“The Wife” begins with a letter to the narrator, Pavel Andreitch, alerting him to a rapidly growing famine in the region. Andreitch, a retired engineer who now spends his days writing, feels it is his duty to try to alleviate the suffering of the starving peasants.
Seems like a decent enough beginning for a longer work, no? Alas, it turns into a rudderless mess fairly quickly.
Andreitch is a fussy snob who is essentially estranged from his much younger wife. Oddly, his wife lives in a lower apartment in their home, while Andreitch occupies the upstairs.
But, what to do about the famine? Andreitch for some reason seeks the counsel of his old friend and, apparently, mentor, Ivan Ivanitch, who has an odd, elliptical way of speaking:
‘Yes, yes, yes,” sighs Ivan Ivanitch. “To be sure… to be sure… to be sure.”
Ivanitch rarely says anything more definitive than that. Which seems funny? That is, I am uncertain: Does Chekhov mean for this to be an amusing character? Are we supposed to laugh? And yet the conversation is about famine and whether Andreitch should do anything to help the local population. Ivanitch has nothing of value to say about the famine, but he does have some advice for Andreitch: Run away. “Pavel Andreitch,” he says, managing for once to make a declaration. “I speak to you as a friend: Try to be different…. You are young, wealthy, and healthy. Ah, if I were younger I would whisk away like a hare.”
Meanwhile, Andreitch’s estranged wife gets to work to help the peasants by taking up a collection from her social circle. Unlike Andreitch, who is basically an ineffectual do-nothing, his wife actually raises funds for the poor, although she keeps poor records and disburses money carelessly.
When his wife refuses to allow Andreitch to assist in her fundraising efforts, he decides to leave for Petersburg, but in the end he doesn’t get very far. His travel efforts are almost comically inept (although there is nothing that is straightforwardly humorous in this story) and he must turn back, having barely made it out of town. He returns home, resuming his life of writing, while his wife goes on with her own life downstairs.
Weirdly, much of this mystifying narrative is drawn from life: There was a gruesome famine in 1891, and Chekhov donated to relief efforts and rallied to the cause. Not only that, but in the harsh winter months after the crops failed, Chekhov learned that relief money had been embezzled. All of this mirrors details in “The Wife,” and yet the famine itself is always out of sight in this story, mentioned but never seen.
Andreitch makes for a fussy, annoying narrator. Personally, I wanted to ring his neck for his pomposity, his inactivity, his obviously unnecessary writing project (very meta of me, I know!), his obeisance to the absurd Ivanitch… And he is vaguely complicit in the suffering of the peasantry, having alerted the police to the theft of some of his wheat–stolen, presumably, to allay hunger.
But even more than I wanted to ring Andreitch’s neck, I wanted to ditch the story altogether. Like several other of his novellas (but not all of them!!!), “The Wife” never seems to find its center, and the characterizations, while fairly crisp, aren’t really made to carry a long narrative.
Amazingly enough, Chekhov biographer Donald Rayfield claims that “The Wife” generated “more publicity for famine relief than any manifesto.”
I’m not doubting that statement but I have to say I’m mystified as to how it could be so.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
One of the great oddities of “The Wife” is its seemingly prudish inability to look the famine square in the eye. The starving poor are nowhere directly to be seen. It’s as if Chekhov did not trust himself to portray the poor. But of course he often did write about “peasants,” that is, the rural poor of Russia, in some of his most searing and effective stories. The novella “Peasants,” written five years later, could almost be seen as a corrective to “The Wife,” a closely observed portrait of life in a poverty-stricken village where privation mixes with drunken cruelty.
A Chekhov Circus 