The very next day Chekhov also announced the glad tidings to Suvorin: "What do you know? I'm writing a novel!! I write and write and there seems to be no end to my writing. I have begun doing it, i.e., the novel, all over again, correcting and abridging considerably what has already been written. By now I've already sketched nine individuals. And what a plot!" Though each chapter would consist of a separate story, he assured Suvorin that the whole would be securely tied together through a common basis of plot, ideas, and characters. However, technical problems bothered him, he admitted. "I'm still weak in this quarter and feel that I'm making many mistakes. There will be excessively lengthy passages and inanities. Although in places I do stray into conventional types, I shall try to avoid faithless wives, suicides, kulaks, virtuous peasants, devoted slaves, moralizing old ladies, kind old nurses, rustic wits, red-nosed captains, and the 'new' people."
Before many weeks had passed, however, Chekhov's enthusiasm began to fade. Pleshcheev, to whom he had sent the beginning of the work, wrote to Korolenko on August 24: "I regret that he does not continue his novel, the first three chapters of which I have reach I liked them very much."3 Though material factors arose which interfered with the work, a more serious difficulty was the usual one with him in attempting to write a novel — a lack of focus which would enable him to synthesize the varied experiences he described and thus give his novel a cohesive artistic direction and social aim. Some suggestion of his mounting uncertainty and the reason behind it may be observed in a letter to Pleshcheev (April 9,1889): "My novel had made considerable headway and then ran aground while waiting for a tide. ... I have based this novel on the life of good people, on their characters, deeds, words, thoughts, and hopes; my purpose is to kill two birds with one stone: to draw life faithfully and at the same time to show how far this life diverges from the norm. The norm is unknown to me, as it is to any of us. We all know what a dishonorable act is, but what honor is we do not know. I shall cling to the frame nearest my heart, one which has already been tried by men stronger and wiser than I. This frame
3 These three chapters and any further manuscript material of the novel were apparently destroyed by Chekhov.
is the absolute freedom of man, freedom from violence, prejudices, ignorance, the devil, freedom from passions, etc."
Within another month his statements of intention grew less frequent, his zeal for the novel muted. Then he began to respond to questions of correspondents about when the novel would be published with the information that it was too early to think of this; that it would take two to three years to finish it: "I write a bit on my novel but I delete more than I write," he informed Pleshcheev on June 26. Finally, he grew silent about the novel for the remainder of 1889.
Obviously the paralyzing difficulty was Chekhov's inability to encompass his twofold objective — to depict life's norm and at the same time to show how certain of his characters diverge from the norm. But if he could not envisage the norm, clearly he could not be sure of the deviations from it. Chekhov was no doubt correct in assuming that to cope successfully with the complex structure of the novel the artist, in order to perceive the vital connection of the parts to the whole, must have a unified vision of the norm of life. It was just this perception that he lacked at this time. As a dispassionate witness of life as it is, with a negative conviction that we are all slaves to unconscious instincts, he had as yet failed to develop a focus in life, a social symbol of faith, which he could apply artistically as the unifying principle in the vast canvas of a novel.
«4*
Nikolai's serious illness at the end of March 1889 was one reason why Chekhov interrupted his work on the novel. The artist brother, on a periodic turn of duty with his common law wife, had come down with typhoid fever. Though the traveling consumed several hours each way, Chekhov regularly made two daily visits over more than a week to tend Nikolai. To have a sick brother is a sorrow, he remarked, but to be a physician and have a sick brother was a double sorrow. Indeed, Dr. Chekhov quickly ascertained that typhoid fever, from which Nikolai was soon cured, was the least of his worries; tuberculosis had also made deep inroads. Consultations with medical colleagues confirmed the fact.
Chekhov realized that the ailing Nikolai should be removed to the dry and warmer climate of the Crimea, but there was no money for this; and besides, his lack of a passport would have made such a long journey difficult if not impossible to arrange. Though Chekhov himself had planned a trip to the Caucasus in the early spring, he now decided to give this up and take Nikolai at once to the dacha on the Lintvarev estate —which he had again rented for the summer —in the hope that the pleasanter Ukrainian weather at this time of year would benefit his brother. The whole situation filled him with gloom. He wanted his mother and younger brother to precede him and prepare the house for the sick man, but Misha begged off — he did not wish to desert his current light-o'-love in Moscow. "What a commission for a creator to be entrusted withl" the vexed Chekhov wrote Suvorin. "One is ill, the other in love, a third talks too much—and so forth. What trouble I have with all of them." (April 22, 1889.) He arrived at Luka with Nikolai on April 25, feeling that his horizon was now circumscribed by very dark clouds.
Though the novelty of this charming spot in the Ukraine had somewhat worn off, Chekhov gloried in the burgeoning spring with its freshness and emergent colors and its symphony of mingled song and sound of nightingales, bitterns, cuckoos, and frogs. Blossoming fruit trees — like brides in their wedding gowns, he observed — bore a look of innocence, as though they were ashamed to have people stare at them. Then there was the broad Psyol River, with its lovely banks already adorning themselves in dress of varied green. Nature he regarded as a sedative that pacifies man, makes him carefree and thus able to see things clearly, to be just, and to work properly.
As the days wore on, however, Chekhov's spirits drooped while he watched Nikolai wasting away before his eyes like the wax of a brightly burning candle. His deep compassion must have been mingled with a terrifying premonition as he recognized in himself the dangerous symptoms of his brother's disease — earlier that year he had had another slight hemorrhage. He grieved at times that he was a physician and hence morbidly aware of the significance of Nikolai's constant racking cough, which impressed upon him the sad indefiniteness of his own future. As a patient Nikolai could be exacting, irascible; he behaved like a veritable general, Chekhov wrote his brother Ivan. Nikolai had no thought of death and dreamed only of the time when he would again begin to practice his art. But as he grew weaker he became milder, more affectionate, and dozed in a chair most of the day.
In contrast to the previous summer, life had become insufferably dull for Chekhov —who loved gaiety, he declared, more than an honorarium. Since his friends had been informed of Nikolai's serious illness, they naturally hesitated to visit, despite Chekhov's rather quixotic pleas that they come and help share his boredom. A few, like Suvorin, who understood his special need, came. And he and Chekhov fished for hours at the picturesque old mill on the bank of the Psyol and talked endlessly about literature and the theater. P. M. Svobodin, who had brilliantly acted the role of Shabclsky in Ivanov, arrived for a stay and at once endeared himself to the family and Chekhov, with whom he shared a love for humor and practical jokes. He amused all by his clowning and grimacing, and positively dumbfounded the peasants by fishing in a dress coat, top hat, and white gloves. Or, as a lark, he and Chekhov set aflutter the patrons of a hotel in a neighboring town, Svobodin perfectly acting the part of a distinguished count and Chekhov that of his valet.