On July 20, Dr. Chekhov traveled to Moscow to get a toothache treated and at the end of the month went to Zvenigorod to cover duties for his colleague, Dr. Uspensky. He spent a few days there, but was back in Babkino by the 28th, whence he wrote the actress Elizaveta Sakharova a warm letter. She was getting married and had asked Chekhov to be her “best man.” He couldn’t help his family friend with that request, but he passed along some news about having just seen her aunt in Zvenigorod and shared a pleasant recollection of when she had hung out with him and Levitan, who was at Babkino now: “His talent grows not by the day but by the hour. Nikolay works little. My sister lives and is well. Misha [Mikhail Chekhov] is in love and philosophizes, and so on and so forth…”
On July 30, he wrote defensively, apologetically, evasively to Leykin: “Thank you for the letter, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich! Thank you that it’s not curses, as I expected….” He had had a bad few days, sick for one thing, the toothache for another, and his cursed hemorrhoids:
I wanted to write lying down, but this trick doesn’t suit me, and even more that together with the bumps the general situation was revolting. Five days ago I went Zvenigorod to substitute for a short time for my colleague, the district doctor, where I was busy up to my neck and sick. That’s all… Now: why didn’t I write you that there wouldn’t be stories? The reason why I didn’t write is that with each hour I didn’t lose the hope of sitting down and writing a story… There was not a telegraph office in Voskresensk….
I’m still sick. My soul’s mood is disgusting, and there’s no money (in July I didn’t work anywhere), and domestic circumstances are not joyful… The weather is crummy.10
He had invited Leykin to come to Babkino, but Leykin, feeling slighted, didn’t come because he said he didn’t have the proper directions. Chekhov gave him directions now and reminded Leykin that even though he hadn’t received the request for those directions about how to get to Babkino, it would have been very easy and he could’ve asked anybody once he got to Voskresensk.
August 1886
You complain that my heroes are gloomy,—alas! that’s not my fault. This happens apart from my will, and when I write it does not seem to me that I am writing gloomily; in any case, as I work I am always in excellent spirits. It has been observed that gloomy, melancholy people always write cheerfully, while those who enjoy life put their depression into their writings.
—To a fellow writer1
August was a light month again for writing letters—there were, it seems, three, though only one has survived—but he wrote half a dozen stories, including one of his greatest love stories.
All of the stories except the last touch on or focus on marriage. As far as anyone knows, he saw nothing of Dunya Efros this month, but she was, evidently, on his mind. In August’s first story, retitled from “Ty i Vy” (“You [informal] and You [formal],” August 4) to “Women Make Trouble” by Avrahm Yarmolinsky in The Unknown Chekhov, a foolish peasant gives rambling testimony about a hooligan who drank and hit everyone in the vicinity, including the hooligan’s wife. The peasant, confirming for us that he is a blockhead, blames the innocent wife.
Chekhov leaves no doubt that husbands are, as a category, beasts. “The Husband” (“Muzh,” August 9) is about the self-justifying cruelty of a jealous husband who hates seeing his wife enjoy dancing with some visiting regimental soldiers. It’s not that Shalikov’s wife hasn’t been swept off her feet; she has! But so have all the other provincial women:
The ladies felt as though they were on wings. Intoxicated by the dancing, the music, and the clank of spurs, they threw themselves heart and soul into making the acquaintance of their new partners, and quite forgot their old civilian friends. Their fathers and husbands, forced temporarily into the background, crowded around the meagre refreshment table in the entrance hall. All these government cashiers, secretaries, clerks, and superintendents—stale, sickly looking, clumsy figures—were perfectly well aware of their inferiority. They did not even enter the ball-room, but contented themselves with watching their wives and daughters in the distance dancing with the accomplished and graceful officers.2
And this husband, instead of resigning himself to the husbands’ and fathers’ inevitable position, becomes riled: “It was not jealousy he was feeling. He was ill-humored—first, because the room was taken up with dancing and there was nowhere he could play a game of cards; secondly, because he could not endure the sound of wind instruments; and, thirdly, because he fancied the officers treated the civilians somewhat too casually and disdainfully. But what above everything revolted him and moved him to indignation was the expression of happiness on his wife’s face.”
That last phrase puts me in mind of stories by D. H. Lawrence, who would one day mock Chekhov as “a willy wet-leg,”3 but who also so well describes aspects of marital spite of the sort that Chekhov depicts in this story. The husband despises his wife:
Not only her face but her whole figure was expressive of beatitude…. The tax-collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire to jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had forgotten herself, that life was by no means so delightful as she fancied now in her excitement….
“You wait; I’ll teach you to smile so blissfully,” he muttered. “You are not a boarding-school miss, you are not a girl. An old fright ought to realise she is a fright!”
When that mazurka ends, Shalikov steps in with the order that his wife go home with him:
Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed all over: she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly looking, ill-humored, ordinary husband.
When she balks, Shalikov swears he will make a scene if she doesn’t cooperate. Chekhov’s keen reading of Shalikov’s selfish, resentful impulses shows he hates Shalikov even more than Shalikov’s wife does:
The tax-collector walked behind his wife, and watching her downcast, sorrowful, humiliated little figure, he recalled the look of beatitude which had so irritated him at the club, and the consciousness that the beatitude was gone filled his soul with triumph. He was pleased and satisfied, and at the same time he felt the lack of something; he would have liked to go back to the club and make every one feel dreary and miserable, so that all might know how stale and worthless life is when you walk along the streets in the dark and hear the slush of the mud under your feet, and when you know that you will wake up next morning with nothing to look forward to but vodka and cards. Oh, how awful it is!
The superb next story, “A Misfortune” (“Neschast’e,” August 16), which Chekhov wrote for New Times, has perhaps made wives and girlfriends blush for themselves and caused lovelorn men, me for instance, to groan with recognition. There are love stories and there are love stories. There are no serious love stories that end happily in Chekhov.
Chekhov’s understanding of fidelity and sexuality were completely different from Tolstoy’s. Chekhov understood sexuality without typical contemporary prejudices. He knew physiology and accepted the sexual drive as part of our human nature. He was not wanton himself and lived long enough with his illness to see his own sexual drive diminish.
He understood restraint and advised his recklessly horny brother Nikolay to restrain himself sexually. He thought, in fact, that artists needed to conserve their amorousness.
Even so, Chekhov was a very attractive man and quite susceptible to attractive, educated, lively women. He had girlfriends, affairs, flirtations. He was a tough read for his female friends, and women went after him and taunted and teased him, but only at the end, nearing forty, like his hero Gurov in “The Lady with the Dog,” did he fall head over heels in love.