If one reads these late stories, then, in conjunction with the late plays, one is presented with an anatomy of Russian society, as observed and estimated by Chekhov, at the end of the nineteenth century and just before the Revolution of 1905 (Chekhov died in 1904). This picture is anything but reassuring. The propertied classes are losing their grip but cannot merge in any healthy fashion with the rising serfs who are buying them up. The old merchant class are narrow and harsh, their world is almost a ghetto; when the young people try to escape from it by aping the intelligentsia or marrying into the gentry, they find that they do not pan out, that they cannot adapt themselves. The recently arrived bourgeoisie—factory owners and engineers—are uncomfortable because they find themselves cut off from the people from whom they have sprung. The hierarchy of the church is a routine affair, unilluminated by true religious feeling, and fanatical religion on a lower level does not rise beyond savagery and superstition. The well-to-do peasants who have been turning into shopkeepers and entrepreneurs now carry their cupidity to criminal lengths. The poor peasants are living in ignorance and filth: they crawl about their villages like badly kept beasts, and when they try their luck in the city—untrained at any trade that is practiced there—they are hardly better off. One is brought to the conclusion that Chekhov, whose family had been serfs till the Emancipation and who knew the life of the lower classes, is here contradicting deliberately the Tolstoyan idealization and the Turgenevian idylizing of the peasantry, as, in his stories about religion, he is confronting Dostoevsky’s saints with something more degraded or prosaic. It is a picture, in general, of a feudal society attempting to modernize itself, but still in a state of transition that is considerably less than half-baked. One of the strongest impressions, in fact, conveyed by the whole of Chekhov’s work is that, although the old order is petering out, there is not very much to build on for a sound democratic and up-to-date Russia. And yet there is just barely a note of hope. The architect’s son of My Life does achieve a measure of satisfaction by abandoning his pretensions to gentility and settling down as a professional house-painter. In the last story Chekhov wrote, Betrothed—which counterbalances and to some extent offsets the first in this sequence, A Woman’s Kingdom—he does allow his heroine to break away, at the cost of moral effort and some ruthlessness, from her stultifying provincial family, and to study for a career in St. Petersburg. A cousin, a raté intellectual, has egged her on to this. He has told her that the more people like her become trained and “dedicated,” “the sooner the Kingdom of Heaven will descend upon the earth. In that time, little by little, there will not be left of your town one stone upon another. Everything will be changed, as if by magic. There will arise large and splendid houses, marvelous parks, extraordinary fountains, remarkable people.” There is, of course, an element of parody, or irony, in this vision of the future on the part of one who has been so unsuccessful in the present, as there is in The Three Sisters in the case of a somewhat similar prophecy; yet Nadya does get to St. Petersburg as the sisters do not get to Moscow.
I hope that this volume may help to redeem Chekhov, one of the tersest, most lucid and most purposive of writers, from the Anglo-Saxon charges of vagueness; to give something of his true weight and point for readers who may have been bewildered by reading him in scrambled collections.
—EDMUND WILSON
* Here is the complete chronology of the stories and plays of this period (I give all the titles in Constance Garnett’s translation): 1894. The Black Monk, A Woman’s Kingdom, Rothschild’s Fiddle, The Student, The Teacher of Literature, At the Manor, The Head Gardener’s Story; 1895. Three Years, The Helpmate, Whitebrow, Anna on the Neck, The Murder, Ariadne; 1896. An Artist’s Story, My Life, The Sea Gull; 1897. Peasants, Pechenyeg, At Home, The Schoolmistress, Uncle Vanya; 1898. The Man in the Case, Gooseberries, About Love, Ionich, A Doctor’s Visit, The Darling; 1899. The New Villa, On Official Business, The Lady with the Dog, At Christmas Time; 1900. In the Ravine; 1901. The Three Sisters; 1902. The Bishop; 1903. Betrothed; 1904. The Cherry Orchard. (If anyone should set out to read these consecutively in Constance Garnett’s edition, he would be put to considerable inconvenience.)
PEASANTS AND OTHER STORIES
A WOMAN’S KINGDOM
1. CHRISTMAS EVE
HERE WAS A thick roll of notes. It came from the bailiff at the forest villa; he wrote that he was sending fifteen hundred rubles, which he had been awarded as damages, having won an appeal. Anna Akimovna disliked and feared such words as “awarded damages” and “won the suit.” She knew that it was impossible to do without the law, but for some reason, whenever Nazarich, the manager of the factory, or the bailiff of her villa in the country, both of whom frequently went to law, used to win lawsuits of some sort for her benefit, she always felt uneasy and, as it were, ashamed. On this occasion, too, she felt uneasy and awkward, and wanted to put that fifteen hundred rubles further away that it might be out of her sight.
She thought with vexation that other girls of her age—she was in her twenty-sixth year—were now busy looking after their households, were weary and would sleep sound, and would wake up tomorrow morning in holiday mood; many of them had long been married and had children. Only she, for some reason, was compelled to sit like an old woman over these letters, to make notes upon them, to write answers, then to do nothing the whole evening till midnight, but wait till she was sleepy; and tomorrow they would all day long be coming with Christmas greetings and asking for favors; and the day after tomorrow there would certainly be some scandal at the factory—someone would be beaten or would die of drinking too much vodka, and she would be fretted by pangs of conscience; and after the holidays Nazarich would turn off some twenty of the workpeople for absence from work, and all of the twenty would hang about at the front door, without their caps on, and she would be ashamed to go out to them, and they would be driven away like dogs. And all her acquaintances would say behind her back, and write to her in anonymous letters, that she was a millionaire and exploiter—that she was devouring other men’s lives and sucking the blood of the workers.
Here there lay a heap of letters read through and laid aside already. They were all begging letters. They were from people who were hungry, drunken, dragged down by large families, sick, degraded, despised. . . . Anna Akimovna had already noted on each letter, three rubles to be paid to one, five to another; these letters would go the same day to the office, and next the distribution of assistance would take place, or, as the clerks used to say, the beasts would be fed.
They would distribute also in small sums four hundred and seventy rubles—the interest on a sum bequeathed by the late Akim Ivanovich for the relief of the poor and needy. There would be a hideous crush. From the gates to the doors of the office there would stretch a long file of strange people with brutal faces, in rags, numb with cold, hungry and already drunk, in husky voices calling down blessings upon Anna Akimovna, their benefactress, and her parents: those at the back would press upon those in front, and those in front would abuse them with bad language. The clerk would get tired of the noise, the swearing, and the singsong whining and blessing; would fly out and give someone a box on the ear, to the delight of all. And her own people, the factory hands, who received nothing at Christmas but their wages, and had already spent every farthing of it, would stand in the middle of the yard, looking on and laughing—some enviously, others ironically.