‘Tell me, Mother, how’s Grandmother’s health these days?’
‘Not too bad, it seems. After you left with Sasha and your telegram arrived, Grandmother collapsed when she read it. She lay for three days without moving. Then she kept praying and crying. But she’s all right now.’
She stood up and paced the room.
That knocking could be heard again – it was the night watchman.
‘Your whole life must be filtered through a prism, that’s what’s most important,’ she said. ‘In other words, one’s perception of life must be broken down into its simplest elements, like the seven primary colours, and each element must be studied separately.’
Whatever else Nina Ivanovna said, Nadya didn’t hear. And she didn’t hear her leave either, as she was soon fast asleep.
May passed, June began. Nadya had grown used to that house again. Grandmother fussed over the samovar, heaving deep sighs, and Nina Ivanovna talked about her philosophy in the evenings. She was still in the ignominious position of hanger-on in that household and had to turn to Grandmother for every twenty-copeck piece. The house was full of flies and the ceilings seemed to get lower and lower. Grannie and Nina Ivanovna never went out into the street, for fear of meeting Father Andrey, or Andrey his son. Nadya would walk around the garden, down the street, look at the houses, the grey fences. Everything in that town struck her as ancient, obsolete – either it was awaiting its own demise or perhaps some fresh beginning. Oh, if only that bright new life would come quickly, then one could face one’s destiny boldly, cheerful and free in the knowledge that one was right! That life would come, sooner or later. Surely the time would come when not a trace would remain of Grandmother’s house, where four servants were forced to live in one filthy basement room – it would be forgotten, erased from the memory. The only distraction for Nadya was the small boys from next door. Whenever she strolled in the garden they would bang on the fence, laugh and taunt her with the words, ‘And she thought she was going to get married, she did!’
A letter came from Sasha – from Saratov.6 In that sprightly, dancing hand of his he wrote that his trip on the Volga had been a huge success, but that he hadn’t been well in Saratov, had lost his voice and had been in hospital for two weeks. Nadya understood what this meant and felt a deep foreboding that was very similar to absolute certainty. But her forebodings and thoughts about Sasha did not trouble her as much as before, and this she found disagreeable. She passionately wanted a full life and to go to St Petersburg again, and her friendship with Sasha seemed a thing of the far distant past, even though she still cherished it. She lay awake the whole night and next morning sat by the window listening. And she did hear voices down below – Grandmother, highly agitated, was asking one question after another.
Then someone began to cry. When Nadya went downstairs she saw Grandmother standing in a corner praying, her face tear-stained. On the table lay a telegram.
Nadya paced the room for a long time listening to Grandmother crying, then she picked up the telegram and read it. The news was that yesterday morning Aleksandr Timofeich (or Sasha for short) had died of tuberculosis in Saratov.
Grandmother and Nina Ivanovna went to church to arrange a prayer service, while Nadya kept pacing the house, thinking things over. She saw quite clearly that her life had been turned upside down, as Sasha had wanted, that she was a stranger in this place, unwanted, and that there was nothing in fact that she needed from it. She saw how her whole past had been torn away, had vanished as if burnt and the ashes scattered in the wind.
She went to Sasha’s room and stood there for a while.
‘Goodbye, dear Sasha!’ she thought, and before her there opened up a new, full and rich life. As yet vague and mysterious, this life beckoned and lured her.
She went upstairs to pack and next morning said goodbye to her family. In a lively, cheerful mood she left that town – for ever, so she thought.
PUBLISHING HISTORY AND NOTES
The House with the Mezzanine
First published in Russian Thought in 1896. On 29 December 1895 Chekhov wrote to A. S. Suvorin: ‘I’m writing a short story and I just cannot finish it: visitors keep disturbing me. Since 23 December people have been knocking around all over the place and I long for solitude. But when I’m on my own I get angry and feel revulsion for the day that has passed. All day long nothing but eating and talking, eating and talking.’
Chekhov’s first reference to this story is in his First Notebook (1891–1904) for February 1895, where he writes: ‘Missy: I respect and love my sister so dearly that I would never offend or hurt her.’ The first mention of actual work on the story is in a letter of 26 November 1895 to Yelena Shavrova: ‘I’m writing a little story now, “My Fiancée”. I once had a fiancée, she was called Missy. That’s what I’m writing about.’
The story’s setting – and possibly prototypes for the characters – is largely derived from Chekhov’s stay at Bogimovo, Kaluga province, during the summer of 1891, where he rented part of a large country house on the estate. Chekhov’s brother Mikhail states that the owner of Bogimovo, Ye. D. Bylim-Kosolovsky and his wife Anemaisa were possibly the prototypes for Belokurov and Lyubov Ivanovna.
Chekhov described the rented house (clearly the house in the story) in a letter to Suvorin on 18 May 1891: ‘If only you knew how charming it is! Huge rooms… a wonderful garden with avenues of which I’ve never seen the like, a river, pond, church… and every comfort.’ And Chekhov’s brother Mikhail writes: ‘Anton Pavlovich occupied the large drawing-room in Bogimovo, a vast room with columns and a couch of such improbable size that you could sit twelve men on it side by side. He slept on that couch. When a storm passed over at night those huge windows were illuminated in the lightning.’
The main theme of Lida’s quarrel with the artist – the state of the peasantry – had become particularly topical since the famine and cholera epidemic of 1891–2.
Chekhov’s attitude to the peasant (exemplified in the artist’s speeches in the story) echoes some of Tolstoy’s pronouncements at the time, especially the articles What Then Must We Do? (1886) and On Famine (1891), where, like the artist in the story, Tolstoy stresses that the condition of the suffering peasants cannot be improved without changing one’s own life.
1. Amos stoves: A special kind of stove invented by Major-General Nikolay Amosov (1787–1868).
2. Lake Baikal: So-called ‘pearl of Siberia’, seventh largest lake in the world and the deepest.
3. Buryat: A Mongol people, forming a large indigenous group in southeastern Siberia, living near Lake Baikal and in Irkutsk district.
4. Ryurik’s: Ryurik was a Varangian prince of Kiev, traditionally said to be the founder of the Russian state (A D 862). The Varangians were Viking warriors.
5. Gogol’s Petrushka’s: Chichikov’s comically inept (and bibulous) manservant in Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), renowned for reading with little comprehension.
6. Vichy: Famous spa in central France.
7. ‘God sent a crow a piece of cheese’: from the fable The Crow and the Fox, by I. A. Krylov (1769–1844).