PartY
THE YALTA PERIOD BEGINS 1898 -1900
chapter xix
"As I Grow Older, the Pulse of Life in Me Beats Faster ..."
Neither he nor Levitan had valued life when they were well, Chekhov told Alexandra Khotyaintseva; only since they had fallen ill had they discovered life's peculiar charm. And now, as though unwilling to forgo its slightest attraction, Chekhov tried to resume his former activities upon his return to Melikhovo in the summer of 1898. He courted the illusion of recovered health, and as he and Alexandra strolled about the estate, followed by Bromine and Quinine and a brown cow, it was difficult to believe that her companion, full of cheerful conversation, was a sick man. In the spirit of the occasion she drew an amusing cartoon of his hideout, the Lodge, with a flag raised to indicate that he was at home ready to receive visiting peasants and neighbors.
Indeed, after months of "idleness" abroad and the hated business of being doctored, Chekhov slipped into the familiar busy Melikhovo pattern with a sense of relief. He wrote an old family friend, Bishop Sergei, "now everything is fine, I feel well enough, at least I don't regard myself as ill, and I live as I have been living. As formerly, I'm busy with my medical practice and with literature; I heal peasants, write tales, and every year I build something." (May 27, 1898.) Nor did he allow the scores of visitors, eager to see him after his long absence, to prevent him from working in the garden or from collecting and packing off books to Taganrog. Though he finally gave up a contemplated trip to his native city to participate in the celebration of its two-hundredth anniversary, Chekhov felt equal to paying visits to Sobolevsky and Levitan in the country, and to Moscow, where he took Alexandra Khotyaintseva to the circus. But he resisted Sergeenko's invitation to appear at Yasnaya Polyana on the occasion of Tolstoy's seventieth birthday, for he divined correctly that the great man's life had become a continuous celebration which only annoyed him. Then there were the usual manuscripts of young authors to read and place, Alexander's oldest son to take care of at Melikhovo until he began his studies at Moscow in the fall, and school meetings at Serpukhov to attend.
In fact, Chekhov's interest in the district schools had in no sense flagged during his trip abroad. He now created a society for the aid of teachers in the area and discussed the establishment of a rural mobile school museum and library. And as though actually unwilling to let a single year pass without building something, as he had told Bishop Sergei, he began to lay plans that summer for a third model school, this time in his own village of Melikhovo, though in this project Masha took the lead in raising the money with a helpful gift of a thousand roubles from her brother. But with a substantial registration of children already anxious to attend in the fall, before money could be obtained to begin construction, he persuaded the local authorities to allow him to rent a hut in the village, renovate it, buy desks and other equipment, and hire a teacher. He offered the hospitality of his home to these rural teachers, gave them books, magazines, theater tickets, and often helped them out in their personal difficulties. One wrote of him in his recollections: "It is hard to say what was uppermost in Chekhov — the man or the artist. His warm personality represented an entirely harmonious whole, in which it was impossible to separate the human being from the artist or the artist from the man."
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"My machine has already begun to work," Chekhov jubilantly reported to Goltsev soon after his return from abroad. The conviction that his writing, which had virtually ceased toward the end of his stay in Europe, would revive in the familiar setting of Melikhovo turned out to be correct. Sytin's proposal that he publish a volume of the early humorous tales in Fragments attracted Chekhov and he set about gathering these together. Misha, who was visiting, helped in searching through old issues. He read a story aloud: "Is that one of my tales?" Chekhov exclaimed, laughing with delight. "I don't remember it at all! But it is funny." Though Sytin had offered five thousand roubles for the volume, Chekhov soon abandoned the idea because, as he said, his heart was not in another book with a new title. A more practical reason perhaps was the idea that had occurred to him of getting out a collected edition of his writings, which he now proposed to Suvorin, who initially gave only a grudging assent.
Drawing upon outlines and observations which he had previously jotted down in his notebook, Chekhov wrote four short stories over the summer of 1898. Dr. Startsev in Ionych[11] belongs to that rather large group of rural physicians in Chekhov's writings who often begin their careers as idealists but in the end succumb in the unequal struggle with social injustice or ignorance or disease. After his rejection by the spoiled daughter of a pretentious provincial family, he turns his back on youthful ideals and merges his lot with the vulgarity of his surroundings in an orgy of grasping accumulation in his medical practice. Here Chekhov seems content, as in many of his tales, to reveal those forces that compel man's submission to a corrupting social order from which there appears to be no escape. But in other stories his heroes, like Nikitin in The Teacher of Literature, revolt.
And the sentiment of revolt, if not its action, rings out with startling elarity in the other tales he wrote this summer — The Man in a Shell, Gooseberries, and About Love.[12] These three stories are unique in Chekhov's fiction in being connccted by a common framework that involves the same two characters. This fact has led some critics to suppose that they may have been contributions to the novel which Chekhov dreamed of writing one day. However, the idea of a series of short stories, connected by some loose framework, had occurred to him years before, and in the present instance he intended, but failed, to add more stories to this series of three. Besides the common characters, the teacher Burkin and the veterinary Ivan Ivanych, one may disccrn a common motif — the aspiration for freedom, freedom from all the stuffy conventions of life, from the regimentation of authority, the imbecility of functionaries, from everything that tyrannizes and debases the human spirit; that "most absolute freedom" which Chekhov had passionately claimed as his goal in life in his remarkable testimony to Pleshcheev ten years earlier. The poetic Melikhovo landscape also pervades all three stories, and its lyric presence somehow informs and illuminates the basic idea of freedom with its protest against the dead forms of life.
The story of the Greek teacher Belikov,3 which Burkin tells to Ivan Ivanych in the barn when they are out hunting, etches to perfection the image of a petty man rendered arrogantly servile by the preposterous bureaucracy that enslaves him. Though Belikov is ridiculous, he is also sinister, for he demands that all other people, like himself, live in shells. To the thoroughly emancipated and philosophically-minded Ivan Ivanych, the Belikovs, all these men in shells, are the ghastly end- products of the Russian social system, and he draws the conclusion in words that clearly echo what Chekhov had come to believe: "To see and hear how they lie . . . and they call you a fool for putting up with these lies; to endure insult, humiliation, not dare to declare openly that you are on the side of honest, free people, and to lie and smile yourself, and all for a crust of bread, for the sake of a warm corner, for some lowly rank in the service that is not worth a farthing — no, one cannot go on living like this!"