In this extraordinary letter written to his friend Suvorin, a man whom Lenin later characterized as “the running dog of the Tzar,” Chekhov came closer than ever again to defining his ultimate beliefs. His attitude toward life was poetic and practical, as a child is poetic and practical, but at the same time he spoke with a strange authority which came from his vast knowledge of suffering. Sometimes he seems to be talking like those old peasants who sit round the campfires in his stories, but his voice remained young and vibrant to the end.
His last years were spent at Yalta in the white house he built facing the sea. He had mellowed a little, and the stories tended to become longer and slower, as though he took even greater enjoyment in mulling them over, sipping them like wine. Now at last he could afford to write without any sense of being dogged by time. For fifteen years he had been dreaming of writing “The Bishop,” and in March 1901 he began writing it, but it was not finished until a year later. It is one of the most autobiographical of his stories, though he liked to say that it came about after he had seen a photograph of a certain Bishop Mikhail Gribanovsky in a bookshop in Yalta. He bought the picture, made a few discreet inquiries about the bishop’s life, and sat down to write the story. But in fact the photograph was no more than the catalytic agent. In the portrait of the dying bishop he painted himself.
“The Bishop,” “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” and “The Bride” were all written in Yalta. There is no falling off of strength: there is the same calm, the same mastery, the same flickering gaiety. But what is especially noticeable is that the language has been stripped bare of ornaments: in those last stories he writes close to the bone.
Once in “Gusev” Chekhov spoke of “the huge bull without eyes,” the ultimate horror, the symbol of all that was confused and terrible and final in life. Unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, he showed no rage, no presumptuousness: he would confront the evil calmly, gaily, refusing to be overwhelmed by it, remembering always that his first task was to celebrate life, celebrating it all the more fervently because so little life remained in him.
Sometimes it amused him to wonder how long his works would last. One day, talking with the writer Ivan Bunin, he said he thought that people might go on reading him for seven years.
“Why seven?” asked Bunin.
“Well, seven and a half,” Chekhov replied. “That’s not so bad. I’ve got six years to live. Mind you, don’t tell the Odessa reporters about that.”
He was dead a few months later, making quips and jokes to the end.
Chekhov made a gross mistake in calculating the extent of his fame. His real fame is only just beginning, and it is likely that he will be read hundreds of years from now, for he was one of those who, in the words of Boris Pasternak, “are like apples plucked green from the trees, ripening of themselves, mellowing gradually and always increasing in meaning and sweetness.”
IV
It is perhaps Chekhov’s very greatness as a writer which makes him so impossibly difficult to translate. He writes, of course, in the idiom of the nineteenth century with a certain deliberate diffuseness, and with a feeling for the balanced phrase and for rising and falling periods. Dostoyevsky writes in a harsh journalese; he is nearly always the hammer raining down blows on the souls of men and on recalcitrant paragraphs. Chekhov remains the musician, charming his audience, sometimes introducing melodies for no better reason than that it pleases him to listen to the music. He is Mozart to Dostoyevsky’s Beethoven, and like Mozart, he is the master of many moods and many instruments.
So one translates him as best one can, knowing that there are no precise equivalents, and that nothing is to be gained by making him speak in the modern manner. His precision is not our precision, and we do him a disservice if we put him into crisp English, for his language is essentially romantic. He will speak of “the sweet May-time,” and think nothing of it. He rejoices in the pathetic fallacy, and goes to considerable trouble to make his landscapes reflect the moods of his characters. And since this is as much a part of him as his gaiety and his impudence, we must accept him as he is. To modernize him is to destroy him completely.
The difficulties of translating Chekhov are endless. It is not only that he speaks in the manner of his time; he is continually describing a way of life which has vanished from the earth. The Russians no longer speak as Chekhov spoke. Time after time he describes events which are unthinkable in modern Russia. His peasants fall into colloquialisms which must have been completely intelligible to Russians living at the end of the last century, though they are almost beyond understanding today, with the result that modern texts of Chekhov published in Russia are often provided with explanatory footnotes. More than once I have been baffled by a phrase, and consulted a Russian, only to discover that he was equally baffled. To translate Chekhov adequately, one should have a vast knowledge of church ritual, the social customs of the nineteenth century, the dialects of Moscow and half a dozen other towns in Russia. Ideally, he should be translated by a group of churchmen, sociologists, and experts on dialect, but they would quarrel interminably and the translation would never be done.
Though we can no longer recapture precisely what Chekhov meant by “the sweet May-time,” for too many cruel Aprils have intervened, there is no mystery about his way of looking at the world, or the value he placed on human freedom. The texture of the language changes, but the human heart remains oddly unchangeable, though various. Chekhov celebrated the human variety, and while his peasants and princes have vanished, they are closer to us than we know.
That is why of all Russian writers Chekhov, the archconservative, is the most subversive. He is dynamite for children, for he proclaimed the utmost freedom and gave to the human heart the place of sovereign eminence. His stories are hosannas in praise of freedom, of the wanderings of the human heart in search of its own peace. And so, with the insidious power of genius, he prepares us for the revolutions of the future.
ROBERT PAYNE
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
These translations have been made from the twelve-volume edition of Chekhov’s Collected Works, edited by V. V. Yermilov and published by the Biblioteka Ogonyok (Moscow, 1950).
The Little Apples
BETWEEN the Black Sea and the Solovetsky Islands, at such and such degrees of latitude and longitude, the landowner Trifon Semyonovich had been living on his own black earth for a long time. His surname was as long as a barge pole, and derived from a very resounding Latin word designating one of the innumerable human virtues. He owned an estate comprising about 8,000 acres of black earth. This estate, being in his full possession, had been mortgaged and offered for sale. The “For Sale” notices were put up before he acquired his bald spot, but the estate has never been sold, thanks to the gullibility of the bank manager and the skill of Trifon Semyonovich, and so the worst has not befallen him. One day, of course, the bank will fail, because Trifon Semyonovich and all those others whose names are legion take bank loans without paying the interest. Indeed, whenever Semyonovich did pay a little interest on his loan, he always made a great ceremony of it, as a man does when he offers a penny for the repose of the souls of the dead or for the building of a cathedral. If this world were not this world, and if things were called by their proper names, then Trifon Semyonovich would be called by another name than Trifon Semyonovich: he would be given a name usually reserved for horses and cows. Frankly, Trifon Semyonovich is nothing more than a beast. I am sure he would agree with me. If he ever hears of this (for he sometimes reads The Dragonfly), he will probably not burst a blood vessel, for he is a man of considerable intelligence and is likely to be in complete agreement with my thesis, and he might also send me a dozen of his Antonovka apples in the autumn as an act of gratitude for my not revealing his surname, for on this instance I have confined myself to the use of his Christian name and patronymic. I shall not describe all his virtues: it would be very tedious. To describe Trifon Semyonovich in his entirety would demand a volume as thick and heavy as The Wandering Jew of Eugène Sue. I shall not mention his cheating at cards, or his politics, which have enabled him to avoid paying his debts and the interest on his mortgage, nor shall I mention the tricks he plays on the old priest and the deacon, or how he rides through the village streets in a costume contemporary with Cain and Abel. I shall confine myself to a single incident characteristic of his attitude towards his fellow creatures, in praise of whom, after three quarters of a century of continuing experience of their affairs, he once composed the following quick-firing couplet: