Rereading this, I get tears in my eyes, as I’ll bet Tchaikovsky did too: “His thoughts were only of what was good, warm, touching, of which one might think for a whole lifetime without wearying. Longing for his son […]”! How can we not finally love the deacon? But will he or won’t he heed Anastasy’s advice?
“Don’t send it,” said the latter, with a wave of his hand.
And again, while revealing to me my own sentimental impulses, Chekhov won’t let readers mush up the story. The deacon is obedient; he admires His Reverence. He has committed to sending the letter.
Just as with the Greek gods, however, the gift of the letter cannot be ungifted, but there can be conditions and qualifiers attached that completely alter its quality:
The deacon took an envelope from the table, but before putting the letter into it he sat down to the table, smiled, and added on his own account at the bottom of the letter:
“They have sent us a new inspector. He’s much friskier than the old one. He’s a great one for dancing and talking, and there’s nothing he can’t do, so that all the Govorovsky girls are crazy over him. Our military chief, Kostyrev, will soon get the sack too, they say. High time he did!” And very well pleased, without the faintest idea that with this postscript he had completely spoiled the stern letter, the deacon addressed the envelope and laid it in the most conspicuous place on the table.
Chekhov made the Psychology of Forgiveness the god of this story.
*
On the road on April 20 to a wedding in Zverevo, Chekhov wrote a note to Alexander: “I’m alive and well. […] Why don’t you write?”13
In these two years, Chekhov was so productive that he only very rarely looked back at old work and recycled it. With a new title and revisions, probably submitted to the Petersburg Gazette before he left Moscow, “Boa Constrictor and Rabbit” (“Udav i Krolik,” April 20) is a story he wrote for Fragments (“The Behavior of Husbands” [“K Svedeniyu Muzhei”]) that had been blocked by a censor in January of 1886 and been given up on by Leykin. An old Don Juan advises his listener how to lead a husband into preparing his wife to be seducible: “According to this method, if you’re trying to seduce a man’s wife, you should keep as far away from her as possible. […] It’s all a matter of hypnosis. She must not see you but feel you, just as a rabbit feels the gaze of the boa constrictor.”14 The speaker’s cynical, knowing voice, it seems to me, is Chekhov’s brother Nikolay’s or their friend Levitan’s; part of the seduction, in any case, depends on the wife beginning to study herself in the mirror with the eye of a head over heels admirer.
On the 23rd, Chekhov wrote his sister from Zverevo to assure her he would be writing a lot about his visit to the Kravtsovs’ in Novocherkassk. Their brother Ivan wrote Chekhov on this date that “The Letter” was so popular that the issue of New Times it was in was unavailable to buy, even from Suvorin’s own bookshops.15 Though Chekhov had been having a terrible time trying to write fiction, on the 24th he mailed to the Petersburg Gazette the exciting, seemingly un-Chekhovlike murder story “An Adventure.” On the 25th, he wrote up his adventures about the previous day’s event in Zverevo: “A real Cossack wedding with music, feminine bleating, and revolting drunkenness…. The bride is sixteen. They were married in the cathedral. I acted as best man, and was dressed in somebody else’s evening suit with fearfully wide trousers, and not a single stud on my shirt. In Moscow such a best man would have been kicked out, but here I looked smarter than anyone.”16
I saw lots of rich prospective brides. An enormous choice, but I was so drunk all the time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles. Owing to my drunken condition, probably, the local girls found I was witty and “sarcastical.” The girls here are absolute sheep: if one gets up to leave a room, the others follow after. The boldest and “smartest” of them, who wanted to show that she was not unaware of subtle niceties of behavior and the social graces, kept tapping me on the arm with her fan and saying, “You bad boy!” though she kept on darting timid glances at me all the time. I taught her to repeat to the local cavaliers, “How naïve you are!”
[…] I have many themes in mind for New Times but the heat is such that even letter-writing is a chore.17
At Zverevo I shall have to wait from nine in the evening till five in the morning. Last time I spent the night there in a second-class railway-carriage on the siding. I went out of the carriage in the night [for a pee]18 and outside I found veritable marvels: the moon, the limitless steppe, the barrows, the wilderness; deathly stillness, and the carriages and the railway lines sharply standing out from the dusk. It seemed as though the world were dead…. It was a picture one would not forget for ages and ages.
*
Chekhov’s “Spring: Monologue Scene” (“Vesnoy,” April 25), the monologue of a cat, had been at Fragments for a month, but after Leykin abridged it, as he had asked Chekhov’s permission to do, he held it and renamed it “Spring” to conform to the season. Leykin cut, as far the Collected Works editors can figure, specific references to Moscow, as the original piece had been written for Moscow’s Alarm Clock. It reads simply and clearly, with no evidence of abridgment: In the early morning, a young gray cat with a big scratch on his nose speaks on a variety of topics, but the first one is love: “Here before you is the happiest of mortals! Oh, love! O, sweet moments! Oh, when I am dead and they take me by the tail and fling me in the garbage pit, even then I won’t forget the first encounter beside the toppled barrel. I won’t forget the glance of her sharp eyes, her velvety, furry tail. For one twitch of that graceful unearthly tail, I’m ready to reject the whole world.”19
I was tempted to put Chekhov into the cat’s shoes (or paws), but there seems no particular connection and necessarily no immediate connection to his adventures in Taganrog or on the steppe, as he had written the story more than a month before. In his letters, Chekhov did not share news of any liaisons this trip, but perhaps that was only because most of the letters were to his sister or entire family.
While in Taganrog the previous week, Chekhov sent “The Critic” (“Kritik,” April 27) to the Petersburg Gazette. There had probably never been a story about a critic who is sympathetic, much less a hero. And there still isn’t one. There are two critics in “The Critic”: At the buffet of a theater, a drama-loving priest and a newspaper man drink, argue, get drunk, and on principal cut down to size any actor the other appreciates.
From April 26 to May 6 Chekhov was in Ragozin Ravine.
While there he had his eye on his return north; he wrote to Maria on the 29th. She and their mother and eventually the whole family were heading for Babkino before Anton would get back.
Alexander wrote that Suvorin wanted to put Anton on a 200-ruble-a-month retainer, twice as much as Leykin had paid him in 1886.20
Chekhov wrote the whole family on the 30th: “The evening is warm. There are storm-clouds about, and so one cannot see a thing. The air is close and there is a smell of grass.”21
I am staying in Ragozin Ravine at K.’s. There is a small house with a thatched roof, and barns made of flat stone. There are three rooms, with earthen floors, crooked ceilings, and windows that lift up and down instead of opening outward. […] The first necessaries [outhouses] are conspicuous by their absence, and one has in all weathers to slip out to the ravine, and one is warned to make sure there is not a viper or some other creature under the bushes. […]
Now about food. In the morning there is tea, eggs, ham and bacon fat. At midday, soup with goose, roast goose with pickled sloes, or a turkey, roast chicken, milk pudding, and sour milk. No vodka or pepper allowed. At five o’clock they make on a camp fire in the wood a porridge of millet and bacon fat. In the evening there is tea, ham, and all that has been left over from dinner.