Chekhov informed Sobolevsky, for whose Russian News he was planning several tales, that he would not guarantee the quality of what he wrote, but the quantity would preserve him from poverty and the need of asking for loans. But he demanded from the reluctant editor that he sfcnd him proofs abroad: "I don't read proof in order to correct merely the surface features; I ordinarily complete the ending in proof, and correct the whole with its musicality in mind, as you might say." (November 20, 1897.)
In truth, the quantity was slender over October and November — three brief tales (The Pecheneg, At Home, In the Cart)2 — and the quality was not always of the highest, but each has memorable characterizations and descriptive passages, and all reveal Chekhov's deep concern now for human problems that embody elements of social protest. For the locale of the first two stories Chekhov once again drew upon memories of his youth and his 1887 trip to southern Russia —the vast, silent expanse of the Donets steppe where man was dwarfed by the elemental, mysterious forces of nature. The Pecheneg3 is a character study
All three tales first appeared in Russian News in 1897: The Pecheneg (November 2), At Home (November 16), In the Cart (December 21).
The Pechenegs, a word used to describe the central character Zhmukhin, were a tribe of fierce Mongolian nomads who fought the Russians in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
of a retired Cossack officer who has allowed his little estate in the steppe to run down, has brought up his two sons as young savages without any education — they throw chickens in the air and shoot them — and abuses his cowering, sad-eyed young wife: "I must own that I don't consider a woman a human being," he says. Utterly shiftless, he enjoys "philosophizing" endlessly with any stray visitor; in the story, he ruminates on the vegetarian convictions of a fellow traveler whom he brings home for the night. Chekhov extracts not a little humor from the Pecheneg's soliloquizing to his sleepless guest through most of the night on the golden age, when all will have become vegetarians and men and beast will live in brotherly love, although it is difficult for him to assign pigs a place in this picture. Between the lines Chekhov is pointing out in the story the national problem involved in the widespread deterioration of rural estates.
A similar problem exists in At Home, which concerns another steppe estate where the vicious customs of the past in master-peasant relations are only below the surface. But the story focuses on Vera, who, after her father's death and her years of education and travel abroad, returns to run the estate, filled with high ideals of serving the people. With keen psychological insight Chekhov details the struggle that goes on within Vera between her ideals and the crass reality of life in this rural community. Reality wins out as she finally decides to marry one of the products of this vulgarization of life whom she detests: "Evidently truth and happiness existed somewhere outside real life. . . . One must give up one's own life and merge oneself into the luxuriant steppe, boundless and indifferent as eternity, with its flowers, its ancient barrows, and its distant horizons, and then all will be well."
The beautiful euphoric moment of the rural schoolteacher in On the Cart, as she imagines what her life might have been if her father and mother had lived, only serves, by way of contrast, to underscore the pathos of the unhappy years she has spent in the damp village school- house on a mere pittance of salary, insulted daily by menial officials, and harrassed by endless cares about firewood and how well her charges will do before the incompetent examiners. Insensibly she has begun to sink to the level of the peasants, bowing and scraping before every petty official. The tale is a crushing indictment of rural schools and the lot of their teachers, subjects close to Chekhov's heart. In fact, the heroine is modeled on a Talezh schoolteacher who more than once brought her troubles to him. On the Cart provides a concrete illustration of Chekhov's application of his method of filtering a subject through his memory. For what remained in his artistic filter, as indicated by the observations in his notebook drawn from the real life of his model, are the important and typical features which are then developed in the tale with the universality of art.
« 5 *
Chekhov made the comment that Nice was a place in which to read, not to write, and, in his inability at this time to concentrate on the latter, he read various authors, including Voltaire, but mostly the French periodical press; and he regularly scanned Russian newspapers and magazines that were sent to him. His reading provided him with new insights on France, a nation which, he had come to believe, was ahead of all the others and gave tone to European culture, with a people that knew how to make use of their mistakes. Of the French press, he liked especially L'Aurore and La libre Parole.
In November, on the basis of fresh evidence, the press once again began to pour forth news items and editorial opinions on the celebrated case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French army officer who, in 1894, had been court-martialed and condemned to life imprisonment as a spy in the interests of Germany. Chekhov avidly ran down all the details, spending whole days in reading these accounts. And he was positively electrified when Zola, for whom he had no high opinion as a novelist, brought out his famous open letter, "J'accuse," in L'Aurore (January 1),4 in which he denounced the efforts of the government and the War Office to stifle the truth in the case. In February Chekhov excitedly followed every scrap of the published stenographic reports of the proceedings of Zola's trial for libel in which he was convicted and sentenced to a year's imprisonment. Alexandra Khotyaintseva recalled that Chekhov could not talk about the case without agitation.
His careful study of the facts, as well as his liberal sympathies, so evident now in his activities and writing and in his association with such liberal publications as Russian Thought and Russian News, predisposed him to side with the growing number who believed Zola justified in his charges and Dreyfus innocent. It exasperated him to observe that a part of the Russian press, following the lead of con-
4 This is Old Style Russian dating; Zola's open letter was published in France on January 13.
servative elements of the French press, condemned Zola and heaped slander on Dreyfus in a wave of anti-Semitism. In this respect, Suvorin's New Times was one of the worst offenders.
In October there had been an unpleasant episode in the relations of these two close friends. Because of his illness and the climate of Paris at that time of the year, Chekhov had refused to go there to meet Suvorin, then on a visit, and had cordially invited him to Nicc instead. Suvorin declined, and wrote an angry letter which, as Chekhov noted in his reply, "disagreeably stunned" him. Their correspondence lapsed for several weeks and when it resumed the tone was less cordial on both sides.