Forty Stories Read online

  First Vintage Classics Edition, March 1991

  Copyright © 1963 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published under the title The Image of Chekhov in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1963.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904.

  [Short stories. English. Selections]

  Forty stories / by Anton Chekhov; translated and with an

  introduction by Robert Payne.—1st Vintage classics ed.

  p. cm.—(Vintage classics)

  Originally published: The image of Chekhov, New York:

  Knopf, 1963.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77853-6

  1. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. 1860–1904—

  Translations, English.

  1. Payne, Robert, 1911– . II. Title. III. Series.

  PG3456.A13P39 1991

  891.73’3—dc20 90-50473

  v3.1

  FOR

  Patricia

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by Robert Payne

  Translator’s Note

  1880 The Little Apples

  1881 St. Peter’s Day

  1882 Green Scythe

  1883 Joy

  The Ninny

  The Highest Heights

  Death of a Government Clerk

  At the Post Office

  1884 Surgery

  In the Cemetery

  Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

  1885 A Report

  The Threat

  The Huntsman

  The Malefactor

  A Dead Body

  Sergeant Prishibeyev

  1886 A Blunder

  Heartache

  Anyuta

  The Proposal

  Vanka

  Who Is to Blame?

  1887 Typhus

  1888 Sleepyhead

  1889 The Princess

  1890 Gusev

  1891 The Peasant Women

  1892 After the Theater

  A Fragment

  In Exile

  1893 Big Volodya and Little Volodya

  1894 The Student

  1895 Anna Round the Neck

  1896 The House with the Mezzanine

  1897 In the Horsecart

  1898 On Love

  1899 The Lady with the Pet Dog

  1902 The Bishop

  1903 The Bride

  About the Author

  Introduction

  I

  WE KNOW this image well, for it is usually reproduced as a frontispiece to his works or stamped on the bindings—the image of a solemn, elderly man with lines of weariness deeply etched on his thin face, which is very pale. The accusing eyes are nearly hidden by pince-nez, the beard is limp, the lips pursed in pain. It is the image of an old scholar or the forbidding family doctor who has brought too many children into the world.

  We know him well, but what we know bears little resemblance to the real Chekhov. This portrait of Chekhov is based on a painting made by an obscure artist called Joseph Braz in 1898, when Chekhov was already suffering from consumption. He was restless while sitting for his portrait, and had little confidence in the artist’s gifts, and the best he could say of the portrait was that the tie and the general configuration of the features were perhaps accurate, but the whole was deadly wrong. “It smells of horse-radish,” he said. Five years later, when the portrait was solemnly hung on the walls of the Moscow Art Theater, he wrote to his wife that he would have done everything in his power to prevent the painting from being hung there. He would have preferred to have a photograph hanging in the Moscow Art Theater—anything but that abomination. “There is something in it which is not me, and something that is me is missing,” he wrote, but that was one of his milder criticisms. His rage against the portrait increased as time went on. It became “that ghastly picture,” and he would lie awake thinking about the harm it would do. The painting has a fairly academic quality: he may have guessed that posterity would take it to its heart.

  Chekhov had good reason to hate the picture, for he knew himself well and possessed a perfectly normal vanity. In his youth and middle age he was quite astonishingly handsome. The writer Vladimir Korolenko, who met Chekhov in 1887, speaks of his clean-cut regular features which had not lost their characteristically youthful contours. His eyes were brilliant and deep-set, thoughtful and artless by turns, and his whole expression suggested a man filled with the joy of life. His face was never still, and he was always joking. Even in his later years, when he was afflicted with blindness and hemorrhoids and consumption, and perhaps half a dozen other diseases, he continued to crack jokes like a schoolboy. There are still a few people living who can remember the sound of his infectious laughter.

  Let us imagine Chekhov entering a room about the year 1889, when he was nearly thirty and had already written most of the stories he would ever write. “A Dead Body,” “Heartache,” “Anyuta,” “Vanka,” “Sleepyhead,” and countless others are already behind him, and he is at the height of his fame. He has received the Pushkin Prize from the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and he has been elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. He is already aware that he is a great writer with a certain place in Russian literature, and he is dressed accordingly in a silk shirt with a necktie made of colored strings and a fawn-colored coat which offsets the ruddy color of his face. He is over six feet tall, but the narrow shoulders make him seem even taller. He wears a thin beard pointed in the Elizabethan manner, and there is something of the Elizabethan in his calm assumption of power, in his elegance and the nervous quickness of his movements. His thick brown hair is brushed straight back from a clear forehead. He has thick brown eyebrows, and his eyes too are brown, though they grow darker or brighter according to his mood, and the iris of one eye is always a little lighter than the other, giving him sometimes an expression of absent-mindedness when he is in fact all attention. His eyelids are a little too heavy, and sometimes they droop in a fashionable artistocratic manner, but the real explanation is that he works through the night and sleeps little. He is nearly always smiling or breaking out into huge peals of laughter. Only his hands trouble him: they are the hands of a peasant, large, dry and hot, and he does not always know what to do with them. Excessively handsome, slender and elegant, he knew his power over people and drew them to him like a magnet.

  This young and handsome giant was without any trace of arrogance. He treated his gifts with a kind of careless disdain. “Do you know how I write my stories?” he said once to Korolenko. “Look!” His eyes moved across the table until they fixed upon an ash tray. “There’s the story,” he said. “Tomorrow shall I bring you a story called ‘The Ash Tray’?” Korolenko had the curious feeling that vague images were already swarming over the ash tray, and already situations and adventures were beginning to shape themselves, while the light of Chekhov’s humor was already playing on the absurdities and ironies of an ash tray’s existence. When the veteran writer Dmitry Grigorovich, the friend and mentor of Dostoyevsky, complimented him on the classical perfection of his short story “The Huntsman,” Chekhov was genuinely surprised, and wrote back that he had written the story to pass away the time in a bathhouse and had thought nothing more of it. He could write under any conditions, but he seems to have written best when he was surrounded by his friends.

  He was tireless in his attention to his friends—nothing was too good for them. He ha
d a passion for entertaining them, and his hospitality was princely. The severe, accusing doctor of the Braz portrait vanishes in the actor, the mimic, the clown, who would amuse himself by going to a hotel with a friend, pretending to be a valet, and proclaiming in a loud voice all the secret vices of his master, until the whole hotel was in an uproar. He adored buffoonery. He liked putting on disguises. He would throw a Bokhara robe round his shoulders and wrap a turban round his head and pretend to be some visiting emir from the mysterious lands of the East. On a train journey he was in his element. If he was traveling with his mother he would pretend she was a countess and himself a very unimportant servant in her employ, and he would watch the behavior of the other passengers toward the bewildered countess with wide-eyed wonder and delight. He had a trick of making a walk in the country an adventure in high drama. Everything excited him. He was fascinated by the shapes of clouds, the colors of the sky, the texture of fields, and it amazed him that each person walking along a country path contained so many improbable miracles in his soul. The world abounded in miracles, and he rejoiced in all of them with an unself-conscious and devouring eagerness.

  Even in his last years Chekhov bore very little resemblance to the Braz portrait. No one could guess from looking at that portrait that this was a man who was always laughing and joking, who was gay and carefree and confident of his powers, who was kind and gentle and generous and very human. What distinguished him from other people was precisely what the portrait left out—the flame of eagerness in the eyes, the wild appetite for experience, the sense of sheer enjoyment which accompanied him everywhere. Men felt doubly men in his presence, and women were continually falling in love with him. There was nothing of the puritan in him. He yearned for only one thing—that people should live in the utmost freedom, perhaps because very early in his own life he had acquired all the freedom he wanted.

  By the time he was thirty Chekhov had traveled across the whole length of Russia, visited Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ceylon, and half the great cities of Europe. He makes one of his characters say: “I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean—wherever my imagination ranges …” “I want to go to Spain and Africa,” he wrote at another time. “I have a craving for life.” He imagined himself leading great caravans of his friends across the whole world, and since this was impossible he was always inviting them to come and stay with him, so that his various houses in the country came to resemble circuses with all the visitors assigned to play out their comic roles. He wrote to the vaudeville writer Bilibin: “I tell you what: get married and come down here, wife and all, for a week or two. I assure you it’ll do you all a world of good, and you’ll go away marvelously stupid.” The venerable Grigorovich came to stay with him, and some time later, remembering the strange things that had happened to him, he lifted his arms in mock horror and exclaimed: “If you only knew what went on at the Chekhovs’! A saturnalia, a regular saturnalia, I tell you!”

  What went on, of course, was nothing more than an experiment in furious good humor, with Chekhov playing his usual conspiratorial role. The wonder is that he was able to write so many stories in a life given over to so many friendships. He never stinted his friends, and gave money away recklessly. At those famous house parties there would be poets and novelists and musicians, some high officials, an ecclesiastical dignitary or two, a handful of circus folk, but there were also other people who were not so easily categorized, and these would turn out to be horse thieves, ex-convicts, piano tuners, or prostitutes, anyone in fact that he had met in the course of his travels. He had an especial fondness for pretty young women and homely priests, and he loved all animals except cats, which he abominated. What he sought for in people was that eagerness for life and experience which he regarded as man’s birthright, and his hatred of poverty arose from the despairing knowledge that poverty saps unendurably at human vitality. He had no liking for the government, and he had even less liking for the revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the government. He loved life, and regarded politics as death.

  Chekhov was l’homme moyen sensuel raised to the level of genius. He worked prodigiously hard at his medical practice and over his stories and plays, but even at the moments of greatest tension good humor kept creeping in. Everything about him was phenomenal—his charm, his courage, his capacity for work, his thirst for experience—but what he prized most was his ordinary humanity. He enjoyed and often celebrated the animal pleasures of life, and he was something of a connoisseur of wine and women. He had his first sexual experience at thirteen, and this love affair was followed by countless others. The legend of the remote, detached analyst of the human soul with a faintly ironical smile dies hard, and is not yet dead. The Braz portrait and some of the later photographs showing him in the throes of consumption, white as a sheet, with his coat buttoned to the neck, have helped to give credence to the legend. But those who knew him best remember his stupendous gaiety.

  Even today, nearly sixty years after his death, there are still a handful of people who can remember him. A Russian now living in New York remembers meeting him as a boy in Yalta. “Chekhov was always cracking jokes,” he said recently. “He was an actor, a clown. He would sweep off his pince-nez and gaze at you with a quizzical expression, telling you some perfectly impossible story with a straight face. He had a habit of walking with one arm curled round his back, pretending to be very old and tired, and very sad, and then he would straighten up and howl with laughter. In those days he was very ill, and his voice was the hoarse voice of a consumptive, but you soon forgot his illness. And what an actor he was! He could do the most extraordinary things with his pince-nez. He used them as actors use props. He was always sweeping them on and sweeping them off. He looked so young without them, and so old when they were on, that it was like seeing two different people. He would look down on me from his immense height, and I had the feeling that all his attention, all his humor, all his kindness, were being given to me.”

  In the hot summer of 1904 Chekhov, accompanied by his actress wife, arrived in the German watering place of Badenweiler. He was already dying, but he was in good spirits. He sent off gay messages to his friends, telling them how delighted he was with the small villa where he was staying, and how he was looking forward to a trip to Italy, a country he had loved ever since he had journeyed through it after his return from the Far East. And then after Italy there would be a leisurely cruise through the Mediterranean, and so to the Black Sea and his house in Yalta. At seven o’clock on the evening of July 1 the dinner bell rang, but for some reason neither Chekhov nor his wife heard it. A few minutes later, when they realized their mistake, Chekhov characteristically invented a story on the theme of the unheard dinner bell.

  The story he told concerned a fashionable watering place full of fat, well-fed bankers and ruddy-faced Englishmen and Americans, all of them hurrying back to dinner from their sight-seeing expeditions in the country, all of them exuding animal vigor and thinking only of their stomachs. But when they arrived at the hotel, there was no dinner bell, for there was no supper—the cook had fled. Then, gaily and happily, Chekhov went on to describe all those pampered visitors as they confronted the awful fact that there would be no supper. He described their horror, their stratagems, their mounting impatience, and he told the story kindly, as he had told so many similar stories in the past. His wife sat curled up on a sofa, laughing as one comic invention followed on another. He died shortly after midnight, falling suddenly on his side, and it was observed that in death he looked very young, contented, and almost happy. Through the wide windows the wind brought the scent of new-mown hay, and later into the terrible stillness of the night there came, like a messenger from another world, a huge black moth which burst into the room like a whirlwind and kept beating its wings madly against the electric ligh
ts.

  The funeral took place a week later in Moscow. Gorky and others have related the strange circumstances of the funeral, usually with bitterness. They tell how the body arrived in Moscow in a freight train labeled with the words FOR OYSTERS in large letters, and how part of the crowd waiting for Chekhov followed the coffin of General Keller, who had been brought from Manchuria, and they were a little surprised that Chekhov was being buried with full military honors. When the confusion was straightened out, a sad little procession of about a hundred people accompanied Chekhov’s coffin to the Novodevichy Cemetery through the heat and dust of a Moscow summer. “I recall particularly two lawyers,” wrote Gorky. “They were both wearing new boots and spotted neckties, and I heard one of them discoursing on the intelligence of dogs and the other on the comforts of his country home and the beauty of the landscape all round it. Then there was a lady in a lilac dress with a lace-fringed umbrella who was trying to convince an old gentleman in large spectacles about the merits of the deceased. ‘Ah, he was so wonderfully charming, and so witty,’ she said, while the old gentleman coughed incredulously. At the head of the procession a big, fat policeman rode majestically on a fat white horse. It all seemed cruelly common and vulgar, and quite incompatible with the memory of a great and subtle artist.”

  But was it so incompatible? Chekhov laughed gaily throughout his life, and he would have laughed at the human absurdities which accompanied his funeral. FOR OYSTERS would have pleased him, and it would have delighted him that he should have been mistaken for General Keller, and he would have listened entranced to all the inane conversations of the people following the coffin, and it would have rejoiced his heart to see the fat policeman on the fat horse. He would have swept off his pince-nez, thrown back his head, and hooted with joy when he discovered that he was being buried next to “the Cossack widow Olga Kookaretnikov,” a name as improbable as any he invented in his stories. Chekhov loved the absurd, and he loved all the splendors and inanities of the human condition.