As he smelled the autumn in the air, Chekhov yearned to take off with the cranes. In fact, flight had by now become a psychic need of his nature. No matter how busy or how seemingly content he was, the desire for change, to be somewhere else, obsessed him. In the very thick of his summer activities, he wrote friends that he would like to go to the Crimea, to Norway, to America. When Suvorin stopped over on his way to Feodosiya, Chekhov accompanied him on part of the journey. He even made plans to visit him in August, for he thirsted for the sea, the sands, and nocturnal conversations, and he gave up his proposed trip only because he did not wish to incur more debt.
Part of his difficulty was overwork and the conviction that his efforts were getting him nowhere. Suvorin, worried over these occasional fits of despondency, advised him to leave his family, but Chekhov replied that this was not in his power, that the family was his law of necessity. He told Alexander that he sometimes dreamed of winning forty thousand roubles in a lottery and cutting himself off completely from writing, which he was sick of, and buying a piece of land where he could live in idle seclusion. In truth, he had begun to taste the good things of life and wanted more of them. He wrote Suvorin that he envied him. "I should now like carpets, an open fireplace, bronzes, and learned conversation. Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan! In women I love beauty above all things, and in the history of mankind, culture, expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit!" (August 30, 1894.) Instead, as he left Bogimovo for Moscow at the beginning of September, he had to be content with the knowledge that he had done a good deal of writing that summer and that with his earnings he had paid off a thousand roubles of debt.
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If Chekhov's experience in the hell of Sakhalin had aroused him to the need of doing something practical about the ills of the country, they had also increased his impatience with the feckless philosophizing of the do-nothing intelligentsia. Rather unfairly, he vented this annoyance on the most celebrated of all the contemporary theorists, Tolstoy, who had actually attempted to do a great deal that was practical in aiding the underprivileged. Having just read the "Afterword" to The Kreut- zer Sonata, Chekhov wrote Suvorin: "To hell with the philosophy of the mighty of this world! All the eminent sages are as despotic as generals, and as discourteous and lacking in delicacy as generals, because they know they won't be punished. Diogenes spat in people's beards, knowing that nothing would happen to him; Tolstoy abuses doctors as scoundrels and is ignorant in important questions, because he is like a Diogenes whom you can't lock up or scold in the newspapers. And so, to hell with the philosophy of the great of this world! All of it . . . isn't worth a single filly in his story Kholstomer."4 (September 8, i8gi.)
ТЪе "Moscow Hamlets" he saw around him in the city, the superfluous intellectual types — eternally bored, utterly self-centered, poseurs in all things cultural, and incapable of improving the lot of others because they were totally unaware of their own failings — Chekhov bit- ingly satirized in an article, In Moscow, which appeared under a pseudonym in New Times in December, 1891. The "Hamlet" in the article naively keeps wondering about the advice of a certain gentleman whom he had confronted with the ever-present problem of his boredom: "Oh, take a piece of telephone wire and hang yourself to the first telephone pole!"
Chekhov himself tried to do something practical by exposing one of these charlatans among the intelligentsia who had perpetrated a scientific fraud. A brochure of the distinguished scientist K. A. Timiryazev was brought to his attention, in which he revealed the extensive waste
4 Tolstoy's famous short story about the horse Stridcr.
of public funds on an animal experimental laboratory in the Moscow Zoological Garden. Professor A. P. Bogdanov, who ran the laboratory, or rather completely neglected it and yet made false claims about the scientific value of his experiments, had so far been able to keep the truth of the situation out of the press. Chekhov made a serious investigation of the facts, in which he availed himself of the assistance of his Bogimovo friend, the zoologist Wagner. The result was a scathing article, Conjurors (October, 1891), published anonymously in New Times, for he feared to harm the career of Wagner whose friendship with him was known among scientists. With a deft combination of scientific skill, satire, and humor, Chekhov exposed the deception of the animal experimental laboratory and heaped ridicule on the spurious claims of Professor Bogdanov. The article caused a considerable stir in scientific circles.
In the stories that Chekhov wrote over 1891, this concern with the problems of the intelligentsia takes a more imaginative and psychological direction. An exception is The Peasant Women, which he wrote in a hurry, tearing himself away from his work on the Sakhalin book, "for I'm sitting here literally without a two-kopeck piece in my pocket," he told Suvorin. "It is dull," he added as an afterthought, "to write about the peasantry." (June 16, 1891.) The story was published in New Times (June, 1891). The evil-begetting power of evil, much as in Tolstoy's drama of peasant life, The Power of Darkness — a play that fascinated Chekhov when he saw it and which may well have influenced his central theme — penetrated the atmosphere of the tale. For there is something horrifying at the end, when the two young peasant wives are in bed together, after having heard Matvei's gruesome tale of the seduC' tion of his friend's wife and the husband's murder. The wanton Var^ vara whispers to Sofya that all their troubles would be over if they did away with her drunkard of a husband and their common father-in-law. And we somehow know that they will commit this terrible crime. It is interesting that I. Gorbunov-Posadov, agent for The Intermediary, Tolstoy's series of inexpensive booklets designed to entertain and offer moral instruction to the mass reader, asked and received Chekhov'.i permission to reprint The Peasant Women, because it "excellently depicted the type of a people's Tartuffe, a debauchee, a hypocrite, and an atheist."
If A Dreary Story marks the beginning of a more mature, psychologically denser period in Chekhov's writing, then The Duel may be regarded as a continuation of this kind of probing in depth into the life forces which bring about a state of mutual isolation among his characters. He worked hard over this lengthy effort, which, he said, cost him a pound of nerves. It disappointed him to have to publish this novella in New Times, a daily newspaper, for it had to appear piecemeal over eleven issues during October and November, 1891. Some of the staff members, whose regular contributions had to be sidetracked, expressed their annoyance over what they described as Chekhov's "monopoly" of New Times.