Chekhov’s narrator remarks, “Apparently misfortune attracts people.”
He had kept his own “misfortune” with Efros quiet and out of sight. In his letter to Leykin on November 6, as he had effectively extinguished any possibility of marriage, Chekhov opened with a joke, possibly because he was using wedding stationery that had the letter (Ч) for Chekhov stamped on it: “I’m going to get married.” He also wanted to tease Leykin, who was continually vexed by Chekhov’s resistance to dating his letters. In the twelve-volume Soviet edition of Chekhov’s letters, the editors often explain the various calculations they have made to provide possible or probable dates on the letters. The editors probably sympathized with Leykin’s repeated complaint and sighed here at Chekhov’s explanation:
In the last letter I purposely didn’t put the date on and made a bet with myself that you wouldn’t leave such an incident without attention. For me, the date on letters is a prejudice and excessive embellishment. I understand the date on payments, business articles and letters, on checks, receipts, and so on, but on a letter, which goes to the address in only one day, it can go without a date.3
On November 10, Chekhov published the skit “Kalkhas” (“Kalkhas”), which he would rewrite in 1887 as a one-man one-act, “Swansong.” A drunk fifty-eight-year-old actor delivers a monologue reviewing his life in the theater. Chekhov was now considering writing a full-length play.
“Dreams” (“Mechti,” November 15) may be the most famous of this month’s stories; it is, along with “Excellent People,” concerned with Tolstoyan ideas about the meaning and purpose of life. The dreamer is a man in his thirties who, having refused to give his name, has been arrested for vagrancy and is being escorted to a transport to Siberia. He impresses his escorts, who are as moved by his life story as most readers will be. When Chekhov composes Tolstoy-inspired stories, he is not dominated or oppressed by Tolstoy; I see Chekhov even more distinctly. In all the ways that the story is not written by Tolstoy, there Chekhov is. For instance, the dreamer tells of his previous experience in prison:
“… For four years I went about with my head shaved and fetters on my legs.”
“What for?”
“For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so, my mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into my master’s glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the storeroom, numbers of them; it was easy to make a mistake over them.”
The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:
“She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man’s soul is a slumbering forest! It may have been an accident, or maybe she could not endure the affront of seeing the master prefer another servant…. Perhaps she put it in on purpose, God knows! I was young then, and did not understand it all… now I remember that our master had taken another mistress and mamma was greatly disturbed. Our trial lasted nearly two years…. Mamma was condemned to penal servitude for twenty years, and I, on account of my youth, only to seven.”4
Chekhov stands out from Tolstoy in his assertion that “another man’s soul is a slumbering forest!” Tolstoy did not concede such ignorance; he saw into others’ souls. The tramp admits to his curious escorts that he has run away from prison. By not giving his name, he can’t be sent back to prison, only to a settlement in eastern Siberia.
And why is the story called “Dreams”?
The tramp muttered and looked, not at his listeners, but away into the distance. Naïve as his dreams were, they were uttered in such a genuine and heartfelt tone that it was difficult not to believe in them. The tramp’s little mouth was screwed up in a smile. His eyes and little nose and his whole face were fixed and blank with blissful anticipation of happiness in the distant future. The constables listened and looked at him gravely, not without sympathy. They, too, believed in his dreams.
“I am not afraid of Siberia,” the tramp went on muttering. “Siberia is just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as here. They are just as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only there is more freedom there and people are better off….”
In 1890, Chekhov would see Siberia for himself, as he traveled across its entire width to the Pacific prison island of Sakhalin.
But the tramp’s beautiful dreams of the life there, thousands of miles away from the mud through which they are walking to a local lockup, are made of smoke.
Whether [one of the escorts] envied the tramp’s transparent happiness, or whether he felt in his heart that dreams of happiness were out of keeping with the gray fog and the dirty brown mud—anyway, he looked sternly at the tramp and said:
“It’s all very well, to be sure, only you won’t reach those plenteous regions, brother. How could you? Before you’d gone two hundred miles you’d give up your soul to God. Just look what a weakling you are! Here you’ve hardly gone five miles and you can’t get your breath.”
Tolstoy may well have found a sober and profound conclusion to such a story, but he would not have popped the tramp’s bubble. Chekhov anyway does bring us to think about those pacifying, inspiring dreams that come to us in the most hopeless times. Dispirited for the moment, perhaps the tramp will dream another dream.
Chekhov enjoyed making fun of creative artists’ self-importance, including their need for peace and quiet. He needed it too! I will include a discussion of “Hush!” (November 15) in the next chapter, when he, writing on deadline as usual, would compose an additional tale of a writer working on deadline.
He had Leykin, the pestering deadline-reminder, as company in Moscow from November 16 to 19. Leykin stayed with the Chekhov family the last night before returning by train to Petersburg. What they did and talked about is unknown.
Though I enjoy seeing the connections between what Chekhov was writing and what was going on in his life, most enjoyable of all is simply rereading the stories again in the midst of a particular month. He would exclude “At the Mill” (“Na Mel’nitse,” November 17) from his Collected Works, which led to Constance Garnett’s overlooking it. Or maybe she read it and didn’t care for this tale about a terribly miserly, grumbling, kvetching miller. The miller’s mother comes to beg for a little money. The monks who are already there for the milling of their grain, and who themselves have been insulted by the miller for among other things having gone fishing in what he thinks of as his river, are appalled by the miller’s rudeness.
We can enjoy this story because we do not have suffer the miller’s inventive and relentless cynical abuse. One of the monks exclaims, “Holy Lord, there is nothing harder for me to obey than to come to the mill! It is real hell! Hell, truly hell!”5 I find myself thinking that at some point the miller will bend. But no, he has figured out the world, and he self-righteously abuses one and all for their offenses against him, against life, against his ideas of fairness. “It was evident that to scold or to swear was as much a habit with him, as the sucking of his pipe.”