Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (502 page)

“Well,” began Ivan Ivanitch, getting up, “so you will stay. . . .”

All at once the look of business-like reserve vanished from his face; he flushed a little and said with a mournful smile:

“Mind you work hard. . . . Don’t forget your mother, and obey Nastasya Petrovna. . . . If you are diligent at school, Yegor, I’ll stand by you.”

He took his purse out of his pocket, turned his back to Yegorushka, fumbled for a long time among the smaller coins, and, finding a ten-kopeck piece, gave it to Yegorushka.

Father Christopher, without haste, blessed Yegorushka.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. . . . Study,” he said. “Work hard, my lad. If I die, remember me in your prayers. Here is a ten-kopeck piece from me, too. . . .”

Yegorushka kissed his hand, and shed tears; something whispered in his heart that he would never see the old man again.

“I have applied at the high school already,” said Ivan Ivanitch in a voice as though there were a corpse in the room. “You will take him for the entrance examination on the seventh of August. . . . Well, good-bye; God bless you, good-bye, Yegor!”

“You might at least have had a cup of tea,” wailed Nastasya Petrovna.

Through the tears that filled his eyes Yegorushka could not see his uncle and Father Christopher go out. He rushed to the window, but they were not in the yard, and the red dog, who had just been barking, was running back from the gate with the air of having done his duty. When Yegorushka ran out of the gate Ivan Ivanitch and Father Christopher, the former waving his stick with the crook, the latter his staff, were just turning the corner. Yegorushka felt that with these people all that he had known till then had vanished from him for ever. He sank helplessly on to the little bench, and with bitter tears greeted the new unknown life that was beginning for him now. . . .

What would that life be like?

NOTES

the widow of a collegiate secretary: a minor official, Class 10 in the civil service Table of Ranks

on the day of the Holy Mother of Kazan: July 8 (Julian Calendar)

eyes: an old Russian custom

Lomonosov set off with the fishermen: Mikhaylo V. Lomonosov (1711-1765) was the son of a fisherman; he became famous as a scientist and poet

For the glory of our Maker . . . : the ending of the morning prayer that was recited in Russian classrooms before the start of class

barrows: stone sculptures up to 17 feet high, used as tombstones by Turkic peoples 2,000 years ago

Arctic petrels: a type of sea bird

crosier-bearer: cross-bearer, an honor only given to a boy or man of good character

patron saint’s day: August 30; Alexander I died in 1825

Puer bone, quam appelaris?: Good boy, what is your name?

Christopherus sum: I am Christopher

Robinson Crusoe: hero of Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name, published in 1719; about a man who survives living on an island

“Like the cherubim”: see Ezekiel 10:19; sung while Russian Orthodox priests bring bread and wine to the altar

Plague take you, cursed idolater!: the Russian translates literally as “the anathema of an idol upon you”

Moisey Moisevitch: Ashkenazic Jews in Russia would not have named a son for a living father (Solomon is a younger brother); however, Russians tend to make up a patronymic based on one’s first name if they don’t know the correct patronymic

eagle: the symbol of pre-1917 Russia

Molokans’: Molokans were a religious sect

high school:
gimnaziya
were schools originally intended for sons of the gentry, but later open to others; Chekhov graduated from such a school in 1879

stamped paper: legal documents had to be on special paper bearing the Imperial Russian seal (a form of taxation)

Pharaoh in his chariot: Exodus 14

Jacob: Genesis 37; Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, was sold into slavery by his brothers

Tchernigov: Chernigov province is located in the Ukraine

Solomon the Wise: meant ironically of course; Solomon in the Bible was noted for his wisdom

mouth: so that the devil cannot enter his soul through his open mouth

Dranitsky: Dranicka is a Polish surname

Ilya Muromets and Solovy the Brigand: two mythical Russian folk heroes

coat: short jacket worn in the Ukraine

Yegory, the Bearer of Victory: a name for St. George, 4th century Roman soldier who died for Christianity; the Russian Order of St. George is given for the highest military bravery in battle

Tim: town about 250 miles south of Moscow

Varvara: also called St. Barbara the Great, martyred in the 3rd century

holy bread: altar bread given out at the end of the liturgy

Epiphany: January 19 (Julian Calendar)

name down: members of the Russian Orthodox Church customarily carried a small book with names in it of relatives and friends, living and dead, to be remembered

Old Believer: someone who adhered to the ritual of the Russian Orthodox Church as practiced before the 17th century reforms; they did not eat or drink with the same utensils as other people

St. Peter’s Day: June 29 (Julian Calendar)

Mazeppa: a traitor; Ivan S. Mazeppa (1645-1709) went over to the Swedish enemy at the Battle of Poltava

A. . . a. . . va: Chekhov is imitating sounds that remain after other syllables are lost in the wind

Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth: from Isaiah 6:3; used in the Russian Orthodox liturgy

Pyotr Mogila: Peter Mogila (1596-1647) was a famous cleric and educator

Do not apply yourself to strange and diverse studies: Hebrews 13:9

Saul: 1 Samuel 28:8-20

Basil the Great: 329-379, a famous churchman

St. Nestor: 11th century monk

honour your mother: Exodus 20:12

sat down: a Russian tradition to bring good luck on the journey

Translated by Constance Garnett 1888-1895

I

It was eight o’clock in the morning -- the time when the officers, the local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to drink tea or coffee. Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of twenty-eight, wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and with slippers on his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of acquaintances on the beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the army doctor.

With his big cropped head, short neck, his red face, his big nose, his shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, his stout puffy figure and his hoarse military bass, this Samoylenko made on every newcomer the unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after making his acquaintance, one began to think his face extraordinarily good-natured, kind, and even handsome. In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always ready to be of use. He was on familiar terms with every one in the town, lent every one money, doctored every one, made matches, patched up quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked
shashlik
and an awfully good soup of grey mullets. He was always looking after other people’s affairs and trying to interest some one on their behalf, and was always delighted about something. The general opinion about him was that he was without faults of character. He had only two weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good nature, and tried to disguise it by a surly expression and an assumed gruffness; and he liked his assistants and his soldiers to call him “Your Excellency,” although he was only a civil councillor.

“Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch,” Laevsky began, when both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders. “Suppose you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or three years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel that you had nothing in common with her. How would you behave in that case?”

“It’s very simple. ‘You go where you please, madam’ -- and that would be the end of it.”

“It’s easy to say that! But if she has nowhere to go? A woman with no friends or relations, without a farthing, who can’t work . . .”

“Well? Five hundred roubles down or an allowance of twenty-five roubles a month -- and nothing more. It’s very simple.”

“Even supposing you have five hundred roubles and can pay twenty-five roubles a month, the woman I am speaking of is an educated woman and proud. Could you really bring yourself to offer her money? And how would you do it?”

Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the shingle. The friends got out and began dressing.

“Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don’t love her,” said Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. “But one must look at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I should never show a sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I died.”

He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said:

“But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go to the devil!”

The friends dressed and went into the pavilion. There Samoylenko was quite at home, and even had a special cup and saucer. Every morning they brought him on a tray a cup of coffee, a tall cut glass of iced water, and a tiny glass of brandy. He would first drink the brandy, then the hot coffee, then the iced water, and this must have been very nice, for after drinking it his eyes looked moist with pleasure, he would stroke his whiskers with both hands, and say, looking at the sea:

“A wonderfully magnificent view!”

After a long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no better for the bathe and the coffee.

“Let us go on with our talk, Alexandr Daviditch,” he said. “I won’t make a secret of it; I’ll speak to you openly as to a friend. Things are in a bad way with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and me . . . a very bad way! Forgive me for forcing my private affairs upon you, but I must speak out.”

Samoylenko, who had a misgiving of what he was going to speak about, dropped his eyes and drummed with his fingers on the table.

“I’ve lived with her for two years and have ceased to love her,” Laevsky went on; “or, rather, I realised that I never had felt any love for her. . . . These two years have been a mistake.”

It was Laevsky’s habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did so now.

“I know very well you can’t help me,” he said. “But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I’m bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else’s theories, in literary types -- in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: ‘Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!’ And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!”

Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said:

“Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature.”

“My God!” sighed Laevsky; “how distorted we all are by civilisation! I fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with, we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away from her husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured our future like this: to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the people and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter the service; then at our leisure we would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so on. If you were in my place, or that zoologist of yours, Von Koren, you might live with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for thirty years, perhaps, and might leave your heirs a rich vineyard and three thousand acres of maize; but I felt like a bankrupt from the first day. In the town you have insufferable heat, boredom, and no society; if you go out into the country, you fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions, or snakes lurking under every stone and behind every bush, and beyond the fields -- mountains and the desert. Alien people, an alien country, a wretched form of civilisation -- all that is not so easy, brother, as walking on the Nevsky Prospect in one’s fur coat, arm-in-arm with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, dreaming of the sunny South. What is needed here is a life and death struggle, and I’m not a fighting man. A wretched neurasthenic, an idle gentleman. . . . From the first day I knew that my dreams of a life of labour and of a vineyard were worthless. As for love, I ought to tell you that living with a woman who has read Spencer and has followed you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with any Anfissa or Akulina. There’s the same smell of ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same self-deception.”

“You can’t get on in the house without an iron,” said Samoylenko, blushing at Laevsky’s speaking to him so openly of a lady he knew. “You are out of humour to-day, Vanya, I notice. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is a splendid woman, highly educated, and you are a man of the highest intellect. Of course, you are not married,” Samoylenko went on, glancing round at the adjacent tables, “but that’s not your fault; and besides . . . one ought to be above conventional prejudices and rise to the level of modern ideas. I believe in free love myself, yes. . . . But to my thinking, once you have settled together, you ought to go on living together all your life.”

“Without love?”

“I will tell you directly,” said Samoylenko. “Eight years ago there was an old fellow, an agent, here -- a man of very great intelligence. Well, he used to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long. You have lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you ought to exercise all your patience. . . .”

“You believe in your old agent; to me his words are meaningless. Your old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an object indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen so low. If I want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumb-bells or a frisky horse, but I’ll leave human beings alone.”

Samoylenko asked for some white wine with ice. When they had drunk a glass each, Laevsky suddenly asked:

“Tell me, please, what is the meaning of softening of the brain?”

“How can I explain it to you? . . . It’s a disease in which the brain becomes softer . . . as it were, dissolves.”

“Is it curable?”

“Yes, if the disease is not neglected. Cold douches, blisters. . . . Something internal, too.”

“Oh! . . . Well, you see my position; I can’t live with her: it is more than I can do. While I’m with you I can be philosophical about it and smile, but at home I lose heart completely; I am so utterly miserable, that if I were told, for instance, that I should have to live another month with her, I should blow out my brains. At the same time, parting with her is out of the question. She has no friends or relations; she cannot work, and neither she nor I have any money. . . . What could become of her? To whom could she go? There is nothing one can think of. . . . Come, tell me, what am I to do?”

“H’m! . . .” growled Samoylenko, not knowing what to answer. “Does she love you?”

“Yes, she loves me in so far as at her age and with her temperament she wants a man. It would be as difficult for her to do without me as to do without her powder or her curl-papers. I am for her an indispensable, integral part of her boudoir.”

Samoylenko was embarrassed.

“You are out of humour to-day, Vanya,” he said. “You must have had a bad night.”

“Yes, I slept badly. . . . Altogether, I feel horribly out of sorts, brother. My head feels empty; there’s a sinking at my heart, a weakness. . . . I must run away.”

“Run where?”

“There, to the North. To the pines and the mushrooms, to people and ideas. . . . I’d give half my life to bathe now in some little stream in the province of Moscow or Tula; to feel chilly, you know, and then to stroll for three hours even with the feeblest student, and to talk and talk endlessly. . . . And the scent of the hay! Do you remember it? And in the evening, when one walks in the garden, sounds of the piano float from the house; one hears the train passing. . . .”

Laevsky laughed with pleasure; tears came into his eyes, and to cover them, without getting up, he stretched across the next table for the matches.

“I have not been in Russia for eighteen years,” said Samoylenko. “I’ve forgotten what it is like. To my mind, there is not a country more splendid than the Caucasus.”