Peasants and Other Stories Read online

  ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV (1860–1904), the son of a grocer and a former serf, worked as a physician and ran an open clinic for the poor, while also writing the plays and short stories that have established him as one of the greatest figures in Russian literature.

  EDMUND WILSON (1895–1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of over twenty books, including To the Finland Station, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County.

  PEASANTS AND OTHER STORIES

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  Selected and with an Introduction by

  EDMUND WILSON

  Translated from the Russian by

  CONSTANCE GARNETT

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  Introduction Copyright © 1956 by Edmund Wilson; copyright renewed © 1984 by Helen Miranda Wilson.

  Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, Inc., on behalf of the Estate of Edmund Wilson All rights reserved.

  First published by Doubleday Anchor Books 1956

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Cover illustration: Isaac Levitan, Haystacks at Dusk, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  Scala/Art Resource, NY.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904.

  [Short stories. English. Selections]

  Peasants and other stories / Anton Chekhov; selected and with a preface by Edmund Wilson.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956.

  Contents: A woman’s kingdom — Three years — The murder — My life — Peasants — The new villa — In the ravine — The bishop — Betrothed.

  ISBN 0-940322-14-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904 Translations into English. 2. Russia — Social life and customs Fiction. I. Wilson, Edmund, 1895–1972. II. Title.

  PG3456.A15W53 1999

  891.73'3—dc 21

  99-14551

  ISBN 978-1-59017-944-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  PEASANTS AND OTHER STORIES

  A Woman’s Kingdom

  Three Years

  The Murder

  My Life

  Peasants

  The New Villa

  In the Ravine

  The Bishop

  Betrothed

  INTRODUCTION

  IT HAS ALWAYS been a serious obstacle to the understanding of Chekhov on the part of English-speaking readers that the volumes of translations of his stories made by Constance Garnett and others do not, as a rule, present his work in its chronological sequence. You get humorous sketches from his earliest phase, when he was writing for the comic papers, side by side with his most serious stories; and the various periods of this serious work are themselves all jumbled together: the terse ironical anecdote, which began by being funny and then turned pathetic; the more rounded-out drama of character and situation; the product of what Chekhov’s English biographer, Mr. Ronald Hingley, calls his Tolstoyan period, when new moral preoccupations and a new psychological interest appear; and the more complex social study with which we are concerned in this volume. This garbling of Chekhov’s development is one of the causes for the frequent complaints on the part of English-speaking critics that they cannot make out what he is driving at. What could one make of Mark Twain if one found The Mysterious Stranger followed immediately by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, or of Joyce if a story from Dubliners were followed by a passage from Finnegans Wake.

  In the later years of Chekhov’s life—1894–1903—he was occupied mainly with a series of works, plays as well as stories, that were evidently intended to constitute a kind of analysis of Russian society, a miniature Comédie Humaine. The stories often run to greater length than is usual with his earlier pieces, and they differ from the longer of these, such as The Steppe, The Duel, and Ward Number 6, in that the latter deal with individuals, whereas the larger-scale stories of this latest period—though they sometimes, as in The Bishop, center about an individual—tend to be studies of milieux. The method here is like that of the full-scale plays, from The Sea Gull to The Cherry Orchard, which were written within these years, 1896–1904. In going through Chekhov in the Soviet edition, where his stories are printed in their proper sequence, one becomes aware that this final series begins with the story called A Woman’s Kingdom. This follows immediately The Black Monk, a tale of the supernatural, rather suggestive of Hawthorne, which is also an inside presentation of a psychiatric case; but we find ourselves, with A Woman’s Kingdom, definitely in a new domain. Up to now, we have had usually in Chekhov a certain vein of the grotesque or satiric, an exaggeration, comic or bitter, that is not always made quite plausible; but we are now in a provincial household of which the domestic incidents are soberly and solidly presented. The subject is a social phenomenon: the difficult readjustments of a new industrial middle class. And in each of the long stories that follows, you have a household or a local community which is intended to be significant of the life of some social group: the new factory owners in A Woman’s Kingdom; the old Moscow merchant class in Three Years; in The Murder, the half-literate countrymen, fundamentalist and independent (“raskolniki or something of the sort”—raskolniki are dissident sectarians—Chekhov says in one of his letters); the Tolstoyan intelligentsia in My Life; the lowest stratum of the peasantry in Peasants; the new class of engineers in The New Villa; the kulaks, in In the Ravine, on their way to the commercial middle class; the professional churchmen in The Bishop; and in Betrothed, the old-fashioned provincial household and the revolt against it of the new generation. I have here brought these stories together, in the order in which they were written, omitting the more anecdotal ones with which they are interspersed. * That Chekhov was quite conscious that these interspersed pieces belonged to a different category from the more elaborate social studies would seem to be shown by his writing to his publisher (in a letter to A. S. Suvorin, June 21, 1897) that he did not want An Artist’s Story brought out in the same volume with Peasants, on the ground that it had “nothing in common” with the more ambitious story. (Actually, Peasants and My Life were first published together in a volume by themselves.) It will be noticed that the life of the gentry is not treated at length in this series, but The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard make up for this omission. It is probable that Chekhov preferred to deal with the land-owning class in the theater, because they could be made more amusing as well as more attractive than his peasant and commercial and industrial groups. One does not find in any of his stories the same sort of atmosphere and tone that is characteristic of these three plays; and, conversely, one cannot imagine the incidents of Peasants or In the Ravine so effectively presented in a play.

  If one reads these late stories, then, in conjunction with the late plays, one is presented with an anatomy of Russian society, as observed and estimated by Chekhov, at the end of the nineteenth century and just before the Revolution of 1905 (Chekhov died in 1904). This picture is anything but reassuring. The propertied classes are losing their grip
but cannot merge in any healthy fashion with the rising serfs who are buying them up. The old merchant class are narrow and harsh, their world is almost a ghetto; when the young people try to escape from it by aping the intelligentsia or marrying into the gentry, they find that they do not pan out, that they cannot adapt themselves. The recently arrived bourgeoisie—factory owners and engineers—are uncomfortable because they find themselves cut off from the people from whom they have sprung. The hierarchy of the church is a routine affair, unilluminated by true religious feeling, and fanatical religion on a lower level does not rise beyond savagery and superstition. The well-to-do peasants who have been turning into shopkeepers and entrepreneurs now carry their cupidity to criminal lengths. The poor peasants are living in ignorance and filth: they crawl about their villages like badly kept beasts, and when they try their luck in the city—untrained at any trade that is practiced there—they are hardly better off. One is brought to the conclusion that Chekhov, whose family had been serfs till the Emancipation and who knew the life of the lower classes, is here contradicting deliberately the Tolstoyan idealization and the Turgenevian idylizing of the peasantry, as, in his stories about religion, he is confronting Dostoevsky’s saints with something more degraded or prosaic. It is a picture, in general, of a feudal society attempting to modernize itself, but still in a state of transition that is considerably less than half-baked. One of the strongest impressions, in fact, conveyed by the whole of Chekhov’s work is that, although the old order is petering out, there is not very much to build on for a sound democratic and up-to-date Russia. And yet there is just barely a note of hope. The architect’s son of My Life does achieve a measure of satisfaction by abandoning his pretensions to gentility and settling down as a professional house-painter. In the last story Chekhov wrote, Betrothed—which counterbalances and to some extent offsets the first in this sequence, A Woman’s Kingdom—he does allow his heroine to break away, at the cost of moral effort and some ruthlessness, from her stultifying provincial family, and to study for a career in St. Petersburg. A cousin, a raté intellectual, has egged her on to this. He has told her that the more people like her become trained and “dedicated,” “the sooner the Kingdom of Heaven will descend upon the earth. In that time, little by little, there will not be left of your town one stone upon another. Everything will be changed, as if by magic. There will arise large and splendid houses, marvelous parks, extraordinary fountains, remarkable people.” There is, of course, an element of parody, or irony, in this vision of the future on the part of one who has been so unsuccessful in the present, as there is in The Three Sisters in the case of a somewhat similar prophecy; yet Nadya does get to St. Petersburg as the sisters do not get to Moscow.

  I hope that this volume may help to redeem Chekhov, one of the tersest, most lucid and most purposive of writers, from the Anglo-Saxon charges of vagueness; to give something of his true weight and point for readers who may have been bewildered by reading him in scrambled collections.

  —EDMUND WILSON

  * Here is the complete chronology of the stories and plays of this period (I give all the titles in Constance Garnett’s translation): 1894. The Black Monk, A Woman’s Kingdom, Rothschild’s Fiddle, The Student, The Teacher of Literature, At the Manor, The Head Gardener’s Story; 1895. Three Years, The Helpmate, Whitebrow, Anna on the Neck, The Murder, Ariadne; 1896. An Artist’s Story, My Life, The Sea Gull; 1897. Peasants, Pechenyeg, At Home, The Schoolmistress, Uncle Vanya; 1898. The Man in the Case, Gooseberries, About Love, Ionich, A Doctor’s Visit, The Darling; 1899. The New Villa, On Official Business, The Lady with the Dog, At Christmas Time; 1900. In the Ravine; 1901. The Three Sisters; 1902. The Bishop; 1903. Betrothed; 1904. The Cherry Orchard. (If anyone should set out to read these consecutively in Constance Garnett’s edition, he would be put to considerable inconvenience.)

  PEASANTS AND OTHER STORIES

  A WOMAN’S KINGDOM

  1. CHRISTMAS EVE

  HERE WAS A thick roll of notes. It came from the bailiff at the forest villa; he wrote that he was sending fifteen hundred rubles, which he had been awarded as damages, having won an appeal. Anna Akimovna disliked and feared such words as “awarded damages” and “won the suit.” She knew that it was impossible to do without the law, but for some reason, whenever Nazarich, the manager of the factory, or the bailiff of her villa in the country, both of whom frequently went to law, used to win lawsuits of some sort for her benefit, she always felt uneasy and, as it were, ashamed. On this occasion, too, she felt uneasy and awkward, and wanted to put that fifteen hundred rubles further away that it might be out of her sight.

  She thought with vexation that other girls of her age—she was in her twenty-sixth year—were now busy looking after their households, were weary and would sleep sound, and would wake up tomorrow morning in holiday mood; many of them had long been married and had children. Only she, for some reason, was compelled to sit like an old woman over these letters, to make notes upon them, to write answers, then to do nothing the whole evening till midnight, but wait till she was sleepy; and tomorrow they would all day long be coming with Christmas greetings and asking for favors; and the day after tomorrow there would certainly be some scandal at the factory—someone would be beaten or would die of drinking too much vodka, and she would be fretted by pangs of conscience; and after the holidays Nazarich would turn off some twenty of the workpeople for absence from work, and all of the twenty would hang about at the front door, without their caps on, and she would be ashamed to go out to them, and they would be driven away like dogs. And all her acquaintances would say behind her back, and write to her in anonymous letters, that she was a millionaire and exploiter—that she was devouring other men’s lives and sucking the blood of the workers.

  Here there lay a heap of letters read through and laid aside already. They were all begging letters. They were from people who were hungry, drunken, dragged down by large families, sick, degraded, despised. . . . Anna Akimovna had already noted on each letter, three rubles to be paid to one, five to another; these letters would go the same day to the office, and next the distribution of assistance would take place, or, as the clerks used to say, the beasts would be fed.

  They would distribute also in small sums four hundred and seventy rubles—the interest on a sum bequeathed by the late Akim Ivanovich for the relief of the poor and needy. There would be a hideous crush. From the gates to the doors of the office there would stretch a long file of strange people with brutal faces, in rags, numb with cold, hungry and already drunk, in husky voices calling down blessings upon Anna Akimovna, their benefactress, and her parents: those at the back would press upon those in front, and those in front would abuse them with bad language. The clerk would get tired of the noise, the swearing, and the singsong whining and blessing; would fly out and give someone a box on the ear, to the delight of all. And her own people, the factory hands, who received nothing at Christmas but their wages, and had already spent every farthing of it, would stand in the middle of the yard, looking on and laughing—some enviously, others ironically.

  “Merchants, and still more their wives, are fonder of beggars than they are of their own workpeople,” thought Anna Akimovna. “It’s always so.”

  Her eye fell upon the roll of money. It would be nice to distribute that hateful, useless money among the workpeople tomorrow, but it did not do to give the workpeople anything for nothing, or they would demand it again next time. And what would be the good of fifteen hundred rubles when there were eighteen hundred workmen in the factory besides their wives and children? Or she might, perhaps, pick out one of the writers of those begging letters—some luckless man who had long ago lost all hope of anything better—and give him the fifteen hundred. The money would come upon the poor creature like a thunderclap, and perhaps for the first time in his life he would feel happy. This idea struck Anna Akimovna as original and amusing, and it fascinated her. She took one letter at random out of the pile and read it. Some petty official called Cha
likov had long been out of a situation, was ill, and living in Gushchin’s Buildings; his wife was in consumption, and he had five little girls. Anna Akimovna knew well the four-storied house, Gushchin’s Buildings, in which Chalikov lived. Oh, it was a horrid, foul, unhealthy house!

  “Well, I will give it to that Chalikov,” she decided. “I won’t send it; I had better take it myself to prevent unnecessary talk. Yes,” she reflected as she put the fifteen hundred rubles in her pocket, “and I’ll have to look at them, and perhaps I can do something for the little girls.”

  She felt lighthearted; she rang the bell and ordered the horses to be brought round.

  When she got into the sledge it was past six o’clock in the evening. The windows in all the blocks of buildings were brightly lighted up, and that made the huge courtyard seem very dark: at the gates, and at the far end of the yard near the warehouses and the workpeople’s barracks, electric lamps were gleaming.

  Anna Akimovna disliked and feared those huge dark buildings, warehouses, and barracks where the workmen lived. She had only once been in the main building since her father’s death. The high ceilings with iron girders; the multitude of huge, rapidly turning wheels, connecting straps and levers; the shrill hissing; the clank of steel; the rattle of the trolleys; the harsh puffing of steam; the faces—pale, crimson, or black with coal dust; the shirts soaked with sweat; the gleam of steel, of copper, and of fire; the smell of oil and coal; and the draught, at times very hot and at times very cold—gave her an impression of hell. It seemed to her as though the wheels, the levers, and the hot hissing cylinders were trying to tear themselves away from their fastenings to crush the men, while the men, not hearing one another, ran about with anxious faces and busied themselves about the machines, trying to stop their terrible movement. They showed Anna Akimovna something and respectfully explained it to her. She remembered how in the forge a piece of red-hot iron was pulled out of the furnace; and how an old man with a strap round his head, and another, a young man in a blue shirt with a chain on his breast, and an angry face, probably one of the foremen, struck the piece of iron with hammers; and how the golden sparks had been scattered in all directions; and how, a little afterwards, they had dragged out a huge piece of sheet iron with a clang. The old man had stood erect and smiled, while the young man had wiped his face with his sleeve and explained something to her. And she remembered, too, how in another department an old man with one eye had been filing a piece of iron, and how the iron filings were scattered about; and how a red-haired man in black spectacles, with holes in his shirt, had been working at a lathe, making something out of a piece of steel: the lathe roared and hissed and squeaked, and Anna Akimovna felt sick at the sound, and it seemed as though they were boring into her ears. She looked, listened, did not understand, smiled graciously, and felt ashamed. To get hundreds of thousands of rubles from a business which one does not understand and cannot like—how strange it is!