I continued climbing the hill, in the inflexible grip of unhappiness over my lost clothes. And then the realization came: the recognition that when my suitcase was taken something else had been restored to me—feeling itself. Until the mishap at the airport, I had not felt anything very much. Without knowing exactly why, I have always found travel writing a little boring, and now the reason seemed clear: travel itself is a low-key emotional experience, a pallid affair in comparison to ordinary life. When Gurov picks up Anna at an outdoor restaurant (approaching her through her dog) they converse thus:
“Have you been long in Yalta?” [he says.]
“Five days.”
“And I have already dragged out a fortnight here.” There was a brief silence.
“Time goes fast, and yet it is so dull here!” she said, not looking at him.
“That’s only the fashion to say it is dull here. A provincial will live in Belyov or Zhidra and not be dull, and when he comes here it’s ‘Oh the dullness! Oh, the dust!’ One would think he came from Granada.”
Although the passage functions (as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out) as an illustration of Gurov’s attractive wit, it also expresses the truth that had just been revealed to me, and that Chekhov’s Yalta exile revealed to him—that our homes are Granada. They are where the action is; they are where the riches of experience are distributed. On our travels, we stand before paintings and look at scenery, and sometimes we are moved, but rarely are we as engaged with life as we are in the course of any ordinary day in our usual surroundings. Only when faced with one of the inevitable minor hardships of travel do we break out of the trance of tourism and once again feel the sharp savor of the real. (“I have never met anyone who was less a tourist,” Maxim Kovalevsky, a professor of sociology whom Chekhov met in Nice in 1897, wrote of his compatriot, and went on to say, “Visiting museums, art galleries, and ruins exhausted rather than delighted him. . . . In Rome I found myself obliged to assume the role of guide, showing him the Forum, the ruins of the palace of the Caesars, the Capitol. To all of this he remained more or less indifferent.”) Chekhov was deeply bored in Yalta before he built his house and put in his garden, and even afterward he felt as if he had been banished and that life was elsewhere. When he wrote of the three sisters’ yearning for Moscow, he was expressing his own sense of exile: “One does not know what to do with oneself.”
Chekhov’s villa in Autka—Nina took me there on our first day together—is a two-story stucco house of distinguished, unornamented, faintly Moorish architecture, with an extensive, well-ordered garden and spacious rooms that look out over Yalta to the sea. Maria Chekhova, who lived until 1957, preserved the house and garden, fending off Nazi occupiers during the war and enduring the insults of the Stalin and Khrushchev periods. It remains furnished as in Chekhov’s time: handsomely, simply, elegantly. As Chekhov cared about women’s dress (it does not go unnoted in the work, and is always significant), he cared about the furnishings of his houses. Perhaps his love of order and elegance was innate, but more likely it was a reaction against the disorder and harshness of his early family life. His father, Pavel Yegorovich, was the son of a serf who had managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife and children. Pavel rose in the world and became the owner of a grocery store in Taganrog, a town with a large foreign (mostly Greek) population, on the sea of Azov, in southern Russia. The store, as Chekhov’s best biographer, Ernest J. Simmons, characterizes it in Chekhov (1962), resembled a New England general store—selling things like kerosene, tobacco, yarn, nails, and home remedies—though, unlike a New England store, it also sold vodka, which was consumed on the premises in a separate room. In Simmons’s description, the place had “filthy debris on the floor, torn soiled oilcloth on the counters, and in summer, swarms of flies settled everywhere. An unpleasant mélange of odors emanated from the exposed goods: the sugar smelled of kerosene, the coffee of herring. Brazen rats prowled about the stock.”
Chekhov’s oldest brother, Alexander, in a memoir of Anton, wrote of a freezing winter night on which “the future writer,” then a nine-year-old schoolboy, was dragged by his father from the warm room where he was doing his homework and made to mind the unheated store. The account lays stress on the cruelty of the father and the misery of the boy, and is crudely written, in a sort of penny-dreadful style. The reticent Anton himself left no memoir of his childhood sorrows, though there are passages in his stories that are assumed to refer to them. In the long story “Three Years” (1895), for example, the hero, Laptev, says to his wife, “I can remember my father correcting me—or, to speak plainly, beating me—before I was five years old. He used to thrash me with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I woke up my first thought was whether he would beat me that day.” In a letter of 1894 to his publisher and close friend Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov permitted himself the bitter reflection, “I acquired my belief in progress when still a child; I couldn’t help believing in it, because the difference between the period when they flogged me and the period when they stopped flogging me was enormous.” Chekhov had what he described to another correspondent in 1899 as “autobiographophobia.” The correspondent was Grigory Rossolimo, who had been a class-mate in medical school, and had written to Chekhov to ask him for an autobiography for an album he was assembling for a class reunion—which Chekhov supplied, but not before expressing his reluctance to write about himself. Seven years earlier, when V. A. Tikhonov, the editor of a journal called Sever, asked him for biographical information to accompany a photograph, Chekhov made this reply:
Do you need my biography? Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the Taganrog school. In 1884 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia—and back by sea. In 1891 I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with V. A. Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov’s] name-day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa. My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me. I grasped the secrets of love at the age of thirteen. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians, Zakharin. However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical.
Maxim Gorky wrote of Chekhov that “in the presence of Anton Pavlovich, everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself.” Chekhov’s mock biography produces a similar chastening effect. After reading it, one can only regard any attempt at self-description that is longer and less playful as pretentious and rather ridiculous.
Two
"This morning I felt giddy,” Nina tells me at the lookout in Oreanda. “I was afraid I would not be able to come today. Fortunately I am better.” I question her about her symptoms and urge her to see a doctor. She explains that she hasn’t the money for a doctor—doctors can no longer get by on their salaries from the state and now charge for their services. I ask if there are clinics, and she says yes, but they are overcrowded—one has to wait interminably. She finally agrees to go to a clinic the next day to have her blood pressure checked. Nina and I took to each other immediately. She is extremely likable. Because she is large and I am small she has begun giving me impulsive bear hugs and calling me her little one—for lack of a better equivalent for the Russian diminutive. Over the two days we have been together, I have received an increasing sense of the pathos of her life. She is very poor. Her apartment is too small, she says, to keep a cat in. The dress she is wearing was given to her by a Czech woman whose guide she was a few years ago. She is grateful when clients give her leftover shampoo and hand cream; nothing is too small. Earlier in the day, during a visit to the Livadia palace, where the Yalta agreement was signed, she told me that as a young child she lived through the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. Her grandparents died during the siege, and her parents’ lives, she said, were shortened because of the sacrifices they made for their children. Now, as she talks about the leftover shampoo, I think about the large tip I will give her at the end of the day, anticipating her surprise and pleasure. Then a suspicion enters my mind: has she been putting on an act and playing on my sympathy precisely so that I will give her money? A week earlier, in St. Petersburg, someone else had used the term “putting on an act.” I had been walking along the Nevsky Prospect with my guide, Nelly, when I was stopped in my tracks by the horrifying sight of an old woman lying face down on the pavement convulsively shaking, a cane on the ground just out of reach of the trembling hand from which it had fallen. As I started to go to her aid, Nelly put her hand on my arm and said, “She lies here like this every day. She is a beggar.” She added, “I don’t know if she’s putting on an act or not.” I looked at her in disbelief. “Even if she’s acting, she must be in great need,” Nelly allowed. I then noticed a paper box with a few coins in it sitting on the ground near the cane. As the occasional passerby added a coin to the box, the woman took no notice; she simply continued to shake.