Chekhov tells us nothing to explain Zotov’s tone. We wait dumbly, as curious as Zotov’s animals. And now the outburst comes that clarifies almost everything:
“I am not obliged to feed you, you loafers! I am not some millionaire for you to eat me out of house and home! I have nothing to eat myself, you cursed carcasses, the cholera take you! I get no pleasure or profit out of you; nothing but trouble and ruin. Why don’t you give up the ghost? Are you such personages that even death won’t take you? You can live, damn you! but I don’t want to feed you! I have had enough of you! I don’t want to!”
To our surprise and their perplexity, he orders them out of his yard. They don’t go far:
When he had driven out his dependents he felt calmer, and began sweeping the yard. From time to time he peeped out into the street: the horse and the dog were standing like posts by the fence, looking dejectedly toward the gate.
“Try how you can do without me,” muttered the old man, feeling as though a weight of anger were being lifted from his heart. “Let somebody else look after you now! I am stingy and ill-tempered…. It’s nasty living with me, so you try living with other people…. Yes….”
But why should his anger dissipate? What are we learning about psychology here?
The freeloaders have accused him of being difficult! Of depriving them!
Here is where I, raised on the milk of Tolstoy’s psychology, see a distinction between Tolstoy and Chekhov. Tolstoy would have gone softer on the protagonist; Zotov would not have been so harsh. But I think Chekhov takes us into a realm of psychology that Tolstoy perhaps could not. Tolstoy’s own supernatural sympathy toward animals would have bent his resolve. Chekhov, however, maintains Zotov’s backbone and allows the animals to remain confused.
Zotov curses them again but allows their return to his yard before he goes off to visit a friend in his friend’s “little general shop,” the sort of shop Chekhov’s father had run. They talk about the weather and share his friend’s tea. But the awkwardness of asking for loans!… How well Chekhov knew this. Within a week of publishing this story and having moved into his new Moscow digs, he would have to pawn his gold watch to pay off a debt. Keeping his dependents, the Chekhov family, financially stable was a constant in these years.
But what else could Chekhov do? Who else could support his family?
“I have a favor to ask of you, Mark Ivanich,” he began, after the sixth glass, drumming on the counter with his fingers. “If you would just be so kind as to give me a gallon of oats again today….”
From behind the big tea-chest behind which Mark Ivanich was sitting came the sound of a deep sigh.
“Do be so good,” Zotov went on; “never mind tea—don’t give it me today, but let me have some oats…. I am ashamed to ask you, I have wearied you with my poverty, but the horse is hungry.”
Let’s all of us give a cheer for the continually mocked Leykin. Whenever Chekhov was as desperate as poor Zotov, Leykin advanced him rubles.
“I can give it you,” sighed the friend—“why not? But why the devil do you keep those carcasses?—tfoo!—Tell me that, please. It would be all right if it were a useful horse, but—tfoo!—one is ashamed to look at it…. And the dog’s nothing but a skeleton! Why the devil do you keep them?”
“What am I to do with them?”
“You know. Take them to Ignat the slaughterer—that is all there is to do. They ought to have been there long ago. It’s the proper place for them.”
“To be sure, that is so!… I dare say!…”
“You live like a beggar and keep animals,” the friend went on. “I don’t grudge the oats…. God bless you. But as to the future, brother… I can’t afford to give regularly every day! There is no end to your poverty! One gives and gives, and one doesn’t know when there will be an end to it all.”
Chekhov would eventually see “an end” to his family’s tight finances. They weren’t this poor. We don’t want our favorite artists to be desperate for money and have to crank out stories or paintings to pay the rent, but so it happens. Chekhov’s older brothers had set out on their independent lives only to have to retreat again and again to their family, which was led in spirit and money-making by Chekhov.
Mark Ivanich points out that Zotov, if he’s going to persist living himself, is going to have to move somewhere. Zotov has a distant almost-relative who is bound to inherit his property and he says he can go to her. They decide he should leave that very day:
“I’ll go at once! When I get there, I shall say: Take my house, but keep me and treat me with respect. It’s your duty! If you don’t care to, then there is neither my house, nor my blessing for you! Goodbye, Ivanich!”
And, the gate of his yard unfastened, he sets out, his belongings in hand, determined to walk the “eight or nine miles” to her.
He had not gone a mile into the country when he heard steps behind him. He looked around and angrily clasped his hands. The horse and Lyska, with their heads drooping and their tails between their legs, were quietly walking after him.
“Go back!” he waved to them.
They stopped, looked at one another, looked at him. He went on, they followed him. Then he stopped and began ruminating. It was impossible to go to his great-niece Glasha, whom he hardly knew, with these creatures; he did not want to go back and shut them up, and, indeed, he could not shut them up, because the gate was no use.
“To die of hunger in the shed,” thought Zotov. “Hadn’t I really better take them to Ignat?”
If you have a weak spot for animals, do not read the concluding paragraphs of “The Dependents.”
If Chekhov’s master Tolstoy had written the story, the end would not be as devastating and tearful or maybe as sublime.
*
The other stories he published this month?
The most significant and least trivial is “A Trivial Incident” (“Pustoy Sluchay,” September 20), in which Chekhov again wrestles with the conflicting feelings about getting married. The male narrator is out hunting with an impoverished hereditary “prince,” of which sort of princes there were many, especially in Russian literature.
A watchman tells them they are forbidden to shoot in this particular forest. He mentions the woman landowner’s name. The prince, surprised, excuses himself to the narrator:
“I used to know her at one time, but… it’s rather awkward for me to go to her. Besides, I am in shabby clothes…. You go, you don’t know her…. It’s more suitable for you to go.”
The prince had been, possibly, according to the gossip that the narrator has heard, engaged or nearly so to her.
The narrator is fascinated by this humble and humbled man: “Apparently he was in that mood of irritation and sadness when women weep quietly for no reason, and men feel a craving to complain of themselves, of life, of God….”
Though deeply in debt (as Chekhov feared becoming), the prince held onto his last shred of honesty:
“I tell you frankly I have had the chance once in my life of getting rich if I had told a lie, a lie to myself and one woman… and one other person whom I know would have forgiven me for lying; I should have put into my pocket a million. But I could not. I hadn’t the pluck!”
The narrator goes to this very woman’s house to ask for her permission to hunt, which she refuses, despite the narrator’s dropping the prince’s name. She even remarks, reflecting Chekhov’s own thinking about hunting at the time: “ ‘And, besides, what pleasure is there in shooting birds? What’s it for? Are they in your way?’ ”