Sofya Petrovna, feeling utterly disconcerted, tried to think as quickly as possible of something to say to stop him. “I’ll go away,” she decided, but before she had time to make a movement to get up, Ilyin was on his knees before her…. He was clasping her knees, gazing into her face and speaking passionately, hotly, eloquently. In her terror and confusion she did not hear his words; for some reason now, at this dangerous moment, while her knees were being agreeably squeezed and felt as though they were in a warm bath, she was trying, with a sort of angry spite, to interpret her own sensations. She was angry that instead of brimming over with protesting virtue, she was entirely overwhelmed with weakness, apathy, and emptiness, like a drunken man utterly reckless; only at the bottom of her soul a remote bit of herself was malignantly taunting her: “Why don’t you go? Is this as it should be? Yes?”
Oh, how can we not sympathize with her? And how can we not admire Chekhov describing her sensations—her knees in a warm bath! Only a doctor could get away with that. Tolstoy brings us readers close to Anna Karenina in so many ways—but not quite to that spot.
Seeking for some explanation, she could not understand how it was she did not pull away the hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and why, like Ilyin, she hastily glanced to right and to left to see whether anyone was looking. The clouds and the pines stood motionless, looking at them severely, like old ushers seeing mischief, but bribed not to tell the school authorities. The sentry stood like a post on the embankment and seemed to be looking at the seat.
“Let him look,” thought Sofya Petrovna.
“But… but listen,” she said at last, with despair in her voice. “What can come of this? What will be the end of this?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he whispered, waving off the disagreeable questions.
He has finally persuaded her of his feelings, and she has had to admit to herself that she has feelings, those feelings.
They heard the hoarse, discordant whistle of the train. This cold, irrelevant sound from the everyday world of prose made Sofya Petrovna rouse herself.
“I can’t stay… it’s time I was at home,” she said, getting up quickly. “The train is coming in… Andrey is coming by it! He will want his dinner.”
The train tooted for Agafya in March, and it toots here in August for Sofya.
Sofya Petrovna turned toward the embankment with a burning face. The engine slowly crawled by, then came the carriages. It was not the local train, as she had supposed, but a goods train. The trucks filed by against the background of the white church in a long string like the days of a man’s life, and it seemed as though it would never end.
Chekhov has taken one step, maybe two, outside of the story with that simile. I don’t believe Sofya or Ilyin are thinking about timelessness or the end of time. Chekhov is reminding us, though not them, because they would not or could not listen, that this is the most excruciating and probably exciting moment of their lives, and it, too, will end. Their love affair, which is their whole world at this moment, will disappear eventually, as will everything else. Chekhov may be the oldest twenty-six-year-old who ever lived.
How the rest of the story goes, you’ll have to read and see.
…But now that I’ve shown my hand that I believe Chekhov mischievously embodied his family’s hostess and his friend Maria Kiseleva in Sofya, I have to admit that there is no hint of any affair between her and Chekhov. Even Donald Rayfield, a biographer who in Michael C. Finke’s opinion sees liaisons everywhere, does not detect anything between them.7 But as we will see in letters between Chekhov and Kiseleva, there was repeated contentious discussion between them about the propriety of depicting sexuality in literature.
*
If you’re a teacher or editor, how dismayed should you be by your students’ or relatives’ grammatical or mechanical carelessness in writing? How offended are you or ought you to be about the faulty punctuation of a friend, parent, or spouse?
Chekhov, writes Ronald Hingley, “had been taught to read and write by his mother, whose own spelling and punctuation were rudimentary.”8 Chekhov did not mock his mother to others. Apparently among family he could tease her. His brother Mikhail remembers that “she never used punctuation and would start her letters with lines like: ‘Antosha on the shelf in the pantry,’ and Anton would poke gentle fun at her, replying, ‘After a long search, no Antosha was found on the pantry shelf.’ ”9
In “A Pink Stocking” (“Rozovyi Chulok”) published the same day as “A Misfortune” (August 16), a piggish husband, bored with the steady rain, idly glances at a letter that his wife has been writing and is mortified by the lack of punctuation and absence of thought:
“Well, this is beyond anything!” he mutters, as he finishes reading the letter and flings the sheets on the table, “It’s positively incredible!”
“What’s the matter?” asks Lidochka, flustered.
“What’s the matter! You’ve covered six pages, wasted a good two hours scribbling, and there’s nothing in it at all! If there were one tiny idea! One reads on and on, and one’s brain is as muddled as though one were deciphering the Chinese wriggles on tea chests! Ough!”
“Yes, that’s true, Vanya,…” says Lidochka, reddening. “I wrote it carelessly….”
“Queer sort of carelessness! In a careless letter there is some meaning and style—there is sense in it—while yours… excuse me, but I don’t know what to call it! It’s absolute twaddle! There are words and sentences, but not the slightest sense in them. Your whole letter is exactly like the conversation of two boys: ‘We had pancakes today! And we had a soldier come to see us!’ You say the same thing over and over again! You drag it out, repeat yourself…. The wretched ideas dance about like devils: There’s no making out where anything begins, where anything ends…. How can you write like that?”
“If I had been writing carefully,” Lidochka says in self-defense, “then there would not have been mistakes….”
“Oh, I’m not talking about mistakes! The awful grammatical howlers! There’s not a line that’s not a personal insult to grammar! No stops nor commas—and the spelling… brrr! ‘Earth’ has an a in it!! And the writing! It’s desperate! I’m not joking, Lida…. I’m surprised and appalled at your letter…. You mustn’t be angry, darling, but, really, I had no idea you were such a duffer at grammar…. And yet you belong to a cultivated, well-educated circle: you are the wife of a University man, and the daughter of a general! Tell me, did you ever go to school?”
There will be no moral to this comic story, except that it reminds me of how jerky we teachers can be with our students… and with family!
“You know, Lidochka, it really is awful!” says Somov, suddenly halting in front of her and looking into her face with horror. “You are a mother… do you understand? A mother! How can you teach your children if you know nothing yourself? You have a good brain, but what’s the use of it if you have never mastered the very rudiments of knowledge? There—never mind about knowledge… the children will get that at school, but, you know, you are very shaky on the moral side too! You sometimes use such language that it makes my ears tingle!”
Somov shrugs his shoulders again, wraps himself in the folds of his dressing-gown and continues his pacing…. He feels vexed and injured, and at the same time sorry for Lidochka, who does not protest, but merely blinks…. Both feel oppressed and miserable…. Absorbed in their woes, they do not notice how time is passing and the dinner hour is approaching.
The condescending Somov, having had his fill of carping, repents and decides he would rather his wife be as she is (she “who never pokes her nose into anything, does not understand so much, and never obtrudes her criticism”) than an educated woman. Perhaps only here do we detect the couple’s similarity to Chekhov’s parents. Pavel was a fussy scold, and Evgenia was less educated than he.