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By Stuart Mitchner
January is the birth month of two ageless poets of the snow, Anton Chekhov, born on the Feast Day of St. Anthony the Great, January 17, 1860, and Franz Schubert, born on January 31, 1797.
Chekhov’s 1886 story “Misery” has a wintry atmosphere like that of “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man,” the last song in Winterreise (1828), Schubert’s song cycle about a man whose snowy wanderings end with an old organ-grinder playing “with numb fingers as best he can,” holding his little plate, “with no reward to show,” for “no one wants to listen.” Chekhov’s epigraph for “Misery,” which I first read as “Heartache” in Avrahm Yarmolinksy’s edition of The Portable Chekhov, is “To whom shall I tell my sorrows,” a reference to the plight of a bereft St. Petersburg cabby, who sits unmoving in the snow, waiting for a fare.
Reading On a Train
“Misery” is one of Chekhov’s best known stories — if it’s translated by Constance Garnett. “Heartache” is titled and translated by Yarmolinksy, whose handy Portable Chekhov kept me company on a snowy January train ride to Kansas for my aunt’s funeral. The fine points of translation are no match for the pleasure of reading Chekhov on a train with a compartment all to yourself, snow falling outside the window at night, your eyes moving from the printed page to the dreamlike passage of the wintry outside world. The page and the window merge as the train glides all but soundlessly into Kansas City: “Evening twilight. Large flakes of wet snow are circling lazily about the street lamps which have just been lighted, settling in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses’ backs, peoples’ shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the cabby, is all white like a ghost.”
As the train departs Union Station, the cabby is carrying his first fare of the evening through the streets of St. Petersburg; by the time three drunken youths climb aboard (“Cabby, to the Police Bridge!”), the train is gliding through Kansas City’s mysterious, dimly-lit outskirts on its way to the bridge across the Missouri River; and as Iona shyly struggles to tell indifferent passengers of the death of his son, I’m staring through the snowy haze of night remembering my aunt, who was an attractive, intelligent, vivacious woman Chekhov would have admired. Lulled by the rocking movement of the train, I indulge in a Chekhov-in-Kansas daydream in which he and my aunt become involved in a flirtation.
Chekhov and Women
My train-window reverie was inspired by “Champagne,” a story from the 1880s narrated by a self-described “young, strong, hot-headed” man from the north in charge of a railway station in the steppe, who enjoys scanning the windows of passing trains for the faces of pretty women, for which he “would stand like a statue without breathing and stare … until the train turned into an almost invisible speck.”
The story’s title refers to the champagne the man and his wife are toasting the New Year with, but when the bottle slips from his grasp, the wife declares that a dropped bottle means some misfortune will happen to them this year. Put off by her “superstitious nonsense,” the station agent goes for a walk along the railway embankment even as a train stops at the station and delivers a visitor, his wife’s pretty, good-natured, flirtatious aunt, with whom he will polish off a second bottle of champagne — after which everything goes “head over heels to the devil” in a “fearful, frantic whirlwind” that sweeps “from the face of the earth” the wife and the aunt, flinging the husband from “the little station in the steppe” into a dark city street where he wonders “what further evil can happen to me?”
Sins of Omission
When I wrote about “Champagne” eight years ago, I neglected to mention the suggestive subtitle, “A Wayfarer’s Story,” and the fact that Chekhov delivers the tale in the first person, which gives the wild turn of events at the end an unrestrained personal urgency that undermines the connection between my aunt and the one in the story, who not only bewitches the narrator but has him quoting a song about a femme fatale (“Eyes black as pitch, eyes full of passion…How I love you, / How I fear you!”). My most flagrant sin of omission was to leave unmentioned the revealing statement the narrator makes just before describing the “fearful, frantic whirlwind”: “I don’t remember what happened next. Anyone who wants to know how love begins may read novels and long stories; I will put it shortly and in the words of the same silly song”: “It was an evil hour / When first I met you.”
33 Women
The melodramatic writer-to-reader aspect of Chekhov’s comment about novels, stories, and seduction reminded me of a March 1, 2013 Guardian article, “Anton Chekhov: a lifetime of lovers,” in which William Boyd presents documented evidence that Chekhov had intimate relations with 33 women, plus numerous anonymous encounters, and “some two dozen love affairs of varying intensity” up until 1898 when he fell in love with the actress Olga Knipper (1869-1959), married her in 1901, and spent his last hours on earth with her in July 1904.
Although apparently well acquainted with his amorous history, his wife would have been quick to challenge the idea of Chekhov as a literary Don Juan. As it happens, the dynamic is the source of one of his most quoted admissions — “medicine is my lawful wife, literature is my mistress.”
His “Holy of Holies”
In 1889, when Chekhov was 29, he said “My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom — freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take.” This is the man who wrote the opening paragraph of “Heartache,” in which he describes the cabby Iona’s mare, “who is also white and motionless” in the snow. At this point, readers know nothing of the driver’s loss, but they know his horse: “She is probably lost in thought. Anyone who has been torn away from the plow, from the familiar gray scenes, and cast into this whirlpool full of monstrous lights, of ceaseless uproar and hurrying people, cannot help thinking.”
The passengers the cabby tries to converse with about the death of his son could care less. Yet he keeps trying. “There is a look of anxiety and torment in Iona’s eyes as they wander restlessly over the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the street. Isn’t there someone among those thousands who will listen to him?… His grief is immense, boundless. If his heart were to burst and his grief to pour out, it seems that it would flood the whole world, and yet no one sees it.”
In the end he gives up and goes back to the sledge drivers’ yard, where he makes one last attempt to talk about it with another cabby, who has “drawn his cover over his head and is already asleep.” There’s finally nowhere to go but into the stable to converse with the mare about the oats she’s chewing (“There, chew away, chew away . . . If we haven’t earned enough for oats, we’ll eat hay . . . Yes, I’ve grown too old to drive, my son ought to be driving not me . . . He was a real cabby”). The story concludes as the mare “listens and breathes on her master’s hands. Iona is carried away and tells her everything.”
Champagne
Chekhov’s wife Olga was with him when he died far from snow and winter in Badenweiler, Germany, on a hot summer night, July 15, 1904, at the age of 44. Champagne had been ordered. “He took a glass,” she writes, “turned his face towards me, smiled his amazing smile and said, ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne,’ calmly drained his glass, lay down quietly on his left side, and shortly afterward fell silent forever.”
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