He looked for Vera’s footprints on the road, and could not believe that the girl who had so attracted him had just declared her love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly “refused” her. For the first time in his life it was his lot to learn by experience how little that a man does depends on his own will, and to suffer in his own person the feelings of a decent kindly man who has against his will caused his neighbor cruel, undeserved anguish.
Chekhov knew how love stories usually go. His brother-in-detachment Ognev also knows. And even if it’s not the ultimate love story, the absolutely mutually satisfying love story it should be, isn’t almost enough enough?
His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as though he had lost something very precious, something very near and dear which he could never find again. He felt that with Vera a part of his youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which he had passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.
Chekhov then suddenly gives us the present tense; for Ognev this story has long ended: “And Ivan Alexeich remembers that he went back again.” What he remembers only brings him more shame: that is, he remembers that he walked around the outside of her house and then retreated.
That might be our metaphor for Chekhov’s relationship with Dunya Efros.
*
Chekhov was dependable for providing periodicals with Lent stories. In “Shrove Tuesday” (“Nakanune Posta,” February 25), the last day before Lent, a family, having shared the last non-Lenten meal, is tired, stuffed, but the mother tells the father to go tutor their frustrated son, who has to prepare for the next day’s lessons.
“Are you working?” asks Pavel Vassilich, sitting down to the table and yawning. “Yes, my boy…. We have enjoyed ourselves, slept, and eaten pancakes, and tomorrow comes Lenten fare, repentance, and going to work. Every period of time has its limits. Why are your eyes so red? Are you sick of learning your lessons? To be sure, after pancakes, lessons are nasty to swallow. That’s about it.”
Because it’s the last night before Lent, “Faces and gestures betray the sloth and repletion that comes when the stomach is full, and yet one must go on eating.” The story concludes: “No one is hungry, everyone’s stomach is overfull, but yet they must eat.”
For Chekhov, Shrove Tuesday was a comic holiday.
How did the Chekhov family celebrate it? There is nothing in the chronicle of his life that indicates a special get-together, but the stories last year and this suggest they were a happily satiated time in the Chekhov household.
*
Chekhov wrote Leykin a casual, wandering letter on February 25, as he had responsibly sent Fragments “A Defenseless Creature” (“Bezzashchitnoe Sushchestvo”) the day before for the next issue (February 28). He asked about Motley Stories. “How’s my book doing?”17 He mentioned that at the end of March he would be going south, alone, for a month. He was being hopeful, as he did not have the funds to do so and didn’t know how he would get them.
A couple of days later, Leykin replied that as for Motley Stories, nobody’s books were selling except the Pushkin edition by Suvorin. He suggested that Chekhov get Suvorin to publicize the book in New Times.
On February 27, Leykin wrote Chekhov about his previous story for Fragments, “An Inadvertence,” which was “superb,” but that “Verochka” (in New Times) was “an unsuccessful little thing.” (Alexander, in Petersburg with Leykin, wrote to say “Verochka” was being praised.)18 “Your short stories succeed better,” Leykin wrote, by which he meant the very short ones for Fragments and the Petersburg Gazette. “I’m not the only one saying this…. On Tuesday I was at Mikhnevich’s […] and there were many writing brothers there, and a conversation came up about you, and they all said the same.”19
Leykin was apparently sincerely baffled by Chekhov’s success as a “serious” writer. “In subsequent years, with the spread of Chekhov’s fame, note Heim and Karlinsky, Leykin repeatedly claimed to have been the first to discern his talent. But, as his published diaries demonstrate, he was actually incapable of appreciating Chekhov’s mature work and, like many Russians in his day, admired the early humorous sketches […] while being quite baffled by The Seagull and ‘The Lady with the Dog.’ ”20
Though Chekhov was modest about his talent, he knew he was at least among the first rank of young Russian fiction writers. The writer Vladimir Korolenko was the one peer that Chekhov rated higher than himself. Chekhov did not note the date they met and neither did Korolenko. Writing his memoirs, Korolenko placed the date “at the end of 1886,” but “the exact date escapes my memory.” Scholars figured out it had to be sometime in February 1887. The two young literary stars, who had already admired each other’s work from afar, hit it off. Korolenko recalled: “Thinking back to the first time we met in his living room, I see Chekhov’s mother, who always sat by his side.”21
Chekhov told Korolenko that he wanted to write a play, and, in an interesting lack of nerve, or perhaps simply imagining that having a writing partner would make the task less daunting, “suggested writing it together (in Nizhni Novgorod): ‘We will work together. Let’s write a play. In four acts. In two weeks.’ Korolenko refused: ‘No, Anton Pavlovich. I can’t chase after you. You’ll write a play alone, and you’ll come still to Nizhni.’ ”22 Korolenko was right, and Chekhov would follow through on his own and in less than two weeks in September would write a four-act play.
March 1887
Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and—was it Aphet? All Ham could see was that his father was a drunkard; he completely disregarded the fact that Noah was a genius, that he had built the Ark and saved the world. Writers must avoid imitating Ham. Mull that one over for a while. […] I do dare remind you of justice, which is more precious for an objective writer than air.
—Letter to a young writer1
Chekhov believed in nightmares and hallucinations, but not in ghosts. “A Bad Business” (“Nedobroe Delo,” March 2) creates as eerie an atmosphere as a nightmare. The story begins:
“Who goes there?”
No answer. The watchman sees nothing, but through the roar of the wind and the trees distinctly hears someone walking along the avenue ahead of him. A March night, cloudy and foggy, envelops the earth, and it seems to the watchman that the earth, the sky, and he himself with his thoughts are all merged together into something vast and impenetrably black. He can only grope his way.2
Now that I have read Grigorovich’s pseudo-dream story, it occurs to me that this story, though realistic, is more actually dreamlike than Grigorovich’s. When I read it a few years ago in Russian, I found myself more deeply spooked than when I was breezing through it in English. It’s as if I was groping through the same apprehension as the watchman. Chekhov resorts again to the present tense, which perhaps lends itself to the narration of scary stories:
The watchman stops for a minute to light his pipe. He stoops down behind the traveler’s back and lights several matches. The gleam of the first match lights up for one instant a bit of the avenue on the right, a white tombstone with an angel, and a dark cross; the light of the second match, flaring up brightly and extinguished by the wind, flashes like lightning on the left side, and from the darkness nothing stands out but the angle of some sort of trellis; the third match throws light to right and to left, revealing the white tombstone, the dark cross, and the trellis around a child’s grave.
The “traveler” is in fact a lookout for a gang of thieves. But while still in the disguise of darkness he is all too candid and truthfuclass="underline"
“Our doings are wicked, our thoughts are deceitful! Sins, sins! My soul accursed, ever covetous, my belly greedy and lustful! I have angered the Lord and there is no salvation for me in this world and the next. I am deep in sins like a worm in the earth.”