A happy young couple find their idyllic day in the country ruined when unexpected family visitors come to call.
This is truly the most minor of stories, and yet it manages to pack a fair amount of unpleasantness into its three or four pages. Some of that unpleasantness is certainly intentional on the author’s part, but not, I think, all of it.
The husband, Sasha, is a nasty fellow. When his wife, Varya, waxes poetic about the landscape, he responds, “What hot little hands you have, Varya.” And then he asks what’s for dinner.
From this tiny bit of dialog I pronounce Sasha to be a selfish ass. This assessment is proven accurate when the unwanted relatives arrive: Sasha looks “almost with hatred” at his young wife and says, “It’s you they’ve come to see! Damn them!” And these are his own relatives, as she points out!
From these tidbits, I have to assume that this tale was written in a sour moment, perhaps on an evening when Chekhov had been spurned by a girlfriend. Why do I say that? Consider his description of the moon overlooking the young couple: “The moon peeped up from the drifting cloudlets and frowned, as it seemed, envying their happiness and regretting her tedious and utterly superfluous virginity.”
Now, that is a really nicely written sentence, but what the hell? The moon is a virgin???
I suppose this could be (generously) interpreted as some kind of strange classical reference to the goddess Artemis, the Greek epitome of virginity, who also happens to be the goddess of the moon–but Chekhov really wasn’t that kind of writer.
In any case, to throw in a sour reference to the moon’s superfluous virginity is, in itself, superfluous and suggests a young man (the author) who is perhaps working too hard between writing and medical school and who may have, that night, been given the brush-off by a pretty young woman, who like the moon was maintaining her virginity for whatever reason.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
If Chekhov wasn’t feeling hurt by some unknown young woman when he wrote this story, he might simply have been feeling claustrophobic amongst his family, with whom he lived pretty much nonstop through much of his adult life, and, as it happens, who were staying with him in a rented dacha in Babkino, about 30 miles outside of Moscow, at the time that this story was written.
In that spirit, I would recommend that, rather than reading another story, you seek out the letter Chekhov wrote to his brother Mikhail on May 10, 1885, from Babkino. In it, he describes the difficulties of the trip to the country house, including a miserably slow and bumpy troika ride–a leitmotif that would turn up over and over again in his stories through the years. There is, naturally, much excitement about fishing. (“I did get one chub, but such a tiddler that he wasn’t really ready for the pan.”)
There is also a pretty funny itemization of the furnishings of the house: “Everything is marvelously comfortable and cozy. Ashtrays and matchbox stands, cigarette boxes, two washbasins, and… goodness knows what else.” I love that the availability of smoking paraphernalia is equal to, if not more important, than washbasins.
The letter includes an odd little throwaway line: Chekhov mentions that his friend Maria Kiselyova provides him jokes from old French magazines, which apparently he repurposes and writes up as short stories. “We split the proceeds 50-50,” he says.
More proof that geniuses do quite a bit of creative plagiarizing.
A Chekhov Circus 