Perhaps thinking of his friend Bilibin’s honeymoon in Finland, Chekhov wrote “A Happy Man” (“Chastlivchik,” May 5), which is about a groom on his honeymoon who gets out of the train at a station-stop to have a smoke. Back on board, the cheerful groom boasts to fellow passengers about his happiness. They soon help him realize that at the station he must have accidentally got on this train, which is going the opposite direction to the one he was on. Chekhov could not, it seems, figure out which way to go about his own marriage.
He worked especially diligently on his stories for Suvorin. “The Privy Councillor” (“Taynyy Sovetnik,” May 6), however, is one of his least ambitious or impressive New Times stories. The adolescent narrator’s uncle, the privy councillor, is a big shot short on cash, and comes to his sister’s to summer while he works remotely. The uncle has Chekhov’s ability to focus on the paperwork in front of him:
For days together he sat in his own room working, in spite of the flies and the heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting as though glued to his table produced upon us the effect of an inexplicable conjuring trick. To us idlers, knowing nothing of systematic work, his industry seemed simply miraculous. Getting up at nine, he sat down to his table, and did not leave it till dinner-time; after dinner he set to work again, and went on till late at night. Whenever I peeped through the keyhole I invariably saw the same thing: my uncle sitting at the table working.
And what the narrator as a boy witnesses is what Chekhov’s family saw of him. He was systematic. He showed them how to get a lot of work done. But it is doubtful whether Chekhov was as carefree as the merry privy councillor; also, while Chekhov appreciated fine scents, he was no dandy:
The work consisted in his writing with one hand while he turned over the leaves of a book with the other, and, strange to say, he kept moving all over—swinging his leg as though it were a pendulum, whistling, and nodding his head in time. He had an extremely careless and frivolous expression all the while, as though he were not working, but playing at noughts and crosses. I always saw him wearing a smart short jacket and a jauntily tied cravat, and he always smelt, even through the keyhole, of delicate feminine perfumery. He only left his room for dinner, but he ate little.4
The uncle (nameless in the story) uses his little bit of idle time to flirt with the bailiff’s wife, with whom the young narrator’s tutor is also in love. The narrator’s mother, tired of the disruptions at her well-ordered estate, finally gives the uncle money to go away and summer at his usual place abroad.
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Chekhov took the May 8 train from Petersburg to Moscow and arrived the next day. The family apartment had been given up and they were staying at Babkino until they found a new place in the fall. He stayed the night on the Arbat at his brother Ivan’s school-issued apartment.
He wrote Alexander on the 10th about Petersburg:
The time I spent there was great. I couldn’t have gotten closer to Suvorin and Grigorovich. There are so many details that I can’t pass them along in a letter, and so I’ll tell them to you when we meet.5
He had commenced an intimacy already, not quite a friendship, with Suvorin and Grigorovich. What details did Anton relate to Alexander as they sat together later this summer at Babkino? In the next paragraph, he critiqued Alexander’s latest story:
“The City of the Future” will become an artistic production only by the following conditions: 1) the absence of prolix wordy politico-socialistic-economic features; 2) continuous objectivity; 3) correctness in describing people and objects; 4) special brevity; 5) boldness and originality; fleeing from stereotypes; 6) heart.
In letters, Chekhov often resorted to list-making, which makes me wonder if it was a habit he had developed as a student or from writing prescriptions for patients.
In my opinion, a true description of nature must be very brief and possess the character of relevance. Commonplaces such as “the sinking sun, bathing in the waves of the darkening sea, sheds a light of purple gold,” and so forth, or “the swallows, flying over the surface of the sea, twittered merrily”—such commonplaces must be excluded. In descriptions of nature one ought to seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such a way that when you close your eyes after reading you see a picture. For example, you will get the effect of a moonlit night if you write that a glow like a light from a star flashed from the broken bottle on the milldam, and the round, black shadow of a dog or wolf appeared, etc. Nature becomes animated if you are not squeamish about employing comparisons about its phenomena with human activities, etc.6
He was thinking of the nature-descriptions in his own recent stories, particularly “The Wolf,” as he wrote that.
Details are also the thing in the sphere of psychology. God preserve us from generalizations. Best of all, avoid depicting the hero’s state of mind; you ought to try to make it clear from the hero’s actions. It is not necessary to portray many active figures. The center of gravity should be two persons—he and she.
He was making plain to himself, to Alexander, and to us the sharp focus and method he had been using in his fiction. And we and Alexander nod and agree, Oh, sure, it’s not complicated… if you are a super-focused self-disciplined genius!
A short piece for Fragments came out on May 10, “A Literary Table of Ranks” (“Literaturnaya Tabel’ o Rangakh”), atop of which list are Tolstoy and Goncharov. The purpose of the skit, however, according to the Soviet editors, was to name and exclude S. Okreyts, the reactionary editor of Luch (The Ray), who Chekhov had been making the butt of jokes for a few years, including nicknaming him Judophobe Judophobovich.7 While Chekhov himself made Jewish jokes, he did not suffer writers who were seriously anti-Semitic.
On May 11 or 12 he went to join his family, including wayward Nikolay, in Babkino,8 where the family had rented a furnished cottage for the first time the previous summer from an artistic and aristocratic family, the Kiselevs. Chekhov could unwind and the extended family and a wide range of friends could gather as time and opportunity allowed. Chekhov had described his first impressions of their situation to Leykin the year before:
The country house is situated on the steep bank of a river. It is a very picturesque spot. Below is the river, famed for its fish; on the other side of the river is a huge forest; and there are woods on this side of it. Near the cottage are hot-houses, flowerbeds, etc. I love to be in the country at the beginning of May. It is so jolly to watch the buds opening on the trees and to listen to the first songs of the nightingales. There are no houses near the estate, and we shall be completely alone. Kiselev and his wife, Begichev, the former opera tenor Vladislavlev, Markevich’s ghost, and my family—that is all. The month of May is excellent for fishing, especially crucian carp and tench, that is, pond fish, and there are ponds on the estate.9
Babkino
He would spend happy hours in the woods and on the river and at the ponds. In May of 1885, he further described the estate’s attractions to his brother Mikhaiclass="underline"
At last I have taken off my heavy waders, my hands no longer smell of fish, and I can sit down to write to you. It is six o’clock in the morning now. Our people are asleep. It is extraordinarily quiet all around. Only from time to time is the silence broken by the twittering of the birds and by the scratching of the mouse behind the wallpaper. I am writing these lines sitting before the large square window of my room. From time to time I glance through it. An extraordinary enchanting and lovely landscape stretches before my eyes: the little stream, the distant woods, a corner of the Kiselev house….
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The most sentimental story Chekhov ever wrote might be “A Day in the Country” (“Den’ za Gorodom,” May 19), about an old man educating children about nature: “there is no secret in Nature which baffles him. He knows everything. Thus, for example, he knows the names of all the wild flowers, animals, and stones. He knows what herbs cure diseases, he has no difficulty in telling the age of a horse or a cow. Looking at the sunset, at the moon, or the birds, he can tell what sort of weather it will be next day. And indeed, it is not only Terenty who is so wise. Silanty Silich, the innkeeper, the market-gardener, the shepherd, and all the villagers, generally speaking, know as much as he does. These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.” Though the depictions of the folk seem too good to be true, Terenty does remark, rather beautifully: “ ‘The nightingale is a singing-bird, without sin. He has had a voice given him in his throat, to praise God and gladden the heart of man. It’s a sin to disturb him.’ ”