These characters take in the impressions each in his own way: “… the crows, awakened by the noise of the wheels, stirred among the foliage and uttered prolonged plaintive cries as though they knew the doctor’s son was dead and that Abogin’s wife was ill.”
When Abogin breaks the silence, we understand why he says it and why Kirilov would say nothing in reply:
“It’s an agonizing state! One never loves those who are near one so much as when one is in danger of losing them.”
Not because of Abogin’s words but because the carriage crosses a river does Kirilov come to—realizing he really should not have left his wife on her own.
But it’s too late. They’ve come too far to go back. They continue on their way through the dimness.
In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape….
Again, though separate from each other, unrealizing of the other, the same mood has descended on them. Or is it mostly Chekhov’s mood?
Abogin anticipates being crushed, while Kirilov already has been. Arriving at the house, Abogin says: “ ‘If anything happens… I shall not survive it.’ ”
They enter the quiet house:
Now the doctor and Abogin, who till then had been in darkness, could see each other clearly. The doctor was tall and stooped, was untidily dressed and not good-looking. There was an unpleasantly harsh, morose, and unfriendly look about his lips, thick as a negro’s, his aquiline nose, and listless, apathetic eyes. His unkempt head and sunken temples, the premature grayness of his long, narrow beard through which his chin was visible, the pale gray hue of his skin and his careless, uncouth manners—the harshness of all this was suggestive of years of poverty, of ill fortune, of weariness with life and with men. Looking at his frigid figure one could hardly believe that this man had a wife, that he was capable of weeping over his child.
We see why Abogin doesn’t fully sympathize with Kirilov’s tragedy: he can’t see the suffering of the doctor, which has been internalized. The doctor is someone he needs but is not quite fully realized as a person to him. On the flip side:
Abogin presented a very different appearance. He was a thick-set, sturdy-looking, fair man with a big head and large, soft features; he was elegantly dressed in the very latest fashion. In his carriage, his closely buttoned coat, his long hair, and his face there was a suggestion of something generous, leonine; he walked with his head erect and his chest squared, he spoke in an agreeable baritone, and there was a shade of refined almost feminine elegance in the manner in which he took off his scarf and smoothed his hair. Even his paleness and the childlike terror with which he looked up at the stairs as he took off his coat did not detract from his dignity nor diminish the air of sleekness, health, and aplomb which characterized his whole figure.
Kirilov perceives the vitality—the unattractive vitality of Abogin. Why should he have so much life? But he does! He has so much vitality and takes it for granted. It’s appalling! There is a limitation in this view, but under the circumstances it is too much to ask of Kirilov to appreciate Abogin as a complete human being.
The first time reading this story, or the first time coming back to it after a decade or two, a reader of Chekhov might not anticipate or remember what happens next—but Chekhov keeps us so much on our toes that we feel anything could happen. Abogin is prepared for one kind of tragedy: She has died! But the lack of bustle in the house seems to preclude that possibility.
“There is nobody and no sound,” he said going up the stairs. “There is no commotion. God grant all is well.”
He has the doctor wait in the fancy drawing room. (I wonder why he wouldn’t have the doctor rush up the stairs with him?) Kirilov, not letting himself think, takes in the details of the room. Eventually, “Somewhere far away in the adjoining rooms someone uttered a loud exclamation…” We don’t know and Kirilov doesn’t know what’s happened, but we know we’ll soon find out.
Five minutes later:
In the doorway stood Abogin, but he was not the same as when he had gone out. The look of sleekness and refined elegance had disappeared—his face, his hands, his attitude were contorted by a revolting expression of something between horror and agonizing physical pain. His nose, his lips, his moustache, all his features were moving and seemed trying to tear themselves from his face, his eyes looked as though they were laughing with agony….
Abogin took a heavy stride into the drawing room, bent forward, moaned, and shook his fists.
“She has deceived me,” he cried, with a strong emphasis on the second syllable of the verb. “Deceived me, gone away. She fell ill and sent me for the doctor only to run away with that clown Papchinsky! My God!”
And Abogin goes on and on, in naked agony before the doctor. He has been transformed by his grief—it is grief, though on a different order, almost anyone would say, from that of Kirilov. Chekhov does not say this. And of course we sympathize with Abogin, to a point. We sympathize as humans for someone genuinely suffering, but if we imagine being in Kirilov’s shoes, comparing griefs, Abogin’s would seem mockable.
Abogin took a heavy step toward the doctor, held out his soft white fists in his face, and shaking them went on yelling:
“Gone away! Deceived me! But why this deception? My God! My God! What need of this dirty, scoundrelly trick, this diabolical, snakish farce? What have I done to her? Gone away!”
Tears gushed from his eyes. He turned on one foot and began pacing up and down the drawing room. Now in his short coat, his fashionable narrow trousers which made his legs look disproportionately slim, with his big head and long mane he was extremely like a lion.
I had misread the story. Kirilov does not understand what Abogin has been saying. At the beginning of the story, Chekhov told us: “Kirilov listened and said nothing, as though he did not understand Russian.” He is in that state again.
A gleam of curiosity came into the apathetic face of the doctor. He got up and looked at Abogin.
“Excuse me, where is the patient?” he said.
“The patient! The patient!” cried Abogin, laughing, crying, and still brandishing his fists. “She is not ill, but accursed! The baseness! The vileness! The devil himself could not have imagined anything more loathsome! She sent me off that she might run away with a buffoon, a dull-witted clown, an Alphonse! Oh God, better she had died! I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!”
Now Kirilov gets it. Now it all sinks in. He should or could have just walked out the door back to the carriage. Maybe that is what Chekhov would have done. But Chekhov shows us why this man, about whom we know little beyond his strained life and the brand-new tragedy that marks the end of the rest of his life, instead makes a stand that brings about his loss of self-controclass="underline"