Chekhov deleted this because… he never explained such decisions. I suspect that it was because Shiryaev would not have been forgivable. And who could have forgiven Pavel had anyone described such a scene in the Chekhov house?
*
Chekhov wrote several stories this month, and a few of them are substantial and worth noting. Two of them, not otherwise worth noting, “Oh, My Teeth” (“Akh, Zuby!,” October 9) and “Whining: A Letter from Far Away” (“Nyt’e: Pis’mo Izdaleka,” October 12), focus on toothaches, which had afflicted Chekhov in July and for which he had had to leave Babkino for treatment in Moscow.
When Chekhov sat at his desk in his book-lined study in Moscow and leaned over the paper to compose a new piece, he did not hunt for distant or special topics. We can hope that the toothache, anyway, was a memory and not a continuation from the summer. But the second tale about toothache made me wonder if it wasn’t Chekhov’s substitution for tuberculosis. He did not let himself “whine” about his tuberculosis, and for another eleven years denied to everyone that he even had it. The whining letter-writer narrator is in Siberia, where he is serving time for forgery (committed by his mistress). He writes, as Chekhov would, “I swear to you I’m healthy. That is to say, I’m not consumptive and I don’t cough […] The thought that there’s nowhere and nohow I would be cured [of the toothache] further increased my torment.”9 And in real life, there was nowhere and nohow Chekhov could be cured of tuberculosis. He didn’t mention his toothache again in the letters.
He had been making multiple trips this summer and fall, including on October 4, to a court to testify in a case concerning a peasant, and this may have inspired the setting of the Victor Hugo–like tale “In the Court” (“V Sude,” October 11), which is about a trial of a peasant who has murdered his wife. The peasant is thoroughly bewildered in this dulling, dispassionate, legal atmosphere: “What he met here was not at all what he could have expected. The charge of murder hung over him, and yet here he met with neither threatening faces nor indignant looks nor loud phrases about retribution nor sympathy for his extraordinary fate; not one of those who were judging him looked at him with interest or for long…. The dingy windows and walls, the voice of the secretary, the attitude of the prosecutor were all saturated with official indifference and produced an atmosphere of frigidity, as though the murderer were simply an official property, or as though he were not being judged by living men, but by some unseen machine, set going, goodness knows how or by whom….” A doctor, perhaps in the same role Chekhov had served, indifferently testifies. “The last to be examined was the district doctor who had made a postmortem on the old woman. He told the court all that he remembered of his report at the postmortem and all that he had succeeded in thinking of on his way to the court that morning.”10 The doctor is no clever hero. He is as flattened and dulled as the rest of those involved in the proceedings. His testimony does not clarify the details of the murder.
Chekhov rarely wrote neat stories with surprise endings, but this is one. The awkward soldier who has brought the peasant into the courtroom turns out to be the peasant’s son.
After a few other short pieces came another marriage story, “The Proposaclass="underline" A Story for Young Ladies” (“Predlozhenie: Rasskaz dlya Devits,” October 23), a one-page skit about a business and marriage proposal in one: The son of a factory owner assures Princess Vera, “We will sell a million poods11 of fat a year! Let’s build a fat-rendering factory on our adjoining estates and go halfsies!”12
Why couldn’t Chekhov make his living as a doctor? He loved saying he was lazy; to make a ruble as a doctor in mid-1880s Moscow, he would have had to hustle and seek out more patients than he already had. He would have had to charge his friends and his friends’ acquaintances for his services. In “A Peculiar Man” (“Neobiknovenniy,” October 25), we meet the kind of client who could have driven Chekhov out of his medical career. This peculiar Kiryakov wants to find the cheapest midwife in town. Quibbling and fussing, he wears down Maria Petrovna until she agrees to his price. Later, having completed her midwifery, she remarks:
“Well now, thank God, there is one human being more in the world!”
“Yes, that’s agreeable,” said Kiryakov, preserving the wooden expression of his face, “though indeed, on the other hand, to have more children you must have more money. The baby is not born fed and clothed.”
A guilty expression comes into the mother’s face, as though she had brought a creature into the world without permission or through idle caprice. Kiryakov gets up with a sigh and walks with solid dignity out of the room.
“What a man, bless him!” says the midwife to the mother. “He’s so stern and does not smile.”
The mother tells her that he is always like that…. He is honest, fair, prudent, sensibly economical, but all that to such an exceptional degree that simple mortals feel suffocated by it. His relations have parted from him, the servants will not stay more than a month; they have no friends; his wife and children are always on tenterhooks from terror over every step they take. He does not shout at them nor beat them, his virtues are far more numerous than his defects, but when he goes out of the house they all feel better, and more at ease. Why it is so the woman herself cannot say.13
The put-upon exhausted midwife, having rendered her services to the wife, is so glad to be done with the peculiar man that when she realizes she has left without getting paid, she decides not to go back.
*
On October 7 Chekhov wrote Leykin to ask him to read Maria Kiseleva’s story; it was short and, granted, “a bit sentimental,” but if Leykin liked it, he could get away with paying her only six kopecks a line. She, as a budding writer, would save Leykin expenses. That was clever of Chekhov, but Leykin wrote back to say he thought her tale was indeed “sentimental” and “unhumorous”14 and rejected it. Chekhov did, however, help get it published in The Alarm Clock. Chekhov also wanted to complain to Leykin about not having received his fees from the Petersburg Gazette. “I don’t know how I lived through September and how now I can expect to live in expectation of the pay?”15 He wouldn’t write for them again until they paid him.
Leykin didn’t mind the Gazette’s financial sloppiness, however, if it meant Chekhov would write more regularly for Fragments. In his reply, Leykin advised Chekhov to avoid the Gazette; he could and should increase his contributions to Fragments and New Times. Leykin wasn’t satisfied with the writers or writing that Chekhov was trying to foist on him as replacements. Leykin remarked about Alexander: “Telling stories aloud he’s much better, sharper, more literary than when he writes; when for others it’s usually the opposite.”16
Chekhov felt desperate about money and so wrote desperately and jokingly to Schechtel on the 19th, including even a drawing of himself hanging by a hook. “If you are not touched by this artistic representation of my fate, you don’t have a heart, Franz Osipovich! As a matter of fact, the firm ‘Doctor A. P. Chekhov and Co.’ is now living through a financial crisis… If you don’t give me by the 1st 25–50 rubles in loan, you are a pitiless crocodile…”17 Chekhov’s requests for loans were usually heeded; he knew his recipients, and he was scrupulous about repaying.