Stories (3 page)
Authors: Anton Chekhov
Andrei Yefimych, the doctor-protagonist of “Ward No. 6,” meditating one night on the “life cycle,” the naturalists’ final solution to the question of human immortality, thinks to himself: “Only a coward whose fear of death is greater than his dignity can comfort himself with the thought that in time his body will live in grass, a stone, a toad … To see one’s own immortality in the life cycle is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future to the case after the costly violin has been broken and made useless.” In a letter of April 16, 1897, Chekhov rejected Tolstoy’s idealist notion of immortality
in almost the same terms: “He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can only imagine such a principle or force as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I, my individuality, my consciousness would merge with this mass—and I feel no need for this kind of immortality …”
Here we touch on the paradox that Lev Shestov finds at the heart of Chekhov’s work:
Idealism of every kind, whether open or concealed, roused feelings of intolerable bitterness in Chekhov. He found it more pleasant to listen to the merciless menaces of a downright materialist than to accept the dry-as-dust consolations of humanising idealism. An invincible power is in the world, crushing and crippling man—this is clear and even palpable. The least indiscretion, and the mightiest and the most insignificant alike fall victims to it. One can only deceive oneself about it as long
as one knows of it only by hearsay But the man who has once been in the iron claws o
f necessity loses forever his taste for idealistic self-delusion.
And thus, says Shestov, “the only philosophy which Chekhov took seriously, and therefore seriously fought, was positivist materialism,” which says that “man, brought face to face with the laws of nature, must always adapt himself and give way, give way, give way” The human spirit can only submit. And yet in Chekho
v “the submission is but an outward show; under it lies concealed a hard, malignant hatred of the unknown enemy.”
It is worth pursuing Shestov’s argument, because it is easy to mistake his meaning. He calls Chekhov “the poet of hopelessness.” This sounds like the same old accusation of pessimism and resignation that is so often leveled at Chekhov. But Shestov means something very different.
Thus the real, the only hero of Chekhov, is the hopeless man. He has absolutely no
action
left for him in life, save to beat his head against the stones … He has nothing, he must create everything for himself. And this “creation out of the void,” or more truly the possibility of this creation, is the only problem which can occupy and inspire Chekhov. When he has stripped his hero of the last shred, when nothing is left for him but to beat his head against the wall, Chekhov begins to feel something like satisfaction, a strange fire lights in his burnt-out eyes, a fire which Mikhailovsky did
not call “evil” in vain.
Shestov is right to state the paradox in the most extreme terms. Chekhov, who admired men of action, has no
action
left except to beat his head against the wall. It is hardly a scientific way to proceed. But then, readily as he acknowledged his debt to science, it is precisely science that has “robbed him of everything.” His only hope lies in utter hopelessness. Anything else would be a lie or a form of violence, a general idea or a utopia at gunpoint. And it is here, in this “void,” that Chekhov begins “seeking new paths.”
Like Hamlet, he would dig beneath his opponent a mine one yard deeper, so that he may at one moment
blow engineer and engine into the air. His patience and fortitude in this hard, underground toil are amazing and to many intolerable. Everywhere is darkness, not a ray, not a spark, but Chekhov goes forward, slowly, hardly, hardly moving … An inexperienced or impatient eye will perhaps observe no movement at all. It may be Chekhov himself does not know for certain whether he is moving forward or marking time.
That is how Chekhov
formulates the question.
In a conversation with Ivan Bunin, he mentioned that his own favorite among his stories was “The Student,” and wondered how people could call him a pessimist after that. The story is one of his shortest. It interweaves the student’s grim thoughts about poverty and hunger and the surrounding emptiness and darkness—“all these horrors had been, and were, and would be, and when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better”—with his sudden recollection of Peter’s denial of Christ. He tells the story to an old widow and her daugh
ter, and they both begin to “weep bitterly,” as Peter wept after his betrayal. The student goes on his way. “A cruel wind was blowing, and winter was indeed coming back, and it did not seem that in two days it would be Easter.” He begins thinking about the widow: “If she wept, it meant that everything that had happened with Peter on that dreadful night had some relation to her …” And joy suddenly stirs in his soul: “The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touche
d one end, and the other moved.” The student’s thoughts are given only the slightest shade of irony, just enough to call his youthful “anticipation of happiness, an unknown, mysterious happiness” into question without demolishing it. That happiness remains, along with the tears of Peter and of the two women, along with the cold wind, the surrounding darkness, and the promise of Easter. “In his revelation of those evangelical elements,” writes Leonid Grossman, “the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature.”
The old professor of “A Boring Story,” who knows that he has only six months to live, finds something strange happening to him, despite his faith in science and indifference to “questions about the darkness beyond the grave.”
In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly I want to cry in a loud voic
e that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I’ve been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry.
His stifled protest and hysteria have little in common with the dignity with which the bishop dies in almost the last story Chekhov wrote. But are the two men not essentially alike? The one belongs to the hierarchy of science, the other to the hierarchy of the Church, but life, which is given to us only once (how often Chekhov repeats that trite phrase!), is being taken from both of them, senselessly and ineluctably Each of them is isolated from his family and friends in this incommunicable and incomprehensible experience. The bishop “goes to the Lord’s Passion,” to read the Gospel accou
nts of the crucifixion on Good Friday, and dies on Holy Saturday, before the bells joyfully announce the resurrection. What happens to him is the same as what happens to the old professor. By very different means, with opposite tonalities, both stories reveal the infinite value of what is perishing. Through the forms Chekhov finds to express this living contradiction, the world begins to show itself in a new way.
R
ICHARD
P
EVEAR
*
Quotations of Chekhov’s letters, unless otherwise noted, are from
Letters of Anton Chekhov,
selection, introduction, and commentary by Simon Karlinsky, trans. by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky, New York, 1973.
*
“Chekhov at Large” (1944), in
Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. R. L. Jackson, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967.
**
See the chapter on Chekhov in his
History of Russian Literature.
*
“Chekhov as Naturalist” (1914), in
Chekhov,
ed. R. L. Jackson.
*
Trans. by Elizabeth Henderson, in
Chekhov,
ed. R. L. Jackson.
**
According to the memoirs of his brother Mikhail, Chekhov sometimes swam off the ship with a towline and in that way once happened to observe the movements of a shark and a school of pilot fish. He also witnessed the burial of two men at sea: “When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth flying head over heels into the water … you grow frightened and somehow start thinking that you are going to die too and that you too will be thrown into the sea” (letter of Suvorin, December 9, 1890).
RANSLATORS
N
OTE
No one who makes a one-volume selection of Anton Chekhov’s stories can help being painfully aware of what has been left out. Our selection represents all periods of Chekhov’s creative life, from his first sketches to his very last story We have included short pieces from different periods (it is interesting to see Chekhov return to the extreme brevity of his earliest work in “At Christmastime,” written in 1900), and the most important of the longer stories, those of thirty-five to fifty pages. We have not included any of the “novelized stories” of eighty to a hundred pages—“The Steppe,” “
My Life,” “The Duel,” “Three Years”—thinking they would go better in a separate volume. As for the rest of the collection, it is meant to show the best of Chekhov’s work in all its diversity.
Chekhov’s prose does not confront the translator with the difficulties found in Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Leskov. “His temperament,” as Nabokov remarked, “is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness.” Words cannot be translated, but meanings can be, and rhythms can be. Every good writer has an innate rhythm, which “tells” the world in a certain way. Chekhov has a preference, especially in his later stories, for stringing clauses and sentences together with the conjunction “and”: “Far ahead the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe were barely visible, to the right a line of hills stretched a
way and then disappeared far beyond the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the river, with meadows, green willows, country houses, and if you stood on one of the hills, from there you could see equally vast fields, telegraph poles, and the train, which in the distance looked like a caterpillar crawling, and in clear weather you could even see the town.” Often he begins sentences and even paragraphs with an “and,” as if events keep accumulating without quite integrating. A related feature, and one
more difficult to maintain in English, is his use of the continuous tense, with sudd
en shifts to the simp
le present or past and back again. We have tried as far as possible to keep these stylistic qualities in our translation.
We would like to express our gratitude to two Chekhovians, Cathy Popkin of Columbia University and Michael Finke of Washington University, for their suggestions of stories to be included. Limitations of space have kept us from following all of them, but without them the collection would not be what it is.
R. P., L. V.
HE
D
EATH OF A
C
LERK
O
ne fine evening the no less fine office manager Ivan Dmitrich Cherviakov
1
was sitting in the second row of the stalls, watching
The Bells of Corneville
2
through opera glasses. He watched and felt himself at the height of bliss. But suddenly … This “but suddenly” occurs often in stories. The authors are right: life is so full of the unexpected! But suddenly his face wrinkled, his eyes rolled, his breath stopped … he put down the opera glasses, bent forward, and … ah-choo!!! As you see, he sneezed. Sneezing is not prohibited to anyone anywhere. Peasants sneeze, police chiefs sneeze, some
times even privy councillors sneeze. Everybody sneezes. Cherviakov, not embarrassed in the least, wiped his nose with his handkerchief and, being a polite man, looked around to see whether his sneezing had disturbed anyone. And now he did become embarrassed. He saw that the little old man sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and neck with his glove and muttering something. Cherviakov recognized the little old man as General Brizzhalov,
3
who served in the Department of Transportation.
“I sprayed him!” thought Cherviakov. “He’s not my superior, he serves elsewhere, but still it’s awkward. I must apologize.”
Cherviakov coughed, leaned forward, and whispered in the general’s ear:
“Excuse me, Yr’xcellency, I sprayed you … I accidentally …”
“Never mind, never mind …”
“For God’s sake, excuse me. I … I didn’t mean it!”
“Ah, do sit down, please! Let me listen!”
Cherviakov became embarrassed, smiled stupidly, and began looking at the stage. He looked, but felt no more bliss. Anxiety began to torment him. In the intermission he went up to Brizzhalov, walked around him, and, overcoming his timidity, murmured:
“I sprayed you, Yr’xcellency … Forgive me … I … it’s not that I …”
“Ah, come now… I’ve already forgotten, and you keep at it!” said the general, impatiently twitching his lower lip.
“Forgotten, but there’s malice in his eyes,” thought Cherviakov, glancing suspiciously at the general. “He doesn’t even want to talk. I must explain to him that I really didn’t mean it … that it’s a law of nature, otherwise he’ll think I wanted to spit. If he doesn’t think so now, he will later! …”
On returning home, Cherviakov told his wife about his rudeness. His wife, it seemed to him, treated the incident much too lightly. She merely got frightened, but then, on learning that Brizzhalov served “elsewhere,” she calmed down.
“But all the same you should go and apologize,” she said. “He might think you don’t know how to behave in public!”
“That’s just it! I apologized, but he was somehow strange … Didn’t say a single sensible word. And then there was no time to talk.”
The next day Cherviakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut, and went to Brizzhalov to explain … Going into the general’s reception room, he saw many petitioners there, and among them was the general himself, who had already begun to receive petitions. Having questioned several petitioners, the general raised his eyes to Cherviakov.
“Yesterday, in the Arcadia, if you recall, Yr’xcellency,” the office manager began, “I sneezed, sir, and … accidentally sprayed you … Forg …”
“Such trifles … God knows! Can I be of help to you?” the general addressed the next petitioner.
“He doesn’t want to talk!” thought Cherviakov, turning pale. “That means he’s angry … No, it can’t be left like this … I’ll explain to him …”
When the general finished his discussion with the last petitioner and headed for the inner rooms, Cherviakov followed him and murmured:
“Yr’xcellency! If I venture to trouble Yr’xcellency, it’s precisely, I might say, from a feeling of repentance! … It wasn’t on purpose, you know that yourself, sir!”
The general made a tearful face and waved his hand.
“You must be joking, my dear sir!” he said, disappearing behind the door.
“What kind of joke is it?” thought Cherviakov. “This is no kind of joke at all! A general, yet he can’t understand! If that’s the way it is, I won’t apologize to the swaggerer any more! Devil take him! I’ll write him a letter, but I won’t come myself! By God, I won’t!”
So Cherviakov thought, walking home. He wrote no letter to the general. He thought and thought, and simply could not think up that letter. So the next day he had to go himself and explain.
“I came yesterday to trouble Yr’xcellency,” he began to murmur, when the general raised his questioning eyes to him, “not for a joke, as you were pleased to say. I was apologizing for having sneezed and sprayed you, sir … and I never even though
t of joking. Would I dare joke with you? If we start joking, soon there won’t be any respect for persons … left…”
“Get out!!” barked the general, suddenly turning blue and shaking.
“What, sir?” Cherviakov asked in a whisper, sinking with terror.
“Get out!!” the general repeated, stamping his feet.
Something in Cherviakov’s stomach snapped. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, he backed his way to the door, went out, and plodded off… Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and … died.
J
ULY
1883