“… Whether it’s your doing or not, I only know that when your blood’s on fire there’s sure to be bad weather, and when there’s bad weather there’s bound to be some crazy fellow turning up here. It happens so every time! So it must be you!”
And of course Savely is ridiculous: there’s no such thing as witches! And yet, once we see her in the presence of the postman, we can’t help wondering:
The postman began undoing the knot in his hood. The sexton’s wife gazed into his eyes, and seemed trying to look right into his soul.
“You ought to have a cup of tea…” she said.
The weary postman is hooked:
And the postman, not yet quite awake, not yet quite able to shake off the intoxicating sleep of youth and fatigue, was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire for the sake of which mail-bags, postal trains… and all things in the world, are forgotten. He glanced at the door in a frightened way, as though he wanted to escape or hide himself, seized Raissa around the waist, and was just bending over the lamp to put out the light, when he heard the tramp of boots in the outer room, and the driver appeared in the doorway. Savely peeped in over his shoulder. The postman dropped his hands quickly and stood still as though irresolute.
Okay, I admit the postman might also believe Raissa is a witch. And Chekhov, in this month of March, wonders here, as he will in next week’s “Agafya,” what is it, how is it that we can be “overwhelmed by a desire for the sake of which […] all things in the world are forgotten”? What does it mean that there are desires bigger than all our conscious and deliberate choices?
*
He wrote to Leykin on March 8 to compliment the proofreader who had reviewed the first galley of Motley Stories: “I didn’t find a single mistake on all of the five sheets. You’re right when you called her ideal. If of course she wouldn’t be insulted and if you advise me so, on the publication of the book I will give her something.”18 He also caught up Leykin on his brothers; namely, that Alexander “is crawling with debt and wants to get out of Novorossiysk…. The Devil knows how he arranges his life! He doesn’t drink, smoke, attend balls, but he can’t live in the provinces at 120–150 rubles a month, while I with a big family for the last 2–3 years live in Moscow at 100–120 rubles. Apparently, he lives disgustingly, eats crap!” Leykin would question Chekhov’s own financial management. It might seem to some of us that the twenty-six-year-old was managing pretty well.
Meanwhile, Chekhov told Leykin, “Today I went to Nikolay and brought him back home. He only just received the money from The Whole World Illustrated, to which he gave Aksakov’s funeral. He lives of course not just as he might. To my question if he desired to work for Fragments, he answered: ‘Of course! Tomorrow I’m sending them a drawing!’ ” Chekhov added, in case Leykin wasn’t skeptical enough already, that the “tomorrow” might mean weeks or months. Though Maria Chekhova as an editor twenty years later of her brother’s letters didn’t suggest an early or any particular March date of Chekhov’s long letter to Nikolay, the mentions of Alexander’s debts and Chekhov’s retrieval of Nikolay on March 7 from some sort of dissipated setting indicate that the letter had been sent and received, and that Chekhov was now following up and bringing Nikolay back under the family’s wing.
On Chekhov’s medical day off, Sunday, he would be writing Leykin a new piece (probably “My Conversation with the Postmaster”), “if nothing bothers me.”
By the time Chekhov wrote Leykin on March 4 about the distractions he had had while writing “Poison” (“Otrava,” published March 8), he was writing or about to write “A Story without an End” (“Rasskaz bez Kontsa,” March 10), in which an unnamed narrator tells of being awakened in the middle of the night to go check on the lodger of an old landlady next door. Confused, annoyed, he goes to investigate and finds a coffin with a body in it and discovers in the dark a man who has shot himself but is still alive. The impoverished and grieving husband Vassilyev is a suicide in all but achievement, as the bullet has passed through his ribs and out his back. The narrator, though not a doctor, neatly analyzes the wound and helps patch up Vassilyev and listens to him. (The narrator would have gone for a doctor, but the wounded man doesn’t want him to leave.)
The crummy living situation suggests to the narrator what has led to this double tragedy:
I sat silent, looking about the room into which fate had brought me so unexpectedly. What poverty! This man who was the possessor of a handsome, effeminate face and a luxuriant well-tended beard, had surroundings which a humble working man would not have envied. A sofa with its American-leather torn and peeling, a humble greasy-looking chair, a table covered with a little bit of paper, and a wretched oleograph on the wall, that was all I saw. Damp, gloomy, and gray.19
Vassilyev is irritated when the narrator recognizes him from a party in which Vassilyev was an actor “in some private theatricals”:
“I don’t understand your curiosity,” he muttered. “You’ll be asking me next what it was drove me to commit suicide!”
Before a minute had passed, he turned around toward me again, opened his eyes and said in a tearful voice:
“Excuse me for taking such a tone, but you’ll admit I’m right! To ask a convict how he got into prison, or a suicide why he shot himself is not generous… and indelicate. To think of gratifying idle curiosity at the expense of another man’s nerves!”
“There is no need to excite yourself…. It never occurred to me to question you about your motives.”
“You would have asked…. It’s what people always do. Though it would be no use to ask. If I told you, you would not believe or understand…. I must own I don’t understand it myself…. There are phrases used in the police reports and newspapers such as: ‘unrequited love,’ and ‘hopeless poverty,’ but the reasons are not known…. They are not known to me, nor to you, nor to your newspaper offices, where they have the impudence to write ‘The diary of a suicide.’ God alone understands the state of a man’s soul when he takes his own life; but men know nothing about it.”
This complaint or observation is Chekhov’s as much as it is Vassilyev’s. We outsiders assign motives and reasons to others’ actions—and yet even the person who has taken the action doesn’t know why they did it. Although Chekhov himself could have spoken Vassilyev’s next words, the narrator is skeptical; he says that Vassilyev “went on in the tone of some great professor”:
“Man will never understand the psychological subtleties of suicide! How can one speak of reasons? Today the reason makes one snatch up a revolver, while tomorrow the same reason seems not worth a rotten egg. It all depends most likely on the particular condition of the individual at the given moment…. Take me for instance. Half an hour ago, I had a passionate desire for death, now when the candle is lighted, and you are sitting by me, I don’t even think of the hour of death. Explain that change if you can! Am I better off, or has my wife risen from the dead? Is it the influence of the light on me, or the presence of an outsider?”
“The light certainly has an influence…” I muttered for the sake of saying something. “The influence of light on the organism….”
“The influence of light…. We admit it! But you know men do shoot themselves by candle-light! And it would be ignominious indeed for the heroes of your novels if such a trifling thing as a candle were to change the course of the drama so abruptly. All this nonsense can be explained perhaps, but not by us. It’s useless to ask questions or give explanations of what one does not understand….”
Besides that the narrator is an author (of humor pieces, in fact), he does not closely resemble Chekhov—except perhaps at this next moment, when he says, abruptly and to my and Vassilyev’s surprise:
“Forgive me,” I said, “but… judging by the expression of your face, it seems to me that at this moment you… are posing.”