This young and handsome giant was without any trace of arrogance. He treated his gifts with a kind of careless disdain. “Do you know how I write my stories?” he said once to Korolenko. “Look!” His eyes moved across the table until they fixed upon an ash tray. “There’s the story,” he said. “Tomorrow shall I bring you a story called ‘The Ash Tray’?” Korolenko had the curious feeling that vague images were already swarming over the ash tray, and already situations and adventures were beginning to shape themselves, while the light of Chekhov’s humor was already playing on the absurdities and ironies of an ash tray’s existence. When the veteran writer Dmitry Grigorovich, the friend and mentor of Dostoyevsky, complimented him on the classical perfection of his short story “The Huntsman,” Chekhov was genuinely surprised, and wrote back that he had written the story to pass away the time in a bathhouse and had thought nothing more of it. He could write under any conditions, but he seems to have written best when he was surrounded by his friends.
He was tireless in his attention to his friends—nothing was too good for them. He had a passion for entertaining them, and his hospitality was princely. The severe, accusing doctor of the Braz portrait vanishes in the actor, the mimic, the clown, who would amuse himself by going to a hotel with a friend, pretending to be a valet, and proclaiming in a loud voice all the secret vices of his master, until the whole hotel was in an uproar. He adored buffoonery. He liked putting on disguises. He would throw a Bokhara robe round his shoulders and wrap a turban round his head and pretend to be some visiting emir from the mysterious lands of the East. On a train journey he was in his element. If he was traveling with his mother he would pretend she was a countess and himself a very unimportant servant in her employ, and he would watch the behavior of the other passengers toward the bewildered countess with wide-eyed wonder and delight. He had a trick of making a walk in the country an adventure in high drama. Everything excited him. He was fascinated by the shapes of clouds, the colors of the sky, the texture of fields, and it amazed him that each person walking along a country path contained so many improbable miracles in his soul. The world abounded in miracles, and he rejoiced in all of them with an unself-conscious and devouring eagerness.
Even in his last years Chekhov bore very little resemblance to the Braz portrait. No one could guess from looking at that portrait that this was a man who was always laughing and joking, who was gay and carefree and confident of his powers, who was kind and gentle and generous and very human. What distinguished him from other people was precisely what the portrait left out—the flame of eagerness in the eyes, the wild appetite for experience, the sense of sheer enjoyment which accompanied him everywhere. Men felt doubly men in his presence, and women were continually falling in love with him. There was nothing of the puritan in him. He yearned for only one thing—that people should live in the utmost freedom, perhaps because very early in his own life he had acquired all the freedom he wanted.
By the time he was thirty Chekhov had traveled across the whole length of Russia, visited Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ceylon, and half the great cities of Europe. He makes one of his characters say: “I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean—wherever my imagination ranges …” “I want to go to Spain and Africa,” he wrote at another time. “I have a craving for life.” He imagined himself leading great caravans of his friends across the whole world, and since this was impossible he was always inviting them to come and stay with him, so that his various houses in the country came to resemble circuses with all the visitors assigned to play out their comic roles. He wrote to the vaudeville writer Bilibin: “I tell you what: get married and come down here, wife and all, for a week or two. I assure you it’ll do you all a world of good, and you’ll go away marvelously stupid.” The venerable Grigorovich came to stay with him, and some time later, remembering the strange things that had happened to him, he lifted his arms in mock horror and exclaimed: “If you only knew what went on at the Chekhovs’! A saturnalia, a regular saturnalia, I tell you!”
What went on, of course, was nothing more than an experiment in furious good humor, with Chekhov playing his usual conspiratorial role. The wonder is that he was able to write so many stories in a life given over to so many friendships. He never stinted his friends, and gave money away recklessly. At those famous house parties there would be poets and novelists and musicians, some high officials, an ecclesiastical dignitary or two, a handful of circus folk, but there were also other people who were not so easily categorized, and these would turn out to be horse thieves, ex-convicts, piano tuners, or prostitutes, anyone in fact that he had met in the course of his travels. He had an especial fondness for pretty young women and homely priests, and he loved all animals except cats, which he abominated. What he sought for in people was that eagerness for life and experience which he regarded as man’s birthright, and his hatred of poverty arose from the despairing knowledge that poverty saps unendurably at human vitality. He had no liking for the government, and he had even less liking for the revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the government. He loved life, and regarded politics as death.
Chekhov was l’homme moyen sensuel raised to the level of genius. He worked prodigiously hard at his medical practice and over his stories and plays, but even at the moments of greatest tension good humor kept creeping in. Everything about him was phenomenal—his charm, his courage, his capacity for work, his thirst for experience—but what he prized most was his ordinary humanity. He enjoyed and often celebrated the animal pleasures of life, and he was something of a connoisseur of wine and women. He had his first sexual experience at thirteen, and this love affair was followed by countless others. The legend of the remote, detached analyst of the human soul with a faintly ironical smile dies hard, and is not yet dead. The Braz portrait and some of the later photographs showing him in the throes of consumption, white as a sheet, with his coat buttoned to the neck, have helped to give credence to the legend. But those who knew him best remember his stupendous gaiety.
Even today, nearly sixty years after his death, there are still a handful of people who can remember him. A Russian now living in New York remembers meeting him as a boy in Yalta. “Chekhov was always cracking jokes,” he said recently. “He was an actor, a clown. He would sweep off his pince-nez and gaze at you with a quizzical expression, telling you some perfectly impossible story with a straight face. He had a habit of walking with one arm curled round his back, pretending to be very old and tired, and very sad, and then he would straighten up and howl with laughter. In those days he was very ill, and his voice was the hoarse voice of a consumptive, but you soon forgot his illness. And what an actor he was! He could do the most extraordinary things with his pince-nez. He used them as actors use props. He was always sweeping them on and sweeping them off. He looked so young without them, and so old when they were on, that it was like seeing two different people. He would look down on me from his immense height, and I had the feeling that all his attention, all his humor, all his kindness, were being given to me.”
In the hot summer of 1904 Chekhov, accompanied by his actress wife, arrived in the German watering place of Badenweiler. He was already dying, but he was in good spirits. He sent off gay messages to his friends, telling them how delighted he was with the small villa where he was staying, and how he was looking forward to a trip to Italy, a country he had loved ever since he had journeyed through it after his return from the Far East. And then after Italy there would be a leisurely cruise through the Mediterranean, and so to the Black Sea and his house in Yalta. At seven o’clock on the evening of July 1 the dinner bell rang, but for some reason neither Chekhov nor his wife heard it. A few minutes later, when they realized their mistake, Chekhov characteristically invented a story on the theme of the unheard dinner bell.