PREFACE
Anton Tchekhoff, the writer of the stories and sketches here translated, although hardly known in this country, and but little better known on the western continent of Europe, has during the last fifteen years been regarded as the most talented of the younger generation of Russian writers. Even the remarkable popularity attained during the last few years by Maxim Gorky has not eclipsed his fame, though it has probably done much to prevent the recognition of his talents abroad. Tchekhoff's stories lack the striking incidents and lurid colouring of the younger writer's, and thus, while they appeal more strongly to the cultivated Russian, they are devoid of the more obvious qualities that attract the translator and the public which read translations. Though they have gone into numberless editions in Russia, they are almost unknown abroad, being, in fact, represented only by a few scattered translations and small volumes published in France and Germany, and by a few critical articles in the reviews of those countries. In England, Tchekhoff is only a name to most of those interested in Eastern literature, and not even a name to the general public.
Anton Pavlovitch Tchekhoff was born in 1860, spent his infancy in South Russia, and was educated in the Medical Faculty of Moscow University. Although a doctor by profession, and actually practising for some years as a municipal medical officer, he began his literary career as a story writer before completing his professional education, contributing, when a student, sketches to the weekly comic journals, and feuilletons to the St. Petersburg newspapers. Tchekhoff's early stories turn largely upon domestic misunderstandings; they are brief, avowedly humorous, and even farcical. They attracted early attention by their irresponsible gaiety, seldom untinged with a certain bitterness. The Steppe, a panorama of travel through the great plains of South Russia, published serially in the now extinct Sieverni Viestnik, was the first of his productions of sustained merit. It was followed by a series of stories and sketches and one volume of dramas, which have, in the opinion of Russian critics, established the writer on a level with the best native fiction writers, and on a much higher level than any of his contemporaries.
Tchekhoff in his manner of thought is essentially a Russian; as an artist essentially Western, having perhaps only one thing in common with the writers of his own country. Russian novelists, with few exceptions—Turgenieff, a man of Western training and sympathies, was one—have commonly lacked the instinct of coherency, the lack of which in fiction is redeemed only by genius. The novels of Dostoyeffsky and Tolstoy are notoriously defective in this respect. Tchekhoff and Gorky suffer from the same deficiency. Unlike Gorky, Tchekhoff has never essayed the long novel; and even his longer short stories, one of which is included in this volume, are redeemed from failure chiefly by their humour and close observation of Russian life. With this exception, Tchekhoff has little in common with other Russian writers. He is more objective, less diffuse, less inspiring, and less human. His compatriots, Count Tolstoy among them, compare him with Maupassant His method of treatment presents many parallels; he has the same brevity, the same remorselessness, the same insistence upon the significantly little.
But in his teaching, if teaching it can be called, Tchekhoff is thoroughly Russian. A French critic[1] has lately reviewed his stories in a chapter called L'impuissance de vivre, and this phrase summarises admirably what Tchekhoff has to say. The political condition of modern Russia involves the repression of all intellect and initiative, or, at best, their diversion into unproductive official channels; hence, the distaste for life. and intellectual stagnation which, represented here in "Ward No. 6," run through all Tchekhoff's longer stories, and particularly through his dramas, most of which end in disillusion and suicide. Russian life presents itself to Tchekhoff as the unprofitable struggle of the exceptional few against the trivial and insignificant many. His pages are peopled with psychopaths, degenerates of genius and virtue, who succumb in feeble revolt against the baseness and banality of life, and are quite unfit to combat the healthy, rude, but unintelligent forces around them. Kovrin, Likharyóff, and Doctor Andréi Yéfimitch, three heroes in this collection, are characteristic of Tchekhoff's outlook. All aspiring men, he says, are predestined martyrs; only the base achieve immunity from ruin: and as martyrdom is the exception, not the rule, it results that Tchekhoff's ordinary men, and the secondary characters in most of his stories, are insignificant and mean. The life depicted is in itself uninteresting; its colour is grey, its keynote tedium, its only humour the humour of the satirist, not of the sympathiser, and its only tragedy, failure. Tchekhoff is essentially an objective writer, and this gives him an undue detachment from the life which he describes; he never points a moral, delays over an explanation, or shrinks from the incompleteness which, truthful to life, is often unsatisfactory in art. But his attitude towards life is not the less unmistakable because never openly expressed; pessimism, inspired by fatalism and denial of the will, but tempered by humour and apathy, is its note. That note appears perhaps less in this volume than it would in a more representative collection of Tchekhoff's writings. But in choosing these stories from among more than a hundred, I have been guided not merely by what was best, but also by what seemed most likely to be understood by a public unfamiliar with Russian manners and Russian thought.
The stories "The Black Monk," "In Exile," "Rothschild's Fiddle," "A Father," and "At the Manor," have been translated from the volume Poviesti i Razskazni, St. Petersburg, 1898; "A Family Council," from Razskazni, 12th edition, St. Petersburg, 1898; "Ward No. 6," from Palata No. Shestoi, 6th edition, St. Petersburg, 1898; "On the Way," "At Home," "Two Tragedies," and "An Event," from V Sumerkakh, 13th edition, St. Petersburg, 1899; and "Sleepyhead," from Khmuriye Liudi, 8th edition, St. Petersburg, 1898. "In Exile" was published in the Fortnightly Review in September, 1903, and is reprinted here with the Editor's permission.
R. E. C. L.
[1] Ivan Strannik. La Pensée Russe Contemporaine. Paris, Librairie Armand Colin, 1903.
CONTENTS
[The Black Monk]
[On the Way]
[A Family Council]
[At Home]
[In Exile]
[Rothschild's Fiddle]
[A Father]
[Two Tragedies]
[Sleepyhead]
[At the Manor]
[An Event]
[Ward No. 6]
THE BLACK MONK
Andrei Vasilyevitch Kovrin, Magister, had worn himself out, and unsettled his nerves. He made no effort to undergo regular treatment; but only incidentally, over a bottle of wine, spoke to his friend the doctor; and his friend the doctor advised him to spend all the spring and summer in the country. And in the nick of time came a long letter from Tánya Pesótsky, asking him to come and stay with her father at Borisovka. He decided to go.
But first (it was in April) he travelled to his own estate, to his native Kovrinka, and spent three weeks in solitude; and only when the fine weather came drove across the country to his former guardian and second parent, Pesótsky, the celebrated Russian horti-culturist. From Kovrinka to Borisovka, the home of the Pesótskys, was a distance of some seventy versts, and in the easy, springed calêche the drive along the roads, soft in springtime, promised real enjoyment.
The house at Borisovka was, large, faced with a colonnade, and adorned with figures of lions with the plaster falling off. At the door stood a servant in livery. The old park, gloomy and severe, laid out in English fashion, stretched for nearly a verst from the house down to the river, and ended there in a steep clay bank covered with pines whose bare roots resembled shaggy paws. Below sparkled a deserted stream; overhead the snipe circled about with melancholy cries—all, in short, seemed to invite a visitor to sit down and write a ballad. But the gardens and orchards, which together with the seed-plots occupied some eighty acres, inspired very different feelings. Even in the worst of weather they were bright and joy-inspiring. Such wonderful roses, lilies, camelias, such tulips, such a host of flowering plants of every possible kind and colour, from staring white to sooty black,—such a wealth of blossoms Kovrin had never seen before. The spring was only beginning, and the greatest rareties were hidden under glass; but already enough bloomed in the alleys and beds to make up an empire of delicate shades. And most charming of all was it in the early hours of morning, when dewdrops glistened on every petal and leaf.
In childhood the decorative part of the garden, called contemptuously by Pesótsky "the rubbish," had produced on Kovrin a fabulous impression. What miracles of art, what studied monstrosities, what monkeries of nature! Espaliers of fruit trees, a pear tree shaped like a pyramidal poplar, globular oaks and lindens, apple-tree houses, arches, monograms, candelabra—even the date 1862 in plum trees, to commemorate the year in which Pesótsky first engaged in the art of gardening. There were stately, symmetrical trees, with trunks erect as those of palms, which after examination proved to be gooseberry or currant trees. But what most of all enlivened the garden and gave it its joyous tone was the constant movement of Pesótsky's gardeners. From early morning to late at night, by the trees, by the bushes, in the alleys, and on the beds swarmed men as busy as ants, with barrows, spades, and watering-pots.
Kovrin arrived at Borisovka at nine o'clock. He found Tánya and her father in great alarm. The clear starlight night foretold frost, and the head gardener, Ivan Karlitch, had gone to town, so that there was no one who could be relied upon. At supper they spoke only of the impending frost; and it was decided that Tánya should not go to bed at all, but should inspect the gardens at one o'clock and see if all were in order, while Yegor Semiónovitch should rise at three o'clock, or even earlier.
Kovrin sat with Tánya all the evening, and after midnight accompanied her to the garden. The air already smelt strongly of burning. In the great orchard, called "the commercial," which every year brought Yegor Semiónovitch thousands of roubles profit, there already crept along the ground the thick, black, sour smoke which was to clothe the young leaves and save the plants. The trees were marshalled like chessmen in straight rows—like ranks of soldiers; and this pedantic regularity, together with the uniformity of height, made the garden seem monotonous and even tiresome. Kovrin and Tánya walked up and down the alleys, and watched the fires of dung, straw, and litter; but seldom met the workmen, who wandered in the smoke like shadows. Only the cherry and plum trees and a few apple trees were in blossom, but the whole garden was shrouded in smoke, and it was only when they reached the seed-plots that Kovrin was able to breathe.
"I remember when I was a child sneezing from the smoke," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "but to this day I cannot understand how smoke saves plants from the frost."
"Smoke is a good substitute when there are no clouds," answered Tánya.
"But what do you want the clouds for?"
"In dull and cloudy weather we have no morning frosts."
"Is that so?" said Kovrin.
He laughed and took Tánya by the hand. Her broad, very serious, chilled face; her thick, black eyebrows; the stiff collar on her jacket which prevented her from moving her head freely; her dress tucked up out of the dew; and her whole figure, erect and slight, pleased him.
"Heavens! how she has grown!" he said to himself. "When I was here last time, five years ago, you were quite a child. You were thin, long-legged, and untidy, and wore a short dress, and I used to tease you. What a change in five years!"
"Yes, five years!" sighed Tánya. "A lot of things have happened since then. Tell me, Andrei, honestly," she said, looking merrily into his face, "do you feel that you have got out of touch with us? But why do I ask? You are a man, you live your own interesting life, you.... Some estrangement is natural. But whether that is so or not, Andrusha, I want you now to look on us as your own. We have a right to that."
"I do, already, Tánya."
"Your word of honour?"
"My word of honour."
"You were surprised that we had so many of your photographs. But surely you know how my father adores you, worships you. You are a scholar, and not an ordinary man; you have built up a brilliant career, and he is firmly convinced that you turned out a success because he educated you. I do not interfere with his delusion. Let him believe it!"
Already dawn. The sky paled, and the foliage and clouds of smoke began to show themselves more clearly. The nightingale sang, and from the fields came the cry of quails.
"It is time for bed!" said Tánya. "It is cold too." She took Kovrin by the hand. "Thanks, Andrusha, for coming. We are cursed with most uninteresting acquaintances, and not many even of them. With us it is always garden, garden, garden, and nothing else. Trunks, timbers," she laughed, "pippins, rennets, budding, pruning, grafting.... All our life goes into the garden, we never even dream of anything but apples and pears. Of course this is all very good and useful, but sometimes I cannot help wishing for change. I remember when you used to come and pay us visits, and when you came home for the holidays, how the whole house grew fresher and brighter, as if someone had taken the covers off the furniture; I was then a very little girl, but I understood...."
Tánya spoke for a time, and spoke with feeling. Then suddenly it came into Kovrin's head that during the summer he might become attached to this little, weak, talkative being, that he might get carried away, fall in love—in their position what was more probable and natural? The thought pleased him, amused him, and as he bent down to the kind, troubled face, he hummed to himself Pushkin's couplet:
"Oniégin; I will not conceal
That I love Tatyana madly."
By the time they reached the house Yegor Semiónovitch had risen. Kovrin felt no desire to sleep; he entered into conversation with the old man, and returned with him to the garden. Yegor Semiónovitch was tall, broad-shouldered, and fat. He suffered from shortness of breath, yet walked so quickly that it was difficult to keep up with him. His expression was always troubled and hurried, and he seemed to be thinking that if he were a single second late everything would be destroyed.
"There, brother, is a mystery for you!" he began, stopping to recover breath. "On the surface of the ground, as you see, there is frost, but raise the thermometer a couple of yards on your stick, and it is quite warm.... Why is that?"
"I confess I don't know," said Kovrin, laughing.
"No!... You can't know everything.... The biggest brain cannot comprehend everything. You are still engaged with your philosophy?"
"Yes, ... I am studying psychology, and philosophy generally."
"And it doesn't bore you?"
"On the contrary, I couldn't live without it."
"Well, God grant ..." began Yegor Semiónovitch, smoothing his big whiskers thoughtfully. "Well, God grant ... I am very glad for your sake, brother, very glad...."
Suddenly he began to listen, and making a terrible face, ran off the path and soon vanished among the trees in a cloud of smoke.
"Who tethered this horse to the tree?" rang out a despairing voice. "Which of you thieves and murderers dared to tether this horse to the apple tree? My God, my God! Ruined, ruined, spoiled, destroyed! The garden is ruined, the garden is destroyed! My God!"
When he returned to Kovrin his face bore an expression of injury and impotence.
"What on earth can you do with these accursed people?" he asked in a whining voice, wringing his hands. "Stepka brought a manure cart here last night and tethered the horse to an apple tree ... tied the reins, the idiot, so tight, that the bark is rubbed off in three places. What can you do with men like this? I speak to him and he blinks his eyes and looks stupid. He ought to be hanged!"
When at last he calmed down, he embraced Kovrin and kissed him on the cheek.
"Well, God grant ... God grant!..." he stammered. "I am very, very glad that you have come. I cannot say how glad. Thanks!"
Then, with the same anxious face, and walking with the same quick step, he went round the whole garden, showing his former ward the orangery, the hothouses, the sheds, and two beehives which he described as the miracle of the century.
As they walked about, the sun rose, lighting up the garden. It grew hot. When he thought of the long, bright day before him, Kovrin remembered that it was but the beginning of May, and that he had before him a whole summer of long, bright, and happy days; and suddenly through him pulsed the joyous, youthful feeling which he had felt when as a child he played in this same garden. And in turn, he embraced the old man and kissed him tenderly. Touched by remembrances, the pair went into the house and drank tea out of the old china cups, with cream and rich biscuits; and these trifles again reminded Kovrin of his childhood and youth. The splendid present and the awakening memories of the past mingled, and a feeling of intense happiness filled his heart.
He waited until Tánya awoke, and having drunk coffee with her, walked through the garden, and then went to his room and began to work. He read attentively, making notes; and only lifted his eyes from his books when he felt that he must look out of the window or at the fresh roses, still wet with dew, which stood in vases on his table. It seemed to hint that every little vein in his body trembled and pulsated with joy.