The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw a deep breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which had begun to irritate his throat and to make him feel giddy.
“What a strange woman!” he thought, looking about him. “She talks fluently, but… far too much, and too freely. She must be neurotic.”
That’s as far as Sokolsky can go in his analysis of her; he’s no Chekhov, but in this story, Chekhov doesn’t quite seem himself, either. In a panic of confusion or guilt, heterosexual men of all ages label attractive women as crazy or “neurotic.” Chekhov has confusing or confused motives: one is to describe a literary type, a newfangled Circe, another is falling under the spell of Dunya Efros. Our author’s misogynistic and anti-Semitic vision results in Susanna:
There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish, except, perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau. The lieutenant looked around about him, and, shrugging his shoulders, thought of his strange, new acquaintance, of her free-and-easy manners, and her way of talking. But then the door opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady herself, in a long black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her figure looked as though it had been turned in a lathe. Now the lieutenant saw not only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a head black and as curly as lamb’s-wool. She did not attract him, though she did not strike him as ugly. He had a prejudice against un-Russian faces in general, and he considered, too, that the lady’s white face, the whiteness of which for some reason suggested the cloying scent of jasmine, did not go well with her little black curls and thick eyebrows; that her nose and ears were astoundingly white, as though they belonged to a corpse, or had been molded out of transparent wax. When she smiled she showed pale gums as well as her teeth, and he did not like that either.
But the joke is on Sokolsky. He will lose to her all the money that she owes him and he will borrow more money and lose that, too. In this, we are not getting to the mystery of Chekhov’s finances. But we are seeing Chekhov’s final insult to Dunya: her looks. He never let her forget that he found her “Jewish” features distinctive and unattractive.
This is the only contemporary photograph of Efros that has come to light:24
Dunya Efros.
Chekhov describes the guilty, dirty secret of Sokolsky and his equally bewitched cousin Kryukov:
Both of them felt, somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud. Yet they remembered it and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be pleasant to recall in old age.
On the day “Mire” was published, Dunya Efros paid Chekhov a call. To conclude his letter of October 29 to Maria Kiseleva, he confessed, “Mother and auntie are praying for me to marry a merchant’s daughter [that is, not Efros]. There was Efros just now. I angered her, telling her that a young Hebrew was not worth a groat; she was insulted and left.”25
Chekhov, one of the most decent literary figures I have ever come to know through books, behaved in this instance like a cad.
Did he have to insult her in person so that she would hate him for good, before she even read “Mire,” so that she could thank her lucky stars they didn’t end up together when she did read it? Or had she read it and, hurting, come over, and he felt himself obliged to show her he was indeed a beast and she was better off without him?
In Chekhov’s life and writings of these two years, there are confounding Jewish problems. The biographer Rayfield persuades me with his conclusion: “Dunya’s Jewishness was certainly instrumental in bringing her and Anton together and in sundering them. Like many southern Russians, Anton liked and admired Jews. Always a defender of Jews, he asked Bilibin why he used the word ‘yid’ three times in one letter? Yet he himself used the word ‘yid’ both neutrally and pejoratively and, like many southern Russians, Anton felt Jews to be a race apart […] ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew’ were categories in which he classified every new acquaintance, even though his utterances and his behavior make him, by the standards of the times, a judophile.”26
Characters throughout the fiction wrestle with forgiveness, and I hope we can all conclude our wrestling matches with him over his unfortunate expressions of anti-Semitism. Dunya Efros, the offended one herself, forgave him.
The two most informative works concerning the issue of anti-Semitism in Chekhov’s life and work are Chekhov i Evrei (Chekhov and the Jews) by Mark Ural’sky and “From Susanna to Sarra: Chekhov in 1886–1887” by Helena Tolstoy. In 1887 Efros married Efim Konovitser, one of Chekhov’s Jewish classmates and friends from Taganrog. Chekhov and Konovitser and Dunya continued being friends.
During World War I, Konovitser died, and after the Russian Revolution, Efros and her two children moved to Paris. In 1943, when she was eighty-two, she was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Treblinka and murdered in the Holocaust. Her son Nikolay survived and eventually visited the USSR in 1956 to hand over some Chekhov-related material. Nikolay Konovitser said that in his childhood he often saw Chekhov, who spoke to him about, among other things, writing: “You can write, so write!” When young Konovitser asked him what to write, Chekhov said, “Whatever you want, but especially what you see, and when you’re big, you’ll become a writer, but write every day.”27
*
After his embarrassing encounter with Efros on October 29, 1886, Chekhov went to the theater to watch a play. When he got home, the family was celebrating his parents’ thirty-second wedding anniversary.28
His last letter of the month was to Leykin, to whom he admitted his reluctance to lobby Suvorin for a review of a new novel by Leykin’s and Chekhov’s friend Palmin: “I will write to Suvorin about the review only if I’m writing him a business letter, writing à propos; otherwise, I’m not able to ask. People I know well, you, for example, or Bilibin, I can ask, but writing to people not connected with me in close acquaintance, about a favor, courtesy or service is blocked by my faintheartedness. In general asking for things I’m terribly shy, and so of course I don’t gain anything and I lose a lot. Maybe in the middle of November I’ll be in Peter and talk with Suvorin personally.”29
Leykin answered that he would come down to Moscow himself to see Chekhov. They had a lot to talk over, he said.
Chekhov got over his shyness and wrote Suvorin on November 6 to ask him if New Times could review Palmin’s book.
November 1886
…while Tolstoy is in literature it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even to be aware that one has done nothing and is doing nothing is not so terrible, since Tolstoy does enough for all. His work serves as the justification of all the hopes and anticipations built upon literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy stands firmly, his authority is immense, and while he lives, bad tastes in literature, banality of every kind, impudent or lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will remain far away, deep in the shade. His moral authority alone is capable of maintaining on a certain height the so-called literary moods and currents. Without him they would all be a shepherdless flock, or a hotch-potch in which it would be difficult to make out anything.
—Letter to a friend1
The Lodger” (“Zhilets,” November 1), is ironically titled, as the lodger is the put-upon husband of a woman who owns a lodging house. The house runs by her rules, so when the husband tries to command the servants, they ignore him. He thus starts on his way to being a drunk. “A Bad Night: Sketches” (“Nedobraya Noch’: Nabroski,” November 3) includes a terrifying description of a fire that burns down the neighboring village:
Having driven five or six versts, the lady sees something unusually monstrous, which not everyone ever sees even once in their life, and for the richest imagination is impossible to imagine. An enormous fire has the village ablaze. The field of vision is obscured in a mass of creeping blinding flames, into which, like into a fog, sink the huts, trees and the church. Bright almost sunlike light mixes with puffs of black smoke and frosty steam; gold tongues glide with greedy crackings, smiling and merrily winking, and lick the black frameworks. Red clouds and golden dust quickly sweep to the sky, and, as if to increase the illusion, agitated pigeons dive into these clouds. In the air is a strange mix of laughing sounds: horrific cracklings, rustling flames, resembling the rustle of a thousand birds’ wings, people’s voices, bleatings, mooings, the scraping of wheels. The church is fearsome. Flames burst out of its windows and clouds of thick smoke. The bell tower stands like in a black ogre in a mass of light and gold dust; it is already burned over, but the bells hang on, and it’s hard to understand what they’re holding onto.2