The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904

by Anton Chekhov

  She gave the furniture a cold, serious look as if she wanted to make an inventory. Then she went on, ‘Comfort and luxury have a magical power. They gradually drag even strong-willed people down. Father and I once lived modestly and simply, but now take a look. It’s just unheard of. We get through twenty thousand a year,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘In the provinces!’

  ‘Comforts and luxuries should be viewed as the inevitable privilege of capital and education,’ I said, ‘and it strikes me that the comforts of life can be combined with any type of work, even the hardest and dirtiest. Your father is rich, but he himself says that he once had to work as an engine-driver and ordinary greaser.’

  She smiled and sceptically shook her head. ‘Papa sometimes eats bread soaked in kvass too,’ she said. ‘It’s just a whim of his!’

  At that moment the doorbell rang and she stood up.

  ‘Educated and rich people should work like everyone else,’ she went on, ‘and everyone should be able to share in the creature comforts. There shouldn’t be any privileges. Well, that’s enough of the theorizing. Tell me something to cheer me up. Tell me about the house-painters. What are they like? Funny?’

  The doctor came in. I started telling them all about the painters, but I was short of conversational practice. This had an inhibiting effect and I talked in the earnest dull voice of an ethnographer. The doctor told some stories too, about workmen’s lives. He staggered, wept, knelt and even lay down on the floor to imitate a drunkard. It was an excellent piece of mimicry and Mariya Viktorovna watched him and laughed until the tears came. Then he played the piano and sang in his pleasant, slight tenor voice while Mariya Viktorovna stood nearby choosing the songs and correcting him when he made a mistake.

  ‘I’ve heard that you sing as well,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, she sings “as well”!’ the doctor said, horrified. ‘She’s wonderful, a true artist. And you say she sings “as well”. Really, that’s a bit much!’

  ‘I used to study it once quite seriously,’ she answered, ‘but I’ve given it up now.’

  Sitting on a low stool, she told us about her life in St Petersburg and imitated some well-known singers, mimicking their voices and styles. She made a sketch of the doctor in her album and then me. Although she was poor at drawing, she produced good likenesses of us both. She laughed, grew mischievous, pulled faces most charmingly. This suited her better than all her talk of ill-gotten gains. I felt that she had not really meant what she had just said about wealth and comfort, that it was all a kind of masquerade. She was an excellent comic actress. I pictured her next to the young ladies from the town, and even the beautiful, majestic Anyuta Blagovo didn’t bear comparison with her. The difference was enormous – like that between a fine, cultivated rose and a wild one.

  The three of us had supper together. The doctor and Mariya Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne and then coffee with brandy. They clinked glasses and drank to friendship, intellect, progress, freedom. They didn’t get drunk, only went red in the face, and they kept laughing at nothing until the tears flowed. As I didn’t want to appear a wet blanket, I drank some red wine too.

  ‘Extremely clever, richly gifted people,’ Mariya Viktorovna said, ‘know how to live and they go their own way. But average people, like myself, for example, know nothing and can’t do anything on their own. All that’s left for them is to take note of important social trends and swim along with the tide.’

  ‘But you can’t take note of what doesn’t exist, can you?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Doesn’t exist? We only say that because we can’t actually see it.’

  ‘Really? Social trends are an invention of modern literature. We don’t have any such trends.’

  And an argument started.

  ‘We don’t have any profound social currents and we never did,’ the doctor said in a loud voice. ‘There’s just no limit to what this modern literature has invented. It’s even thought up these intellectual tillers of the soil, but search any village around here – all you’ll find is country bumpkins in their jackets or black frock-coats who can’t even write a three-letter word without making four mistakes. In this land of ours cultural life hasn’t even begun. There’s that same savagery, that same out-and-out boorishness, that same mediocrity that existed five hundred years ago. These trends and currents are a load of piffling, pitiful trash – they’re all bound up with lousy little interests! How can you possibly see anything worthwhile in them? If you think you’ve spotted some important social trend and follow it and devote your life to the latest rage – say freeing insects from slavery, or abstaining from beef rissoles – then I must congratulate you, madam. We must study and study. But as for significant social trends, we’re not mature enough for them yet and, to be honest, we understand nothing about them.’

  ‘You don’t understand, but I do,’ Mariya Viktorovna said. ‘Heavens, you’re so dreadfully boring this evening!’

  ‘Our job is to study, to try and accumulate as much knowledge as we can, since important social trends are to be found together with knowledge. The future happiness of mankind will proceed from knowledge alone. I drink to learning!’

  ‘One thing is certain: we must reorganize our lives somehow,’ Mariya Viktorovna said after a pause for thought. ‘Up to now life hasn’t been worth living. Let’s not talk about it.’

  When we left her the cathedral clock was already striking two.

  ‘Did you like her?’ the doctor asked. ‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’

  On Christmas Day we dined at Mariya Viktorovna’s and we visited her almost every day during the holidays. We were the only visitors and she was right when she said that she knew no one in town besides myself and the doctor. We spent most of the time in long conversations. Sometimes the doctor brought a book or magazine, from which he read aloud to us. He was in fact the first educated man whom I had met. I’m not qualified to judge how much he knew, but he always let others into what he knew, as he wanted them to benefit from it. When it came to medicine, he was quite unlike any of our town doctors and what he said struck me as novel, something special. I felt that he could have become a real scholar had he wished. And he was perhaps the only man who had any serious influence on me at this time. After our frequent meetings and reading the books he gave me, I felt more and more the need for knowledge that might breathe life into my cheerless labours. Now it seemed strange that I hadn’t known before that the whole world consisted of sixty elements, for example, or what oils or paint were made from, and that somehow I had got by without knowing these things. My friendship with the doctor uplifted me morally too. We often argued, and although I usually stuck to my opinions, it was thanks to him that I gradually became aware I just didn’t understand everything, and I tried to devise the most stringent moral guidelines, so that my conscience would not be clouded or muddled.

  For all that, the doctor, the most educated, the best man in the whole town, was far from perfect. In his manners, in his readiness to argue, in his pleasant tenor voice – even in his friendliness – there was something rather crude and bumptious. Whenever he took his coat off and walked around in his silk shirt, or when he tipped a waiter at a restaurant, I always had the impression that there was something of the barbarian in him, despite his being a cultured man.

  One morning, towards Epiphany, he returned to St Petersburg. After dinner my sister came to see me. Without taking off her fur coat or hat she sat silently, very pale, staring at something. She had the shivers and I could see she was fighting against it.

  ‘You must have caught a cold,’ I said.

  Her eyes filled with tears. She stood up and went over to Karpovna without a word to me, as if I had offended her. Shortly afterwards I heard her bitterly complaining voice: ‘Nanny, what have I been living for up to now? What for? Tell me, I’ve wasted my youth, haven’t I? The best years of my life have been spent keeping accounts, pouring tea, counting copecks, entertaining guests, in the conviction that there was nothing
better! Please understand, Nanny, I have spiritual needs like anyone else and I want to lead a full life. But all they’ve done is turn me into a kind of housekeeper! Don’t you think that’s dreadful?’

  She flung the keys through the doorway and they fell clattering to the floor in my room. They were the keys to the sideboard, kitchen cupboard, cellar and china cabinet – keys that Mother had once carried.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear me!’ the old woman said in horror. ‘Saints above!’

  As she left, my sister came into my room to pick up the keys.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘Something strange has been happening to me recently.’

  VIII

  One day, in the late evening, I came home from Mariya Viktorovna’s to find a young police officer in a new uniform sitting at my table looking through a book.

  ‘At last!’ he said, standing up and stretching himself. ‘This is the third time I’ve been. The Governor has ordered you to report to him at precisely nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Without fail.’

  After taking a signed statement from me that I would do exactly what the Governor had ordered, he left. The police officer’s late visit, plus the unexpected invitation to the Governor’s, utterly depressed me. Since early childhood I have always been scared of gendarmes, policemen and court officials, and now I was worried stiff that I might really have committed some crime. I just could not sleep. Nanny and Prokofy were upset too and they couldn’t sleep either. And Nanny had earache as well. She kept groaning, and several times she started crying from the pain. Hearing that I was awake, Prokofy gingerly entered my room with a lamp and sat down at the table.

  ‘You should drink some pepper-brandy,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘A drink won’t never do you harm in this vale of tears. And if Nanny had a drop of that stuff in her ear it would do her the world of good.’

  After two o’clock he prepared to leave for the slaughterhouse to fetch some meat. I knew that I wouldn’t sleep before morning, so I went with him to kill the time until nine o’clock. We took a lamp with us. Prokofy’s assistant Nikolka, a thirteen-year-old boy with blue patches on his face from frostbite – a real bandit from the look of him – urged on his horse in a husky voice as he followed us in a sledge.

  ‘Like as not you’ll be punished at the Governor’s,’ Prokofy told me on the way. ‘Governors, archimandrites, officers, doctors – every calling has its own proper way of doing things. But you don’t fall into line at all, you won’t get away with that.’

  The slaughterhouse was beyond the cemetery and up to now I’d only seen it from the distance. It consisted of three gloomy sheds surrounded by a grey fence, and they gave off a suffocating stench when the wind blew from their direction on hot summer days. But it was so dark as we went into the yard we couldn’t see them. I kept meeting horses and sledges – either empty or laden with meat. Men were walking around with lamps, cursing and swearing obscenely. Prokofy and Nikolka swore just as badly, and the incessant sound of abuse, coughing and the neighing of horses filled the air.

  There was a smell of carcases and dung. It was thawing and snow mingled with the mud – in the darkness I felt I was walking over pools of blood.

  When our sledge was fully laden we went off to the butcher’s stall in the market. Day was breaking. Cooks with baskets and elderly women in cloaks passed by, one after the other. Cleaver in hand and wearing a blood-stained white apron, Prokofy swore terribly, crossed himself in the direction of the church and shouted all over the market that he was selling his meat at cost price, at a loss even. He gave short weight and short change. Despite seeing this, the cooks were so deafened by his shouting that they offered no protest, apart from calling him swindler and crook. Raising and bringing down that fearful cleaver with a fierce ‘Ugh!’ every time, he assumed picturesque poses. I was scared that he really might chop off someone’s head or hand.

  I spent the whole morning at the butcher’s and when I finally went to the Governor’s my fur coat smelt of meat and blood. I felt that someone had ordered me to go and attack a bear with a spear. I remember that steep staircase with its striped carpet and the young clerk in coat and tails with bright buttons silently pointing towards a door with both hands and then dashing off to announce me. I entered the hall, which was luxurious but cold, and tastelessly furnished. The narrow wall mirrors and bright yellow curtains were particular eyesores. I could see that governors might come and go, but the furnishings stayed the same for ever. The young clerk again pointed at the door with both hands and I went over to a large green table, behind which stood a general with the Order of Vladimir round his neck.

  ‘Mr Poloznev, I asked you to report to me,’ he began, holding some letter and opening his mouth wide, like the letter ‘O’. ‘I asked you to come here so that I can inform you of the following. Your dear respected father has applied both orally and in writing to the Provincial Marshal of the Nobility, requesting him to summon you and make quite clear to you the absolute incompatibility of your behaviour with the title of gentleman, to which class you have the honour to belong. His Excellency Alexander Pavlovich, rightly assuming that your behaviour might lead others into temptation, and finding that mere persuasion on his part might be insufficient and that it was a clearcut case for serious intervention on the part of the authorities, has conveyed his opinion of you in this letter. That opinion I happen to share.’

  He said all this softly, respectfully, standing upright as though I were his superior. And there was nothing at all severe in the way he looked at me. His face was flabby, worn, and covered with wrinkles, with bags under the eyes. He dyed his hair and it was impossible to guess his age by looking at him – he could have been forty or sixty.

  ‘I hope,’ he went on, ‘that you appreciate the tact of honourable Alexander Pavlovich in approaching me privately and not through official channels. I also invited you unofficially and I’m not talking to you as Governor but as a sincere admirer of your father. So, I’m asking you. Either mend your ways and return to those responsibilities befitting your rank. Failing that, to keep yourself out of trouble, go and live somewhere else, where you’re not known and where you can do what you like. Otherwise I shall be compelled to take extreme measures.’

  He stood surveying me in silence for about thirty seconds, his mouth wide open. ‘Are you a vegetarian?’8 he asked.

  ‘No, sir, I eat meat.’

  He sat down and reached for some document. I bowed and left.

  It wasn’t worth going to work before dinner and I went back home to sleep, but I was unable to because of the unpleasant feelings aroused by the slaughterhouse and the conversation with the Governor. I waited until evening and then went off to Mariya Viktorovna’s in a gloomy, troubled frame of mind. I told her that I had been to the Governor’s and she looked at me in disbelief. Then she suddenly broke into the kind of loud, cheerful, uninhibited laugh that only good-natured people with a sense of humour can produce.

  ‘If only I could tell them in St Petersburg!’ she said, leaning towards the table and nearly collapsing with laughter. ‘If only I could tell them in St Petersburg!’

  IX

  Now we met quite often, about twice a day. Almost every afternoon she came to the cemetery, where she read the inscriptions on crosses and tombstones while waiting for me. Sometimes she would come into the church and stand by me, watching me work. The silence, the painters’ and gilders’ simple work, Radish’s good sense, the fact that outwardly I was no different from the other men and worked just as they did, in waistcoat and old shoes, and the fact that they spoke to me as if I were one of them – all this was new to her and she found it moving. Once when she was there an artist who was high up painting a dove shouted down to me, ‘Misail, give me some whiting.’

  I carried it up to him, and afterwards, when I was climbing down the rickety scaffolding, she looked at me, moved to tears, and smiling.

  ‘What a dear you are!’ she said.

  Ever since I was a child I remembe
red how a green parrot had escaped from its cage in one of the rich men’s houses in the town and how it had wandered round the town for a whole month, lazily flying from garden to garden, lonely and homeless. Mariya Viktorovna put me in mind of that bird.

  ‘At the moment I’ve absolutely nowhere to go besides the cemetery,’ she told me laughing. ‘I’m bored to death in this town. At the Azhogins’ they do nothing but read, sing and babble away; I just can’t stand them lately. Your sister keeps to herself, Mademoiselle Blagovo hates me for some reason, and I don’t like the theatre. So where can I go?’

  When I visited her I smelt of paint and turpentine and my hands were black. She liked this and wanted me to wear only my ordinary working clothes when I called on her. But they made me feel awkward in her drawing-room – it was as if I were in uniform, and therefore I always wore my new woollen suit when I went there. She didn’t like this.

  ‘You must admit, you haven’t quite got used to your new role,’ she told me once. ‘You feel awkward and embarrassed in your workman’s clothes. Tell me, is it because you’ve lost confidence in yourself, because you’re dissatisfied? This work you’ve chosen – all this splashing paint around – does that really satisfy you?’ she asked, laughing. ‘I know that painting makes things prettier, makes them last longer, but surely these things belong to the rich people in town and are really luxuries. Besides, as you yourself said more than once, everyone should earn bread by his labours, whereas you earn money, not bread. Why don’t you stick to the literal meaning of what you say? If it’s bread that you have to earn, then you must plough, sow, reap, thresh, or do something directly connected with agriculture – keeping cows, for example, digging, building log-huts…’

  She opened a pretty little cupboard near her writing-table and said, ‘I’ve been telling you all this because I want to let you into my secret. Voilà. This is my agricultural library. Here are books on arable land, vegetable gardens, orchards, cattle-yards and bee-keeping. I love reading them, and I know all the theory already, in great detail. It’s my dream, my cherished wish to go to Dubechnya as soon as March is here. It’s wonderful there, fantastic! Don’t you agree? For the first year I’ll just look around to get the hang of things, but the following year I’ll really start work, without sparing myself, as they say. Daddy’s promised me Dubechnya and I can do anything I want there.’