“I would have acquitted him,” Chekhov replied. “I would say to him: ‘You, Denis, have not yet ripened into a deliberate criminal. Go—and ripen!’ ”
In “Sergeant Prishibeyev” Chekhov described once and for all the type of the officious prosecutor. There is no malice in the story. He laughs quietly at the besotted sergeant who is always arresting people for infractions of the rules, but even that inane sergeant is given a human dimension. There is no cracking of the whip, no flicker of hatred. In the end the sergeant became a legend, his name repeated all over Russia whenever an officious policeman or magistrate appeared, for everyone had read the story and recognized the beast when he saw it.
We can very rarely pinpoint the precise origin of a Chekhov story. The incidents which made up the story derived from ancient memories, anecdotes told to him long ago and then forgotten, the face of a girl coming across a room, the way a man stepped out of a carriage on a busy street. Chekhov was perfectly aware that he wrote out of his memories. He said: “I can only write from my memories, and I have never written directly from nature. The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical.” We know some of the memories which were later shaped into stories, and it is instructive to observe what he took from them and what he left out.
“A Dead Body,” written in the late summer of 1885, clearly derives from an incident which took place the previous year, when Chekhov had to conduct an autopsy in an open field near the city of Voskresensk. Here is the account he wrote the same day to his friend Nikolay Leikin:
Today I attended a medico-legal autopsy which took place ten versts from V. I drove in a valiant troika with an ancient examining magistrate who could scarcely draw breath and who was almost entirely useless, a sweet little gray-haired man who had been dreaming for twenty-five years of a place on the bench. I conducted the post-mortem in a field with the help of the local district doctor, beneath the green leaves of a young oak tree, beside a country road … The dead man was no one the villagers knew by name, and the peasants on whose land the body was found entreated us tearfully, by the Lord God, not to conduct the post-mortem in their village. “The women and children will be too terrified to sleep.…” At first the examining magistrate made a wry face, because he was afraid it would rain, but later, realizing that he could make out a rough draft of his report in pencil, and seeing that we were perfectly prepared to cut up the body in the open air, he gave in to the desires of the peasants. A frightened little village, the witnesses, the village constable with his tin badge, the widow roaring away fifty yards from the post-mortem, and two peasants acting as custodians near the corpse. Near these silent custodians a small campfire was dying down. To guard over a corpse day and night until the arrival of the authorities is one of the unpaid duties of peasants. The body, in a red shirt and a pair of new boots, was covered with a sheet. On the sheet was a towel with an icon on top. We asked the policeman for water. There was water all right—a pond not far away, but no one offered us a bucket: we would pollute the water. The peasants tried to get round it; they would steal a bucket from a neighboring village. Where, how, and when they had the time to steal it remained a mystery, but they were terribly proud of their heroic feat and kept smiling to themselves. The post-mortem revealed twenty fractured ribs, emphysema, and a smell of alcohol from the stomach. The death was violent, brought about by suffocation. The chest of the drunken man had been crushed with something heavy, probably by a peasant’s knee. The body was covered with abrasions produced by artificial respiration. The local peasants who found the body had applied artificial respiration so energetically for two hours that the future counsel for the defense would be justified in asking the medical expert whether the fracture of the ribs could have been caused by the attempts to revive the dead man. But I don’t think the question will ever be asked. There won’t be any counsel for the defense and there won’t be any accused. The examining magistrate is so decrepit that he would hardly notice a sick bedbug, let alone a murderer.…
Such is Chekhov’s account in a letter which is evidently written hurriedly, but with total recall and with a purely medical fascination for the details of death. The scene is crowded, and the characters are painted in swiftly. The pond, the village, the oak tree, the policeman with the tin badge and the crowds of villagers, the local doctor and the decrepit examining magistrate, would all, it would seem, find their proper place in any story he wrote about the dead body. But what did Chekhov do? He deliberately threw away all the superficially interesting details, and reduced the scene to its simplest proportions—the dead body and the two guardians. The autopsy took place in daylight; in the story it takes place in the dead of night. The oak tree remains, but the country road becomes a path along the edge of a forest. In fact there was very little mystery about the dead peasant. Deliberately in the story Chekhov creates a mystery—the appalling mystery of a dead body lying abandoned in a field.
By deliberately cutting away the dead wood, by reducing his characters only to the essential, and by creating a mood of profound uneasiness and disquiet, Chekhov prepared the stage for a story which is at once tragic and exceedingly comic. The comedy comes from the invention of a wandering lay brother who blunders upon the corpse and is frightened out of his wits, so frightened indeed that he dare not continue his journey in the dark unless one of the guardians accompanies him. (The lay brother may be a projection of Chekhov himself.) So Chekhov tells a story which seems at first sight to have only a remote connection with the scene he had described in the letter to Leikin, but afterward we come to realize that he has in effect told almost the same story, only now it is stripped to the bone. “The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical.”
“A Dead Body” in its final form becomes a wrily amusing fable, but not all Chekhov’s stories are amusing. “Heartache” lives up to its title, and “Vanka” is a heart-rending study of a child caught in a trap. Chekhov had a horror of cruelty, a horror closely connected with his conviction that violence and lies were sins against the Holy of Holies. Confronted by cruelty in any form, he would leap to the defense of the victim. The thought of convicts languishing forgotten on the island of Sakhalin tormented him so much that in 1890 he abandoned his medical practice and set off to make a tour of inspection of the prison camps, hoping in this way to call attention to their sufferings. He was thirty years old, but after Tolstoy he was the most famous living Russian writer. Honors had been showered on him. He had won the Pushkin Prize, and everywhere he went he was pointed out as the writer who would endure when most of the others were forgotten. He was already ill with tuberculosis when he went to the Far East, and he may have known he was signing his death warrant.
Chekhov had almost no interest in social problems; he did not go to the Far East to test any social theories, and he kept apart from the radicalism of his age. He had no messianic belief in the healing power of flames or firing squads, and he loathed the thought of a revolution overwhelming Russia. For most of his working life his greatest friend was his publisher, Alexey Suvorin, a former serf who had raised himself by intelligence and business sense to a commanding position in the world of publishing, owning newspapers, magazines, and printing houses. Suvorin had “a devilish literary scent”; he had been the friend and publisher of Dostoyevsky; he knew everybody of importance, and he remained oddly humble. Chekhov liked him as a man in spite of his reactionary sympathies, and went on liking him until they quarreled over the Dreyfus case. Chekhov could not understand why anyone should defend those who cruelly abused Dreyfus, and Suvorin could not understand why Chekhov could be so foolish as to defend a lost cause.
It would seem that all the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century were defending lost causes. The cause which Chekhov defended was perhaps the most precarious of all, for he defended the ordinary humors and frailties of ordinary men. He rarely wrote about exceptional people. His men and women are of
the earth, earthy, and usually they desire nothing more than to be left in peace. There are no Fyodor Karamazovs saturated with hate, no Anna Kareninas endlessly communing with their consciences; there are no violent intrigues, almost no dramas. There is life endlessly renewing itself, the bright rings of a tree, and there is the figure of a man walking in majesty down a lonely road.
III
Tolstoy said that Chekhov would have been a better writer if he had not been so good a doctor. Chekhov himself regarded his medical training as the salvation of himself as a writer, for medicine gave him an intimate contact with people he would otherwise never have known. Even when, after his return from the Far East, he settled down on a small country estate at Melikhovo with the surviving members of his family, he was unable to escape from medicine. He built a clinic and attended the peasants from miles around, usually forgetting to charge them any fees. He threw himself into a plan for building more clinics in Moscow. 1891, the year of the great famine, found him traveling in western Europe, but immediately on his return to Russia, when he realized the extent of the suffering in the famine-stricken provinces, he was away again, organizing relief, pouring his time, his money, and his affection on those who were suffering wherever he found them. There was something in him of the dedicated priest. He was continually coughing up blood, continually wracked by hemorrhoids, but he accounted his sufferings a small price to pay for the honor of being a human being shaped in the likeness of God. It was a phrase which was often on his lips, and often encountered in his stories.
He was changing a little. He had grown a full beard, and there was a grayness about his face which sometimes startled his friends. Two heavy vertical lines of worry appeared on his forehead. But the humor shone through, and his eyes crinkled with amusement, and his deep voice, very soft and musical and curiously veiled with hoarseness, would explode in ringing laughter whenever he heard or told a good story. He was as gregarious as ever, inviting hordes of friends to stay with him on the estate, taking part in charades, and playing practical jokes; and then he would be off again, traveling from village to village in a broken-down carriage, curing bodies and healing souls, driving himself so furiously that, as he once complained, he had become a kind of cupboard which was falling apart.
There was gaiety in Chekhov always, but there was also despair—the despair of a man who could no longer conceal from himself the knowledge that he was dying at an absurdly early age. The intensity of his despair was equaled only by the intensity of his gaiety.
Among the surviving fragments of Chekhov’s notebooks there are some lines of a play he once contemplated on the life of Solomon. He speaks about the play very briefly in his letters, but whether it was to be a full-length play or simply a monologue is never made clear, and perhaps Chekhov himself never really knew. All we have is the fragment which seems to have been written in his heart’s blood on one of those long nights when he suffered from insomnia and gave himself up to despair. He wrote:
SOLOMON (alone): Oh how dark life is! No night since the days of my childhood has terrified me so much as this darkness terrifies me in my incomprehensible existence. Dear God, Thou who gavest to my father David the gift of assembling words and music, and the gift of song and of praising Thee on the harp, and of sweet weeping and of compelling tears to arise in strangers’ eyes and of smiling upon beauty, why hast Thou given me a soul fatigued unto death and oppressed by interminable hungry thoughts? Like an insect born of the dust, I hide in darkness, in terror and despair, given over to trembling and shivering, and everything I see and hear is an incomprehensible mystery to me. Why this morning? Why did the sun come out from behind a temple and gild the palm tree? Why the beauty of women? Where is the bird hurrying and what is the meaning of its flight if it and its young and the place to which it hastens must like myself turn to dust? Oh, it were better if I had never been born or were a stone to whom God had given neither eyes nor thoughts. In order to tire out my body by nightfall, all day yesterday like a mere workman I carried marble to the Temple, and now the night comes and I cannot sleep. I shall go and lie down. Phaorses tells me that if I imagine a flock of sheep running and refuse to think about anything else, then my thoughts will become confused and I shall sleep sound. I’ll do this. (He goes out.)
Nowhere else in Chekhov’s notebooks is there any passage comparable with this in its fierce elegiac beauty. It is a passage of sustained eloquence, the words ringing like iron on stone, and though the subject is the futility of life on earth, the prose moves with a kind of urgency which is itself a denial of futility. Writing this, Chekhov is like a man hurled back by the horror he has seen, but a moment later he catches his breath and sings a song in honor of the dying world. He is writing about himself, his own vision and his own fears, and he is himself the “mere workman” who wearies himself unendurably by carrying marble to the Temple.
Here and there in Chekhov’s notebooks we find equally disturbing fragments. Usually they are short and spare, and seem to have been dashed off at night in the intervals of nightmares. “Perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster,” he wrote once. On another page he wrote: “Russia is an enormous plain over which wander mischievous men,” a statement which is harmless enough until we remember that he also wrote in a letter to a friend: “I am a sort of Potemkin who appears from the depths of devastation.” There was savagery in him, and he knew it. He was far from being the gentle ironist. Like Dostoyevsky, he was one of those who believe that man is a mystery which needs to be solved “even if you pass your entire life solving it.” “I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man,” Dostoyevsky wrote, and there is little doubt that Chekhov occupied himself with the mystery for the same reason.
The “Solomon” fragment stands alone in the notebooks, but that peculiar tone, that ringing elegiac music soaring triumphantly over the chasms of futility, can be heard again in many of his stories. We hear it at the end of “Gusev,” where an old soldier dies at sea and his body is tossed overboard with hardly more ceremony than if he were a dead fish, and suddenly Chekhov summons a full orcestra to describe the perfect majesty of sunset as it impassively offers its benediction on the dead soldier. It is a passage very close in feeling and texture to the concluding words of Melville’s Billy Budd, written in the same year. Such passages are marked by an intensity which betrays the author’s deepest feelings, and usually they come at the very end of a story with a sudden flowering into another and more permanent world, into another dispensation of time altogether. When Billy Budd is lifted into the rosy dawn light, he is utterly transformed, and his death is an intimation of immortality: he becomes the accomplice of the serene and beautiful heavens. So it is with the dead soldier in Chekhov’s story, as the indifferent heavens gaze down on him.
We know how the story “Gusev” came to him from a wonderful letter he wrote on his return from the Far East:
When we left Hong Kong our steamer began to roll. She was sailing without ballast, and sometimes she had a list of 38°, so that we were afraid she would capsize. I was not seasick, and this discovery came as a pleasant surprise. On the way to Singapore we threw two bodies into the sea. When you watch a dead man, wrapped in sailcloth, flying head over heals into the water, and when you realize that the sea is a couple of miles deep, you are overwhelmed with fear, and for some reason you begin to think that you, yourself, will die and be cast into the sea.
I remember very little about Singapore, for when we passed it I felt sad and was close to weeping. Then we arrived in Ceylon, and Ceylon was Paradise, and here I traveled more than seventy miles by train and had my fill of palm groves and bronze-hued women. When I have children I’ll say to them, not without pride: “You sons of dogs, in my day I made love to a dark-eyed Indian girl, and where? In a forest of coconut palms, in moonlight.” From Ceylon we sailed for thirteen days and nights without a single stop and grew dazed with boredom. I stand the heat well. The Red Sea is dismal. Looking at Mount Sinai, I was deeply
moved.
The Lord’s earth is beautiful. Only one thing is not beautiful, and that is us. How little there is in us of justice and humility, and how poorly we understand the meaning of patriotism. A drunken, worn-out, good-for-nothing husband loves his wife and children, but what good is this love? The newspapers tell us we love our great country, but how does this love express itself? Instead of knowledge—immeasurable arrogance and conceit; instead of hard work—laziness and filth. There is no justice, and the conception of honor does not go beyond “the honor of the uniform,” a uniform which is too often seen in the prisoners’ dock. What is needed is work: everything else can go to the devil. The main thing is to be just, for if we are just all the rest will come of itself.
In this extraordinary letter written to his friend Suvorin, a man whom Lenin later characterized as “the running dog of the Tzar,” Chekhov came closer than ever again to defining his ultimate beliefs. His attitude toward life was poetic and practical, as a child is poetic and practical, but at the same time he spoke with a strange authority which came from his vast knowledge of suffering. Sometimes he seems to be talking like those old peasants who sit round the campfires in his stories, but his voice remained young and vibrant to the end.
His last years were spent at Yalta in the white house he built facing the sea. He had mellowed a little, and the stories tended to become longer and slower, as though he took even greater enjoyment in mulling them over, sipping them like wine. Now at last he could afford to write without any sense of being dogged by time. For fifteen years he had been dreaming of writing “The Bishop,” and in March 1901 he began writing it, but it was not finished until a year later. It is one of the most autobiographical of his stories, though he liked to say that it came about after he had seen a photograph of a certain Bishop Mikhail Gribanovsky in a bookshop in Yalta. He bought the picture, made a few discreet inquiries about the bishop’s life, and sat down to write the story. But in fact the photograph was no more than the catalytic agent. In the portrait of the dying bishop he painted himself.