Volodya’s mother Anna Ivanovna had died fourteen years before, shot in the head by her lover, who then killed himself. In his diary of May 2, Suvorin reviews that connection and describes her death.
What Suvorin wrote or told Chekhov about the tragedy is unknown, but by May 5 Chekhov had heard from Alexander about Volodya Suvorin’s death. What condolences Chekhov wrote or expressed to Suvorin is also unknown. Perhaps, I ignorantly speculated, Chekhov’s story was intended to show Suvorin his son’s possible state of mind? But even that would be presumptuous and tactless. It was too soon!
To summarize: Chekhov’s Volodya is plain and unhappy, a failure at school, embarrassed by his widowed mother, who sponges off a rich distant relative. At the relative’s house, he becomes infatuated with a plain but sexy thirty-year-old married woman. Her flirtation leads them to an embarrassing sexual encounter (“Then it seemed to Volodya that the room, Nyuta, the sunrise and himself—all melted together in one sensation of acute, extraordinary, incredible bliss, for which one might give up one’s whole life and face eternal torments…. But half a minute passed and all that vanished. Volodya saw only a fat, plain face, distorted by an expression of repulsion, and he himself suddenly felt a loathing for what had happened”), and his shame over failing at his exams and his anger at his mother’s lack of shame at being a sponging relative results in Chekhov imagining a suicide to its conclusion:
Volodya put the muzzle of the revolver to his mouth, felt something like a trigger or spring, and pressed it with his finger…. Then felt something else projecting, and once more pressed it. Taking the muzzle out of his mouth, he wiped it with the lapel of his coat, looked at the lock. He had never in his life taken a weapon in his hand before….
“I believe one ought to raise this…” he reflected. “Yes, it seems so.”
[…] Volodya put the muzzle in his mouth again, pressed it with his teeth, and pressed something with his fingers. There was a sound of a shot…. Something hit Volodya in the back of his head with terrible violence, and he fell on the table with his face downward among the bottles and glasses. Then he saw his father, as in Mentone, in a top-hat with a wide black band on it, wearing mourning for some lady, suddenly seize him by both hands, and they fell headlong into a very deep, dark pit.
Then everything was blurred and vanished.
What did the grieving Suvorin think? What did Chekhov hope to awaken in Suvorin or in himself with this terribly vividly imagined suicide?
The answer is less than a misfire. If Suvorin did indeed read “Volodya” in the Petersburg Gazette, he wouldn’t have blinked. The story as published on June 1, 1887, is subtitled, “His First Love,” and ends with Volodya’s angry denunciation of his mother while they are riding in a coach from the relative’s estate to the station. Volodya shoots off his mouth but does not shoot himself. There are many reasons Chekhov provides for why Volodya behaves so rudely to his mother: “dirty memories, a sleepless night, the Little Russian outfit with a bustle” that his mother wears, “exclusion, a remorseful conscience—all this came together in him as a heavy dark anger.” He is furious with his poor mother, whom he doesn’t love, which declaration embarrasses her in front of the driver. The story ends, with her declaring, “He can hear everything!”5
It wasn’t until three years later, when Chekhov was preparing a volume of stories titled Gloomy People, that he substantially revised “Volodya” and developed it to its most gloomy of conclusions.
*
Chekhov wrote to thank Leykin on June 4 for the loan of forty rubles and to arrange for his trip to Leykin’s summer place at Lake Ladoga. The weather continued to be lousy at Babkino. Chekhov often kvetched at Leykin about Leykin’s kvetching: “You write that if while I’d been traveling in the south I’d sent you the stories that were published in the Gazette, I wouldn’t have received any less and they would’ve been in the spirit of the magazine! Oh, come on!”6
He also wrote to his younger brother Ivan to see if Ivan would join him on his trip to Leykin’s. He started one more letter that day to Schechtel and continued it the next, mostly about being busy with writing at chilly Babkino and hoping to cross paths with him in Petersburg in a few days. In the Soviet edition there is a footnote explaining that some words to Schechtel had been crossed out. The inveterate researcher (and biographer) Donald Rayfield deciphered the censored sentence: “In Babkino there’s still nobody to screw. So much work that there’s no time even for a quiet fart.”7
Chekhov had been busily writing, making up for the lull during his spring adventure. On June 6 “Happiness” (“Schast’e”), a story full of the south, appeared. In the early morning on the steppe, there are two shepherds and an overseer; more notably, though, are the sheep themselves, whose brains, perhaps to their surprise, Chekhov glances into:
The sheep were asleep. Against the gray background of the dawn, already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky, the silhouettes of sheep that were not asleep could be seen here and there; they stood with drooping heads, thinking. Their thoughts, tedious and oppressive, called forth by images of nothing but the broad steppe and the sky, the days and the nights, probably weighed upon them themselves, crushing them into apathy; and, standing there as though rooted to the earth, they noticed neither the presence of a stranger nor the uneasiness of the dogs.8
When the eager and superstitious old shepherd and the dispassionate, well-read overseer reach a standstill in their conversation about their surroundings and memories, Chekhov meditates: “In the bluish distance where the furthest visible hillock melted into the mist nothing was stirring; the ancient barrows, once watch-mounds and tombs, which rose here and there above the horizon and the boundless steppe had a sullen and deathlike look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence; another thousand years would pass, myriads of men would die, while they would still stand as they had stood, with no regret for the dead nor interest in the living, and no soul would ever know why they stood there, and what secret of the steppes was hidden under them.”
After the overseer rides away, Chekhov muses: “The old shepherd and Sanka stood with their crooks on opposite sides of the flock, stood without stirring, like fakirs at their prayers, absorbed in thought. They did not heed each other; each of them was living in his own life. The sheep were pondering, too.”
Alexander wrote on June 14 to say that “Happiness” was being praised all around: “I’m convinced that you yourself were a sheep when you experienced and described all those sheepy feelings.”9
There had been bad weather at Babkino for a while, and on June 8 “Bad Weather” (“Nenast’e”), a dacha story, came out in the Petersburg Gazette: “Big raindrops were pattering on the dark windows. It was one of those disgusting summer holiday rains which, when they have begun, last a long time—for weeks, till the frozen holiday maker grows used to it, and sinks into complete apathy. It was cold; there was a feeling of raw, unpleasant dampness.”10 A good, kind young wife and her mother worry about her husband, who, working in the city, insists that he can’t be at the dacha in rainy weather; when his innocent wife goes to the city to relieve him of his boredom, she learns he hasn’t been to their apartment in days. She realizes he has been deceiving them and returns miserably to the dacha; but the weather changes, and he shows up and tells them an elaborate story about his whereabouts; she and her mother believe him (that dirty liar!) and are relieved.