The history--that is, the philosophical history--of a national
literature is sure to reveal the close relation subsisting between
the significant social movements of that nation and its literature.
Those who think lightly of fiction as a force in a people’s life fail
to recognize that in the large it is something more than a mirror of
the times, since worthy fiction must be an expression--and that the
most vivid possible--of the ideals, the faiths, the scepticisms, the
struggles, the foibles, the prejudices, the occupations light and
serious, and, chiefly, the social ferment, of the era it represents,
because out of, and not merely during, that era its fiction was born.
While really no more applicable to Russia than to any other nation,
this representative quality of literature is more startlingly apparent
in Slavic literature than in any other. During the period just
preceding 1880, the “back to the people” movement was at its height.
Tolstoi’s life among his peasants inspired many to imitation--but that
is a story by itself. Enough to note here that the movement broke
down of its own weight, as all social movements must which think to
fill old skins with new wine. And Anton Pavlovich Chekhov came to
a full though depressing inheritance of the stunned discouragement
characteristic of the early eighties. In common with his entire school,
Chekhov’s philosophy embraced three paramount tenets: The “system” in
Russia is productive of evil, and evil only; there is no present hope
of better things; but for the future, such hope as may gestate unborn
can come to birth only by the Russian people’s facing the full truth
honestly and fearlessly.
Here is a social philosophy which is something more than pessimism, for
while it believes that things must be worse before they can be better,
it neither denies nor predicts the coming of that meliorated day. The
true basis of Russian realism is thus seen to differ from the French:
French realism is sensational and of the senses; that of Russia is
intellectual and largely for a patriotic purpose.
* * * * *
Chekhov was a south-Russian, born January 17, 1860, in Taganrog, a
seaport on an arm of the Black Sea, near the mouth of the river Don.
His father was a serf, whose ambition and ability led him early to buy
his freedom and provide for the education of his four children. Anton
passed through the local college and was graduated from the school of
medicine at Moscow, but more than his year as a hospital interne, and a
volunteer service during an epidemic of cholera, he did not practise.
His medical education, however, set the tone for Chekhov’s literary
work, for he became a great pathologist of character, dealing chiefly
with those sick of mind and heart whom we are wont to think of as
unnormal. Early afflicted with the tubercular trouble which he combated
in vain, and which carried him off July 2, 1904, in Badenweiler,
Germany, at forty-four, he disclosed in his work, as Professor Phelps
has pointed out, the double character of the observing physician and
the sick patient. To the observer and in the observed, in such a dual
rôle, trivialities would assume a larger interest than to the typical
healthy man writing of complacent themes in a rosy land. And so they
did to Chekhov--as will more and more appear.
While yet the youth was in the University (1879) he began to write
“fugitive sketches” for the minor metropolitan newspapers, and
eventually for the better-known _Novoe Vremya_ and the St. Petersburg
_Gazette_. A humor keen, if somewhat coarse, characterized these
productions, which were often only a few hundred words in length. This
light satirical tone prevailed until after the appearance in 1887
of his first book. Perhaps the critical disapproval it aroused made
him see that one who could write so well might be better employed
than in merely making people laugh, as one reviewer expressed it. At
all events, his later work was more serious, though always a subtle,
intellectual humor might be found--for it often lurked--in his most
sober fictional and dramatic writings.
Chekhov was so modest, so retiring, so diffident even, that he came
to his own by dint of sheer merit. When in the later years of his
short life he married Olga Knipper, the blonde beauty of the Théâtre
Libre, they took a villa at Yalta, on the Black Sea, for the husband’s
enfeebled health demanded a milder climate than that of the metropolis.
At Yalta, for a time, dwelt also Tolstoi and Gorki, and there Chekhov
learned to know his brother writers. With that sincere big-heartedness
which is happily characteristic of each of the Russian littérateurs
chosen for inclusion in this series, both did much to bring his work to
the attention of the public to which they were themselves looking.
With Tolstoi’s convictions Chekhov had little in common, so he did not
seek him out. But the elder artist went to the younger, and a firm
friendship ensued. That the enthusiastic prophesies of both Tolstoi
and Gorki were not fully realized was doubtless due to the untimely
ending of a career so full of promise and of real literary achievement.
* * * * *
Naturally, Chekhov’s attitude toward life was something more personal
than was his conscious philosophy. The lost illusions of the Russian
people--I speak now of the Russia of the late eighties and early
nineties--were perfectly reflected in our author’s work. Of one of his
characters he writes:
The Student remembered that when he left the house his mother sat
in the hall, barefooted, and cleaned the samovar; and his father
lay upon the stove and coughed; and because it was Good Friday
nothing was being cooked at home, though he was tortured with
desire to eat. And now, shivering with cold, the Student reflected
that just the same icy wind blew in the reign of Rurik, in the
reign of Ivan the Terrible, and in the reign of Peter the Great;
and that there was just the same gnawing hunger and poverty, just
the same dilapidated thatched roofs, just the same ignorance, the
same boredom with life, the same desert around, the same darkness
within, the same sense of oppression--that all these terrors were
and are and will be, and that, though a thousand years roll by,
life can never be any better.
Could anything be more pitiful--and more hopeless! And yet it was not
the pity of it that Chekhov was picturing. It was the fatalism, the
mockery, the uselessness of struggle, the satire of even complaining,
that seemed to him to demand a voice. All contemporary life was
gray. To him it was a silly thing to seek to idealize it. The only
course was to view things as they are--the venom, the scurrility, the
disenchantment, the heart-break, the hunger, the chill of soul and
body, were real; then why delude self by renaming them, for alter
them one could not! Why struggle when inertia accomplished just as
much--that is to say, nothing! Why dream when the visions brought one
no nearer light than did waking! Again and again his characters set out
cheered by hopes and warmed by illusions, but one by one they return,
hardened, dulled, disenchanted. But even this experience is not worth
fretting about. The gaunt, wild-eyed men, the flat, empty-breasted
women, are products of the Russian system, so why should they aspire
to the unattainable? Let them be indifferent, for that is the surest
anæsthetic.
But in all this one feels the terrible arraignment of the
god-of-things-as-they-are, and no blame for the individual. Chekhov
doubtless pitied men, but he excoriated Russian society. If he laughed
at misery, it was that misery might not crush out the very life. If he
preached indifferentism, it was that the Juggernaut of society should
not pulverize those over whom its wheels must surely pass.
In the banalities of life and its useless beatings against the bars
Chekhov was quick to see effective literary material. If life was
colorless, it still called for a master of grays and neutral tints to
lay them effectively upon the canvas--and such a painter was Chekhov.
Dealing with trivial things, and dealing with them in a manner
sometimes bitterly laughing, again at times with fierce cynicism, but
sometimes too with the gentle sadness of an accepted despair, the man
became a sincere realist--an accurate delineator of “the unprofitable
life.” He could picture, in “The Steppe,” that most monotonous of
all landscapes with an idealized charm of variety which enchanted
the reader, but his obligation to human nature was to paint it
remorselessly with truth. Unhappily, his pathological mind saw little
but the contemptible, the trivial, the stupid, and the mean. The nobler
elements he did not omit, but he never asserted or even intimated their
final triumph. He could strip the shreds of pretension and illusion
from the soul of man as ruthlessly as a fiend would denude the body of
his helpless victim. For old age to be despicable, or for youth to be
polluted, was all the justification needed to picture them just so upon
his canvas.
“Ward No. 6”--a pitiless tragedy disclosing the ultimate break-down
of all that is noble in body, mind, and spirit--is probably Chekhov’s
greatest story. It takes its title from the lunatic asylum in a
“squalid, remote, and stagnant country town.... A pandemonium of
brutality, corruption, and neglect.” The patients suffer unspeakable
abuses from the attendants, chiefly from the porter, Nikita, whose
brutal fists beat all protesting patients into insensibility.
The old doctor used to sell the hospital stores to enrich himself, but
Ragin, the new physician, was a man of honesty, heart, and ability.
The abuses of the place he detests, and the sufferings of the inmates
make his gorge rise and his heart burn. But, as with most of Chekhov’s
good men, his will is inert, and at last he condones and falls into
indifference toward the horrors of the place.
One day he discovers an unusual intelligence in Gromof, one of the
long-time inmates, and comes to take a great interest in him. For hours
at a time he gives up his occupations and listens to Gromof’s wisdom.
The nurses, at this, think Ragin insane, and by a trick shut him up in
the very room whose terrible condition at first so inspired him with
horror. “I am glad! You drank other men’s blood; now they will drink
yours!” screams Gromof in a rage of madness.
After a short confinement, Ragin joins the other inmates in a revolt,
but Nikita uses his huge fists, and the next day Ragin is dead.
I recite this at some length because no shorter story could so fully
present the hopeless philosophy of its author. It is a powerful,
impressionistic picture of Russia--at its worst, let us hope.
Chekhov made several excursions into the drama, but he was not given
to plot, and all his efforts were subtle and intellectual, so that it
requires a company of brilliant actors to present his plays. The most
important are “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Seagull,” “The Bear,” and “The
Gray Stocking.”
* * * * *
In the short-story our author excelled, but here too his tendency
was not toward plot. The objectivist in fiction tends toward the
impressionistic sketch, and Chekhov was a master in sensing a mood
outside of himself and relentlessly reproducing the impression.
Of “Darling,” Tolstoi has said that the author intended to laugh at
Darling, sneer at her self-sacrifice; but in spite of his plan he had
created a character of beauty.
Olenka Plemyannikof, the daughter of a retired “college assessor,”
cannot live unless she is loving some one. She loves her father, her
mother, her relatives, and when at school she had fallen in love with
the French-master. Observing her rosy cheeks and kind expression, and
the naïve smile playing on her face when she is pleased, every one
feels attracted to her, and frequently women stop in the midst of a
conversation and grasp her hand, exclaiming, “You darling!”
Koukin, manager and proprietor of the Tivoli pleasure gardens, occupies
the wing in the Plemyannikofs’ house. Troubles connected with rainy
evenings, when his audiences are small, touch Olenka’s kind heart, and
she stays awake at night until he comes home, so that she may smile
encouragement through her window. At length they marry, and their life
runs smoothly, Olenka helping her husband in many ways. Her radiant
face alone draws people, and she tells them that the theatre is the
greatest thing in the world. “What a wonderful man you are!” she says
adoringly to her husband. But when on a business trip to Moscow Koukin
dies; and Olenka feels then that the end of the world has come for her.
Three months after, returning from church one day, she meets Vassili
Andreyich Pastovalof, manager of a timber merchant’s yard, and he
tells her that she should bear submissively the fate which God willed.
His grave voice stays in her memory--and shortly afterward they are
married. They live happily, and now it seems to Olenka that she has
been in the timber trade all her life. She echoes her husband’s
opinions--whatever he thinks, she thinks, wherever he wants to go, or
not to go, she does the same. When her friends suggest recreation, her
reply is, “I and Vassichka have no time to frequent theatres. We are
business people, with no time for trifles. Besides, what good is there
in theatres?”
Thus they live harmoniously for six years. But one cold morning, after
drinking some hot tea, Pastovalof steps into the yard without his hat
and catches a chill. Four months later Olenka is again a widow.
Not till six months after her husband’s death does she remove her weeds
and open the house shutters, so great is her grief. Then it is rumored
that she takes tea with a regimental veterinary surgeon, Smirnin, who
occupies one of the wings of her house. He is separated from his wife,
but contributes to his son’s support. Olenka becomes absorbed in this
new interest, for she cannot live without lavishing her affection on
some one. Their happiness is interrupted by Smirnin’s being called
away with his regiment; and now the woman is once more desolate.
The years pass and Olenka is entirely without fixed opinions, has
nothing to speak about, so she grows old-looking and dormant. She has
nothing to reflect. But one night Smirnin comes back. He has retired
from the army, is reunited with his wife, and wants to settle down in
the town. Olenka offers him her house free to live in, saying that the
wing is quite enough for her; so the man and the woman and their child
come to Olenka’s house. And in the little boy she finds an object to
love, even taking him into her own rooms, where they play and study
together. Then Olenka develops opinions on education, and grows young
again.
* * * * *
In his earlier days Chekhov espoused satirical comedy. In “A Work of
Art--The Story of a Gift” we have one of these typical nonsense stories.
A young man, Alexander Smirnoff, enters the office of Dr. Koshelkoff,
his physician, and, with many expressions of profoundest gratitude,
presents him with an exquisite bronze candelabrum. The youth is the
only son of his mother, and out of the stock left by his father--for
they are carrying on his business in antiques--they have reserved this
treasure, which they now give to the physician because his care had
saved the young man’s life. Smirnoff’s one regret is that he does not
possess the mate, so as to give the doctor the pair.
The medical man is embarrassed. The piece is lovely, but--improper.
The two dancing female figures are quite too unconventional for the
doctor’s office--he has a wife, a family, a mother-in-law, and lady
patients! No, he cannot accept the gift. But after many hurt protests
on the part of the donor, the physician keeps it anyhow.
No sooner is the young man gone than the doctor remembers a gay
bachelor lawyer to whom he owes many favors, and hurries off to give
him the beautiful but immodest bronze. The lawyer cannot express his
admiration--and regret. His patrons would be horrified, it would injure
his reputation. No, he cannot keep it.
The physician in turn is deeply wounded, so to save his friend’s
feelings the lawyer consents to keep it; and the doctor hurries off
chuckling in glee.
Immediately the lawyer presents the statuette to an actor. The
theatrical star is delighted, and soon his room is besieged by men who
want to see the savory work of art. But presently the actor sees that
he cannot receive lady visitors in the presence of such a statuette.
“Sell it,” suggests a friend, and at once he despatches the offending
candelabrum to Madame Smirnoff, the old woman who deals in antiques.
Two days later Dr. Koshelkoff sat peacefully in his study--when
suddenly the door of his room flew open, and Alexander Smirnoff
burst upon his sight. His face beamed with joy, he fairly shone,
and his whole body breathed inexpressible content.
In his hands he held an object wrapped in a newspaper.
“Doctor,” he began breathlessly, “imagine my joy! What good
fortune! Luckily for you, my mother has succeeded in obtaining
a companion piece to your candelabrum. You now have the pair
complete. Mother is so happy. I am her only son, you know. You
saved my life.”
Trembling with joy and with excess of gratitude, young Smirnoff
placed the candelabrum before the doctor. The physician opened his
mouth, attempted to say something, but the power of speech failed
him--and he said nothing.
Again in a different vein is “The Safety Match.”
Lieutenant Klausoff, a retired officer of the Horse Guards, who has
separated from his wife, Olga, on account of his own dissipations
and her shrewish temper, is reported as missing by Psyekoff, the
lieutenant’s agent. The examining magistrate, Chubikoff, and Dukovski,
his ambitious assistant, learn that Klausoff has not been seen for a
week, and when they break open his room all signs suggest a murder.
Young Dukovski, who is a disciple of induction as a means of arriving
at the facts of crime, discovers in the room one boot, a burned
safety-match, marks of teeth on a pillow, signs of struggle about the
bed, an unfastened window, footprints beneath it, the mark of a knee
on the window-sill, and some threads of blue cloth caught in a burdock
bush near-by. All these lead him to conclude that the murderers, one of
whom wore blue trousers, climbed in the window, sprang upon Klausoff
while he was taking off his boots, smothered him with a pillow, and
dragged him away. The second boot is at length found near-by, and the
investigators now seek for the criminals. The shrewd Dukovski, who
is continually laughed at by his superior Chubikoff, infers that two
of the murderers are the valet and Psyekoff, the agent, because it
developed that first the valet and then Psyekoff had loved the same
woman, whom their master had finally won. Besides, Psyekoff wears blue
trousers. Jealousy must have been the cause, for the victim’s watch
and money still lay upon his table. When confronted with these facts
and a reconstruction of the deed, neither can make effective denial.
A third conspirator is found in the victim’s sister, who is a religious
enthusiast and intensely indignant that her rakish brother should be
living apart from his wife, Olga.
At last Dukovski succeeds in tracing the purchase of a box of safety
matches to Olga, whereupon he concludes that she also is implicated.
He and Chubikoff confront her with the circumstantial evidences which
indicate that she and her accomplices have dragged off the body of her
husband. Astounded, she breaks down, and leads the officers into an
adjoining room, where the body of Klausoff is lying on a couch--asleep!
The wife, who still loves her tipsy lord, has dragged him away and
holds him in durance so that she may live with him whether he will or
not.
* * * * *
Master of an alert, firm style, and skilled not only in penetration
but in effective expression, Chekhov has a place in Russian literature
which is less difficult to designate than is usual in the case of one
only a few years dead. Certainly his themes are neither big nor vital
enough, nor yet sufficiently human, to accord him position beside
the philosophical Tolstoi, the titanic Turgenev, and the iron-hearted
Dostoevski (a greater novelist than short-story writer). Rather do his
workmanship, power of characterization, and subtle, sardonic humor
point to a solitary niche close to the grim and morbid Andreev. His
appeal--always intellectual--to his own people is tremendous, and in
Germany his vogue is still important. It seems safe to say that among
Russian fictionists he stands in the first rank of the second company.
* * * * *
To represent Chekhov’s work, I have chosen “In Exile,” which follows
complete in a new translation, because, while it exhibits all his
mature characteristics, it is less unpleasant on the one hand and on
the other less trivial than many of his other short-stories. But of its
qualities the reader may now judge.
IN EXILE
_By Anton Chekhov_
Old Simon, nicknamed Wiseacre, and a young Tartar, whom no one knew by
name, sat on the river-bank before a bonfire. The other three ferrymen
were in the hut. Simon, a man of sixty, gaunt and toothless, but broad
of shoulder and still hale in appearance, was drunk. He had meant to
go to sleep long ago, but there was a flask in his pocket, and he
feared that his comrades in the hut might ask him to pass it around.
The Tartar felt ill and tired; shivering in his rags, he was recounting
what a comfortable home he had had in his native province, and what
a handsome, clever wife he had left there. He was hardly more than
twenty-five years old, but now, before the blaze of the bonfire, his
pale, melancholy face seemed to be that of a mere lad.
“It’s no paradise here, to be sure,” Wiseacre agreed with him. “You
can see for yourself: water, bare banks, and everywhere clay--nothing
more.... Holy Week has passed, there’s ice on the river, and only this
morning it snowed.”
“It’s miserable! Miserable!” said the Tartar, as he glanced round him
in terror.
Some ten paces away flowed the dark, cold river. It seemed to grumble
as it noised its way past the corroded clay bank and rapidly bore
itself onward somewhere towards the distant sea. At the very edge of
the bank there rose the dark, massive form of a barge, the kind called
_karbass_ by the ferrymen. Looking in the distance towards the opposite
bank, one could see numerous fires, flaring and retreating, and
resembling so many leaping serpents. It was the burning of last year’s
grass. And beyond the fires, again darkness. The sound of floating ice
beating against the barge could be heard. It was damp, cold....
The Tartar glanced up towards the sky. There were just as many stars
here as at home, and the same surrounding darkness; yet there was
something lacking. Somehow, at home, in the Simbirsk province, there
were no such stars and no such sky.
“It’s miserable! Miserable!” he repeated.
“You’ll get used to it!” said Wiseacre, and laughed. “You are still
in your teens, and silly. Your mother’s milk hasn’t as yet dried upon
your lips. Of course it seems to your foolish mind that there is no
one more miserable than you; but the time will come when you yourself
will say, ‘May God grant every one such a life!’ Now, look at me. In
another week the water will be normal again; I shall take charge of
the ferry-boat; you will go jaunting through Siberia, while I shall
remain here and resume making my way from bank to bank. I’ve been doing
it twenty-two years, night and day. The pike and the salmon under the
water; I above it. And thank God for that! I want nothing. May God
grant every one such a life!”
The Tartar threw more brushwood into the fire, and, moving closer to
it, said:
“I have an ailing father. When he dies, my mother and my wife will join
me here. They have promised.”
“What do you want with a mother and a wife?” asked Wiseacre. “You’ll
repent it, brother. It’s the devil that’s putting you up to it, curse
his soul! Don’t listen to him, the accursed one! Don’t give in to him.
When he gets your mind on women, just spite him; tell him, ‘I don’t
want them!’ When he talks freedom to you, get stubborn; tell him, ‘I
don’t want it! I want nothing--neither father, nor mother, nor wife,
nor freedom, nor house, nor anything! I want nothing, confound their
souls!’”
Wiseacre took another gulp from his flask, and continued:
“Now, look at me, brother. I am not a simple muzhik, but a sexton’s
son, in fact; and when I lived in freedom in Kursk I wore a frock-coat;
but now I’ve gotten so that I could sleep naked on the ground and eat
grass. And God grant every one such a life! I want nothing, and I fear
no one. I’m on good terms with myself, and I cannot imagine any one
richer and freer than I. When I was banished from Russia, I insisted
from the very first day: ‘I want nothing!’ The devil he talks to me
of wife, and of home, and of freedom; and I back at him: ‘I want
nothing!’ I insisted on mine, and, as you see, I live well, and do not
complain. Give way to the devil but an inch, and you are lost. There’s
no deliverance, you sink into the bog over your very head, and there’s
no getting out. Not alone your brother, the stupid _muzhik_; but nobles
and educated men are lost. Some fifteen years ago they sent here one of
that gentry. He didn’t share some property with his brothers, tampered
somehow with a will. They say he comes from the dukes or the barons--or
perhaps he is only an official--how should one know? Well, this
gentleman arrived here, and the first thing he did was to buy himself a
house and some land. ‘I intend,’ he said, ‘to live by the sweat of my
brow, because,’ he said, ‘I am no longer a gentleman, but a convict.’
‘Well,’ said I to myself, ‘may God help him, he means well!’ He was at
that time a fussy, bustling young man; did his own mowing and now and
then caught fish, and rode sixty versts a day on horseback. That was
his one misfortune. From the very first year he made trips to Girino,
to the post-office there. Times were and he would be on my ferry-boat,
sighing: ‘Ah, Simon, it’s rather a long time since they have sent me
money from home!’ ‘There’s no need,’ I’d go on telling him, ‘of money,
Vassili Sergeyich. What good is it? Throw it aside,’ I argued with him.
‘All that’s gone by; forget it as if it never were; as if you had only
dreamt it; and begin life anew. Don’t listen,’ I said to him, ‘to the
devil. It’ll lead to no good; it’ll only draw a noose around your neck.
Now it’s money you want, and later it’ll be another thing--there’s no
end to it. If it’s happiness you seek, first of all desire nothing.
Yes.... If,’ I said to him, ‘fate has treated you and me badly, there’s
no begging charity of her, no falling at her feet; rather should one
treat her with scorn and laugh at her--then she too will laugh.’ So I
spoke to him.... Two years later I ferried him over to this side--and
he all overjoyed and laughing. ‘I am going,’ he said, ‘to Girino to
meet my wife. She has taken pity on me,’ he said, ‘and is coming
out here. She’s a fine woman, good-hearted.’ He almost choked from
happiness. The next day he brought his wife. She was young, handsome,
in a pretty hat; and in her arms a girl baby; and all sorts of baggage
with her. As to Vassili Sergeyich, he fussed around her, couldn’t stop
feasting his eyes on her or stop raving about her. ‘Yes, brother Simon,
even in Siberia people live.’ ‘All right,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t be
too sure of that.’ And from that time on, mark it, he began to make
weekly visits to Girino: to see if any money had come from Russia. He
needed no end of money. ‘She,’ he said, ‘is sacrificing her youth and
beauty in Siberia for my sake, and is sharing with me my bitter lot;
and therefore,’ he said, ‘I should give her every possible pleasure.’
... To make it cheerful for her, he started up an acquaintance with the
officials and with all sorts of trashy people. Well, all this company
had to be furnished food and drink; then a piano had to be had, and
a shaggy little dog for the sofa--the deuce take it!... In a word,
luxury, extravagance! She did not live long with him. How could she?
Here she saw only mud, water, cold, no vegetables or fruits, and all
around her uneducated people, full of drink, and without manners--and
she a spoiled lady from St. Petersburg.... Naturally, she grew sick of
it. And the husband too was no longer what he had been, but a convict.
“It was one Assumption Eve, three years later, that I remember some one
shouting from the opposite bank. I crossed over, and whom should I see
but the lady herself, all wrapped up--and with her a young gentleman,
one of the officials. A troika!... I ferried them over to this side;
the troika was ready; ah, but you should have seen them fly! Hardly the
wink of an eye and there was not a trace of them.
“And in the morning Vassili Sergeyich came running here. ‘Simon, has
my wife passed this way with a gentleman in spectacles?’ ‘Yes, she did
pass this way,’ I said to him. ‘Go and seek the wind in the fields!’
He gave chase to them, but returned in five days. When I ferried him
across to the other side, he threw himself down in the bottom of the
boat, and began to beat his head against the planks and to whine.
‘What else had you to expect?’ I said to him. I laughed and reminded
him: ‘Even in Siberia people live!’ But he only beat his head the
harder.... Then he began to hanker after freedom. He heard his wife
was in Russia, and of course he wanted to go there and to take her
away from her lover. Almost every day he would go to the post-office
or to the government offices. He presented petition after petition,
begging for pardon and for permission to return home. He told me he
had spent a couple of hundred rubles on telegrams alone. He sold his
land, while he mortgaged his house to Jews. He grew gray and bent;
his face yellow--a consumptive, in fact. Speaking to you, he would
always go: _khe-khe-khe_ ... and his eyes full of tears. For eight
years he kept on handing in those petitions, but after that he had
come to life and grown jolly again. You see, he had thought of another
luxury. His daughter had grown up. And he feasted his eyes on her and
didn’t get enough of it. She really was an attractive girl--pretty,
black-browed, and rather spirited in manner. Every Sunday he’d take
her with him to Girino to church. They’d stand hand in hand on the
ferry, and he not taking his eyes from her. ‘Yes, Simon,’ he would
say, ‘even in Siberia people live. Even in Siberia there is happiness.
Just look what a daughter I’ve got! You can’t find another like her if
you seek a thousand miles around!’ The girl, as I said, was really a
beauty.... But I thought to myself: ‘Just wait.... She’s a young girl;
the blood tingles, and one wants to live, and what sort of life is to
be had here?’ And, comrade, to make the story short, she really began
to ail.... She got to coughing, and coughing, to pining away; and now
she is very sick, can hardly stand on her legs. Consumption! There’s
your Siberian happiness for you--the deuce take it!--that’s how even
in Siberia people live.... Now he’s begun to chase after doctors, and
to bring them back home with him. Let him but hear there’s a doctor
or a healer within two hundred or three hundred versts, and off he
goes after him. It’s terrible to think how much money he has spent on
doctors. I’d rather drink up the money.... She’ll die, any way. She’ll
die, there’s no gainsaying that, and then he’ll be lost altogether.
He’ll hang himself from sorrow, or he’ll escape to Russia--and then you
know what will happen. He’ll be caught, sentenced to hard labor; he’ll
taste the knout....”
“That is well,” murmured the Tartar, trembling with cold.
“What is well?” asked Wiseacre.
“He’s had his wife, his daughter.... You say you want nothing. To have
nothing is bad! His wife lived with him three years--God was good
to him. To have nothing is bad, but three years is good. Don’t you
understand?”
Trembling with cold, stammering out with difficulty the few Russian
words he knew, the Tartar expressed the hope that God might preserve
him from dying in a strange land and being buried in a cold, blighted
earth; if his wife should come only for a single day, for a single
hour, he would consent, for the sake of this brief happiness, to
undergo the worst tortures and thank God for them. Better one day of
happiness than nothing!
Again he spoke of the handsome and clever wife he had left at home;
then, putting his hands to his head, he began to cry and to assure
Simon that he was innocent and was undergoing punishment for no just
cause. His two brothers and an uncle had stolen some horses from a
_muzhik_ and had beaten the old man half to death; but society dealt
with him unjustly, and sent the three brothers to Siberia, while the
uncle, a rich man, remained at home.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Simon.
The Tartar did not reply, but fixed a tearful gaze upon the fire. His
face expressed doubt and alarm, as if he still did not understand why
he was here in this darkness and cold, among strangers, and not at
home. Wiseacre lay beside the fire, chuckled at something, and hummed.
“What sort of happiness is there for her with her father?” he said
after a pause. “He loves her, and is comforted in her, it is true;
but he’s no fool; he’s a stern, harsh old man--and young girls don’t
want sternness.... They want caresses and ha-ha-ha! and hi-ho-ho!--and
perfume and pomade. Yes.... Ekh, this business!” sighed Simon, and
lifted himself awkwardly. “The vodka’s all gone; that means it’s time
to go to bed. Well, I’m going, brother....”
Left alone, the Tartar added more brushwood to the fire, lay down
facing it, and began to think of his native village and of his wife; if
she were to come, even if only for a month, for a day--then let her go
back if she wanted to! Better a month, even a day, than nothing! But
if his wife were to keep her promise and come, how should he feed her?
Where could she live?
“If there is nothing to eat, how can one live?” he asked aloud.
For working day and night at an oar he was paid but ten copecks a day;
it is true, passengers sometimes gave a gratuity for tea and for vodka,
but his companions shared it among themselves, and gave the Tartar
nothing, only laughing at him. And poverty made him feel hungry, cold,
and frightened. Now, since his body ached and trembled, he wished to go
into the hut and to bed, but he knew that there was nothing there to
cover oneself with, and that it was colder than on the bank; here too
there was nothing to cover oneself with, but one could at least keep up
the fire....
In another week, when the water should have subsided, and the regular
ferry-boat resumed its course, the services of the ferrymen, with the
exception of Simon’s, would be dispensed with; then the Tartar must
start tramping from village to village and beg for alms and work. His
wife was but seventeen years old; pretty, petted, and shy--must she too
traverse villages and beg for bread? No, the mere thought of it was
terrible.
Dawn was already breaking. The barge and the willows stood out clearly;
the surging foam too was visible. Glancing behind him, the Tartar could
see the clayey slope; the small, brown-thatched hut was at its base,
and the huts of the village above. The cocks already crowed in the
village.
The red clayey slope, the barge, the river, the strange, evil-minded
people, hunger, cold, disease--they all seemed not to exist at all. It
was all a dream, thought the Tartar. He imagined that he was asleep
and could hear himself snoring.... Of course he was at home, in the
Simbirsk province, and all he needed to do to have his wife appear
was to call her by name; and in the next room was his mother.... What
terrible things dreams are! Of what use are they? The Tartar smiled and
opened his eyes. What river was this? The Volga?
It began to snow.
“Ho, there!” came a shout from the other side. “The boat!”
The Tartar sprang up and went to wake his companions. Pulling on their
torn sheepskin coats while on the way to the boat, filling the air with
oaths from their hoarse throats, and shivering with cold, the ferrymen
made their appearance. After their sleep, the river, with its cold,
penetrating wind, seemed to them most repellent and terrible. Leisurely
they took their places in the _karbass_.
The Tartar and three ferrymen seized the long, broad-bladed oars,
resembling in the dark the claws of a crab; while Simon threw himself
down on his stomach across the helm. The shouting continued on the
other side; two revolver-shots were also heard; it was apparent that
he who fired them thought the ferrymen were still asleep, or in the
village tavern.
“Never mind, you’ll get there,” murmured Wiseacre in a voice which
conveyed his assurance that in this world there was no need of
hurrying--that it was all the same in the long run.
The heavy, awkward barge parted from the bank, and made its way slowly
through the willows; and only the slightly perceptible backward
movement of the willows indicated that the barge was moving at all.
The ferrymen, with measured slowness, swung their oars. Wiseacre lay
on his stomach across the helm, and, describing a curve in the air,
was thrown from one side to the other. In the dark, it seemed as if
a number of men were sitting on some long-clawed antediluvian animal
and were floating towards that cold, melancholy land seen only in
nightmares.
The barge passed beyond the willows and was now in the open. Presently,
on the other bank, could be heard the creaking and the measured dipping
of the oars; while those in the boat could hear some one shouting,
“Quicker! Quicker!” Another ten minutes, and the barge struck heavily
against the landing.
“It keeps on snowing! It keeps on snowing!” grumbled Simon, wiping the
snow from his face. “God knows where it all comes from!”
On the bank stood a rather thin, low-statured old man, dressed in a
short foxskin coat and a white lambskin cap. He stood at some distance
from the horses and did not move; his face had a morose, concentrated
expression, as if he were making an effort to recall something and were
angry at his disobedient memory. When Simon, smiling, approached him,
and took off his cap, the man said:
“I am in great haste to go to Anastasevka. My daughter is worse again,
and there, I am told, a new doctor has come.”
The coach was wheeled on board the barge, which started to cross back.
The man, whom Simon called Vassili Sergeyich, stood all the time
immovable, tightly compressing his thick lips, and looking with a fixed
gaze into the distance. When the driver asked permission to smoke in
his presence, he did not reply, as if he had not heard. Simon lay on
the bottom of the boat, on his stomach, looked at him derisively, and
said:
“Even in Siberia people live. L-live!”
The face of Wiseacre wore a triumphant expression, as if he had
demonstrated something and rejoiced that what he had prophesied had
come true. The unhappy, helpless look of the man in the foxskin coat
apparently afforded him considerable gratification.
“Rather muddy now for travelling, Vassili Sergeyich,” said he, while
the horses were being harnessed. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to postpone
your trip for a week or two, till it gets a bit more dry. Perhaps it
were better you didn’t go at all.... If there were only some sense in
your going! Well, you yourself know that people travel eternally, day
and night, and get nowheres. What do you say?”
Vassili Sergeyich gave the ferrymen for vodka, sat himself in the
coach, and was off.
“There! After the doctor again!” said Simon, trembling from cold....
“Yes, seek a real doctor, catch the wind in the field, seize the devil
by the tail, confound your soul! What queer people there are! And
forgive me, O Lord, a sinner!”
The Tartar walked up to Wiseacre, and looked at him with hatred and
repulsion. He trembled, and as he spoke he mingled with his broken
Russian several Tartar words:
“He is good ... good, but you are bad! You are bad! He is a good soul,
a noble soul, but you are a beast, you are bad! He is living, but you
are dead.... God created men that they might live, that they might
have joys and sorrows; but you want nothing--which means that you are
dead, you’re a stone, you’re earth! A stone wants nothing--and you
want nothing!... You’re a stone--and God does not love you, but him He
loves!”
All laughed; the Tartar frowned disgustedly, waved with his hand, and,
wrapping his rags around him, walked up to the fire. Simon and the
ferrymen went towards the hut.
“It’s cold!” hoarsely murmured one ferryman, stretching himself on the
straw, with which the entire floor was covered.
“Yes, it isn’t warm!” agreed another. “A galley slave’s life!”
All lay down. The door flew open before the wind, and the snow drifted
into the hut. No one wanted to get up and close the door; they all felt
cold and lazy.
“Well, things suit me,” said Simon drowsily. “God grant every one such
a life!”
“You, as every one knows, are a born galley slave. Even the devil won’t
take you!”
From the outside came sounds resembling the whining of a dog.
“What’s that? Who’s there?”
“That’s the Tartar crying!”
“Well!... What a character!”
“He’ll get used to it!” said Simon, and soon was asleep.
Soon the others were also asleep. But the door remained unshut.