He is also a wickedly teasing philosopher: “ ‘There are pilgrims of different sorts. There are the real ones who are God-fearing men and watch over their own souls, and there are such as stray about the graveyard at night and are a delight to the devils… Ye-es! There’s one who is a pilgrim could give you a crack on the pate with an axe if he liked and knock the breath out of you.’ ”
With that, the watchman has a renewed sense of apprehension. And his apprehension only increases as the one thief holds him to prevent him from raising an alarm while the other thieves ransack the church.
*
On March 2, Petya Kravtsov, knowing Chekhov had been under the weather, invited him to stay with his family in the village of Rogozin Ravine, the “best air” to be found in the Crimea and Caucasus.3 Chekhov had been Petya’s tutor in Taganrog when the Chekhov family, fleeing creditors, left him behind and relocated to Moscow in 1876. As a teenager, Chekhov had spent a few summers there in the countryside with Petya’s family.
This was yet another reason to go south. But how to pay for it?
*
In “Home” (“Doma,” March 7), Chekhov seems to elude any attempt by me to link the story to his life. Bykovsky, a weary prosecutor and the recently widowed father of a seven-year-old son, comes home to an annoyed governess; she complains that the boy, Seryozha, has been smoking cigarettes: “ ‘When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice.’ ”4 Yes, Chekhov had been a tutor, but of course he wasn’t a lawyer, he was never widowed, and he had no children. But… otherwise… let’s see. Chekhov had once been a child and seemed to understand childhood and children at a psychological depth reached by few writers. Bykovsky is amused by the thought of his little boy smoking, but he realizes he has a responsibility to the governess. The trouble is: he doesn’t really know his son, much less children. He is used to thinking about law and its consequences; now he “remembered the head-master of the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion. This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.”
Chekhov was a smoker. It was a “vice,” and Chekhov knew he should have avoided it. He was in a period of weighing the benefits versus the drawbacks of punishment. Punish drinkers? He didn’t think that worked. Bykovsky, meanwhile, ponders the situation:
The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled and their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very often the punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime itself. The living organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself, growing accustomed and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise man would be bound to feel at every moment what an irrational basis there often is underlying his rational activity, and how little of established truth and certainty there is even in work so responsible and so terrible in its effects as that of the teacher, of the lawyer, of the writer….
Before he has prepared himself, the governess sends Seryozha to him. He scolds the boy with harsh words but little feeling:
“I am very, very much displeased with you! You used to be a good boy, but now I see you are spoiled and have become a bad one.”
Yevgeny Petrovich smoothed down Seryozha’s collar and thought:
“What more am I to say to him!”
“Yes, it’s not right,” he continued. “I did not expect it of you. In the first place, you ought not to take tobacco that does not belong to you. Every person has only the right to make use of his own property; if he takes anyone else’s… he is a bad man!” (“I am not saying the right thing!” thought Yevgeny Petrovich.) “For instance, Natalya Semyonovna has a box with her clothes in it. That’s her box, and we—that is, you and I—dare not touch it, as it is not ours. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ve got toy horses and pictures…. I don’t take them, do I? Perhaps I might like to take them, but… they are not mine, but yours!”
“Take them if you like!” said Seryozha, raising his eyebrows. “Please don’t hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is mine, but I don’t mind…. Let it stay.”
The prosecutor realizes he cannot even explain law to his son. But he continues to try, desperately seeking the proper level. He returns to the smoking topic, one perfectly in accord with Chekhov’s views:
“Though I smoke it does not follow that you may. I smoke and know that it is stupid, I blame myself and don’t like myself for it.” (“A clever teacher, I am!” he thought.) “Tobacco is very bad for the health, and anyone who smokes dies earlier than he should. It’s particularly bad for boys like you to smoke. Your chest is weak, you haven’t reached your full strength yet, and smoking leads to consumption and other illness in weak people. Uncle Ignat died of consumption, you know. If he hadn’t smoked, perhaps he would have lived till now.”
Seryozha looked pensively at the lamp, touched the lamp-shade with his finger, and heaved a sigh.
“Uncle Ignat played the violin splendidly!” he said. “His violin is at the Grigoryevs’ now.”
Seryozha leaned his elbows on the edge of the table again, and sank into thought.
True enough about smoking and Chekhov’s own consumption (tuberculosis), but the father thinks he has still not connected with Seryozha. But, just as Tolstoy showed the depths of thought and feeling in Anna Karenina’s nine-year-old son Seryozha, Chekhov shows us his younger Seryozha’s, whose actual thoughts Chekhov insists he can only guess at:
His white face wore a fixed expression, as though he were listening or following a train of thought of his own; distress and something like fear came into his big staring eyes. He was most likely thinking now of death, which had so lately carried off his mother and Uncle Ignat. Death carries mothers and uncles off to the other world, while their children and violins remain upon the earth. The dead live somewhere in the sky beside the stars, and look down from there upon the earth. Can they endure the parting?
Most assuredly, Chekhov describes what the contemplative boy now does, which is draw pictures and chatter:
“Cook was chopping up cabbage today and she cut her finger,” he said, drawing a little house and moving his eyebrows. “She gave such a scream that we were all frightened and ran into the kitchen. Stupid thing! Natalya Semyonovna told her to dip her finger in cold water, but she sucked it… And how could she put a dirty finger in her mouth! That’s not proper, you know, papa!”
Then he went on to describe how, while they were having dinner, a man with a hurdy-gurdy had come into the yard with a little girl, who had danced and sung to the music.
Chekhov puts us not in Seryozha’s but in the father’s shoes:
“He has his own train of thought!” thought the prosecutor. “He has a little world of his own in his head, and he has his own ideas of what is important and unimportant. To gain possession of his attention, it’s not enough to imitate his language, one must also be able to think in the way he does. He would understand me perfectly if I really were sorry for the loss of the tobacco, if I felt injured and cried…. That’s why no one can take the place of a mother in bringing up a child, because she can feel, cry, and laugh together with the child. One can do nothing by logic and morality. What more shall I say to him? What?”
This story is Bykovsky’s reckoning: “ ‘[…] in school and in court, of course, all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at home; here one has to do with people whom one loves beyond everything, and love is exacting and complicates the question. If this boy were not my son, but my pupil, or a prisoner on his trial, I should not be so cowardly, and my thoughts would not be racing all over the place!’ ”