In the same issue of Fragments, he had the skit “List of People Having the Right to Travel Free on the Russian Railroad.” Chekhov did not have this “right,” but his friend Schechtel did, and on June 8 he followed up his late May letter to Schechtel to encourage him again to hop on a train and come up to Babkino. The letter is the best kind of invitation to a friend—insistent yet funny. He lists all the reasons why Schechtel should come: fishing, swimming, the grass, the air, the birds; and of course painting (their mutual friend the landscape master Levitan was already there painting and so was Nikolay Chekhov). He himself was dashing off numerous skits and stories, but he told Schechtel he felt “lazy.”
On June 15 Dunya Efros wrote the first of two surviving letters from her to Chekhov. “Dear Anton Pavlovich. You, perhaps, are amazed at my letter, but I am unable to find another way to find out everything that is going on with you, how you’re doing. I sent three letters to your sister and not one reply. What this signifies I decidedly don’t know. Couldn’t you get her to write me, or maybe, not be too lazy to write me yourself…”6
Chekhov replied, lazy or not, but what he said is unknown, except as what can be guessed from her reply on June 27.
*
He didn’t write a story for New Times this month, but he indeed came through for Leykin, as promised. His other stories were for the Petersburg Gazette. In “Fears” (“Strakhi,” June 16) the narrator relates three instances in his life where he had been scared out of his wits:
“It’s stupid!” I said to myself. “That phenomenon is only terrible because I don’t understand it; everything we don’t understand is mysterious.”7
The narrator eventually concludes that “cowardice was stronger than common sense.”
Chekhov on the other hand wasn’t too cowardly to write to Dunya Efros at this time, though his letter has disappeared. He went to Moscow at some point and returned by June 23.
The biographer Magarshack concludes that Babkino “had a most beneficial effect on Chekhov’s health, chiefly owing to the regular life he led there. He usually got up at seven o’clock and immediately sat down at his improvised desk (the bottom part of a big sewing machine from which the treadle had been removed) and wrote his stories, raising his eyes from time to time to have a look at the magnificent view through the large, square window, as though drawing inspiration from it. His room was sparsely furnished: a small bed covered with a striped blanket, a tall wardrobe at the bottom of the bed by the window, a bedside table with a candle in a cheap candlestick, a washbasin, and on the wall above the head of the bed a pair of chemist’s scales in which he weighed out the medicines for the patients who flocked to him from all over the countryside. […] His surgery hours were from ten to one o’clock. At one o’clock he usually had lunch and then went for a walk in the woods. After tea he sat down to his writing again. In the afternoon he would fish or have a game of croquet, which would sometimes go on till after nightfall, when they would stick lighted candles near the [wickets]. At eight o’clock he had dinner, after which they all went to spend the evenings with the Kiselevs…. Vladislavlev would sing the latest songs… (Chekhov’s favorite piece of music was Chopin’s Nocturne in G major and during his last years in Yalta he would often ask a visiting pianist to play it to him.)”8
Mikhail Chekhov’s drawing of Chekhov’s room at Babkino
Mikhail Chekhov’s copy of Levitan’s sketch of the prospect by the main Kiselev house.
A simple story without consequential events, and seemingly set near Babkino, is “The Chemist’s Wife” (“Aptekarsha,” June 21). One early morning after a party, an officer and a military doctor temporarily stationed in the area idly think about how to go about seducing the drugstore owner’s wife. They have the usual or typical male arrogance about their right to do so, and as bachelors the usual or typical contempt for husbands:
“The pharmacist is asleep. And his wife is asleep, too. She is a pretty woman, Obtyosov.”
“I saw her. I liked her very much…. Tell me, doctor, can she possibly love that jawbone of an ass? Can she?”
“No, most likely she does not love him,” sighed the doctor, speaking as though he were sorry for the chemist. “The little woman is asleep behind the window, Obtyosov, what? Tossing with the heat, her little mouth half open… and one little foot hanging out of bed. I bet that fool the chemist doesn’t realise what a lucky fellow he is…. No doubt he sees no difference between a woman and a bottle of carbolic!”9
She, for her part, is listless, unsatisfied, and happens to be awake next to her snoozing husband and seems to have overheard them. When they ring, she throws on a dress and slippers and hustles to the shop door.
They don’t have much of a plan besides chatting her up. They ask for throat lozenges, then soda powder, then seltzer, all to maintain her company. The doctor knows enough to ask for an alcoholic chemical mixture, and she fetches it for them to add to their seltzer:
“What a flirt you are, though!” the doctor laughed softly, looking slyly at her from under his brows. “Your eyes seem to be firing shot: piff-paff! I congratulate you: you’ve conquered! We are vanquished!”
The chemist’s wife looked at their ruddy faces, listened to their chatter, and soon she, too, grew quite lively. Oh, she felt so gay! She entered into the conversation, she laughed, flirted, and even, after repeated requests from the customers, drank two ounces of wine.
They linger and kiss her hand farewell. She scolds them, but she is excited: “She ran quickly into the bedroom and sat down in the same place. She saw the doctor and the officer, on coming out of the shop, walk lazily away a distance of twenty paces; then they stopped and began whispering together. What about? Her heart throbbed, there was a pulsing in her temples, and why she did not know…. Her heart beat violently as though those two whispering outside were deciding her fate.”
By the time the officer works up his nerve and returns to ring at the shop, the bell awakens the chemist, who gets up, irritated with his wife for not answering it. He serves the dismayed officer, and returns to the bedroom:
“How unhappy I am!” said the chemist’s wife, looking angrily at her husband, who was undressing quickly to get into bed again. “Oh, how unhappy I am!” she repeated, suddenly melting into bitter tears. “And nobody knows, nobody knows….”
We know!
These young, attractive, lonely, bored women populate Chekhov’s fictional world. The chemist’s wife might be, in that world, a cousin of “The Witch,” stuck in the boonies (probably in the neighborhood of Babkino) with a dull, unappreciative husband.
“Not Wanted” (“Lishnie Lyudi,” June 23), on the other hand, is about an unappreciated husband, a lawyer who takes the train two or three times a week to the dacha community where his wife and son are spending the summer. We learn from his fellow traveler at the station that the trips there and back to the city are “all petty expenditure not worth considering, but, mind you, in the course of the summer it will run up to some two hundred rubles. Of course, to be in the lap of Nature is worth any money—I don’t dispute it… idyllic and all the rest of it; but of course, with the salary an official gets, as you know yourself, every farthing has to be considered.”10 Chekhov was never free from worry about money, even in “idyllic” Babkino. The lawyer is grouchy from all the inconveniences of the journey. As the title of the story indicates, his wife, occupied with friends putting on amateur plays and musical performances, doesn’t actually need him, and he himself is impatient with his son, who needs looking after.
“A Serious Step” (“Ser’eznyi Shag,” June 28) is about a father who is irritated with his wife’s permissiveness in regard to their daughter, who is being courted and who, in the course of the story, seems to have been proposed to: