After more joking around with Bilibin, he got down to business. He wanted Bilibin to send him copies of Fragments that had some short stories Chekhov wanted to consider including in his book. He didn’t want to cut up his own copies of the magazine, and he included a list of those stories and the issues they had appeared in. He thanked Bilibin for that task and also for his praise of Chekhov’s recent stories in the Petersburg Gazette. He suggested that he didn’t enjoy knowing that literary people were reading him: “Before, when I didn’t know that I was being read and judged, I wrote unconcernedly, just as if I were eating bliny; now I write and I’m afraid…”
He asked when Bilibin would be in Moscow: “Here’s what you’re going to do: get married and you and your wife come to me in May at the dacha for a week or two.” He told him about the Tatyana Day festivities on the 12th and about the name day party, and that if the holidays were to go on any longer he would be done for, as he was now completely broke: “Pray for me.” He then confided that he had been invited to write for New Times, but that he didn’t want Bilibin to tell Leykin yet, as he didn’t know when that assignment would start.
*
“On the Phone” (“U Telefona,” January 19) is a skit in dialogue format about a caller’s misconnections trying to reach the Slavyansky Bazaar. A Soviet editor informs us that the first telephones in Petersburg were installed in 1882–1883.38 There are no accounts I have read of Chekhov using a phone until 1901, when Tolstoy, recuperating from various ailments in Crimea, called Chekhov, who was convalescing in the neighboring town. I would welcome a tsarist secret-police transcript of that call.
Meanwhile, Chekhov was trying to placate Leykin: “As hard as I tried, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich,” Chekhov wrote to Leykin on January 19, “I didn’t have time to send you a story by Monday.”39 He now apparently enclosed the short story “The Discovery.” “You say I write as if I want to cut things off. Why do you say that?” he asked warily. The only person in these two years that Chekhov deliberately and repeatedly deceived was editor Leykin. Chekhov did in fact “want to cut things off,” and had told others so. He was displaying the bad conscience of a boyfriend intending to dump his girlfriend. Despite their long professional and personal relationship, Chekhov didn’t tell him about the offer he had received on January 2 to write for New Times, though now would have been a fitting time.
In “Children” (“Detvora,” January 20) one recognizes Chekhov’s awareness of the sophistication of children’s feelings and relationships. The situation: While the parents are out and the servants are occupied, young children play lotto; they make their own rules and resolve their own disputes. The story is amusing, but Chekhov is strict with himself about psychology: The children talk and behave like children. It is as if he was giving a writing lesson to his brother Alexander; these children are not projections of parents’ love or created with “subjectivity”:
“I did see something yesterday!” says Anya, as though to herself. “Filipp Filippich turned his eyelids inside out somehow and his eyes looked red and dreadful, like an evil spirit’s.”
“I saw it too,” says Grisha. “Eight! And a boy at our school can move his ears. Twenty-seven!”
Illustration from “Children.”
Later, one of them hears bells:
“I believe they are ringing somewhere,” says Anya, opening her eyes wide.
They all leave off playing and gaze open-mouthed at the dark window. The reflection of the lamp glimmers in the darkness.
“It was your fancy.”
“At night they only ring in the cemetery,” says Andrey.
“And what do they ring there for?”
“To prevent robbers from breaking into the church. They are afraid of the bells.”
“And what do robbers break into the church for?” asks Sonya.
“Everyone knows what for: to kill the watchmen.”
A minute passes in silence. They all look at one another, shudder, and go on playing.
The children are not adults; they’re also not “subjective” projections of a sentimental adult; they argue and fight and recover from their disputes quickly and thoroughly:
Andrey turns pale, his mouth works, and he gives Alyosha a slap on the head! Alyosha glares angrily, jumps up, and with one knee on the table, slaps Andrey on the cheek! Each gives the other a second blow, and both howl. Sonya, feeling such horrors too much for her, begins crying too, and the dining-room resounds with lamentations on various notes. But do not imagine that that is the end of the game. Before five minutes are over, the children are laughing and talking peaceably again. Their faces are tear-stained, but that does not prevent them from smiling…40
Chekhov was a keen observer of the behavior of animals, children, sick people, family, friends, and lovers. Those who knew him well noticed how patients, children, and animals relaxed in his presence and could be themselves.
In “The Discovery” (“Otkrytie”), published on January 25, a fifty-two-year-old engineer sees a woman he was in love with decades before; she is no longer beautiful, and his thoughts about time’s toll are sour. But watch what happens as he does something Chekhov in these years almost never did, which is sit “behind his desk with nothing to do.” From his unhappy thoughts about the transience of beauty, the engineer looks down at the paper on which he has been doodling:
On the sheet of paper upon which he had mechanically dragged his pencil, by crude strokes and a scrawl, a charming womanly head peeped out, the very one he had once upon a time fallen in love with. In general the drawing was shaky, but the languid, severe look, the softness of the features, and the disordered full wave of hair were done to perfection…41
Amazed by his hidden talent, the engineer draws other things, and out they brightly appear. He remembers the respect his mother gave writers, painters, composers—kissing their hands in reverence. “And in his imagination a life was revealed not resembling millions of other lives. Comparing it with the lives of the usual mortals was absolutely impossible.” His own engineering projects? No one will know about them or care!… But if he had been a famous artist? When he goes to bed, however, looked after by his lackey, he remembers, under a warm blanket, the poverty of artists and he is happy to be as he is.
Is the engineer an unflattering future projection caricature of Chekhov himself? What if he hadn’t had artistic “talent”? Or what if his talent had remained hidden? And maybe, what if he, like the engineer, could avoid marriage? Now that he had been engaged for a few days, perhaps he was imagining himself disentangled. Like children and literary artists, Chekhov squared up to his quandaries through dramatizing them in the lives of his characters.
He also published on January 25 a clever one-page joke story, “The Biggest City” (“Samyi Bol’shoi Gorod”): Every time the touring Englishman journalist wakes up from a long nap, he and the carriage are in the city of Tim. What he hasn’t noticed is that his driver is continually climbing out of the carriage to pull it or the horses out of the mud. The journalist reports to his newspaper: “In Russia, the biggest city is neither Moscow nor Petersburg, but Tim.”42
The most famous of Chekhov’s stories this month was the last published in January: “Misery” (“Toska,” January 27). A sledge driver in midwinter is mourning the death of his son but no one will listen sympathetically to his story:
Iona looks at his fare and moves his lips…. Apparently he means to say something, but nothing comes but a sniff.