Chekhov continued his correspondence with Maria Kiseleva on December 13. He sent her the fateful story “Mire” with his letter and meanwhile defended himself from her teasing about his love life. He was paid 115 rubles for that story about a Jew, he told her, so “how after this not incline toward the Hebrew tribe?”16 I sure wish he hadn’t said that.
He added, because she had joshed him about his busy love life: “You cruelly insult me, reproaching me for Yashen’ka, Madame Sakharova and so on. Weren’t you informed that I long ago turned away from the world’s bustle, from earthly pleasures, and gave up everything but medicine and literature? A better-intentioned and more restrained person than I is hard to find in the world. I suppose that even the Archimandrite Veniam is a bigger sinner than I.”
Kiseleva would find other sins to charge him with in “Mire.”
*
He was definitely unhappy with his first Christmas-issue story for New Times, but he was perhaps the only person unhappy with it. On December 21, he wrote to Suvorin: “I began the yuletide story [“On the Road”] two weeks ago and haven’t at all finished it. An evil spirit has nudged me toward a theme with which I can’t cope. After two weeks I succeeded in getting acquainted with the theme and the story and now I don’t understand what’s good and what’s bad. Simply a disaster! Tomorrow, I hope, I’ll finish it and send it to you. You’ll receive it the 24th, at three o’clock. If you take a look at the story you’ll understand the effort with which it was written and excuse that I was late and didn’t keep my promise.”17
He kept his promise; on Christmas Day “On the Road” (“Na Puti”) was published. His brother Alexander read it and reported on the “sensation” that it had produced in Petersburg; while Alexander had been visiting the New Times offices, he had even been introduced around as “the author’s brother.” The young women office-workers there told him they had been delighted by Anton’s Christmas card.18
Chekhov sent his Christmas and New Year’s greetings with friendly jokes to Leykin and a request for an immediate payout for his December contributions to Fragments: “Excuse me that I’m breaking your law of bookkeeping, but… what am I to do?”19
The hero of “On the Road” (December 25) is even harder pressed than Chekhov was. The story’s play-like setting might remind us of “The Witch,” except instead of a posting station, we have a tavern, snowed in during a Christmas-season blizzard: “Something frantic and wrathful, but profoundly unhappy, seemed to be flinging itself about the tavern with the ferocity of a wild beast and trying to break in.” In a traveler’s room, Likharev, an idealistic but impoverished forty-two-year-old ex-landowner, and his eight-year-old daughter are waiting out the storm when a young woman landowner traveling with a sledge driver stops for refuge. Likharev is a widower whose charisma is infectious:
“I say this from hard, bitter experience: the proudest, most independent women, if I have succeeded in communicating to them my enthusiasm, have followed me without criticism, without question, and done anything I chose; I have turned a nun into a Nihilist who, as I heard afterward, shot a gendarme; my wife never left me for a minute in my wanderings, and like a weathercock changed her faith in step with my changing enthusiasms.”
As he converses with the young woman, his intellectual vitality revives:
“There, you see,” cried Likharev delighted, and he even stamped with his foot. “Oh dear! How glad I am that I have met you! Fate is kind to me, I am always meeting splendid people. Not a day passes but one makes acquaintance with somebody one would give one’s soul for. There are ever so many more good people than bad in this world. Here, see, for instance, how openly and from our hearts we have been talking as though we had known each other a hundred years. Sometimes, I assure you, one restrains oneself for ten years and holds one’s tongue, is reserved with one’s friends and one’s wife, and meets some cadet in a train and babbles one’s whole soul out to him. It is the first time I have the honor of seeing you, and yet I have confessed to you as I have never confessed in my life. Why is it?”20
Her reaction shows him that he has gone too far again:
Miss Ilovaisky got up slowly, took a step toward Likharev, and fixed her eyes upon his face. From the tears that glittered on his eyelashes, from his quivering, passionate voice, from the flush on his cheeks, it was clear to her that women were not a chance, not a simple subject of conversation. They were the object of his new enthusiasm, or, as he said himself, his new faith! For the first time in her life she saw a man carried away, fervently believing. With his gesticulations, with his flashing eyes he seemed to her mad, frantic, but there was a feeling of such beauty in the fire of his eyes, in his words, in all the movements of his huge body, that without noticing what she was doing she stood facing him as though rooted to the spot, and gazed into his face with delight.
He realizes he has bewitched her: “Whether his finely intuitive soul were really able to read that look, or whether his imagination deceived him, it suddenly began to seem to him that with another touch or two that girl would have forgiven him his failures, his age, his desolate position, and would have followed him without question or reasonings.” Likharev is unconsciously seductive the way Raissa in “The Witch” is, but he is a good man, and this is a Christmas story, and he deliberately sends the young woman on her way. Likharev is like Chekhov in this way, that he unintentionally attracted women who sensibly lost their heads over him.
As a medical student Chekhov himself had been swept off his feet by another of Likharev’s enthusiasms:
“When you set to work to study any science, what strikes you first of all is its beginning. I assure you there is nothing more attractive and grander, nothing is so staggering, nothing takes a man’s breath away like the beginning of any science. From the first five or six lectures you are soaring on wings of the brightest hopes, you already seem to yourself to be welcoming truth with open arms. And I gave myself up to science, heart and soul, passionately, as to the woman one loves. I was its slave; I found it the sun of my existence, and asked for no other.”
As a wayward and awkward postscript to this story, last year I was editing a collection of Chekhov’s love stories for an anthology. I included “On the Road,” as I had also fallen for Likharev. However, in the midst of the story, Chekhov includes a popular Russian Christmas carol that a group of children sing for the guests at the tavern. It goes like this:
Hi, you Little Russian lad,
Bring your sharp knife,
We will kill the Jew, we will kill him,
The son of tribulation…
Happy holidays and murder? It is not Chekhov’s fault, is it, that perversity and cruelty had made tormenting and murdering Jews a Christian custom? It’s not his fault, but he might, just might, have excised it from a Christmas story in a right-wing anti-Semitic newspaper. I cut it from the Dover anthology, and I, in a failure of scrupulousness, didn’t note the excision.
Chekhov’s Christmas story for Petersburg Gazette was “Vanka,” about a nine-year-old orphan apprenticed to a shoemaker in Moscow. Vanka writes his grandfather begging him to bring him back home. He complains: “They make me sleep in the vestibule, and when their brat cries, I don’t sleep at all, but have to rock the cradle. Dear Grandpapa, for Heaven’s sake, take me away from here, home to our village, I can’t bear this any more…. I bow to the ground to you, and will pray to God for ever and ever, take me from here or I shall die….”21 When he mails his heartsick letter, he carefully addresses it “To grandfather in the village.”