*
Chekhov was a do-gooder. He believed that we help others through generous acts and sympathy rather than through well-meaning advice and admonitions. “The Beggar” (“Nishchiy,” January 19) is a good and probably familiar story to most Chekhov readers: A drunken beggar is apparently reformed by taking on odd jobs that a lawyer has offered him. Although Chekhov had been on a kind of campaign against lying in 1886, he makes us think twice about its absolute prohibition when the lawyer, having detected the lies in the educated beggar’s sob-story, says, “You are poor and hungry, but that does not give you the right to lie so shamelessly!”31
But doesn’t it actually give him the right? The lawyer’s sense of justice is too harsh for Chekhov:
The beggar at first defended himself, protested with oaths, then he sank into silence and hung his head, overcome with shame.
“Sir!” he said, laying his hand on his heart, “I really was… lying! I am not a student and not a village schoolmaster. All that’s mere invention! I used to be in the Russian choir, and I was turned out of it for drunkenness. But what can I do? Believe me, in God’s name, I can’t get on without lying—when I tell the truth no one will give me anything. With the truth one may die of hunger and freeze without a night’s lodging! What you say is true, I understand that, but… what am I to do?”
Even the lawyer is won over by this argument, and he offers an alternative: payment for chopping wood. Chekhov was no pushover, though. He well understood the beggar’s laziness and lack of discipline—it was quite similar to Chekhov’s brother Nikolay’s. The beggar, anyway, agrees to the work:
It was evident from his demeanor that he had consented to go and chop wood, not because he was hungry and wanted to earn money, but simply from shame and amour propre, because he had been taken at his word. It was clear, too, that he was suffering from the effects of vodka, that he was unwell, and felt not the faintest inclination to work.
The lawyer hires him for monthly work. Eventually the lawyer moves away. Two years later he and the ex-beggar run into each other at the ticket window of a theater. The beggar is respectably dressed and has a real job. The proud lawyer learns now, however, the true story of the beggar’s remarkable conversion:
“I used to come to you to chop wood and she [the cook] would begin: ‘Ah, you drunkard! You God-forsaken man! And yet death does not take you!’ and then she would sit opposite me, lamenting, looking into my face and wailing: ‘You unlucky fellow! You have no gladness in this world, and in the next you will burn in hell, poor drunkard! You poor sorrowful creature!’ and she always went on in that style, you know. How often she upset herself, and how many tears she shed over me I can’t tell you. But what affected me most—she chopped the wood for me! Do you know, sir, I never chopped a single log for you—she did it all! How it was she saved me, how it was I changed, looking at her, and gave up drinking, I can’t explain. I only know that what she said and the noble way she behaved brought about a change in my soul, and I shall never forget it.”
I wonder if Chekhov had seen or was only hoping to see this change in his older brothers? Perhaps, he had decided, all the righteous scolding wouldn’t do as much for Alexander or Nikolay as a self-conversion inspired by someone’s unexpected kindness.
*
The heaviest of this month’s heavy stories, “Enemies” (“Vragi,” January 20), is Chekhov’s greatest and most disturbing story of the winter. Where did it come from? He had probably just finished “Enemies” on January 14 when he was responding to Kiseleva’s letter objecting to the contents of “Mire.”
Before I started to reread it again, what I remembered is…
… a doctor and his wife are grieving. Their young son, their lone child, has just died. They are devastated.
Someone arrives to ask for the doctor’s services.
The doctor explains the situation.
The someone, a landowner, understands but insists that his wife has a serious illness and requires help right away.
The doctor explains again why he can’t leave his wife right now.
The man insists, and threatens to report him for not doing his duty.
The estate is “not far,” he says and the miserable doctor gives in.
They get there and the landowner finds a letter from his wife that she has run away with her lover.
He is wretched and dramatic and wants sympathy, and the doctor blows up at him.
They say terrible things at each other.
The landowner sends the doctor home in his carriage.
Both of them are out of their minds with hatred of each other, which Chekhov directly points at and explains that both of them, in any other circumstances, would have been decent and sympathetic to the other.
My sympathy is not at all with the landowner: So what? His wife left him.
The doctor and his wife—the tragedy of their son’s death is the darkest of clouds that will never leave them. They will never recover. They will live but not recover.
The landowner? He has money. He’ll remarry and maybe to someone who loves him and he’ll think of himself as better off.
Now I’ll read it in Russian. Why? If I say, “to go as far as possible as I can into the story,” I would be skeptical of my claim. Will I really take in any more of it through Russian than I do in English?
And why focus on this story?
It’s not characteristic of Chekhov, is it?
It’s not uncharacteristic, how about that?
The anger, the fury, the disgusting hatred the enemies fling at each other—had Chekhov felt it or only witnessed it?
Before starting the Russian, I check the “Variants” page in the back of the volume and see that Chekhov made almost no changes in it after its initial publication. Just a few rephrasings…
I’ve now read the Russian. It is so full of surprises. I did not misrepresent the plot in my memory above, but the effects and surprises abound.
The first paragraph is two sentences, but they contain so much; they do what everyone who ever wrote a short story wants to do in the opening paragraph. It’s tempting to say the beginning is too polished. It’s the kind of beginning, it’s better to say, that everyone would want to be able to write. Like a story by Heinrich von Kleist: at the moment the story starts, you know the dramatic situation and the setting and the impending next action. (I will be quoting Constance Garnett’s translation rather than my herky-jerky reading of the Russian.)
Between nine and ten on a dark September evening the only son of the district doctor, Kirilov, a child of six, called Andrey, died of diphtheria. Just as the doctor’s wife sank on her knees by the dead child’s bedside and was overwhelmed by the first rush of despair there came a sharp ring at the bell in the entry.
I’ve already summarized the story, so let me just comment where surprises come up or there are interesting details I didn’t note. I didn’t remember, for instance, that Dr. Kirilov and the estate-owner Abogin have met once before. They’re in the dark of the house, however, and can’t see each other’s faces.
I forgot that when the doctor tells him his son has just now died, Abogin reacts like a human being:
“Is it possible!” whispered Abogin, stepping back a pace. “My God, at what an unlucky moment I have come! A wonderfully unhappy day… wonderfully. What a coincidence…. It’s as though it were on purpose!”
Abogin took hold of the door-handle and bowed his head. He was evidently hesitating and did not know what to do—whether to go away or to continue entreating the doctor.