Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (547 page)

“My sweet, my precious . . .” said a man’s voice so near the fence that Laptev could hear the man’s breathing.

Now they were kissing. Laptev was convinced that the millions and the business which was so distasteful to him were ruining his life, and would make him a complete slave. He imagined how, little by little, he would grow accustomed to his position; would, little by little, enter into the part of the head of a great firm; would begin to grow dull and old, die in the end, as the average man usually does die, in a decrepit, soured old age, making every one about him miserable and depressed. But what hindered him from giving up those millions and that business, and leaving that yard and garden which had been hateful to him from his childhood?

The whispering and kisses the other side of the fence disturbed him. He moved into the middle of the yard, and, unbuttoning his shirt over his chest, looked at the moon, and it seemed to him that he would order the gate to be unlocked, and would go out and never come back again. His heart ached sweetly with the foretaste of freedom; he laughed joyously, and pictured how exquisite, poetical, and even holy, life might be. . . .

But he still stood and did not go away, and kept asking himself: “What keeps me here?” And he felt angry with himself and with the black dog, which still lay stretched on the stone yard, instead of running off to the open country, to the woods, where it would have been free and happy. It was clear that that dog and he were prevented from leaving the yard by the same thing; the habit of bondage, of servitude. . . .

At midday next morning he went to see his wife, and that he might not be dull, asked Yartsev to go with him. Yulia Sergeyevna was staying in a summer villa at Butovo, and he had not been to see her for five days. When they reached the station the friends got into a carriage, and all the way there Yartsev was singing and in raptures over the exquisite weather. The villa was in a great park not far from the station. At the beginning of an avenue, about twenty paces from the gates, Yulia Sergeyevna was sitting under a broad, spreading poplar, waiting for her guests. She had on a light, elegant dress of a pale cream colour trimmed with lace, and in her hand she had the old familiar parasol. Yartsev greeted her and went on to the villa from which came the sound of Sasha’s and Lida’s voices, while Laptev sat down beside her to talk of business matters.

“Why is it you haven’t been for so long?” she said, keeping his hand in hers. “I have been sitting here for days watching for you to come. I miss you so when you are away!”

She stood up and passed her hand over his hair, and scanned his face, his shoulders, his hat, with interest.

“You know I love you,” she said, and flushed crimson. “You are precious to me. Here you’ve come. I see you, and I’m so happy I can’t tell you. Well, let us talk. Tell me something.”

She had told him she loved him, and he could only feel as though he had been married to her for ten years, and that he was hungry for his lunch. She had put her arm round his neck, tickling his cheek with the silk of her dress; he cautiously removed her hand, stood up, and without uttering a single word, walked to the villa. The little girls ran to meet him.

“How they have grown!” he thought. “And what changes in these three years. . . . But one may have to live another thirteen years, another thirty years. . . . What is there in store for us in the future? If we live, we shall see.”

He embraced Sasha and Lida, who hung upon his neck, and said:

“Grandpapa sends his love. . . . Uncle Fyodor is dying. Uncle Kostya has sent a letter from America and sends you his love in it. He’s bored at the exhibition and will soon be back. And Uncle Alyosha is hungry.”

Then he sat on the verandah and saw his wife walking slowly along the avenue towards the house. She was deep in thought; there was a mournful, charming expression in her face, and her eyes were bright with tears. She was not now the slender, fragile, pale-faced girl she used to be; she was a mature, beautiful, vigorous woman. And Laptev saw the enthusiasm with which Yartsev looked at her when he met her, and the way her new, lovely expression was reflected in his face, which looked mournful and ecstatic too. One would have thought that he was seeing her for the first time in his life. And while they were at lunch on the verandah, Yartsev smiled with a sort of joyous shyness, and kept gazing at Yulia and at her beautiful neck. Laptev could not help watching them while he thought that he had perhaps another thirteen, another thirty years of life before him. . . . And what would he have to live through in that time? What is in store for us in the future?

And he thought:

“Let us live, and we shall see.”

NOTES

dedication day: a patron saint’s day

M. Laptev: Monsieur Laptev; in Chekhov’s time it was polite to refer to a gentleman as “monsieur,” even if he was Russian

paysage
: landscape, scenery

Poor Anton
: refers to Anton Goremyka [Goremyka = “woebegone”], the hero of the sentimental short story “Anton Goremyka” (1847) by Dmitri V. Grigorovich (1822-1899)

Tolstoy: from Tolstoy’s novel
Anna Karenina

thou
: using the intimate form of “you”

Gaspard: a comic figure in the 1877 operetta
The Chimes of Normandy
by the French composer Robert Planquette (1848-1903)

cayenne pepper: extremely rare in Russia

lips: it is normal in Russia for male family members or close male friends to kiss

opponent: Chekhov actually writes, “for woman’s heart is a Shamil,” referring to the Moslem guerrilla leader (1797-1871) who led the Caucasians in their struggle against the Russians

Fley’s: a Moscow pastry shop

Iudushka: the sanctimonious hero of the novel
The Golovlyov Family
by M. Y. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889)

pater-familias
: head of the household

calotte: a
kamelaukion,
a high brimless hat worn by Russian Orthodox priests

sacrifice: the passage is from 1 Samuel 16:4-5

Rubinstein: Rubinstein (1829-1894) was a pianist, composer and conductor

ninth symphony: Beethoven’s last symphony (1824)

Becker piano: the Becker grand pianos were made in St. Petersburg by Jacob Becker

oleographs: imitation oil paintings

reinheit
: purity

basta
: enough

candle: he flings the candle away because candles are for the dead and his wife is still living at this point

twenty degrees: 13 below zero F.

lessons: Russian schools included Orthodox religion in the curriculum

Filippov’s: Russian bakery chain; they had many stores in Moscow

censorship: nothing was published in Russia without approval by the state censor

decadents: the French symbolists

“The Maid of Orleans”: 1801 play about Joan of Arc by Friedrich von Schiler (1759-1805)

Ermolova: Mariya Yermolov (1853-1928) was a famous Russian actress, one of whose roles was Joan of Arc

pounder: this might also be translated “bouncer” (a strong person hired to get rid of undesirables at bars and clubs)

In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread: Genesis 3:19

privy councillor: Class 3 in the Table of Ranks

Rothschild: rich banking family; their name was a synonym for wealth in Chekhov’s time

Shiskin’s: Ivan I. Shishkin (1832-1898) was a Russian landscape painter

Exaltation of the Cross: September 14

tender friend: the words were from Pushkin’s 1823 poem “Night,” and the music was by Anton Rubinstein

Muscovite Tsars: the kings of the Moscow-ruled Russian state from the fourteenth through the early eighteenth century

Lyapunovs: the brothers P. P. Lyapunov and Z. P. Lyapunov; the first was a hero of the national resistance against the invading Poles in the early seventeenth century

Godunovs: Boris Gudunov (1552-1605) was Tsar of Muscovy from 1558 to 1605

Yaroslav or of Monomach: Yarsolav the Wise was prince of Kiev from 1019-1054; Vladimir Monomakh was prince of Kiev from 1113-1125

monologue of Pimen: a famous speech in Pushkin’s
Boris Godunov

Kalmuck: the Kalmyk were an Asian ethnic group

Polovtsy: or Cumans, a Turkic-speaking group who fought sporadicaslly with Kievan Russia between 1054 and 1238

Dulcinea: lady love, from a character in Cervantes’ novel
Don Quixote

need much sense to bring children into the world: allusion to a line from the play
Woe from Wit
by A. S. Griboyedov (1795-1829)

Vale of Daghestan: alludes to the first line of Lermontov’s poem “The Dream” (1841): “In noontide’s heat, in a valley of Daghestan, with a bullet in my breast, I lay motionless.”

actual civil councillor: 4th in the table of ranks in the civil service

gendarmes: the political police

fear: Fyodor Stepanovitch is wrong; according to Exodus 20:12, the commandment is “honor thy father and thy mother”

our enemies: Matthew 6:44

Malyuta Skuratov: Malyuta Skuratov was the dreaded leader of the Oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s secret police; his daugther married Boris Godunov

the exhibition: World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893

THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL

Translated by Constance Garnett 1896-1904

I

THE Superintendent said to me: “I only keep you out of regard for your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago.” I replied to him: “You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of flying.” And then I heard him say: “Take that gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves.”

Two days later I was dismissed. And in this way I have, during the years I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to the great mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I have served in various departments, but all these nine jobs have been as alike as one drop of water is to another: I had to sit, write, listen to rude or stupid observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed.

When I came in to my father he was sitting buried in a low arm-chair with his eyes closed. His dry, emaciated face, with a shade of dark blue where it was shaved (he looked like an old Catholic organist), expressed meekness and resignation. Without responding to my greeting or opening his eyes, he said:

“If my dear wife and your mother were living, your life would have been a source of continual distress to her. I see the Divine Providence in her premature death. I beg you, unhappy boy,” he continued, opening his eyes, “tell me: what am I to do with you?”

In the past when I was younger my friends and relations had known what to do with me: some of them used to advise me to volunteer for the army, others to get a job in a pharmacy, and others in the telegraph department; now that I am over twenty-five, that grey hairs are beginning to show on my temples, and that I have been already in the army, and in a pharmacy, and in the telegraph department, it would seem that all earthly possibilities have been exhausted, and people have given up advising me, and merely sigh or shake their heads.

“What do you think about yourself?” my father went on. “By the time they are your age, young men have a secure social position, while look at you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on your father!”

And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of to-day were on the road to perdition through infidelity, materialism, and self-conceit, and that amateur theatricals ought to be prohibited, because they seduced young people from religion and their duties.

“To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously,” he said in conclusion. “You ought not to remain one single day with no regular position in society.”

“I beg you to listen to me,” I said sullenly, expecting nothing good from this conversation. “What you call a position in society is the privilege of capital and education. Those who have neither wealth nor education earn their daily bread by manual labour, and I see no grounds for my being an exception.”

“When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid and vulgar!” said my father with irritation. “Understand, you dense fellow -- understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse physical strength you have the divine spirit, a spark of the holy fire, which distinguishes you in the most striking way from the ass or the reptile, and brings you nearer to the Deity! This fire is the fruit of the efforts of the best of mankind during thousands of years. Your great-grandfather Poloznev, the general, fought at Borodino; your grandfather was a poet, an orator, and a Marshal of Nobility; your uncle is a schoolmaster; and lastly, I, your father, am an architect! All the Poloznevs have guarded the sacred fire for you to put it out!”

“One must be just,” I said. “ Millions of people put up with manual labour.”

“And let them put up with it! They don’t know how to do anything else! Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable of manual labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the slave and the barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only to a few!”

To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father worshipped himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself. Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had long ago taken their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of the manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor, while I, his only son, was nothing! To continue the conversation was unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly retorted, hoping that I might at last be understood. The whole question, of course, was clear and simple, and only concerned with the means of my earning my living; but the simplicity of it was not seen, and I was talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire, of my uncle a forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial verses; I was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I longed to be understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and my sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them -- a habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got rid of it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in constant dread of wounding them, constantly afraid that my father’s thin neck would turn crimson and that he would have a stroke.

“To sit in a stuffy room,” I began, “to copy, to compete with a typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What can the sacred fire have to do with it?”

“It’s intellectual work, anyway,” said my father. “But that’s enough; let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you: if you don’t go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts. I shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!”

With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which I wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:

“The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me. I shall renounce it all beforehand.”

For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were deeply resented by my father. He turned crimson.

“Don’t dare to talk to me like that, stupid!” he shouted in a thin, shrill voice. “Wastrel!” and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual movement he slapped me twice in the face. “You are forgetting yourself.”

When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with my hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight in the face. And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and, as though I were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look him in the face. My father was old and very thin but his delicate muscles must have been as strong as leather, for his blows hurt a good deal.

I staggered back into the passage, and there he snatched up his umbrella, and with it hit me several times on the head and shoulders; at that moment my sister opened the drawing-room door to find out what the noise was, but at once turned away with a look of horror and pity without uttering a word in my defence.

My determination not to return to the Government office, but to begin a new life of toil, was not to be shaken. All that was left for me to do was to fix upon the special employment, and there was no particular difficulty about that, as it seemed to me that I was very strong and fitted for the very heaviest labour. I was faced with a monotonous life of toil in the midst of hunger, coarseness, and stench, continually preoccupied with earning my daily bread. And -- who knows? -- as I returned from my work along Great Dvoryansky Street, I might very likely envy Dolzhikov the, engineer, who lived by intellectual work, but, at the moment, thinking over all my future hardships made me light-hearted. At times I had dreamed of spiritual activity, imagining myself a teacher, a doctor, or a writer, but these dreams remained dreams. The taste for intellectual pleasures -- for the theatre, for instance, and for reading -- was a passion with me, but whether I had any ability for intellectual work I don’t know. At school I had had an unconquerable aversion for Greek, so that I was only in the fourth class when they had to take me from school. For a long while I had coaches preparing me for the fifth class. Then I served in various Government offices, spending the greater part of the day in complete idleness, and I was told that was intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic and official sphere had required neither mental application nor talent, nor special qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such intellectual work I put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise it, and I don’t think that for one moment it could serve as a justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed nothing but a sham, one of the forms of that same idleness. Real intellectual work I have in all probability never known.

Evening came on. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street; it was the principal street in the town, and in the absence of decent public gardens our
beau monde
used to use it as a promenade in the evenings. This charming street did to some extent take the place of a public garden, as on each side of it there was a row of poplars which smelt sweet, particularly after rain, and acacias, tall bushes of lilac, wild-cherries and apple-trees hung over the fences and palings. The May twilight, the tender young greenery with its shifting shades, the scent of the lilac, the buzzing of the insects, the stillness, the warmth -- how fresh and marvellous it all is, though spring is repeated every year! I stood at the garden gate and watched the passers-by. With most of them I had grown up and at one time played pranks; now they might have been disconcerted by my being near them, for I was poorly and unfashionably dressed, and they used to say of my very narrow trousers and huge, clumsy boots that they were like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats. Besides, I had a bad reputation in the town because I had no decent social position, and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and also, perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before an officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to account for this.

In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov’s. It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky. Here my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked slowly by with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.

“Look up,” he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. “Look up at the sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant is man in comparison with the universe!”

And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he was the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty years that I could remember not one single decent house had been built in it. When any one asked him to plan a house, he usually drew first the reception hall and drawing-room: just as in old days the boarding-school misses always started from the stove when they danced, so his artistic ideas could only begin and develop from the hall and drawing-room. To them he tacked on a dining-room, a nursery, a study, linking the rooms together with doors, and so they all inevitably turned into passages, and every one of them had two or even three unnecessary doors. His imagination must have been lacking in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As though feeling that something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to all sorts of outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see now the narrow entries, the poky little passages, the crooked staircases leading to half-landings where one could not stand upright, and where, instead of a floor, there were three huge steps like the shelves of a bath-house; and the kitchen was invariably in the basement with a brick floor and vaulted ceilings. The front of the house had a harsh, stubborn expression; the lines of it were stiff and timid; the roof was low-pitched and, as it were, squashed down; and the fat, well-fed-looking chimneys were invariably crowned by wire caps with squeaking black cowls. And for some reason all these houses, built by my father exactly like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top-hat and the back of his head, stiff and stubborn-looking. In the course of years they have grown used in the town to the poverty of my father’s imagination. It has taken root and become our local style.