Before Chekhov could set out on June 8 to stay with Leykin at Lake Ladoga, he was asked by Dr. Uspensky to fill in for him, just as he had last year, at the Zvenigorod District Hospital for a few days from June 13 on. Chekhov wrote Leykin the next day to tell him he was sorry, but he probably had to substitute for a medical colleague. Besides which, he was sick, the family was sick, and the fish weren’t biting. “If I don’t come, curse, but don’t get angry. I think that you understand my situation and, being in my situation, you wouldn’t do otherwise.”11
Leykin seemed to think that Chekhov was happy to have an excuse not to come, and instead of replying went silent.
*
“A Play” (“Drama,” June 13), one of Tolstoy’s favorite stories,12 is about an imperious woman author who forces her work and herself upon a leery critic: “I will not venture to call myself an authoress, but… still I have added my little quota… I have published at different times three stories for children.”13 Chekhov gave Madame Murashkin the same literary background as Maria Kiseleva, which his friend would have taken as amusing, as she and Chekhov had once exchanged just as absurd a drama in miniature as that which Murashkin reads at the critic.14 Chekhov and Kiseleva would also have shared a laugh here:
“You see… (the lady cast down her eyes and turned redder) I know your talents… your views, Pavel Vassilyevich, and I have been longing to learn your opinion, or more exactly… to ask your advice. I must tell you I have perpetrated a play, my firstborn—pardon pour l’expression!—and before sending it to the Censor I should like above all things to have your opinion on it.”
Nervously, with the flutter of a captured bird, the lady fumbled in her skirt and drew out a fat manuscript.
Pavel wants her to leave it, but she is too clever for him and insists on giving him a sample, just a half-hour’s worth… before dumping the whole heap over him. As the hours pass, he begins daydreaming and dozing:
Like a man condemned to be executed and convinced of the impossibility of a reprieve, Pavel Vassilyevich gave up expecting the end, abandoned all hope, and simply tried to prevent his eyes from closing, and to retain an expression of attention on his face…. The future when the lady would finish her play and depart seemed to him so remote that he did not even think of it.
“Trooo—too—too—too…” the lady’s voice sounded in his ears. “Troo—too—too… sh—sh—sh—sh…”
The ending cannot be summarized.
Chekhov had been able to get back to producing stories, but except for “Happiness,” which he and his readers particularly enjoyed, he doesn’t seem to have been fully activated or inspired. “One of Many” (“Odin iz Mnogikh,” June 15) is another dacha story. “The father of the family” (otherwise unnamed), who works in the city and commutes back and forth to the dacha, wants to shoot himself for weariness and irritation over all the petty errands his family demands of him. “What am I living for? For what?”15 he demands of his friend. Having detailed the items he’s asked to pick up for family, friends, acquaintances, and his wife, he rants: “You’re the husband, but the word ‘husband’ in translation to a lady’s language means a wimp, an idiot, and voiceless beast on whom you’re able to ride and burden, as much as she likes, not fearing intervention by the animal welfare society.” Now that he has got it all off his chest, the father of the family asks for his friend’s sympathy. The friend sympathizes… and asks him if he could just do him one little favor.
*
Anton cursed out Alexander in his letter of June 16, because Alexander, editing In the Twilight, had monkeyed with the galleys’ dedication to Grigorovich. Chekhov was touchy or anxious and didn’t catch that Alexander had been joking. Anton congratulated his brother on his debut story the week before in New Times, but wondered why he wouldn’t take a serious subject. He wrote Alexander again on June 21 to explain that Anna’s poor health would or could continue for a while because of the typhus. And then more jokes and insults. His postscript: “In 50 years you can publish this letter in ‘Old Russia.’ ”
Right about now Chekhov seems to have developed a worry that the contents of his letters were going too far afield. In his very next letter, two days later, to his cousin Georgy, he declared unusually seriously: “besides to your own family, don’t read my letters to anyone; private correspondence is a family secret with which nobody has any business.”16 Letters were where Chekhov could cut loose and clown around, and thus were private, to be shared only with the particular people he had in mind while writing them; this in itself distinguishes his letters from his fiction. But here we are, minding his business, joining a happy world of Chekhov correspondence readers. The best essay I have encountered about reading Chekhov’s collected letters is by the Russian-Israeli novelist Dina Rubina. She explains her and our attraction to the personal Chekhov:
I was ten years old, and was not yet aware that reading other people’s correspondence was boring […] I simply read everything, one letter after another, skipping over things that I didn’t understand, circling languidly over the marvelous images in them, returning over and over to things I found funny—and there were so many […]. Circling like a goat tied to a stake who eats the grass within his reach, gathering sustenance, I entered the world of Chekhov’s friends, relatives, correspondents, and lovers, making it my own. I was intoxicated by the intonation of his voice, which was something unique unto itself, unlike any other person or thing I knew, conveying dignity, irony, warmth, and at the same time a remarkably serious attitude toward life.
I often tried to picture him as he was when he wrote these letters: his slightly slanting handwriting unfurling in long lines, one following after another… I pictured him reaching the end of a page; without looking, he reaches for his ink blotter and rolls it across the damp lines in an accustomed gesture before turning to the next page…
I hereby attest: long before I began writing short stories, I knew everything about the life of this writer—not in the sense of dates, but in the most precise sense—his moods, his tastes, the life of his heart.17
*
In “First Aid”18 (“Skoraya Pomoshch’,” June 22) the title is ironic, as Chekhov describes peasants trying to bring back to his senses an old drunk man they rescued from a river. A grand lady decides that he was drowning and orders her coachman to intervene with “rubbing” and artificial respiration. This intervention kills the man. Perhaps Chekhov intended this story as a public service announcement: Don’t do this!
Chekhov was private but liked bustle, and he continually asked friends to visit and no one ever complained of him as a host. On June 27 or 28 he cajoled Lazarev to come to Babkino, the sooner the better. He would send the coachman Aleksei to pick him up: “You’ll recognize him by 1) stupidity 2) a distracted look and 3) a NT [New Times] I’ll tell him to hold in his hand.”19 He asked Lazarev to bring various sausages from Moscow. Instead of Lazarev, two of Chekhov’s cousins arrived at Babkino on June 28.
In “An Unpleasant Story” (“Nepryatnaya Istoriya,” June 29), the philandering protagonist Zhirkov learns that different cultures have different customs. In the rain he arrives at a house for a rendezvous with his married lover, but when the maid answers the door, she mentions that the master has just returned home. “At the word ‘master’ Zhirkov made a step back from the door, and in a moment faintheartedness covered him, a pure boyish terror, which even brave people experience when they unexpectedly bump into the possibility of meeting a husband.”20 He flees, but his driver has left. It’s pouring, so he returns to get help from the maid, but this time the husband answers the door.
Zhirkov panics and lies to the husband, who is thoroughly French and unfamiliar with Russian customs, that he is a messenger from the dressmaker. Just then, his mistress enters the room and expresses her delight to see him. “Oh, I see! Probably you’re scared of Jacques?” she laughs. Her husband thinks nothing of her boyfriend’s visit, and Zhirkov spends the night with her.