On the 14th, Chekhov visited Grigorovich, who seemed to him to be dying: “The old man kissed me on the forehead, hugged me, began crying […]” Chekhov sat by the writer’s bedside for two and a half hours and found himself “cursing the whole time my worthless medicine.” He only left when Grigorovich’s own doctor arrived.17
Chekhov departed for Moscow the next day.
Between the train ride home from Petersburg and the 18th, Chekhov selected and edited sixteen of his New Times stories18 for the collection that Suvorin had just solicited. Quick and efficient, Chekhov suggested the format and layout that he had seen in Suvorin’s edition of Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories had become popular in literary Russia. Unlike Poe, Chekhov couldn’t think up a good title, so he suggested “My Stories” or “Stories.”19 Alexander, now in good standing with Suvorin, would be the supervising editor. There were eventually nineteen stories in this collection, In the Twilight; it included three stories from the Petersburg Gazette.20
*
On March 17, safe and sound in Moscow, Chekhov wrote to Maria Kiseleva about his trip. He had talked to a textbook publisher in Petersburg about her children’s book, which he now encouraged her to publish as soon as possible. As for himself, he had received that “big advance” from Suvorin. Chekhov, not one to crow, actually crowed: “Petersburg recognizes only one writer right now: me!”21
He told her also, on the other hand: “I went there with a frightened imagination; on the way, I encountered two coffins.” Death was everywhere he went. He saw children dying in agony from croup. Dispirited, he remarked, “True, one could start drinking. However, they say everything is usable in belle lettres.” Indeed. By March 21, Chekhov had finished the 1,850-word “Typhus” and sent it to the Petersburg Gazette, where it was published on March 23. Several years later, he would tell Yelena Shavrova, one of his young writing mentees, “For myself, I stand by the following rule: I write about sickness only when it forms part of the characters or adds color to them. I am afraid of frightening people with diseases.”22
It seems that Chekhov was able to communicate all the reasons anyone could have to be sensibly frightened of typhus. I began translating “Typhus” (“Tif”) at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.23 Sentence 1: “Young Lieutenant Klimov was riding in the smoking car on the post train from Petersburg to Moscow.” Chekhov had just been on this train. Klimov is coming down with typhus but doesn’t realize it. He becomes cranky and discombobulated. A fellow passenger, an old man, a “foreigner,” smokes a stinky pipe. Klimov “daydreamed about how good it would be to rip the raspy pipe from his hand, toss it under the stuffed seat, and drive the Finn away into another car. ‘Disgusting people these Finns… and Greeks!’ he thought. ‘Absolutely worthless, good for nothing, rotten people, they’re only taking up space on the planet. What use are they?’ ”
And the thought of Finns and Greeks produced something like nausea throughout his entire body. For comparison, he wanted to think about the French and Italians, but the memory of those people somehow only evoked images of organ-grinders, naked women, and the foreign oleographs that hung over the dresser at his aunt’s house.
Chekhov reminds us that such reflexive Dostoevskian prejudices say nothing about Finns, Greeks, the French, or Italians. Expressed prejudices such as these by Klimov are signs of weakness and confusion. They’re ranklings inspired by weariness and sickness:
The officer didn’t feel right at all. His arms and legs somehow didn’t fit on the seat, despite the whole seat being available; his mouth was dry and sticky, and his head was filled with a heavy fog. His thoughts, it seemed, roamed not only through his mind but out beyond his skull, among the seats and the people shrouded in the nighttime haze. Through his head-sludge, as if it were in a dream, he heard a murmur of voices, the knocking of wheels, the clomping of doors. Bells, the conductor’s whistling, passengers rushing along the platform, resounded more often than usual. Time passed swiftly, unnoticeably, and so it seemed as if the train was stopping at a new station every minute, and metallic voices floated into the carriage.
Chekhov gives us such a keen, fine description of physical discomfort and mental derangement. Upon arrival in Moscow, Klimov makes his way home to the apartment that he shares with his aunt and younger sister, who is studying to become a teacher, just as Maria Chekhova was.
When Katya greeted him, she had in her hands a notebook and a pencil, and he recalled that she was preparing for her teacher’s exam. Not answering their questions or greetings, only gasping from the heat, he aimlessly passed through all the rooms and, reaching his bed, fell onto his pillow. The Finn, the red coat, the woman with the white teeth, the stink of the frying meat, and the blinking spots occupied his consciousness, and he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t hear the excited voices.
Chekhov knew the long train ride and the tedium firsthand; he knew the various illnesses from medical literature and practice.
Awakening, he saw he was in his bed, undressed; he saw the carafe with the water and Pavel, but none of this made him either cooler, more relaxed, or more comfortable. As before, his legs and arms would not settle down. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he heard the sobbing of the Finn’s pipe. Near the bed, a black-bearded doctor was fussing about and bumping Pavel with his broad back.
He has a bad few days. “As in the train, at home time flew by astoundingly fast… In the bedroom, daylight every now and then turned into dusk.”
Finally:
When Klimov awoke from oblivion, there was not a soul in his bedroom. The morning sun slid through the window beneath the lowered curtain, and a trembling ray of light, thin and airy like a blade, played on the carafe. There was the clatter of wheels—this meant there was no longer snow outside. The lieutenant looked at the light, the familiar furniture, at the door, and the first thing he did was laugh. His chest and belly shook with tickling laughter from the sweetness, the happiness. His whole being, from his head to his toes, was overpowered by unlimited happiness and joy of life, which probably the first human felt when he became conscious and saw the world.
Unfortunately, his typhus infected his sister and she has died. How often had Chekhov witnessed such tragedies? Every time he saw Yanova, her family’s tragedy, which he as the fussing doctor had not been able to prevent, would have come to mind.
The infector survives his family:
Only a week later, when he was in his robe and supported by Pavel, and when he went to the window and looked out at the cloudy spring sky and was hearing the unpleasant banging of the old railway that ran past, did his heart seize up from pain; he began to cry and he leaned his forehead on the window-frame.
“How unhappy I am!” he moaned. “God, how unhappy!”
And joy gave way to mundane tedium and the feeling of irreversible loss.
*
With a happier and healthier family in Moscow than poor Klimov’s, Chekhov wrote warmly to Suvorin on March 18 to update him on Grigorovich’s health. Striking while the iron was hot, he was sending a list of sixteen stories for the book that Suvorin would publish this summer; meanwhile, he said, he would be trying to write the Easter story to send soon.
Anton followed up in a letter to Alexander on March 19, his first point being that his brother was an ass for not updating them on his family’s health. The letter was full of jokes and banter and directions about the book, which Alexander would be in charge of overseeing. “Size and font and so on—just like ‘Unusual Stories’ by Poe.” He still wanted the simple title, and he set up an order of presentation of the stories. He told his brother which ones to take out if there were too many (“An Incident,” “In the Court,” “A Trivial Incident”) and if more were needed, which ones they might include. He provided the text of an advertisement for his Motley Stories to be printed on the book cover.