Chekhov by V. S. Pritchett

Author:V. S. Pritchett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1988-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The summers at Melikhovo were delectable, but the winters were severe. By 1893, when he was thirty-three, Chekhov was still slaving half the week at the book on Sakhalin, which was being serialized in the “thick journal” Russian Thought, and the rest of the week working on the stories. There were exhausting trips to Moscow and Petersburg, where he restlessly “feasted,” as he said, with his friends. There was a price: he returned with what he called bronchitis caused, he said, by smoking cigars. He gave them up. He groaned about his debts and added to the work in hand his official duties as sanitary inspector of the hospitals of his region and on the zemstvo, the local council. He had become deeply depressed and talked wildly of going abroad—to South Africa, Japan and India—more precisely, of joining Tolstoy’s son Leo on a trip to the World’s Fair in Chicago! Nothing came of these dreams of travel. One reason for his depression, his brother Alexander said after a querulous visit to Melikhovo, was that he was shut up in the tedious company of his father and his simple mother, with whom he had nothing in common. Alexander said, “What sense is there in letting the A la Tremontanas devour your soul the way the rats devour candles.” (This absurd word was the nickname the sons had given their father.) Alexander begged his brother to give up the dream of idyllic peace of country life. Anton listened and said nothing. He had become notoriously an apparent listener who, even in more exciting company than Alexander’s, was given to uttering apparently irrelevant yet gnomic or fantastic comments that killed the subject. He had once interrupted a wrangling discussion of Marxism with the eccentric suggestion: “Everyone should visit a stud farm. It is very interesting,” as if his mind were wandering. Was the remark so irrelevant? Chekhov’s apparent perversities were sly. The peace of country life? The industrial revolution had seeped in here and there into the country around Melikhovo. As a doctor Chekhov saw disturbing instances of a new sickness. The traditional idle landowners and the ignorant peasants were being replaced by a new race: the factory owners, enterprising and ruthless men from the towns.

Chekhov’s concern at first is with the lives of the wives and daughters of the rich manufacturers whose homes are attached to the factory sites. His impressions are those of a doctor and are diagnoses. In A Doctor’s Visit we hear the hellish noises of the factory and are told of the boring, squalid lives of the workers. The industrial dust lies on the leaves of the lilac trees near the factory. Chekhov is a man for sounds. We hear the metallic banging made by the watchmen to warn off intruders, we sense the military nature of the organization. We see the third-rate oil paintings and terrible chandeliers of the factory owner’s house. The husband has died, but his widow lives fretfully on, tarnished by a dreary life; her daughter is on the point of a nervous breakdown.

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