Chekhov had been keen on Bilibin but, as with all his male friends, he joked coarsely to him. Bilibin seems to have been resistant or uncomfortable with that, never joking back in a similar manner. And he didn’t like Chekhov’s prodding him to write better. What was Bilibin protesting except, I’m not as good as you, Anton Chekhov!
Who was?
*
In “An Avenger” (“Mstitel’,” September 12), “Shortly after finding his wife in flagrante delicto Fyodor Fyodorovich Sigaev was standing in Schmuck and Co.’s, the gunsmiths, selecting a suitable revolver. His countenance expressed wrath, grief, and unalterable determination.” This is a Fragments comedy. The atmosphere is as authentic as a vaudeville stage-set. Sigaev’s “unalterable determination” means that it will be altered. The shopman is a chatty foil, “a sprightly little Frenchified figure with rounded belly and white waistcoat.” Sigaev is daunted by the price of a Smith & Wesson, and increasingly distracted by various thoughts about the proper form of vengeance:
His imagination pictured how he would blow out their brains, how blood would flow in streams over the rug and the parquet, how the traitress’s legs would twitch in her last agony…. But that was not enough for his indignant soul. The picture of blood, wailing, and horror did not satisfy him. He must think of something more terrible.
“I know! I’ll kill myself and him,” he thought, “but I’ll leave her alive. Let her pine away from the stings of conscience and the contempt of all surrounding her. For a sensitive nature like hers that will be far more agonizing than death.”
And he imagined his own funeraclass="underline" he, the injured husband, lies in his coffin with a gentle smile on his lips, and she, pale, tortured by remorse, follows the coffin like a Niobe, not knowing where to hide herself to escape from the withering, contemptuous looks cast upon her by the indignant crowd.
He suffers finally from the awkwardness of changing his mind and having wasted the shopman’s time. He instead buys a quail net.
Chekhov in the midst of his own despair and depression, mocked self-pity; such feelings eventually, usually, resulted in the consolation of buying oneself “a quail net.” He had sent the story to Leykin on September 7, and perhaps, like “The Siren,” he wrote it in one dash, without corrections. He liked it enough a dozen years later to include it in his Collected Works. It’s pretty funny.
*
He wrote to Maria Kiseleva on September 13 in his usual jocular way, responding to her concern and sympathy for his low mood. What could he tell her? Chekhov looked at his desk and started there, opening with “I have a new lamp,” which news he had conveyed at closing two days before to Leykin (“I bought (or, truer, I was given) a new room lamp”), “but all the rest is boring, gray and old.”8 After a couple of lines, he paused, mentally, though his pen went on: “There are no new thoughts, but the old things are tangled in my head and resemble worms in a green box that have been in the heat for five days. What’s to write about? That I’m moneyless and deaf? You already know that.” What didn’t she know? He told her he had been reading reviews of In the Twilight and “cannot at all understand: are they praising me or complaining about my lost soul? ‘Talent! Talent! But nonetheless the Lord rest his soul’—such is the implication of the reviews.”
By the way, he went on newsily, “I’ve been twice at Korsh’s theater and both times Korsh asked me to write him a play.” Chekhov shrugged: “But of course I won’t write plays.” He mentioned a small publisher who would pay him a token sum and collect some of his old stories for a book. Dunya Efros had been over today, “in a new hat.” As for the cat Fedor Timofeich, he “comes home to eat; all the rest of the time he strolls the roofs and dreamily looks at the sky. Apparently he came to the realization that life is without purpose.” He had sent a couple of Kiseleva’s joke-pieces to Leykin; in the meantime he greeted her family and told her everyone at the Chekhov house was well. He wound up, “The boredom is oppressive. Ought I get married?”
Joke, joke, joke. But Chekhov was still thinking about marriage… with Efros. He was always joking! But actually, in a week he would start writing a full-length play, Ivanov, and whatever Kiseleva’s answer, he did not soon get married, and in three months the cat Fedor Timofeich would costar in a long story about a dog, “Kashtanka.”
He seems to have got over the doldrums, but “The Post” (“Pochta,” September 14) provides evidence of what those doldrums feel like. As usual, I try to sum up, but the neatest, quickest situational summary is Chekhov’s own:
It was three o’clock in the night. The postman, ready to set off, in his cap and his coat, with a rusty sword in his hand, was standing near the door, waiting for the driver to finish putting the mail bags into the cart which had just been brought around with three horses. The sleepy postmaster sat at his table, which was like a counter; he was filling up a form and saying:
“My nephew, the student, wants to go to the station at once. So look here, Ignatyev, let him get into the mail cart and take him with you to the station: though it is against the regulations to take people with the mail, what’s one to do? It’s better for him to drive with you free than for me to hire horses for him.”9
The scene becomes alive only once the journey begins, as Chekhov peers into the darkness and listens for the sounds and sniffs the air:
The big bell clanged something to the little bells, the little bells gave it a friendly answer. The cart squeaked, moved. The big bell lamented, the little bells laughed. Standing up in his seat the driver lashed the restless tracehorse twice, and the cart rumbled with a hollow sound along the dusty road. The little town was asleep. Houses and trees stood black on each side of the broad street, and not a light was to be seen. Narrow clouds stretched here and there over the star-spangled sky, and where the dawn would soon be coming there was a narrow crescent moon; but neither the stars, of which there were many, nor the half-moon, which looked white, lighted up the night air. It was cold and damp, and there was a smell of autumn.
For the driver and the postman, the beauty of the sky and the adventure of being out on a dark fall night are too routine to be remarkable, but for the young student, everything is amusing and exciting:
It was the first time in his life that he had driven by night in a mail cart, and the shaking he had just been through, the postman’s having been thrown out, and the pain in his own back struck him as interesting adventures. He lighted a cigarette and said with a laugh:
“Why you know, you might break your neck like that! I very nearly flew out, and I didn’t even notice you had been thrown out. I can fancy what it is like driving in autumn!”
The postman did not speak.
“Have you been going with the post for long?” the student asked.
“Eleven years.”
“Oho; every day?”
“Yes, every day. I take this post and drive back again at once. Why?”
Making the journey every day, he must have had a good many interesting adventures in eleven years. On bright summer and gloomy autumn nights, or in winter when a ferocious snowstorm whirled howling around the mail cart, it must have been hard to avoid feeling frightened and uncanny. No doubt more than once the horses had bolted, the mail cart had stuck in the mud, they had been attacked by highwaymen, or had lost their way in the blizzard….
“I can fancy what adventures you must have had in eleven years!” said the student. “I expect it must be terrible driving?”