A third conspirator is found in the victim’s sister, who is a religious enthusiast and intensely indignant that her rakish brother should be living apart from his wife, Olga.
At last Dukovski succeeds in tracing the purchase of a box of safety matches to Olga, whereupon he concludes that she also is implicated. He and Chubikoff confront her with the circumstantial evidences which indicate that she and her accomplices have dragged off the body of her husband. Astounded, she breaks down, and leads the officers into an adjoining room, where the body of Klausoff is lying on a couch—asleep! The wife, who still loves her tipsy lord, has dragged him away and holds him in durance so that she may live with him whether he will or not.
Master of an alert, firm style, and skilled not only in penetration but in effective expression, Chekhov has a place in Russian literature which is less difficult to designate than is usual in the case of one only a few years dead. Certainly his themes are neither big nor vital enough, nor yet sufficiently human, to accord him position beside the philosophical Tolstoi, the titanic Turgenev, and the iron-hearted Dostoevski (a greater novelist than short-story writer). Rather do his workmanship, power of characterization, and subtle, sardonic humor point to a solitary niche close to the grim and morbid Andreev. His appeal—always intellectual—to his own people is tremendous, and in Germany his vogue is still important. It seems safe to say that among Russian fictionists he stands in the first rank of the second company.
To represent Chekhov’s work, I have chosen “In Exile,” which follows complete in a new translation, because, while it exhibits all his mature characteristics, it is less unpleasant on the one hand and on the other less trivial than many of his other short-stories. But of its qualities the reader may now judge.
IN EXILE
By Anton Chekhov
Old Simon, nicknamed Wiseacre, and a young Tartar, whom no one knew by name, sat on the river-bank before a bonfire. The other three ferrymen were in the hut. Simon, a man of sixty, gaunt and toothless, but broad of shoulder and still hale in appearance, was drunk. He had meant to go to sleep long ago, but there was a flask in his pocket, and he feared that his comrades in the hut might ask him to pass it around. The Tartar felt ill and tired; shivering in his rags, he was recounting what a comfortable home he had had in his native province, and what a handsome, clever wife he had left there. He was hardly more than twenty-five years old, but now, before the blaze of the bonfire, his pale, melancholy face seemed to be that of a mere lad.
“It’s no paradise here, to be sure,” Wiseacre agreed with him. “You can see for yourself: water, bare banks, and everywhere clay—nothing more.... Holy Week has passed, there’s ice on the river, and only this morning it snowed.”