Chekhov

by IVAN BUNIN

1

I MET Chekhov for the first time in Moscow, at the end of 1895 A few characteristic phrases of his have remained fixed in my memory to this day.

“Do you write a lot?" he asked me.

I replied that I did not.

“What a shame,” he said glumly, in his deep chest-voice. “You must work, you know. You must work without stopping....All your life.”

Then, after a pause, he added without any apparent connection: “I think thut when one has finished writing a short story one should delete the beginning and the end. That’s where we, fiction writers, mostly go wrong. And one should be brief, as brief as possible. , . .”

When our conversation turned to poetry ho suddenly livened up.

“And what about Alexei Tolstoy? Do you like his verse? I think he’s an actor. He put on an opera cloak in his youth and has kept it on ever since.”

After our meeting in Moscow I did not see him again till the spring of 1899. I went to Yalta for a few days, and met him one evening on the quay.

“ Why don’t you come and see me?” he said. “Yon must come tomorrow.”

“At what time?”

“Come in the morning, at about seven.” Probably noticing that I was somewhat startled, he explained: “We get up early. Do you?”

“Yes, I do too.”

“Well, that’s all right, then. Come as soon as you’re ready. We’ll have coffee together. One should always drink coffee in the morning, not tea. It’s wonderful. When I am working I have nothing till evening except coffee and bouillon.”

Wo walked in silence along the quay and sat down on a bench in the square.

“Do you like the sea?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Only it’s so empty.”

“That’s the best thing about it,” I said.

“I don’t know ...”he said, gazing into the distance, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts. “ J think it must be nice to be an officer, or a young student. To sit in some crowded place and listen to gay music. . . .”

And after a pause he added in his characteristic manner, without any visible connection: “The sea is difficult to describe. Do you know the description I read the other day, in a schoolboy’s exercise book? ‘The sea was big.’ That was all it said. I found it wonderful.”

In Moscow I had met a middle-aged man, tall, slim, and light in his movements. At our first meeting he had been friendly, but so simple in his manner that I mistook that simplicity for coldness. In Yalta I found him changed: he had grown thinner, his face had darkened, his movements were slower, and his voice sounded more hollow. But on the whole he was almost the same: friendly, but still reserved. His manner was quite lively, but he spoke even more simply and briefly than before, and all the time, with his face slightly turned upward, he seemed to be thinking about something else, leaving il to his companion to follow the changing course of the hidden current of his thoughts.

The day after our meeting on the quay I went to his house. I well remember the sunny morning we spent in his little garden. After that day I visited him more and more often, and soon became like a member of the household. His attitude toward me altered accordingly: it grew warmer, though the reserve remained. That was noticeable in his manner not only towards me but also towards the people who were closest to him, although, as I understood later on, it did not denote coldness: it was merely self-rest raint.

The white stone house in Autka, the little garden which he, always fond of flowers, cultivated with such care, the trees, the study with its walls quite bare except for two or three landscapes by Levitan, the large semicircular window overlooking the Uchan-Su valley drowned in orchards, and the blue triangle of the sea, the hours, days, and sometimes months I spent there will remain forever among my dearest memories.

Copyright 1951 by Ivan Bunin.

Chekhov burst into his infectious laughter only when somebody else said something amusing. He himself said the funniest things without a flicker of a smile. He loved jokes, absurd nicknames, hoaxes of any kind. Even in the last years of his life, as soon as he felt at all better, he was inexhaustible in these things. Hut he never overstressed anything — with a mischievous twinkle of his eyes over his pince-nez, he would jusl put in a word or two.

His self-restraint was evident in everything. Who, for example, ever heard him complain? Yet he had many grounds for complaint. Being one of a large family which at the time was very badly off, he began work very young. He earned next to nothing and remained hard up for a long time. Yet nobody ever heard him lament over his fate, and this was not because his requirements were limited: he loathed drabness and poverty, f or fifteen years he suffered from an exhausting illness. And yet did his readers — the Russian readers who had heard so many writers’ lamentations —know anything about it? Even in his home, on the days when he suffered most pain, no one suspected anything.

“Aren’t you feeling well, Antosha.?” His mother or sister would ask, seeing him sit all day in his armchair, with his eyes closed.

“I?” he would say quietly, opening his eyes, so meek without their pince-nez. “No, I’m all right. Just a slight headache.”

2

CHEKHOW admired Maupassant and Tolstoy. He spoke particularly often about them, and also about Lermontov’s Taman.

“What boats me,”he would say. “is that he was able to write il when he was still a mere boy. Ah, if I could write something like that, and perhaps a good vaudeville as well. I’d die in peace!”

Ho often said: “One shouldn’t ever read one’s writing before it s printed. Nor should one ever take other people’s advice. All right — you’ve gone wrong somewhere, you’ve made a mistake — but let the mistake be your own. In work one has to have daring. There are big dogs and small dogs, and the small ones need not be put out by the existence of the big ones. All of them have a duty to bark —to bark with whatever voice God has given them.”

It is said about nearly every writer after his death that he rejoiced in other people’s triumphs, that he was free of vanity. But in Chekhov’s case it was true. He did rejoice at every sign of talent, and could not help rejoicing. The word “untalented,”I think, was the worst insult on his lips. Yet he felt somewhat bitter about his own successes.

“Well, Anton Pavlovich, soon we’ll be celebrating your silver jubilee.”

“Ah, I know all about these jubilees. For twentyfive years they tear a man to shreds, and then they come and present him with a quill pen made of aluminum, and spend the entire day going into raptures, shedding tears and smothering him with kisses.”

“Have you read it?” I would ask, having seen an article about him somewhere.

He would glance at me from the corner of his He, above his pince-nez. Thank you very much. They go and write a thousand lines aboul somebody else, and then add at the very bottom: ‘There also exists another writer, Chekhov: the one who keeps moaning.’ And yet, have you ever heard me moan? Am I ‘gloomy,’or ‘cold-blooded,’ as the critics call me? I —a pessimist? But do you know that of all my stories the one I like best is ' The Student’? The word itself’ is sickening—‘pessimist . . .''

Occasionally, he would add to that: “Whenever, my dear sir, someone abuses you, remember me, your servant: I got a thrashing for the slightest slip, like the chaps at the seminary. One critic prophesied that 1 would die in the gutter: he imagines me as a young man w ho’s been kicked out of secondary school for drinking too much.”

One of my last memories of him refers to early spring 1903: Yalta, the Hotel Russia, late evening. Suddenly I was called to the telephone. I went and heard: “Dear sir, find a good cab and come and fetch me. We’ll go out for a ride.”

“A ride? At night ? What’s the matter with you, Anton Pavlovich?”

“I’m in love.”

“That’s excellent. But it’s gone nine. Besides, you might catch cold.”

“Young man, don’t argue.”

Ten minutes later I was in Autka. The house, where in I he winter he lived alone with his mother, was quiet and dark as usual. The study was dimly lit by two candles. And, as usual, my heart ached at the sight of that room where he spent so many lonely winter evenings.

“A wonderful night,” he said with surprising softness and a kind of wistful joy. “And it’s so dull at home. The only dlistraction I get is when the telephone rallies and somebody wants to know what I’m doing and I say, ‘I’m catching mice.’ Let’s drive to Orianda.”

The night was calm and warm, with a clear moon and light clouds. The carriage drove along the white high road. We kept silent, looking at the brilliant plain of the sea. Then came the wood, with a light pattern of shadows; after that, black crowds of cypresses rose towards the stars. We got out of the carriage and slowly walked under them. As we were going past the ruins of the palace, pale blue in the moonlight, he suddenly stopped and said: “Do you know how many years people will go On reading me? Seven.”

“ Why seven?”

“Well, seven and a half.”

“You’re sad today, Anton Pavlovich,” I said, looking into his face, very pale in the moonlight.

He was looking down, thoughtfully digging the end of his walking stick into the gravel; but when I said that he was sad he glanced at me mischievously. “It’s you who are sad,” he said. “You’re sad because you’ve spent some money on a cab.” Then he added in a serious tone: “Nevertheless, they’ll read me only for seven years, and I have even less to live: six years. But don’t tell the Odessa reporters about that.”

Here he was particularly mistaken: he lived not for six years, but just over one year.

3

CHEKHOV’S notebook contains a few things I heard him say myself. Sometimes he said: “A writer should be as poor as a beggar. He should know that he will die of hunger if he doesn’t write, if he allows bis laziness to get the better of him. Writers should be put in prison and forced to write by any means: solitary confinement, flogging, birching. . . . Oh, how grateful I am to fate for having made me poor when I was young! I so admired Davydova! Mamin-Sibiryak would come to her: 1 haven’t a kopek! Please give me five rubles at least in advance.’ — “Not if you were dying of starvation, my friend. I’ll give you money on one condition only: if you agree that I should lock you up in my study, here and now, provide you with a pen and ink and paper and three bottles of beer, and keep you there until you knock and say through the door that you have a story ready.’ ”

But sometimes he spoke quite differently: “A writer should be fabulously rich —so rich that at any moment he would be able to start on a journey round the world in his own yacht, or set up an expedition to the sources of the Nile, to the South Pole, to Tibet, or to Arabia, and buy up the entire C aucasus or the Himalayas. Tolstoy says that all a man needs is three square yards of earth. Nonsense! Three square yards is enough fora corpse, but a living man needs the whole globe. Especially if he’s a writer.”

Speaking of Tolstoy, he once said: “What impresses me particularly about him is the contempt he has for all of us, the other writers — or more exactly, he doesn’t even feel any contempt, but simply considers that we are just nothing at all. Sometimes, for instance, he praises Maupassant, Kuprin, Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? Because he looks upon us as children. For him, our short stories and novels are nothing but child’s play, so, on the whole, he takes the same view of Maupassant and of Semenov. But if you take Shakespeare -that’s quite another matter. That one was grown-up, and so it irritates him that he wrote in an un-Tolstoyan manner. . .”

One day Chekhov’ looked up from a newspaper and said unhurriedly, without any intonation: “It’s all the time like that: Korolenko and Chekhov, Pot a pen ko and Chekhov, Gorki and Chekhov. . . .”

Now he has been set apart. But it seems to me that he has not yet been completely understood: he was too complex and original a man, with a shy, reticent heart.

Chekhov’s voice was drowned for a long time. Before the appearance of “Peasants” — by no means the best he had written —the public read him willingly enough, but he was for them no more than an entertaining storyteller, the author of “A Game of vint” and “The Book of Complaints.” Intellectuals with an “ideology” had, on the whole, little interest in him. They recognized his talent hut did not take him seriously. I remember some of them being heartily amused when I, a mere youth, dared compare him to Korolenko and Garshin. In literary circles the attitude towards him was different, and many critics judged him highly, but never without some reservations.

Heal fame came to him only when the Arts Theatre put on his plays, and this must have hurt him as much as the fact that he began to be spoken of at all only after the appearance of “Peasants.”

His plays, again, were certainly not the best things he ever wrote; and, besides, their success meant that it was the theatre that attracted the public attention to him — the fact that his name was seen a thousand times on posters, that one remembered “Twenty-two misfortunes,” “Ob, highly esteemed cupboard,” or “ A man has been forgotten.”

He often said: “ What sort of playwrights are we? The only real dramatic playwright is Nnydenov: a born dramatist, with the most genuine dramatic spring inside of him. Now he must write another ten plays, of which nine will flop but the tenth will again be such a triumph that we’ll all gasp.”

And after a short pause he’d break again into peals of laughter: “You know, I’ve just been to Gaspra to see Tolstoy. He is still ill in bed, but he spoke a lot about all sorts of things, including me. M hen at last I got up to say good-by he kept my hand in bisand said. ‘Kiss me.’ I bent down to kiss him and he suddenly leaned close to my ear and said in his brisk, old-man’s voice: “I still can’t abide your plays, you know. Shakespeare wrote badly, but you’re even worse.’ ”

I thought at the time, and I still think, that he ought never to have written about the nobility, their country estates, and so forth: he did not know them well enough. This was particularly noticeable in his plays — in Uncle Vanya or The Cherry Orchard. The noble landowners in them are very false. The heroine of The Cherry Orchard, for example, supposed to have been born in that class, does not belong to it by a single trait: she is an actress, written with the sole purpose of giving a part to Olga Knipper. Firs is as cliché as can be, and his phrase, “A man has been forgotten,” is a typical curtain line.

It sometimes happened that people of quite different social ranks would gather in his house. He was the same with everybody, he did not show any preferences, never made anybody’s pride suffer; nobody felt forgotten or unwanted. But at the same time he kept everybody at a certain distance.

He had a great sense of dignity, of independence.

“Tolstoy is the only man I’m afraid of. Just think, it was he who wrote about Anna Karenina that she felt she saw her own eyes shining in the dark!”

“Seriously, I’m afraid of him,” he would say again with a laugh, as though he enjoyed his fear.

Once, when he was going to visit Tolstoy, he spent nearly an hour making up his mind what trousers he would wear. He took off his pince-nez, which made him look years younger, and half serious and half laughing, as was usual with him, he kept coming out of his bedroom with a different pair of trousers on.

“No, these are indecently narrow. He’ll say, what a pen-pusher!”

And he would go out, put on another pair, and again come out laughing: “But these are as wide as the Black Sea. He’ll think, what a bounder!”

4

EVEN in everyday life, he used words with precision and economy. He valued words very highly. He could not bear pompous, false, bookish words. His own speech was beautiful— fresh, clear, and to the point. In his way of talking one never heard the writer; he seldom used similes or epithets, and when he did they were usually quite commonplace; he never flaunted or relished a well-chosen word. “Big” words he loathed. A book of memoirs about him contains a noteworthy passage: “I once complained to Anton Pavlovich: What am I to do? I am consumed by self-analysis. And he replied: ‘You ought to drink less vodka”

It was probably owing to that hat red of the “ big” words, the words used in the careless, slapdash manner characteristic of many versifiers, modern ones in particular, that poetry so seldom satisfied him.

“This is worth the whole of Urenius,” he once said, speaking of Lermontov’s “The Sail.”

“Urenius?”

“Why, isn’t there Such a poet ?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, then, Uprudius,” he said gravely.

He lisped at some sounds, he had a hollow voice and often spoke in a kind of toneless mutter. At times it was hard to tell whether he was in earnest or not. I for one gave up trying to guess. He would take off his pince-nez, press his hand to his heart, and say over and over again, carefully enunciating every word, with a barely perceptible smile on his pale lips: “I beg you most insistently, monsieur le Marquis Bookishon — if ever you get bored with the forgotten old writer, stay all the same for the sake of Masha, Mamasha [Mummy], my wife, the Hungarian woman knipshitz, who is in love with you. . . . We’ll discuss literature logel her.”

Sometimes we stayed all morning in his study, in complete silence, glancing through the newspapers which he received in great numbers. He would say: “Let’s read the provincial gossip columns and try and fish out some plots for dramas and vaudevilles.”

Occasionally we would come across some—for the most part very unintelligent — comments about me, and he would hasten to soften the blow for me: “Believe me, they’ve said even sillier things about me, much more cruel things, too, or else they’ve kept completely silent.”

On one occasion, a critic detected a Chekhovian mood” in me. He became quite agitated and exclaimed with a kind of restrained excitement: “Oh, how stupid this is, how stupid! For my part; you know, I’ve been pestered with ‘Turgenevian notes.’ You and I are about as much alike as a borzoi and a bloodhound. For one thing, you’re much sharper than me, For instance, you’ve written: ‘The sea smelled of watermelon.’ That’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t have said it.”

Then he suddenly dropped his paper and asked: “What’ll you write about me in your memoirs?”

“It’s you who’ll be writing about me. You’ll oul live me.”

“But you could be my son.”

“All the same — you have peasant blood.”

“But you have noble blood. Peasants and merchants degenerate terribly quickly. Just read my story, ‘Throe Years. And then look how tough you artd The only thing that’s wrong with you is that you are too thin — like a good borzoi. Take a tonic, and you’ll live a hundred years. I’ll write you a prescription today if you like. I’m a doctor, remember. Kondakov himself has been to me for treatment, and I cured him of piles. . . . But in your memoirs you mustn t write lhat I had ‛a sympathetic talent ' and was ‘a man of crystal purity."'

“That was written about me,” I said. “They said I had a sympathetic gift.”

His laughter had a curiously strained ring, almost as if it hurt him. He always laughed like that when he was particularly pleased.

“Wait — what was it Korolenko said about you ?”

“It wasn’t Korolenko, it was Zlatovratski. He wrote about one of my first short stories that ‛it would have done credit even to a bigger writer.”

He doubled up in a long fit of laughter, then put on his pince-nez and said, looking at me sharply and gaily: “Still, it’s not as bad as the things that have been said about me. At the beginning I wrote like the last son of a bitch. I am a proletarian, you know. When I was little 1 sold tallow candles in our shop in Taganrog. Ugh, how devilishly cold it was there! And yet I took the greatest pleasure in wrapping up an icy candle in a scrap of paper. And our latrine was a waste plot of ground a mile away from the house. Sometimes I’d run there in the middle of the night and find some rogue sleeping there. We’d scare each other terribly. Hut here is my advice 1o you,”he suddenly added. “Stop being a dilettante; try to become a craftsman, at least to some extent. It’s very bad to write as I did — for a piece of bread — but a certain degree of craftsmanship is really indispensable. You cannot always sit and wait for inspiration.”

Then, after a pause: “As to Korolenko, he ought to go and be unfaithful to his wife. That would make him write better. Do you remember telling me how he wept with enthusiasm over a poem in the Russian Wealth by somebody, Ycrbov or Yet kov or something, which described the ‘wolves of reaction’ surrounding the popular poet in a field, in a terrible snowstorm, and how the pool struck a melodious chord on his lyre and the wolves scampered away in terror. Was that true?”

“My word of honor.”

“By the way, do you know that in Perm all the eab-drivers look like Dobrolubov?”

“You don’t like Dobrolubov?”

“Yes, I do. At least, he was a decent man. Not like Skabichevski, who wrote that I would die in the gutter from too much drinking, because I hadn’t ‘the divine spark’ in me.”

“Do you know,”I said, “that Skabichevski told me once that he had never seen how rye grows, and had never spoken to a peasant?”

“There you are! And yet all his life he wrote about the ‘common people’ and about books on peasant life. Yes, it’s funny to remember all the things that have been said about me. My blood was cold, they said — do you remember, I’ve got a short story called Cold Blood’? And I don’t care a hang what I’m depicting —a dog or a drowned man, a train or first love. . . . ‘The Gloomy People’ helped me a bit, though; it was found that the story had sortie value because it allegedly dealt with the reaction of the eighties. Likewise ‘The Fit ‘ — because in it an ‘honest ‘ student goes mad thinking about prostitution. And yet I detest Russian students— they’re all gadabouts. . .”

He ate little, slept little, and was exceptionally tidy. His rooms were kept remarkably clean, his bedroom was like a young girl’s. No matter how ill he felt, he never let himself go where his appearance was concerned.

His hands were large, dry, and pleasant.

As it happens to many people who do a great deal of thinking, he often forgot things he had already said several times.

I remember his silences. his cough, his closed eyes, his thoughtful, calm, and sorrowful, almost solemn, face. But I do not remember “melancholy” or “ warmth.”

A clear, cool, winter day in the Crimea; thick sleepy clouds over the Yaila. The alarm clock in his mother’s room is ticking regularly. He is sitting in his study, by the desk, and writing something unhurriedly and carefully. Then he gets up, puts on his coat and hat and low leather galoshes, and goes out somewhere where a mousetrap has been set. He comes back holding a live mouse by the end of its tail, goes out onto the porch, slowly walks across the garden to the fence, beyond which, on a stony hillock, lies a Tatar graveyard. lie carefully drops the mouse over the fence and walks hack, examining he young trees on his way. A crane comes running after him — behind it, two small dogs. He sits down on a bench in t he middle of the garden and starts playing gently with his stick with one of the dogs, which has rolled on its back at his feet. He smiles: some fleas are crawling over the pink belly. . . . Then, leaning back on the bench, he looks into the distance, at Yaila, his face raised, thinking thoughts of his own. He remains there for an hour or more. . . .

His last letter, written abroad, reached me in the country in the middle of June, 1904. He wrote that he was feeling fairly well, that he had ordered himself a new suit, and that his only worry was Japan, “a wonderful country” which would obviously be beaten and crushed by Russia. On the 4t h of July I rode on horseback to the village post office, collected my mail and newspapers, and turned towards the \ illage forge to have my horse res hod. It was a sultry, sleepy day, as they occur in the steppes, wilh a dimly glimmering sky and a hot wind. I sat down on the doorstep of the blacksmith’s cottage, opened a newspaper — and suddenly an icy razor slashed my heart. . . .

His death was hastened by a cold. Before leaving Moscow he went to the public steam baths, and after he had taken a bath and got dressed he went out into the street too soon.

What did he think of death?

He often said, firmly and deliberately, that immortality, life after death in any form whatever, is sheer buncombe.

“It’s a superstition, and any superstition is awful. One should think clearly and courageously. One day we must discuss it all thoroughly, you and I. I’ll prove to you, like two and two make four, that immortality is nonsense.”

But more than once he said the opposite, even more firmly: “It’s quite impossible that we should disappear without a trace. Of course we’ll live after death! Immortality is a fact. Just wait, I’ll prove it to you.”