This is a tale of dissolution that could have been titled “If These Walls Could Talk.”
The old house of the title is an apartment building cum boarding house with a rough history. In one of the apartments lived a clerk with his old mother, his wife, his children, and a lodger. (All in three rooms.) The description of life in the apartment is downright funky: The clerk copying documents at his desk, his exhausted-looking wife bent over her sewing, the lodger, a locksmith and repairman, filing away with a rasp. The children’s drawers hang on a line over the stove. The whole of it stinks of cabbage soup and diapers and the lodger’s feet.
(It’s a great description, not merely reveling in the ugliness. The children race about in the halls, apparently happy and healthy.)
But then the clerk’s wife dies and, in a bit of double ill fortune, he loses his job. His life quickly unravels. He becomes a desperate drunkard, pawning off the family’s meager belongings to pay for his vodka. At last, he bottoms out, selling his eldest son’s coat (which was made from cloth from his dead wife’s dress, yeesh). The boy must go to his high school wrapped in his grandmother’s shawl.
And then the clerk pawns off the shawl.
Through all this, Granny is still trying to earn a little money. She does whatever work comes her way. But when her son finally skulks away for good, Granny too succumbs to drinking, and the children are removed from the apartment. The high school boy, Vassya, ends up working in a laundry in the building, and later works as some kind of muscle for the prostitutes who occupy several of the boarding house rooms.
And then Vassya too drifts away from the house, we know not where.
It’s a pretty grim story, not really colored by characterization. We don’t know much about the clerk or his wife or the lodger or even Vassya. These characters aren’t badly drawn, but the brushstrokes are pretty slashing and quick.
One notable aspect of “The Old House” is the form of narration. The tale is told by the house’s owner; the building is about to be torn down or renovated, and he is recalling the lives that were lived within the rooms. He is familiar with the building’s history and its tenants, but not, it seems, intimately familiar. He had entered the clerk’s flat a few times; he had seen the family members bent over their work. But doesn’t want to know too much about the building’s activities: he knows, for instance, that some of the female tenants are “always receiving visitors.” Therefore, he notes, they are better dressed than other tenants and paid their rent on time. And that is all that is said of the matter. Similarly, the men who work in a laundry in the back of the house tend to drink too much and cause uproars. No further comment from him.
The problem with using a disengaged, distant narrator is that, logically, he can’t see through the walls or hear what the tenants are saying, In other words, he really can’t tell a story about a family living in the building. And yet, that is what he does.
Chekhov gets away with it with a bit of sleight of hand. As the family’s fortunes reach near the bottom, the narrator simply says, “Picture this.” And then suddenly we are inhabiting the apartment, hearing the mumbled conversations, even entering their consciousness. (“Vassya would like to cry, but crying is impossible.”)
Now, this kind of narrative inconsistency isn’t terrible, although it is sloppy.
But what if the narrator is not what he seems? What if he is not merely the landlord but actually the devil? For surely the old house is a kind of hell, and he is the master of this hellish world. He has a blithe attitude about the suffering of the clerk and his family. Their catastrophic downfall is related not with any real sympathy, but more as a matter of interest.
The story even begins with a sort of demonic touch: The narrator recalls a tenant who died in the house and whose coffin was subsequently dropped when his drunken pallbearers stumbled on the stairs: “The dead man looked very serious, as though nothing had happened, and shook his head when they lifted him up from the ground and put him back in the coffin.”
The tale concludes with a strange, almost devilishly cold contempt for poor Vassya. After noting that he doesn’t know where Vassya has gone, he immediately (and blithely) drops the subject, pointing to another apartment and recalling that a musician lived there and was found with a small fortune in his deathbed. I can’t think of a colder way to end the story.
So let’s call the narrator the devil, even if in other parts of the story he seems superstitious and calls the apartment haunted…
One autobiographical note: One of the most wrenching details of this story is the drunken father’s pawning of his son’s coat. Sadly, it is drawn from life. In the winter of 1876/1877, while Chekhov was living essentially as an orphan in Taganrog, his family was scraping by in utter poverty in Moscow (probably renting an apartment not unlike the one in this story). His younger brother, Misha, had managed to win a scholarship to a school (thus avoiding being put to work in a fabric warehouse where his father was employed) but the family couldn’t afford a coat for him, so the 11-year-old went coatless that winter–in Moscow, with it’s bitter cold winters.
And that is only half the story! There is more overcoat related suffering in the Chekhov family. Ten years later, Chekhov’s older brother, Aleksandr, stole an overcoat from another Chekhov brother, Vanya. (Aleksandr’s life lurched from chaos to chaos. The coat was stolen because he was penniless at the time.)
And six months after Aleksandr stole his brother’s coat, Chekhov made use of the detail in the story “The Old House.”
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov wrote one other tale featuring a seemingly haunted house, the brief and affecting “The Trousseau.” It’s an interesting counterpoint to “The Old House.”
A Chekhov Circus 