Chekhov himself was a convert, educated away from his faith into a belief in Science and Progress, and Alexander Ivanich’s experiences in his family were not so different from Chekhov’s as a boy under the hand and fist of Pavel. This declaration by Alexander Ivanich is not a pretext for anti-Semitism but for “freedom from lies,” from superstition. Chekhov had nothing against an intellectually curious teenager rebelling against the law of the father.
Alexander Ivanich goes on and on about his life and travails, with the narrator at various times noting his “Semitic” characteristics. And Chekhov, having allowed his narrator to make Alexander Ivanich a distinctly foreign entity, has his own artistic counterweights kicking in. Alexander Ivanich is afflicted with Chekhov’s own troubles. After a mining accident, says Alexander, “the doctors there said I should go into consumption. I always have a cough now and a pain in my chest. And my psychic condition is terrible…. When I am alone in a room I feel overcome with terror.”
There is no serious character, it seems, who does not have a dose of Chekhov’s own mind or body.
The narrator, however, is suspicious of conversion. He doesn’t buy Alexander Ivanich’s rationalization of it: “There was nothing for it but to accept the idea that my companion had been impelled to change his religion by the same restless spirit that had flung him like a chip of wood from town to town, and that he, using the generally accepted formula, called the craving for enlightenment. […] Picking out his phrases, he seemed to be trying to put together the forces of his conviction and to smother with them the uneasiness of his soul, and to prove to himself that in giving up the religion of his fathers he had done nothing dreadful or peculiar, but had acted as a thinking man free from prejudice, and that therefore he could boldly remain in a room all alone with his conscience. He was trying to convince himself, and with his eyes besought my assistance.”
The narrator isn’t sympathetic to Alexander Ivanich, but I think we are. And so was Chekhov, who was never smug about his atheism.
The narrator’s conscience, as dawn comes on and they lie down to sleep, is awakened, and he muses: “some hundreds of such homeless wanderers were waiting for the morning, and further away, if one could picture to oneself the whole of Russia, a vast multitude of such uprooted creatures was pacing at that moment along highroads and side-tracks, seeking something better, or were waiting for the dawn, asleep in wayside inns and little taverns, or on the grass under the open sky…. As I fell asleep I imagined how amazed and perhaps even overjoyed all these people would have been if reasoning and words could be found to prove to them that their life was as little in need of justification as any other.”
On either side of the presentation of Alexander Ivanich is the narrator’s recollection of his glorious time in Holy Mountains:
When I woke up my companion was not in the room. It was sunny and there was a murmur of the crowds through the window. Going out, I learned that mass was over and that the procession had set off for the Hermitage some time before. The people were wandering in crowds upon the river bank […] One boat with rugs on the seats was destined for the clergy and the singers, the other without rugs for the public. When the procession was returning I found myself among the elect who had succeeded in squeezing themselves into the second. […] The singing of the Easter hymns, the ringing of the bells, the splash of the oars in the water, the calls of the birds, all mingled in the air into something tender and harmonious. […]
The narrator is intercepted by Alexander Ivanich, who then tags along with him. The insecure convert should distinctly remind us of Chekhov himself, as he, Alexander Ivanich, starts describing “how hard it was to eradicate in the boy the habitual tendency to evil and superstition, to make him think honestly and independently, to instill into him true religion, the ideas of personal dignity, of freedom, and so on.”
*
On his way back to Taganrog from Holy Mountains on May 8, Chekhov, without the company of the fictional Alexander Ivanich, waited six hours for a train. One benefit this trip had been giving him was the luxury of not having to make efficient use of his time. Had there been Wi-Fi and email, he could have read at the train station this note from his sister:
We’re all doing well. There’s money and we’re soon going to the dacha [at the Kiselevs’]. We’re expecting you as soon as possible; we’re bored without you. The only unpleasantness is poor Alexander; his whole family is sick again. Anna Ivanovna, you know, is in the hospital, Annushka is also in the hospital, little Kolya is sick with catarrh of the intestines, and little Antosha [Anton’s namesake one-year-old nephew] has a rash and a further something, I don’t remember—last night we got a telegram. We were getting ready to send mother, but Alexander took in some sort of nurse. […]
Everyone reads your diary with pleasure. A few days ago Maria Vladimirovna and Aleksei Sergeevich [the Kiselevs] were here, and they read excerpts from your diary; there was a lot of laughter. Write when you come back. On May 10 we’re going to Babkino. Be well.
P.S. Don’t forget about the money, darling.
Levitan’s on the Volga. We’re bored, come as soon as possible from Marfa Ivanovna; we will be glad.8
For his last week in the south, May 9–15, he was based in Taganrog at his uncle’s, but he also ventured out of town to see friends.
*
“The Examining Magistrate” (“Sledovatel’,” May 11) is one of the stories that could fairly be called Maupassantian. Guy de Maupassant is, of all of Chekhov’s contemporaries, the one to whom he is most often compared, if just for quality and quantity of short stories.9 They both had periods where they wrote as fast as journalists. I was about to summarize the story, but again the opening sets up the situation better than I can describe it:
A district doctor and an examining magistrate were driving one fine spring day to an inquest. The examining magistrate, a man of five and thirty, looked dreamily at the horses and said:
“There is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature; and even in everyday life, doctor, one must often come upon phenomena which are absolutely incapable of explanation. I know, for instance, of several strange, mysterious deaths, the cause of which only spiritualists and mystics will undertake to explain; a clear-headed man can only lift up his hands in perplexity. For example, I know of a highly cultured lady who foretold her own death and died without any apparent reason on the very day she had predicted. She said that she would die on a certain day, and she did die.”
The rest of the story is about how the examining magistrate, under the curious and careful questions of the doctor, further unfolds the details. Maupassant couldn’t have written it better. Anyone who has read dozens of stories by each author would know it’s a Chekhov story, however, because… No, except for a description of a “Russian” face, I wouldn’t be able to tell.
Perhaps “The Examining Magistrate” is also less characteristic of Chekhov in that he had to have worked out the plot before he wrote it: the cautious revelation of a medical mystery.