“For one thing you all ought to be grateful to me,”—he would say to young writers.—“It was I who opened the way for writers of short stories. Formerly, when one took a manuscript to an editor, he did not even read it. He just looked scornfully at one. ‘What? You call this a work? But this is shorter than a sparrow's nose. No, we do not want such trifles.’ But, see, I got round them and paved the way for others. But that is nothing; they treated me much worse than that! They used my name as a synonym for a writer of short stories. They would make merry: ‘O, you Chekhovs!’ It seemed to them amusing.”
Anton Pavlovitch had a high opinion of modern writing, i. e., properly speaking, of the technique of modern writing. “All write superbly now; there are no bad writers”—he said in a resolute tone. “And hence it is becoming more and more difficult to win fame. Do you know whom that is due to?—Maupassant. He, as an artist in language, put the standard before an author so high that it is no longer possible to write as of old. You try to re-read some of our classics, say, Pissemsky, Grigorovitch, or Ostrovsky; try, and you will see what obsolete, commonplace stuff it is. Take on the other hand our decadents. They are only pretending to be sick and crazy,—they all are burly peasants. But so far as writing goes,—they are masters.”
At the same time he asked that writers should choose ordinary, everyday themes, simplicity of treatment, and absence of showy tricks. “Why write,”—he wondered—“about a man getting into a submarine and going to the North Pole to reconcile himself with the world, while his beloved at that moment throws herself with a hysterical shriek from the belfry? All this is untrue and does not happen in reality. One must write about simple things: how Peter Semionovitch married Marie Ivanovna. That is all. And again, why those subtitles: a psychological study, genre, nouvelle? All these are mere pretense. Put as plain a title as possible—any that occurs to your mind—and nothing else. Also use as few brackets, italics and hyphens as possible. They are mannerisms.”
He also taught that an author should be indifferent to the joys and sorrows of his characters. “In a good story”—he said—“I have read a description of a restaurant by the sea in a large city. You saw at once that the author was all admiration for the music, the electric light, the flowers in the buttonholes; that he himself delighted in contemplating them. One has to stand outside these things, and, although knowing them in minute detail, one must look at them from top to bottom with contempt. And then it will be true.”
VIII
The son of Alphonse Daudet in his memoirs of his father relates that the gifted French writer half jokingly called himself a “seller of happiness.” People of all sorts would constantly apply to him for advice and assistance. They came with their sorrows and worries, and he, already bedridden with a painful and incurable disease, found sufficient courage, patience, and love of mankind in himself to penetrate into other people's grief, to console and encourage them.
Chekhov, certainly, with his extraordinary modesty and his dislike of phrase-making, would never have said anything like that. But how often he had to listen to people's confessions, to help by word and deed, to hold out a tender and strong hand to the falling…. In his wonderful objectivity, standing above personal sorrows and joys, he knew and saw everything. But personal feeling stood in the way of his understanding. He could be kind and generous without loving; tender and sympathetic without attachment; a benefactor, without counting on gratitude. And these traits which were never understood by those round him, contained the chief key to his personality.
Availing myself of the permission of a friend of mine, I will quote a short extract from a Chekhov letter. The man was greatly alarmed and troubled during the first pregnancy of a much beloved wife, and, to tell the truth, he distressed Anton Pavlovitch greatly with his own trouble. Chekhov once wrote to him:
“Tell your wife she should not be anxious, everything will be all right. The travail will last twenty hours, and then will ensue a most blissful state, when she will smile, and you will long to cry from love and gratitude. Twenty hours is the usual maximum for the first childbirth.”
What a subtle cure for another's anxiety is heard in these few simple lines! But it is still more characteristic that later, when my friend had become a happy father, and, recollecting that letter, asked Chekhov how he understood these feelings so well, Anton Pavlovitch answered quietly, even indifferently:
“When I lived in the country, I always had to attend peasant women. It was just the same—there too is the same joy.”
If Chekhov had not been such a remarkable writer, he would have been a great doctor. Physicians who sometimes invited him to a consultation spoke of him as an unusually thoughtful observer and penetrating in diagnosis. It would not be surprising if his diagnosis were more perfect and profound than a diagnosis given by a fashionable celebrity. He saw and heard in man—in his face, voice, and bearing—what was hidden and would escape the notice of an average observer.
He himself preferred to recommend, in the rare cases when his advice was sought, medicines that were tried, simple, and mostly domestic. By the way he treated children with great success.
He believed in medicine firmly and soundly, and nothing could shake that belief. I remember how cross he was once when some one began to talk slightingly of medicine, basing his remarks on Zola's novel “Doctor Pascal.”
—“Zola understands nothing and invents it all in his study,”—he said in agitation, coughing. “Let him come and see how our Zemstvo doctors work and what they do for the people.”
Every one knows how often—with what sympathy and love beneath an external hardness, he describes those superb workers, those obscure and inconspicuous heroes who deliberately doomed their names to oblivion. He described them, even without sparing them.
IX
There is a saying: the death of each man is like him. One recalls it involuntarily when one thinks of the last years of Chekhov's life, of the last days, even of the last minutes. Even into his funeral fate brought, by some fatal consistency, many purely Chekhovian traits.
He struggled long, terribly long, with an implacable disease, but bore it with manly simplicity and patience, without irritation, without complaints, almost in silence. Only just before his death, he mentions his disease, just by the way, in his letters. “My health is recovered, although I still walk with a compress on.” … “I have just got through a pleurisy, but am better now.” … “My health is not grand…. I write on.”
He did not like to talk of his disease and was annoyed when questioned about it. Only from Arseniy (the servant) one would learn. “This morning he was very bad—there was blood,” he would say in a whisper, shaking his head. Or Yevguenia Yakovlevna, Chekhov's mother, would say secretly with anguish in her voice:
“Antosha again coughed all night. I hear through the wall.”
Did he know the extent and meaning of his disease? I think he did, but intrepidly, like a doctor and a philosopher, he looked into the eyes of imminent death. There were various, trifling circumstances pointing to the fact that he knew. Thus, for instance, to a lady, who complained to him of insomnia and nervous breakdown, he said quietly, with an indefinable sadness:
“You see; whilst a man's lungs are right, everything is right.”
He died simply, pathetically, and fully conscious. They say his last words were: “Ich sterbe.” And his last days were darkened by a deep sorrow for Russia, and by the anxiety of the monstrous Japanese war.