Though Chekhov thought living was cheap at Yalta, his entertaining and numerous trips to tourist sights, one of them as far as Bakhchisarai, compelled him at the end of a couple of weeks to write to Alexander to say that he had not a kopeck in his pocket to leave, and he asked his brother to send him at once the latest accumulation from the sale of his books. When Chekhov received the money, he left Yalta on August 9 and arrived at his dacha three days later. Apparently the shade of Nikolai still haunted the house and he and the family were happy to leave for Moscow at the beginning of September. On the train home, however, he seems to have recovered a bit of his old esprit. Professor N. I. Storozhenko, the celebrated Shakespearian scholar and Masha's former teacher, whom she held in reverent awe, sat near them in the coach. Chekhov quickly observed that his sister, afraid that he and the cellist Semashko, who accompanied the family, might say or do something that was undignified, pretended not to be associated with them. To punish her he ostentatiously played the part of a cook of Countess Keller and Semashko became a valet. Bowing low in peasant fashion to his mother, he declared in a loud voice that he hoped she would find a good servant's position in Moscow.
"there is a sort of stagnation in my soul" / lgi « 6 »
A Dreary Story: from the Notebook of an Old Man, the lengthy picee of fiction which Chekhov had been working on at Yalta, continued to absorb him after he returned to Moscow. The long and disappointing effort on his novel, as well as Nikolai's illness and death, had limited any concentration on the short story, for up to this point in 1889 he had published only one tale, The Princess, an almost morbid revelation of the parasitism of a wealthy lady who excuses her incredible self-indulgence by false piety and hypocritical almsgiving. One may detect in it a note of social protest against the flagrant abuses of rank and riches.
Excellent as is the characterization of the central figure in The Princess, the tale leaves one with the impression of an incomplete sketch which Chekhov perhaps thought was adequate for New Times, the newspaper in which it appeared. But the much longer A Dreary Story, intended for the magazine Northern Herald, he regarded as another major effort. He frankly admitted to the editor that the story was a reflection of "that abominable frame of mind from which I could not separate myself all summer." This "frame of mind," however, had been with him for some time. It was a complex of anxieties, aggravated by his critics and growing out of his noninvolvement — in either his art or personal life — in the great questions of the day. His belief that art had no mandate to answer such questions had been shaken recently by the thought that his noninvolvement was perhaps connected with a lack of philosophical convictions. The situation suggested a story about a thinking man who discovers at a critical moment in his life that he has no philosophy, no ruling idea to aid him in resolving his dilemma. No doubt Nikolai's death pointed up this conception, which now became the theme of a thinking man who finds himself a spiritual bankrupt when confronted with the ultimate question — death.
The subject was new, Chekhov confided, the characters different, the situations unique, and he was convinced that the tale would cause a stir and be abused by the enemy camp, an outcome which he thought all to the good. One may also see in it an answer to his friend, the critic P. N. Ostrovsky, who insisted that a writer, if he could not depict contemporary society with its beliefs and ideals, must at least depict it in its search for beliefs, in its anguish over the absence of an ideal. It is man's "anguish over the absence of an ideal" that Chekhov embodied in the main character of A Dreary Story, an anguish which he himself plainly experienced.
As he worked away, frequent artistic doubts about his writing assailed him. He refused to send the story in at the time he promised; he had to recast whole pages, to polish; he worried over his inexperience with this new theme, and above all he feared to appear stupid. Perhaps the features that troubled him most were the long speeches from the notebook of the old professor in the tale. They could not be dispensed with, he assured Pleshcheev, for "they characterize the hero, as well as his frame of mind and his shuffling before himself." (September 24, 1889.) Perhaps one ought to be old, he ruminated, if one were to write in so much detail about the observations of an old man, but it was not his fault that he was young. Disappointed over his progress at one stage, he wrote Leontiev-Shcheglov: "This is not a story but a dissertation. It will suit the taste only of lovers of boring and heavy reading, and I'll make a mistake if I don't send it to the Artillery Journal." (September 18,1889.)
Chekhov finally dispatched the manuscript to the Northern Herald toward the end of September. Pleshcheev's favorable reaction must have banished some if not all of his worries over the piece. "You have done nothing so powerful and profound as this," wrote the editor, and he praised the characterizations of the old professor and his ward Katya. In parrying one of Pleshcheev's strictures, that not enough was known about the secondary characters, Chekhov made the interesting point that this was the professor's fault since all information depended upon his notebook, and one of his chief traits was his complete unconcern for the inner life of those around him. If his nature had been different, said Chekhov, then the lives of Katya and his daughter Liza might have been less negative. Nor would Chekhov accept Pleshcheev's advice that, for obvious reasons, he change the title of A Dreary Story: he did not fear the scamps who indulged in poor jokes about a title, and if by chance some good ones were struck off, he would be happy to have given them the opportunity.
Chekhov had some reason to be concerned with sustaining reader interest in A Dreary Story. In conception and treatment the piece represented a new departure for him, and as an outgrowth of accumulated feelings stirred by his recent thinking on the relation of art to life and on the death of his brother Nikolai, the story is more subjective than he had allowed himself to be in any serious work up to this point. The distinguished old scientist, Professor Nikolai Stepanovich, knows that he will soon die, and as he reviews his past and present existence he comes to the terrible conclusion that the total success of his life — his passion for science; his behavior to his wife, daughter, and ward Katya; his views on theater, literature, colleagues, students; even the very picture which his fertile imagination has painted of himself and his achievements — has all been entirely devoid of what might be called a "general idea" which would serve as a god for a living man. His life has suddenly come to have no meaning, and on the threshhold of the grave he feels himself a spiritual bankrupt. I lis favorite Katya, who adored the old scientist and might have brought him solace, has ruined her life because she too lacked "a ruling idea." Though he fully understands the tragedy of her hopeless drifting, he is utterly unable to advise her when she pleads for his aid, thus symbolizing the futility of his own life as well as that of his ward. Some readers imagined that Katya's disillusion was caused by a hopeless love for her guardian. Chekhov regarded this as an "impure suspicion" and wrote Pleshcheev: "If people lose belief in the friendship, respect, and boundless love which exist outside the sphere of sex, at least they should not attribute bad taste to me. If Katya were in love with an old man barely alive, it would be, you must agree, sexual perversity, a freak which could interest only a psychiatrist, and then merely as an unimportant and untrustworthy anecdote. If there had been in it only this sexual perversity, would it have been worth while to write the story?" (October 21, 1889.)