The Disabused
by Elizabeth Hardwick
Stories
by Anton Chekhov
translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Bantam Books, 454 pp. $11.95
Anton Chekhov was born in 1860, just a year
before the emancipation of the serfs in Russia.
Many of the peasants in his stories are still
laboring for the old masters on the old acres
and others are land-workers, hiring out for
the day. The country is a vast landmass with
nine months of winter which in some of Chekhov's
fictions were thought to account for the sloth
and the passivity of the fortunate classes,
and for the god-forsaken numbness of the hordes
of the poor.
So often in Chekhov's stories there is an opening
on a magnificent day; vast clear skies, the
smell of new-mown hay, "languid, transparent
woods." And in an ending on the water--in the
story "Gusev," for example--after a sick man
has been sewn in canvas and thrown to the sharks:
"A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds
and stretches to the very middle of the sky....
The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent,
enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but
soon itself takes on such tender, joyful, passionate
colors as human tongue can hardly name."
The snow falls like a shroud; the holes in
the road could almost swallow an old horse;
there is mud everywhere; and inside screaming
for the serving girl to light the stove so that
the mistress can arise. Chekhov is only in passing
a landscape painter, but the reader notes that
the landscape is always there, in a few sentences,
a paragraph, perhaps serving as authorial craft,
or as a memory, a vision set apart from the
human dramas to make a suffering life more bearable:
the warm May wind before a real storm gathers.
The storm in the human heart, if such a phrase
is acceptable, is what the magical stories by
Chekhov seem to know with an almost ghostly
intimacy. Thirty of his stories are presented
in a brisk new translation by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky with an interesting
introduction. Chekhov wrote a great many stories--there
are thirteen volumes in the Ecco Press edition--and
others might have been chosen by Pevear and
Volokhonsky. But here is their fine book, a
useful and challenging revelation to meet a
wanderer in a bookstore.
"Sleepy": a bedtime story. It is night, the
baby is howling without pause, and Varka, a
thirteen year old girl, her eyes drooping, is
rocking the cradle. The mother comes to nurse
the baby, and hands it back to the nodding girl,
saying: "Sleeping, you slut!" Next door the
master and his apprentice are snoring. Outside
the big house, Varka's family, peasants on the
place, are also howling, because the father
is dying, and the night passes with the sleepless
Varka called to bring the firewood, to set up
the samovar, to clean the master's galoshes,
to wash the steps, to peel potatoes. "Her head
droops on the table ... the knife keeps falling
from her hand." Guests arrive and it is: Varka,
fetch the vodka, Varka, clean the herring. The
guests leave, the lights are put out, and the
last call is: "Varka, rock the baby." Varka,
in her daze, ponders the problem of her life
and decides that "the enemy is the baby." She
strangles the baby in his crib and "quickly
lies down on the floor, laughing with joy that
she can sleep, and a moment later is already
fast asleep, like the dead...."
This tender, terrible story is all of five
pages long. The baby, Varka, the master, the
mistress, the guests, Varka's dying father,
two days and nights passing. That is all. Chekhov
does not offer a moral; his summation is to
be found in the words "like the dead." Like
the dead baby, or like the death that will come
to Varka?
hekhov's grandfather was a serf who bought
his freedom before the emancipation; his father
was a tradesman who did not prosper. The family
in which he grew up was a close family, which
no doubt created an atmosphere of kindness that
caused the writer to notice the absence of humility
and understanding in so many of the embattled
families portrayed in his fictions. Chekhov
received a good education, and also a deep experience
of the Orthodox church, which illuminates the
stories even though the writer lost his faith.
"Easter Night": a strange setting for the words
of the ferryman, a novice in a religious order
who is mourning the death of an old monk who
wrote beautiful, original canticles in honor
of Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints.
The ferryman remembers the words: "Tree of bright
fruit, tree of good-shading leaves ... Besides
smoothness and eloquence, sir, it is necessary
that every little line be adorned in all ways,
to have flowers in it, and lightning, and wind,
and sun, all the things of the visible world."
Even though it is Easter, the faithful novice-ferryman
is not relieved of his duties on the boat. The
narrator grieves for him: "There would be no
happier man in the whole church. But now he
is going back and forth across the dark river
and pining for his dead brother and friend."
"The Bishop": Death, which concludes so many
of Chekhov's tales, often with great suddenness,
will bring a moment of transformation. The Bishop
is ill. He will die before Easter. The story
begins: "On the eve of Palm Sunday the vigil
was going on in the old Petrovsky Convent."
Although he is in great distress, the Bishop
will perform his duties: "The first Gospel,
the longest, the most beautiful, he read himself."
He is a modest man who regretted the fear that
his exalted position aroused even in his old
mother. On his deathbed, "he imagined he was
now a simple, ordinary man, and he was free
as a bird and could go wherever he liked."
Chekhov's family left their village and moved
to Moscow, where he joined them to enter medical
school. Along the way, he began to write stories,
and when they brought him critical recognition
he devoted his short life to writing fiction
and the exquisite plays. Medical school, hospitals,
disease, doctors' visits in the stories--all
of this inflamed his imagination as he sat at
his desk creating the swarm of Russian life
at the end of the nineteenth century.
"Ward No. 6": a complex, celebrated story that
takes place in a provincial hospital. One wing
is set aside for the mad; and although it is
seldom visited by the staff, the doctor in the
story becomes fascinated by an inmate who is
suffering from persecution mania. The development
of the affliction is described with sharp, glancing
detail. The appearance of a policeman in the
street makes the poor man believe he is to be
accused of a crime and so "he smiled and began
to whistle in order to appear indifferent."
He feared that a bribe would be put into his
pocket to frame him for malfeasance. "His thoughts
had never been so supple and inventive as now."
The plot of the story is that the doctor becomes
so enthralled by the madman that he "began visiting
the annex every day.... He went in the morning
and after dinner, and often in the evening darkness..."
The staff could not understand "why he sat there
for hours at a time, what he talked about, why
he did not make any prescriptions." The ending
of the story is that the doctor is himself locked
up in Ward No. 6.
The hospital itself is a hive of cockroaches,
bedbugs, and mice; there are only two scalpels
and not a single thermometer; potatoes are stored
in the bath. To complain, or to suggest that
the place be torn down, would not go over well
with the town officials. "Everyday filth and
muck are necessary because in time they turn
into something useful as dung turns into black
earth." Edmund Wilson tells us that the young
Lenin, already a revolutionist but for a time
trapped in his native village, wrote in a letter
to his sister that "I absolutely had the feeling
that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself."
"Beating": The doleful word "beating" appears
in many of Chekhov's stories. A large population
that had to work or starve excited this privilege:
in Chekhov's universe, knocking an inferior
about was as automatic as bowing to a superior
on the street. (Turgenev's mother, a rich landowner,
was an infamous brute, strong as an athlete,
given to marathon thrashings until she fainted.)
Shopkeepers, factory managers, petty officials,
and their insolent women back home beat a peasant
child for taking a cookie, and a housemaid for
slowness; husbands beat their wives for impudence,
for complaining, and for just being there when
they come home drunk, which is how they come
home in this landscape where a flood of alcohol
marks the evening as cups of tea mark the day.
"The Huntsman": He is a strong, handsome man
of the people whose skill has led the local
squire to take him into his house as a cherished
companion on the hunt. One day the huntsman
is alone in the field and hears a plaintive
voice calling for him. It is his wife, a poor
landworker, begging him to come home. The huntsman
feels free and happy, spoiled and footloose.
He is known as the best shot in the whole district,
and he is enjoying his reputation. His marriage
was a drunken joke. But the forlorn wife, making
a sort of claim, pleads with him: "You stopped
by our cottage for a drink of water on Easter
day ... You swore at me, beat me, and left ...
If only you'd come one little time."
"Vanka": The nine year old boy is writing to
his grandfather on Christmas Eve. "Have pity
on me, a wretched orphan, because everyone beats
me ... And the other day the master hit me on
the head with a last, so that I fell down and
barely recovered ... I remain your grandson,
Ivan Zhukov, dear grandpa, come."
There is much weeping in Chekhov's stories:
eyes brimming with tears; weeping for sadness
when the son leaves, weeping for joy when he
returns. Weeping for the beauty of the moon
beyond the window. As in "The Bishop": "Tears
glistened on his face, his beard. Then someone
else began to weep near him, then someone else
further away, then another and another, and
the church was gradually filled with quiet weeping."
The poor in the stories have an innocent ignorance
as they try to make their head-scratching way
through the convoluted, abrupt commands of officials,
documents, bureaucratic encounters, or commonsense.
In "The Malefactor," a peasant in a "calico
shirt and patched trousers" is brought before
the magistrate because he has been taking nuts
from the railway ties to use as sinkers for
his fishing rod. The official inquires about
the nuts that they found in searching the peasant's
place, and the confused man replies: "You mean
the one that was under the little red trunk?"
Explanations that the nut ties the rail to the
track are answered by: "We don't unscrew all
of them.... We leave some." When he is told
he must go to prison, the poor man says: "Your
Honor! I haven't got time. I have to go to the
fair, and also get three roubles from Yegor
for the lard...."
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