*
“Who would’ve thought that out of an outhouse would come such a genius?”5 Chekhov wrote Alexander, repeating that family joke-line. He had last used it in his correspondence to refer to himself. Now it was Alexander’s turn at geniushood:
Your last story, “At the Lighthouse,” is beautiful and miraculous. Probably you stole it from some great writer. I read it through myself, then asked Mikhail to read it aloud, then I gave it to Masha to read, and in all cases, I was convinced that in this lighthouse you had outdone yourself. A blinding spark in the darkness of ignorance! A smart word after 30 stupid years. I’m in ecstasy, so I’m writing so that you wouldn’t be long expecting my letter… (lazy!).
He went through a list of the characters with praise and criticism: “Olya is not at all successful, like all of your women. You sure don’t know women!”
But Chekhov was otherwise enthusiastic and encouraging, assuring Alexander that with a dozen such high-quality stories, he would have a book of stories himself. Chekhov meanwhile wondered where his In the Twilight was. Had it been published or not?
Having expressed himself kindly and intimately, he concluded, as Alexander would have thought proper, with insults: “I bow to all your people, but not to you. You are not a genius, and there is nothing in common between us.”
*
Chekhov had two more solar eclipse stories up his sleeve. He played one, “The Intruders: An Eyewitness Account” (“Zloumyshlenniki: Rasskaz Ochevidtsev,” August 8) in Fragments, and “Before the Eclipse: Snippets from the Spectacle” (“Pered Zatmeium: Otryvok iz Feerii,” August 9) in Alarm Clock, one and two days after the actual eclipse, which Chekhov himself wanted to witness but couldn’t, as a dense cloud-cover intervened. “The darkness, very formidable, continued a minute,” he later wrote Leykin.6
“The Intruders” are scientists who have appeared out of nowhere in a provincial town; the eyewitness is a poorly educated townsman who suspiciously scrutinizes them as they sit to a meal in a grubby tavern and make plans, sometimes in French, which the eyewitness doesn’t understand. They talk about the next morning, when they would like the waiter to have tea ready for them that doesn’t have flies or cockroaches in it.
“Are you aware of what’s happening tomorrow morning?” one intruder asks the waiter.
“Not at all,” he replies.
“Well! Tomorrow morning you will be struck and amazed.”7
The townspeople watch as the next morning the scientist-observers set up their table outside the tavern and lay out their charts and papers and telescopes.
Suddenly the sun disappears and the night begins “and where the day went, no one knows.” The citizens and the animals, there at the town square for market day, panic.
When daylight returns, the intruders (perhaps Austrians, the eyewitness wonders) pack up and leave, who knows where.
“Before the Eclipse,” on the other hand, is in the format of a dialogue between the sun and the moon, “sitting on the horizon and drinking a beer.” They part after several exchanges, agreeing if they’re too drunk to perform the eclipse in August that they’ll cover themselves with clouds.8
“Zinochka” (“Zinochka,” August 10) is another Maupassant-like tale: a group of hunters, resting one evening, have been telling various rounds of stories (which we don’t get to read) until one suggests a new topic:
“It is nothing much to be loved; the ladies are created for the purpose of loving us men. But, tell me, has any one of you fellows been hated—passionately, furiously hated? Has any one of you watched the ecstasies of hatred? Eh?”9
He is met by silence, so he proceeds and recalls that as a bratty child, he tattled on his young governess, who was having a romance with his older brother. Chekhov was aware of fashions and cliches in storytelling, and he regularly scolded his brother Alexander for not noticing which were worn-out topics and where there might be room for discovery. “The ecstasies of hatred” was a clever and original topic.
It looks and sounds like a love story:
“At the edge of the pond, between the thick stumps of two old willows, stood my elder brother, Sasha […]. He looked toward Zinochka as she approached him, and his whole figure was lighted up by an expression of happiness as though by sunshine. And Zinochka, as though she were being driven into the Cave of Dogs, and were being forced to breathe carbonic acid gas, walked toward him, scarcely able to move one leg before the other, breathing hard, with her head thrown back.10… To judge from appearances she was going to a rendezvous for the first time in her life. But at last she reached him…. For half a minute they gazed at each other in silence, as though they could not believe their eyes. Thereupon some force seemed to shove Zinochka; she laid her hands on Sasha’s shoulders and let her head droop upon his waistcoat. Sasha laughed, muttered something incoherent, and with the clumsiness of a man head over ears in love, laid both hands on Zinochka’s face. […]”
This appreciation of Sasha and Zinochka’s joyful encounter makes me hope Chekhov had experienced such a moment for himself and not just as a bystander. The hunter recalls himself taunting her and his brother with his secret knowledge and how he exploited her fear of his tattling by refusing to do his schoolwork. He was overwhelmed by his power. After he nearly spilled the beans in front of his mother, the tormented Zinochka gave up trying to propitiate little Petya.
“At our evening lessons that day I noticed a striking change in Zinochka’s face. It looked sterner, colder, as it were, more like marble, while her eyes gazed strangely straight into my face, and I give you my word of honor I have never seen such terrible, annihilating eyes, even in hounds when they overtake the wolf. I understood their expression perfectly, when in the middle of a lesson she suddenly clenched her teeth and hissed through them:
“ ‘I hate you! Oh, you vile, loathsome creature, if you knew how I hate you, how I detest your cropped head, your vulgar, prominent ears!’ ”
He eventually ratted her out, which led to his mother firing her. But Chekhov surprises us:
“Zinochka soon afterward became my brother’s wife. She is the Zinaida Nikolaevna whom you know. The next time I met her I was already an ensign. In spite of all her efforts she could not recognize the hated Petya in the ensign with his moustache, but still she did not treat me quite like a relation…. And even now, in spite of my good-humored baldness, meek corpulence, and unassuming air, she still looks askance at me, and feels put out when I go to see my brother. Hatred it seems can no more be forgotten than love….”
Did Chekhov have anyone in mind? Was there a woman who hated him or was it someone he hated?… As Chekhov did not cultivate his hatreds of individual people, it’s more likely he had seen rather than experienced the feeling.
*
Chekhov wrote Leykin on August 11 to try once again to explain their missed connections and miscommunications: the mail didn’t come every day to Voskresensk and hence to Babkino; he had sent the story to Bilibin because he didn’t know where Leykin was. As for safe, non-debatable topics, the weather was lousy; there had not been a sunny week. But then Chekhov got back to his usual mode with Leykin. He defended Gruzinskiy (Lazarev) for complaining about Leykin’s shortening one of Lazarev’s pieces: “If you take the editorial right to correct and not insert pieces, why not recognize the correspondent’s right to protest?”11
As for In the Twilight, “Judging by the ad in [New Times], my Suvorin book came out 9 days ago, but I haven’t heard anything about it, even though Alexander oversees the publication.”
Chekhov was tactful and polite, usually, but not now. He asked, “Speak frankly: Aren’t you sick of editing Fragments yet? If I were in your place, I would toss it all to hell, put my money in a side pocket and go on an around-the-world cruise. […] Life is short.”