The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91

by Anton Chekhov

  I still lecture fairly well, as I always have done; as before, I can still hold my audience’s attention for two hours. My fervour, my elegant exposition and my humour almost completely conceal the defects of my voice, which is dry, harsh and sing-song, like a sanctimonious preacher’s. But I write badly. The portion of my brain that controls the faculty of writing has refused to function. My memory is fading, my thoughts have little consistency and whenever I put them to paper I always feel that I have lost the knack of linking them organically, that my phrasing is monotonous and my language sketchy and feeble. Often I don’t write what I mean. When I’m writing the conclusion I’ve already forgotten the beginning. Often I forget ordinary words and I always have to waste a great deal of energy to avoid superfluous phrases and unnecessary parentheses – both of which are unmistakable proof of my declining mental faculties. Amazingly, the simpler the subject the more painful the effort. I feel far more at ease and intelligent with scientific articles than with letters of congratulation or with memoranda. And another thing: I find it easier to write in German or English than in Russian.

  As for my present mode of life I must give first place to the insomnia from which I’ve been suffering of late. If someone were to question me as to what constitutes the fundamental, basic feature of my life now I would reply: insomnia. From force of habit I still undress and go to bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but between one and two o’clock I wake up, feeling that I haven’t slept a wink. I get out of bed and light a lamp. For an hour or two I pace up and down and look at those long-familiar pictures and photographs. When I am weary of walking I sit down at my table and stay there motionless, thinking of nothing, desiring nothing. If there’s a book in front of me I draw it towards me and mechanically read it, without any interest. This was how I read in one night an entire novel with the odd title: What Song the Swallow Sang.5 Or to occupy my mind I force myself to count to a thousand or imagine a colleague’s face, trying to remember when and under what circumstances he joined the Faculty. I like to listen for sounds. Sometimes my daughter Liza will mutter something rapidly in her sleep two rooms away, or my wife will cross the drawing-room and invariably she’ll drop the matchbox; or the warped cupboard will creak; or the lamp burner will suddenly start humming – for some reason all these sounds excite me.

  To lie awake at night is to be conscious every minute that you are not normal, and that is why I so long for the morning and the day, when I have the right not to sleep. Many wearisome hours pass before the cock crows in the yard – he is my first herald of good tidings. The moment he crows I know that within an hour the house-porter will wake up and come upstairs for some reason, angrily coughing. And then the light will gradually grow pale at the windows, voices will ring out in the street.

  My day begins when my wife arrives. She enters in her petticoat, her hair undone, but washed and smelling of flower-scented eau-de-Cologne and looking as if she has come in by accident. Every time she says the same thing, ‘Sorry, I only dropped in for a moment… Had another bad night?’

  Then she puts the lamp out, sits by the table and starts talking. I’m no prophet, but I know in advance what she’s going to talk about – the same thing every morning. Usually, after anxious inquiries about my health, she’ll suddenly mention our son, who is an army officer stationed in Warsaw. After the twentieth of every month we send him fifty roubles – and this is our main topic of conversation.

  ‘Of course, it’s hard for us,’ my wife sighs, ‘but it’s our duty to help until he can finally fend for himself. The boy’s in a strange country, his pay’s not very much… But if you like we can send him forty roubles instead of fifty next month. What do you think?’

  Everyday experience might have taught my wife that constant talk about expenses doesn’t reduce them in any way, but my wife refuses to learn from experience and every morning she regularly discusses our officer son and tells me that bread, thank God, is cheaper, but sugar is two copecks dearer – and all this as if she were communicating some important news.

  I listen, mechanically agree and probably because I’ve had a bad night, strange, inappropriate thoughts grip me. I look at my wife and I wonder like a child. In bewilderment I ask myself if this extremely stout, clumsy old woman with her dull look of petty anxiety and fear that we might starve, her eyes clouded by constant brooding over debts and privation, who can talk of nothing but expenses and who smiles only when prices come down – could this woman possibly be the same slim Varya with whom I once fell in love so passionately for her fine, lucid mind, her pure soul, her beauty, because she felt ‘sympathy’ for my studies as Desdemona did for Othello?6 Could this really be the same Varya, my wife who once bore me a son?

  I gaze intently into this flabby, clumsy old woman’s face, trying to discover my Varya, but of her past self nothing remains except her concern for my health and her habit of calling my salary ‘our salary’, my cap ‘our cap’. It pains me to look at her and to provide her with a few scraps of comfort I let her say what she likes – and I even keep quiet when she criticizes people unfairly or picks on me for not going into private practice or publishing textbooks.

  Our conversations always end the same way. My wife suddenly remembers that I haven’t had my tea and takes fright.

  ‘What am I sitting here for?’ she says, getting up. ‘The samovar’s been on the table for ages and here I am chattering away. Heavens, I’ve become so forgetful!’

  She quickly goes out but she stops at the door to ask, ‘Did you know we owe Yegor five months’ wages? We mustn’t let the servants’ wages run up, I’ve told you that so many times! It’s far easier paying them ten roubles a month than fifty every five months!’

  In the doorway she stops again to say, ‘The one I feel most sorry for is our Liza. She’s a student at the Conservatoire, she’s always mixing in good society, yet just look how she’s dressed! That fur coat would make anyone ashamed to be seen in the street with it. It wouldn’t matter so much if she were anyone’s daughter, but everyone knows that her father is a famous professor, a Privy Councillor!’

  And after reproaching me with my name and position she finally leaves. So begins my day. Nor does it get any better.

  While I’m drinking my tea in comes my daughter Liza in her fur coat and little hat, carrying some music books – all ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is twenty-two, but she looks younger. She’s pretty and a bit like my wife when she was young. She kisses me affectionately on the temple and hand.

  ‘Good morning, Papa. How are you?’ she asks.

  As a child she was very fond of ice cream and I often took her to a café. Ice cream was her criterion of excellence. If she wanted to praise me she would say, ‘Papa, you’re all ice creamy!’ One of her fingers would be called ‘pistachio’, another ‘cream’, another ‘raspberry’ – and so on. Usually when she came in to say good morning I would sit her on my knee and kiss her fingers.

  ‘Vanilla… pistachio… lemon…’ I would say.

  And even now, for old time’s sake, I still kiss Liza’s fingers and mutter, ‘Pistachio, cream, lemon…’, but it somehow doesn’t sound right. I’m as cold as ice cream myself, I feel embarrassed. When my daughter comes in and touches my temple with her lips I give a sudden start, as if stung by a bee, produce a forced smile and turn my face away. Ever since I first began to suffer from insomnia one question has constantly been nagging me: my daughter often sees me, an elderly, distinguished man, blush painfully because I haven’t paid our footman his wages. She sees how often my worrying over petty debts makes me stop work and thoughtfully pace the room for hours on end. So why has she never once come to see me without her mother’s knowledge to whisper, ‘Papa, here’s my watch, my bracelets, earrings, dresses… pawn the lot, you need the money’? When she sees her mother and myself trying to keep up appearances why doesn’t she give up the expensive pleasure of studying music? I could never accept her watch, or bracelets or any other sacrifices – God forbid! I
don’t need them.

  And this leads me to think of my son, the army officer in Warsaw. He is an intelligent, honest and sober person. But that’s not enough for me. I fancy that if I had an old father and knew that there were times when he was ashamed of being so poor, I would give up my commission to someone else and take a job as a labourer. Such thoughts about my children poison me. But what good are these thoughts? Only a narrow-minded or embittered man can harbour malicious thoughts about ordinary mortals for not being heroes. But enough of that.

  At a quarter to ten I have to go and deliver a lecture to my dear boys. I get dressed and walk down the road I have known for thirty years and which has a history of its own for me. Here is the large grey building with the chemist’s shop. Here there used to be a small house with an ale bar – there I planned my thesis and wrote my first love letter to Varya, in pencil, on a page with the heading Historia Morbi.7 Next comes the grocer’s, once kept by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit and later by a fat woman who was fond of the students because ‘every one of them had a mother’. Now it’s occupied by a red-haired shopkeeper – a very phlegmatic man who drinks his tea from a copper teapot. And here are the grim university gates that have long needed repairing, a bored janitor in a sheepskin jacket, a broom, heaps of snow… Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a bright young boy from the provinces who imagines that the Temple of Learning really is a temple. All in all, the dilapidated university buildings, the gloomy corridors and grimy walls, the lack of light, the dismal aspect of the steps, coat-hooks and benches play a leading role as a conditioning factor in the history of Russian pessimism. And here is our garden. I fancy it has grown neither better nor worse since I was a student. I do not like it. It would have been much more sensible to have grown some lofty pines and fine oaks there instead of shrivelled-up limes, yellow acacias and skimpy, clipped lilacs. Most students’ moods are influenced by their environment, therefore they should be able to see only what is noble, impressive and elegant at all times at their place of study. God preserve them from spindly trees, broken windows, grey walls and doors upholstered with torn oil-cloth.

  When I approach my own entrance the door is flung open and I’m met by my old colleague, contemporary and namesake, Nikolay the porter. He lets me in, clears his throat and says, ‘It’s very frosty, Professor!’ Or if my fur coat is damp: ‘It’s raining, Professor!’

  Then he runs on ahead and opens all the doors on the way. In my study he solicitously takes off my coat, at the same time managing to communicate some item of university news. Thanks to the close camaraderie that exists between all university porters and caretakers, he knows simply everything that is going on in all four faculties, in the registry, the Vice-Chancellor’s study and the library. There’s absolutely nothing he doesn’t know about. When the latest news is a Dean’s or Vice-Chancellor’s resignation, for example, I can hear him talking to the young janitors, naming candidates for the vacancy, explaining that So-and-So wouldn’t be approved by the Minister, or that So-and-So would turn it down himself. Then he goes into fantastic detail about some mysterious papers that were received in the registry about a secret conversation alleged to have taken place between the Minister and a trustee – and so on. If you spare all the details, in general he’s almost always right. His descriptions of each candidate’s character, although highly original, turn out to be correct as well. If you need to know in what year someone defended a thesis, took up his post, retired or died, then call on this old soldier’s prodigious memory and he will not only tell you the year month and day, but will also furnish all the details that accompanied this or that event. Only someone who loves his work can have such a memory.

  He is a custodian of university traditions. From the porters who were his predecessors he has inherited many legends of university life and to this repository of wealth he has added many riches of his own, acquired during years of service. Many are the stories he will tell you – long or short – if you so desire. He can tell of extraordinary sages who knew everything, of remarkable scholars who would go without sleep for weeks on end, of science’s innumerable martyrs and victims. In his stories good always triumphs over evil, the weak over the strong, the wise over fools, the humble over the proud, the young over the old… There’s no need to take all his cock-and-bull stories and fables at their face value, but if you sift them you will be left with what is truly important: our fine traditions and the names of real, universally recognized heroes.

  In our society all information about the academic world is confined to a few anecdotes about the phenomenal absent-mindedness of elderly professors and two or three witticisms variously ascribed to Gruber,8 myself or Babukhin.9 For an educated public this is rather feeble. If people loved learning, scholars, students as Nikolay does, its literature would long ago have included entire epics, legends and chronicles which it unfortunately lacks these days.

  Whenever he tells me the news Nikolay assumes a grave expression and we get down to business. If an outsider could observe the ease with which Nikolay uses scientific terminology at these times he might easily conclude that here was an academic masquerading as an old campaigner. Incidentally, those rumours about the erudition of university porters are greatly exaggerated. True, Nikolay knows more than a hundred Latin terms, can put a skeleton together, can occasionally prepare specimens or amuse the students with some long, learned quotation. But a simple theory such as the circulation of the blood, let’s say, is as great a mystery to him now as it was twenty years ago.

  At a table in my study, bent low over a book or some preparation, sits Pyotr Ignatyevich my demonstrator, a hard-working, modest but untalented man of about thirty-five, already bald and with a fat belly. He slaves away from dawn to dusk, reads a great deal and can remember everything he has read – in this respect he’s a perfect treasure. But in all other respects he’s a mere drudge – in other words a learned blockhead. The drudge-like features that distinguish him from someone of genuine talent are as follows: his horizon is narrow and severely restricted to his speciality; outside his special subject he is like a child. I can remember going into his office one morning and saying, ‘What terrible news! I’ve heard that Skobelev’s10 died.’

  Nikolay crosses himself, but Pyotr Ignatyevich turns to me and asks, ‘Who is this Skobelev?’

  Another time – this was somewhat earlier – I tell him that Professor Perov11 has died and my dear old Pyotr Ignatyevich asks ‘What did he lecture on?’

  I fancy that if Patti12 sang into his ear, if hordes of Chinese invaded Russia, if there was an earthquake, he wouldn’t turn a hair and would calmly keep squinting down his microscope. In short, ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’13 I would give anything to see this dry old stick in bed with his wife.

  Another feature is his fanatical faith in the infallibility of science and above all in everything written by Germans. He has great confidence in himself and in his preparations, he knows the purpose of life and is a total stranger to those doubts and disappointments which make more talented people go grey. There’s his cringing deference to authority and complete absence of any desire for independent thought. It’s impossible to make him change his mind about anything and it’s impossible to argue with him. Just try and argue with a man who is firmly convinced that medicine is queen of the sciences, that doctors are a superior breed and that medical traditions are the finest. The sole surviving tradition from medicine’s tarnished past is the white tie, still worn by doctors. For scholars and any educated person there can only be traditions that apply to the university as a whole, without distinction between medicine, law, etc. But it’s hard for Pyotr Ignatyevich to agree with this and he is prepared to argue with you until doomsday.

  I have a clear picture of his future. In the course of his life he’ll make a few hundred preparations of unparalleled purity, write many dreary but very decent articles, turn out a dozen or so conscientious translations. But he’ll never set the world alight. For that you need imagin
ation, inventiveness, vision, but Pyotr Ignatyevich is blessed with none of these things. In brief, he’s not a master in science, but a journeyman.

  Pyotr Ignatyevich, Nikolay and I speak in an undertone. We feel a little uneasy. You always have this special kind of feeling when you can hear your audience booming away like the sea on the other side of the lecture-room door. Thirty years haven’t inured me to this feeling and I have it every morning. Nervously I button up my frock-coat, ask Nikolay unnecessary questions, get cross. I may seem to be behaving like a coward, but this is something quite different from cowardice, something which I can neither put a name to nor describe.

  ‘Well then, it’s time to go in,’ I say.

  And we proceed into the hall, in the following order: first is Nikolay with the preparations or charts, then myself – and after me lumbers the old drudge, head humbly bowed. Or, when it’s necessary, a corpse is carried in first on a stretcher, followed by Nikolay, and so on. On my appearance the students stand up, then they sit down and the roar of the sea suddenly subsides: the ocean is becalmed.

  I know what I’m about to lecture on, but have no idea how I’m going to lecture, what I shall begin with and how I shall conclude. I haven’t a single sentence ready in my mind. But I only have to cast my eyes over the lecture-hall (it is built like an amphitheatre) and utter the obligatory: ‘At last week’s lecture we stopped at…’ for the sentences to spring from my inner self in long procession – and then I’m off! I speak with irrepressible speed and passion and feel that no earthly power could stem the flow of words. To lecture well – so that your audience will profit from your lecture and not be bored – you need not only talent but a certain knack, experience, the clearest possible awareness of your own strengths, of your audience and the subject of your lecture. Besides that, you need to be on your toes, to be ever-vigilant and never lose sight of your objective for one moment.