Pathetic coward! I stayed silent. He loved her. She loved him passionately. And I must kill him because I loved her more than life. I loved her and I hated him. That dreadful night he would die. He would pay for his love with his life. Love and hatred seethed within me. They were my second existence. These two sisters, met together in a single vessel, these two spiritual vandals, wreak desolation.
“Stop!” I told the coachman as the carriage rolled up to the destination. Theodore and I leapt out. The moon peered down coldly from behind the clouds. The moon—it is an impartial, silent witness of sweet moments of love and of revenge. Now it would witness the death of one of us. Before us lay an abyss, a bottomless pit, as bottomless as the barrel of Danaus’s criminal daughters.* We stood at the edge of a dead volcanic crater. Frightening legends were told about this volcano. My knee moved. Down plunged Theodore into the dreadful abyss! A volcano’s crater—it is the earth’s very maw.
“Damnation!” he shouted in response to my own curses.
A powerful man hurling his enemy into a volcano crater because of a woman’s beautiful eyes—it is a magnificent, grandiose, and edifying picture! The only thing missing was lava!
The coachman. The coachman—so like a statue to ignorance erected by Fate itself. Away with the predictable! The coachman followed Theodore. I sensed that now only love remained in my breast. I fell facedown upon the earth and began to weep from the rapture of it all. Tears of rapture are the result of a divine reaction that occurs in the depths of a loving heart. The horses neighed merrily. How onerous it is not to be human! I freed them of their bestial miserable lives. I killed them. Death is both fetters and freedom from fetters.
I went to the Hotel of the Violet Hippopotamus and drank five glasses of good wine.
Three hours after wreaking my revenge, I was at the door of her apartment. The dagger, that friend of death, helped me make my way there over dead bodies. I strained my ears. She did not sleep. She was daydreaming. I listened. She was silent. The silence lasted almost four hours. Four hours for a man in love—it is like four-nineteenths of a century! Finally she called for her maid. The maid walked past me. I gazed at her demonically. She noticed me looking. Her wits left her. I killed her. Better to die than to live witless.
“Annette,” she cried, “why is Theodore not here yet? Dread gnaws at my heart. I am gripped by a dark premonition. Oh, Annette! Go, bring him here. He is probably out carousing with that horrible godless Antonio! My god, who is it that I see? Antonio!”
I went to her. She blanched . . .
“Go!” she cried. Terror distorted her noble, beautiful features.
I gazed at her. The gaze is the sword of the soul. She staggered. Within my gaze she saw everything: Theodore’s death, demonic passion, myriad human desires. My pose—it was majesty itself. My eyes glimmered with electricity. My hair was stirring and standing on end. Before her she saw a demon within a mortal shell. I saw her feast her eyes. This silence of the tomb and mutual contemplation continued for about four hours. Then thunder rolled. She fell upon my chest. A man’s chest—it is a woman’s fortress. I clasped her in my embrace. Both of us cried out. Her bones cracked. A galvanic current ran through our bodies. A passionate kiss . . .
She fell in love with the demon within me. I wanted her to fall in love with the angel within me. “I am donating one and a half million franks to the poor!” I said. She fell in love with the angel within me. She wept. I wept. What tears they were! A month later, a solemn wedding ceremony took place at the church of Saints Titus and Hortense. I was marrying her. She was marrying me. The poor were blessing us. She begged me to forgive my enemies—those I had killed earlier. I forgave them. I left for America with my young wife. My loving young wife was an angel in the virginal forests of America, an angel before whom lions and tigers bowed low. I was a young tiger. Three years after our marriage, old Sam was fussing over our curly-haired little boy. The boy looked more like his mother than he did like me. That vexed me. Yesterday my second son was born—I was so happy, I hanged myself. My second boy reaches out his little hands to the readers, exhorting them not to listen to his papa. His papa had no children; his papa had no wife. His papa fears marriage like the plague. My boy doesn’t lie. He is an infant. Believe him. Infancy is a holy age. None of this ever happened . . . Good night.
*In the Greek myth, the daughters of King Danaus killed their husbands and were sentenced to fill a bottomless barrel in Hades for all of eternity.
NOTES
As source text for the stories, I have used the standard academic edition of Chekhov’s works, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii pisem (The Complete Collected Edition of Works and Letters) (Moscow: Nauka, 1973–1983) vols. 1–18, works; vols. 1–12, letters, the text versions indicated for The Prank. I prefer the Library of Congress system of transliteration as the most practical one available, and that is what I used to transliterate the Russian text when needed. I have made an exception for Russian names and attempted to use the versions most familiar to Anglophone readers.
INTRODUCTION
1 See Ivan Bunin, About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony, edited and translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 63. Olga Vasilieva, a young Russian who was translating Chekhov’s stories into English, asked him to which English journals she should submit these translation, and he responded: “I am of so little interest to the English public that I don’t care in the least”; see Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 513.
2 Chekhov wrote sketches, stories, and plays as a teenager and managed to publish at least two short sketches with his brother Alexander’s help in 1879, but it was only in 1880 that he began to write and publish as a way of making a living.
3 Bunin, About Chekhov, 38.
4 Cited by Chekhov’s colleague and friend A.V. Amfiteatrov in “Anton Chekhov i A.S. Suvorin: Otvetnye mysli,” Novoe russkoe slovo (July 2, 1914).
5 Anton Chekov to V.V. Bilibin, letter of January 18, 1895, in A.P. Chekhov, Perepiska (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996), vol. I: 243.
6 Although it is often claimed that Chekhov cared more about making money with the early stories than anything else, literary recognition was clearly important to him. He downplayed his literary ambitions, but he was keenly interested in all signs of attention to his work. In the letters to his brother Alexander of 1883, Anton was writing with some satisfaction that he was “becoming better known and had already read critical reviews [of his work]” and that his “stories are not sordid and, it is said, better than others in form and substance, and [some] consider [him] to be among the very best humorist—even the very best, and [his] stories are being recited at literary evenings . . . let’s wait and see [what happens next]”; see Alexander and Anton Chekhov, Perepiska. Vospominania (Moscow: Zakharov, 2012), 326, 342.
7 Older than Anton by two years, Nikolay was a promising artist, now chiefly remembered for his much reproduced portrait of the young handsome Anton in profile, unruly locks of hair falling on his forehead. Nikolay’s drawings featured fine flowing lines and dramatic compositions; what is more important, they were funny and memorable: He had a gift for caricature, for including telling—sometimes daring—detail, and for capturing likeness. Despite all of Nikolay’s talent and early promise, he would become a nonfunctioning alcoholic and die of tuberculosis five years before Anton.