" 'Why is it mine? You'd do better to think up something for yourself.'
" 'Well, tomorrow I'm leaving.'
" 'Where to?'
" 'To Melikhovo/
" 'But how can you? Grigorovich, his letter . . . Such relations . . . Finally, the disappointment of Lavrov and all the others . . .'
" 'To be sure, this is understandable. I was discovered by Grigorovich, and consequently I ought to make a speech. Not to say something simple, mind you, but precisely a speech. And in this speech to say, without fail, how he discovered me. Otherwise I'll be considered ungracious. My voice must tremble and my eyes fill with tears. In this situation I'll not be able to make such a speech however much they pester me, because I simply cannot do it. Then Lavrov will arise and tell how Grigorovich discovered me. And Grigorovich will heave himself up, come over to me, stretch out his arms and embrace me, and will weep from tenderness. Old writers love to weep. Well, that is his business, but the principal thing is that I ought to weep and I'm not able to do this.' "1
Chekhov was not joking, Potapenko observed. To play the part of a hero in any scene caused him acute suffering. The dinner took place without Chekhov. Potapenko lied nobly on his behalf, announcing that Chekhov had fallen ill and had had to return to the country. But old Grigorovich unwittingly saved him any further embarrassment by at once taking the floor and launching into a speech about Chekhov, how he had discovered his talent, their correspondence. . . . Shortly after the event Chekhov informed Suvorin that those who had attended were now saying to each other, "How much we lied at that dinner and how much he lied\" (January 25,1894.)
At times, indeed, Chekhov's behavior puzzled the writers and artists he liked to dine with in Moscow restaurants on his trips from Melikhovo. Both Nemirovich-Danchenko and Potapenko wondered whether it was even possible to become a truly intimate friend of Chekhov. Many no doubt deeply loved him, and in turn he profoundly understood them. Perhaps it was his unusual capacity to see through people that kept him from revealing himself fully to his friends. Often a kind of impenctrableness surrounded his personality. Potapenko conjectures that Chekhov was nearly always in the posture of a person constantly creating, and Masha's testimony supports this notion. When free of the responsibilities of being a host, his usual attentive and friendly glance in conversation would become fixed, as though it had been turned inward, contemplating something mysterious and important that was taking place in his soul. The general conversation might be on
^The writer I. A. Bunin, a close friend of the family, once asked Chekhov's mother and sister if they ever saw him weep. "Never in his life," they both positively replied. Alexander observed that even at the death of their brother Nikolai, Chekhov never wept.
Marxism and he would suddenly ask: "Have you ever been to a stud farm? By all means you must visit one." One friend was talking to him about his recent trip to Italy, but eventually the conversation drifted into the field of literature. He * noticed that Chekhov was clearly thinking of something else and the next moment he abruptly asserted, apropos of nothing: "One ought to go to Australia." Then, blushing slightly, he returned to the subject being discussed.
On the other hand, with his inexhaustible wit he would charm his Moscow literary friends, enter into lively disputes with Goltsev and Lavrov of Russian Thought, or play unexpected pranks on one of the editors of Russian News, "Granddaddv" Mikhail Sablin, who adored Chekhov.
« 2 »
One afternoon at Melikhovo, when all save Misha were enjoying their after-dinner naps, Chekhov dashed out of his bedroom, rubbing his eyes and forehead. Misha asked if he had had another attack of the "twitches." "No," Chekhov replied, "I've just had a terrible dream. A black monk appeared to me." The impression of the dream was so powerful, Misha recalled, that it took Chekhov some time to calm down. That summer he began his story, The Black Monk, which appeared in Artist in January 1894.
The tale is unlike anything Chekhov had written previously and he never returned to its supernatural subject matter. It was an attempt, he told Suvorin, to depict a young man suffering from the mania of greatness. The Black Monk is an absorbing study of mental disease, with perhaps shrewd moral implications. A spectral black monk appears to the mediocre philosopher Kovrin, whose nerves have been wrecked by overwork, and convinces him that he is among the chosen of God, the servant of eternal truth. Kovrin's fears about his sanity are neatly dismissed by the black monk, who explains that geniuses are above the common herd and are entitled to a modicum of instability. The clash between Kovrin's morbid state of exaltation and prosaic reality further unhinges his mind, and in the end his sanity, and his young bride and her father, both of whom worship him, are sacrificed to this illusion of greatness. Chekhov may well have been satirizing in Kovrin those members of the intelligentsia who elevated themselves above the common herd in the conviction that they possessed the secret of universal happiness.
Leonticv-Shchcglov quoted the editor of Artist, F. A. Kumanin, as saying that The Black Monk was "not an important thing, very watery and unnatural. . . . But you know, there is Chekhov's name. ... It would be awkward not to print it." Readers were puzzled by the story, and Suvorin's suspicion that Chekhov had dcpicted his own spiritual malaise in Kovrin amused the author. Critics have also been sharply divided, some asserting that it was Chekhov's complete failure in his mature creative period, others that it was one of his best talcs. A friend reported to Chekhov that Tolstoy, after reading it, had declared with unusual animation and tenderness: "This is charming! Ah, how charming it is!"
That same month Russian Thought published A Woman's Kingdom, another story which Chekhov had written in 1893. merchant milieu, factory sccncs, and squalid proletarian tenements provide a striking contrast to the idyllic life of the gentry and the supernatural atmosphere in The Black Monk. The problem of the good-hcarted but lonely heroine, Anna, whose inheritance of a large factory and much wealth has in no sense dimmed the memory of her working-class origin, is the conflict between her natural desire for marriage and the limitations thrust upon her by her recently acquired social position. A prisoner of but not a slave to her money, she considers marrying one of her attractive workmen, but in the end she has to admit to herself that this deviation from propriety would be out of place in her new world. The excellencc of the story is to be found not only in the completely realized characterizations of Anna, of the lawyer Lysevich — an ingratiating gourmet — and of the sharp-featured, sly female pilgrim who urges the lonely heroine to sin in her youth, for there will be enough time left for forgiveness, but also in the realistic scenes in the factory, the workers' hovels, and in Anna's kitchen on Christmas Eve.
Chekhov's early manner of combining the grotesque and farcical with deft touches of the pathetic and somber is revived in the short story Rothschild's Fiddle, which appeared in the Moscow newspaper Russian News in February. The losses of old Yakov in his coffin-making sour his disposition and eventually dominate his whole existence. When he measures his sick wife for a coffin, he methodically enters this item as a loss in his account book. In his literal-mindedncss, he finally decides that only in death are there absolutely no losses; there, all is gain. But in the end his wife's death stirs up in him a train of remorseful thinking. The hard-bitten old Yakov sorrowfully reflects that in their fifty-two years of life together he had never once spoken a kind word to this crushed woman, who with a quiet smile had welcomed her demise as a long-sought release. And just before his own death Yakov wonders why people, with hatred and malice in their hearts, hinder each other from living. As a last gesture of repentance for his harsh treatment of Rothschild, a fellow musician in a pick-up orchestra, he presents him with his precious fiddle. Like the best of Chekhov's early and similar tales, this piece is a perfect little study in the harmony of mood and tone.