Reading Chekhov

In the short story "The Schoolmistress," written ten years later, we see how the compression that made Chekhov so uneasy in 1888 was now his modus operandi. It is another emblematic story of a journey, but this one is the mere return day trip of a spinster schoolteacher, Marya Vassilyevna, from the town where she goes to get her monthly salary. The teacher is one of the pathetic drudges who (as Chekhov learned at Melikhovo) taught in Russia's district schools in the nineteenth century (and may still do so in the twenty-first). The life of a schoolteacher is a hardworking, an uninteresting, life, and only silent, patient cart horses like Marya Vassilyevna could put up with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked about a vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up the work. The teacher is traveling in a horse-drawn cart, driven by an old coachman named Semyon. It is April, with traces of winter, "dark, long, and spiteful," still on the ground, but with delicious signs of spring in the air-to which, however, Marya Vassilyevna is impervious. She has taken this trip monthly for thirteen years and "whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her." Like Kuzmitchov obsessively thinking about wool and prices and Varlamov, Marya obsessively thinks about the examinations she must prepare her students for, about the brutality of the school watchman, about the indifference of Zemstvo officials, about the difficulty of obtaining firewood for the schoolroom. Chekhov pauses to tell us that Marya Vassilyevna was orphaned at ten, and can remember almost nothing of her early life, in a large flat in Moscow, near the Red Gate. Then he gives us an unforgettable image: Marya's one relic from her childhood is a photograph of her mother, but it has faded so badly that nothing remains visible but the hair and the eyebrows. We feel we have seen such photographs, but have never before thought of them as metaphors for fading memory.

As the teacher and the coachman travel through an increasingly mired terrain, they meet a landowner named Hanov, driving a carriage with four horses. Marya Vassilyevna is acquainted with Hanov, and so are we: he is our old friend the good man who cannot make good, cousin to Ivanov, Laevsky, Astrov, Vershinin. In this version, he is "a man of forty with a listless expression and a face that showed signs of wear, who was beginning to look old, but was still handsome and admired by women. He lived in his big homestead alone, and was not in the service; and people used to say of him that he did nothing at home but walk up and down the room whistling, or play chess with his old footman. People said, too, that he drank heavily."

After greeting Hanov, the schoolteacher goes back to her obsessions. But the thought floats into her mind that Hanov is attractive. When the road grows so muddy that Semyon and Hanov have to get down and lead their horses, she watches Hanov and thinks, "In his walk there was something, just perceptible, that betrayed in him a being already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin." She gets a whiff of alcohol, and goes on to feel "dread and pity for this man going to ruin for no visible cause or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin." She pursues the fantasy-and quickly dismisses it. The mere thought that he and she might be close to one another and equals seemed impossible and absurd. In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding, that when one thought about it one felt uncanny, and one's heart sank. "And it is beyond all understanding," she thought, "why God gives beauty, this graciousness, and sad, sweet eyes to weak, unlucky, useless people- why they are so charming."