The party at Masha's apartment after the performance was a merry one for all except Lika; she had to be polite to Olga Knipper, who she knew was in love with Chekhov. The company were celebrating not only his fortieth birthday, but also his election to the exalted Academy of Sciences. In December of the previous year the government decreed that a Pushkin Scction of Belles Lettres, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the famous poet, should be set up in the Academy, and that distinguished writers as well as scholars could be appointed to it. When Chekhov heard of this move, he told his learned friend at Yalta, the archeologist N. P. Kondakov, who was already a member of the Academy, that sueh a special section was superfluous, for Russian literature would not gain in interest because of the seeond- rate authors the Academy would inevitably select.
When the news arrived of his election, very appropriately the day before his birthday, Chekhov could hardly have been less interested — he was in bed, ill. Unable to savor the new title, he remarked later, by the time he recovered he had got used to being an academician. Yet he was obviously pleased to be one of the first ten seleeted, in a list whieh included Tolstoy and Korolenko. Congratulatory telegrams poured in, and in honor of this "significant event" the Taganrog town council voted two scholarships in his name to be awarded to students in schools for boys and girls.
When he learned more about the details of the award, Chekhov took less satisfaction in it. Authors of belles lettres were only honorary members, for full membership and participation in the active work of the Academy were reserved for learned scholars, who were remunerated. He detected favoritism to celebrated professors and hostility to writers among the bigwigs of the Academy. Tolstoy, he suspected, had been elected only with a gnashing of teeth, for Chekhov was certain that he
1 The experience prompted one of Lika's now rare letters to Chekhov, which he answered: he had heard that she had grown fat, but he had grown old, he wrote, and when he looked at a pretty woman he now smiled in an aged way. But he did give her the cold comfort of saying: "In your letters, just as in your life, you are a very interesting woman." (January 29, 1900.) was regarded as a nihilist by these conservative academicians. But he liked the privileges, for even honorary membership entitled him to the right of inviolability — he could not be arrested — and to a special passport for foreign travel which relieved him of the supervision of customs officials. And at the first opportunity he exercised his right to nominate for membership, recommending such writers as Boborykin, Ertel, and Mikhailovsky — the latter choice of his one-time critic testifies to the objectivity of his judgment. Curiously enough, it gave him some pleasure to leam that his fellow physicians were happy that one of their number had been elevated.
As time wore on, however, Chekhov tended to treat his new honor rather lightly. He jokingly signed his letters to intimates "Acadcmicus" or "Hereditary Honorary Academician," and he delightedly wrote Masha that the old family servant had warned a new caller that her master was now a "general,"2 so the man constantly addressed Chekhov as "Your Excellency." More prophetically, he informed Menshikov that as a writer he was pleased with the title of academician. "But I shall be still more happy when I lose this title after some misunderstanding. And there will most certainly be misunderstandings, for the learned academicians very much fear that we shall shock them." (January 28, 1900.)
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In the Ravine, the long story Chekhov had finished at the end of the previous year, most auspiciously inaugurated the new magazine Life in January. He wrote Suvorin that Russian society "is weary, hatred is making it as rank and sour as grain in a bog, and it has a longing for something fresh, free, and light —a desperate longing." (January 8, 1900.) Chekhov describes a slice of this society in his memorable tale, but it is written out of Russian life rather than being a direct criticism of it. "I depict life here as it is found in the central provinces," he told his protege S. N. Shchukin. "In reality the merchants Khrymin actually exist but are in fact still worse. Their children begin to drink vodka from the age of eight and are depraved even in their childhood; they infect the neighborhood with syphilis. I do not mention this in my story, because I would regard it as inartistic to do so."
In this work Chekhov introduces more characters than usual in his
2 In the traditional table of ranks, the title of academician was equated with that of general.
tales, but each possesses a distinctive personality — the old village shopkeeper Tsybukin who will deal in anything, legally or illegally, to accumulate money; his second wife Varvara, who tries by small acts of charity to compensate for the greed of her husband; the rapacious daughter-in-law Aksinya who is faithless to her weakling of a husband and finally usurps the position of Tsybukin and drives him out of his home; and the ugly son Anisim whose crime helps to ruin his father. The desperate longing for something fresh, free, and light, which Chekhov had mentioned to Suvorin, is beautifully embodied in the lovely Lipa, the peasant girl wantonly sacrificed in marriage to Anisim. Lipa's long walk home from the hospital that night, cradling in her arms her dead infant, horribly scalded by the jealous Aksinya in a fit of rage, is described as an elegiac pilgrimage of human suffering. In the moonlight the grief-stricken Lipa carries on a dialogue with the mysterious noises of the night, seeking an answer to why her baby, who has no sins, should be so painfully tormented before its death. The old peasant carter, who gives her a lift, provides a simple answer: "Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there will be more good and there will be more bad, there is everything yet to come. Great is Mother Russia!"
Like the earlier Peasants, In the Ravine caught the public eye because it mercilessly revealed ugly commonplaces of Russian life which had been swept under the national rug. The majority of the many reviews stressed that Chekhov invented nothing in his searing realism yet treated even his sinning men and women with a compassion born out of his love of life. Mirolyubov wrote him that he was thrice overcome by tears while reading In the Ravine; Gorbunov-Posadov that he powerfully felt "not only your talent but your heart, the love for mankind in your heart, a tender, profound love for all who suffer . . ."; and Koni, who had also been made an academician, wrote: "It seems to me that it is the best of all you have written, that this is one of the profoundest productions of Russian literature." Gorky's outstanding review of the story, Chekhov told him, was balsam to his soul, and later Gorky informed him of how he read In the Ravine to a group of peasants and they wept over parts of it and he with them.
Gorky also reported that he had heard from Tolstoy how deeply he had been affected by In the Ravine. On the other hand, Tolstoy made it amply clear that Chekhov's plays did not similarly affect him. On one of his rare visits to the theater at this time, to see Uncle Vanya,
Tolstoy occupied the governor's box and received an ovation from the audience. Like The Sea Gull, which he had only read, he condemned Uncle Vanya. "Where is the drama? In what does it consist?" he stormed at the actor A. A. Sanin. The action never moved from one place, he declared, and Uncle Vanya and Astrov were simply good-for- nothing idlers escaping from real life into the country as a place of salvation. Nemirovich-Danchenko tried to soften the blow by reporting to Chekhov that Tolstoy just did not understand the play, and when he tried to explain its focus, Tolstoy objected that there was no tragic situation, and anyway there was no point in trying to discover it in guitars and crickcts.