Chekhov excluded “A Day in the Country” from his Collected Works as well as the next four he wrote, an unusual streak of what he later judged to be unworthy stories. And while I wonder occasionally at his exclusions, I will save my disagreement with him only over the last one of the month.
“In a Pension” (“V Pansione,” May 24) is about a teacher who, wanting a raise, butters up his woman boss while denying the beauty of a beautiful seventeen-year-old student, about whom the boss says: “You won’t find a better nose in all of Russia.” The only nose Chekhov regularly remarked upon was Dunya Efros’s. He may have seen her in Moscow, as he was there on May 20 before returning on May 24 to Babkino and his family.
Reviews of Motley Stories were appearing.
After Leykin wrote and asked him to “push himself” and send him some pieces, he replied on May 24 with excuses so weak that he seemed to hope Leykin would become disgusted and fire him.
I’m guilty before you: I’m working poorly for Fragments. Now I’m working poorly for everywhere. What happened with me, I don’t know. Probably the prophet with the praises turned my head… But if you believe in the evil eye, I can in justification say “Jinxed!” Mostly these trips to Peter always act on me badly. I get off track and for a long time can’t get the intoxication from my head… I will be lazy until June 1, and then I give you my word to work.10
But, right now, this week, he had been writing the excellent “The Boredom of Life.” He was also, he explained in his next letter to Leykin on May 27, seeing patients:
The post bell’s ringing… Someone’s gone… I run out to see… A guest has come, but I continue writing. […]
I have a lot of sick patients. Rickety children and old ones with rashes. There’s a 75-year-old woman with erysipelas on her hand; I’m afraid I’ll have dealings with erysipelas of the tissue. There will be abscesses, but cutting into an old woman is frightful…
In response to the May 24 letter, Leykin suggested that Chekhov think up or “steal” themes for Nikolay to illustrate.
“At a Summer Villa” (“Na Dache,” May 25) is one of his humor stories where he seems to have worked out the plot before writing it. When Chekhov was writing his best or most seriously-minded stories, they seem to have formed in front of his mind and pen as he wrote. “At a Summer Villa” is clever enough that there is an amusing short film of it in Russian.11 The wife wants to clean up the dacha, their summer cabin, but her lazy husband and studious younger brother are in the way, so she sends each a love note from a mysterious young woman who wants to meet them the next afternoon. The husband and brother show up at the same spot and are angry with each other for being in the way. At dinner that evening, the wife/sister laughs and tells the grumpy pair, who have been stood up, what she did to trick them.
In “Nothing to Do: A Dacha Story” (“Ot Nechego Delat’,” May 26), Chekhov imagines married life with a lazy, wanton woman. Nikolay, a lawyer, catches his children’s tutor Vanya, a nineteen-year-old engineering student, kissing his wife. Vanya runs off in fright and the husband mocks his thirty-three-year-old wife,” ‘You should not turn a boy’s head, old dear. You shouldn’t, you know. He is a nice, kind boy.’ ”12 Nikolay finds Vanya and teases him that Vanya will now have to provide for his wife and pay child support. If Vanya refuses, they will have to duel. Having tormented him, Nikolay returns home to scold his wife again for idly seducing Vanya. Nikolay goes for a stroll, the sights and sounds of which Chekhov, happily ensconced at Babkino, would not have had to invent, only describe: “When evening came and twilight shrouded the earth, the lawyer went for another walk. It was a glorious evening. The trees were sleeping and looked as though no storm could wake them from their young springtime slumber. The drowsy stars looked down on the earth. Frogs croaked and an owl screeched somewhere behind the garden. The short, jerky whistles of a nightingale’s song could be heard from afar.”13
Nikolay encounters Vanya again. Vanya, feeling guilty, accepts the terms for dueling. Nikolay immediately laughs it off, tells Vanya that his wife is not worth it, and he and the young man take a friendly walk.
On May 31, he published his second story of the month in New Times, “The Boredom of Life” (“Skuka Zhizni”). Before doing the research on this book, I had never read it, and because Constance Garnett had not translated it, or as far as I knew neither had anyone else, I read it in Russian. With each new paragraph, I felt I was making a major literary find for the English-reading world. I would translate it! It’s a fateful, moving and great novel in only 4,000 words (about ten pages of this book you’re reading).
Now is an appropriate time to talk about translating versus reading.
What’s Chekhov like in Russian?
I described it once as Chekhov being just a little funnier. You can hear Chekhov’s smile. You can hear his particular voice, the tuning as clear as a bell.
But if your Russian isn’t completely fluent, or you’re not a compulsive reader, maybe reading him in translation doesn’t matter, or it’s a trade-off. For me, reading Chekhov in English, I get speed at the expense of revelation. I read more freshly in Russian, because it’s hard. I continually have to dig out words and phrases, and the images develop slowly but deeply. Unfortunately, in Russian I also step into an occasional hole and get distracted by my stumbling. There’s a key word I’m missing! Do I stop or do I wait until I see that word again? But maybe the story turns on that particular word? After I finished one pass through of a translation of “The Boredom of Life,” which I might compare to one feed-through of a color-spray printer (there! the blue is down, next comes magenta, then yellow), I discovered a preexisting translation, disguisedly entitled “Taedium Vitae”; April FitzLyon and Kyril Zinovieff’s translation is better than what I was doing, and so I’ll quote from it rather than from my motley one.
In “The Boredom of Life” (I’ll keep my title), Anna Mikhailovna Lebedeva, an estate-owner, has given up on life because her teenaged daughter has died. “As soon as someone consciously begins to question the point of existence—in no matter what way—and feels an acute need to look beyond the grave, then neither sacrifices nor fasting, nor knocking about from place to place will satisfy him. But, fortunately for Anna Mikhailovna, just as she arrived at Zhenino, fate brought her face to face with an occurrence which made her forget about old age and the nearness of death for a long time.”14
Her cook burns himself with boiling water and she treats him. She realizes she is good at nursing and always has been, and she dedicates herself to treating the local peasants. She had affairs when her daughter was little (“doctors had been numbered among her lovers, and she had learned a bit from them”), and her husband left her.