The father of the old lady who had just driven by, for instance, had for some offense lain for half his lifetime under the ban of the wrath of Tsar Nicholas I; her husband had been a gambler; of her four sons, not one had turned out well. One could imagine how many terrible scenes there must have been in her life, how many tears must have been shed. And yet the old lady seemed happy and satisfied, and she had answered his smile by smiling, too. The student thought of his comrades, who did not like talking about their families; he thought of his mother, who almost always lied when she had to speak of her husband and children….
And those really have been Pyotr’s thoughts, because they’re the thoughts that eventually prompt him to turn back. He doesn’t turn on his heel; he has too much pride for that. He walks until he knows he has to return. And he is braver now. He has survived the confrontation with his father and is able to steel himself a bit.
There is no description of Chekhov ever battling his father. Having seen his explosive brothers confront his father, he probably found a quieter, more effective way of getting around Pavel.
As he walked back he made up his mind at all costs to talk to his father, to explain to him, once and for all, that it was dreadful and oppressive to live with him.
He found perfect stillness in the house. His sister Varvara was lying behind a screen with a headache, moaning faintly. His mother, with a look of amazement and guilt upon her face, was sitting beside her on a box, mending Arhipka’s trousers. Yevgraf Ivanovich was pacing from one window to another, scowling at the weather. From his walk, from the way he cleared his throat, and even from the back of his head, it was evident he felt himself to blame.
“I suppose you have changed your mind about going today?” he asked.
It’s there, just there, that Chekhov creates a flash of sympathetic understanding of the father.
The student felt sorry for him, but immediately suppressing that feeling, he said:
“Listen… I must speak to you seriously… yes, seriously. I have always respected you, and… and have never brought myself to speak to you in such a tone, but your behavior… your last action…”
The father looked out of the window and did not speak. The student, as though considering his words, rubbed his forehead and went on in great excitement:
“Not a dinner or tea passes without your making an uproar. Your bread sticks in our throat… nothing is more bitter, more humiliating, than bread that sticks in one’s throat…. Though you are my father, no one, neither God nor nature, has given you the right to insult and humiliate us so horribly, to vent your ill-humor on the weak. You have worn my mother out and made a slave of her, my sister is hopelessly crushed, while I…”
“It’s not your business to teach me,” said his father.
Pyotr has again become Chekhov or Chekhov has become Pyotr:
“Yes, it is my business! You can quarrel with me as much as you like, but leave my mother in peace! I will not allow you to torment my mother!” the student went on, with flashing eyes. “You are spoiled because no one has yet dared to oppose you. They tremble and are mute toward you, but now that is over! Coarse, ill-bred man! You are coarse… do you understand? You are coarse, ill-humored, unfeeling. And the peasants can’t endure you!”
But Chekhov would not have said “the peasants” to his father, as it wouldn’t make sense. Perhaps “servants” would do, as in their present-day Moscow middle-class household, they had a cook and a maid.
We see that the conscience-ridden father has determined to accept some words of reproach—but not this many:
The student had by now lost his thread, and was not so much speaking as firing off detached words. Yevgraf Ivanovich listened in silence, as though stunned; but suddenly his neck turned crimson, the color crept up his face, and he made a movement.
“Hold your tongue!” he shouted.
“That’s right!” the son persisted; “you don’t like to hear the truth! Excellent! Very good! begin shouting! Excellent!”
Chekhov would not have mocked his father, probably.
“Hold your tongue, I tell you!” roared Yevgraf Ivanovich.
Fedosya Semyonovna appeared in the doorway, very pale, with an astonished face; she tried to say something, but she could not, and could only move her fingers.
“It’s all your fault!” Shiryaev shouted at her. “You have brought him up like this!”
“I don’t want to go on living in this house!” shouted the student, crying, and looking angrily at his mother. “I don’t want to live with you!”
Varvara uttered a shriek behind the screen and broke into loud sobs. With a wave of his hand, Shiryaev ran out of the house.
Again the father has stalked off!
The student went to his own room and quietly lay down. He lay till midnight without moving or opening his eyes. He felt neither anger nor shame, but a vague ache in his soul. He neither blamed his father nor pitied his mother, nor was he tormented by stings of conscience; he realized that every one in the house was feeling the same ache, and God only knew which was most to blame, which was suffering most….
Aren’t all unhappy families perhaps alike? Is Chekhov standing Tolstoy’s already famous epigraph from Anna Karenina on its head?
The misery that envelops a family in expectation of, during, and after such disputes, isn’t it always like so? “Despotism and lies so disfigured our childhood that it makes me sick and horrified to think of it,” Chekhov wrote his brother Alexander more than two years after writing this story. “Remember the disgust and horror we felt every time father made a scene at dinner because there was too much salt in the soup or called mother a fool.”6
Chekhov knew the characters’ agony. Meanwhile, the “sick and horrified” student Pyotr groans and bears it:
At midnight he woke the laborer, and told him to have the horse ready at five o’clock in the morning for him to drive to the station; he undressed and got into bed, but could not get to sleep. He heard how his father, still awake, paced slowly from window to window, sighing, till early morning. No one was asleep; they spoke rarely, and only in whispers. Twice his mother came to him behind the screen. Always with the same look of vacant wonder, she slowly made the cross over him, shaking nervously.
And here is Chekhov too—in his quiet sympathy for the mother, for his own mother or for all mothers married to tyrants. How much she has had to endure. Chekhov never justified his father, though in his teens he and his brothers and cousins learned to appreciate through meeting Pavel’s and Mitrofan’s father just how horrible their father’s and uncle’s lives must have been, and how moderate they as fathers were in comparison. Chekhov witnessed and experienced his own generation’s huge leap of improved behavior, of restraint, of education.
“Difficult People” concludes, as nearly all of Chekhov’s stories do, with life, damaged or wounded as it is, going on:
At five o’clock in the morning he said goodbye to them all affectionately, and even shed tears. As he passed his father’s room, he glanced in at the door. Yevgraf Ivanovich, who had not taken off his clothes or gone to bed, was standing by the window, drumming on the panes.
“Goodbye; I am going,” said his son.
“Goodbye… the money is on the round table…” his father answered, without turning around.
A cold, hateful rain was falling as the laborer drove him to the station. The sunflowers were drooping their heads still lower, and the grass seemed darker than ever.
Is it possible that Chekhov stood outside these characters, invented them from whole cloth, and didn’t know them from within?
“Difficult People” contains more power than any of his famous plays that involve family dramas. In this story, he caught lightning—and thunder—in a bottle. And yet, looking at the original version of this story, I was surprised to see how very much he cut out. There are clipped phrasings throughout; he neatly trimmed several descriptions. He cut the length by more than two pages, the bulk of that coming in three passages. The only significant change, however, resulting in “a softening,” as K. S. Overina puts it,7 occurs after Pyotr’s return to the house. In the midst of Pyotr and his father’s ferocious screaming, the mother, unseen by either, rushes between them and is “accidentally” struck by her husband’s fist between her neck and shoulder. She collapses to a chair and father and son turn away and retreat to opposite corners.8