Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

CHEKHOV, RECORDER OF LOST ILLUSIONS

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.

ANDREEV, APOSTLE OF THE TERRIBLE

Of contemporary Russian fictionists, Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev rises largest with promise. Just past forty, he has for fourteen years been producing work of strength and individual flavor, and, now that Tolstoi is gone, his place is probably ahead of even Maxim Gorki--at least, he is _primus inter pares_.

Andreev’s life is best told in his own brief words:

“I was born in 1871, in Oryol, and studied there at the gymnasium. I studied poorly: while in the seventh class I was for a whole year known as the worst student, and my mark for conduct was never higher than 4, sometimes 3. The most pleasant time spent in school, which I recall to this day with pleasure, was recess time between the lectures, and also the rare occasions when I was sent out from the class-room. The sunbeams which penetrated some cleft, and which played with the dust in the hallway--all this was so mysterious, so interesting, so full of a peculiar, hidden meaning.

“When I studied at the gymnasium my father, an engineer, died, and while at the university I was in dire need. During my first year at the St. Petersburg University I even starved--not so much out of real necessity as because of my youth, inexperience, and inability to utilize the unnecessary parts of my costume. I am to this day ashamed to think that I went without food at a time when I had two or three pairs of trousers, two overcoats, and the like.

“It was then that I wrote my first story--about a starving student. I cried when I wrote it, and the editor who returned my manuscript--laughed. That story of mine remained unpublished.

“In 1894 I made an unsuccessful attempt to kill myself by shooting. As a result of this unsuccessful attempt, I was forced by the authorities into religious penitence, and I contracted heart trouble, though not of a serious nature, yet very annoying. During this time I made one or two unsuccessful attempts at writing. I devoted myself with greater pleasure and success to painting, which I loved from childhood on. I made portraits to order at three and five rubles apiece.

“In 1897 I received my diploma and became an assistant attorney, but I was sidetracked at the very outset of my career. I was offered a position on the _Courier_, for which I was to report court proceedings. I did not succeed in securing any practice as a lawyer. I had but one case, and lost it at every point.

“In 1898 I wrote my first story--for the Easter number--and since then I have devoted myself exclusively to literature. Maxim Gorki helped me considerably in my literary work by his always practical advice and suggestions.”

* * * * *

The anecdote is told that when this first story was published Gorki telegraphed the _Courier_, “Who is it who hides himself under the pseudonym of Leonid Andreev?” And later, when the Russian _Life_ issued another of his stories, the poet Mereschkowsky asked if Andreev was the pseudonym of Gorki or of Chekhov.

But Andreev is best to be studied through his writings.

“The Friend” is an effective bit of impressionism which must have driven countless thousands to repentant kindness toward neglected animals.

Vladimir, the typical young Russian, is a promising writer, wrapped up in his work, and safely past the period of gay carousing. At night he returns to his room and his “only friend,” Vasyuk, a little black-haired dog, who adores his master. “My friend, my only friend,” are words often on Vladimir’s lips, but at length he comes to love Natalia, and Vasyuk gets his favorite dish of liver less often. One day the dog is taken ill, but in his haste to visit Natalia, Vladimir does not take Vasyuk to the veterinary. By and by it is too late. In months to come, Vladimir fails to make good his literary promise, and--

... then, like the cover of a coffin, heavy, dead oblivion fell
upon him.

The woman had also forsaken him; she too considered herself
deceived.

The fumy, vaporous nights went by, also the mercilessly punishing
white days, and often, more often than before ... he lay in his bed
... and whispered:

“My friend, my only friend!”

And his quivering hand fell faintly upon the empty place.

From the foregoing, and even more from that which follows, we may conclude it to be a peculiar property of the sketch-form in fiction that its story may not be told in synopsis. Indeed, in the true sketch there _is_ no story. Atmosphere, character-drawing, swift outlining of a situation, impressions of mood and feeling--all these permeate the sketch, but crises in human lives, complications arising therefrom, and the untangling of the plotted skein--these belong to the short-story and the novel.

For this reason much of Andreev’s shorter work defies our efforts to retell it; one must go to the writer himself for his final phrase, his subtly suggested situation, his almost uncanny evocation of mood. “Valia,” for example, is one of his sketches which baffle the second-hand narrator: as well try to reconstruct an old-time beauty by dressing up a lay-figure in hand-me-downs.

Valia is a sensitive child who is awakened from his unconscious joy in home by the hard, prickling kisses of a thin-lipped, long-necked woman who announces herself to be his mother. Indignantly, yet politely, the lad turns for denial to his supposed mother, rosy and sweet-lipped, but she tearfully confirms the claim--he had been abandoned in babyhood when he was inconvenient, but now that the mother was lonely she claimed the child. The impending separation tears the hearts of foster-father and -mother and the child himself. Valia becomes nervous, fearful of the dark, and pines almost to illness. But joy and new health come to them all when the courts, which have been invoked to aid the unnatural mother, decide against her claim. At length, however, the highest tribunal reverses the lower court, and the child must go away. The final scene leaves the real mother weeping because her stranger-child takes no pleasure in playthings. The situation is symbolical, for that is the only appeal a sordid, self-serving woman knows how to make to a spirituelle child who has drawn his spirituality not from her nature, but--who knows whence, if not from the breast of his foster-mother! And when the child at the last timidly approaches the weeping egoist and with gentle dignity promises to love her “all he can,” we see a triumph of impressionistic sketch-work.

Even more difficult to outline is “The Man Who Found the Truth.” It is the story told by himself of a man who at sixty is released from an unjust imprisonment, after having been convicted years before of murdering several members of his family in order to gain an inheritance. But when he realizes the stress of his old life out in the world, he has his room transformed into a model of his old cell, hires a keeper from his prison, and once more returns to a tranquil life. Its _leit-motif_ is strikingly like that of Pierre Loti’s “The Wall Opposite.”

The last cry in mysticism is Andreev’s “A Story Which Will Never Be Finished.” Seek to lay your finger upon its precise meaning, and it flutters away like a gauzy-winged visitant; and yet every progressing line deepens an impression upon the soul. It is a pervasive, atmospheric thing, full of mysterious movements, potent though nameless--breaths of uncharted freedom whisper of an impinging world where our realities are unreal; sleeping senses, hitherto unsuspected, strangely stir to their awakening; yet they do not actually awaken. Is it war, is it death opening out into life, is it emancipation--one doesn’t quite know; yet it is all of these. Hawthorne was never more vaguely pregnant, and Poe never more perfectly conveyed the sense of an unnamed something which is just about to be.

Here indeed Andreev is like Poe. Now and then I hear him called “The Russian Poe.” The epithet is not satisfactory. Something of our American poet there is in the Russian, for both, like Hawthorne, are masters of introspection, and both know the ritual of fantasy as past-masters, but when Andreev depicts the weird there is always a basis of human reality. Poe could harrow the soul with a sense of fantastic horrors impending, but Andreev need only draw aside the curtains and show us truth unadorned, truth unrelieved by truth’s beautiful other half, and a deeper shudder rocks the soul than ever chilled the flesh at Poe’s phantasmagoric evocations. Really, this young titan is two men--one mystical like Hawthorne, a vein of melancholy in his pessimism, but sympathetic withal, and showing more pity for his characters than the realistic school approves. The other fairly makes revel with the gibbering images of war, abnormalities of soul rise and take on flesh at his bidding, and there is no spirit so gloomy, wicked, and repellent but he can conjure it into being for these terrible story-pictures. Which will be the artist’s final mood, one may not surely forecast. In either extreme he is not his best self, one may surmise. Certainly we should deplore the constant choice of a theme like that of “The Abyss,” his first important story, in which the love of a pure lad for a spotless girl is transformed into a vicious thing that leads at length to a revolting crime. At the other end of the gamut sounds the author’s idealistic note. “To the Stars,” his first drama, is as far removed in tone from “The Abyss” as the titles indicate. But Andreev’s dramas are worthy of a separate study.