And in his tone there was something which at once made the “aristocrat” trivial and ridiculous.
“He's a very gifted man,” he said of a certain journalist. “He always writes so nobly, humanely, … lemonadely. Calls his wife a fool in public … the servants' rooms are damp and the maids constantly get rheumatics.”
“Don't you like N. N., Anton Pavlovitch?”
“Yes, I do—very much. He's a pleasant fellow,” Anton Pavlovitch agrees, coughing. “He knows everything … reads a lot … he hasn't returned three of my books … he's absent-minded. To-day he will tell you that you're a wonderful fellow, and to-morrow he will tell somebody else that you cheat your servants, and that you have stolen from your mistress's husband his silk socks … the black ones with the blue stripes.”
Some one in his presence complained of the heaviness and tediousness of the “serious” sections in thick monthly magazines.
“But you mustn't read those articles,” said Anton Pavlovitch. “They are friends' literature—written for friends. They are written by Messrs. Red, Black, and White. One writes an article; the other replies to it; and the third reconciles the contradictions of the other two. It is like playing whist with a dummy. Yet none of them asks himself what good it is to the reader.”
Once a plump, healthy, handsome, well-dressed lady came to him and began to speak à la Chekhov:—
“Life is so boring, Anton Pavlovitch. Everything is so gray: people, the sea, even the flowers seem to me gray…. And I have no desires … my soul is in pain … it is like a disease.”
“It is a disease,” said Anton Pavlovitch with conviction, “it is a disease; in Latin it is called morbus imitatis.”
Fortunately the lady did not seem to know Latin, or, perhaps, she pretended not to know it.
“Critics are like horse-flies which prevent the horse from plowing,” he said, smiling his wise smile. “The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a doublebass, and a fly settles on his flanks and tickles and buzzes … he has to twitch his skin and swish his tail. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: ‘Look, I too am living on the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.’ For twenty-five years I have read criticisms of my stories, and I don't remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once Skabitchevsky wrote something which made an impression on me … he said I would die in a ditch, drunk.”
Nearly always there was an ironical smile in his gray eyes, but at times they became cold, sharp, hard; at such times a harder tone sounded in his soft, sincere voice, and then it appeared that this modest, gentle man, when he found it necessary, could rouse himself vigorously against a hostile force and would not yield.
But sometimes, I thought, there was in his attitude towards people a feeling of hopelessness, almost of cold, resigned despair.
“A Russian is a strange creature,” he said once. “He is like a sieve; nothing remains in him. In his youth he fills himself greedily with anything which he comes across, and after thirty years nothing remains but a kind of gray rubbish…. In order to live well and humanly one must work—work with love and with faith. But we, we can't do it. An architect, having built a couple of decent buildings, sits down to play cards, plays all his life, or else is to be found somewhere behind the scenes of some theatre. A doctor, if he has a practice, ceases to be interested in science, and reads nothing but The Medical Journal, and at forty seriously believes that all diseases have their origin in catarrh. I have never met a single civil servant who had any idea of the meaning of his work: usually he sits in the metropolis or the chief town of the province, and writes papers and sends them off to Zmiev or Smorgon for attention. But that those papers will deprive some one in Zmiev or Smorgon of freedom of movement—of that the civil servant thinks as little as an atheist of the tortures of hell. A lawyer who has made a name by a successful defense ceases to care about justice, and defends only the rights of property, gambles on the Turf, eats oysters, figures as a connoisseur of all the arts. An actor, having taken two or three parts tolerably, no longer troubles to learn his parts, puts on a silk hat, and thinks himself a genius. Russia is a land of insatiable and lazy people: they eat enormously of nice things, drink, like to sleep in the day-time, and snore in their sleep. They marry in order to get their house looked after and keep mistresses in order to be thought well of in society. Their psychology is that of a dog: when they are beaten, they whine shrilly and run into their kennels; when petted, they lie on their backs with their paws in the air and wag their tails.”
Pain and cold contempt sounded in these words. But, though contemptuous, he felt pity, and, if in his presence you abused any one, Anton Pavlovitch would immediately defend him.
“Why do you say that? He is an old man … he's seventy.” Or: “But he's still so young … it's only stupidity.”
And, when he spoke like that, I never saw a sign of aversion in his face.
When a man is young, banality seems only amusing and unimportant, but little by little it possesses a man; it permeates his brain and blood like poison or asphyxiating fumes; he becomes like an old, rusty sign-board: something is painted on it, but what?—You can't make out.
Anton Pavlovitch in his early stories was already able to reveal in the dim sea of banality its tragic humor; one has only to read his “humorous” stories with attention to see what a lot of cruel and disgusting things, behind the humorous words and situations, had been observed by the author with sorrow and were concealed by him.
He was ingenuously shy; he would not say aloud and openly to people: “Now do be more decent”; he hoped in vain that they would themselves see how necessary it was that they should be more decent. He hated everything banal and foul, and he described the abominations of life in the noble language of a poet, with the humorist's gentle smile, and behind the beautiful form of his stories people scarcely noticed the inner meaning, full of bitter reproach.
The dear public, when it reads his “Daughter of Albion,” laughs and hardly realizes how abominable is the well-fed squire's mockery of a person who is lonely and strange to every one and everything. In each of his humorous stories I hear the quiet, deep sigh of a pure and human heart, the hopeless sigh of sympathy for men who do not know how to respect human dignity, who submit without any resistance to mere force, live like fish, believe in nothing but the necessity of swallowing every day as much thick soup as possible, and feel nothing but fear that some one, strong and insolent, will give them a hiding.
No one understood as clearly and finely as Anton Chekhov, the tragedy of life's trivialities, no one before him showed men with such merciless truth the terrible and shameful picture of their life in the dim chaos of bourgeois every-day existence.
His enemy was banality; he fought it all his life long; he ridiculed it, drawing it with a pointed and unimpassioned pen, finding the mustiness of banality even where at the first glance everything seemed to be arranged very nicely, comfortably, and even brilliantly—and banality revenged itself upon him by a nasty prank, for it saw that his corpse, the corpse of a poet, was put into a railway truck “For the Conveyance of Oysters.”
That dirty green railway truck seems to me precisely the great, triumphant laugh of banality over its tired enemy; and all the “Recollections” in the gutter press are hypocritical sorrow, behind which I feel the cold and smelly breath of banality, secretly rejoicing over the death of its enemy.
Reading Anton Chekhov's stories, one feels oneself in a melancholy day of late autumn, when the air is transparent and the outline of naked trees, narrow houses, grayish people, is sharp. Everything is strange, lonely, motionless, helpless. The horizon, blue and empty, melts into the pale sky and its breath is terribly cold upon the earth which is covered with frozen mud. The author's mind, like the autumn sun, shows up in hard outline the monotonous roads, the crooked streets, the little squalid houses in which tiny, miserable people are stifled by boredom and laziness and fill the houses with an unintelligible, drowsy bustle. Here anxiously, like a gray mouse, scurries “The Darling,” the dear, meek woman who loves so slavishly and who can love so much. You can slap her cheek and she won't even dare to utter a sigh aloud, the meek slave…. And by her side is Olga of “The Three Sisters”: she too loves much, and submits with resignation to the caprices of the dissolute, banal wife of her good-for-nothing brother; the life of her sisters crumbles before her eyes, she weeps and cannot help any one in anything, and she has not within her a single live, strong word of protest against banality.