Reading Chekhov

Maxim Gorky wrote of Chekhov that "in the presence of Anton Pavlovich, everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself." Chekhov's mock biography produces a similar chastening effect. After reading it, one can only regard any attempt at self-description that is longer and less playful as pretentious and rather ridiculous. Two iff I %is morning I felt giddy," Nina tells me at the look-X out in Oreanda. "I was afraid I would not be able to come today. Fortunately I am better." I question her about her symptoms and urge her to see a doctor. She explains that she hasn't the money for a doctor-doctors can no longer get by on their salaries from the state and now charge for their services. I ask if there are clinics, and she says yes, but they are overcrowded-one has to wait interminably. She finally agrees to go to a clinic the next day to have her blood pressure checked. Nina and I took to each other immediately. She is extremely likable. Because she is large and I am small she has begun giving me impulsive bear hugs and calling me her little one-for lack of a better equivalent for the Russian diminutive. Over the two days we have been together, I have received an increasing sense of the pathos of her life. She is very poor. Her apartment is too small, she says, to keep a cat in. The dress she is wearing was given to her by a Czech woman whose guide she was a few years ago. She is grateful when clients give her leftover shampoo and hand cream; nothing is too small. Earlier in the day, during a visit to the Livadia palace, where the Yalta agreement was signed, she told me that as a young child she lived through the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. Her grandparents died during the siege, and her parents' lives, she said, were shortened because of the sacrifices they made for their children. Now, as she talks about the leftover shampoo, I think about the large tip I will give her at the end of the day, anticipating her surprise and pleasure. Then a suspicion enters my mind: has she been putting on an act and playing on my sympathy precisely so that I will give her money? A week earlier, in St. Petersburg, someone else had used the term "putting on an act." I had been walking along the Nevsky Prospect with my guide, Nelly, when I was stopped in my tracks by the horrifying sight of an old woman lying face down on the pavement convulsively shaking, a cane on the ground just out of reach of the trembling hand from which it had fallen. As I started to go to her aid, Nelly put her hand on my arm and said, "She lies here like this every day. She is a beggar." She added, "I don't know if she's putting on an act or not." I looked at her in disbelief. "Even if she's acting, she must be in great need," Nelly allowed. I then noticed a paper box with a few coins in it sitting on the ground near the cane. As the occasional passerby added a coin to the box, the woman took no notice; she simply continued to shake.

If Nina is acting, I think, she, too, must be impelled by desperation, but I decide that she is on the level. There is an atmosphere of truth about her. She is like one of Chekhov's guileless innocents; she is Anna Sergeyevna in late middle age. We rise from the seat and walk over to a semicircular stone pavilion at the edge of the cliff. Names and initials have been penciled on or scratched into the stone. In Chekhov's story "Lights" (1888), the hero, an engineer named Ananyev, speaks of a decisive youthful encounter in a stone summerhouse above the sea, and offers this theory of graffiti: When a man in a melancholy mood is left tete-a-tete with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he will live and die in obscurity and he reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy. And that, I suppose is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with pen-knives.