“I can’t get that Cossack out of my head, do what you will!” he said to his wife. “He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if God meant to try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a Cossack? It does happen, you know. It’s bad, Lizaveta; we were unkind to the man!”
This leads to the newlyweds’ first but definitely not last fight:
Maxim got up from the table and began reproaching his young wife for hard-heartedness and stupidity. She, getting angry too, answered his reproaches with reproaches, burst into tears, and went away into their bedroom, declaring she would go home to her father’s.
This was the first matrimonial squabble that had happened in the Torchakovs’ married life. He walked about the yard till the evening, picturing his wife’s face, and it seemed to him now spiteful and ugly. And as though to torment him the Cossack haunted his brain, and Maxim seemed to see now his sick eyes, now his unsteady walk.
“Ah, we were unkind to the man,” he muttered.
When the day ends without Maxim able to find the Cossack to whom he wanted to make up for his unkindness, “he was overcome by an insufferable depression such as he had never felt before.”
Feeling so dreary, and being angry with his wife, he got drunk, as he had sometimes done before he was married. In his drunkenness he used bad language and shouted to his wife that she had a spiteful, ugly face, and that next day he would send her packing to her father’s. On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to sober himself, and got drunk again.
And with that his downfall began.
His horses, cows, sheep, and hives disappeared one by one from the yard; Maxim was more and more often drunk, debts mounted up, he felt an aversion for his wife. Maxim put down all his misfortunes to the fact that he had an unkind wife, and above all, that God was angry with him on account of the sick Cossack.
Lizaveta saw their ruin, but who was to blame for it she did not understand.
So their despairing, miserable story ends. But there is a bigger story than theirs. Chekhov himself had enjoyed the pretty sunrise over the steppe, and, unlike Lizaveta, his narrator doesn’t begrudge sharing it: “In the east the first rays of the rising sun shone out, cutting their way through the feathery clouds, and the song of the lark was heard in the sky. Now not one but three kites were hovering over the steppe at a respectful distance from one another. Grasshoppers began churring in the young grass.” This is Chekhov’s odd Thomas Hardy-like moment, where the world shines in its glory while the abject humans crawl across it.
But what stories was Chekhov writing now that he was bouncing around the environs of Taganrog? In the next letter to his family, he stated again, as he had last week, that his offspring were his creative works: “My children aren’t Yegor or Little Vladimir,” he wrote his family, “but stories and tales, about which I’m unable to think… To write disgusts me.”10 He was restless and unhappily unproductive. He was wondering if his long multi-day letters hadn’t gone astray: “I’ve sent you twice 16pp of diary and I’m amazed that you still haven’t received it.”
To Leykin he wrote a letter on the 17th explaining or excusing himself in list-form for not writing to him (or thereby for Fragments) because of how sick he was feeling; among his other afflictions were hemorrhoids, coughing, a bad leg. He also diagnosed and questioned Leykin’s doctor’s remedies for Leykin and offered his own medical advice, qualified only by “Such is my opinion.”11
On the 18th of April, he was on the road to his friends on the steppe at Rogozin Ravine and on the 19th sent the next installment of his diary-letter.
On the 18th, Surovin published Chekhov’s “The Letter” (“Pis’mo,” then known as “Laypeople”), which the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky read through “twice in a row” and loved. This story led to these Russian titans meeting in October of 1889 and their friendship.
Here’s the first paragraph:
The clerical superintendent of the district, His Reverence Father Fyodor Orlov, a handsome, well-nourished man of fifty, grave and important as he always was, with an habitual expression of dignity that never left his face, was walking to and fro in his little drawing room, extremely exhausted, and thinking intensely about the same thing: “When would his visitor go?”
Besides the marvelous immediate characterization of Father Orlov, there’s the excitement of the suspenseful situation: wishing one’s visitor would leave.
The thought worried him and did not leave him for a minute. The visitor, Father Anastasy, the priest of one of the villages near the town, had come to him three hours before on some very unpleasant and dreary business of his own, had stayed on and on, was now sitting in the corner at a little round table with his elbow on a thick account book, and apparently had no thought of going, though it was getting on for nine o’clock in the evening.
I wonder if either of Chekhov’s new friends Lazarev and Ezhov reading the next paragraph wouldn’t have tried to keep it in mind the next time they dropped in on Chekhov:
Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie. But Father Anastasy perceived it clearly, and realized that his presence was burdensome and inappropriate, that His Reverence, who had taken an early morning service in the night and a long mass at midday, was exhausted and longing for repose; every minute he was meaning to get up and go, but he did not get up, he sat on as though he were waiting for something.
The third and final character arrives, the deacon Liubimov, and this is where I will begin a summary of the middle of the story, and save the end for further quotations, commentary, and revelations of Chekhov’s moral bearings.
The deacon has family problems—a wayward son—and can confide the problem to Father Orlov in a way that the latter can give counsel in a tried-and-true fashion. It’s Lent, and the deacon’s son is violating the fast…. But that’s not all! Liubimov’s son has been living with a married woman for three years, and they socialize as if they are indeed married! They have not produced any children, he says, at which Father Anastasy most inappropriately remarks:
“I suppose they have been living in chastity!” chuckled Father Anastasy, coughing huskily. “There are children, Father Deacon—there are, but they don’t keep them at home! They send them to the Foundling! He-he-he!…” Anastasy went on coughing till he choked.
“His Reverence” tells Anastasy to butt out, and the deacon continues his story. We don’t know if Anastasy’s comment is true; it’s ignored as if it is true or too cynical to bother refuting. Orlov, we learn from Chekhov, is not an impartial judge of Liubimov’s son Pyotr. He has known Pyotr since he was a noisy, difficult boy who avoided church “and had been given to raising delicate and insoluble questions with a peculiarly provoking zest.”