Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [9]
Chekhov uses an astonishing economy of means. It is the same in “The Malefactor,” where the peasant Denis Grigoryev is put on trial for stealing nuts from railroad ties to use as sinkers for his fishing lines. Clearly the peasant has endangered the lives of hundread of people traveling on the trains. Chekhov tells the story without taking sides, amused by the confrontation of the baffled peasant and the armed might of justice, uninterested as always in the political implications of his stories. Gorky relates that a lawyer made a special visit to Chekhov to determine whether Denis Grigoryev was guilty or innocent in the eyes of his creator. The lawyer made a long speech about the necessity of punishing those who damaged state property and asked Chekhov what he would have done to the prisoner if he were the judge.
“I would have acquitted him,” Chekhov replied. “I would say to him: ‘You, Denis, have not yet ripened into a deliberate criminal. Go—and ripen!’ ”
In “Sergeant Prishibeyev” Chekhov described once and for all the type of the officious prosecutor. There is no malice in the story. He laughs quietly at the besotted sergeant who is always arresting people for infractions of the rules, but even that inane sergeant is given a human dimension. There is no cracking of the whip, no flicker of hatred. In the end the sergeant became a legend, his name repeated all over Russia whenever an officious policeman or magistrate appeared, for everyone had read the story and recognized the beast when he saw it.
We can very rarely pinpoint the precise origin of a Chekhov story. The incidents which made up the story derived from ancient memories, anecdotes told to him long ago and then forgotten, the face of a girl coming across a room, the way a man stepped out of a carriage on a busy street. Chekhov was perfectly aware that he wrote out of his memories. He said: “I can only write from my memories, and I have never written directly from nature. The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical.” We know some of the memories which were later shaped into stories, and it is instructive to observe what he took from them and what he left out.
“A Dead Body,” written in the late summer of 1885, clearly derives from an incident which took place the previous year, when Chekhov had to conduct an autopsy in an open field near the city of Voskresensk. Here is the account he wrote the same day to his friend Nikolay Leikin:
Today I attended a medico-legal autopsy which took place ten versts from V. I drove in a valiant troika with an ancient examining magistrate who could scarcely draw breath and who was almost entirely useless, a sweet little gray-haired man who had been dreaming for twenty-five years of a place on the bench. I conducted the post-mortem in a field with the help of the local district doctor, beneath the green leaves of a young oak tree, beside a country road … The dead man was no one the villagers knew by name, and the peasants on whose land the body was found entreated us tearfully, by the Lord God, not to conduct the post-mortem in their village. “The women and children will be too terrified to sleep.…” At first the examining magistrate made a wry face, because he was afraid it would rain, but later, realizing that he could make out a rough draft of his report in pencil, and seeing that we were perfectly prepared to cut up the body in the open air, he gave in to the desires of the peasants. A frightened little village, the witnesses, the village constable with his tin badge, the widow roaring away fifty yards from the post-mortem, and two peasants acting as custodians near the corpse. Near these silent custodians a small campfire was dying down. To guard over a corpse day and night until the arrival of the authorities is one of the unpaid duties