Forty Stories

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