Leykin was sharp and would have recognized that Chekhov was baiting him. He wasn’t going anywhere, and he would continue using any tricks he could to keep Chekhov from leaving him.
Chekhov would return to Moscow in early September, but for now he was occupied. He wrote his friend Schechteclass="underline" “I’m dreaming of winter, as I’m sick of summer. For me, after all, summer began April 1.” His letters to Schechtel were invariably easy-breezy: “Find me a fiancée.”12 In a postscript, he noted a distraction: “I’ve gone mad on mushrooms. I wander in the woods for days, looking under my feet. I shall have to give it up, for this pleasure is interfering with my work.”13
Another distraction was wanting to see his book, finally. “Goose!” he wrote Alexander. “If you believe the Monday book ads, my book came out 9 days back already. Not a word or a peep about it.”14
*
In “The Doctor” (“Doktor,” August 17) the protagonist-doctor wants a confession from the mother of a dying nine-year-old boy that he is not the boy’s father. There is no hope for the boy, who has a brain tumor.
The boy is dreamy and passive, possibly hallucinating.
“Misha, does your head ache?” he asked.
Misha answered, not at once: “Yes. I keep dreaming.”
“What do you dream?”
“All sorts of things….”15
The doctor has been paying the mother for support of the boy, as have two other men. He asks her, at this crucial time, to confess that she knows the boy is not his. She insists the boy is his. He argues: “A father’s rights to the boy are equally shared with me by Petrov and Kurovsky the lawyer, who still make you an allowance for their son’s education, just as I do! Yes, indeed! I know all that quite well! I forgive your lying in the past, what does it matter? But now when you have grown older, at this moment when the boy is dying, your lying stifles me!”
He is cracking, but she, grieving over her son’s impending death, is not. He only wants her to tell him the truth. Chekhov doesn’t tell us that the doctor is correct in his surmise, only that the doctor is sure she is lying. But there is no way for him to know and he is frustrated with his powerlessness. The story concludes with him uttering to himself on his way home: “What a pity that I don’t know how to speak! I haven’t the gift of persuading and convincing. It’s evident she does not understand me since she lies! It’s evident! How can I make her see? How?”
*
Lazarev returned to Babkino on August 20, and Chekhov wrote Leykin on August 21 to continue trying to mediate between his friend and Leykin. Chekhov explained that he had read a couple of lines of Leykin’s complaints to Lazarev and that Lazarev had been amazed to learn he had offended Leykin. He invited Leykin to come to Babkino. He added: “Well, I burden the end of this letter with requests”—could Leykin place an announcement of In the Twilight in Fragments?… And, one more thing, could he have an advance, please? He apologized that Leykin hadn’t received a copy of In the Twilight. “I’m not sending you my new book, as I don’t have it.”16 As always, Leykin came through with the money; he printed an advertisement for In the Twilight and also had Bilibin write a review.
Meanwhile, Lazarev would describe Chekhov writing a story “all day” at Babkino; “finishing it, he turned to me with the request: ‘Read “The Siren,” A. S.! Did I leave out a word or comma? Is there any drivel? By the way, this is a record, the story was written without a single cross-out.’ ”17 The comical “The Siren” (“Sirena,” August 24) is about hungry judges awaiting one judge to finish writing his dissent. To pass the time, the others discuss, most distractingly, instances of “real appetite.”18 For example, “The richest odor is that of young onions when they just begin to get golden-brown, you know, and when the rascals fill the house with their sizzling.”
Amid the lusty discussion, the dissenting judge finds it hard to concentrate and, unlike Chekhov in the story’s errorless composition, keeps making mistakes, forcing him to start over.
The secretary, “a short man with sidewhiskers growing close to his ears and a sugary expression on his face,” is the sweetest siren of alclass="underline"
He was so carried away that, like a nightingale singing, he heard only his own voice. “The meat pie must make your mouth water, it must lie there before you, naked, shameless, a temptation! You wink at it, you cut off a sizable slice, and you let your fingers just play over it, this way, out of excess of feeling. You eat, the butter drips from it like tears, and the filling is fat, juicy, rich, with eggs, giblets, onions…”
His quiet seductive voice sends one judge after another fleeing for a restaurant. The secretary reaches the end of the imagined meaclass="underline"
“Yes, my friend,” the secretary continued. “And while you are sipping your brandy, it’s not a bad thing to smoke a cigar, and you blow rings, and you begin to fancy that you are a generalissimo, or better still, you are married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and all day long she is floating under your windows in a kind of pool with goldfish in it. She floats there, and you call to her: ‘Darling, come and give me a kiss.’ ”
The presiding judge finally flees too, tossing aside his work.
This is a variation on Chekhov’s writer-on-deadline story from December 1886, “The Order.” But it’s better, neater, funnier. It would’ve made an appropriate gift for Leykin and Fragments, but Chekhov had sent it to the Petersburg Gazette. And, as noted by Lazarev, it was “written without a single cross-out.”
As a counterweight to that farce, Chekhov followed with “The Pipe” (“Svirel’,” August 29). Sitting at his desk at Babkino, Chekhov took one step into his imagination and conjured up this dreamlike scene:
Meliton Shishkin, a bailiff from the Dementyev farm, exhausted by the sultry heat of the fir-wood and covered with spiders’ webs and pine-needles, made his way with his gun to the edge of the wood. His Damka—a mongrel between a yard dog and a setter—an extremely thin bitch heavy with young, trailed after her master with her wet tail between her legs, doing all she could to avoid pricking her nose. It was a dull, overcast morning. Big drops dripped from the bracken and from the trees that were wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell of decay from the dampness of the wood.19
Meliton’s senses, though weary, are awake, as are Damka’s.
There were birch-trees ahead of him where the wood ended, and between their stems and branches he could see the misty distance. Beyond the birch-trees someone was playing on a shepherd’s rustic pipe. The player produced no more than five or six notes, dragged them out languidly with no attempt at forming a tune, and yet there was something harsh and extremely dreary in the sound of the piping.
And so we follow the sound of the pipe and discover the piper, an old shepherd.
Meliton, a bailiff, is chatty, but the shepherd is not.
“What weather! God help us!” he said, and he turned his head from side to side. “Folk have not carried the oats yet, and the rain seems as though it had been taken on for good, God bless it.”
The shepherd looked at the sky, from which a drizzling rain was falling, at the wood, at the bailiff’s wet clothes, pondered, and said nothing.
“The whole summer has been the same,” sighed Meliton. “A bad business for the peasants and no pleasure for the gentry.”
This was Chekhov’s dreary-weather summer at Babkino.
The shepherd offers no comfort. He sees the environmental destruction at the end of the 19th century that everyone ever since has been shocked to witness:
“It’s a wonder,” he said, “what has become of them all! I remember twenty years ago there used to be geese here, and cranes and ducks and grouse—clouds and clouds of them! The gentry used to meet together for shooting, and one heard nothing but pouf-pouf-pouf! pouf-pouf-pouf! There was no end to the woodcocks, the snipe, and the little teals, and the water-snipe were as common as starlings, or let us say sparrows—lots and lots of them! And what has become of them all? We don’t even see the birds of prey. The eagles, the hawks, and the owls have all gone…. There are fewer of every sort of wild beast, too. Nowadays, brother, even the wolf and the fox have grown rare, let alone the bear or the otter. And you know in old days there were even elks! For forty years I have been observing the works of God from year to year, and it is my opinion that everything is going the same way.”