Reading Chekhov

I looked for the restaurant Nina had mentioned-it was called the Krymen-with small expectation of finding it open, but it was open, though without customers. After a search, a tattered handwritten menu in English with strange spellings was produced by an amiable waitress, and soon a delicious dinner of trout and potatoes and cucumber-and-tomato salad was set before me. I am always touched by simple, nicely prepared food, by the idea that a stranger I will never meet has taken care over my dinner, cooking it perfectly and arranging it handsomely on the plate. I feel something friendly and generous wafting toward me. Conversely, I feel the malice and aggression in pretentious, carelessly prepared hotel food; and even the elegant, rigorously prepared dishes served in good restaurants often produce in me a sense of the egotism of their makers: they are doing it for art's sake, not for mine. I have a few times in my life eaten food on the highest level of gastronomy, food imbued with the impersonality of art-from which flowed the same spirit of kindliness and selflessness that I felt at the Krymen. In "The Wife" (1892), Chekhov describes a meal served at the house of a benign old landowner named Bragin:

… first a cold course of white suckling pig with horseradish cream, then a rich and very hot cabbage soup with pork in it, with boiled buckwheat… pie was served; then, I remember, with long intervals between, during which we drank homemade liquors, they gave us a stew of pigeons, some dish of giblets, roast suckling pig, partridges, cauliflower, curd dumplings, curd cheese and milk, jelly, and finally pancakes and jam.

The narrator, Pavel Andreitch Asorin, is another of Chekhov's flawed heroes who is mysteriously transformed into a decent person. He and his wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, are living together-but not living together-on his country estate. They are like an estranged modern couple who stubbornly continue to occupy a large rent-controlled apartment. The relationship itself has a modern flavor-the raw, close-to-the-bone ambivalence of marriage in the theater of Pinter and Albee. The story centers on a famine in the village, and on the struggle between Natalya, who has organized a successful relief fund, and Asorin, a harsh, abrasive man who attempts to take over her work and run it into the ground because he can't bear the idea of her effectiveness. Asorin's transformation occurs when he awakes from a nap after the gargantuan meal. "I feel as though I had woken up after breaking the fast at Easter," he tells his host, and as he drives home he feels that "I really had gone out of my mind or become a different man. It was as though the man I had been till that day were already a stranger to me." When he arrives home, he goes to his wife and tells her, "I've shaken off my old self with horror, with horror; I despise him and am ashamed of him." He begins a new life of philanthropy and serene relations with Natalya. In the story's final words, "My wife often comes up to me and looks about my rooms uneasily, as though looking for what more she can give to the starving peasants 'to justify her existence,' and I see that, thanks to her, there will soon be nothing of our property left, and we shall be poor; but that does not trouble me, and I smile at her gaily. What will happen in the future I don't know."