He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to make a “speech,” of the general public who absorb history only from legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables, novels, poems.
“Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this foolish habit since the days of Adam… though, indeed, perhaps it is all natural, and ought to be so…. There are many deceptions and delusions in nature that serve a purpose.”
Amen.
*
On March 8, Chekhov got on the train to St. Petersburg to see his brother Alexander and his publisher Suvorin. Alexander had beckoned him there via telegram to treat him for typhus, his presumed “dangerous illness.” Chekhov’s consolation was reading Anna Karenina on the unusually long, slow, crowded ride north, arriving on March 9.
Petersburg was in the midst of a typhus epidemic, and once Chekhov arrived at his brother’s, he discovered that Alexander was symptomless but that his wife Anna had typhus. Petersburg gave Chekhov the impression of being “a city of death.” After spending the first night in Alexander’s crowded apartment, Chekhov accepted a medical colleague’s invitation to stay at his house.
Besides fear of typhus, money worries were more than usual preying on Chekhov, and his next three stories were about characters desperately seeking money. “The Lottery Ticket” (“Viigrishniy Bilet,” March 9) is a trick story. The first sentence provides the conventional fiction setup information:
Ivan Dmitrich, a middle-class man who lived with his family on an income of twelve hundred a year and was very well satisfied with his lot, sat down on the sofa after supper and began reading the newspaper.7
A real story by Chekhov seems alive, because, as in “Home,” it was alive as he created it. He didn’t have to be alert to work through “The Lottery Ticket.” He could’ve handed off the idea to Alexander or any of his mentees and have had them do it. As soon as Ivan and his wife Masha start daydreaming about winning the lottery on the ticket Masha holds, they begin hating each other with a passion they haven’t until now realized: “And he looked at his wife, not with a smile now, but with hatred. She glanced at him, too, and also with hatred and anger. She had her own daydreams, her own plans, her own reflections; she understood perfectly well what her husband’s dreams were. She knew who would be the first to try to grab her winnings.” The ticket doesn’t win, however, but the couple maintains their newfound hatred.
The next story, “Too Early!” (“Rano!” March 16), is slight, but Chekhov was imaginatively engaged in picturing it to himself, daydreaming himself out of the city. The present tense in this story allows Chekhov to paint the setting’s picture as his painter-friends might have:
In Semyon’s pothouse […] two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter. He has at one time been employed in a nail factory, has been turned off for drunkenness and idleness, and now lives upon his old wife, who begs for alms. He is thin and weak, with a mangy-looking little beard, speaks with a hissing sound, and after every word twitches the right side of his face and jerkily shrugs his right shoulder. The other, Ignat Ryabov, a sturdy, broad-shouldered peasant who never does anything and is everlastingly silent, is sitting in the corner under a big string of bread rings. The door, opening inward, throws a thick shadow upon him, so that Slyunka and Semyon the publican can see nothing but his patched knees, his long fleshy nose, and a big tuft of hair which has escaped from the thick uncombed tangle covering his head. Semyon, a sickly little man, with a pale face and a long sinewy neck, stands behind his counter, looks mournfully at the string of bread rings, and coughs meekly.
The two idlers, who “haven’t got a ruble,” try to badger Semyon to give them back the gun that Slyunka pawned with him so they can hunt birds. He refuses and they grumble and wander outside into the muddy winter. They, like Chekhov, see signs of spring. The author conjures up a beautiful scene for them and himself: “The sun has set and left behind it a red streak like the glow of a fire, scattered here and there with clouds; there is no catching the colors of those clouds: their edges are red, but they themselves are one minute gray, at the next lilac, at the next ashen.” Slyunka and Ryabov wouldn’t have needed the gun anyway; it’s “too early!” for snipe.
*
On the 10th, Chekhov dined with Leykin and then went to see the printer Golike. From a hotel room he wrote home: “Alexander is in fact perfectly well. All that had happened was that he imagined he was ill, became depressed and frightened, and that’s why he sent that telegram. Anna Ivanovna actually does have typhoid fever, but not very severely. I consulted with the other doctor. We agreed to treat her according to my regime. […] The typhoid fever that is raging throughout Petersburg at the moment is a particularly virulent form. The commissionaire at Leykin’s offices, a tall, thin old man whom you may remember, Masha, died of it yesterday.”8
On March 11, he treated for tuberculosis the dying mother of an office worker at Fragments. He was “hanging between the heavens and earth,” he wrote to his sister Maria on the 11th or early on the 12th. He was sending her ten rubles but asked her to spend as little as possible. He didn’t know yet when he was coming back, but probably by the 15th. Alexander, he reported, was well but low-spirited. He tossed in a greeting, of sorts, to Dunya, “Homage to the Nose with Efros,”9 and Maria’s friend Yashenka.
In the next day or two, almost as anxious at the moment about money as about typhus, he wrote his friend Schechtel, who had connections with the railroad, telling him he just had to go south, and could Schechtel get him a free round-trip ticket to Taganrog?10 “Everywhere I am made much of, but no one has the bright idea of handing me one or two thousand rubles.”11 He didn’t ask Schechtel for a loan but mentioned: “Right now I am sitting in the boring hotel room about to make a clean copy of a finished story.” The editors of the Soviet edition of the letters say that “probably” that story was “Too Early!” which would be published in the Petersburg Gazette on the 16th. “An Encounter” would come out on the 18th in New Times.
Both “Early!” and “An Encounter” are about needing money; this letter is about needing money. Because he didn’t ask Schechtel for a loan, that means, I think, he might have been expecting that Suvorin would give him the loan or advance on the night of the 12th. Chekhov could have written “Too Early!” in one sitting; it’s short, simple, uninvolving. Probably Chekhov was rewriting “An Encounter.” Garnett did not translate “An Encounter,” so I found the story in the Russian edition, which includes a reproduction of a manuscript draft page of the first page of the story (there are very few handwritten manuscripts of Chekhov’s creative work). The page has a lot of cross-outs. There are a great number of differences between the manuscript and the published copy. So it must have been “An Encounter” that he was making “a clean copy of”; otherwise, why would he revise a completely finished story? Most likely the draft, which, unusually, survived, is the first draft, and the published story is the second draft. He was already in Petersburg and he could have walked the second draft to the office, greeted his weary but mostly well brother, handed him the story, and New Times printed it from that.
Let’s imagine encountering the fresh final draft of “An Encounter” (March 18), one of his best stories so far this year, a few days ahead of the date of publication, and definitely in the week of its writing.12 I imagine Chekhov, pen in hand, deadline looming, financial needs pressing, anxiously looking around: “Yefrem Denisov anxiously looked around.” First sentence, done. Chekhov was thirsty, he was achy: “He was tormented by thirst and he ached all over.”