Selected Stories of Anton Chekov (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Translation) by Anton Chekhov

Author:Anton Chekhov [Chekhov, Anton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9780307568281
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1903-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

II

In the country he went on leading the same nervous and restless life as in the city. He read and wrote a great deal, studied Italian, and while strolling thought with pleasure that he would soon sit down to work again. He slept so little that everyone was amazed; if he inadvertently dozed off for half an hour in the afternoon, he would not sleep all night afterwards, and following the sleepless night would feel himself as brisk and cheerful as if nothing had happened.

He talked a lot, drank wine, and smoked expensive cigars. Often, if not every day, neighboring young ladies visited the Pesotskys, sang and played the piano with Tanya; occasionally a young man came, a neighbor, who was a good violinist. Kovrin listened eagerly to the music and singing, and it filled him with languor, which manifested itself physically in the closing of his eyes and the drooping of his head to one side.

Once after evening tea he was sitting on the balcony reading. In the drawing room, just then, Tanya—a soprano, one of her friends—a contralto, and the young man with the violin were rehearsing the famous serenade of Braga.2 Kovrin listened to the words—they were in Russian—and was quite unable to understand their meaning. Finally he put his book down and, listening attentively, understood: a girl with a morbid imagination heard some sort of mysterious sounds in the garden at night, so beautiful and strange that she could only take them for a sacred harmony, which we mortals were unable to understand and which therefore flew back to heaven. Kovrin’s eyes began to close. He got up and strolled languidly through the drawing room, then through the reception hall. When the singing stopped, he took Tanya under the arm and walked out to the balcony with her.

“Ever since this morning I’ve been thinking about a certain legend,” he said. “I don’t remember whether I read it or heard it somewhere, but the legend is somehow strange, incongruous. In the first place, it’s not distinguished by its clarity. A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black, was walking in the desert somewhere in Syria or Arabia … Several miles from the place where he was walking, some fishermen saw another black monk moving slowly over the surface of a lake. This second monk was a mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which the legend seems not to recognize, and listen further. The mirage produced another mirage, and that one a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be transmitted endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to another. He was seen now in Africa, now in Spain, now in India, now in the Far North … Finally he left the limits of the earth’s atmosphere and is now wandering all over the universe, never getting into conditions that might enable him to fade away. Perhaps he can now be seen somewhere on Mars or on some star in the Southern Cross.

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