FRAGMENTS OF RECOLLECTIONS
BY
MAXIM GORKY
Once he invited me to the village Koutchouk-Koy where he had a tiny
strip of land and a white, two-storied house. There, while showing me
his "estate," he began to speak with animation: "If I had plenty of
money, I should build a sanatorium here for invalid village teachers.
You know, I would put up a large, bright building--very bright, with
large windows and lofty rooms. I would have a fine library, different
musical instruments, bees, a vegetable garden, an orchard.... There
would be lectures on agriculture, mythology.... Teachers ought to know
everything, everything, my dear fellow."
He was suddenly silent, coughed, looked at me out of the corners of his
eyes, and smiled that tender, charming smile of his which attracted one
so irresistibly to him and made one listen so attentively to his words.
"Does it bore you to listen to my fantasies? I do love to talk of it....
If you knew how badly the Russian village needs a nice, sensible,
educated teacher! We ought in Russia to give the teacher particularly
good conditions, and it ought to be done as quickly as possible. We
ought to realize that without a wide education of the people, Russia
will collapse, like a house built of badly baked bricks. A teacher must
be an artist, in love with his calling; but with us he is a journeyman,
ill educated, who goes to the village to teach children as though he
were going into exile. He is starved, crushed, terrorized by the fear of
losing his daily bread. But he ought to be the first man in the village;
the peasants ought to recognize him as a power, worthy of attention and
respect; no one should dare to shout at him or humiliate him personally,
as with us every one does--the village constable, the rich shop-keeper,
the priest, the rural police commissioner, the school guardian, the
councilor, and that official who has the title of school-inspector, but
who cares nothing for the improvement of education and only sees that
the circulars of his chiefs are carried out.... It is ridiculous to pay
in farthings the man who has to educate the people. It is intolerable
that he should walk in rags, shiver with cold in damp and draughty
schools, catch cold, and about the age of thirty get laryngitis,
rheumatism, or tuberculosis. We ought to be ashamed of it. Our teacher,
for eight or nine months in the year, lives like a hermit: he has no one
to speak a word to; without company, books, or amusements, he is growing
stupid, and, if he invites his colleagues to visit him, then he becomes
politically suspect--a stupid word with which crafty men frighten fools.
All this is disgusting; it is the mockery of a man who is doing a great
and tremendously important work.... Do you know, whenever I see a
teacher, I feel ashamed for him, for his timidity, and because he is
badly dressed ... it seems to me that for the teacher's wretchedness I
am myself to blame--I mean it."
He was silent, thinking; and then, waving his hand, he said gently:
"This Russia of ours is such an absurd, clumsy country."
A shadow of sadness crossed his beautiful eyes; little rays of wrinkles
surrounded them and made them look still more meditative. Then, looking
round, he said jestingly: "You see, I have fired off at you a complete
leading article from a radical paper. Come, I'll give you tea to reward
your patience."
That was characteristic of him, to speak so earnestly, with such warmth
and sincerity, and then suddenly to laugh at himself and his speech. In
that sad and gentle smile one felt the subtle skepticism of the man who
knows the value of words and dreams; and there also flashed in the smile
a lovable modesty and delicate sensitiveness....
We walked back slowly in silence to the house. It was a clear, hot day;
the waves sparkled under the bright rays of the sun; down below one
heard a dog barking joyfully. Chekhov took my arm, coughed, and said
slowly: "It is shameful and sad, but true: there are many men who envy
the dogs."
And he added immediately with a laugh: "To-day I can only make feeble
speeches ... It means that I'm getting old."
I often heard him say: "You know, a teacher has just come here--he's
ill, married ... couldn't you do something for him? I have made
arrangements for him for the time being." Or again: "Listen, Gorky,
there is a teacher here who would like to meet you. He can't go out,
he's ill. Won't you come and see him? Do." Or: "Look here, the women
teachers want books to be sent to them."
Sometimes I would find that "teacher" at his house; usually he would be
sitting on the edge of his chair, blushing at the consciousness of his
own awkwardness, in the sweat of his brow picking and choosing his
words, trying to speak smoothly and "educatedly"; or, with the ease of
manner of a person who is morbidly shy, he would concentrate himself
upon the effort not to appear stupid in the eyes of an author, and he
would simply belabor Anton Chekhov with a hail of questions which had
never entered his head until that moment.
Anton Chekhov would listen attentively to the dreary, incoherent speech;
now and again a smile came into his sad eyes, a little wrinkle appeared
on his forehead, and then, in his soft, lusterless voice, he began to
speak simple, clear, homely words, words which somehow or other
immediately made his questioner simple: the teacher stopped trying to be
clever, and therefore immediately became more clever and interesting....
I remember one teacher, a tall, thin man with a yellow, hungry face and
a long, hooked nose which drooped gloomily towards his chin. He sat
opposite Anton Chekhov and, looking fixedly into Chekhov's face with his
black eyes, said in a melancholy bass voice:
"From such impressions of existence within the space of the tutorial
session there comes a psychical conglomeration which crushes every
possibility of an objective attitude towards the surrounding universe.
Of course, the universe is nothing but our presentation of it...."
And he rushed headlong into philosophy, and he moved over its surface
like a drunkard skating on ice.
"Tell me," Chekhov put in quietly and kindly, "who is that teacher in
your district who beats the children?"
The teacher sprang from his chair and waved his arms indignantly: "Whom
do you mean? Me? Never! Beating?"
He snorted with indignation.
"Don't get excited," Anton Chekhov went on, smiling reassuringly; "I'm
not speaking of you. But I remember--I read it in the newspapers--there
is some one in your district who beats the children."
The teacher sat down, wiped his perspiring face, and, with a sigh of
relief, said in his deep bass:--
"It's true ... there was such a case ... it was Makarov. You know, it's
not surprising. It's cruel, but explicable. He's married ... has four
children ... his wife is ill ... himself consumptive ... his salary is
20 roubles, the school like a cellar, and the teacher has but a single
room--under such circumstances you will give a thrashing to an angel of
God for no fault ... and the children--they're far from angels, believe
me."
And the man, who had just been mercilessly belaboring Chekhov with his
store of clever words, suddenly, ominously wagging his hooked nose,
began to speak simple, weighty, clear-cut words, which illuminated, like
a fire, the terrible, accursed truth about the life of the Russian
village.
When he said good-bye to his host, the teacher took Chekhov's small, dry
hand with its thin fingers in both his own, and, shaking it, said:--
"I came to you as though I were going to the authorities, in fear and
trembling ... I puffed myself out like a turkey-cock ... I wanted to
show you that I was no ordinary mortal.... And now I'm leaving you as a
nice, close friend who understands everything.... It's a great thing--to
understand everything! Thank you! I'm taking away with me a pleasant
thought: big men are simpler and more understandable ... and nearer in
soul to us fellow men than all those wretches among whom we live....
Good-bye; I will never forget you."
His nose quivered, his lips twisted into a good-natured smile, and he
added suddenly:
"To tell the truth, scoundrels too are unhappy--the devil take them."
When he went out, Chekhov followed him with a glance, smiled, and said:
"He's a nice fellow.... He won't be a teacher long."
"Why?"
"They will run him down--whip him off."
He thought for a bit, and added quietly:
"In Russia an honest man is rather like the chimney-sweep with whom
nurses frighten children."
* * * * *
I think that in Anton Chekhov's presence every one involuntarily felt in
himself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one's self; I often
saw how people cast off the motley finery of bookish phrases, smart
words, and all the other cheap tricks with which a Russian, wishing to
figure as a European, adorns himself, like a savage with shells and
fish's teeth. Anton Chekhov disliked fish's teeth and cock's feathers;
anything "brilliant" or foreign, assumed by a man to make himself look
bigger, disturbed him; I noticed that, whenever he saw any one dressed
up in this way, he had a desire to free him from all that oppressive,
useless tinsel and to find underneath the genuine face and living soul
of the person. All his life Chekhov lived on his own soul; he was always
himself, inwardly free, and he never troubled about what some people
expected and others--coarser people--demanded of Anton Chekhov. He did
not like conversations about deep questions, conversations with which
our dear Russians so assiduously comfort themselves, forgetting that it
is ridiculous, and not at all amusing, to argue about velvet costumes in
the future when in the present one has not even a decent pair of
trousers.
Beautifully simple himself, he loved everything simple, genuine,
sincere, and he had a peculiar way of making other people simple.
Once, I remember, three luxuriously dressed ladies came to see him; they
filled his room with the rustle of silk skirts and the smell of strong
scent; they sat down politely opposite their host, pretended that they
were interested in politics, and began "putting questions":--
"Anton Pavlovitch, what do you think? How will the war end?"
Anton Pavlovitch coughed, thought for a while, and then gently, in a
serious and kindly voice, replied:
"Probably in peace."
"Well, yes ... certainly. But who will win? The Greeks or the Turks?"
"It seems to me that those will win who are the stronger."
"And who, do you think, are the stronger?" all the ladies asked
together.
"Those who are the better fed and the better educated."
"Ah, how clever," one of them exclaimed.
"And whom do you like best?" another asked.
Anton Pavlovitch looked at her kindly, and answered with a meek smile:
"I love candied fruits ... don't you?"
"Very much," the lady exclaimed gayly.
"Especially Abrikossov's," the second agreed solidly. And the third,
half closing her eyes, added with relish:
"It smells so good."
And all three began to talk with vivacity, revealing, on the subject of
candied fruit, great erudition and subtle knowledge. It was obvious that
they were happy at not having to strain their minds and pretend to be
seriously interested in Turks and Greeks, to whom up to that moment they
had not given a thought.
When they left, they merrily promised Anton Pavlovitch:
"We will send you some candied fruit."
"You managed that nicely," I observed when they had gone.
Anton Pavlovitch laughed quietly and said:
"Every one should speak his own language."
On another occasion I found at his house a young and prettyish crown
prosecutor. He was standing in front of Chekhov, shaking his curly head,
and speaking briskly:
"In your story, 'The Conspirator,' you, Anton Pavlovitch, put before me
a very complex case. If I admit in Denis Grigoriev a criminal and
conscious intention, then I must, without any reservation, bundle him
into prison, in the interests of the community. But he is a savage; he
did not realize the criminality of his act.... I feel pity for him. But
suppose I regard him as a man who acted without understanding, and
suppose I yield to my feeling of pity, how can I guarantee the community
that Denis will not again unscrew the nut in the sleepers and wreck a
train? That's the question. What's to be done?"
He stopped, threw himself back, and fixed an inquiring look on Anton
Pavlovitch's face. His uniform was quite new, and the buttons shone as
self-confidently and dully on his chest as did the little eyes in the
pretty, clean, little face of the youthful enthusiast for justice.
"If I were judge," said Anton Pavlovitch gravely, "I would acquit
Denis."
"On what grounds?"
"I would say to him: you, Denis, have not yet ripened into the type of
the deliberate criminal; go--and ripen."
The lawyer began to laugh, but instantly again became pompously serious
and said:
"No, sir, the question put by you must be answered only in the interests
of the community whose life and property I am called upon to protect.
Denis is a savage, but he is also a criminal--that is the truth."
"Do you like gramophones?" suddenly asked Anton Pavlovitch in his soft
voice.
"O yes, very much. An amazing invention!" the youth answered gayly.
"And I can't stand gramophones," Anton Pavlovitch confessed sadly.
"Why?"
"They speak and sing without feeling. Everything seems like a caricature
... dead. Do you like photography?"
It appeared that the lawyer was a passionate lover of photography; he
began at once to speak of it with enthusiasm, completely uninterested,
as Chekhov had subtly and truly noticed, in the gramophone, despite his
admiration for that "amazing invention." And again I observed how there
looked out of that uniform a living and rather amusing little man, whose
feelings towards life were still those of a puppy hunting.
When Anton Pavlovitch had seen him out, he said sternly:
"They are like pimples on the seat of justice--disposing of the fate of
people."
And after a short silence:
"Crown prosecutors must be very fond of fishing ... especially for
little fish."
* * * * *
He had the art of revealing everywhere and driving away banality, an art
which is only possible to a man who demands much from life and which
comes from a keen desire to see men simple, beautiful, harmonious.
Banality always found in him a discerning and merciless judge.
Some one told in his presence how the editor of a popular magazine, who
was always talking of the necessity of love and pity, had, for no reason
at all, insulted a railway guard, and how he usually acted with extreme
rudeness towards his inferiors.
"Well," said Anton Pavlovitch with a gloomy smile, "but isn't he an
aristocrat, an educated gentleman? He studied at the seminary. His
father wore bast shoes, and he wears patent-leather boots."
And in his tone there was something which at once made the "aristocrat"
trivial and ridiculous.
"He's a very gifted man," he said of a certain journalist. "He always
writes so nobly, humanely, ... lemonadely. Calls his wife a fool in
public ... the servants' rooms are damp and the maids constantly get
rheumatics."
"Don't you like N. N., Anton Pavlovitch?"
"Yes, I do--very much. He's a pleasant fellow," Anton Pavlovitch agrees,
coughing. "He knows everything ... reads a lot ... he hasn't returned
three of my books ... he's absent-minded. To-day he will tell you that
you're a wonderful fellow, and to-morrow he will tell somebody else that
you cheat your servants, and that you have stolen from your mistress's
husband his silk socks ... the black ones with the blue stripes."
Some one in his presence complained of the heaviness and tediousness of
the "serious" sections in thick monthly magazines.
"But you mustn't read those articles," said Anton Pavlovitch. "They are
friends' literature--written for friends. They are written by Messrs.
Red, Black, and White. One writes an article; the other replies to it;
and the third reconciles the contradictions of the other two. It is like
playing whist with a dummy. Yet none of them asks himself what good it
is to the reader."
Once a plump, healthy, handsome, well-dressed lady came to him and began
to speak _a la Chekhov_:--
"Life is so boring, Anton Pavlovitch. Everything is so gray: people, the
sea, even the flowers seem to me gray.... And I have no desires ... my
soul is in pain ... it is like a disease."
"It is a disease," said Anton Pavlovitch with conviction, "it is a
disease; in Latin it is called _morbus imitatis_."
Fortunately the lady did not seem to know Latin, or, perhaps, she
pretended not to know it.
"Critics are like horse-flies which prevent the horse from plowing," he
said, smiling his wise smile. "The horse works, all its muscles drawn
tight like the strings on a doublebass, and a fly settles on his flanks
and tickles and buzzes ... he has to twitch his skin and swish his tail.
And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply
because it is restless and wants to proclaim: 'Look, I too am living on
the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.' For twenty-five
years I have read criticisms of my stories, and I don't remember a
single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once
Skabitchevsky wrote something which made an impression on me ... he said
I would die in a ditch, drunk."
Nearly always there was an ironical smile in his gray eyes, but at times
they became cold, sharp, hard; at such times a harder tone sounded in
his soft, sincere voice, and then it appeared that this modest, gentle
man, when he found it necessary, could rouse himself vigorously against
a hostile force and would not yield.
But sometimes, I thought, there was in his attitude towards people a
feeling of hopelessness, almost of cold, resigned despair.
"A Russian is a strange creature," he said once. "He is like a sieve;
nothing remains in him. In his youth he fills himself greedily with
anything which he comes across, and after thirty years nothing remains
but a kind of gray rubbish.... In order to live well and humanly one
must work--work with love and with faith. But we, we can't do it. An
architect, having built a couple of decent buildings, sits down to play
cards, plays all his life, or else is to be found somewhere behind the
scenes of some theatre. A doctor, if he has a practice, ceases to be
interested in science, and reads nothing but _The Medical Journal_, and
at forty seriously believes that all diseases have their origin in
catarrh. I have never met a single civil servant who had any idea of the
meaning of his work: usually he sits in the metropolis or the chief town
of the province, and writes papers and sends them off to Zmiev or
Smorgon for attention. But that those papers will deprive some one in
Zmiev or Smorgon of freedom of movement--of that the civil servant
thinks as little as an atheist of the tortures of hell. A lawyer who has
made a name by a successful defense ceases to care about justice, and
defends only the rights of property, gambles on the Turf, eats oysters,
figures as a connoisseur of all the arts. An actor, having taken two or
three parts tolerably, no longer troubles to learn his parts, puts on a
silk hat, and thinks himself a genius. Russia is a land of insatiable
and lazy people: they eat enormously of nice things, drink, like to
sleep in the day-time, and snore in their sleep. They marry in order to
get their house looked after and keep mistresses in order to be thought
well of in society. Their psychology is that of a dog: when they are
beaten, they whine shrilly and run into their kennels; when petted, they
lie on their backs with their paws in the air and wag their tails."
Pain and cold contempt sounded in these words. But, though contemptuous,
he felt pity, and, if in his presence you abused any one, Anton
Pavlovitch would immediately defend him.
"Why do you say that? He is an old man ... he's seventy." Or: "But he's
still so young ... it's only stupidity."
And, when he spoke like that, I never saw a sign of aversion in his
face.
* * * * *
When a man is young, banality seems only amusing and unimportant, but
little by little it possesses a man; it permeates his brain and blood
like poison or asphyxiating fumes; he becomes like an old, rusty
sign-board: something is painted on it, but what?--You can't make out.
Anton Pavlovitch in his early stories was already able to reveal in the
dim sea of banality its tragic humor; one has only to read his
"humorous" stories with attention to see what a lot of cruel and
disgusting things, behind the humorous words and situations, had been
observed by the author with sorrow and were concealed by him.
He was ingenuously shy; he would not say aloud and openly to people:
"Now do be more decent"; he hoped in vain that they would themselves see
how necessary it was that they should be more decent. He hated
everything banal and foul, and he described the abominations of life in
the noble language of a poet, with the humorist's gentle smile, and
behind the beautiful form of his stories people scarcely noticed the
inner meaning, full of bitter reproach.
The dear public, when it reads his "Daughter of Albion," laughs and
hardly realizes how abominable is the well-fed squire's mockery of a
person who is lonely and strange to every one and everything. In each of
his humorous stories I hear the quiet, deep sigh of a pure and human
heart, the hopeless sigh of sympathy for men who do not know how to
respect human dignity, who submit without any resistance to mere force,
live like fish, believe in nothing but the necessity of swallowing every
day as much thick soup as possible, and feel nothing but fear that some
one, strong and insolent, will give them a hiding.
No one understood as clearly and finely as Anton Chekhov, the tragedy of
life's trivialities, no one before him showed men with such merciless
truth the terrible and shameful picture of their life in the dim chaos
of bourgeois every-day existence.
His enemy was banality; he fought it all his life long; he ridiculed it,
drawing it with a pointed and unimpassioned pen, finding the mustiness
of banality even where at the first glance everything seemed to be
arranged very nicely, comfortably, and even brilliantly--and banality
revenged itself upon him by a nasty prank, for it saw that his corpse,
the corpse of a poet, was put into a railway truck "For the Conveyance
of Oysters."
That dirty green railway truck seems to me precisely the great,
triumphant laugh of banality over its tired enemy; and all the
"Recollections" in the gutter press are hypocritical sorrow, behind
which I feel the cold and smelly breath of banality, secretly rejoicing
over the death of its enemy.
* * * * *
Reading Anton Chekhov's stories, one feels oneself in a melancholy day
of late autumn, when the air is transparent and the outline of naked
trees, narrow houses, grayish people, is sharp. Everything is strange,
lonely, motionless, helpless. The horizon, blue and empty, melts into
the pale sky and its breath is terribly cold upon the earth which is
covered with frozen mud. The author's mind, like the autumn sun, shows
up in hard outline the monotonous roads, the crooked streets, the little
squalid houses in which tiny, miserable people are stifled by boredom
and laziness and fill the houses with an unintelligible, drowsy bustle.
Here anxiously, like a gray mouse, scurries "The Darling," the dear,
meek woman who loves so slavishly and who can love so much. You can slap
her cheek and she won't even dare to utter a sigh aloud, the meek
slave.... And by her side is Olga of "The Three Sisters": she too loves
much, and submits with resignation to the caprices of the dissolute,
banal wife of her good-for-nothing brother; the life of her sisters
crumbles before her eyes, she weeps and cannot help any one in anything,
and she has not within her a single live, strong word of protest against
banality.
And here is the lachrymose Ranevskaya and the other owners of "The
Cherry Orchard," egotistical like children, with the flabbiness of
senility. They missed the right moment for dying; they whine, seeing
nothing of what is going on around them, understanding nothing,
parasites without the power of again taking root in life. The wretched
little student, Trofimov, speaks eloquently of the necessity of
working--and does nothing but amuse himself, out of sheer boredom, with
stupid mockery of Varya who works ceaselessly for the good of the
idlers.
Vershinin dreams of how pleasant life will be in three hundred years,
and lives without perceiving that everything around him is falling into
ruin before his eyes; Solyony, from boredom and stupidity, is ready to
kill the pitiable Baron Tousenbach.
There passes before one a long file of men and women, slaves of their
love, of their stupidity and idleness, of their greed for the good
things of life; there walk the slaves of the dark fear of life; they
straggle anxiously along, filling life with incoherent words about the
future, feeling that in the present there is no place for them.
At moments out of the gray mass of them one hears the sound of a shot:
Ivanov or Triepliev has guessed what he ought to do, and has died.
Many of them have nice dreams of how pleasant life will be in two
hundred years, but it occurs to none of them to ask themselves who will
make life pleasant if we only dream.
In front of that dreary, gray crowd of helpless people there passed a
great, wise, and observant man; he looked at all these dreary
inhabitants of his country, and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle
but deep reproach, with anguish in his face and in his heart, in a
beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them:
"You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that."
TO CHEKHOV'S MEMORY
BY
ALEXANDER KUPRIN
_He lived among us...._
You remember how, in early childhood, after the long summer holidays,
one went back to school. Everything was gray; it was like a barrack; it
smelt of fresh paint and putty; one's school-fellows rough, the
authorities unkind. Still one tried somehow to keep up one's courage,
though at moments one was seized with home-sickness. One was occupied in
greeting friends, struck by changes in faces, deafened by the noise and
movement.
But when evening comes and the bustle in the half dark dormitory ceases,
O what an unbearable sadness, what despair possesses one's soul. One
bites one's pillow, suppressing one's sobs, one whispers dear names and
cries, cries with tears that burn, and knows that this sorrow is
unquenchable. It is then that one realizes for the first time all the
shattering horror of two things: the irrevocability of the past and the
feeling of loneliness. It seems as if one would gladly give up all the
rest of life, gladly suffer any tortures, for a single day of that
bright, beautiful life which will never repeat itself. It seems as if
one would snatch each kind, caressing word and enclose it forever in
one's memory, as if one would drink into one's soul, slowly and
greedily, drop by drop, every caress. And one is cruelly tormented by
the thought that, through carelessness, in the hurry, and because time
seemed inexhaustible, one had not made the most of each hour and moment
that flashed by in vain.
A child's sorrows are sharp, but will melt in sleep and disappear with
the morning sun. We, grown-up people, do not feel them so passionately,
but we remember longer and grieve more deeply. After Chekhov's funeral,
coming back from the service in the cemetery, one great writer spoke
words that were simple, but full of meaning:
"Now we have buried him, the hopeless keenness of the loss is passing
away. But do you realize, forever, till the end of our days, there will
remain in us a constant, dull, sad, consciousness that Chekhov is not
there?"
And now that he is not here, one feels with peculiar pain how precious
was each word of his, each smile, movement, glance, in which shone out
his beautiful, elect, aristocratic soul. One is sorry that one was not
always attentive to those special details, which sometimes more potently
and intimately than great deeds reveal the inner man. One reproaches
oneself that in the fluster of life one has not managed to remember--to
write down much of what is interesting, characteristic and important.
And at the same time one knows that these feelings are shared by all
those who were near him, who loved him truly as a man of incomparable
spiritual fineness and beauty; and with eternal gratitude they will
respect his memory, as the memory of one of the most remarkable of
Russian writers.
To the love, to the tender and subtle sorrow of these men, I dedicate
these lines.
* * * * *
Chekhov's cottage in Yalta stood nearly outside the town, right on the
white and dusty Antka road. I do not know who had built it, but it was
the most original building in Yalta. All bright, pure, light,
beautifully-proportioned, built in no definite architectural style
whatsoever, with a watch-tower like a castle, with unexpected gables,
with a glass verandah on the ground and an open terrace above, with
scattered windows--both wide and narrow--the bungalow resembled a
building of the modern school, if there were not obvious in its plan the
attentive and original thought, the original, peculiar taste of an
individual. The bungalow stood in the corner of an orchard, surrounded
by a flower-garden. Adjoining the garden, on the side opposite the road
was an old deserted Tartar cemetery, fenced with a low little wall;
always green, still and unpeopled, with modest stones on the graves.
The flower garden was tiny, not at all luxurious, and the fruit orchard
was still very young. There grew in it pears and crab-apples, apricots,
peaches, almonds. During the last year the orchard began to bear fruit,
which caused Anton Pavlovitch much worry and a touching and childish
pleasure. When the time came to gather almonds, they were also gathered
in Chekhov's orchard. They usually lay in a little heap in the
window-sill of the drawing room, and it seemed as if nobody could be
cruel enough to take them, although they were offered.
Anton Pavlovitch did not like it and was even cross when people told him
that his bungalow was too little protected from the dust, which came
from the Antka road, and that the orchard was insufficiently supplied
with water. Without on the whole liking the Crimea, and certainly not
Yalta, he regarded his orchard with a special, zealous love. People saw
him sometimes in the morning, sitting on his heels, carefully coating
the stems of his roses with sulphur or pulling weeds from the flower
beds. And what rejoicing there would be, when in the summer drought
there at last began a rain that filled the spare clay cisterns with
water!
But his love was not that of a proprietor, it was something else--a
mightier and wiser consciousness. He would often say, looking at his
orchard with a twinkle in his eye:
"Look, I have planted each tree here and certainly they are dear to me.
But this is of no consequence. Before I came here all this was waste
land and ravines, all covered with stones and thistles. Then I came and
turned this wilderness into a cultivated, beautiful place. Do you
know?"--he would suddenly add with a grave face, in a tone of profound
belief--"do you know that in three or four hundred years all the earth
will become a flourishing garden. And life will then be exceedingly
light and comfortable."
The thought of the beauty of the coming life, which is expressed so
tenderly, sadly, and charmingly in all his latest works, was in his life
also one of his most intimate, most cherished thoughts. How often must
he have thought of the future happiness of mankind when, in the
mornings, alone, silently, he trimmed his roses, still moist from the
dew, or examined carefully a young sapling, wounded by the wind. And how
much there was in that thought of meek, wise, and humble
self-forgetfulness.
No, it was not a thirst for life, a clinging to life coming from the
insatiable human heart, neither was it a greedy curiosity as to what
will come after one's own life, nor an envious jealousy of remote
generations. It was the agony of an exceptionally refined, charming, and
sensitive soul, who suffered beyond measure from banality, coarseness,
dreariness, nothingness, violence, savagery--the whole horror and
darkness of modern everyday existence. And that is why, when towards the
end of his life there came to him immense fame and comparative security,
together with the devoted love of all that was sensitive, talented and
honest in Russian society,--that is why he did not lock himself up in
the inaccessibility of cold greatness nor become a masterful prophet nor
shrink into a venomous and petty hostility against the fame of others.
No, the sum of his wide and hard experience of life, of his sorrows,
joys, and disappointments was expressed in that beautiful, anxious,
self-forgetting dream of the coming happiness of others.
--"How beautiful life will be in three or four hundred years."
And that is why he looked lovingly after his flower beds, as if he saw
in them the symbol of beauty to come, and watched new paths being laid
out by human intellect and knowledge. He looked with pleasure at new
original buildings and at large, seagoing steamers; he was eagerly
interested in every new invention and was not bored by the company of
specialists. With firm conviction he said that crimes such as murder,
theft, and adultery are decreasing, and have nearly disappeared among
the intelligentsia, teachers, doctors, and authors. He believed that in
the future true culture would ennoble mankind.
Telling of Chekhov's orchard I forgot to mention that there stood in the
middle of it swings and a wooden bench. Both these latter remained from
"Uncle Vanya," which play the Moscow Art Theatre acted at Yalta,
evidently with the sole purpose of showing the performance to Anton
Pavlovitch who was ill then. Both objects were specially dear to Chekhov
and, pointing to them, he would recollect with gratitude the attention
paid him so kindly by the Art Theatre. It is fitting to say here that
these fine actors, by their exceptionally subtle response to Chekhov's
talent and their friendly devotion to himself, much sweetened his last
days.