As the miller’s mother appeals to him to help his brother, I wonder: Was this passage also about the desperate circumstances of Chekhov’s brother Alexander?
“Looking at him I’m terribly worried…. There’s nothing to eat, the children in tatters, he himself is ashamed to show his nose in the street, his trousers are all in holes and he has no boots…. All six of us sleep in one room. Such poverty, such poverty! Nothing worse can be imagined. I have come to ask you to help. Aleshenka, in consideration of an old woman, help Vasili…. Remember, he’s your brother!”
She compares the miller’s circumstances to his brother’s, just as, I imagine, Chekhov’s down-on-their-luck older brothers compared theirs to his miraculous success:
“He is poor, but you thank the Lord! The mill is your own, and you have kitchen-gardens and you trade in fish. The Lord has given you wisdom and exalted you above others, and bestowed on you plenty…. You are also alone…. But Vasya has four children, and I, accursed old thing, am a weight on his neck, and his wages are only seven rubles. How can he feed us all? Help us!…”
Though he himself was ever generous, the character Chekhov is closest to in this story is, of all people, the horrible miller.
His brother Alexander was in bad straits, and, like the miller’s brother Vasili, a drinker. Alexander did not have his mother Evgenia Chekhova living with him, but he did have a wife and three (not four) children, and Chekhov was actively trying to help Alexander get a job in the publishing world in Petersburg. Alexander was writing and sending pieces to Leykin again. Chekhov, sitting pretty in Moscow in the red house that looked like a chest of drawers, had to support the immediate family and also come up with money sometimes to bail out his brother in the provinces.
The mean miller, after his mother rues having come when he refuses her anything, nevertheless has had his hard heart touched for a second and almost gives her the money she would need. But his heart rehardens and he gives her instead a twenty-kopeck coin.
And why did Chekhov exclude from his Collected Works this incisive story, so much more powerful and moving than others he included? There’s no telling.
He did include “Excellent People” (“Khoroshie Lyudi,” November 22), an analytical portrait presented by an unnamed first-person narrator about two siblings, Vladimir, a well-to-do critic, and Vera, his doctor-sister. Vladimir “was a literary man all over when with an inspired face he laid a wreath on the coffin of some celebrity, or with a grave and solemn face collected signatures for some address; his passion for making the acquaintance of distinguished literary men, his faculty for finding talent even where it was absent, his perpetual enthusiasm, his pulse that went at one hundred and twenty a minute, his ignorance of life, the genuinely feminine flutter with which he threw himself into concerts and literary evenings for the benefit of destitute students, the way in which he gravitated toward the young—all this would have created for him the reputation of a writer even if he had not written his articles.”6
Vera, who lost her husband to typhus and attempted suicide after that tragedy, worships her brother:
She gave up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she were a prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colorless apathy, with bowed head and hanging hands. The only thing to which she was not completely indifferent, and which brought some brightness into the twilight of her life, was the presence of her brother, whom she loved. She loved him himself and his programme, she was full of reverence for his articles; and when she was asked what her brother was doing, she would answer in a subdued voice as though afraid of waking or distracting him: “He is writing….” Usually when he was at his work she used to sit beside him, her eyes fixed on his writing hand. She used at such moments to look like a sick animal warming itself in the sun….
Chekhov’s friends would observe such displays of reverence toward him from both his mother and sister.
The story also shows Chekhov’s scorn for know-nothing critics:
On the table near the writing hand there lay open a freshly cut volume of a thick magazine, containing a story of peasant life, signed with two initials. Vladimir Semyonich was enthusiastic; he thought the author was admirable in his handling of the subject, suggested Turgenev in his descriptions of nature, was truthful, and had an excellent knowledge of the life of the peasantry. The critic himself knew nothing of peasant life except from books and hearsay, but his feelings and his inner convictions forced him to believe the story. He foretold a brilliant future for the author, assured him he should await the conclusion of the story with great impatience, and so on.
Chekhov was calling nonsense on the predictive power of critics, even of the critics that had predicted grand things for him.
That very night, in the story, it seems to have dawned on Vera that what Vladimir does isn’t actually important at all. She asks him what he thinks about “nonresistance to evil,” and as he splutters, she seems to see the same smug thoughtlessness that the narrator sees. The ensuing discussions of this idea divide them. She is becoming, it seems, a Tolstoyan and she soon leaves her brother’s house. Not long after, Vladimir dies of an illness, soon to be forgotten by the literary community. “Excellent People” is a rehearsal for some of the famous plays Chekhov would write a decade later. Chekhov later shortened the version we know by more than three pages from the original in New Times, where he had titled the speech-heavy story “The Sister.” In revision, he snipped the lone mention of Tolstoy.7
Chekhov would continue wrestling with Tolstoy’s ideas until 1895, when he and the Grand Master of Literary Russia finally met in person at Tolstoy’s estate. Ideas and philosophies were not the men, and, with insight into each other’s character and appreciation of each other’s art, they loved each other and were friends to the end of the younger man’s life.
*
The Letopis’ (Chronology) of Chekhov’s life is ever helpfuclass="underline" letters and incidents in Chekhov’s life are noted and excerpted. For November 21, the editors quote a sentence from Chekhov’s letter of November 22 to Leykin, “Last night I accompanied a young lady in a cab and caught a cold.” They speculate that the “young lady” referred to was “probably” Dunya Efros.8
Had he intercepted her somewhere and abjectly apologized for having hurt her feelings? I hope so. Where did he take her? There is no explanation by the editors of how they made their guess. What do they know of Efros’s movements that the rest of us don’t? Are there any clues in the stories?… No. Any other references in this period to Efros?… No, not until January 17, 1887, at his name day party.
Also in that November 22 letter to Leykin was the news that Chekhov would arrive in Petersburg in several days. He didn’t mention that his sister Maria would join him on this late November, early December trip.
Maria and he and all the Chekhovs loved pets, and “The Incident” (“Sobytie,” November 24) is about the benefits of children having pets, in this instance a cat. “Domestic animals play a scarcely noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part in the education and life of children. Which of us does not remember powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkeys, mild old tabby cats, who forgave us when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonizing pain? I even fancy, sometimes, that the patience, the fidelity, the readiness to forgive, and the sincerity that are characteristic of our domestic animals have a far stronger and more definite effect on the mind of a child than the long exhortations of some dry, pale Karl Karlovich, or the misty expositions of a governess, trying to prove to children that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.”9 This story’s cat has kittens, which delight the children. Unfortunately, their uncle and his dog come over and “the incident” of the title is that the dog eats the unminded kittens.