has endangered the lives of hundread of people traveling on the trains. Chekhov tells the story without taking sides, amused by the confrontation of the baffled peasant and the armed might of justice, uninterested as always in the political implications of his stories. Gorky relates that a lawyer made a special visit to Chekhov to determine whether Denis Grigoryev was guilty or innocent in the eyes of his creator. The lawyer made a long speech about the necessity of punishing those who damaged state property and asked Chekhov what he would have done to the prisoner if he were the judge.
“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,
