykin did not see eye to eye on the physical well-being that one needed for writing. In a letter that has been lost, but of which we know something of the contents through Leykin’s reply on April 13, Chekhov had reproached Leykin for reproaching him, Chekhov, for being lazy. “I reproached you for laziness,” wrote Leykin, “not concerning work; you write a lot; but concerning writing letters. Of course you lazily write letters. And I can’t believe that it’s possible to get sick from such work as ours. I write more than you; for sixteen years I have been writing every day without taking a breath, but if I get sick, I get sick not from work but from colds, from overeating […] You say further on, ‘By god, someday I’ll have to describe you.’ Write it. I’ll be glad. I’ll even put it in Fragments.”19 It’s not clear how or if Chekhov ever characterized Leykin in a story.
A week later, he and Leykin were squabbling over the contents of Motley Stories. “As for ‘A Nightmare,’ ” declared Chekhov, “I again stand on it not suiting the book. The stories are so motley, but if side by side with ‘Swedish Match’ you present ‘A Nightmare,’ you’ll get a motley from which you’ll sicken. No, my pigeon, spit on ‘A Nightmare!’ ”20 Perhaps as a concession, Chekhov told Leykin he was intending to write something for Fragments.
In most Chekhov biographies, Leykin comes off as the crooked editor and publisher that all of us writers have in mind as blocking or exploiting our genius. But however much Chekhov defamed and mocked him, however much we naturally side with our hero and hold in contempt anyone or anything hampering his literary development, Leykin is my favorite supporting character.
Nineteen years older than Chekhov, Leykin was of peasant stock. As a provincial boy he was apprenticed to a shop owner in St. Petersburg, where he was also enrolled in a school. “He had written, by his own account, more than 20,000 short stories and sketches, and called himself ‘a man of letters’ with great pride,” writes Mikhail Chekhov.21 According to Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, Leykin’s humorous writings, which the Chekhov brothers had grown up reading, were primarily about Russian merchants and their domestic lives, but the fiction’s “wide popularity with less-literate readers rapidly dwindled at the beginning of the 20th century.”22
Leykin had been a literary father to the three eldest Chekhov boys. Mikhail Chekhov, who did not work for him, described him: “He was short, broad-shouldered, lame in one leg, and eccentric.”23 Because he was unattractive and had a bad leg, Chekhov and Alexander would refer to him as “Quasimodo.”