“ ‘Take you, for example,’ said the lawyer. ‘You are convinced at this moment that your fiancée is an angel and that there is not a man in the whole town happier than you. But I tell you: ten or twenty minutes would be enough for me to make you sit down to this table and write to your fiancée, breaking off your engagement. […]’ ”
And it was! The “little man” did write that letter.
He reflects: “What my friend said was not new, it was what everyone has known for ages, and the whole venom lay not in what he said, but in the damnable form he put it in.” The storyteller mailed the fateful letter; the lawyer, having won the argument, immediately counter-argued for the future happiness of his friend’s marriage. When the storyteller then broke down in despair over what he had just done, the lawyer explained that he himself had misaddressed the envelope on purpose so that it would be lost.
It’s a clever story about, among other things, storytelling, persuasion, the fragility and ephemeral nature of romantic love, about fallibility. And what about Chekhov’s broken engagement? Would he rue its dissolution? How the devil was he to know what the right thing to do was? About marrying Efros there were persuasive arguments for (love, settling down, dowry) and against (feisty antagonism, “cultural” differences).
Meanwhile, here the jury members are, deciding the fate of a murderer, based on arguments of talented lawyers. When the last member of the jury asks the others to think now at midnight about the thoughts of the murderer whose fate they are weighing, they don’t like realizing how vulnerable they are to the strong impressions the trial lawyers have left on them.
*
On April 24, Chekhov set out for Petersburg to see Leykin about Motley Stories; he arrived the next morning. Rosamund Bartlett notes that “The fact that Chekhov wrote so few letters during his St. Petersburg visits says a lot about the frenetic social life he led there; it also means we actually know comparatively little about what he actually got up to.”30 But on his first day of two weeks there this spring, Chekhov, “within 5 hours after arrival,” filled in a lot of details in a giddy account to his brother Mikhaiclass="underline"
Coming and staying in the furnished rooms of the merchant Oleynichikov (the corner of Nevsky and Pushkin), I washed up, put on my new coat, new pants, and sharp shoes and traveled for 15 kopecks on the Troitsky Alley to the editorial office of Fragments. There the office manager greeted me as her fiancé of the future, and she began to pour out her soul, calling Leykin a burdened person and I his favorite employee… From the editorial office to the printer Golike was no distance. But I didn’t find Golike so I went over to Bilibin’s. His fiancée opened the door to me with a lesson in her hands (she, Misha, is in two departments!), and was very glad to see me. I shuffled my new shoes and asked: “How is your health?” But later… Having drunk at I. Grek’s a glass of tea that was strong as tar, I went with him to stroll along the Neva, i.e., not with the tea, not with the tar, but with Bilibin. On the Neva we went in a boat, which made an impression on me. Off the boat we took ourselves to Dominico’s, where for 60 kopecks we ate pie, drank a glass and a cup of coffee… But that’s not all! You’ll be amazed!
From Dominico’s I went to the Petersburg Gazette.
From Pet Gaz I went to New Times, where I met with Suvorin. He received me very graciously and even gave me his hand. […]
From Suv I went to the office […]. The office manager Leont’eva, paying out the money to me, was quite not-bad. I gave her, Misha, my hand and tomorrow I will go to her to change my address… From the office I went to the office of Volkov and sent you a hundred (100) rubles […]. From Volkov I went along Nevsky to my place on Pushkin and lay down to sleep… O wonders and miracles! In five hours I did so much! Who would have predicted that from an outhouse would come such a genius?
This “such a genius” line was a Chekhov family standard, originating when Anton had arrived in Moscow to rejoin his family at nineteen. Donald Rayfield recounts it this way: “Aleksandr had brought home Fiodor as a kitten who had been abandoned in a freezing latrine. Anton was much comforted when Fiodor stretched out on his lap and to this cat he first addressed an expression he applied to himself and his brothers: ‘Who would have thought that such genius would come out of an earth closet?’ ”31 After this, mock praise of one’s own or another’s cleverness would prompt this remark by the Chekhov brothers.32 Fedor Timofeich’s name and personality would characterize the subsequently famous cat in Christmas 1887’s story “Kashtanka.” In closing, Chekhov appended a greeting to “Dunechka [Dunya Efros], Sirusichka [?] and the other laxative weaknesses.”33 Not flattering to Efros, but a mention all the same. In Petersburg, free of medical duties and immediate responsibilities to the family, Chekhov could socialize and be primarily a writer, but Efros was in his thoughts.
As Bartlett points out, though, the socializing also freed him, for the most part, from letter-writing. In the next two weeks he wrote only three letters, two of them notes, including one to his sister, in which he sent greetings again to Efros (“with the long nose”) and announcing, “I got married.” The editors of the Soviet edition note that this fib was followed by an excision from the letter.34
“About Women” (“O Zhenshchinakh,”35 April 26) satirizes men’s arrogance and condescension. The only good thing about women, the buffoon essayist-narrator declares, is that they give birth to men.
May 1886
Day and night I’m obsessed by one recurring thought: I must write, I must write, I must write…. The moment I finish a tale, I must, for some reason, write another one, then a third, and after the third, a fourth one… I’m writing nonstop, like a traveler switching horses midway, and I can’t do otherwise.
—Trigorin, The Seagull1
May started with Chekhov still in Petersburg. He would be on the move throughout the month, and perhaps coincidentally the ten stories that he would publish in May are not especially grounded or vital, except for the last one, “The Boredom of Life.”
Moving chronologically through Chekhov’s year, reading his letters and translating portions of them, I notice patterns. He writes frequently to this person or that, but then there is a new friend I have not been familiar with, or there appears the beginning of a relationship I have known about, or there is an unusual tone. I notice that in busy May there are not very many letters and only a couple that now seem of significance. Because he was good at keeping up his correspondence, was there an anxiety he felt as he rushed about and the communications from friends were being forwarded after him?… He expressed longing to get away from his Moscow medical duties and regain his bearings at Babkino, where, although he would have office hours every day to treat the local peasants, he could also wander in the woods hunting mushrooms or sit on the riverbank fishing.
On May 3 he and Bilibin took a steamer from Petersburg to Leykin’s estate on the left tributary of the Neva.2 It seems to have been a day trip. By May 6, Motley Stories was in print and at least available to Chekhov; he signed one for the printer Golike and gave another to Leykin.3 He wrote to his sister the same day, teasing her and Dunya Efros again about his having gotten married.
*
In “A Gentleman Friend” (“Znakomyi Muzhchina,” May 3), a kept woman who is down on her luck tries to entice a Jewish dentist, but she loses her nerve—and a tooth. She is undaunted and by that night finds a new man. Also published in Fragments on May 3, “A Fairy Tale: Dedicated to the Idiot Who Brags about His Contributions to the Newspaper” (“Skazka: Posvyashchaetsya Balbesu, Khvastayushchemu svoim Sotrudnichestvom v Gazetakh”) is a skit in which a fly boasts that he writes for the newspapers. The other bugs challenge him to prove it. He shows them a newspaper and all its fly-speck punctuation.