Despite Chekhov’s momentary embarrassment, most of the stories went into the Collected Works, which inclusion a dozen years later had to survive Chekhov’s steely criticism. Perhaps this fall he was embarrassed about exploiting his own fame—In the Twilight was very recent and popular—or about the Verners exploiting his fame, or that he was not (and never would be) a good negotiator, only receiving 150 rubles.
On the other hand, Chekhov had so many fine stories in his archives, so why not publish them while they were wanted?
*
Chekhov had pep in his step when he wrote to first reader Ezhov on October 27: “You, as the groomsman of my Ivanov, I regard it as not out of place to communicate the following: Ivanov will definitely go on at the end of November or early December.”21 Ivanov would be played by Davydov, with whom Chekhov had sat until three in the morning the night before. Davydov had told Chekhov he had done by instinct all that makes a play correct. Chekhov beamed: “From this comes the moraclass="underline" ‘Don’t be shy, young people!’ ”
And so, Ezhov’s friend and mentor continued, “Of course it’s bad that you’re lazy and write little. You’re a ‘beginner’ in the full meaning of that word and ought not to forget under the fear of a death sentence that each line in the present establishes capital for the future. If now you don’t train your hand and your head to discipline and forced marches, if you don’t hurry and tune yourself, in 3–4 years it will be already too late.” He scolded him and Lazarev for not making hay: “You both work too little.” He pestered Ezhov to submit pieces to every issue of Fragments. As a sidenote, he confided: “For example, my brother Agafopod [Alexander] wrote meagerly and now already feels written out…. You know that whoever’s a little and lazy cockroach begins impotence early. I say this to you on a scientific basis.” He invited little lazy Ezhov, who was teaching outside of Moscow, to visit at Christmas. Chekhov, meanwhile, had persuaded Lazarev to start working on a play about Hamlet with him; Chekhov had started it, all Lazarev had to do was finish it.22
Lazarev wrote Ezhov about this conversation, and then years later wrote it up in a memoir:
On one of my latest meetings with him, he gave me “Hamlet, Prince of Danes.”
“Take the play with you to Kirzhach, A. S.! I began, but I’m too lazy to finish it. I’m too busy and tormented by Ivanov. Write the end, we’ll work it over together.”
I countered that I had never written a play and I was afraid I could not justify the hopes that he raised on me as a playwright.
“Nonsense, nonsense! You have to begin, my dear. Plays—they’re the bread for our brother. Write twenty plays, they’ll make you a fortune!”23
What’s compelling about this recollection is hearing Chekhov’s energetic, encouraging, irrefutable voice: his boldness about taking on projects. The joint manuscript was lost, but Lazarev’s description of the play sounds plausible and modern:
The play’s action took place behind scenes at a provincial theater at the time of rehearsing Hamlet. […] The first act began with preparing for the rehearsal. […]
The first act was supposed to end with a scandal and general confusion.
In the second act it was suggested to give a scene from “Hamlet.”
Thinking over the first act, I sketched out some combinations and a plan for the first act to the end. […] Making for myself a copy of the original Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, together with my sketches, I sent them to Chekhov […]
Chekhov replied in the middle of November with several comments and directives.
*
If one writes to a confidant about one’s mood, perhaps the mood is likely to be low? On October 27, the same day he wrote cheerfully to Ezhov, he wrote to Alexander, kvetching about Alexander not having yet sent a fee from the Petersburg Gazette; he didn’t have any money! “I’ve fallen into a depression again; I’m not working. I sit all day in my armchair looking at the ceiling. However, there’s the practice.”24 By which, did Chekhov mean that being a doctor was comparatively satisfying? Alexander invited him to come to Petersburg for a couple of months and liven up.
Chekhov’s distraction was Ivanov. Rehearsals were starting.
*
On October 29, “The Old House: A Story Told by a Houseowner” (“Stariy Dom”) was published. In this sociological tale of poverty and criminality, Chekhov is unrelenting. Surveying the rooms in the house that is about to be knocked down to be replaced by a new house, the narrator grimly notes:
The door at the end of the corridor leads to the wash-house, where by day they washed clothes and at night made an uproar and drank beer. And in that flat of three rooms everything is saturated with bacteria and bacilli. It’s not nice there. Many lodgers have died there, and I can positively assert that that flat was at some time cursed by someone, and that together with its human lodgers there was always another lodger, unseen, living in it.25
He recalls the funeral of a mother and relates the pitiful story of her family, who lived in that flat:
It seemed to me that he [the widower] himself, his children, the grandmother and Yegorich, were already marked down by that unseen being which lived with them in that flat. I am a thoroughly superstitious man, perhaps, because I am a houseowner and for forty years have had to do with lodgers. I believe if you don’t win at cards from the beginning you will go on losing to the end; when fate wants to wipe you and your family off the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its persecution, and the first misfortune is commonly only the first of a long series…. Misfortunes are like stones. One stone has only to drop from a high cliff for others to be set rolling after it.
This narrator is unusual. An older man, he likes the way he sounds: he concludes there with a nice folksy, wise summation. He writes quotably. Chekhov determinedly resisted writing fine quotable sentences. Wit and wisdom were to be suppressed in the service of description, so that only the description left its impression.
The father of the family loses his job, becomes a drunk, the family disintegrates.
Chekhov in his service as a doctor saw such lodgings; witnessing such poverty, he despaired.
*
“The Cattle-Dealers” (“Kholodnaya Krov,’ ” October 31 and November 3): Over the course of several days a father and son ride railroad cars with the cattle they’re bringing to a city. Malahin, the father, has to keep bribing railroad officials, track inspectors, everyone who has anything to do with letting the eight cattle-cars pass. He’s a drinker, but he is meticulous in teaching his son Yasha the ropes of this peculiar business.
Malahin, laying out a complaint in the midst of the frequently delayed journey, seeks to achieve as a storyteller what only an artist can give a sense of: “he wants to describe in the protocol not any separate episode but his whole journey, with all his losses and conversations with station-masters—to describe it lengthily and vindictively.”
The primary description of “his whole journey,” could Malahin have done it, is this:
The van is quite full. If one glances in through the dim light of the lantern, for the first moment the eyes receive an impression of something shapeless, monstrous, and unmistakably alive, something very much like gigantic crabs which move their claws and feelers, crowd together, and noiselessly climb up the walls to the ceiling; but if one looks more closely, horns and their shadows, long lean backs, dirty hides, tails, eyes begin to stand out in the dusk. They are cattle and their shadows. There are eight of them in the van. Some turn around and stare at the men and swing their tails. Others try to stand or lie down more comfortably. They are crowded. If one lies down the others must stand and huddle closer. No manger, no halter, no litter, not a wisp of hay….