“What?” inquires the officer.
Iona gives a wry smile, and straining his throat, brings out huskily: “My son… er… my son died this week, sir.”
“H’m! What did he die of?”
Iona’s misery “is immense, beyond all bounds,” but Chekhov also shows us how and why it is awkward for the listeners, even when they make some attempt at pity: “Iona looks to see the effect produced by his words, but he sees nothing.” The customers are busy, self-occupied. They don’t want to hear or think about this. And Iona sees they can’t or won’t give him the quiet listening he needs.
He puts on his coat and goes into the stables where his mare is standing. He thinks about oats, about hay, about the weather…. He cannot think about his son when he is alone…. To talk about him with someone is possible, but to think of him and picture him is insufferable anguish….
“Are you munching?” Iona asks his mare, seeing her shining eyes. “There, munch away, munch away…. Since we have not earned enough for oats, we will eat hay…. Yes,… I have grown too old to drive…. My son ought to be driving, not I…. He was a real cabman…. He ought to have lived….”
Iona is silent for a while, and then he goes on:
“That’s how it is, old girl…. Kuzma Ionich is gone…. He said goodbye to me…. He went and died for no reason…. Now, suppose you had a little colt, and you were own mother to that little colt…. And all at once that same little colt went and died…. You’d be sorry, wouldn’t you?…”
The little mare munches, listens, and breathes on her master’s hands. Iona is carried away and tells her all about it.43
The mare is the only creature doing this human thing that all the humans are failing to do. If Chekhov had written only this story, it would still be read and appreciated today. It was translated in his own lifetime into more languages (eight) than any of his others. Years later, when his brother Alexander was grieving over the serious illness of one of his sons, he recalled details of this story and declared that “Misery” had made Chekhov “immortal.”44
Chekhov included it in the book that he was preparing, the yet untitled Motley Stories. He made few corrections from the original publication in the Petersburg Gazette, but one of them was deleting a too obvious conclusion: “There is nothing one can do better than listening to a person.”45 Chekhov’s medical friends noted that he was an excellent listener and observer. Nodding, chewing oats but otherwise silent. A critic, L. E. Obolenskiy, wrote ecstatically about the story, declaring that Antosha Chekhonte’s “loving heart sees a whole life behind it, which he is so able to understand and so love that we begin to love and understand it!”46
Before Chekhov had ever deliberately signed a story with his own name, in the single month of January 1886, he wrote two gold-star stories, “Children” and “Misery.” The author Antosha Chekhonte was already Anton Chekhov, only not quite yet in name.
*
It’s not clear what records if any Chekhov kept of his patients. As the chronology of his life is revealed in the streamlined Letopis’, that almost daily chore is scarcely mentioned, though medicine, he continued to joke, was his “wife.” The first mention of medical work in the Letopis’ of 1886 comes on January 28, when the editors note that Chekhov “treated” his friend Isaac Levitan, for what Chekhov told Leykin was psychosis.47 Earlier in the month Chekhov had tried to persuade Leykin to give Levitan, on the cusp of artistic fame as a landscape painter, an advance of forty rubles. But Leykin had had enough for the time being of Levitan and Nikolay Chekhov as illustrators. He had a good case against them: they would agree to do pieces for Fragments and then forget or put them off and be late, so he turned Chekhov down. Leykin suggested instead that Levitan submit completed drawings, for which he would indeed pay him forty rubles.
Levitan was a year younger than Chekhov, also hugely talented, but unlike Chekhov in that he was conspicuously moody and susceptible to falling in love. He was attractive and had various affairs. This summer or next, he would ask Maria Chekhova to marry him, and Chekhov disapproved of his sister’s accepting him.48 Levitan and Chekhov had a falling out in the early 1890s over a story Chekhov wrote, “The Grasshopper.” Levitan thought it too closely resembled details of an affair of Levitan’s with one of Chekhov’s former girlfriends. But they made up; Chekhov’s fallings out with friends never seemed to last. He was characteristically forgiving and regularly forgiven.
*
Nine days after his last letter to Leykin, Chekhov seemed to be trying to make up to him, but he was also preparing his editor for being left behind. He wondered in his January 28 letter to Leykin, Why are you mad? Can we take care of matters with the book? He agreed to all the conditions about the book that Leykin had mentioned in the last letter. But Chekhov wanted to clarify what his own duties would be: “All the editing I leave to your oversight, counting myself impotent in publishing. I take on myself only the choice of stories, the look of the cover and those functions that you find necessary for me on the part of the passing it to Stupin and so on. I consider myself at your command. Know that for all you give the book and time, I count the publication of my book a large kindness on the part of Fragments and I award you for this work a would-be Stanislas of the 3rd Rank.”49 (That is, a worthless honorary medal.)
He also had questions and desires about the book. He could send more stories if needed, or take some out if there were too many. He would like his friend Franz Schechtel to draw the cover. He didn’t know why, but he thought the book would be a hit. Couldn’t there be 2,500 copies instead of 2,000? These were humble enough questions, but Leykin did not take writers’ suggestions on publication matters.
And what did Leykin want to call the book, wondered Chekhov: “I’ve gone over all the botanical, zoological and all the verses and elements, but I didn’t find one. I thought up only ‘Stories of A. Chekhonte’ and ‘Trifles.’ […] The price of the book and so on, don’t ask me. I repeat, I agree with everything… However, wouldn’t it be possible to send me the latest galley?”
Leykin answered grouchily a couple of days later that he would consider Schechtel’s drawing, and this after all resulted in the use of Schechtel’s work.
The frontispiece illustration by Franz Schechtel of Motley Stories.
Finally, at the end of January, we learn that Dr. Chekhov had in fact been working “every day” and going out to treat N. S. Yanov, another brother of Maria Yanova.50
Chekhov would soon explain to his new editor Suvorin the special demands of his schedule:
I write comparatively little: no more than two or three brief stories a week. I can find the time to work for New Times, but I’m glad nonetheless that you didn’t make deadlines a condition for my becoming a contributor. Deadlines lead to haste and the feeling of having a weight around your neck. Both of these together make it hard for me to work. For me personally a deadline is inconvenient if only because I’m a physician and practice medicine. I can never guarantee that I won’t be torn away from my desk for a whole day on any given day. The risk of my being late and not finishing a story is always there.51
On top of his medical duties and weekly deadlines for two publications, he added one more, because his family “needed the money”… and because he must have wanted to see where his pen would lead him if it had no constraints on length or topics—or treatment of those topics. Despite his various duties, he would almost never miss a New Times deadline.
February 1886
Yes, I wrote to you once that you must be unconcerned when you write pathetic stories. And you did not understand me. You may weep and moan over your stories, you may suffer with your heroes, but I consider one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect.