Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  But her sister, Missyus, had no cares and spent her life in total idleness, as I did. When she got up in the morning, she at once took a book and started reading, sitting on the terrace in a deep armchair, so that her little feet barely touched the ground, or she hid herself with a book in the linden avenue, or went out the gates into the fields. She read for the whole day, peering greedily into her book, and only because her eyes sometimes became tired, dazed, and her face very pale, could you guess that this reading wearied her brain. When I came, she would blush slightly on seeing me, put her book down, and, looking into my face with her big eyes, tell me excitedly about things that had happened: for instance, that there had been a chimney fire in the servants’ quarters or that some worker had caught a big fish in the pond. On weekdays she usually went about in a pale blouse and a dark blue skirt. We took walks together, picked cherries for preserves, went for boat rides, and when she jumped up to reach a cherry, or handled the oars, her thin, weak arms showed through her loose sleeves. Or else I would paint a study, and she would stand beside me and watch with admiration.

  One Sunday at the end of July I came to the Volchaninovs’ in the morning, around nine o’clock. I walked through the park, keeping away from the house, and looked for mushrooms, which were very numerous that summer, and marked the places, in order to pick them later with Zhenya. A warm breeze was blowing. I saw Zhenya and her mother, both in pale festive dresses, walking from church to the house, and Zhenya keeping her hat from blowing off in the wind. Then I heard them having tea on the terrace.

  For a carefree man like me, seeking to justify his constant idleness, these festive summer mornings on our country estates have always been extremely attractive. When a green garden, still moist with dew, shines all over in the sun and looks happy, when there is a smell of mignonette and oleander around the house, the young people have just come back from church and are having tea in the garden, and when everyone is so nicely dressed and cheerful, and when you know that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people will do nothing all day long, then you want all of life to be like that. And now I was thinking the same thing and walking in the garden, ready to walk that way, idly and aimlessly, all day, all summer.

  Zhenya came with a basket; she looked as if she knew or anticipated that she would find me in the garden. We picked mushrooms and talked, and when she asked about something, she went ahead so as to see my face.

  “Yesterday a miracle took place in our village,” she said. “Lame Pelageya was sick for a whole year, no doctors or medicines helped her, but yesterday an old woman whispered something and it went away.”

  “That’s no matter,” I said. “We shouldn’t look for miracles only around sick people and old women. Isn’t health a miracle? And life itself? Whatever is incomprehensible is a miracle.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of what’s incomprehensible?”

  “No. I approach phenomena that I don’t understand with good cheer and don’t give in to them. I’m above them. Man should be aware that he is above lions, tigers, stars, above everything in nature, even above what is incomprehensible and seems miraculous, otherwise he’s not a man but a mouse afraid of everything.”

  Zhenya thought that, being an artist, I knew a lot and could make right guesses about what I did not know. She would have liked me to lead her into the region of the eternal and the beautiful, that higher world where, in her opinion, I was at home, and she talked to me about God, about eternal life, about the miraculous. And, unable to conceive that I and my imagination would perish forever after death, I replied: “Yes, people are immortal,” “Yes, eternal life awaits us.” And she listened, believed, and did not ask for proofs.

  As we walked towards the house, she suddenly stopped and said:

  “Our Lida is a remarkable person. Isn’t it so? I love her dearly and could sacrifice my life for her at any moment. But tell me,” Zhenya touched my sleeve with her finger, “tell me, why do you argue with her all the time? Why are you annoyed?”

  “Because she’s wrong.”

  Zhenya shook her head, and tears came to her eyes.

  “It’s so incomprehensible!” she said.

  At that moment Lida had just returned from somewhere and, standing by the porch with a whip in her hand, trim, beautiful, lit by the sun, was giving orders to a workman. Hurrying and talking loudly, she received two or three patients, then, with a busy, preoccupied air, she went through the rooms, opening first one cupboard, then another, and went up to the mezzanine; they spent a long time looking for her and calling her to dinner, and she came when we had already finished the soup. For some reason I remember and love all these little details, and I remember that whole day vividly, though nothing special happened. After dinner Zhenya read, lying in a deep armchair, and I sat on the bottom step of the terrace. We were silent. The whole sky clouded over, and a fine, light rain began to drizzle. It was hot, the wind had died down long ago, and it seemed the day would never end. Ekaterina Pavlovna came out to us on the terrace, sleepy, holding a fan.

  “Oh, mama,” said Zhenya, kissing her hand, “it’s not good for you to sleep in the afternoon.”

  They adored each other. Whenever one went to the garden, the other would stand on the terrace and, looking at the trees, call: “Hallo-o-o, Zhenya!” or “Mamochka, where are you?” They always prayed together, and both had the same beliefs and understood each other very well even when they were silent. And their attitude towards people was the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, soon became accustomed and attached to me, and when I did not appear for two or three days, she would send to find out if I was well. She, too, looked at my studies with admiration, and, as loquaciously and candidly as Missyus, told me about things that had happened and often entrusted me with her domestic secrets.

  She stood in awe of her elder daughter. Lida was never tender, she spoke only about serious things; she lived her own separate life and for her mother and sister was as sacred and slightly mysterious a personage as an admiral who always remains in his cabin is for his sailors.

  “Our Lida is a remarkable person,” the mother often said. “Isn’t it so?”

  And now, as the rain drizzled, we talked of Lida.

  “She’s a remarkable person,” the mother said and added in a conspiratorial half-whisper, looking around fearfully: “It would be hard to find the like of her anywhere, though, you know, I’m beginning to worry a little. School, first-aid kits, books—it’s all very good, but why go to extremes? She’s nearly twenty-four, it’s time she thought seriously about herself. With all these books and first-aid kits, she won’t see how life is passing by … She should marry.”

  Zhenya, pale from reading, her hair disheveled, raised her head and, looking at her mother, said as if to herself:

  “Mamochka, it all depends on God’s will!”

  And again she immersed herself in reading.

  Belokurov came in a vest and an embroidered shirt. We played croquet and lawn tennis, then, when it grew dark, had a long supper, and Lida again talked about schools and about Balagin, who had the whole district in his hands. Leaving the Volchaninovs’ that evening, I went away with the impression of a very long, idle day, and the sad awareness that everything in this world, however long, comes to an end. Zhenya accompanied us to the gate, and perhaps because she had spent the whole day with me from morning till evening, I felt that without her I was somehow dull and that this whole dear family was close to me; and for the first time all summer I wanted to paint.

  “Tell me, why is your life so dull, so colorless?” I asked Belokurov, walking home with him. “My life is dull, heavy, monotonous, because I’m an artist, a strange man, from my youth I’ve been chafed by jealousy, dissatisfaction with myself, lack of faith in what I’m doing, I’m always poor, I’m a vagabond, but you, you’re a healthy, normal person, a landowner, a squire—why do you live so uninterestingly, why do you take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven’t you fallen in love with Lida or Zhenya yet?”

&
nbsp; “You forget that I love another woman,” Belokurov replied.

  He was speaking of his friend, Lyubov Ivanovna, who lived with him in the cottage. Every day I saw this lady, very stout, plump, imposing, like a well-fed goose, strolling in the garden, in a Russian costume with beads, always under a parasol, and a serving girl kept calling her, now to eat, now to have tea. Some three years before she had rented one of the cottages as a dacha and had simply gone on living at Belokurov’s, apparently forever. She was a good ten years older than he and ruled him so strictly that, whenever he went away from the house, he had to ask her permission. She sobbed frequently in a male voice, and then I would send word that unless she stopped I would give up my lodgings, and she would stop.

  When we came home, Belokurov sat on the sofa and frowned pensively, and I began pacing the hall, feeling a quiet excitement, as if I were in love. I wanted to talk about the Volchaninovs.

  “Lida can only fall in love with a zemstvo activist, whose passions are the same as hers—hospitals and schools,” I said. “Oh, for the sake of such a girl you could not only join the zemstvo, but even wear out a pair of iron shoes, as in the old tale.5 And Missyus? How lovely this Missyus is!”

  Belokurov, with his drawn out “E-e-eh,” began talking at length about the disease of the age—pessimism. He spoke confidently and in such a tone as if I were arguing with him. Hundreds of miles of deserted, monotonous, scorched steppe cannot produce such gloom as one man when he sits and talks and nobody knows when he will leave.

  “The point isn’t pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably, “but that ninety-nine people out of a hundred are witless.”

  Belokurov took it personally, became offended, and left.

  III

  “The prince is visiting in Malozyomovo and sends you his greetings,” Lida was saying to her mother, having returned from somewhere and taking off her gloves. “He tells many interesting things … He promises to raise the question of a dispensary in Malozyomovo again in the provincial assembly, but he says there’s little hope.” And turning to me, she said: “Excuse me, I keep forgetting that this cannot be of interest to you.”

  I felt annoyed.

  “Why not?” I asked and shrugged my shoulders. “You have no wish to know my opinion, but I assure you the question is of lively interest to me.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes, it is. In my opinion there’s no need at all for a dispensary in Malozyomovo.”

  My annoyance communicated itself to her; she looked at me, narrowing her eyes, and asked:

  “What do they need? Landscapes?”

  “No need for landscapes either. They don’t need anything.”

  She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper that had just been brought from the post office; after a minute she said softly, obviously restraining herself:

  “Last week Anna died in childbirth. If there had been a dispensary nearby, she would still be alive. And it seems to me that gentleman landscape painters ought to have some sort of convictions in that regard.”

  “I have very definite convictions in that regard, I assure you,” I replied, but she shielded herself from me with the newspaper as if she did not wish to listen. “In my opinion, dispensaries, schools, libraries, first-aid kits, under the existing conditions, only serve enslavement. The people are fettered with a great chain, and you don’t cut the chain, you merely add new links to it—there’s my conviction for you.”

  She raised her eyes to me and smiled derisively, while I went on trying to grasp my main thought:

  “What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelageyas bend their backs from early morning till dark, get sick from overwork, tremble all their lives for their hungry and sick children, fear death and sickness all their lives, get treated all their lives, fade early, age early, and die in dirt and stench; their children grow up and start the same tune, and so hundreds of years go by, and billions of people live worse than animals—only for the sake of a crust of bread, knowing constant fear. The whole horror of their situation is that they have no time to think of their souls, no time to remember their image and likeness;6hunger, cold, animal fear, a mass of work, like a snowslide, bar all the paths to spiritual activity, to what precisely distinguishes man from animal and is the only thing worth living for. You come to their aid with hospitals and schools, but that doesn’t free them from bondage, but, on the contrary, enslaves them still more, because, by introducing new prejudices in their life, you increase the number of their needs, not to mention that they must pay the zemstvo for their little pills and primers, and that means bending their backs even more.”

  “I won’t argue with you,” said Lida, lowering the newspaper. “I’ve already heard it all. I’ll tell you just one thing: it’s impossible to sit with folded arms. True, we’re not saving mankind, and maybe we’re mistaken in many ways, but we do what we can, and we’re right. The highest and holiest task for a cultured person is to serve his neighbor, and we try to serve as we can. You don’t like it, but one can’t please everyone.”

  “True, Lida, true,” said the mother.

  She was always timid in Lida’s presence, and kept glancing at her anxiously when she spoke, afraid of saying something unnecessary or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but always agreed—true, Lida, true.

  “Dispensaries, peasant literacy, books with pathetic precepts and jokes cannot diminish either ignorance or mortality, any more than the light from your windows can illuminate this huge garden,” I said. “You give nothing with your interference in these people’s lives, you only create new needs, new pretexts for work.”

  “Ah, my God, but something must be done!” Lida said with vexation, and from her tone it was clear that she considered my arguments worthless and despised them.

  “The people must be freed from heavy physical labor,” I said. “Their yoke must be lightened, they must be given a respite, so that they don’t spend their whole lives at the stove, the washtub, and in the fields, but also have time to think about their souls, about God, to give wider scope to their spiritual capacities. Every man’s calling lies in spiritual activity—in a constant search for truth and the meaning of life. Make it so that crude, brutish labor is not necessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you’ll see what a mockery these books and first-aid kits essentially are. Once a man is conscious of his true calling, he can be satisfied only by religion, the sciences, the arts, and not these trifles.”

  “Free them from labor!” Lida grinned. “Is that really possible?”

  “Yes. Take a share of their work on yourself. If all of us, city and country dwellers, all of us without exception, agreed to divide up the work expended by mankind in general to satisfy its physical needs, the portion for each of us might be no more than two or three hours a day. Imagine that all of us, rich and poor, work only three hours a day, and the rest of our time is left free. Imagine, too, that in order to depend still less on our bodies and to work less, we invent machines to work for us, and try to reduce the number of our needs to the minimum. We train ourselves and our children not to fear hunger and cold, so that we don’t constantly tremble for their health as Anna, Mavra, and Pelageya do. Imagine that we don’t get treated, don’t keep pharmacies, tobacco factories, distilleries—what a lot of free time we’d have in the end! All of us together would devote this leisure to the arts and sciences. As peasants sometimes get together to mend a road, so all of us together would seek truth and the meaning of life, and—I’m certain of it—the truth would be discovered very soon, man would be delivered from this constant, tormenting, oppressive fear, and even from death itself.”

  “You contradict yourself, however,” said Lida. “You say science, science, yet you reject literacy.”

  “Literacy, when a man can only use it to read pothouse signboards and occasional books that he doesn’t understand—such literacy has been with us since the time of Rurik, Gogol’s Petrushka7has been
reading for a long time, and yet the village remains to this day what it was under Rurik. What we need is not literacy, but the freedom to give wide scope to our spiritual capacities. We need not schools but universities.”

  “You reject medicine as well.”

  “Yes. It would be needed only for the study of illnesses as phenomena of nature, not for their treatment. If we’re to treat something, it should be not illnesses but their causes. Remove the main cause—physical work—and there will be no illnesses. I don’t recognize the science of treatment,” I went on excitedly. “The arts and sciences, when genuine, aspire not to temporary, not to specific purposes, but to the eternal and the general—they seek truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul, and when they’re harnessed to the needs and evils of the day, to first-aid kits and libraries, they only complicate and clutter life. We have lots of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, there are lots of literate people, but no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. All our intelligence, all our inner energies have gone to satisfying temporary, passing needs … Among scientists, writers, and artists, work is at the boil, the comforts of life increase every day thanks to them, bodily needs multiply, and yet the truth is still far off, and man still remains the most predatory and slovenly of animals, and the tendency in the majority of mankind is towards degeneration and the permanent loss of all vitality. In such conditions an artist’s life has no meaning, and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his role, since it turns out that, in reality, he is working for the amusement of a predatory, slovenly animal and supporting the existing order of things. But I don’t want to work and will not … Nothing’s any use, let the earth go to hell and gone!”

  “Missyuska, leave us,” Lida said to her sister, obviously finding my words harmful for such a young girl.

  Zhenya looked sadly at her sister and mother and left.

  “Such nice things are commonly said when one wants to justify one’s indifference,” said Lida. “To reject hospitals and schools is easier than to treat or teach people.”