Short Stories by Chekhov
In vain I wait for them to stop their slanders. I prepare to go home.
And it's time, too. Past ten o'clock.
"I'll sit here a little longer," says Mikhail Fiodorovich, "if you give
me leave, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?"
"You have my leave," Katy answers.
"Bene. In that case, order another bottle, please."
Together they escort me to the hall with candles in their hands. While
I'm putting on my overcoat, Mikhail Fiodorovich says:
"You've grown terribly thin and old lately. Nicolai Stiepanovich. What's
the matter with you? Ill?
"Yes, a little."
"And he will not look after himself," Katy puts in sternly.
"Why don't you look after yourself? How can you go on like this? God
helps those who help themselves, my dear man. Give my regards to your
family and make my excuses for not coming. One of these days, before I
go abroad, I'll come to say good-bye. Without fail. I'm off next week."
I came away from Katy's irritated, frightened by the talk about my
illness and discontented with myself. "And why," I ask myself,
"shouldn't I be attended by one of my colleagues?" Instantly I see how
my friend, after sounding me, will go to the window silently, think a
little while, turn towards me and say, indifferently, trying to prevent
me from reading the truth in his face: "At the moment I don't see
anything particular; but still, cher confrère, I would advise you to
break off your work...." And that will take my last hope away.
Who doesn't have hopes? Nowadays, when I diagnose and treat myself, I
sometimes hope that my ignorance deceives me, that I am mistaken about
the albumen and sugar which I find, as well as about my heart, and also
about the anasarca which I have noticed twice in the morning. While I
read over the therapeutic text-books again with the eagerness of a
hypochondriac, and change the prescriptions every day, I still believe
that I will come across something hopeful. How trivial it all is!
Whether the sky is cloudy all over or the moon and stars are shining in
it, every time I come back home I look at it and think that death will
take me soon. Surely at that moment my thoughts should be as deep as the
sky, as bright, as striking ... but no! I think of myself, of my wife,
Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general. My thoughts are not
good, they are mean; I juggle with myself, and at this moment my
attitude towards life can be expressed in the words the famous Arakheev
wrote in one of his intimate letters: "All good in the world is
inseparably linked to bad, and there is always more bad than good."
Which means that everything is ugly, there's nothing to live for, and
the sixty-two years I have lived out must be counted as lost. I surprise
myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself they are accidental
and temporary and not deeply rooted in me, but I think immediately:
"If that's true, why am I drawn every evening to those two toads." And I
swear to myself never to go to Katy any more, though I know I will go to
her again to-morrow.
As I pull my door bell and go upstairs, I feel already that I have no
family and no desire to return to it. It is plain my new, Arakheev
thoughts are not accidental or temporary in me, but possess my whole
being. With a bad conscience, dull, indolent, hardly able to move my
limbs, as though I had a ten ton weight upon me, I lie down in my bed
and soon fall asleep.
And then--insomnia. IV
The summer comes and life changes.
One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a joking tone:
"Come, Your Excellency. It's all ready."
They lead My Excellency into the street, put me into a cab and drive me
away. For want of occupation I read the signboards backwards as I go.
The word "Tavern" becomes "Nrevat." That would do for a baron's name:
Baroness Nrevat. Beyond, I drive across the field by the cemetery, which
produces no impression upon me whatever, though I'll soon lie there.
After a two hours' drive, My Excellency is led into the ground-floor of
the bungalow, and put into a small, lively room with a light-blue paper.
Insomnia at night as before, but I am no more wakeful in the morning and
don't listen to my wife, but lie in bed. I don't sleep, but I am in a
sleepy state, half-forgetfulness, when you know you are not asleep, but
have dreams. I get up in the afternoon, and sit down at the table by
force of habit, but now I don't work any more but amuse myself with
French yellow-backs sent me by Katy. Of course it would be more
patriotic to read Russian authors, but to tell the truth I'm not
particularly disposed to them. Leaving out two or three old ones, all
the modern literature doesn't seem to me to be literature but a unique
home industry which exists only to be encouraged, but the goods are
bought with reluctance. The best of these homemade goods can't be called
remarkable and it's impossible to praise it sincerely without a saving
"but"; and the same must be said of all the literary novelties I've read
during the last ten or fifteen years. Not one remarkable, and you can't
dispense with "but." They have cleverness, nobility, and no talent;
talent, nobility and no cleverness; or finally, talent, cleverness, but
no nobility.
I would not say that French books have talent, cleverness, and nobility.
Nor do they satisfy me. But they are not so boring as the Russian; and
it is not rare to find in them the chief constituent of creative
genius--the sense of personal freedom, which is lacking to Russian
authors. I do not recall one single new book in which from the very
first page the author did not try to tie himself up in all manner of
conventions and contracts with his conscience. One is frightened to
speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological
analysis, a third must have "a kindly attitude to his fellow-men," the
fourth heaps up whole pages with descriptions of nature on purpose to
avoid any suspicion of a tendency.... One desires to be in his books a
bourgeois at all costs, another at all costs an aristocrat.
Deliberation, cautiousness, cunning: but no freedom, no courage to write
as one likes, and therefore no creative genius.
All this refers to belles-lettres, so-called.
As for serious articles in Russian, on sociology, for instance, or art
and so forth, I don't read them, simply out of timidity. For some reason
in my childhood and youth I had a fear of porters and theatre
attendants, and this fear has remained with me up till now. Even now I
am afraid of them. It is said that only that which one cannot understand
seems terrible. And indeed it is very difficult to understand why hall-
porters and theatre attendants are so pompous and haughty and
importantly polite. When I read serious articles, I have exactly the
same indefinable fear. Their portentous gravity, their playfulness, like
an archbishop's, their over-familiar attitude to foreign authors, their
capacity for talking dignified nonsense--"filling a vacuum with
emptiness"--it is all inconceivable to me and terrifying, and quite
unlike the modesty and the calm and gentlemanly tone to which I am
accustomed when reading our writers on medicine and the natural
sciences. Not only articles; I have difficulty also in reading
translations even when they are edited by serious Russians. The
presumptuous benevolence of the prefaces, the abundance of notes by the
translator (which prevents one from concentrating), the parenthetical
queries and sics, which are so liberally scattered over the book or the
article by the translator--seem to me an assault on the author's person,
as well as on my independence as a reader.
Once I was invited as an expert to the High Court. In the interval one
of my fellow-experts called my attention to the rude behaviour of the
public prosecutor to the prisoners, among whom were two women
intellectuals. I don't think I exaggerated at all when I replied to my
colleague that he was not behaving more rudely than authors of serious
articles behave to one another. Indeed their behaviour is so rude that
one speaks of them with bitterness. They behave to each other or to the
writers whom they criticise either with too much deference, careless of
their own dignity, or, on the other hand, they treat them much worse
than I have treated Gnekker, my future son-in-law, in these notes and
thoughts of mine. Accusations of irresponsibility, of impure intentions,
of any kind of crime even, are the usual adornment of serious articles.
And this, as our young medicos love to say in their little
articles--quite ultima ratio. Such an attitude must necessarily be
reflected in the character of the young generation of writers, and
therefore I'm not at all surprised that in the new books which, have
been added to our belles lettres in the last ten or fifteen years, the
heroes drink a great deal of vodka and the heroines are not sufficiently
chaste.
I read French books and look out of the window, which is open--I see the
pointed palings of my little garden, two or three skinny trees, and
there, beyond the garden, the road, fields, then a wide strip of young
pine-forest. I often delight in watching a little boy and girl, both
white-haired and ragged, climb on the garden fence and laugh at my
baldness. In their shining little eyes I read, "Come out, thou bald-
head." These are almost the only people who don't care a bit about my
reputation or my title.
I don't have visitors everyday now. I'll mention only the visits of
Nicolas and Piotr Ignatievich. Nicolas comes to me usually on holidays,
pretending to come on business, but really to see me. He is very
hilarious, a thing which never happens to him in the winter.
"Well, what have you got to say?" I ask him, coming out into the
passage.
"Your Excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking
at me with a lover's rapture. "Your Excellency! So help me God! God
strike me where I stand! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus."
And he kisses me eagerly on the shoulders, on my sleeves, and buttons.
"Is everything all right over there?" I ask.
"Your Excellency! I swear to God...."
He never stops swearing, quite unnecessarily, and I soon get bored, and
send him to the kitchen, where they give him dinner. Piotr Ignatievich
also comes on holidays specially to visit me and communicate his
thoughts to me. He usually sits by the table in my room, modest, clean,
judicious, without daring to cross his legs or lean his elbows on the
table, all the while telling me in a quiet, even voice what he considers
very piquant items of news gathered from journals and pamphlets.
These items are all alike and can be reduced to the following type: A
Frenchman made a discovery. Another--a German--exposed him by showing that
this discovery had been made as long ago as 1870 by some American. Then
a third--also a German--outwitted them both by showing that both of them
had been confused, by taking spherules of air under a microscope for
dark pigment. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Piotr Ignatievich
tells his story at great length, very much as though he were defending a
thesis, enumerating his literary sources in detail, with every effort to
avoid mistakes in the dates, the particular number of the journal and
the names. Moreover, he does not say Petit simply but inevitably, Jean
Jacques Petit. If he happens to stay to dinner, he will tell the same
sort of piquant stories and drive all the company to despondency. If
Gnekker and Liza begin to speak of fugues and counter-fugues in his
presence he modestly lowers his eyes, and his face falls. He is ashamed
that such trivialities should be spoken of in the presence of such
serious men as him and me.
In my present state of mind five minutes are enough for him to bore me
as though I had seen and listened to him for a whole eternity. I hate