Is Chekhov offering a “moral of the story,” or is this only Bykovsky’s?… The story is not over. It goes on continuously marvelously and surprisingly. But, I’ll answer before proceeding: it is Chekhov’s moraclass="underline" “all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at home.” All the hardest questions are easy to answer if they don’t actually involve ourselves and our loved ones. This is a theme in one story after another. Chekhov already knew it; Bykovsky is only understanding it at this instant.
In Babkino, Chekhov occasionally made pictures and stories for Maria Kiseleva’s children. This child Seryozha’s pictures, however, are an artifact of the boy’s imagination that puzzle the father:
Yevgeny Petrovich sat down to the table and pulled one of Seryozha’s drawings to him. In it there was a house with a crooked roof, and smoke which came out of the chimney like a flash of lightning in zigzags up to the very edge of the paper; beside the house stood a soldier with dots for eyes and a bayonet that looked like the figure 4.
“A man can’t be taller than a house,” said the prosecutor.
We don’t groan too much over Yevgeny’s misplay here; he’s a father learning on the job.
Seryozha got on his knee, and moved about for some time to get comfortably settled there.
“No, papa!” he said, looking at his drawing. “If you were to draw the soldier small you would not see his eyes.”
How often our loved ones reveal themselves, and how often instead of appreciating the revelation we strive to get them to cover themselves back up. Papa wonders:
Ought he to argue with him? From daily observation of his son the prosecutor had become convinced that children, like savages, have their own artistic standpoints and requirements peculiar to them, beyond the grasp of grown-up people.
Chekhov shoulders Papa aside now and opens the floor to the rest of us:
Had he been attentively observed, Seryozha might have struck a grown-up person as abnormal. He thought it possible and reasonable to draw men taller than houses, and to represent in pencil, not only objects, but even his sensations. Thus he would depict the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke like spherical blurs, a whistle in the form of a spiral thread…. To his mind sound was closely connected with form and color, so that when he painted letters he invariably painted the letter L yellow, M red, A black, and so on.
Papa hasn’t “attentively observed” Seryozha. But someone like Chekhov, our scientist-writer, has. He noticed those amazing depictions, described as synesthesia, one manifestation of which is associating sounds to numbers or letters or particular colors.
Papa is puzzled, in new territory as a parent. The next moment is as intimate as he might have ever been with his son:
The prosecutor felt the child’s breathing on his face, he was continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a warm soft feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha’s jacket.
He looked at the boy’s big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though from those wide pupils there looked out at him his mother and his wife and everything that he had ever loved.
And still this remarkable, heartbreaking story is not over. Chekhov’s genius renews and renews. After the prosecutor repents to himself over having thought of punishing the boy, he means to send the boy to bed, but Seryozha objects, insisting on a story.
And here in the final two pages of “Home,” following Papa’s random, rambling improvisation, we might learn more about how Chekhov wrote his stories than from his claim to Korolenko that he could create a new story from the most random item, an ashtray:5
Yevgeny Petrovich on his free evenings was in the habit of telling Seryozha stories. Like most people engaged in practical affairs, he did not know a single poem by heart, and could not remember a single fairy tale, so he had to improvise. As a rule he began with the stereotyped: “In a certain country, in a certain kingdom,” then he heaped up all kinds of innocent nonsense and had no notion as he told the beginning how the story would go on, and how it would end. Scenes, characters, and situations were taken at random, impromptu, and the plot and the moral came of itself as it were, with no plan on the part of the storyteller.
Had Chekhov “planned” this very story he was writing? I don’t think so, though he scarcely changed a word of it in its many republishings. I think he discovered depths in “Home” as he composed it. He had written to Alexander on February 22 or 23 that the story was “very ‘clever’ (vumniy6) but not very smart.” It’s clever all right:
Seryozha was very fond of this improvisation, and the prosecutor noticed that the simpler and the less ingenious the plot, the stronger the impression it made on the child.
Chekhov had noticed this, too.
“Listen,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “Once upon a time, in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived an old, very old emperor with a long gray beard, and… and with great gray moustaches like this. Well, he lived in a glass palace which sparkled and glittered in the sun, like a great piece of clear ice. The palace, my boy, stood in a huge garden, in which there grew oranges, you know… bergamots, cherries… tulips, roses, and lilies-of-the-valley were in flower in it, and birds of different colors sang there…. Yes…. On the trees there hung little glass bells, and, when the wind blew, they rang so sweetly that one was never tired of hearing them. Glass gives a softer, tenderer note than metals…. Well, what next? There were fountains in the garden…. Do you remember you saw a fountain at Auntie Sonya’s summer villa? Well, there were fountains just like that in the emperor’s garden, only ever so much bigger, and the jets of water reached to the top of the highest poplar.”
What’s happened for Papa and I believe what happened hundreds and hundreds of times for Chekhov is that he conjured up for himself one flash after another of connections and associations. Not fancy, but clear, visual connections between the imagination and memory. Like dreams.
Yevgeny Petrovich thought a moment, and went on:
“The old emperor had an only son and heir of his kingdom—a boy as little as you. He was a good boy. He was never naughty, he went to bed early, he never touched anything on the table, and altogether he was a sensible boy. He had only one fault, he used to smoke….”
Seryozha listened attentively, and looked into his father’s eyes without blinking.
The prosecutor went on, thinking: “What next?”
I think Papa, having noticed Seryozha’s raptness, experiences a moment of selfconsciousness. Now how does he end this nonsense? Like other stymied storytellers, he decides death is a fitting conclusion:
He spun out a long rigmarole, and ended like this:
“The emperor’s son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and died when he was twenty. His infirm and sick old father was left without anyone to help him. There was no one to govern the kingdom and defend the palace. Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed the palace, and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor little bells in the garden…. That’s what happened.”
This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovich as absurd and naïve, but the whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a sinking voice:
“I am not going to smoke any more….”
When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and down the room and smiled to himself.
“They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,” he meditated. “It may be so, but that’s no comfort. It’s not the right way, all the same…. Why must morality and truth never be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments, sweetened and gilded like pills? It’s not normal…. It’s falsification… deception… tricks….”