He jumped up from the table, clutched at his head, and ran staggering about the room.
“Strip me to the last thread!” he shouted in a shrill voice. “Squeeze out the last drop! Rob me! Wring my neck!”
We can read Chekhov and not notice ourselves exposed on the page. (And by whom am I exposed? By the fuming Shiryaev, unfortunately.) And how is Chekhov himself exposed? Through the pain! He saw this sort of family encounter and knew its damage to everyone in the household.
There is also sympathy somewhere in this story for Shiryaev. It is not in this scene here. We with the children avert our eyes. We wait him out.
But Pyotr, for the first time in his life, cannot let it go:
The student flushed and dropped his eyes. He could not go on eating. Fedosya Semyonovna, who had not after twenty-five years grown used to her husband’s difficult character, shrank into herself and muttered something in self-defense. An expression of amazement and dull terror came into her wasted and birdlike face, which at all times looked dull and scared. The little boys and the elder daughter Varvara, a girl in her teens, with a pale ugly face, laid down their spoons and sat mute.
Poor Varvara! How will she ever escape this house?
Shiryaev, growing more and more ferocious, uttering words each more terrible than the one before, dashed up to the table and began shaking the notes out of his pocket-book.
Shiryaev only makes a bad situation worse.
“Take them!” he muttered, shaking all over. “You’ve eaten and drunk your fill, so here’s money for you too! I need nothing! Order yourself new boots and uniforms!”
The student turned pale and got up.
“Listen, papa,” he began, gasping for breath. “I… I beg you to end this, for…”
“Hold your tongue!” the father shouted at him, and so loudly that the spectacles fell off his nose; “hold your tongue!”
“I used… I used to be able to put up with such scenes, but… but now I have got out of the way of it. Do you understand? I have got out of the way of it!”
“Hold your tongue!” cried the father, and he stamped with his feet. “You must listen to what I say! I shall say what I like, and you hold your tongue. At your age I was earning my living, while you… Do you know what you cost me, you scoundrel? I’ll turn you out! Wastrel!”
How many teenaged children could dodge a parent’s accusation of financial dependence?… Well, Chekhov, for one.
There were lines that Chekhov could not bear seeing crossed. Papa has crossed the line and created agony all around. In this family dynamic, the explosions occur in an enclosed space that doesn’t seem to allow for escape or end.
“Yevgraf Ivanovich,” muttered Fedosya Semyonovna, moving her fingers nervously; “you know he… you know Petya…!”
“Hold your tongue!” Shiryaev shouted out to her, and tears actually came into his eyes from anger. “It is you who have spoilt them—you! It’s all your fault! He has no respect for us, does not say his prayers, and earns nothing! I am only one against the ten of you! I’ll turn you out of the house!”
The daughter Varvara gazed fixedly at her mother with her mouth open, moved her vacant-looking eyes to the window, turned pale, and, uttering a loud shriek, fell back in her chair. The father, with a curse and a wave of the hand, ran out into the yard.
This was how domestic scenes usually ended at the Shiryaevs’.
There are patterns in the family, and this is one of them: Father blows up and stalks out. It’s a bad but predictable outcome. Bad as that is, however, it can become worse, because Pyotr is his father’s son:
But on this occasion, unfortunately, Pyotr the student was carried away by overmastering anger. He was just as hasty and ill-tempered as his father and his grandfather the priest, who used to beat his parishioners about the head with a stick. Pale and clenching his fists, he went up to his mother and shouted in the very highest tenor note his voice could reach:
“These reproaches are loathsome! sickening to me! I want nothing from you! Nothing! I would rather die of hunger than eat another mouthful at your expense! Take your nasty money back! Take it!”
The mother huddled against the wall and waved her hands, as though it were not her son, but some phantom before her. “What have I done?” she wailed. “What?”
What the hell! The fighters blame the peacemaker. Every Adam must have his Eve to take the blame.
If Pyotr is the hero of the story, we’re stuck with him. But Chekhov’s stories don’t usually have conventional heroes or villains. Good people are prickly, bad people are charming, weak people are resilient, strong people are brittle.
Pyotr has no plan except to start walking out onto the steppe from the house. This is the first time we know the geography of the farm. The primary location has been a very particular “at home.” Pyotr’s escape is into the countryside. The fields are wet from the rain. As he walks through the familiar landscape, he imagines, as it occurs to all of us idiots who have ever stormed out of our houses, that he could just keep walking away forever:
Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to walk to Moscow on foot; to walk just as he was, with holes in his boots, without a cap, and without a farthing of money. When he had gone eighty miles his father, frightened and aghast, would overtake him, would begin begging him to turn back or take the money, but he would not even look at him, but would go on and on…. Bare forests would be followed by desolate fields, fields by forests again; soon the earth would be white with the first snow, and the streams would be coated with ice…. Somewhere near Kursk or near Serpuhovo, exhausted and dying of hunger, he would sink down and die. His corpse would be found, and there would be a paragraph in all the papers saying that a student called Shiryaev had died of hunger….
Though he notices details of the road and landscape, Pyotr’s mind is occupied with fantasies of dying on the journey north, of his father’s guilty conscience, of adventures with pilgrims, robbers, a beautiful rich young woman falling in love with him. Nearly to the train station, from where, apparently, he has been hoping to leave (but he has no money), he is shaken into the immediate moment:
“Look out!” He heard behind him a loud voice.
An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the neighborhood, drove past him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her, and smiled all over his face. And at once he caught himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping with his gloomy mood.
Chekhov seems to suggest that young Pyotr is able at this fragile moment to put together a series of thoughts that, I think, probably only Tolstoy or Chekhov himself could have been capable of:
Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do.
That is (and this was not the narrator so much as Chekhov, who had been thinking about this situation for at least ten years): “Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they may be, it’s hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are a secret.”
Next summer, in a letter to his cousin Georgy, Chekhov would write:
In addition, besides to your own family, don’t read my letters to anyone; private correspondence is a family secret with which nobody has any business.5
In such a personal story as this, Chekhov scarcely managed to disguise the secrets of his family.
While Pyotr has been superseded by the author in the previous moments, Pyotr is, I believe, capable of this next series of thoughts. It’s the immediate circumstances that rouse his thoughts. He has this neighbor-woman in mind, and he knows her situation. She has led him into these thoughts: