The entertainments are: shooting bustards, making bonfires, going to Ivanovka, shooting at a mark, setting the dogs at one another, preparing gunpowder paste for fireworks, talking politics, building turrets of stone, etc. […]
…The coal mines are not far off. Tomorrow morning early I am going on a one-horse droshky to Ivanovka (twenty-three versts) to fetch my letters from the post.
…We eat turkeys’ eggs. Turkeys lay eggs in the wood on last year’s leaves. They kill hens, geese, pigs, etc., by shooting here. The shooting is incessant.
Chekhov, far from finding peace and quiet, also detailed the agonized state of his hemorrhoids.
May 1887
I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not one to be impressed with peasant virtues. I acquired my belief in progress when still a child; I couldn’t help believing in it, because the difference between the period when they flogged me and the period when they stopped flogging me was enormous…. Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat.
—Letter to a friend1
While Chekhov was still at Ragozin Ravine, his brother Alexander wrote him a postcard on the 1st of May in Latin to disguise and hide his news from any eavesdroppers: Suvorin’s son Vladimir had killed himself. Chekhov seems to have received this postcard on May 5.
On May 4, Chekhov received two peeved letters from Leykin, to which he replied the next day, as usual leading off with an excuse about why he hadn’t written anything for Fragments lately: “You’re mad at me at my silence for nothing. I’d be glad to write, but there’s no postal service.” He was leaving now for Holy Mountains for three or four days. He asked, with more courage than the son in “Difficult People,” for a loan of 200–300 rubles.
Mikhail Chekhov informed his brother, “Everybody reads your diary with pleasure.” When their friends read sections of it aloud, “there were many laughs.”2 That had to be just what Chekhov intended to happen when his family received his long letters.
He had sent off to New Times at the end of April “An Adventure: A Driver’s Story” (“Proisshestvie: Rasskaz Yamshchika,” May 4), which, like all of Chekhov’s stories of murder, is especially shocking. Murders don’t happen in Chekhov… except when they do.
Unusually, the story is told in the first person by someone of a lower educational class than Chekhov. No one thinks of Chekhov as an experimentalist, maybe because his experiments are too subtle for the likes of us. To tell this story, Chekhov probably figured out in a moment’s flash of inspiration that the third person wouldn’t do. For all the knowledge the story depends on, the tale has to be told by an intelligent, perceptive but not highly cultured person:
To tell the truth, all our family have a great taste for vodka. I can read and write, I served for six years at a tobacconist’s in the town, and I can talk to any educated gentleman, and can use very fine language, but, it is perfectly true, sir, as I read in a book, that vodka is the blood of Satan. Through vodka my face has darkened. And there is nothing seemly about me, and here, as you may see, sir, I am a cab-driver like an ignorant, uneducated peasant.3
The narrator’s father needed his children to accompany him to keep him awake after his bouts of drinking. On this fateful adventure, he brought the narrator’s little sister. His drunken bragging in an inn about the money he has on him leads to him being pursued on the wooded road by robbers. Before the robbers arrive, he gives his daughter the money and instructs her to hide, and then, if there’s more trouble, to run home. Perhaps because Chekhov thought a hero should not tell her own tale, the heroine’s older brother tells the tale of the traumatized and heroic seven-or eight-year-old Anyutka. The story has a neatness and finish that is unusual in Chekhov’s fiction, perhaps because of its being presented as a spoken tale that has been repeated many times.
Fleeing after witnessing her father’s torture, Anyutka finds her way to a forester’s cabin. A seemingly kindly mother listens to the girl’s story and promises to help her get home in the morning.
The woman took the money, and put Anyutka to sleep on the stove where at the time the brooms were drying. And on the same stove, on the brooms, the forester’s daughter, a girl as small as our Anyutka, was asleep. And Anyutka used to tell us afterward that there was such a scent from the brooms, they smelt of honey!
How comfortable or uncomfortable sleeping on brooms is, Chekhov doesn’t say. During his month in the south, traveling here and there, he often slept uncomfortably. The detail of the honey-scent surprises the narrator and pleases Chekhov and us. Chekhov continually makes us aware of our senses pulling in impressions, even if, seemingly, they have nothing to do with the plot of the story. But it’s our senses that give us the atmosphere, our awareness of imagining an absolutely particular place.
Anyutka lay down, but she could not get to sleep, she kept crying quietly; she was sorry for Father, and terrified. But, sir, an hour or two passed, and she saw those very three robbers who had tortured Father walk into the hut; and the one in the crimson shirt, with big jaws, their leader, went up to the woman and said:
“Well, wife, we have simply murdered a man for nothing. Today we killed a man at dinner-time, we killed him all right, but not a farthing did we find.”
So this fellow in the crimson shirt turned out to be the forester, the woman’s husband.
“The man’s dead for nothing,” said his ragged companions. “In vain we have taken a sin on our souls.”
The forester’s wife looked at all three and laughed.
“What are you laughing at, silly?”
“I am laughing because I haven’t murdered anyone, and I have not taken any sin on my soul, but I have found the money.”
Through Anyutka’s telling and her brother’s retelling of her clever escape (“For all she was so simple, she thought of something that, I must say, not many an educated man would have thought of”), it feels almost like a fairy tale. But this is enough summary. I won’t tell the rest.
*
While in Slavyansk, on his way to Holy Mountains, Chekhov ran into Alexandra Selivanova, whom he had tutored when he was in high school in Taganrog. Small world! “She was happy, she works in some kind of factory school, dressed luxuriously and produced a very positive impression.”4 He wrote to her later, “I remember the impression you made on me in Slavyansk (I wanted to throw myself under the train).” She did not, however, inspire him to write any love stories.
In sights, sounds and smells, he sketched his impressions in his letter-diary for his family:
I came to Slavyansk on a dark evening. The cabmen refuse to take me to the Holy Mountains at night and advise me to spend the night at Slavyansk, which I did very willingly, for I felt broken and lame with pain…. The town is something like Gogol’s Mirgorod; there is a hairdresser and a watchmaker, so that one may hope that in another thousand years there will be a telephone. The walls and fences are pasted with the advertisements of a menagerie…. On green and dusty streets walk pigs, cows, and other domestic creatures. The houses look cordial and friendly, rather like kindly grandmothers; the pavements are soft, the streets are wide, there is a smell of lilac and acacia in the air; from the distance come the singing of a nightingale, the croaking of frogs, barking, and sounds of a harmonium, of a woman screeching…. I stopped in Kulikov’s hotel, where I took a room for seventy-five kopecks.
After sleeping on wooden sofas and washtubs [Maybe the bed of brooms from “An Adventure” was a dream image?] it was a voluptuous sight to see a bed with a mattress, a washstand…. Fragrant breezes came in at the wide-open window and green branches thrust themselves in. It was a glorious morning. It was a holiday (May 6th) and the bells were ringing in the cathedral. People were coming out from mass. I saw police officers, justices of the peace, military superintendents, and other principalities and powers come out of the church. I bought two kopecks’ worth of sunflower seeds, and hired for six rubles a carriage on springs to take me to the Holy Mountains and back (in two days’ time). I drove out of the town through little streets literally drowned in the green of cherry, apricot, and apple trees. The birds sang unceasingly. Little Russians whom I met took off their caps, taking me probably for Turgenev; my driver jumped every minute off the box to put the harness to rights, or to crack his whip at the boys who ran after the carriage…. There were strings of pilgrims along the road. On all sides there were white hills, big and small. The horizon was bluish-white, the rye was tall, oak copses were met with here and there—the only things lacking were crocodiles and rattlesnakes.