Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (215 page)

Vladimir cross: one of the many Russian decorations for distinction

Circassians: people who lived in the northern Caucasus

Anna Karenin: the chief character in Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
; see Part I, Chapter 30

Prince Vorontsov: Field Marshal M. S. Vorontsov (1782-1856), Russian General in war of 1812; Viceroy of the Caucasus

superfluous man: a common Russian literary type; see, for example, Turgenev’s
The Diary of a Superfluous Man
(1850)

Onyegin, Petchorin, Byron’s Cain, and Bazarov: all examples of “superfluous men”; Onyegin is the hero of Pushkin’s verse novel
Eugene Onegin
; Petchorin is the hero of Lermontov’s novel
A Hero of Our Time
; “Cain” is a poem by the English poet Byron; Bazarov is the hero of Turgenev’s novel
Fathers and Sons

Faust: legendary figure and the subject of many literary treatments; Chekhov probably has in mind the character in Goethe’s poetic drama
Faust

Tolstoy: the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Schopenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher known for his gloomy outlook

Spencer: Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher whose writings on evolution were influential

aubergines: eggplants

thirty degrees: about 99 degrees F.

duhan: a lodge

hut on hen’s legs: in the Russian fairy tale a witch lives in the hut

Night in the Ukraine: a famous descriptive passage in the second canto of Pushkin’s narrative poem “Poltava”

ikon on his breast: panagia, an image of Mary and Jesus worn by bishops around their necks

Thy Hand has planted: Psalms 80:15-16

His beaver collar is silver with hoar-frost: from verse 16 of Chapter 1 of Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin

cocotte: prostitute

peace: phrases from the Russian Orthodox funeral service

Stanley: Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), an English explorer

who so offendeth one of these little ones: Mark 9:42

kalii bromati: potassium bromide, used as a sedative

tincturæ gentianæ: tincture of gentia, used to improve digestion

aquæ foeniculi: fennel water, used as a sentative and laxative

William I.: Wilhelm I (1797-1888) was King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany

Rudin: the hero of Turgenev’s novel of the same name; another superfluous man

Russification: the state policy of Tsar Alexander III, that non-Russian ethnic groups should be assimilated

consistory: an administrative and judicial institution set up under the archbishop

train: in Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina kills herself because of an unhappy adulterous love affair

smear the gates with tar: to mark where a woman lived who was involved in an immoral love affair

fives and fours: A’s and B’s

post: game were participants write anonymous notes addressed to someone present

art for art’s sake: idea in
Cours de Philosophie
(1818) by Victor Cousin

Kant or Hegel: the German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831)

Leskov: Nikolay Leskov (1831-1895), a Russian novelist and short story writer; the story is “Conscientious Daniel,” first published in 1888

knees of the gods: more accurately, “in the laps of the gods”

fortress: prison were political prisoners were held

PUSHKIN: the final lines of Pushkin’s lyric poem “Memory”; the poet was tragically killed in a duel in 1837

green rays: the green flash is a rare atmospheric phenomena, only observed when the sun is near the horizon; despite its name, the green flash usually lasts several seconds.

Lermontov: there is a duel in Lermontov’s novel
A Hero of Our Time

Bazarov had a duel: Bazarov has a duel with Pavel Kirsanov in Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons

portmanteaus: suitcases

screw he has put on himself: how he has buckled down

One man vanquishes thousands and another tens of thousands: cf. 1 Samuel 18:7

THE WIFE

Translated by Constance Garnett 1888-1895

I

I RECEIVED the
following letter:

“DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREITCH!

“Not far from you -- that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo -- very distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which I feel it my duty to write to you. All the peasants of that village sold their cottages and all their belongings, and set off for the province of Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there, and have come back. Here, of course, they have nothing now; everything belongs to other people. They have settled three or four families in a hut, so that there are no less than fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing to eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The doctor’s assistant says one goes into a cottage and what does one see? Every one is sick, every one delirious, some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor) and his lady assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need bread which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them, on the ground that their names have been taken off the register of this district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and, besides, the Zemstvo has no money.

“Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg you not to refuse immediate help.

“Your well-wisher.”

Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal name* or his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants go on for years growing more and more convinced every day that they can do
nothing,
and yet continue to receive their salaries from people who are living upon frozen potatoes, and consider they have a right to judge whether I am humane or not.

*Sobol in Russian means “sable-marten.”- TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants came every morning to the servants’ kitchen and went down on their knees there, and that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen at night out of the barn, the wall having first been broken in, and by the general depression which was fostered by conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather -- worried by all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing “A History of Railways”; I had to read a great number of Russian and foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then again to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a book or began to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would get up from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would stand still at my study window, and, looking across the wide courtyard, over the pond and the bare young birch-trees and the great fields covered with recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the horizon a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was Pestrovo, concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written to me. If it had not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter’s shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss was being made would have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, motionless, lifeless, and dreary!

My uneasiness hindered me from working and concentrating myself; I did not know what it was, and chose to believe it was disappointment. I had actually given up my post in the Department of Ways and Communications, and had come here into the country expressly to live in peace and to devote myself to writing on social questions. It had long been my cherished dream. And now I had to say good-bye both to peace and to literature, to give up everything and think only of the peasants. And that was inevitable, because I was convinced that there was absolutely nobody in the district except me to help the starving. The people surrounding me were uneducated, unintellectual, callous, for the most part dishonest, or if they were honest, they were unreasonable and unpractical like my wife, for instance. It was impossible to rely on such people, it was impossible to leave the peasants to their fate, so that the only thing left to do was to submit to necessity and see to setting the peasants to rights myself.

I began by making up my mind to give five thousand roubles to the assistance of the starving peasants. And that did not decrease, but only aggravated my uneasiness. As I stood by the window or walked about the rooms I was tormented by the question which had not occurred to me before: how this money was to be spent. To have bread bought and to go from hut to hut distributing it was more than one man could do, to say nothing of the risk that in your haste you might give twice as much to one who was well-fed or to one who was making. money out of his fellows as to the hungry. I had no faith in the local officials. All these district captains and tax inspectors were young men, and I distrusted them as I do all young people of today, who are materialistic and without ideals. The District Zemstvo, the Peasant Courts, and all the local institutions, inspired in me not the slightest desire to appeal to them for assistance. I knew that all these institutions who were busily engaged in picking out plums from the Zemstvo and the Government pie had their mouths always wide open for a bite at any other pie that might turn up.

The idea occurred to me to invite the neighbouring landowners and suggest to them to organize in my house something like a committee or a centre to which all subscriptions could be forwarded, and from which assistance and instructions could be distributed throughout the district; such an organization, which would render possible frequent consultations and free control on a big scale, would completely meet my views. But I imagined the lunches, the dinners, the suppers and the noise, the waste of time, the verbosity and the bad taste which that mixed provincial company would inevitably bring into my house, and I made haste to reject my idea.

As for the members of my own household, the last thing I could look for was help or support from them. Of my father’s household, of the household of my childhood, once a big and noisy family, no one remained but the governess Mademoiselle Marie, or, as she was now called, Marya Gerasimovna, an absolutely insignificant person. She was a precise little old lady of seventy, who wore a light grey dress and a cap with white ribbons, and looked like a china doll. She always sat in the drawing-room reading.

Whenever I passed by her, she would say, knowing the reason for my brooding:

“What can you expect, Pasha? I told you how it would be before. You can judge from our servants.”

My wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the lower storey, all the rooms of which she occupied. She slept, had her meals, and received her visitors downstairs in her own rooms, and took not the slightest interest in how I dined, or slept, or whom I saw. Our relations with one another were simple and not strained, but cold, empty, and dreary as relations are between people who have been so long estranged, that even living under the same roof gives no semblance of nearness. There was no trace now of the passionate and tormenting love -- at one time sweet, at another bitter as wormwood -- which I had once felt for Natalya Gavrilovna. There was nothing left, either, of the outbursts of the past -- the loud altercations, upbraidings, complaints, and gusts of hatred which had usually ended in my wife’s going abroad or to her own people, and in my sending money in small but frequent instalments that I might sting her pride oftener. (My proud and sensitive wife and her family live at my expense, and much as she would have liked to do so, my wife could not refuse my money: that afforded me satisfaction and was one comfort in my sorrow.) Now when we chanced to meet in the corridor downstairs or in the yard, I bowed, she smiled graciously. We spoke of the weather, said that it seemed time to put in the double windows, and that some one with bells on their harness had driven over the dam. And at such times I read in her face: “I am faithful to you and am not disgracing your good name which you think so much about; you are sensible and do not worry me; we are quits.”

I assured myself that my love had died long ago, that I was too much absorbed in my work to think seriously of my relations with my wife. But, alas! that was only what I imagined. When my wife talked aloud downstairs I listened intently to her voice, though I could not distinguish one word. When she played the piano downstairs I stood up and listened. When her carriage or her saddlehorse was brought to the door, I went to the window and waited to see her out of the house; then I watched her get into her carriage or mount her horse and ride out of the yard. I felt that there was something wrong with me, and was afraid the expression of my eyes or my face might betray me. I looked after my wife and then watched for her to come back that I might see again from the window her face, her shoulders, her fur coat, her hat. I felt dreary, sad, infinitely regretful, and felt inclined in her absence to walk through her rooms, and longed that the problem that my wife and I had not been able to solve because our characters were incompatible, should solve itself in the natural way as soon as possible -- that is, that this beautiful woman of twenty-seven might make haste and grow old, and that my head might be grey and bald.

One day at lunch my bailiff informed me that the Pestrovo peasants had begun to pull the thatch off the roofs to feed their cattle. Marya Gerasimovna looked at me in alarm and perplexity.

“What can I do?” I said to her. “One cannot fight single-handed, and I have never experienced such loneliness as I do now. I would give a great deal to find one man in the whole province on whom I could rely.”

“Invite Ivan Ivanitch,” said Marya Gerasimovna.

“To be sure!” I thought, delighted. “That is an idea!
C’est raison,
” I hummed, going to my study to write to Ivan Ivanitch. “
C’est raison, c’est raison.
”

II

Of all the mass of acquaintances who, in this house twenty-five to thirty-five years ago, had eaten, drunk, masqueraded, fallen in love, married, bored us with accounts of their splendid packs of hounds and horses, the only one still living was Ivan Ivanitch Bragin. At one time he had been very active, talkative, noisy, and given to falling in love, and had been famous for his extreme views and for the peculiar charm of his face, which fascinated men as well as women; now he was an old man, had grown corpulent, and was living out his days with neither views nor charm. He came the day after getting my letter, in the evening just as the samovar was brought into the dining-room and little Marya Gerasimovna had begun slicing the lemon.

“I am very glad to see you, my dear fellow,” I said gaily, meeting him. “Why, you are stouter than ever. . . .”

“It isn’t getting stout; it’s swelling,” he answered. “The bees must have stung me.”

With the familiarity of a man laughing at his own fatness, he put his arms round my waist and laid on my breast his big soft head, with the hair combed down on the forehead like a Little Russian’s, and went off into a thin, aged laugh.

“And you go on getting younger,” he said through his laugh. “I wonder what dye you use for your hair and beard; you might let me have some of it.” Sniffing and gasping, he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek. “You might give me some of it,” he repeated. “Why, you are not forty, are you?”

“Alas, I am forty-six!” I said, laughing.

Ivan Ivanitch smelt of tallow candles and cooking, and that suited him. His big, puffy, slow-moving body was swathed in a long frock-coat like a coachman’s full coat, with a high waist, and with hooks and eyes instead of buttons, and it would have been strange if he had smelt of eau-de-Cologne, for instance. In his long, unshaven, bluish double chin, which looked like a thistle, his goggle eyes, his shortness of breath, and in the whole of his clumsy, slovenly figure, in his voice, his laugh, and his words, it was difficult to recognize the graceful, interesting talker who used in old days to make the husbands of the district jealous on account of their wives.

“I am in great need of your assistance, my friend,” I said, when we were sitting in the dining-room, drinking tea. “I want to organize relief for the starving peasants, and I don’t know how to set about it. So perhaps you will be so kind as to advise me.”