Forty Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  They went home. Lying in her warm soft bed and covering herself with her bedclothes, Sophia Lvovna remembered the dark doorway, the smell of incense, and the figures beside the columns, and she was terrified by the thought that these figures would remain motionless through the night, while she slept. The early service would go on forever, and would be followed by “the hours,” and then by the mass, and then by the thanksgiving service.…

  “Oh, there is a God, yes, there truly is a God, and I must surely die, and that is why sooner or later I must think about my soul, about eternal life, and about Olga. Olga is saved now—she has found the answers to all the questions about herself.… But what if there is no God? Then her life has come to nothing. But how has it come to nothing? Why?”

  A moment later another thought entered her head: “Yes, there is a God, and death will surely come, and I must think about my soul. If Olga saw death before her this very minute, she would not be afraid. She is ready. The important thing is that she has solved the problem of life for herself. There is a God … yes.… But is there any other way out, except by entering a nunnery? Entering a nunnery means renouncing life, reducing it to zero.…”

  Sophia Lvovna began to feel a bit frightened. She hid her head under a pillow.

  “I mustn’t think about it,” she muttered. “No, I mustn’t think about it.…”

  Yagich was pacing the carpet in the adjoining room: there came the soft jingling sound of spurs as he surrendered to his contemplations. It occurred to Sophia Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only because he bore the name of Vladimir: that was the only reason. She sat up in bed and called out tenderly: “Volodya!”

  “What’s the matter?” her husband answered.

  “Nothing.”

  She lay down again. She heard the pealing of a bell, and perhaps it came from the same nunnery she had been visiting. Once again she remembered the dark gateway and the figures standing there, and there came to her the idea of God and of her own inevitable death, and she put her hands to her ears to keep out the sound of the bells. It occurred to her that a long, long life stretched before her until old age and death finally overcame her, and every day of her life she would have to live in close proximity to a man she did not love, this man who was now entering the bedroom and preparing to go to bed, and she would have to stifle her hopeless love for the other man, who was young and fascinating and in her eyes quite extraordinary. She looked up at her husband and tried to say good night to him, but instead she suddenly burst into tears. She was distraught.

  “Well, here comes the music!” Yagich said, and he stressed the second syllable of “music.”

  She remained distraught until ten o’clock the next morning, when she finally stopped crying and trembling all over; her tears gave place to a terrible headache. Yagich was in a hurry to attend late mass; he was growling at the orderly who was helping him to dress in the next room. Once he came into the bedroom to fetch something, and his footsteps were attended by the soft jingling of spurs, and then he came in again wearing his epaulettes and medals, limping slightly from rheumatism, and it occurred to Sophia Lvovna that he looked and walked like a ravening beast.

  She heard him ringing up someone on the telephone.

  “Be so good as to connect me with the Vasilyevsky barracks,” he said, and a minute later: “Vasilyevsky barracks? Would you please ask Dr. Salimovich to come to the telephone?” And then another minute later: “Who’s speaking? Is that you, Volodya? Delighted. Dear boy, ask your father to come to the telephone at once. My wife is a bit upset after yesterday. Not at home, eh? Well, thank you very much. Excellent. Much obliged. Merci .…”

  For the third time Yagich entered the bedroom, and he bent over the bed and made the sign of the cross over her and gave her his hand to kiss—the women who had loved him invariably kissed his hand, and he had fallen into the habit of doing this. Then, saying he would be back for dinner, he went out.

  At noon the maid announced that Vladimir Mikhailovich had arrived. Though she was staggering with fatigue and a headache, Sophia Lvovna quietly slipped into her wonderful new lilac-colored dressing gown, which was trimmed with fur, and she hurriedly arranged her hair. In her heart she felt a surge of inexpressible tenderness, and she was trembling with joy and the fear that he might leave her. She wanted only one thing—to gaze upon him.

  Little Volodya was properly attired for calling upon a lady: he wore a frock coat and a white tie. When Sophia Lvovna entered the drawing room he kissed her hand and genuinely offered his sympathy over her illness. When they sat down, he praised her dressing gown.

  “I was absolutely shattered by the visit to Olga yesterday,” she said. “At first I thought it was quite terrible, but now I envy her. She is like a rock which can never be destroyed, nothing can budge her. Tell me, Volodya, was there any other way out for her? Is burying oneself alive the answer to all life’s problems? It is death, not life …”

  Little Volodya’s face was touched with deep emotion as he remembered Olga.

  “Listen to me, Volodya, you are a clever man,” Sophia Lvovna went on. “Teach me how to rise above myself, as she has done. Of course, I am not a believer and could never enter a nunnery, but surely I could do something which is equivalent. My life is not an easy one,” she added after a pause. “Tell me something which will give me faith. Tell me something, even if it is only a single word.”

  “One word? Well—ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!”

  “Volodya, why do you despise me?” she asked, livid with anger. “You have a quite fatuous way of talking to me—I beg your pardon, but you do—people don’t talk to their friends and women acquaintances like that. You are so successful and so learned, and you love science, yet you never talk to me about scientific things. Why? Am I not worthy?”

  Little Volodya’s brows were knit with vexation.

  “Why this sudden interest in science?” he asked. “What about a discussion on the constitution—or maybe about sturgeon and horse-radish?”

  “Very well. I’m an insignificant, silly, stupid woman without principles. I have an appalling number of faults. I’m a psychopath, I am utterly depraved—I should be despised for these things. But remember, you are ten years older than I am, and my husband is thirty years older. I’ve grown up before your eyes, and if you had wanted, you could have made anything out of me—even an angel. But instead”—and here her voice quivered—“you treated me abominably! Yagich married me when he was already an old man, but you could have …”

  “We’ve had quite enough of that, haven’t we?” Volodya said, sitting close to her and kissing both her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, while I kiss your little hands …”

  “You despise me! If only you knew how you are making me suffer!” She spoke uncertainly, knowing already that he would not believe her. “If only you knew how much I want to change and start my life afresh! I think about it with such joy!” she went on, while tears of joy actually sprang into her eyes. “Oh, to be good, honest, pure, never to lie, to have an aim in life …”

  “Please stop putting on those silly airs—I don’t like them at all,” Volodya said, and his face assumed a whimsical expression. “Dear God, it’s like being on the stage! Why don’t we behave like ordinary people?”

  She was afraid he would be angry and go away, and so she began to justify herself, and she forced herself to smile to please him, and once again she talked about Olga and how much she wanted to solve the problem of her life and become human.

  “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay,” he sang under his breath. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay …”

  Quite suddenly he put his arm round her waist. Without knowing what she was doing she put her hands on his shoulders and for a full minute she gazed with a look of dazed rapture at his clever mocking face, his forehead, his eyes, his handsome beard.

  “You have known for a long time how much I love you,” she confessed to him, and she blushed painfully, and she knew her lips
were twisting convulsively with shame. “I love you! Why are you torturing me?”

  She closed her eyes and kissed him fiercely on the lips, and it was a full minute before she was able to put an end to the kiss, even though she knew that kissing him was improper, and that he was standing in judgment over her, and that a servant might come in at any moment.

  “Oh, how you are torturing me!” she repeated.

  Half an hour later, when he had got all he wanted from her, and was sitting over lunch, she knelt before him and gazed hungrily up at his face, while he told her she resembled a puppy waiting for some ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on one knee and danced her up and down, as though she were a child, singing: “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay … Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay …”

  When he was about to leave, she asked in passionate tones: “When? Today? Where?”

  She held out both arms toward his lips, as though she wanted to tear out his answer with her hands.

  “Today would hardly be suitable,” he told her after some thought. “Tomorrow perhaps.”

  And so they parted. Before dinner Sophia Lvovna went along to the nunnery to see Olga, and was told that Olga was reading the psalter over the dead somewhere. From the nunnery she went off to see her father, but he was not at home, and so she took another sleigh and drove aimlessly through the roads and side streets until evening. For some reason she kept remembering that aunt of hers whose eyes were filled with tears and who knew no peace.

  That night they drove again to the restaurant outside the town in a troika and listened to the gypsies. Driving past the nunnery, Sophia Lvovna again thought about Olga, and it terrified her that for girls and women of her station in life there was no solution except to go driving around in troikas and tell lies, or else to enter a nunnery and mortify the flesh. The next day she met her lover, and afterwards she drove around the town alone with a coachman and thought about her aunt.

  During the following week Little Volodya threw her over. Life went on as usual, dull, miserable, sometimes even agonizing. The colonel and Little Volodya spent long hours together at billiards or playing piquet, and Rita continued to tell her tasteless anecdotes. Sophia Lvovna wandered around in her hired sleigh and kept asking her husband to take her for a drive in a troika.

  Almost every day now she went to the nunnery and bored Olga with a recital of her unbearable sufferings, and she wept and felt she was bringing something impure and pitiable and worn-out into the cell with her, while Olga, in the tone of someone mechanically repeating a lesson, told her that all this was of no importance, it would all pass away, and God would forgive her.

  1893

  1 The poet Gavril Derzhavin is said to have blessed the sixteen-year-old Pushkin in 1815.

  The Student

  AT first the weather was fine and it was very quiet. Blackbirds sang, and from the neighboring marshes something living could be heard making a pathetic moaning sound like air being blown in an empty bottle. A solitary woodcock flew up, and someone aimed, and a shot rang out vividly and joyfully on the spring air. Then as the woods grew dark a cold and penetrating wind rose unreasonably from the east, and everything was silent. Needles of ice stretched over the pools; darkness, misery, and loneliness hung over the woods. It smelled of winter.

  Ivan Velikopolsky, a student in the theological seminary and the son of a sacristan, was making his way home from hunting, barefoot, taking the path through the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numbed, and his face burned by the wind. It seemed to him that the sudden fall of temperature had somehow destroyed the order and harmony of the universe, and the earth herself was in agony, and that was why the evening shadows fell more rapidly than usual. All round him there was only emptiness and a peculiar obscurity. The only light shone from the widows’ gardens near the river; elsewhere, far into the distance and close to him, everything was plunged in the cold evening fog, and the village three miles away was also hidden in the fog. The student remembered that when he left home his mother was sitting on the floor in the doorway cleaning the samovar, while his father lay coughing on the stove; and because it was Good Friday, no cooking had been done in the house and the student was ferociously hungry. Oppressed by the cold, he fell to thinking that just such a wind as this had blown in the time of Rurik and in the days of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and in those days men suffered from the same terrible poverty and hunger; they had the same thatched roofs filled with holes; there was the same wretchedness, ignorance, and desolation everywhere, the same darkness, the same sense of being oppressed—all these dreadful things had existed, did exist, and would continue to exist, and in a thousand years’ time life would be no better. He did not want to go home.

  The widows’ gardens were so called because they were kept by two widows, a mother and daughter. There a wood fire was crackling and blazing, throwing a great circle of light over the plowed earth. The widow Vasilissa, a huge, bloated old woman, was wearing a man’s coat. She stood gazing dreamily at the flames while her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid expression, sat on the ground washing a kettle and some spoons. Apparently they had just finished supper. Men’s voices could be heard; they were the local farm workers watering their horses at the river.

  “Well, winter’s back again,” the student said, going up to the fire. “Good day to you!”

  Vasilissa gave a start, but she recognized him and smiled at him warmly.

  “I did not recognize you at first,” she said. “God bless you! You’ll be rich one day!”

  They went on talking. Vasilissa was a woman of experience; she had served the gentry first as a wet nurse and then as a children’s nurse, and she expressed herself with refinement. A grave and gentle smile never left her lips. Her daughter Lukerya was a peasant; the life had been crushed out of her by her husband. She screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing. She had a strange expression, like that of a deaf-mute.

  “On just such a cold night as this St. Peter warmed himself by a fire,” the student said, stretching his hands over the flames. “So it must have been very cold! What a terrible night, eh? Yes, it was an extraordinarily long, sad night!”

  Saying this, he gazed at the encircling shadows, gave a little convulsive shake of his head, and went on: “Tell me, have you ever attended a reading of the Twelve Gospels?”

  “Yes, I have,” Vasilissa answered.

  “Then you’ll remember that at the Last Supper, Peter said to Jesus: ‘I am ready to go with thee down into darkness and death,’ and the Lord answered: ‘I tell thee, Peter, the cock, the bird of dawning, shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me.’ After the supper Jesus suffered the agony in the garden, and prayed, but poor Peter was faint and weary of spirit, and his eyelids were heavy, and he could no longer fight against sleep. So he slept. Then, as you know, Judas came that same night and kissed Jesus and betrayed him to his tormentors. They bound him and took him to the high priest and beat him, while Peter, worn out with fear and anxiety, utterly exhausted, you understand, not yet fully awake, feeling that something terrible was about to happen on earth, followed after him. For he loved Jesus passionately and with all his soul, and he saw from afar off how they were beating him.…”

  Lukerya dropped the spoons and looked fixedly in the direction of the student.

  “They came to the house of the high priest,” he went on, “and they began to interrogate Jesus, while the workmen lit a fire in the courtyard because it was cold, and they warmed themselves round the fire, and Peter stood close by the fire, and he too warmed himself, just as I am doing now. There was a woman who recognized him and said: ‘This man also was with Jesus,’ meaning that he too should be taken for interrogation. And all the workmen who were standing round the fire must have looked at him searchingly and suspiciously, for he was troubled and said: ‘I do not know him.’ After a while someone recognized him as one of the disciples of Jesus, and said: ‘You were one of them.’ And again Peter
denied it. And then for the third time someone turned toward him and said: ’Did I not see thee with him in the garden?” And again Peter denied it, and at that very moment the cock crew, and Peter gazing from afar off at Jesus remembered the words spoken to him earlier in the evening.… He remembered and suddenly recovered his senses and went out from the courtyard and wept bitterly. The Gospels say: ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’ And so I imagine it—the garden was deathly still and very dark, and in the silence there came the sound of muffled sobbing.…”

  The student sighed and fell into deep thought. Though her lips still formed a smile, Vasilissa suddenly gave way to weeping, and the heavy tears rolled down her cheeks, and she hid her face in her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, while Lukerya, still gazing motionlessly at the student, flushed scarlet, and her expression became strained and heavy as though she were suffering great pain.

  The farm workers returned from the river, and one who was on horseback came near them, and the light from the fire glittered on him. The student bade good night to the widows and went on his way. Once again the shadows crowded close around him, and his hands froze. A cruel wind was blowing, winter had settled in, and it was hard to believe that Easter was only the day after tomorrow.

  The student fell to thinking about Vasilissa. It occurred to him that because she had been weeping, everything that happened to Peter on the night of the Last Supper must have a special meaning for her.…

  He looked round him. He could see the solitary fire gleaming peacefully in the dark, but there was no longer anyone near it. Once more the student thought that if Vasilissa gave way to weeping, and her daughter was moved by his words, then it was clear that the story he had been telling them, though it happened nineteen centuries ago, still possessed a meaning for the present time—to both these women, to the desolate village, to himself, and to all people. The old woman wept, not because he was able to tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was close to her and because her whole being was deeply affected by what happened in Peter’s soul.