In the third sentence, Chekhov mentions the hero’s horse, who is also suffering. “His horse, who had not eaten for a long time and was miserable with the heat, drooped his head sadly.”
As I imagine Chekhov imagining this story, there’s the hero, Yefrem Denisov, but the other living creature also has to live. This characterization of the horse is not how Tolstoy would do it, but Tolstoy would also do it. Chekhov characteristically sees and feels his way into a scene.
He concludes the first paragraph: “The forest, a green monster, climbed up a terraced hill, and seemed endless.” This is so simple, so childlike a perception, but to notice such things, to feel the vitality of the world, is a childlike and artistic perspective.
And now the explanation of the situation, after the scene-setting: “Yefrem was traveling about to collect money for the building of a church to replace the one that had burned down in his native village in the province of Kursk.” Chekhov further and clearly explains Yefrem’s humble quest, and then his naturally despairing feeling: “Yefrem did not know where he was, and the forest, which swallowed the road, held out no promise of a settlement nearby.”
Chekhov describes the woods and the smell of the air.
Did he naturally turn on all his senses as he wrote? He suggested, in a letter the following winter, that taking in the smell of an imagined scene was what he strove to do: “I am writing a steppe story. I am writing, but I don’t get the smell of hay…”13 He was like a hungry hunter entering and proceeding through an alien forest. All his senses were up and attentive in expectation and wariness.
This is when the crook suddenly appears, voice first. Yefrem has been looking, seemingly, with attention into the woods. Someone addressing a passing stranger without first making himself seen means he is someone to be leery of.
Now Yefrem takes him in: “Close to the road, his head propped on an anthill, lay a lanky peasant of about thirty wearing a cotton shirt and tight citified trousers tucked into reddish boots. Near his head was a cap that went with some uniform, now so faded that its original color could only be guessed from the spot that had once flaunted a cockade.”
Yefrem makes conversation, addressing the odd-faced stranger as “Fellow Christian,” and asking how far to the next village. Though the stranger may have served in the military, he speaks uneducatedly: “ ‘Not so far. Maloye ain’t no more’n three or four miles from here.’ ”
They exchange names. The crook is Kuzma. We don’t yet know he’s a crook, but one of his first questions makes one suspicious: “ ‘You’re collecting for a church?’ ”
And when Yefrem explains that the church burned down, Kuzma says exactly the thing to put anyone on the alert: “ ‘How did that happen?’ ”
Yefrem tells the unhappy but fateful story.
“Kuzma strode alongside and listened. He was sober”—This is, I assume, Yefrem’s steady, clear-eyed perception of Kuzma and not Chekhov telling us from narrative omniscience. A drunk man is one kind of a menace, a sober man another. Anyway,
He was sober, but he walked as though he were drunk, waving his arms and tramping now beside the cart, now in front of it…
“And what do you get out of it? They pay you wages?” he asked.
“What wages? I am traveling for the salvation of my soul, the community sent me…”
“So you’re traveling for nothing?”
“Who’s to pay me wages? The community sent me, you know—they’ll harvest my crops, sow the rye, pay the taxes for me… So it’s not for nothing!”
“And how do you eat?”
“I beg my bread.”
Yefrem grows leerier. He is surprised that Kuzma has no immediate appreciation of the idea of someone going out into the world to serve his community.
And Kuzma inquired further, what would happen to the horse and the money if Yefrem himself died, where would people put their contributions if the box were suddenly filled, and what if the bottom of the box fell out, and so on.
Does Kuzma purposefully give himself away? Or is he, as suggested by the epigraph, just a “savage predatory animal”?
Yefrem, getting no chance to answer all these questions, merely panted and stared at his fellow traveler in wonder.
Yefrem and Kuzma spend the night in the village, where Kuzma has chatted up the locals, and in the morning the old man sees that the money is gone. Kuzma returns to their shared quarters and feigns outrage when Yefrem accuses him. Yefrem, perhaps from having dealt with such criminals before, says, “Fine, then you didn’t steal it.”
Kuzma can’t stand that Yefrem accepts his denial. He pesters Yefrem as they go on their way. But Yefrem won’t rise to the bait and Kuzma angrily throws the remaining money at him and says it was all a joke. He explains away the missing money and excuses himself for it. Then, guiltily, Kuzma asks how he can make up for it, and Yefrem tells him to go back and confess to the priest, and then send the money when he has it to Yefrem’s village for the church. Kuzma seems to enjoy the thought of having an opportunity to make up for his theft, but as soon as they get to the next village, he is completely himself again, a charismatic lying cheat.
In 1899, a dozen years after composing “An Encounter,” having passed it over for inclusion in any of his collections, Chekhov remembered the story and considered it for the collected edition, but he decided not to try to revise it. Even shortly after it was published this month, he said he didn’t like it.
How can I disagree so often with Chekhov’s assessments of his stories? Lazarev wrote to Ezhov that Chekhov thought the story “Home” was “bad. It stretches out (too much).” As for “An Encounter,” which Lazarev called (rightly) “a beautiful story,” he confided to his pal that “Chekhov doesn’t like it, that is, partly and correctly in that he doesn’t and I don’t like the moral attached to the end. That ought not to be. A moral ought not to be ‘expressed,’ but if it’s there ought to be unnoticed.”14
The story ends:
At noon, when the cart stopped at Telibeyevo, Kuzma disappeared in the pothouse. Yefrem rested for about two hours and all that time Kuzma stayed in the pothouse. One could hear him swearing in there and bragging, pounding the bar with his fist, and the drunken peasants jeering at him. And when Yefrem was leaving Telibeyevo, a brawl had started in the pothouse, and Kuzma was shrilly threatening someone and shouting that he would send for the police.
The moral is… don’t start fights in Telibeyevo bars? I and readers of the Collected Works must not be seeing the moral ending Lazarev and Chekhov saw.15
*
What seems to have completely sealed Chekhov’s devotion to Suvorin was spending several hours with him on the evening of March 12. Suvorin asked him to put together a collection of his New Times stories for publication as a book. The rich, fond, and generous editor gave Chekhov an advance on his pay for his continued contributions to New Times, so that Chekhov could definitely make his long-desired spring trip to Taganrog.
Chekhov wrote home again on the 13th. Money problems solved, he had a whole new mood:
I’m hereby informing you that I’m alive and well and I haven’t contracted typhus. At first I was depressed, as I was bored and feared an impoverished future, but now I feel positive and in character. Surprises rain on my head: 1) the whole time it’s been spring weather, and only being without a coat has prevented me from wandering about, 2) everywhere I’m greeted here with open arms, 3) Suvorin, speaking like a Jew, loaned me money (a secret: 300 rubles) and asked me to send him material for a book edition of my New Times stories. The book will be published by the summer, under conditions quite beneficial for me. And so on. […] I’m going to the south on the 31st or earlier.16