“This is a serious step,” Aleksei Borisich thinks to himself. “One can’t just decide willy-nilly… one has to seriously… from all sides…”11
While awaiting his daughter’s explanation of her situation, he continues to grumble to himself: “One has to look at it… from all sides, to chat, discuss… the holy sacrament of marriage, one can’t just approach it with frivolity.” But his wife and daughter don’t ever get around to discussing the engagement with him. They are happy and after all so is he.
It seems that every time Chekhov contemplated marriage this year, he found reasons not to proceed. But why not go ahead and take that “serious step”? Dunya Efros, however, seems to have had enough for now of his waffling.
Chekhov was writing few letters this month, probably because friends and family were with him, including Alexander and Nikolay, in whose interest he wrote to Leykin on June 24:
I’m lazy as before. The Devil knows where the energy goes… There’s almost no money, the weather is more often bad than good, and the soul is foul, and a day doesn’t come without mental troubles. I continually find foul news and surprises so that I’m even afraid of receiving letters. […]
[Alexander] was blind, but now he is […] able to see. Nikolay is finishing a charming drawing, which he’s sending tomorrow. The drawing’s excellent. A talented person, but… vous comprenez, a bad workman.
[…] In June I’m not coming: family obligations… As for July I can’t say anything positive. I’m not fishing for now. There are a lot of mushrooms, though their growth is hindered by the outrageously cold nights.12
Chekhov, after following up on the prescription he had given Leykin’s wife in April, warned Leykin off prescribing the peasants an irritating treatment made from roots: “Why do so if there’s castor oil?” It seems that like Anna in “The Boredom of Life,” Leykin had taken to treating the local peasants. Castor oil, anyway, couldn’t do any harm.
On June 27, Efros again wrote to Chekhov: “I offer you, Anton Pavlovich, sincere thanks for your letter and that you so quickly wrote me back… I’m completely in agreement with you that you’re happier there than here [she was at a dacha community]. You have Mashenka or Yaden’ka, on whom you make various experiments and whose stupidity makes everyone laugh at her. You put on various extravaganzas for fun, and there’s nothing like that here…. I was thinking about a rich fiancée for you, Anton Pavlovich, even before receiving your letter. There’s the daughter of a Moscow merchant here, not bad, quite tubby (your taste) and quite stupid (also an advantage). She yearns to escape the guardianship of her mother, of whom she’s terribly ashamed. Once she even drank a bucket and a half of vinegar to make herself pale and scare her mother. She told us that herself. It seems to me that you’ll like her—there’s a lot of money.”13
Efros was hurt and trying to sting him back.
But they weren’t through.
*
Meanwhile, there was Maria Kiseleva, probably thirteen years Chekhov’s senior.14 She was the aristocratic daughter of a playwright, Begichev, who was the director of the Imperial Theaters, and she was the wife of the owner of Babkino, Aleksei Kiselev. As a mother of two, she was an aspiring children’s book author; Chekhov, as editor and volunteer agent, would help her publish some of her stories.
The Chekhovs came from a long line of serfs, while the Kiselevs were aristocrats. Both families, however, were theatrical and musical and for three summers they seem to have for the most part enjoyed each other’s company. All were cultured and educated, and to Kiseleva’s credit, she sought out the genius Chekhov’s free literary guidance. Kiseleva’s letters to him reveal her as a prim, proud, educated, cultured person. Chekhov was patient with her and encouraged her and they became close enough friends that they could have serious arguments about literature.
July 1886
“If your friend truly wants to write, he should write and let nothing get into his way. He should submit to newspapers and magazines without caring whether they accept them or not. One good short story a year will not make him a writer, any more than hammering one nail into a piece of wood each year will make him a carpenter.”
—In conversation1
Chekhov was in Babkino for most of the month, with two short trips away. By the end of June, it seems, he had refocused and found all his literary senses engaged again.
“The Chorus Girl” (“Khoristka,” July 5) is about a wife harassing the chorus girl that her husband has been seeing. The wife, with an angry and pitiful sob story, shakes the young woman down for all of her gifted jewelry, even though the husband has only treated her to a few trinkets.
“I ask you for the things! Give me the things! I am crying…. I am humiliating myself…. If you like I will go down on my knees! If you wish it!”
Pasha shrieked with horror and waved her hands. She felt that this pale, beautiful lady who expressed herself so grandly, as though she were on the stage, really might go down on her knees to her, simply from pride, from grandeur, to exalt herself and humiliate the chorus girl.2
The cowardly husband, hiding behind Pasha’s bedroom door, is impressed by his wife’s having bullied the young woman. When his wife has left, he tells off Pasha:
“My God! She, a lady, so proud, so pure…. She was ready to go down on her knees to… to this wench! And I’ve brought her to this! I’ve allowed it!”
He clutched his head in his hands and moaned.
Chekhov fiddled with many phrasings in this story after its original publication in Fragments. It remains however a bitter comedy hinging on the hypocrisy of the wrathful, contemptuous wife, who blames the chorus girl more than her husband, and the self-pitying husband, who also after all blames the chorus girl. With each new insult our sympathy sharpens for Pasha.3
Leykin wrote Chekhov on July 5 explaining how sales of Chekhov’s book were going. As if resigned, Leykin sighed: “But how soon can books with the title ‘Motley Stories’ pay off? […] I make glib titles for my books—and they pay off in 7–8 months. If your book pays off in a year, praise God. Accept that besides that, in summer no books come out.”4
Whatever routine Chekhov had reinstituted for his writing, it was broken up when on July 7 he was asked by a judicial investigator to fill in for his colleague Dr. S. P. Uspensky, who had helped train him, and perform an autopsy several miles away. He set out the next day.5
Chekhov supplied Leykin with the humor piece “A Glossary of Terms for Young Ladies” (“Slovotolkovatel’ dlya Barishen’ ”) for the July 12 issue, the same day that the first-rate “The Schoolmaster” (“Uchitel’ ”) came out in New Times. Sysoev the schoolmaster is dying; everyone sees it. He denies his condition to himself and others.
Just before the factory manager’s house, where the festivity was to take place, he had a little mishap. He was taken with a violent fit of coughing…. He was so shaken by it that the cap flew off his head and the stick dropped out of his hand; and when the school inspector and the teachers, hearing his cough, ran out of the house, he was sitting on the bottom step, bathed in perspiration.6
There is an end-of-school-year banquet with speeches, and Sysoev can’t help himself from acting obnoxiously. Only one beleaguered colleague openly states the connection between Sysoev’s illness and behavior:
“He won’t leave off,” Lyapunov went on, snorting angrily. “He takes advantage of his position as an invalid and worries us all to death. Well, sir, I am not going to consider your being ill.”
“Let my illness alone!” cried Sysoev, angrily. “What is it to do with you? They all keep repeating it at me: illness! illness! illness!… As though I need your sympathy! Besides, where have you picked up the notion that I am ill? I was ill before the examinations, that’s true, but now I have completely recovered, there is nothing left of it but weakness.”