“Unhappy!” said the doctor, with a smile of contempt. “Don’t utter that word, it does not concern you. The spendthrift who cannot raise a loan calls himself unhappy, too. The capon, sluggish from overfeeding, is unhappy, too. Worthless people!”
“Sir, you forget yourself,” shrieked Abogin. “For saying things like that… people are thrashed! Do you understand?”
Abogin says everything wrong. He scarcely restrains himself. He is a “gentleman,” and suggests that Kirilov is a nobody, one of the “people,” someone Abogin feels he would have the right to “thrash.” He even seems to think much of himself for offering to pay Kirilov for his time, but that, too, is, as Kirilov feels, insulting.
Finally:
Abogin and the doctor stood face to face, and in their wrath continued flinging undeserved insults at each other.
So now I don’t understand my previous misunderstandings of the story. This standoff reminds me of the beginning of The Iliad, Achilles and Agamemnon, throwing their furious words at each other, ready to resort to swords. Homer understands both men and doesn’t let us pick sides: What’s terrible is that two men who are nominally on the same side would love to kill the other.
Chekhov explains:
I believe that never in their lives, even in delirium, had they uttered so much that was unjust, cruel, and absurd. The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both. The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.
Chekhov even gives us the long perspective on their lives. They never did worse than what we have just witnessed. We understand why they fight in this ugly way. And somehow Chekhov realizes in this story, or shows us what he has before realized, about “the egoism of the unhappy.” And what an unhappy family he arose from.
But now to the ending. The doctor demands that Abogin send him back home, and Abogin orders that to be done, but he is so beside himself that he screams at and threatens the driver.
To my surprise (once again), Abogin, the bigger offender, shows Kirilov and us that he can pull himself together:
Abogin and the doctor remained in silence waiting for the carriage. The first regained his expression of sleekness and his refined elegance. He paced up and down the room, tossed his head elegantly, and was evidently meditating on something. His anger had not cooled, but he tried to appear not to notice his enemy…. The doctor stood, leaning with one hand on the edge of the table, and looked at Abogin with that profound and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt only to be found in the eyes of sorrow and indigence when they are confronted with well-nourished comfort and elegance.
Robust health! As a doctor, Kirilov sees and appreciates it—wasted on Abogin! And again, Chekhov argues about why the hatred and spite have been foolhardy:
All the way home the doctor thought not of his wife, nor of his Andrey, but of Abogin and the people in the house he had just left. His thoughts were unjust and inhumanly cruel. He condemned Abogin and his wife and Papchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued light among sweet perfumes, and all the way home he hated and despised them till his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning those people took shape in his mind.
Chekhov must have argued with someone about this. He must have known a doctor who had justified himself this way. This is a reaction story. Chekhov shows us that for his part he sympathizes with both sides, and that there were alternatives, and that our self-justifying hatreds cost us:
Time will pass and Kirilov’s sorrow will pass, but that conviction, unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain in the doctor’s mind to the grave.
Chekhov had multiple opportunities to revise this story. He did not. He tacked on the moral and left it there, forever.
*
I know of no classic Russian fiction so mocking of Germans as an episode in Crime and Punishment, where Dostoevsky delights in Marmeladov’s landlady’s grammatical and vocabulary errors:
“Listen to the owl!” Katerina Ivanovna whispered at once, her good-humor almost restored, “she meant to say he kept his hands in his pockets, but she said he put his hands in people’s pockets. (Cough-cough.) And have you noticed, Rodion Romanovich, that all these Petersburg foreigners, the Germans especially, are all stupider than we! Can you fancy anyone of us telling how ‘Karl from the chemist’s’ ‘pierced his heart from fear’ and that the idiot, instead of punishing the cabman, ‘clasped his hands and wept, and much begged.’ Ah, the fool! And you know she fancies it’s very touching and does not suspect how stupid she is!”35
Every time I read it, I blush for my clumsy, lousy Russian.
Chekhov was nicer. There are, however, a few mockings of “foreign” accents, including unfortunately of Jewish ones, and Chekhov regularly mocked his own incapacity with foreign languages, though he occasionally used common French, Latin, and German phrases. “The Good German” (“Dobriy Nemets,” January 24) is about Ivan Karlovich Schwei, a German immigrant with a good job in a steel mill who has married a poor Russian woman. He speaks like so: “Cabman, you good cabman! I love Russian peoples! You are a Russian man, my wife is a Russian man, and I am a Russian man.”36 Toiling away in Tver, he misses his wife in Moscow and returns home unannounced to see her and discovers a man in their bed. After writing an angry ungrammatical letter to her parents, he learns that his admirably frugal wife has rented out their former bedroom to a locksmith and his wife. Chekhov has fun with the German’s language, but Ivan Karlovich’s challenges with Russian have nothing to do with his honest mistake.
After that light fare, Chekhov ended his very dark January publications with “Darkness” (“Temnota,” January 26): A peasant begs a doctor to intervene for the peasant’s convict brother to get him released. The doctor can do nothing about that, which the peasant, dim and frustrated, has trouble understanding. “What right have I?” asks the exasperated doctor. “Am I a jailer or what? They brought him to the hospital for me to treat him, but I have as much right to let him out as I have to put you in prison, silly fellow!” As the story goes on to its hopeless end, all of Chekhov’s sympathy is directed to the convict’s brother, whose family suffers the relentless and incomprehensible rules of the Russian justice system.
Chekhov felt obliged on January 26 to write Leykin to thank him for the payment for “The Good German” and offer excuses again for not writing for Fragments. “My whole body is achy and weak. I need to work, but it’s not working, and everything I write is bad.”37 He had gone to the famous doctor Zakharin’s ninety-minute lecture on syphilis that day and standing there had exhausted him. “Concerning a trip to Petersburg the second week of Lent, I don’t know what to tell you.” He fretted that after forty or fifty lines of reading aloud at the Literary Fund ceremony his voice would become dry and hissy. Leykin shrugged at that but let him know that there would be a free round-trip ticket for him.
Chekhov also wrote to Alexander that day, sighing, “It’s probable we’ll see each other the second week of Lent. […] I’m sick, living boringly, but I’m starting to write lousily, or I’m tired and can’t follow Levitan’s example of turning the pictures upside down and averting my critical eye…”38
Alexander replied a few days later, telling him that he was constantly hearing praise about Anton, that, for example, “You have the divine spark in you and that they expect from you—what exactly they expect they don’t know, but they expect it.”39
At the end of the month, Chekhov, still anxious about the speech that Leykin expected him to make in Petersburg, wrote and requested Alexander to ask around and find out if it would be good after all for him to go ahead and do it.40 Fortunately, he never had to, as the event was canceled.