Short Stories by Chekhov
a seven year old daughter, Katy, and sixty thousand roubles. By his will
he made me guardian. Katy lived in my family till she was ten.
Afterwards she was sent to College and lived with me only in her
holidays in the summer months. I had no time to attend to her education.
I watched only by fits and starts; so that I can say very little about
her childhood.
The chief thing I remember, the one I love to dwell upon in memory, is
the extraordinary confidence which she had when she entered my house,
when she had to have the doctor,--a confidence which was always shining
in her darling face. She would sit in a corner somewhere with her face
tied up, and would be sure to be absorbed in watching something. Whether
she was watching me write and read books, or my wife bustling about, or
the cook peeling the potatoes in the kitchen or the dog playing
about--her eyes invariably expressed the same thing: "Everything that
goes on in this world,--everything is beautiful and clever." She was
inquisitive and adored to talk to me. She would sit at the table
opposite me, watching my movements and asking questions. She is
interested to know what I read, what I do at the University, if I'm not
afraid of corpses, what I do with my money.
"Do the students fight at the University?" she would ask.
"They do, my dear."
"You make them go down on their knees?"
"I do."
And it seemed funny to her that the students fought and that I made them
go down on their knees, and she laughed. She was a gentle, good, patient
child.
Pretty often I happened to see how something was taken away from her, or
she was unjustly punished, or her curiosity was not satisfied. At such
moments sadness would be added to her permanent expression of
confidence--nothing more. I didn't know how to take her part, but when I
saw her sadness, I always had the desire to draw her close to me and
comfort her in an old nurse's voice: "My darling little orphan!"
I remember too she loved to be well dressed and to sprinkle herself with
scents. In this she was like me. I also love good clothes and fine
scents.
I regret that I had neither the time nor the inclination to watch the
beginnings and the growth of the passion which had completely taken hold
of Katy when she was no more than fourteen or fifteen. I mean her
passionate love for the theatre. When she used to come from the College
for her holidays and live with us, nothing gave her such pleasure and
enthusiasm to talk about as plays and actors. She used to tire us with
her incessant conversation about the theatre. I alone hadn't the courage
to deny her my attention. My wife and children did not listen to her.
When she felt the desire to share her raptures she would come to my
study and coax: "Nicolai Stiepanich, do let me speak to you about the
theatre."
I used to show her the time and say:
"I'll give you half an hour. Fire away!"
Later on she used to bring in pictures of the actors and actresses she
worshipped--whole dozens of them. Then several times she tried to take
part in amateur theatricals, and finally when she left College she
declared to me she was born to be an actress.
I never shared Katy's enthusiasms for the theatre. My opinion is that if
a play is good then there's no need to trouble the actors for it to make
the proper impression; you can be satisfied merely by reading it. If the
play is bad, no acting will make it good.
When I was young I often went to the theatre, and nowadays my family
takes a box twice a year and carries me off for an airing there. Of
course this is not enough to give me the right to pass verdicts on the
theatre; but I will say a few words about it. In my opinion the theatre
hasn't improved in the last thirty or forty years. I can't find any more
than I did then, a glass of dean water, either in the corridors or the
foyer. Just as they did then, the attendants fine me sixpence for my
coat, though there's nothing illegal in wearing a warm coat in winter.
Just as it did then, the orchestra plays quite unnecessarily in the
intervals, and adds a new, gratuitous impression to the one received
from the play. Just as they did then, men go to the bar in the intervals
and drink spirits. If there is no perceptible improvement in little
things, it will be useless to look for it in the bigger things. When an
actor, hide-bound in theatrical traditions and prejudices, tries to read
simple straightforward monologue: "To be or not to be," not at all
simply, but with an incomprehensible and inevitable hiss and convulsions
over his whole body, or when he tries to convince me that Chazky, who is
always talking to fools and is in love with a fool, is a very clever man
and that "The Sorrows of Knowledge" is not a boring play,--then I get
from the stage a breath of the same old routine that exasperated me
forty years ago when I was regaled with classical lamentation and
beating on the breast. Every time I come out of the theatre a more
thorough conservative than I went in.
It's quite possible to convince the sentimental, self-confident crowd
that the theatre in its present state is an education. But not a man who
knows what true education is would swallow this. I don't know what it
may be in fifty or a hundred years, but under present conditions the
theatre can only be a recreation. But the recreation is too expensive
for continual use, and robs the country of thousands of young, healthy,
gifted men and women, who if they had not devoted themselves to the
theatre would be excellent doctors, farmers, schoolmistresses, or
officers. It robs the public of its evenings, the best time for
intellectual work and friendly conversation. I pass over the waste of
money and the moral injuries to the spectator when he sees murder,
adultery, or slander wrongly treated on the stage.
But Katy's opinion was quite the opposite. She assured me that even in
its present state the theatre is above lecture-rooms and books, above
everything else in the world. The theatre is a power that unites in
itself all the arts, and the actors are men with a mission. No separate
art or science can act on the human soul so strongly and truly as the
stage; and therefore it is reasonable that a medium actor should enjoy
much greater popularity than the finest scholar or painter. No public
activity can give such delight and satisfaction as the theatrical.
So one fine day Katy joined a theatrical company and went away, I
believe, to Ufa, taking with her a lot of money, a bagful of rainbow
hopes, and some very high-class views on the business.
Her first letters on the journey were wonderful. When I read them I was
simply amazed that little sheets of paper could contain so much youth,
such transparent purity, such divine innocence, and at the same time so
many subtle, sensible judgments, that would do honour to a sound
masculine intelligence. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her
friends, her successes and failures--she did not write about them, she
sang. Every line breathed the confidence which I used to see in her
face; and with all this a mass of grammatical mistakes and hardly a
single stop.
Scarce six months passed before I received a highly poetical
enthusiastic letter, beginning, "I have fallen in love." She enclosed a
photograph of a young man with a clean-shaven face, in a broad-brimmed
hat, with a plaid thrown over his shoulders. The next letters were just
as splendid, but stops already began to appear and the grammatical
mistakes to vanish. They had a strong masculine scent. Katy began to
write about what a good thing it would be to build a big theatre
somewhere in the Volga, but on a cooperative basis, and to attract the
rich business-men and shipowners to the undertaking. There would be
plenty of money, huge receipts, and the actors would work in
partnership.... Perhaps all this is really a good thing, but I can't
help thinking such schemes could only come from a man's head.
Anyhow for eighteen months or a couple of years everything seemed to be
all right. Katy was in love, had her heart in her business and was
happy. But later on I began to notice dear symptoms of a decline in her
letters. It began with Katy complaining about her friends. This is the
first and most ominous sign. If a young scholar or litterateur begins
his career by complaining bitterly about other scholars or
littérateurs, it means that he is tired already and not fit for his
business. Katy wrote to me that her friends would not come to rehearsals
and never knew their parts; that they showed an utter contempt for the
public in the absurd plays they staged and the manner they behaved. To
swell the box-office receipts--the only topic of conversation--serious
actresses degrade themselves by singing sentimentalities, and tragic
actors sing music-hall songs, laughing at husbands who are deceived and
unfaithful wives who are pregnant. In short, it was amazing that the
profession, in the provinces, was not absolutely dead. The marvel was
that it could exist at all with such thin, rotten blood in its veins.
In reply I sent Katy a long and, I confess, a very tedious letter. Among
other things I wrote: "I used to talk fairly often to actors in the
past, men of the noblest character, who honoured me with their
friendship. From my conversations with them I understood that their
activities were guided rather by the whim and fashion of society than by
the free working of their own minds. The best of them in their lifetime
had to play in tragedy, in musical comedy, in French farce, and in
pantomime; yet all through they considered that they were treading the
right path and being useful. You see that this means that you must look
for the cause of the evil, not in the actors, but deeper down, in the
art itself and the attitude of society towards it." This letter of mine
only made Katy cross. "You and I are playing in different operas. I
didn't write to you about men of the noblest character, but about a lot
of sharks who haven't a spark of nobility in them. They are a horde of
savages who came on the stage only because they wouldn't be allowed
anywhere else. The only ground they have for calling themselves artists
is their impudence. Not a single talent among them, but any number of
incapables, drunkards, intriguers, and slanderers. I can't tell you how
bitterly I feel it that the art I love so much is fallen into the hands
of people I despise. It hurts me that the best men should be content to
look at evil from a distance and not want to come nearer. Instead of
taking an active part, they write ponderous platitudes and useless
sermons...." and more in the same strain.
A little while after I received the following: "I have been inhumanly
deceived. I can't go on living any more. Do as you think fit with my
money. I loved you as a father and as my only friend. Forgive me."
So it appeared that he too belonged to the horde of savages. Later on, I
gathered from various hints, that there was an attempt at suicide.
Apparently, Katy tried to poison herself. I think she must have been
seriously ill afterwards, for I got the following letter from Yalta,
where most probably the doctors had sent her. Her last letter to me
contained a request that I should send her at Yalta a thousand roubles,
and it ended with the words: "Forgive me for writing such a sad letter.
I buried my baby yesterday." After she had spent about a year in the
Crimea she returned home.
She had been travelling for about four years, and during these four
years I confess that I occupied a strange and unenviable position in
regard to her. When she announced to me that she was going on to the
stage and afterwards wrote to me about her love; when the desire to
spend took hold of her, as it did periodically, and I had to send her