“What way?”
“To the bad, young man. To ruin, we must suppose… The time has come for God’s world to perish.”
The shepherd is undauntingly pessimistic. No matter the creature, the shepherd shakes his head and foresees its destruction:
A silence followed. Meliton sank into thought, with his eyes fixed on one spot. He wanted to think of some one part of nature as yet untouched by the all-embracing ruin.
The shepherd, though he has started off to mind the cattle, brings up a recent event and then begins tooting away on his pipe!
“Did you have an eclipse or not?” the shepherd called from the bushes.
“Yes, we had,” answered Meliton.
“Ah! Folks are complaining all about that there was one. It shows there is disorder even in the heavens! It’s not for nothing…. Hey-hey-hey! Hey!”
Driving his herd together to the edge of the wood, the shepherd leaned against the birch-tree, looked up at the sky, without haste took his pipe from his bosom and began playing. As before, he played mechanically and took no more than five or six notes; as though the pipe had come into his hands for the first time, the sounds floated from it uncertainly, with no regularity, not blending into a tune, but to Meliton, brooding on the destruction of the world, there was a sound in it of something very depressing and revolting which he would much rather not have heard. The highest, shrillest notes, which quivered and broke, seemed to be weeping disconsolately, as though the pipe were sick and frightened, while the lowest notes for some reason reminded him of the mist, the dejected trees, the gray sky. Such music seemed in keeping with the weather, the old man, and his sayings.
Chekhov drives the story on, the tension now being: When will a hint of hope appear? And Chekhov resists the demands of the genre, the demands of everyday conversation…. No, there’s no hope!
*
Lazarev remembered an episode at Babkino from that summer. There is no telling whether it was during his July visit or now, at the end of August: “One late evening, near midnight,” writes Lazarev, “when Chekhov and I were about to go to bed, Maria Pavlovna returned in tears from the Kiselev house, and had scarcely entered the room when she went into hysterics. We got frightened and began giving her water and some kind of drops to help.”
“But what’s wrong with you, Masha? What’s wrong with you?” Chekhov kept asking.
“I can’t… I can’t… Aleksei Sergeevich…”
“What about Aleksei Sergeevich?”
“What he says!”
With difficulty getting to the mystery, it came out that he had made a terrible statement. Amid bitter tears, Maria Pavlovna said that Aleksei Sergeevich Kiselev, distracted from a game of patience, for some reason brought up the ambition of the children of peasants and the cook to study, to go to school, and with outrage said that the government was inclined to allow them to do so instead of driving them away from schools and institutes… Kiselev said this sharply and rudely to the finish. In order to emphasize all the charm of this outburst by the head of a highly cultured family, it’s necessary to remember that Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf of Chertkov and that if Kiselev even in the smallest point didn’t know this circumstance, he could not but know that the origins of the Chekhovs were in the peasantry.
Hearing his sister out, Chekhov shrugged his shoulders and said with annoyance: “And you wanted to listen to this idiot!” […] In Chekhov’s peaceful stories, in his even-keeled letters, sometimes for some reason, a sharp hatred flared up, uncharacteristic of his temperament. This is when Chekhov touches upon the rudeness and savagery of “cultured people.”20
Yet he forgave the Kiselevs and they remained friends.
September 1887
You ask me what life is? It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known.
—Letter to his wife, April 20, 19041
Chekhov got to Moscow on September 2, and he wrote Leykin to thank him for the loan. He also wanted to clarify his role with Fragments, offering to write one or two stories a month; but it was time for new writers. He insisted that this arrangement would be fine, as Lazarev and Ezhov were already replacing him.2
He wrote Alexander a short note on September 3 to let him know where to send the next payment from New Times. Alexander wrote him a long letter on September 5, explaining, among other things, the delay in In the Twilight, ten copies of which were finally being sent to him that day. More important, he was responding to a depressed letter from Anton. This despairing letter has not survived. Alexander declared his sympathy:
You write that you’re all alone, there’s no one to speak with, no one to write to […] I repeat once more that I feel for you. You take on massive work, and I well understand that you’re tired. […] There’s one thing I don’t understand in your letter: the complaint that you hear and read lies and lies […] You need to live and not work. You have overworked. The south inspired you and spurred you, but it didn’t satisfy you.3
Alexander declined his brother’s suggestion that he be his posthumous biographer and encouraged Anton to move to Petersburg and write his stories there. And he reminded Anton that Suvorin wanted to pay him 200 rubles a month to write for New Times. Anton could leave their parents behind. Finally, “I should call you the basest of pessimists if I agreed with your phrase: ‘My youth has been wasted.’ ”4 Alexander described his own disappointed feelings of being cut out of serious editorial responsibility at New Times, and his own depressed feelings that had led to his reluctance to write Anton. Alexander knew quite well that he himself was dissipated and actually lazy, and perhaps that Anton’s self-reproach was thus an even bigger reproach upon him.
Chekhov continually suggested to his brother and other correspondents that he was naturally lazy, that it wasn’t in his character to be busy and hard-working. What was their excuse? Or was he reminding them (and us) that laziness can be a deep characteristic, yet allows, at times, exceptional effort?
On September 7 or 8 Anton replied with extra thanks for all the work Alexander had done on the book and continued their discussion of literary matters, including how to get along with Suvorin and shake up New Times.
With copies of In the Twilight finally in hand, Chekhov sent one on September 9 to the family’s landlord, Yakov Korneev: “Instead of paying you for the apartment, I send you a volume of my excrement…. for rooms, alas!, I’ll pay you in a hundred years.” The Soviet editors explain, just in case the volume’s readers have humor-deficiency-syndrome: “Joke. Chekhov paid 650 rubles a year for the apartment in the Korneev home.”5
He confessed to Leykin on September 11 that he had been depressed: “For the last three weeks I gave myself up cravenly to a fit of melancholy. I lost all interest in life, my pen dropped out of my hand; in a word, ‘nerves,’ which you refuse to recognize. I was so disturbed mentally that I simply could not bring myself to sit down to work. There are all sorts of reasons for it: the bad weather, some family trouble, lack of money, moving into town from the country, etc.”6 He asked, by the way, about how Bilibin was doing.
Bilibin, working away at Fragments, and having just reviewed In the Twilight, wrote with exasperation to Chekhov on September 12. “In many letters you assail me because I write the wrong thing in the wrong way. That, obviously, is a misunderstanding. What do you want from me and what do you expect? I do what I can, and my literary conscience is at peace. Not everybody can be word-artists. I—I’m a craftsman, and in this there’s nothing shameful. […] I myself with full right might reproach you, blaming you for burying your talent, but I don’t do this.”7