About Love and Other Stories

by Chekhov, Anton; Bartlett, Leverhulme Research Fellow in Russian Cultural History Rosamund ;

  ‘The last time we were at Elder Prokofy’s barn,’ said Burkin, ‘there was a story you were going to tell.’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to tell you about my brother.’

  Ivan Ivanych let out a long sigh then lit his pipe in order to start his story, but just at that moment it started to rain. Within five minutes the rain was coming down steadily in a heavy downpour, and it was difficult to forecast when it was going to stop. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin paused to think for a moment; the dogs, who were already wet, stood wagging their tails, looking at them affectionately.

  ‘We need to take shelter somewhere,’ said Burkin. ‘Let’s go to Alyokhin’s. It’s nearby.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They turned off their path and walked through the scythed field, sometimes in a straight line and sometimes making turns to the right until they got to the road. Soon there appeared poplars, an orchard, then the red roofs of barns; a river gleamed, and a view opened up of a wide stretch of open water with a windmill and a white bathing hut. This was Sofyino, where Alyokhin lived.

  The windmill was working, muffling the sound of the rain, and the weir was shuddering. Near to the carts stood wet horses with bowed heads, and there were people who had covered themselves with sacks walking about. It was damp, muddy, and uninviting and the open water looked cold and malevolent. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin had started to feel wet, dirty, and uncomfortable all through their bodies and their feet had become heavy with mud; when they were walking past the dam and up to the barns belonging to the estate they were silent, as if they were angry with each other.

  A winnowing-machine was whirring in one of the barns; the door was open and there was dust billowing out of it. Alyokhin himself was standing in the doorway; he was a man of about forty—tall and on the plump side, with long hair, and he looked more like a professor or an artist than a landowner. He was wearing a white shirt which had not been washed for a long time, shorts instead of trousers with a bit of rope for a belt, and there was mud and straw sticking to his boots. He recognized Ivan Ivanych and Burkin and was evidently very glad to see them.

  ‘Please go on up to the house, gentlemen,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’

  The house was large and on two storeys. Alyokhin lived downstairs, in two rooms with vaulted ceilings and small windows which the bailiffs had once lived in; they were furnished simply and smelt of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harnesses. He spent little time in the main rooms upstairs, and only used them when he had guests. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were met at the house by a maid, a young woman who was so beautiful that they both stopped dead in their tracks and looked at each other.

  ‘You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen,’ said Alyokhin, coming into the hall after them. ‘What a surprise!’ He turned to the maid. ‘Pelageya, could you please give the guests something to change into. Actually, I will change too. But I have to go and wash first, as I feel as if I haven’t had a wash since spring. How about nipping down to our bathing area on the river, gentlemen, while they get things ready?’

  The beautiful Pelageya, so delicate and gentle-looking, brought towels and soap, and Alyokhin and his guests went down to the bathing hut.

  ‘Yes, I haven’t had a wash in ages,’ he said as he undressed. ‘I’ve got a wonderful place for bathing, as you can see—my father set it up, but I never seem to have the time to wash.’

  He sat down on the step, putting soap on his long hair and on his neck, and the water around him turned brown.

  ‘Yes, I have to admit…’ said Ivan Ivanych meaningfully as he eyed his head. ‘Haven’t washed in ages,’ repeated Alyokhin sheepishly, as he soaped himself again, the water around him this time turning indigo, like ink. Ivan Ivanych came out of the hut, plunged noisily into the water, and started swimming about in the rain, taking large strokes with his arms, and producing waves on which tossed white water-lilies; he swam right into the middle of the river then dived down and came up in another place a minute later; then he swam further out and kept diving underwater, trying to reach the bottom. ‘Oh my goodness…’ he kept repeating in deep enjoyment. ‘Goodness me…’ He swam up to the windmill, had a chat with the peasants there, and then turned round and lay floating on his back in the middle of the river with his face upturned beneath the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin had already got dressed and were ready to go, but he was still swimming about and diving underwater.

  ‘Oh my goodness…’ he was saying; ‘Goodness gracious me.’

  ‘Come on, that’s enough!’ Burkin shouted out to him.

  They returned to the house. And only when they had lit the lamp in the large drawing room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanych were sitting in armchairs dressed in silk robes and warm shoes, and Alyokhin was walking about the room, freshly washed and with his hair brushed, in a new frock-coat, clearly enjoying the feeling of being warm and clean and wearing dry clothes and light shoes, and the beautiful Pelageya was offering tea with jam on a tray, treading noiselessly on the carpet and smiling gently, only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story, and it seemed that it was not just Burkin and Alyokhin listening to it, but also the young and old ladies and officers who were looking at them sternly and calmly from their golden frames.

  ‘There are two of us brothers,’ he began. ‘There’s me, Ivan Ivanych, and there’s Nikolay Ivanych, who is two years younger. I was the more academic one, and I became a vet, while Nikolay started work in a government office when he was nineteen. Our father, Ivan Chimsha-Gimalaisky was a rank-and-file soldier who was eventually promoted to officer class, and so bequeathed to us hereditary nobility and a minuscule estate. The estate was taken to pay off debts after his death, but despite that we spent our childhood in the countryside in complete freedom. We were just like peasant children, outside in the woods and fields day and night; we kept horses, stripped bark for bast, * went fishing, that kind of thing… And you know, someone who has caught a ruff or seen the thrushes migrating south in flocks above the village in autumn on clear, cool days can never be happy in a town; he is going to long for the freedom of the countryside till the end of his days. My brother was miserable in his government office. The years were going by and he was still in the same place, filling out the same documents and thinking about one thing: how much he would like to be in the country. This longing gradually shaped itself into a particular desire—to carry out his dream of buying a property somewhere on the bank of a river or next to a lake.

  ‘He was a kind and gentle man and I loved him dearly, but I could never understand his desire to closet himself away on his own estate for the rest of his life. People say that a person only needs six feet of earth. * But in fact it’s a corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person. And people also say these days that it’s a good thing when members of our intelligentsia feel drawn to the land and want to live on country estates. But those country houses with their plots of land are nothing other than those six feet of earth. Leaving city life and all its struggles and stresses; leaving all that in order to lock oneself away in the country—that’s no life, that’s being selfish and lazy; it’s a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without any sacrifice. People don’t need six feet of earth, or even a house in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature in its entirety, so they can have the space to express all the capacities and particularities of their free spirit.

  ‘While he was stuck in his office, my brother Nikolay would dream of being able to eat his own pickled cabbage, whose delicious smell he imagined wafting across the yard; he would dream of picnicking on green grass, taking an afternoon nap in the sunshine, and sitting for hours on end on a bench in front of his gateposts and looking at the fields and forests. Books about agriculture and the bits of advice you find in calendars were his greatest joy and his favourite spiritual food; he also loved reading newspapers, but only the notices advertising however many acres of arable land for sale with a meadow and a house and garden, plus a river, an orchard, a windmill, and well-d
rained ponds. And he would begin to draw up in his mind paths in the orchard, flowers and fruit, starling-boxes, carp in the ponds, and, well, you know, all that kind of stuff. These imaginary pictures changed according to the advertisements he came across, but for some reason they all featured gooseberry bushes. There was not one estate or poetic little spot that he imagined which did not include gooseberry bushes.

  ‘“Country life has definitely got something to offer,” he would say. “You can sit on the balcony drinking tea, with your ducks swimming in the pond, everything smelling so good and… and your gooseberry bushes growing.”

  ‘He would sketch out the plan of how his estate would look and each time it would turn out the same: (a) a house, (b) servants’ quarters, (c) a vegetable garden, and (d) gooseberry bushes. He lived in a miserly manner, eating little, drinking little, dressing himself in goodness knows what, like a tramp, and all the time stashing away money in the bank. He was incredibly stingy. It was painful to look at him, and I used to give him things and send stuff over for the holidays, but he would squirrel them away too: once a person is fixed on a certain idea, there is nothing you can do about it.

  ‘The years passed, he was transferred to another region, he had turned forty, and he was still reading advertisements in the newspapers and saving money. Then I heard that he had got married. Still set on buying an estate with gooseberry bushes, he had married an elderly and unattractive widow—not for love but simply because she had a lot of cash. He lived like a miser with her too, keeping her half-starved and putting her money in the bank in his name. She had been married to a postmaster before and had been used to cakes and liqueurs, but with her second husband she could not even eat as much black bread as she wanted; that kind of life made her start wasting away, and after about three years she gave up the ghost and died. And my brother of course never thought for one minute that he might have been responsible for her death. Money makes people behave weirdly, just like vodka. There was a merchant who lived in our town. Just before he died he ordered a dish of honey and went and ate up all his money and his lottery tickets with the honey so that no one else would get them. I was examining cattle at the station once, when a cattle-dealer fell under a train and got his leg chopped off. We took him to the casualty ward with blood pouring everywhere—it was terrible—and he kept asking people to search for his leg, and worrying that he would lose the twenty roubles in the boot he had been wearing.’

  ‘Well, that’s a whole other story,’ said Burkin.

  ‘After his wife died,’ Ivan Ivanych continued, after pausing to think for thirty seconds, ‘my brother started hunting out an estate for himself. Of course, you can spend five years looking but in the end you are bound to trip up and buy something which is not quite what you were dreaming about. Through an agent who organized a mortgage, my brother Nikolay bought three hundred acres with a house, servants’ quarters, and gardens, but no orchard and no gooseberry bushes, and no pond with ducks in it; there was a river, but the water in it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a brick factory and a bone-ash works on the other. But my dear brother was not perturbed; he ordered up twenty gooseberry bushes, planted them, and started living the life of a landowner.

  ‘I went to pay him a visit last year. I thought I would go and see how he was getting on. In his letters, my brother called his estate Chumbaroklov Wilderness, a.k.a. Gimalaiskoe. I arrived at “a.k.a. Gimalaiskoe” after midday. It was hot. There were ditches everywhere, and hedges, fences, and fir trees planted in rows, so it was difficult to work out where the entrance was and where to leave my horse. I walked up to the house and was met by a fat ginger-haired dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark but couldn’t be bothered. The cook came out of the kitchen; she was barefoot and fat and she looked like a pig too; she said the master was having a rest after lunch. So I go in and find my brother sitting up in bed with a blanket over his knees; he had aged and filled out and looked bloated: his cheeks, nose, and lips were all protruding and he was grunting into the blanket.

  ‘We kissed each other and shed a few tears of joy and also sadness at the thought that we had been young once, but were now both grey-haired and it was time for us to die. He got dressed and took me on a tour of his estate.

  ‘“So how are you getting on here?” I asked.

  ‘“Pretty well, really, can’t complain; things are good.”

  ‘He was no longer the timid, poverty-stricken official he used to be but a real landowner now, lord of the manor. He had already settled in, got used to his new life, and begun to enjoy it; he ate a lot, he went for saunas in the bath-house, he had put on weight, was already in litigation with the locals and with both the factories next door to him, and was very put out that the peasants did not call him “your excellency”. And he took care of his soul in a respectable, lordly way, doing good works with ostentation rather than with discretion. And what were these good works? He treated the peasants for all their ailments with soda and castor oil, and on his name day held a service of blessing in the village, then put out large quantities of vodka, thinking that was what was required. All that vodka! One day a fat landowner is dragging peasants to the regional authorities for damaging crops, and the next day it’s a celebration and he’s giving them vodka, so they drink and shout hurrah, and bow down at his feet when they are drunk. Wealth, idleness, and a change in life for the better all produce in Russian people the worst kind of inflated self-opinion. Nikolay Ivanych, who in his government office had even been afraid of having his own views, now spoke only words of wisdom, and in a ministerial-like tone: “Education is vital, but it is premature for the populace”, “Corporal punishment is generally harmful but in certain instances it is indispensable and useful.”

  ‘“I understand the people and how to talk to them,” he would say.

  “They like me. I just have to lift a finger and they will do anything I want.”

  ‘And all this was said, mind you, with a knowing smile. He said about twenty times things like “we of the nobility” or “as a member of the nobility”, and had obviously forgotten that our grandfather was a peasant and his father a soldier. Even our surname, Chimsha-Gimalaisky, which is basically absurd, now seemed sonorous, distinguished, and very pleasant to him.

  ‘But the point of all this is not him but me. I want to tell you what change took place within me during those hours I spent on his estate. In the evening, while we were drinking tea, the cook brought a large plate of gooseberries to the table. They had not been bought, they were his own gooseberries, picked for the first time since the bushes had been planted. Nikolay Ivanych chuckled and looked at the gooseberries for a minute in silence, with tears running down his cheeks— he was so excited he could not speak, then he put a gooseberry into his mouth, looked at me triumphantly, like a child who has finally been handed a favourite toy, and said: “How delicious!”

  ‘He started eating greedily and saying over and over: “Ah, how delicious! You must try one!”

  ‘They were hard and sour, but as Pushkin said, “the lie which exalts us is dearer to us than a host of truths.” * I was watching a contented person, whose cherished dream had so clearly become a reality, who had achieved his aim in life, who had got what he wanted, and who was happy with his lot and with himself. There has always been some sadness mixed in with my thoughts about human happiness, and now, seeing this contented person, I was overcome by a dreadful feeling which was close to despair. It was particularly awful during the night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was still awake and was getting up and going over to the plate of gooseberries and taking one after the other. I started thinking about how many contented, happy people there are in actual fact! What an oppressive force! Think about this life of ours: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, unbelievable poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, deceit… Meanwhile all is quie
t and peaceful in people’s homes and outside on the street; out of the fifty thousand people who live in the town, there is not one single person prepared to shout out about it or kick up a fuss. We see the people who go to the market for their groceries, travelling about in the daytime, sleeping at night, the kind of people who spout nonsense, get married, grow old, and dutifully cart their dead off to the cemetery; but we do not see or hear those who are suffering, and all the terrible things in life happen somewhere offstage. Everything is quiet and peaceful, and the only protest is voiced by dumb statistics: so many people have gone mad, so many bottles of vodka have been drunk, so many children have died from malnutrition… And this arrangement is clearly necessary: it’s obvious that the contented person only feels good because those who are unhappy bear their burden in silence; without that silence happiness would be inconceivable. It’s a collective hypnosis. There ought to be someone with a little hammer outside the door of every contented, happy person, constantly tapping away to remind him that there are unhappy people in the world, and that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show its claws; misfortune will strike—illness, poverty, loss—and no one will be there to see or hear it, just as they now cannot see or hear others. But there is no person with a little hammer; happy people are wrapped up in their own lives, and the minor problems of life affect them only slightly, like aspen leaves in a breeze, and everything is just fine.

  ‘That night I realized that I was contented and happy too,’ Ivan Ivanych continued as he got to his feet. ‘I also pontificated when I was at the dinner table and when I was out hunting, about how to live, how to practise the faith, and about how to deal with the people. I also used to say that learning was sacred, that education was vital but that learning to read and write was quite enough for simple people for the time being. Freedom is a good thing, I used to say; it is as necessary as the air we breathe, but we must bide our time. Yes, I used to talk like that, and now I am wondering what on earth it is that we are actually biding our time for?’ Ivan Ivanych looked angrily at Burkin as he spoke. ‘I’m asking you, what is it we are waiting for? What justification is there? People tell me you can’t do everything at once, that every idea has to be put into practice gradually, in its own good time. But who are the people saying such things? Where is the proof that this is the right way to proceed? You refer to the natural order of things, and to natural phenomena, but where is the order, what is natural about me, a living, thinking person, standing in front of a trench, and waiting for it to grow over by itself or fill up with silt, when I could jump over it or throw a plank over it? Once again, you have to ask, what is the point of waiting—waiting when there is no energy for living? But we need to live, and there is such a strong desire to live!