The Beauties E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 254

Beschreibung

'The uncontestable father of the modern short story… his stories are some of the best that have ever been written' Guardian 'Chekhov's genius lies in the way he manages to convey with such apparent effortlessness a profound sense of the mystery of beauty… a masterpiece of minimalism' Philip Pullman Chekhov was without doubt one of the greatest observers of human nature in all its untidy complexity. His short stories, written throughout his life and newly translated for this essential collection, are exquisite masterpieces in miniature. Here are tales offering a glimpse of beauty, the memory of a mistaken kiss, daydreams of adultery, a lifetime of marital neglect, the frailty of life, the inevitability of death, and the hilarious pomposity of ordinary men and women. They range from the lighthearted comic tales of his early years to some of the most achingly profound stories ever composed. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. Translated by Nicolas Pasternak Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born in Taganrog, Russia, the son of a grocer. While training as a physician he supported his family with his freelance writing, composing hundreds of short comic pieces under a pen name for local magazines. He went on to write major works of drama, including The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, but continued to write prize-winning short stories up until his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44.

Leseprobe

ANTON CHEKHOV

THE BEAUTIES

Essential Stories

Translated from the Russian by Nicolas Pasternak Slater

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

CONTENTS

Title PageThe BeautiesThe Man in a BoxA Day in the CountryA BlunderAbout LoveGriefThe BetA MisfortuneSergeant PrishibeyevThe Lady with the Little DogThe HuntsmanThe Privy CouncillorThe KissAbout the PublisherCopyright

THE BEAUTIES

I

I REMEMBER, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshaya Krepkaya in the Don Region to Rostov-on-Don. It was a wearisomely dreary, sultry August day. The heat and the burning dry wind blew clouds of dust in our faces, gummed up my eyes and dried out my mouth. I didn’t feel like looking around, or talking, or thinking; and when Karpo, our drowsy Ukrainian driver, caught my cap with his whip as he lashed his horse, I didn’t protest or utter a sound; I just woke from my doze and gazed meekly and dispiritedly into the distance to see if I could make out a village through the dust. We stopped to feed the horse at the house of a rich Armenian whom my grandfather knew, in the big Armenian village of Bakhchi-Salakh. Never in my life had I seen such a caricature of a man as this Armenian. Imagine a small, shaven head with thick beetling eyebrows, a beaky nose, a long grizzled moustache and a wide mouth with a long cherrywood chibouk poking out of it. The little head was clumsily attached to a skinny, hunchbacked body, dressed in fantastic attire – a short red tunic and wide, baggy, bright-blue trousers. This figure walked with his legs wide apart, shuffling along in slippers, talked without taking his chibouk out of his mouth, and carried himself with true Armenian dignity, neither smiling nor staring, but striving to pay his guests as little attention as possible.

There was no wind or dust inside this Armenian’s home, but it was just as unpleasant, stifling and dreary as the road and the steppe outside. I remember sitting, covered in dust and worn out by the burning heat, on a green box in a corner. The bare wooden walls, the furniture and the ochre-stained floors all smelt of sun-scorched dry wood. Everywhere you looked there were flies, flies, flies… Grandfather and the Armenian were talking in an undertone about grazing, pastures, sheep… I knew that it would take a whole hour to get the samovar ready, and Grandfather would spend another hour drinking his tea, and then he’d lie down and sleep for two or three hours, and I’d waste a quarter of the day hanging about, after which there would be more heat, and dust, and rattling about in the cart. I listened to the murmur of those two voices and began to feel that the Armenian, and the crockery cupboard, and the flies, and the windows with the hot sun beating in, were all something I had been seeing for a long, long time, and that I would only cease to see them in the far distant future. And I was overcome with loathing for the steppe, and the sun, and the flies…

A Ukrainian peasant woman in a headscarf brought in the tray with the tea things, and then the samovar. The Armenian strolled out onto the porch and called:

“Mashya! Come and pour the tea! Where are you? Mashya!”

There was the sound of hurried footsteps, and in came a girl of about sixteen, in a simple cotton dress and a little white headscarf. As she rinsed the cups and poured out the tea she was standing with her back to me, and all I noticed was that she had a slim waist, her feet were bare, and her little bare heels were covered by the bottoms of her long trousers.

Our host invited me to come and have tea. As I sat down at the table, I glanced at the girl’s face while she handed me my glass, and suddenly felt something like a breath of wind over my soul, blowing away all my impressions of the day, with its tedium and dust. I saw the enchanting features of the loveliest face I had ever seen in my waking life, or imagined in my dreams. Before me stood a beauty, and from the very first glance I understood that, as I understand lightning.

I am ready to swear that Masha, or Mashya as her father called her, was a real beauty; but I cannot prove it. It sometimes happens that ragged clouds gather on the horizon, and the sun, hiding behind them, colours them and the sky in every possible hue – crimson, orange, golden, lilac, dusty pink; one cloud looks like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban. The sunset glow fills a third of the sky, shining on the church cross and the window panes of an elegant house, reflected in the river and the puddles, shimmering on the trees; far, far away against the sunset, a flock of wild ducks flies off to its night’s rest… And the farm lad herding his cows, the surveyor driving his chaise over the dam, and the gentlefolk out for their stroll, all gaze at the sunset, and every one of them finds it terribly beautiful, but no one knows or can say what makes it so.

I was not the only one to find this Armenian girl beautiful. My grandfather, an old man of eighty, rough and indifferent to women and the beauties of nature, gazed affectionately at Masha for a whole minute, and asked:

“Is this your daughter, Avet Nazarich?”

“Yes. That’s my daughter…” replied our host.

“A fine young lady,” said Grandfather appreciatively.

An artist would have called this Armenian girl’s beauty classical and severe. It was just the sort of beauty which, as you contemplate it, heaven knows how, fills you with the certainty that the features you are seeing are right – that the hair, eyes, nose, mouth, neck, breast, and all the movements of this young body, have come together in a single, complete harmonic chord, in which nature has committed not the slightest error; you somehow feel that a woman of ideal beauty must possess exactly the same nose as Masha’s, straight and slightly aquiline, the same large dark eyes, the same long eyelashes, the same languid look; that her wavy black hair and eyebrows go with the gentle whiteness of her brow and cheeks just as a green rush goes with a quiet stream. Masha’s white neck and youthful breast were not yet fully developed, but in order to create them in a sculpture, you feel, one would have to possess an enormous creative talent. You look on, and gradually find yourself wishing to tell Masha something uncommonly agreeable, sincere and beautiful, as beautiful as herself.

At first I was upset and embarrassed that Masha took no notice of me, but kept her eyes lowered; there was, it seemed to me, some special atmosphere of happiness and pride about her that separated her from me, jealously shielding her from my eyes.

“It’s because I’m all covered in dust, and sunburnt,” I thought, “and because I’m only a boy.”

But then I gradually forgot all about myself, and gave myself up wholly to the appreciation of beauty. I no longer remembered the tedium of the steppe, or the dust; I no longer heard the buzzing of the flies, nor noticed the taste of the tea – I was simply aware that opposite me, across the table, there stood a beautiful girl.

I perceived her beauty in a strange sort of way. Masha aroused in me neither desire, nor delight, nor enjoyment, but a strange though pleasant sadness. This sadness was as indeterminate and vague as a dream. For some reason, I felt sorry for myself, and Grandfather, and the Armenian, and the Armenian maiden herself; I felt as if all four of us had lost something important and essential for life, which we would never find again. Grandfather grew sad too. He no longer talked about pastures or sheep, but sat in silence, looking thoughtfully at Masha.

After tea, Grandfather lay down to sleep, while I went out to sit on the porch. This house, like every house in Bakhchi-Salakh, was exposed in full sunlight – there were no trees, or awnings, or shade. The Armenian’s great farmyard, overgrown with goosefoot and mallow, was full of life and merriment despite the baking heat. Threshing was in progress behind one of the low wattle fences that ran across the yard here and there. Twelve horses harnessed in line around a post set in the very middle of the threshing floor, and forming a single long radius around it, were trotting round in circles. Beside them walked a Ukrainian in a long tunic and wide trousers, cracking his whip and shouting out as if he meant to taunt the horses and boast of his power over them:

“He-e-ey, you wretches! He-e-ey… go die of cholera! Frightened, are you?”

The chestnut, white and piebald horses had no idea why they were being forced to trot around in circles crushing wheat straw, and they ran unwillingly, forcing themselves on and flicking their tails with a discontented air. The wind raised great clouds of golden chaff from under their hooves, carrying it far away over the fence. Women with rakes jostled one another beside tall, newly built hayricks, carts moved about, and in another yard beyond the hayricks another dozen similar horses trotted around a post, and a second Ukrainian like the first cracked his whip and taunted them.

The steps I was sitting on were hot, and the heat brought sap oozing up out of the flimsy railings and window frames. Little red bugs huddled together in the strips of shade under the steps and behind the shutters. The sun beat down on my head, and my chest, and my back, but I was unaware of it: all I noticed was the padding of bare feet behind me, on the porch and indoors. When Mashya had cleared away the tea things, she ran past me down the steps, fanning the air around me as she passed, and flew like a bird to a little smoke-blackened outhouse, the kitchen I suppose, from which came a smell of roast mutton and the sound of angry Armenian voices. She vanished through the dark doorway, and in her place a hunchbacked old Armenian woman, red-faced and wearing wide green trousers, appeared at the door. She was angrily scolding someone. Soon Mashya reappeared in the doorway, flushed with the heat of the kitchen and carrying a large black loaf on her shoulder. Bending gracefully under its weight, she ran across the yard to the threshing floor, skipped over the fence, and, enveloped by a cloud of golden chaff, disappeared behind the farm carts. The farm hand driving the horses lowered his whip, held his tongue and stood in silence for a minute looking over towards the carts; then, when the Armenian girl once more darted past the horses and skipped over the fence, he followed her with his eyes and shouted at the horses in a most offended voice:

“Hey! Go drop down dead, you devil’s brood!”

And all the time after that I went on hearing her bare feet stepping here and there, and saw her crossing and recrossing the farmyard with a serious, troubled expression. Sometimes she ran up or down the steps, fanning me with a breeze as she passed on her way to the kitchen, or the threshing-floor, or out of the gate, and I scarcely had time to turn my head and follow her.

And every time she darted past me in all her beauty, I felt sadder and sadder. I was sorry for myself, and for her, and for the farm hand who followed her with sad eyes every time she ran through the cloud of chaff to the carts. Whether I envied her beauty, or whether I was sorry that this girl was not mine and never would be mine and that I was a stranger to her, or whether I had a vague feeling that her rare beauty was accidental and unnecessary, and like everything on earth, would not last; or whether my sadness was that special feeling aroused when a person contemplates real beauty – God only knows!

Three hours of waiting passed unnoticed. It seemed to me that I hadn’t had time to look my fill at Mashya before Karpo had ridden to the river, washed down the horse, and was already harnessing it. The wet horse snorted with pleasure and kicked its hooves against the shafts. Karpo shouted “Ba-a-ack!” Grandfather woke. Mashya opened the creaking gates for us, we took our places in the chaise, and drove out of the yard. We rode in silence, as if angry with one another.

Two or three hours later, when Rostov and Nakhichevan were in sight, Karpo, who had not said a word all the way, looked round quickly and said:

“That’s a fine lass, that Armenian’s!”

And whipped up his horse.

II

On another occasion, when I was a student, I was travelling south on the railway. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe between Belgorod and Kharkov, I left my carriage to walk along the platform.

The evening shadows had already descended on the station garden, the platform and the fields around. The sunset was hidden by the station house, but the highest puffs of smoke from the engine, which were now tinted a soft pink, showed that the sun had not yet quite disappeared.

As I strolled up and down the platform, I noticed that most of the passengers out to stretch their legs were strolling or standing in a group beside one particular second-class carriage, with expressions suggesting that some famous person was sitting in it. One of the curious people I encountered near the carriage, incidentally, was a fellow-traveller, an artillery officer – an intelligent, cordial, pleasant fellow, as anyone is whom one chances to meet briefly on a journey.

“What are you looking at there?” I asked.

He did not reply, but just turned his eyes to point out a female figure. This was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in Russian costume, bareheaded and wearing a little shawl carelessly slung over one shoulder; not a passenger, but probably the stationmaster’s daughter or sister. She was standing next to a carriage window, talking with an elderly lady passenger inside. Before I had time to realize what I was looking at, I was overcome by the same feeling I had once experienced in that Armenian village.

The girl was an amazing beauty, and neither I nor any of the other people looking at her with me was in any doubt about that.

If I was to describe her appearance point by point, as is usually done, then the only truly beautiful thing about her was her thick, wavy fair hair, hanging down and loosely tied with a black ribbon. All the rest was either not quite right, or very commonplace. Whether it was a special way of looking flirtatious, or whether she was short-sighted – her eyes were screwed up, her nose had an uncertain tilt, her mouth was small, her profile weak and indeterminate, her shoulders too narrow for her age; and despite all this, the girl gave the impression of a true beauty, and looking at her, I convinced myself that a Russian face, in order to appear beautiful, does not need to have classically correct features – indeed, if that girl’s upturned nose had been replaced by a different one, correct and faultlessly formed like the Armenian girl’s, I believe her face would have lost all its charm.

As she stood talking by the window, the girl hunched her shoulders to keep out the cold evening air, kept looking round at us, rested her hands on her hips, lifted them to her head to arrange her hair, talked, laughed, expressed amazement, then shock – I cannot remember a moment when her face and body were at rest. The whole secret, the whole magic of her beauty lay in those slight, supremely elegant movements, her smile, the play of her features, her swift glances at us; in the combination of the fine grace of her movements with her youth, her freshness, the innocence of her soul, that sounded through her laughter and speech; and the vulnerability which we love so much in children, in birds, in young deer or young trees.

It was a moth-like beauty – the beauty that goes so well with a waltz, or darting across a garden, or with laughter and merriment, and which has no business with serious thoughts, sorrow or repose. It seemed as if a good gust of wind blowing along the platform, or a sudden shower, would be enough to make that fragile body suddenly wilt, scattering its capricious beauty like pollen from a flower.

“Ye-es…” sighed the officer, when the second bell sounded and we walked back to our carriage.

What that “Ye-es” meant, I couldn’t say.

Perhaps he felt sad, and unwilling to walk away from that beauty, to abandon the spring evening for a stuffy carriage; or perhaps, like me, he felt unaccountably sorry for the beauty, and himself, and me, and all the passengers wandering listlessly and reluctantly back to their compartments. As we passed the station house window, where a telegraphist with upstanding ginger curls and a pale, washed-out face with high cheekbones was sitting at his instrument, the officer said with a sigh:

“I bet the telegraphist is in love with that pretty girl. To live out in the wilds under the same roof as that ethereal creature, and not fall in love – that’s beyond the power of man. But what a misfortune, my friend – what a mockery, to be a round-shouldered, shaggy-haired, insignificant, decent fellow, and no fool, and fall in love with that pretty, silly girl, who won’t take the slightest notice of you! Or even worse – supposing the telegraphist is in love, but he’s already married, and his wife is just as round-shouldered, shaggy and decent as he is… Torture!”

The conductor stood beside our carriage, lolling on the railing between two coaches and looking over to where the beauty was standing. His raddled, flabby, unpleasantly podgy face, worn out by sleepless nights and jolting trains, wore an expression of tenderness and profound sadness, as if in that girl he could see his own youth, happiness, sobriety, purity, his wife and children; as if he was full of regret, and felt with his whole being that this girl was not his, and that he, aged before his time, ungainly and fat-faced, was as far removed from the ordinary, human happiness of us passengers as he was from the sky above.

The third bell rang, whistles sounded, and the train moved slowly off. Past our window there came, first, the conductor, then the stationmaster, then the garden, and the beauty with her wonderful, mischievous, childish smile…

Putting my head out of the window and looking back, I saw her follow the train with her eyes, walk along the platform past the window where the telegraphist sat, pat her hair and run into the garden. The station no longer shut out the western sky, the countryside lay open, but the sun had already set, and black billows of smoke drifted over the velvety green winter corn. There was sadness in the spring air, and the darkening sky, and inside the carriage.

Our own conductor came into the carriage and began lighting the candles.

THE MAN IN A BOX

IT HAD GROWN LATE, and the hunters settled down for the night in a barn belonging to Prokofy, the village elder, on the very edge of the village of Mironositskoe. There were just two of them: Ivan Ivanich the vet, and Burkin, a high school teacher. Ivan Ivanich had a rather strange double-barrelled surname, Chimsha-Gimalaisky, which didn’t suit him in the least, and everyone in the province just knew him as Ivan Ivanich. He lived on a stud farm near the town, and had only come to hunt down here for a breath of fresh air. Burkin the teacher spent every summer as a guest of Count P. and his family, and felt very much at home here.

They were not asleep. Ivan Ivanich, a tall, thin elderly man with a long moustache, sat just outside the door smoking his pipe in the moonlight. Burkin lay inside on the hay, invisible in the dark.

They were telling each other stories. One thing they talked about was how the elder’s wife Mavra, a healthy and sensible woman, had never in her life been anywhere outside her native village, never seen a town or a railway, and had spent the last ten years sitting by the stove and only venturing out at night.

“What’s so surprising about that?” said Burkin. “There are plenty of people like that, solitary people by nature, who do their best to withdraw into their shell, like a hermit crab or a snail. Maybe that’s an atavistic relic, a return to the time when our human ancestors weren’t yet social beings, but each lived in his own lair. Or perhaps it’s just one variant of human nature – who knows? I’m not a naturalist, and not qualified to talk about that sort of thing; all I mean is that people like Mavra aren’t that unusual. In fact you don’t have to look far to find an example: there was a teacher of Greek called Belikov, a colleague of mine, who died in my town a couple of months ago. You’ll have heard of him, of course. The peculiar thing about him was that whenever he went out, even in the finest weather, he always carried an umbrella and wore galoshes and a warm coat lined with wadding. And he carried his umbrella in a case, and his watch in a grey chamois leather case, and if he took out his penknife to sharpen a pencil, the knife was in a little case too; and it looked as if his face was in a case as well, for he was always hiding it behind a raised collar. He wore dark glasses, and an undervest, and plugged his ears with cotton wool, and if he took a cab, he’d tell the driver to put up the roof. In a word, that man showed a constant, overpowering urge to surround himself with a sort of wrapping, to create an outer box for himself, which would isolate him and protect him from outside influences. Reality upset him, frightened him, kept him in a constant state of alarm; and perhaps it was to justify this timidity on his part, his aversion towards the present time, that he always praised the past, and things which had never been. The ancient languages he taught served essentially the same purpose as his galoshes and umbrella – he used them to hide away from real life.

“‘Oh, how resonant, how splendid is the Greek language!’ he used to say with a sweet smile. And as if to demonstrate the truth of his words, he would screw up his eyes, point a finger in the air, and pronounce ‘Anthropos!’

“And Belikov tried to hide his thoughts in a case, too. Nothing seemed clear to him except circulars and newspaper articles prohibiting something. If there was a circular forbidding pupils to go out into the streets after nine at night, or if some article proscribed carnal love, that made sense to him. Those things were forbidden, and that was that. Authorizations and permissions, however, always seemed to him to conceal an element of doubt, something vague and not fully expressed. When there were discussions in town about setting up a drama group, or a reading room, or a tearoom, he would shake his head and quietly say:

“‘Well, that’s all well and good, of course, but it might lead to something…’

“Any kind of infringement, or deviation, or departure from the rules, threw him into gloom, although you might have thought – what business was it of his? If one of his colleagues turned up late for church, or there were rumours about some schoolboy prank, or a schoolmistress was seen walking out with an officer late at night, he’d get very agitated and go on about how it might lead to something. And at the school staff meetings he really got us down, with his caution, his suspicions, his man-in-a-box-like reflections about how the young people in the boys’ and girls’ high schools were so badly behaved, and very rowdy in class – oh, we mustn’t let the authorities hear about it, oh, we must make sure it doesn’t lead to anything; and what about expelling Petrov from the second form, and Yegorov from the fourth, that would be an excellent idea. And what happened? With his sighing and moaning, and his dark glasses on that pale little face – you know, a little face like a polecat’s – he crushed us all, and we gave in to him, and docked marks off Petrov and Yegorov for bad behaviour, and kept them in, and eventually both Petrov and Yegorov got expelled. And he had a peculiar habit of visiting our lodgings. He’d drop in on a teacher and sit there without saying anything, and he seemed to be watching out for something. He’d sit there for maybe an hour or two, in silence, and then go away. He called that ‘keeping up good relations with his colleagues’. And he clearly didn’t at all enjoy visiting us and sitting around; the only reason he did it was because he thought it was his duty as a colleague. We teachers were scared of him. Even the headmaster was scared. Just imagine – all our teachers were an intellectual lot, absolutely respectable, brought up on Turgenev and Shchedrin, and yet that man, who always walked about in galoshes and carried an umbrella, kept the whole school under his thumb for fifteen years on end! And not just the school – the whole town! Our wives would never put on amateur dramatics on Saturdays, for fear he’d find out; and the priests didn’t dare eat meat or play cards in front of him. It was the influence of Belikov and his sort, over the last ten or fifteen years, that’s made everybody in our town afraid of everything now. They’re afraid of talking too loud, or sending letters, or making friends, or reading books; they’re afraid of helping the poor, or teaching people to read and write…”

Ivan Ivanich coughed and wanted to say something, but first he lit his pipe and looked up at the moon. Then he drawled:

“Yes. Thinking people, respectable people who read Shchedrin, and Turgenev, and Buckle, and all those – and yet they knuckled under and put up with it… That’s just the trouble.”

“Belikov lived in the same house as me,” Burkin went on, “on the same floor, in the flat opposite mine. We often saw one another, and I knew how he lived. And when he was at home, it was the same story: dressing gown, nightcap, shutters on the windows, bolts on the doors, a whole string of prohibitions and restrictions, and oh, supposing it leads to something! Lenten food is bad for you, he thought, but you mustn’t eat meat, in case people say that Belikov doesn’t keep the fasts, so he’d eat pike-perch cooked in butter, which wasn’t Lenten food, but you couldn’t call it meat either. He didn’t have a maid, in case people thought ill of him, but he had a cook called Afanasy, an old man of sixty or so, half drunk and half crazy, who had once been an officer’s batman and more or less knew how to cook. This Afanasy would generally stand by the door, arms folded, endlessly muttering the same thing, with a deep sigh:

“‘There’s a lot of them about these days!’

“Belikov had a small, box-like bedroom, and curtains round the bed. When he got into bed, he’d cover up his head; it was hot and stuffy, and the wind would be rattling the closed doors and howling down the chimney; and there’d be the sound of sighs from the kitchen, ominous sighs…

“And under his blanket, he was scared. Scared of something happening, scared of Afanasy cutting his throat, or burglars getting in; and then he’d have frightening dreams all night, and in the morning, when we walked to school together, he was gloomy and pale, and you could see that the school he was going to, with all those people in it, was frightening and repugnant to his whole being, and that with his solitary nature, he found it unpleasant to walk by my side.

“‘They’re terribly noisy in class,’ he’d say, as if trying to account for his gloom. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

“And would you believe it – that Greek master, that man in a box, almost got married.”

Ivan Ivanich quickly looked back into the barn and said:

“You’re joking!”

“No, he almost did get married, strange as it seems. They had sent us a new teacher of history and geography, a man called Kovalenko, Mikhail Savvich, a Little Russian. He didn’t arrive on his own – he brought his sister Varenka. He was a tall, young, swarthy-faced man with enormous hands, and just to look at his face you could tell that he would talk with a deep voice. And so he did – it sounded like a voice from the bottom of a barrel – boom-boom-boom… And she was past her first youth, about thirty, but tall and graceful as well, with dark eyebrows and pink cheeks; in a word, not a young thing, but a sweetie-pie, and so saucy and noisy, always singing Little Russian songs and giggling. At the slightest thing, she’d burst out in a great laugh – Ha-ha-ha! We first got to know the Kovalenkos properly, I remember, at the headmaster’s birthday party. In the midst of all those grim-faced, tense and boring teachers, who wouldn’t even have attended a birthday party if they hadn’t been obliged to, we suddenly saw this new Aphrodite rising from the foam, walking with her arms akimbo, laughing, singing, dancing… She