An inability, like that of the old professor in A Dreary Story, to formulate a "ruling idea" with which to confront the problems of his own life and those of society no doubt aggravated Chekhov's disturbed state Of mind at the end of 1889. Nor did he find much help in the conflicting and often partisan views of the intelligentsia. Rather pointedly he wrote Suvorin on October 28: "You say that it is impossible to imagine anything more contemptible than our liberal opposition. Well, what about those who do not form the opposition? They are hardly any better. The mother of all Russian evil is gross ignorance, and this is present in the same degree in all parties and movements."
Two months later Chekhov returned to this theme by way of an exchange he had been having with Suvorin over the recent novel of the popular French author Paul Bourget, he Disciple, which Suvorin praised highly when it appeared in translation in New Times. Chekhov sharply criticized the work because of its indictment of determinism and its insistence that the scientific approach led to evil. To compel man to turn his back on a materialistic approach to life, Chekhov asserted, amounted to forbidding him to seek the truth. He found still more reprehensible Bourget's belief that those things which in the age-long struggle with nature restrain the brute in men and distinguish them from dogs can be lightly discredited by psychological experiments involving infinite talk about conscience, freedom, love, honor, and morality. Chekhov questioned whether such authors help us to seek for the better and to admit that the bad is truly bad. Rather, he declared, they contribute to degeneration, as they do in Russia, where they "help the devil to beget the wood lice and mollusks we call the intelligentsia. The drowsy, apathetic, lazy, philosophizing, cold intelligentsia, who cannot even-invent for themselves a decent design for paper money; who are not patriotic; who, sad and colorless, get drunk on one glass and visit brothels at fifty kopecks; who grumble and blithely negate everything, since it is easier for a lazy brain to deny than to assert; who refuse to marry and raise children, and so on." (December 27,1SS9.)
Chekhov himself was a member of this intelligentsia, and more than once he had wondered whether his own literary efforts were of any use at all in the atmosphere of social defeatism with which he was surrounded. Not only had the quantity of his writing fallen off sharply in 1889, but at times he seemed deliberately to avoid creative work. He convinced' Suvorin to send him the rejected manuscripts of the literary division of New Times and he would revise those that he deemed worth saving for publication. Although he minimized the effort because of the rapidity with which he functioned as an editor, yet he obviously spent much time on this thankless task, sometimes going so far as to rework entire stories. "In The Singer," he wrote of one of these to Suvorin, "I've made the middle the beginning, the beginning the middle, and the end I've transformed into somthing quite new. The young lady, when she reads it, will be quite horrified." (November 20, 1889.)
In short, Chekhov had reached a spiritual breaking point, which had been building up in him over this whole period of his first success; it compelled him for a time to turn his back on art and seek relief in some other activity, very much as Gogol and Tolstoy had done in similar crises in their lives. "I don't have much passion," he had written Suvorin on May 4. "Add to this the following psychopathic symptom: over the past two years, and for no earthly reason, I've grown sick of seeing my works in print, have become indifferent to reviews, to talks on literature, to slanders, successes, failures, big fees — in fact, I've turned into an utter fool. There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. I explain it by the stagnation in my personal life." In the middle of December, he again wrote Suvorin that not a single line of his writings had any serious value in his eyes. And with some perturbation, he added: "I want passionately to hide myself somewhere for five years and engage in serious, painstaking work. I must teach myself, learn everything from the beginning, because as a writer I'm a complete ignoramus; I must write with a good consciencc, with feeling, with meaning, write not eighty pages a month but sixteen. I must leave my home and live on seven to nine hundred roubles a year and not, as now, on three to four thousand. I must spit on a great many things. ..."
Chekhov's mind was made up. At the end of 1889 brother Misha rather naively explains the reason behind the kind of activity Chekhov had decided upon. While reading Misha's classroom notes on criminal law, Chekhov remarked: "All our attention is centered on the criminal up to the moment when sentence is pronounced, but as soon as he is sent to prison, we forget about him entirely. But what happens in prison? I can imagine!" Then, Misha added, he suddenly began to plan a journey to Sakhalin Island, thousands of miles away on the Pacific, to study life in the penal colony there. It was difficult to know, concluded Misha, whether he spoke seriously or jokingly.
A deeper, more poignant reason may be read in Chekhov's cryptic comment to Suvorin on December 7: "In January I'll be thirty. Hail the old bachelor; useless life, burn to the end!"
Part III
FRUSTRATION, TRAVEL, LITERARY MATURITY
1889-1892
chapter x
"Mania sachalinosa"
This explanation of the complex factors compelling Chekhov to seek a radical change might be more convincing if it were not for his selection of the God-forsaken Island of Sakhalin as the instrument of his spiritual regeneration. Some friends regarded the trip as little short of madness, and the reasons he gave for going were contradictory and not always serious. With his penchant for secrecy in personal matters, he created the impression of running away from some undisclosed emotional experience. One supposition is that he was in love with Lidiya Avilova and, realizing the hopelessness of this situation, had fled to the other side of the world to try to forget her and his unhappiness. All the evidence for this rests upon the assertion which she made in her memoirs years later (A. P. Chekhov in My Life, 1947). There she quotes him as declaring that he fell deeply in love with her at their first meeting in January 1889. His precipitate departure from Petersburg on that occasion, after the performance of Ivanov, and the fact that he avoided returning to the city, are offered in confirmation of the notion that he did not dare trust himself because of his powerful feeling for Lidiya. The assumption is that his Tolstoyan moral principles forbade breaking up the married life of others, and that anyway his sense of duty and finan- ial commitments to his family made it impossible for him to support, in addition, a married woman and her child.
Whatever may have been Lidiya Avilova's feeling for Chekhov, there is no tangible evidence on his part that he was in love with her. His hasty departure from Petersburg he explained repeatedly in letters to friends and in a manner consistent with his nature —he became sur-. feited with the praise showered upon him on the occasion of the sue- cess of Ivanov.1 Nor did he avoid Petersburg thereafter. He had every intention of visiting in the second half of 1889 for the opening of The Wood Demon, but when that play was rejected he understandably dropped the trip. On the other hand, he went to Petersburg at the beginning of 1890 on the business of his Sakhalin venture, and though he remained there a whole month, he appears to have made no effort to see Lidiya. He ate a lot of dinners and suppers, he later wrote Pleshcheev, "but did not captivate a single lady. . . ." Nor should one take too seriously Tolstoyan influence on Chekhov's private morals; the evidence clearly indicates that he paid frequent active tribute to the proverbial trilogy of wine, women, and song. And without in any sense being a philanderer, his personal credo of absolute freedom in human relations would justify love for another man's wife if it were genuine, although he pointed out in his fiction the misery that can ensue from such a situation. "Everyone has the right to live with whom he wishes and how he wishes," he had told Alexander in defense of his brother's passion for a married woman who also had a child. That Chekhov's exaggerated sense of duty to his family at that time could have prevented him from affirming a love once conceived is probably true, but it can be just as logically argued that it would have kept him from falling in love at all. He was surrounded by attractive girls and was very likely a bit in love with more than one, especially with Mizinova, "the beautiful Lika," who was obviously deeply attached to him. In March he wrote Suvorin that if he could only bring together in a summer dacha all his recent girl acquaintances, then it would make for a jolly kind of eventful confusion, a prospect that hardly suggests that he was spending his time mooning over Lidiya Avilova.