Chekhov is fascinated by her, an untrained but devoted healer: “The greater the suffering of the patient and the dirtier and more disgusting his ailment, the sweeter her work seemed to her.” But he is also leery of her messianism:
She adored her patients. Sentiment suggested that they were her saviors, but reason made her want to see them not as individual personalities, not as peasants, but as something abstract—the people!
Through a revived correspondence with her husband, she reconciles with him. He is a general stationed somewhere in the south, and he retires and comes to her at the Zhenino estate. He is bored with life and full of aches and pains. He notices that she has given up meat. He is curious but skeptical about her treating the peasants, as she is not a doctor, and he hates what he judges to be the peasants’ ingratitude. He knows he’s cranky and hates himself for it. He and Anna won’t or can’t talk about their daughter.
It was only in the evenings, when darkness filled the rooms and a cricket chirped despondently behind the stove, that this awkwardness disappeared. They sat side by side in silence, and on those occasions it was just as if their souls were whispering about the thing that neither of them could bring themselves to say aloud.
Insufferably irritable with the household servants and the peasants, the husband revives in the spring and becomes outwardly religious; he has a mass said for his daughter, and he attends church regularly. Dr. Chekhov diagnoses him for us: “It was a paroxysm of elderly grief, but the old man imagined that a reaction, a radical change was taking place in him.” Indeed, his religious fervor disappears and he goes in instead for his more characteristic carping at the peasants who are still coming for his wife’s treatment. They become so offended that they begin staying away.
Anna complains at him for this and he explains, crankily but from Chekhov’s point of view as a medical professional rightly, that they’re better off seeing real doctors: “ ‘In my opinion, you’ll do much more good to a sick man if you shove him off roughly to see a doctor than if you treat him yourself.’ ”
The unhappy old man repeatedly gives clear voice to Chekhov’s own opinions:
“Alexander of Macedon was a great man, but there’s no need to go and make a song and dance about it, and it’s the same with the Russian people—it’s a great people, but it doesn’t follow that you can’t tell it the truth to its face. You can’t make a lap-dog of the people. These [peasants] are human-beings just like you and me, with the same shortcomings, and therefore you shouldn’t worship them, nor coddle them, but you should teach them, reform them… inspire them…”
When Anna suggests that they themselves can learn “how to work” from the peasants, he blows up. Hasn’t he worked hard and endured so much as a soldier and general?
“Perhaps you’ll tell me, I can learn how to suffer from that people of yours? Of course, it isn’t as if I ever suffered! I lost my own daughter… the only thing that still tied me to life in this damned old age! And I haven’t suffered!”
At this sudden memory of their daughter the old people all at once began to weep and to wipe their eyes with their table-napkins.
They cry and talk about their daughter and begin sharing Anna’s bed. He is still grumbly, but they relax and she completely halts seeing patients. He tempts his vegetarian wife with some delicious fish, and she succumbs, and for the next few months they laze around, doing little but planning elaborate dishes: “The old people gave themselves up to gustatory sensations.” He can’t read for long stretches, as he never did so. He putters, she sags. One day in early fall, he has eaten too much, feels heartburn and hopelessness and asks Anna if she still has her medicines. He goes to the cabinet and helps himself, and comes back to bed and never wakes up. She does not investigate his death (not wanting to know, it seems, if he had only taken the wrong drug). The story ends with Anna’s resolution to join a monastery.
Chekhov not only didn’t choose to put “The Boredom of Life” in his Collected Works, but noted on it to not put it in.15 I believe that there’s a story behind this story, but what? Chekhov wrote it after arriving at Babkino this summer. The setting of the story, Zhenino, part-rhymes with Babkino, so I am going to make the undaring suggestion that Chekhov had Babkino in mind.16 My pet theory, which means there is no evidence for or against it, is that there were details in it that even in 1899 were too close to some living person’s experiences. Perhaps the old couple were based on friends or relatives of the Babkino estate owners, Chekhov’s friends the Kiselevs.
June 1886
What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest reticence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. It isn’t that they didn’t think about these things, and to good effect, but to talk about such things seemed to them pretentious, presumptuous.
—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago1
Leykin pinched pennies, and the Chekhovs did not, though Anton continually strove to keep the family finances in the black. In a letter at the beginning of June, Leykin wondered: “You write: No money. Lordy! Where do you put your money? It seems I live on even less than you do.”2
Chekhov taunted Leykin a few days later, in a postscript to his brother Nikolay’s letter: “You ask where I spend my money? On women!!!!”3 This, Leykin knew, was not so.
There is a copy of Motley Stories dated and dedicated to Chekhov’s father Pavel on June 2, 1886: “To the deeply respected Pavel Egorovich from the loving and faithful author.” We know from Pavel’s children’s letters and memoirs that Pavel read newspapers and “French novels” and Nikolay Leskov’s short stories.4 There is no record of Pavel’s response to his son’s writings.
Meanwhile, Bilibin was forwarding reviews of the book to Chekhov, who did not pretend not to read them, but, having read them, he disdained them. A few years later he would remark in a letter to a fellow writer:
And as regards the word “art,” I fear it as merchants’ wives fear a Sodom rain of brimstone. When people talk to me of the artistic and the anti-artistic, of that which is theatric and non-theatric, of tendency, realism, etc., I become confused, consent irresolutely, and answer with platitudinous half-truths that are not worth a penny. I divide all literary works into two classes: those that I like and those that I do not like. I have no other criterion, and if you were to ask me why I like Shakespeare and dislike Zlatovratsky, I should be unable to answer. Perhaps in time, when I become wiser, I shall acquire a criterion, but meanwhile, all this talk about “artistry” only tires me and seems to me only the continuation of the same scholastic discourses with which people wearied themselves in the Middle Ages.5
Chekhov really disliked high-faluting art discussion.
*
His first story in June, “Romance with Double-Bass” (“Roman s Kontrabasom,” June 7), is a farce unlike his usual comic stories. It’s a professionally polished comedy, with all the pluses and minuses of that. A minus for me is that there seem to be no incidentally personal details of the moment. A musician and a woman separately have their clothes stolen while swimming. She hides in his music case, which is discovered by the double-bassist’s fellow musicians, who heft it with them to her engagement party, where, upon the case’s opening, she is literally completely exposed. Meanwhile, the bass player Pitsikatoff “put on his top-hat, swung the double-bass onto his back and padded off toward the bushes. Naked, with his musical instrument slung over his shoulders, he resembled some ancient mythological demigod.” As in a fairy tale, he remains forever naked under a bridge. The clever plot makes me wonder if Chekhov was fed the idea from a friend or a brother and wrote it up. The short British 1974 movie of the story, starring John Cleese, is fully in the story’s spirit.