Reading Chekhov

Warmly and impulsively he put his arms around her and covered her knees and hands with kisses… he stroked her hair and looking into her face, realized that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near and dear to him, whom no one could replace. The duel takes place among the craggy mountains and steep gorges-the landscape where Lermontov's Pechorin fought his deadly duel with Grushnitskii. Lest the reader fail to hear the Lermontovean echo, and to grasp its irony, Chekhov inserts a farcical moment, when no one at the duel knows exactly what to do. " 'Gentlemen, who remembers the description in Lermontov?' asked von Koren, laughing." Laevsky escapes with his life. (He had fired in the air, and von Koren, on the point of going through with his intended execution of the useless, is distracted by a cry from a deacon who has seen the murderous look on his face.) Then, as a prelude to a new life of ordinary kindness and responsibility, Laevsky and Nadezhda sit in a garden- where else?-"huddled close together, saying nothing, or dreaming aloud of their happy life in the future, in brief, broken sentences, while it seemed to him that he had never spoken at such length or so eloquently." The story ends with a glimpse of their new life, and with no assurance that they will be able to sustam the rigors of an existence stripped of illusion and devoted to prosaic work. Characteristically, Chekhov does not allow them the comfort of Tolstoyan pastoral-he does not let them fulfill the fantasy that brought them to the Caucasus. («We would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so on.") The work Laevsky does to pay his debts is not horticulture but the tedious, ill-paid work of copying. (How Nadezhda spends her days is left to the reader's imagination. When we last see her, she is a recessive, diminished figure.) Chekhov's gardens at Me-likhovo and Autka were his hobby; the gardens in his stories and plays, like Marianne Moore's imaginary gardens with real toads in them, are something more serious. (This may be why Chekhov never entrusted them to amateurs; his imaginary gardens are always in the care of professionals.) The garden in which Laevsky and Nadezhda huddle-like the garden of his youth, like every garden in Chekhov-is a symbolic place of grace. The garden at Autka is merely a real garden. Four fy-t I ^hey say that Olga refused to sleep with Chekhov JL because she was afraid of catching his ÒÂ," Nina says as we walk back to the car along the footpath above the sea in Oreanda.

"I've never heard that," I say. "From their correspondence it seems clear that they did sleep together."

"Don't you remember at Gurzuv, when you asked about the narrow bed in Chekhov's room?"