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A.P. Chekhov -
My Life
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THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL
I
THE Superintendent said to me: "I only keep
you out of regard for your worthy father; but for that you would
have been sent flying long ago." I replied to him: "You flatter
me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of
flying." And then I heard him say: "Take that gentleman away; he
gets upon my nerves."
Two days later I was dismissed. And in this way I have, during
the years I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine
situations, to the great mortification of my father, the
architect of our town. I have served in various departments, but
all these nine jobs have been as alike as one drop of water is
to another: I had to sit, write, listen to rude or stupid
observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed.
When I came in to my father he was sitting buried in a low
arm-chair with his eyes closed. His dry, emaciated face, with a
shade of dark blue where it was shaved (he looked like an old
Catholic organist), expressed meekness and resignation. Without
responding to my greeting or opening his eyes, he said:
"If my dear wife and your mother were living, your life would
have been a source of continual distress to her. I see the
Divine Providence in her premature death. I beg you, unhappy
boy," he continued, opening his eyes, "tell me: what am I to do
with you?"
In the past when I was younger my friends and relations had
known what to do with me: some of them used to advise me to
volunteer for the army, others to get a job in a pharmacy, and
others in the telegraph department; now that I am over
twenty-five, that grey hairs are beginning to show on my
temples, and that I have been already in the army, and in a
pharmacy, and in the telegraph department, it would seem that
all earthly possibilities have been exhausted, and people have
given up advising me, and merely sigh or shake their heads.
"What do you think about yourself?" my father went on. "By the
time they are your age, young men have a secure social position,
while look at you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on
your father!"
And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of
to-day were on the road to perdition through infidelity,
materialism, and self-conceit, and that amateur theatricals
ought to be prohibited, because they seduced young people from
religion and their duties.
"To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the
superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously," he
said in conclusion. "You ought not to remain one single day with
no regular position in society."
"I beg you to listen to me," I said sullenly, expecting nothing
good from this conversation. "What you call a position in
society is the privilege of capital and education. Those who
have neither wealth nor education earn their daily bread by
manual labour, and I see no grounds for my being an exception."
"When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid
and vulgar!" said my father with irritation. "Understand, you
dense fellow -- understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse
physical strength you have the divine spirit, a spark of the
holy fire, which distinguishes you in the most striking way from
the ass or the reptile, and brings you nearer to the Deity! This
fire is the fruit of the efforts of the best of mankind during
thousands of years. Your great-grandfather Poloznev, the
general, fought at Borodino; your grandfather was a poet, an
orator, and a Marshal of Nobility; your uncle is a schoolmaster;
and lastly, I, your father, am an architect! All the Poloznevs
have guarded the sacred fire for you to put it out!"
"One must be just," I said. "Millions of people put up with
manual labour."
"And let them put up with it! They don't know how to do anything
else! Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable
of manual labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the
slave and the barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only
to a few!"
To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father
worshipped himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what
he said himself. Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain
with which he talked of physical toil was founded not so much on
reverence for the sacred fire as on a secret dread that I should
become a workman, and should set the whole town talking about
me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had long ago taken
their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of the
manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor,
while I, his only son, was nothing! To continue the conversation
was unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly
retorted, hoping that I might at last be understood. The whole
question, of course, was clear and simple, and only concerned
with the means of my earning my living; but the simplicity of it
was not seen, and I was talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases
of Borodino, of the sacred fire, of my uncle a forgotten poet,
who had once written poor and artificial verses; I was rudely
called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I longed to be
understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and my
sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them
-- a habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever
have got rid of it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I
was in constant dread of wounding them, constantly afraid that
my father's thin neck would turn crimson and that he would have
a stroke.
"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a
typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age.
What can the sacred fire have to do with it?"
"It's intellectual work, anyway," said my father. "But that's
enough; let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I
warn you: if you don't go back to your work again, but follow
your contemptible propensities, then my daughter and I will
banish you from our hearts. I shall strike you out of my will, I
swear by the living God!"
With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by
which I wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:
"The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me.
I shall renounce it all beforehand."
For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were
deeply resented by my father. He turned crimson.
"Don't dare to talk to me like that, stupid!" he shouted in a
thin, shrill voice. "Wastrel!" and with a rapid, skilful, and
habitual movement he slapped me twice in the face. "You are
forgetting yourself."
When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight,
with my hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him
straight in the face. And now when he hit me I was utterly
overwhelmed, and, as though I were still a child, drew myself up
and tried to look him in the face. My father was old and very
thin but his delicate muscles must have been as strong as
leather, for his blows hurt a good deal.
I staggered back into the passage, and there he snatched up his
umbrella, and with it hit me several times on the head and
shoulders; at that moment my sister opened the drawing-room door
to find out what the noise was, but at once turned away with a
look of horror and pity without uttering a word in my defence.
My determination not to return to the Government office, but to
begin a new life of toil, was not to be shaken. All that was
left for me to do was to fix upon the special employment, and
there was no particular difficulty about that, as it seemed to
me that I was very strong and fitted for the very heaviest
labour. I was faced with a monotonous life of toil in the midst
of hunger, coarseness, and stench, continually preoccupied with
earning my daily bread. And -- who knows? -- as I returned from
my work along Great Dvoryansky Street, I might very likely envy
Dolzhikov the, engineer, who lived by intellectual work, but, at
the moment, thinking over all my future hardships made me
light-hearted. At times I had dreamed of spiritual activity,
imagining myself a teacher, a doctor, or a writer, but these
dreams remained dreams. The taste for intellectual pleasures --
for the theatre, for instance, and for reading -- was a passion
with me, but whether I had any ability for intellectual work I
don't know. At school I had had an unconquerable aversion for
Greek, so that I was only in the fourth class when they had to
take me from school. For a long while I had coaches preparing me
for the fifth class. Then I served in various Government
offices, spending the greater part of the day in complete
idleness, and I was told that was intellectual work. My activity
in the scholastic and official sphere had required neither
mental application nor talent, nor special qualifications, nor
creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such intellectual work I
put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise it, and I
don't think that for one moment it could serve as a
justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed
nothing but a sham, one of the forms of that same idleness. Real
intellectual work I have in all probability never known.
Evening came on. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street; it was the
principal street in the town, and in the absence of decent
public gardens our beau monde used to use it as a promenade in
the evenings. This charming street did to some extent take the
place of a public garden, as on each side of it there was a row
of poplars which smelt sweet, particularly after rain, and
acacias, tall bushes of lilac, wild-cherries and apple-trees
hung over the fences and palings. The May twilight, the tender
young greenery with its shifting shades, the scent of the lilac,
the buzzing of the insects, the stillness, the warmth -- how
fresh and marvellous it all is, though spring is repeated every
year! I stood at the garden gate and watched the passers-by.
With most of them I had grown up and at one time played pranks;
now they might have been disconcerted by my being near them, for
I was poorly and unfashionably dressed, and they used to say of
my very narrow trousers and huge, clumsy boots that they were
like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats. Besides, I had a bad
reputation in the town because I had no decent social position,
and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and also,
perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before an
officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to
account for this.
In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at
Dolzhikov's. It was beginning to get dark, and stars were
twinkling in the sky. Here my father, in an old top-hat with
wide upturned brim, walked slowly by with my sister on his arm,
bowing in response to greetings.
"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the
same umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look
up at the sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How
insignificant is man in comparison with the universe!"
And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was
particularly agreeable and flattering to him that he was so
insignificant. How absolutely devoid of talent and imagination
he was! Sad to say, he was the only architect in the town, and
in the fifteen to twenty years that I could remember not one
single decent house had been built in it. When any one asked him
to plan a house, he usually drew first the reception hall and
drawing-room: just as in old days the boarding-school misses
always started from the stove when they danced, so his artistic
ideas could only begin and develop from the hall and
drawing-room. To them he tacked on a dining-room, a nursery, a
study, linking the rooms together with doors, and so they all
inevitably turned into passages, and every one of them had two
or even three unnecessary doors. His imagination must have been
lacking in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As though
feeling that something was lacking, he invariably had recourse
to all sorts of outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I
can see now the narrow entries, the poky little passages, the
crooked staircases leading to half-landings where one could not
stand upright, and where, instead of a floor, there were three
huge steps like the shelves of a bath-house; and the kitchen was
invariably in the basement with a brick floor and vaulted
ceilings. The front of the house had a harsh, stubborn
expression; the lines of it were stiff and timid; the roof was
low-pitched and, as it were, squashed down; and the fat,
well-fed-looking chimneys were invariably crowned by wire caps
with squeaking black cowls. And for some reason all these
houses, built by my father exactly like one another, vaguely
reminded me of his top-hat and the back of his head, stiff and
stubborn-looking. In the course of years they have grown used in
the town to the poverty of my father's imagination. It has taken
root and become our local style.
This same style my father had brought into my sister's life
also, beginning with christening her Kleopatra (just as he had
named me Misail). When she was a little girl he scared her by
references to the stars, to the sages of ancient times, to our
ancestors, and discoursed at length on the nature of life and
duty; and now, when she was twenty-six, he kept up the same
habits, allowing her to walk arm in arm with no one but himself,
and imagining for some reason that sooner or later a suitable
young man would be sure to appear, and to desire to enter into
matrimony with her from respect for his personal qualities. She
adored my father, feared him, and believed in his exceptional
intelligence.
It was quite dark, and gradually the street grew empty. The
music had ceased in the house opposite; the gate was thrown wide
open, and a team with three horses trotted frolicking along our
street with a soft tinkle of little bells. That was the engineer
going for a drive with his daughter. It was bedtime.
I had my own room in the house, but I lived in a shed in the
yard, under the same roof as a brick barn which had been built
some time or other, probably to keep harness in; great hooks
were driven into the wall. Now it was not wanted, and for the
last thirty years my father had stowed away in it his
newspapers, which for some reason he had bound in half-yearly
volumes and allowed nobody to touch. Living here, I was less
liable to be seen by my father and his visitors, and I fancied
that if I did not live in a real room, and did not go into the
house every day to dinner, my father's words that I was a burden
upon him did not sound so offensive.
My sister was waiting for me. Unseen by my father, she had
brought me some supper: not a very large slice of cold veal and
a piece of bread. In our house such sayings as: "A penny saved
is a penny gained," and "Take care of the pence and the pounds
will take care of themselves," and so on, were frequently
repeated, and my sister, weighed down by these vulgar maxims,
did her utmost to cut down the expenses, and so we fared badly.
Putting the plate on the table, she sat down on my bed and began
to cry.
"Misail," she said, "what a way to treat us!"
She did not cover her face; her tears dropped on her bosom and
hands, and there was a look of distress on her face. She fell
back on the pillow, and abandoned herself to her tears, sobbing
and quivering all over.
"You have left the service again . . ." she articulated. "Oh,
how awful it is!"
"But do understand, sister, do understand . . . ." I said, and I
was overcome with despair because she was crying.
As ill-luck would have it, the kerosene in my little lamp was
exhausted; it began to smoke, and was on the point of going out,
and the old hooks on the walls looked down sullenly, and their
shadows flickered.
"Have mercy on us," said my sister, sitting up. "Father is in
terrible distress and I am ill; I shall go out of my mind. What
will become of you?" she said, sobbing and stretching out her
arms to me. "I beg you, I implore you, for our dear mother's
sake, I beg you to go back to the office!"
"I can't, Kleopatra!" I said, feeling that a little more and I
should give way. "I cannot!"
"Why not?" my sister went on. "Why not? Well, if you can't get
on with the Head, look out for another post. Why shouldn't you
get a situation on the railway, for instance? I have just been
talking to Anyuta Blagovo; she declares they would take you on
the railway-line, and even promised to try and get a post for
you. For God's sake, Misail, think a little! Think a little, I
implore you."
We talked a little longer and I gave way. I said that the
thought of a job on the railway that was being constructed had
never occurred to me, and that if she liked I was ready to try
it.
She smiled joyfully through her tears and squeezed my hand, and
then went on crying because she could not stop, while I went to
the kitchen for some kerosene.
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