By the end of June, Chekhov wasn’t mentioning the bad weather anymore. Perhaps he was able to fish again. “His hobbies were also silent,” recalled Vassily Maklakov. “First and foremost was fishing. He used to lie down, having a nap on the grass of a riverbank, and wait for the fish in complete silence…. You should have seen him—so childish and happy—when he caught his fish. He cried out, ‘Hurray, hurray!’ He was very happy and joyful as if he had just won a lottery or bet.”21
July 1887
You express disappointment that your story is uninteresting. Let me tell you that if only one of your five stories has the power to entertain the reader, you may thank God for that. It is not the writing of uninteresting attempts that is terrible, but it is terrible when one feels it a boring task to write, and hateful tedium….
—To a young writer1
This was the Chekhov family’s last summer at Babkino. The two families had apparently continued to enjoy one another’s company, and usually the Kiselevs managed not to step on the plebian Chekhovs’ toes. Maria Kiseleva’s younger sister Natalia Gubareva was married to a Russian senator, who would in 1890 attempt to help advocate through government channels for Chekhov’s travel to Sakhalin Island. Gubareva recalled visiting her sister “quite often” this summer. At gatherings, she remembered, “Chekhov was making such funny jokes we could not stop laughing. Everyone was laughing except for him.”2 This was characteristic of him as an artist: amusing others while maintaining a poker-face.
The topic of marriage had settled back into being only a comedy. In “A Transgression” (“Bezzakonie,” July 4), a guilt-ridden husband, finding a baby on the doorstep of his dacha, believes it is the baby he has in fact fathered with his wife’s former maid.
He was numb with terror, anger, and shame… What was he to do now? What would his wife say if she found out? What would his colleagues at the office say? His Excellency would be sure to dig him in the ribs, guffaw, and say: “I congratulate you!… He-he-he! Though your beard is gray, your heart is gay…. You are a rogue, Semyon Erastovich!” The whole colony of summer visitors would know his secret now, and probably the respectable mothers of families would shut their doors to him. Such incidents always get into the papers, and the humble name of Miguev would be published all over Russia….3
He finds out only after he has confessed his transgression to his wife that the baby he found is that of a visiting woman he has had nothing to do with.
“From the Diary of a Violent-Tempered Man” (“Iz Zapisok Vspil’chivogo Cheloveka,” July 5) is a joke on Chekhov himself. Ever mild, ever restrained, Chekhov’s narrator, having been roped into a romance and consequently marriage, is—to no one’s in the summer community’s knowledge, because there is absolutely no outward indication of it—dangerously “violent-tempered.”
When the duty of walking arm-in-arm with a lady falls to my lot, for some reason or other I always feel like a peg with a heavy cloak hanging on it. Nadenka (or Varenka), between ourselves, of an ardent temperament (her grandfather was an Armenian), has a peculiar art of throwing her whole weight on one’s arm and clinging to one’s side like a leech. And so we walk along.4
When he tries to escape the social scene, he is blocked:
Varenka’s maman, Varenka herself, and the variegated young ladies surround me, and declare that I cannot possibly go, because I promised yesterday to dine with them and go to the woods to look for mushrooms. I bow and sit down again. My soul is boiling with rage, and I feel that in another moment I may not be able to answer for myself, that there may be an explosion, but gentlemanly feeling and the fear of committing a breach of good manners compels me to obey the ladies. And I obey them.
No matter his stony indifference, Varenka and the other females see in his manner the sadness of unrequited love:
“Nicolas,” sighs Nadenka [the narrator continually varies her unknown name], and her nose begins to turn red, “Nicolas, I see you are trying to avoid being open with me…. You seem to wish to punish me by your silence. Your feeling is not returned, and you wish to suffer in silence, in solitude… it is too awful, Nicolas!” she cries impulsively seizing my hand, and I see her nose beginning to swell. “What would you say if the girl you love were to offer you her eternal friendship?”
I mutter something incoherent, for I really can’t think what to say to her.
In the first place, I’m not in love with any girl at all; in the second, what could I possibly want her eternal friendship for? and, thirdly, I have a violent temper.
Chekhov, being a professional writer with an eye on the calendar as well as a scientist, plays a future-events card: “Next morning. Typical holiday weather. Temperature below freezing, a cutting wind, rain, mud, and a smell of naphthalene, because my maman has taken all her wraps out of her trunks. A devilish morning! It is the 7th of August, 1887, the date of the solar eclipse. I may here remark that at the time of an eclipse every one of us may, without special astronomical knowledge, be of the greatest service. Thus, for example, anyone of us can (1) take the measurement of the diameters of the sun and the moon; (2) sketch the corona of the sun; (3) take the temperature; (4) take observations of plants and animals during the eclipse; (5) note down his own impressions, and so on.”
This summer’s eclipse was indeed a special event, and for the educated Russian community it was promoted as such. This was the first published of Chekhov’s four stories that concern or mention the eclipse.
The narrator means to clarify matters with the ridiculous Varenka: “To begin with, I will tell her that she is mistaken in supposing that I am in love with her. That’s a thing one does not say to a lady as a rule, though. To tell a lady that one’s not in love with her, is almost as rude as to tell an author he can’t write.” The violent-tempered man concludes his tale on the day of his wedding: “To lead a violent, desperate man to the altar is as unwise as to thrust one’s hand into the cage of a ferocious tiger.”
Similarly Chekhov didn’t want to marry, but impulses stronger than he, as unstoppable as the eclipse, seem to have been pressing on him.
While they were both at Babkino, crossing paths seemingly every day between the two domiciles, he wrote Maria Kiseleva about his “A Transgression”: “If my Agniya’s language doesn’t sustain itself, it still gives a most definite impression […]. The story is not bad and is worth a thousand ‘Stray Bullets’ [the title of Kiseleva’s story]. […] A stray shot through the temple helps toothache and love. Such a bullet gives a particular impression.”5
Their flirtatious yet testy friendship continued as he critiqued Kiseleva’s stories up and down, and she had the confidence to criticize his.
Chekhov went to Moscow on July 8. Leykin had not written him since Chekhov wrote that he probably wouldn’t be visiting him at Lake Ladoga. Chekhov spent a week in Moscow before returning to Babkino, but what he did, besides meet up with his friend Lazarev, is not recorded. He didn’t like Moscow in the summer; a dozen years later, he wrote his future wife: “It is impossible to live worse or more disgustingly than the Muscovites live in summer. The only amusements are provided by the Aquarium and the farces, and in the streets everybody is suffocated by the smoke from the asphalt.”6
While he was in Moscow, he wrote to Alexander about In the Twilight. What was the hold-up? Could Alexander get him the money for his July 14 New Times story (“Uprooted”)? In reply, Alexander told him, “The book is completely ready and was sent to Suvorin at his dacha for him to determine the price. For two weeks there’s been no answer.”7 Once Alexander had an answer, the cover could be printed. Neither brother mentioned the reason for Suvorin’s withdrawal from society and business, Volodya’s suicide.