Showing posts with label Anton Chekhov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anton Chekhov. Show all posts

Tuesday 13 November 2018

Ur-Gumshoe? D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. The Unvarnished Truth.

 Tchékhov dreamt he was a thief of the back streets who collects coins and collar studs from the pavement with tarred shoe-soles to evade detection.

D-r Tchékhov mounted on Old Roarer (1888).
‘Her breath had frozen on leaving her nostrils so that there was
a horn of ice a foot long projecting through the steam, and
lumps of the hardest ice – of unequal sizes – had
become attached to her hoofs.’ 

A number of extracts from the as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, have been posted here over recent years :
A Skirmish with Wolves
or Chekhov’s talking raven,
or Dead Wife, New Hat,
or Inductive Detection,
or D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. A long lost novel, 
or Problems of a Completist,

The transcription and restoration of a long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) has been a task requiring considerable cerebral vigour, which I confess demands a savviness I can no longer own.

The novel relates the misadventures of the morphine-dependent D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, when investigating the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. 

So for Tchékhov’s perorated musings that colour the penultimate chapter, Pursued by Wolvesretailing this baffling affair, click on the first link above . . . or . . . continue here to read onwards to the conclusion of Part One, A Textbook Case . . 



In three days, life in the garrison had robbed him of all self respect, and brought him to the utter degradation of institutional mindlessness, consumed, like the common soldiers, by a crude and bitter resentment.
  Around him he saw only darkness, barbarity, monotony and the dumb, brutish indifference of callous men stripped of all humanity.
  A melancholy whistle sounded like a chamade of defeat.
  In the far distance, a railway engine laboured on a curve, and then the railway lights came into view over the brow of a hill, and a high column of grey smoke and sparks shifted fretfully hither and thither, trapped in the cutting between the forest trees.
  As though at a familiar signal, the mare whickered and broke into a risyu — a military trot at a brisk, even pace towards the flaring funnel. 
  Below them, a long goods train passed, pulled by two panting engines that belched shafts of crimson flame from their funnels, respiring like the high blowers who filled the rear ranks for draught service alongside Old Roarer.
  Soon, the double yolk of a yellow approach-signal shimmered in a glair of mist.
  In another moment Anton had reached the track and crossed the line to enter the station yard.
  He patted the mare’s neck, smoothing a mane caparisoned by snow and, in places, standing in frozen quiffs.  Her flanks were streaked with frozen sweat.
  “She’s a regular sweetlin’,” he said to the waiting groom.
  He swung out his leg and dismounted smoothly, like a well-turned period.


The Unvarnished Truth


The ramassage train was a mixed goods wagons and passenger service with a vagon-restoran. On the platform, soldiers were rapidly unloading two box-cars of fresh horses under penalty of demurrage.  
  The remounts’ eyes were bright and their coats gleamed.
  “More unsuspecting candidates, like the conscripts, for the dread potions of that infernal médicin empirique,” Anton murmured sourly, and stroked their groomed flanks.
  He paused to watch a little bye-play between a thickset, compact chestnut gelding, with a broad breast, and a sturdy carabagh cob.
  “They say : ‘In the long run truth will triumph’, but it’s untrue,he confided softly, fondling a velvet ear.
  At the rear of the train, he observed, was a railway car disguised to look like a mail-van, with opaque glass windows and four-plank cells to transport exiled political prisoners.
  He entered his own compartment, threw himself on the seat, and took up his private journal.
  He felt all of Russia was on the line harnessed to the lokomotiv and waiting for a signal whose annunciation they would never hear.
  “My visit has been a footling business, he wrote, “the situation is hopeless, and it is impossible to change the course of things.”
  He gazed blankly out of the window, blinking his heavily lashed lids.
  “I have dissected with an ice-pick a frozen monument to romanticism, explored the aphotic regions of the General’s castelry, lingered in the haunts of pleasure, and buried a ghost.”
  Soon, he knew, all traces of the episode would be erased. 
  With much the same intention as Old Vańuška — when attempting the drive of deer to cover his tracks and overwrite, in the snow, the record of his misdeeds — so the Princess would sprinkle holy water on the scandal.                                 
      Yet the bowdlerized version of the events was written in the official record, for had not he, Tchékhov, so written it? [“No more equivocal or casuistical a letter have I ever written.”]
  The Princess emerged from the station-master’s room and boarded the train.
      He compared once more her delicate weak-looking neck and cernuous head with his own bowed shoulders.
      He was aware the shuba he was wearing — as long as a dressing-gown — was not comme il faut, and he was conscious that his raffish bowtie was not the correct thing, yet in these small matters, as in the greater ones, he vowed to resist his own embourgeoisement. 
     “My motto : ‘I don’t want anything.’ ”
  He had probed beneath the surface sheen, and under the varnish he had found nests of corruption and subterfuge which not even the magic of the old Tcheremis mediciner could conceal.
  At the front of the train, a door was flung open, and youthful male voices, resonant and assured, cried out : “Mariya! Mariushka! Manyusya! Mashenka!”

  The whistle sounded. 

  Anton was just in time to see Mariya following her hat-box as she was handed into the compartment of the four bad captains.
  The train steamed out.
  Tchékhov glanced at his watch.  When Anton was sick as a child, or profoundly unhappy, he had played with a small oblong fragment of mirror to dart “sun hares” across the ceiling and on the faded paper of the wall.
  In the bright rays of the gaslamp the glass watch-lens sent out spinning discs of light on the carriage ceiling.
  He repeated under his breath his childhood’s secret chant : “The hare dances at night to seduce the moon.”  He had believed then that a selenogamous marriage was the fate of a poet, and his destiny was to be a flamen devoted to his muse.
  He sighed, and wrote : “It usually takes as much time to feel happy as to wind up one’s watch.” 
  He wound up his watch. 
  In those pages of his journal where he entered his imprest accounts, D-r Tchékhov drew a new line, and itemised his latest expenses – viz the handout to a battalion commander besieged by creditors.
  “In Act I, he wrote, “a respectable man, ‘X’, borrows a hundred roubles from ‘A’, and in the course of all four acts he does not pay it back.” 
  He smiled, and added : “To make an enemy is to lend a man money, and ask it of him again.”
  To be spared the out-go, the yawning byurokrat then crossed out “expenses, sundry” and wrote “expenses, general”.
  The landscape flowing by looked inane.
  When he thought of the General’s penury Anton reckoned he had gone some way to make up the ullage.
  The General had played him for a fool. 
  The dark bulk of the General’s lofty quadrilateral fort disappeared below the treeline.  
  On balance, Anton felt sorry for the General whose domain had shrunk to a second-rate boarding school and four mountain batteries quartered in a snowbound cantonment patrolling a forgotten frontier.
  Anton gazed at the way the land tumbled, and saw the trees were planted anyhow, stupidly ; a land where prospered only zastoi — stagnation, stupidity and mediocrity.
  “The story I have begun,” he scribbled in a draft letter to Nicholai, “is a work de longue haleine — as complicated as it is deeply tedious.”   
  He sighed. “At this moment I see no good reason to live,he confided to his brother, “but then I remembered an editor had commissioned a magazine article on the poor schools and I recognised that I could not die issueless.”
  The carriage lamp burned as fitfully as his own restlessness.
  His hæmmorhoids were afire with a formicary itching which circled his arse like a ring-burner. 
  He had added to his knowledge of enemata by experimenting with variants of Ivanishche’s instillation of opium and myrrh tinctures which had succeeded only in acting upon his guts like evacuants ; purgations each more dreadful than the last.
  To his remaining ampoule he sought relief ; and within the space of a few moments the allumé eyes of the unrepentant meconophagist had undergone their customary pupillary changes.
  At a level-crossing a team of oxen hauling coal slackened their pace.
  His stomach warmed and the abdominal spasms ceased.
  There remained a sickly, sticky sensation in his gullet, however, which was clearly the consequence of too much smoking so he swallowed a linctus of barbitonum – a hypnotic drug – he had mixed with drops of antitussive opianine. 
  He gazed from the window and scanned the horizon through a pair of opera glasses.
  The landscape flowing by looked phantasmagorical.
  A fantaziya.
  (He wrote,“And I dreamt that, as it were, I considered reality was a dream, and the dream was a reality.”)
  In many respects, he considered, the fact that the symptoms of a sufferer from tuberculosis are similar to the signs of morphinism should be regarded by fellow addicts as fortunate indeed.
  The similarities — the brittle nails, the axillary sweating, the dry heat in other regions, the weight loss, his fluctuating temperature night and day — had conveniently veiled his drug dependency from the prying intrusions of overofficious busybodies at the medical faculty in the past.
  “I am a superfluous man ; only the healthy and strong will remain,he wrote. “Nature is straining to rid herself of debilitated organisms and those she doesn’t need . . . famines, typhus, diphtheria — kholera, tuberkulez, skarlatina — an epidemic whose only cure is a course of the natural sciences. But Death defies the doctor. For how can a doctor prevail over disease when his own brother is reluctant to change is underpants.”
  Since his sojourn in the fort his fæces had turned black, a sign which indicated, he believed, not only the presence of stomach blood as “coffee-grounds” in his stools but melæna wrought by an overdose of bismuth.
  He examined the granulating abscess on his lower left femur and removed an incrustation. To his surprise when he looked for the formerly sloughy floor he saw the lesion had healed to a healthy new pink carapace.
  Cicatrix manet. Spasi'bo za poda'rok, Vańuška!” He laughed. “Thanks for the timely gift of spurious health, old man.” 
  Only one thought reconciled Tchékhov to the old feldsher : just as the Prince had suffered from the rascal’s ignorance, so perhaps Anton was benefiting from one of his mistakes.
  “The hour is late afternoon and dark,he wrote. “Only the evening will show what day it has been.”
  He turned the page, and resumed writing.
  “I think more and more of death. I dreamt that Court kammerjunkers were  present at the opening of my grave, and I was preserved like a saint, the skin uncrackt, the odour sweet. Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the thought that you might live forever and never die. To live one must have something to hang on to. In this country only the body works, not the spirit.”
  Above the rattle of the wheels, at the head of the train, he heard the melodiya of Mariya singing. 
  The ballada told of dukes and counts, like those in novels, not ordinary people. The song was not sensual but yearning ; a romanticheskoye yearning to rhyme Ideal and Love with Repentance and purest Sacrifice.
  Mariya sang with a pathos to capture men’s souls, and on his lips he tasted  the sacrament of that first warm kiss which had melted his heart.
  Ahead of him, her singing faded. 
  He wanted to race and overtake her, and it seemed to him as if it were life itself he wanted to overtake, that life which one cannot bring back or overtake or catch, just as one cannot overtake one’s own shadow.
  “To die innominate, unperpetuated — as the Great Anon — should be our early resolve,he continued. 
  When he thought of his death he would recall the words of Cato ; for he would rather people should enquire why he had not a tablet erected to his memory, than why he had. 
  He unfolded his travelling rug, bunched his coat into a pillow, and laid his head in readiness for rest.
  “Nevertheless, the power and salvation of a people lie in its intelligentsyia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.”
  A laconic smile lurked under his beard.
  “At my death destroy these notebook writings as the demented ramblings of a drivelling scribbler, one of the cackling literati.” 
  There was no doubt but that he meant it.
  “In truth, it seems to me that we uncultured, worn-out, money-grubbing people, banal in speech, stereotyped in intentions, have grown quite mouldy, and while we intellectuals are rummaging among old rags and, according to the old Russian custom, biting one another, there is boiling up around us a life we neither know nor notice. The dawn of a new life is breaking. Great events will take us unawares, and we shall turn into sinister old men and women ; and we shall be the first who, in that hatred of that new dawn, will calumniate it.”   
  He closed his eyes.
  He could not forget the Prince monumentalised in the snow.
  He could not forget Mariya imperatrix.  
  Her vivacious amoral'nyi smile. 
  He thought of her complex gamey odour of hairwash and perfumery. 
  “Essentially this chronicle of woe is crude and meaningless. Romantic love, like Mariya’s song appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people.” 
  He opened his eyes and reread the scrap of paper on which he had copied the Prince’s love letter.
  He shook his head in wonderment.
  That the Prince had truly loved Mariya there could be no doubt. For Anton had preserved the scrap like holy writ.
  No love letter should be read au pied de la lettre.
  Just as D-r Tchékhov had struggled to find a way to conclude his Report to the General ; so the Prince had striven in the composition of his duplicitous last words.
  As regards the psychogenesis of the Prince’s neuroses, the psycho-analytical school would continue to proffer the glib formula, “morbid anxiety and depressiya mean unsatisfied love.” 
  But was this diagnosis wholly true when Anton applied it to himself?
  When depersonalisation was manifest, as was the case of the Prince, sometimes, the subjects of these inner stresses or mental conflicts, instead of feeling that they themselves are changed, discover their outer world appears different.
  But surely derealisation was the very condition which sustained the writer’s inner life — was its essence?
  There was no denying that the opium-eating scribbler shared many of the textbook symptoms — and perceptions. 
  “Subjects of depersonalisation appear different from what they used to be ; strange, lifeless, detached, automatic.  In derealisation, the outer world looks dead or macabre.  Such subjects exhibiting manic-depressive psychoses (melankholiya) must be regarded as suicide risks.”
  Definitely spot on!  Korsakov knew his stuff all right!
  The ends of each pencil (there were five) he had found in the Prince’s study were, like the cadet’s finger nails, chewed to the quick. 
  The hands were crossed when Anton had last seen them.
  For repose in his coffin, the bodkin-women had removed the Prince’s gloves.
  Anton dwelt on the darker purposes of such women, prodding and dosing young wronged girls with filthy homegrown deobstruents. 
  He prayed Mariya had remained faithful to her promise.
  At last, he sank into a deep opiated sleep and dreamt of Goshen — a great shining celestial city — velikii gorod — and dreamt he was a thief of the back streets who collects coins and collar studs from the pavement with tarred shoe-soles to evade detection.
  He could not wait to be enclosed once more within the white heart of Moscow.



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Thursday 16 April 2015

Phoney Aphorisms for D-r Tchékhov with Other Doubtful Observations and Flourishes

To tell the truth, the writing of my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv,  was of such a lengthy gestation (since my days as a febrile sixteen-year-old, actually*), I can no longer tell whether the aphorisms I’ve Englished from his observations are my own confections or those of my protagonist.


Can the same fate befall these phoney utterances, I sometimes speculate, as the misattribution that befell the phrase: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’? (Attributed to Voltaire but an aphorism composed by Englishwoman Evelyn Beatrice Hall as an illustration of Voltaire’s beliefs.) 

This misattribution recalls the schoolgirl, Catherine Winkworth, who, learning of General Napier’s conquest of Sindh (1843), remarked to her teacher that Napier’s victorious despatch to the Empire should have been Peccavi (Latin for ‘I have sinned’), a perfect pun that has usually been credited to Napier.

Which raises the question of women as superior phrase-makers standing in the shadows of great men yet nimble-minded enough to equally fill the declamatory breach with a memorable quip if called upon.

Well, here is a questionable selection of my own attempts for uncertain posterity. 

(I should add that my voluminous notes for this sprawling project are in storage, so I shan’t balk at Chekhovian scholars separating the wheat from the chaff and pointing out for me authentic utterances of Anton’s to distinguish them from the inauthentic.)

Aphorisms, Epigrams, Prophecies, Grotesqueries and Paradoxes.

Apropros Goethe : Tchékhov wrote, ‘I am considering a novel to rival Elective Affinities for Russian readers called Comfortable Assumptions.’

Fish and guests smell after three daysTchékhov mused. In truth, that year at Madame Lintvaryova’s country villa in the Ukraine he had grown restless after two.

Nature’s an idiot, fate is a fool, and life isn’t worth a cracked half kopeck.

Follow Duty too close at the heels and it will strike out your teeth.

Anton thought, ‘A tragical plot may yet produce a comical conclusion.’

A doctor, as everyone should know, enjoys being at a duel. 

While a noose is still running there’s still time to pray.

‘If the doctor cures, the sun sees it, if the doctor kills, the dirt hides it.’ Anton could think only of a century’s end, the sun sinking into dissipation and ruin. He thought: ‘Palliating the symptoms will not affect the cause.’

His natty necktie was adrift but his tongue was knotted.

The room smelled of not having been smoked in.

He has the greatest blind-side who thinks he has none.

‘A rich apothecary, a corruptible doctor.’

‘At this moment I see no good reason to live,’ Tchékhov confided to his brother, ‘but then I remembered an editor had commissioned a magazine article on the poor schools and I recognised that I could not die issueless.’

A sacred mystery, like the pure empyrean fire, can – with faith – be entered solely but never divined, for how else could a mystery ever remain so?

‘All fiction, by definition, is unnecessary,’ thought Anton sourly, ‘with the possible exception of the Bible. There is nothing so deceitful as the deceptions of art.

Russian Character.

He saw his dispensary-maid approaching.  She was new to the job and had any number of complaints. But he let her grumble – it showed she was interested in her work.

Russia – a nation of horse-copers where each rogue passes on his losses to the next man.

He had reached an age when the only subjects in which he was interested were fourteen-year-old girls and four-year-old horses. The man was so dyed in deviltry that his black would take no other hue.

Ivanishche scratched raw scalings from his bald spot with a somewhat hairier forefinger.

‘They’re poisoning off all the extra people, you see, sir, so there’s more land for the masters!’ 

The infinite credulity of the disenthralled serf.

Life is mad, licentious, turbulent and then, ultimately, unutterably dull.

Man is composed of 60% water; water strives to seek its own level; 60% of a Russian’s soul desires to plunge at once over the side of a ferry boat.

Wittingly, she had struck an attitude which perfectly expressed the evils of the self-serving autocracy. Offhand. Cruel. Doctrinaire. Unforgiving. Proud. Rude.

He was inclined to count his kopecks as if they were roubles, then would gamble them all away like an extravagant vagrant.

‘Russia, Russia,’ he said softly. ‘A ziggurat to Babeldom.’

Beware! The Russian bear runs fastest when reaching greater heights.
(It is commonly assumed that since bears have fore legs shorter than hind legs they are disadvantaged in running downhill. This is a fallacy.)

A drunkard: The abandonment of one whose essential expression is that of an intestable lunatic at the limits of idiocy.

His family had lived so close in those days they would stand on each other’s toes and tongues.

Nothing must be done hurriedly but the killing of a louse.

To the infant dreaming philosopher, who preferred to sit at his study books instead of laying the table, his mother would raise her finger and scold: ‘You know what ‘thought’ done – he planted a feather in the midden and ‘thought’ it would grow a hen!’

Yashka’s wispy beard gave him the appearance of a man who had recently attempted to eat a sprat and who has not removed the fishtail from his chin. 

In the middle of the forest, the rail-track was reckoned to be laid so crooked the enginemen would throw crooked logs grown at night into the firebox – or so it was said.

He was overcome by an otiose afternoonish oblomovshchina and smiled as he recalled from his library the title-page of his own copy  of Oblomov, which he had deleted and reinscribed Drowsey’s Recollections of Nothing – a title, he recorded, embossed on one of the false spines of the imaginary books with which Charles Dickens decorated his study.

The Russian land is like my fur-coat (he decided).  One side is the parfleshed, scraped meadow; the other-side is the secret bristling forest.

He regarded lovingly – and with an unfeigned tribal fealty – the powerful, brachycelaphic, over-stuffed cushion of a head. Authentic homo russicus.

(A brothel.) A beady-eyed old beldame opened the door, wiping her mouth with a dish rag. Anton thought : ‘A bawd named Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, drunk with the blood of saints.’

One of Tchékhov’s (Repeatable) Jokes.

A howl of adenoidal laughter erupting from the cadets almost drowned the punchline, but Anton was able to make out the last few words, ‘You said it, not me!’

(To satisfy the curious reader the jest recorded by Tchékhov has been traced: An old muzhik appears at the front desk of his local police station and timorously complains to the gendarme.  ‘A Swiss soldier has stolen my Russian watch,’ he claims. The policeman shakes his fist at the old man in fury. ‘Make sense, grandad,’ the policeman says. ‘A Swiss soldier stealing a Russian watch?  Surely you mean a Russian soldier has stolen your Swiss watch!’ The old muzhik grins slyly. ‘You said it, not me.’ 

Observations and Flourishes.

Anton had a sensation (not unfamiliar) as of being obliged to act a part in private theatricals at short notice; he had not an idea what to say, and yet his cue waited.

Anton recalled that moment when as a young man he had glimpsed the Tsar in person, a great distance off, in a restless province reviewing troops; and he remembered reflecting at the time how he could not deny that, in profile, the Emperor’s incused head resembled the obverse of a large, rather worn silver rouble; a coin, as it were, thinned by too much superstitious rubbing whose usage was to be touched by every hand in the Empire.

If only like a wild creature he could lick himself whole again. 

He took a sedative and sat down.

In the cold, dark, foul garret, he set his mind to retaining the loose collar with a multiple compression clamp designed for aseptic resection of the gut. A recto-tenacular pile-clip, therefore, must perform the office of a cuff link.

As he said to himself, brooding, some things were to be seen but once in the great game, and it was worthwhile seeing them, even if life were the shorter for it.

His belly protruded; a corporation as resilient as an old medicine ball.


The furious, fatuous, semi-moronic longing for the company of women.

A drug addict: Deipotent. Impenitent. Invincible. Insensate. Narcotised.

Somewhere in the Forest Zone tigers prowl to the music of Tchaikowsky.

The veil that covers the face seldom covers beauty.

He swung out his leg and dismounted smoothly, like a well-turned period.


Military Sketches.

Constancy in a long marriage! I tell you, it’s the ultimate perversion!’ The General made a long arm and patted his wife’s withered hand. ‘But then, I’m a complete deviant.’

Idle officers cannot remain long without a war. Soldiers in peacetime are like chimneys in summer – tædium vitæ.

‘In her day a better horse never rose to a fence,’ he muttered.

‘Beware the hind parts of a restive horse and all sides of a priest.’

The little sergeant’s speech broadened as soon as he stood at ease.

Nothing like blood, sir, in horses, dogs and men.’

Tchékhov could imagine the medical officer’s dismay at his dismal posting, as he moped in slow decline, from Knight Hospitaller to then come down, at last, to corns and bunions, idleness and drink.

His endurance of the garrison’s grim entertainments at least compared no worse than his attendance, the year past, at a Christmas party on a padded Violent Ward held for the criminally insane.

In those pages of his journal where he entered his imprest accounts, D-r Tchékhov drew a new line, and itemised his latest expenses – viz. the handout to a battalion commander beseiged by creditors. ‘In Act I,’ he wrote, ‘a respectable man, “X”, borrows a hundred roubles from “A”, and in the course of all four acts he does not pay it back.’ He smiled, and added: ‘To make an enemy is to lend a man money, and ask it of him again.’ To be spared the outgo, the Tsar’s yawning functionary then crossed out ‘expenses, sundry’ and wrote ‘expenses, general’.

Russian Officialdom.

As matters stand, a roaring horse is the only creature which can whistle in the streets without getting locked up.

What a country is ours when, to survive, the righteous man must be ever on his guard, seething with unworthy suspicions, and cannot confide in his most intimate friend, nor in the woman he worships, nor in his own brother!

Anton knew that he, himself, was among the first rank in the long catalogue of enemies of the state under surveillance by the despotic Political Department; not even new-born babes-in-arms were free from suspicion. A dame who kept a forbidden crèche of toddlers had been condemned for harbouring an illegal assembly of infants.

In the Customs Houses they treated a revolver with flippancy, but regarded typewriters as more dangerous than dynamite. No! In these oppressive times, the writer was like a whipped cur and his neck was in the noose of an editorial choke-chain, for there was no subject safe from the Tsar’s forbidding system of mental drill. 

Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the thought that you might live forever and never die. To live one must have something to hang on to. In this country only the body works, not the spirit.

Self-confessional psychoanalysis. 

However glib the psychoanalysis, the truth was that – willing-unwilling – he had persisted, somehow, in confusing his aversion to snakes with the caresses of women. Yet the phobia was so vulgarly commonplace! He knew very well that – despite recognising how unreconciled these foolish conflicting emotions remained – he would not cease to fear the Princess’s glissant arms writhing inside her long sleeves; and would not cease calumniating such women as pythonesses. Yes, Tchékhov confessed, like the pythonesses he condemned he was severe in his strictures. (Tchékhov’s snake phobia – ophidiophobia – was manifested in the mongooses he adored as pets and trained for snake-hunting in the woods.)

He had no wish to remain a moment longer at this dismal spot and dwell upon his own end; his heart suddenly leapt with a passion and he gripped the harness fiercely, shaken by the knowledge that he had no other mortal wish than the desire to probe life ever deeper, to live it to the full, to race the whole gamut of experiences, follies, loves, and sacrifices, to squeeze the orange dry, and then to die quite young, having gone the full compass, the needle pointing home.

I don’t want anything. To die innominate, unperpetuated – as the Great Anon – should be our early resolve,’ he concluded.

Tomorrow there will be another layer of sediment in my soul. Look what a fool stands among you!

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*My grandfather had a number of leftist political idealists as his friends, and one in particular was a subscriber to the Moscow State Publishing House (he was a remittance man who could afford the luxury of ideals).  Grandfather, as an artist and sculptor, was in the habit of bartering his artistic products for gifts; a sketch for a hat or a cigar, say.  A number of these gifts secured the works of Chekhov and Gorki which I read in my early teens.  They made a great impression on me at an early age. (For example, Gorki’s description of a night under the stars is paraphrased in my Man in a Wardrobe text published in the literary journal Ambit 191 in 2008.)

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For excerpts from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya.  

Wednesday 18 March 2015

Winter Rules and Le Diable Boiteux.

Another excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya.  
     In this extract we catch up with him as he leaves the garrison ballroom late at night in answer to the General’s order for the attendance of a doctor at the duelling ground.

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In the lobby Anton saw Mariya’s shoulders shake in solitary weeping. 
     He would very much have liked to take her in his arms ; to relive even for one second the breathless span of their mis-tryst.   
     Tears stained the dark red silk of her basquine ; the skirt’s belt was studded with bright rivets like a prison door. 
     He felt a quickening of the pulse, instinct with desire.
     The General brought his guest the adjutant’s polushubok – a short sheepskin coat – which Anton hastily buttoned on, pausing only to cover his dancing pumps with his galoshes.
     The gasoliers effloresced as the General opened the door.

Winter Rules
To a hungry man with a drunken headache whose every nerve shatters at the sound of breaking glass, the moon can appear, after a banquet, as an unbroken dish of slops above the rooftops. 
     So the moon appeared to D-r Tchékhov.
     Anton stood where he was bid – en prise – a hired hand waiting to be taken.
     A meteor fell and he winced as shooting pains attacked his right arm, but whether this was due to the tightness of the adjutant’s coat or his hacking cough he could not be sure.
     The General shouted for escorts to form an undertaker squad. Odd to see the General in ancient felt top-boots yet still cutting a dash in his swagger uniform.
     Shivering in third-wear uniforms and government-issue camelhair hooded bashlyki, two young ensigns, and the two bruised angel-faced recruits relieved from punishment fatigues – now thoroughly shorn and chastened – unstrapped a stretcher from the ambulance wagon’s kit of nosilki.
     Supreme in his vicegerency, the General beckoned to Tchékhov to fall into line.
     The two ensigns formed the vanguard, each carrying a bull’s-eye kerosin lantern with a reflector which sent lampblack shadows swinging in the moonlight.
     The party advanced through an inner archway and across a court towards an embattled parapet between two gun embrasures where, by a snow-covered merlon, a dark robed penitent stood with bowed head awaiting their approach.
     At the sight of a priest, Anton – as ever – shivered in apprehension. His right shoulder continued to twinge, and a new pain gnawed at his left subclavicular region ; all the conclusive signs, in truth, of the incipient tuberculosis his conscious mind had dismissed.*
     However, he could not fail to be aware of the fact that the inflammation of his leg had not subsided and, in consequence, his limp was, to his burning shame, growing hourly more pronounced.  
     To be outrun by a priest was more than he could bear.
     The General had called for the college chaplain as soon as they were clear of the ballroom, with precise orders to seal a vow from him of absolute discretion.
     Father Abiathar (so named with forlorn expectations by his Bishop) had all the bored manner of a priest who was feeling Mondayish even though it was a Saturday, and his eyes (Anton thought) had the cunning look of a mendicant prior dismissed for simony who had been driven to peddle indulgences in bulk.
     His cincture was tight over his grain-sack belly and he smelled of pickled herring. His breath declared the buffet had allowed him a skinful of the chasse-cousin rotgut they reserved for the clergy.
     ‘Nowadays our fellows crawl out from all sorts of unexpected holes,’ said the General, sotto voce
     The General spoke gravely of their special mission and ordered the priest to bless his six-man snatch-squad. 
      As the only two non-combatants present, Father Abiathar and D-r Tchékhov were assigned to the rear of the column.
      Anton thought : ‘Like flies, a doctor or a priest can enter any house. Just as the the First Functionary of the Empire, the Secret Police Chief Count Shuvalov, had a right of Audience, by day and night, with the Tsar and could walk into the Emperor’s cabinet or bedchamber at any hour without risking his imperial displeasure. In this we share the advantage of the house-fly. We enter unannounced and roam at will.’
      Anton had learned from the General that the priest was called Brimstone by the students and most of the Camp. 
     He was tolerated yet heartily loathed.
     ‘It’s as useless as shooting at ravens as clergy,’ the General had said.
     To augment his meagre salary of one hundred and fifty roubles a year there were innumerable fees this Levite could exact, and he fined soldiers fifteen kopecks who had not communicated in Lent, and likewise extracted dues from the Old Ritualists.
      After he pocketed his fee the priest would wring his hands and lower his eyes like a monk who held the Chair for Abjectness. 
      ‘He speaks as though he would creep into one’s mouth,’ the General had added in disgust.
      The Levitical caste was a subject of continuing fascination for Anton and he committed to memory the details of Brimstone’s broad-brimmed, wideawake hat, his large heavy boots, the patched, dingy brown cassock and coarse hodden-gray over-mantle attached to a worn capuche which clung to his head to protect his ears.  
      Within these fuscous robes Father Abiathar concealed his priestcraft : a portable altar in a satchel, a miracle-working triptych from his collection of tchudotvornikh icons, and a crucifix wrapped in his stole, which he clutched for warmth, his hands thrust up his sleeves.
      A series of steps descended the ramparts to a path leading to the forest edge.
      They stepped out on to a tableland laid with linen-white snow.
      Under the soaring revetment the soldiers’ lamps guided them to the first of the raised logging roads covered in impacted snow.
      To keep his spirits up (and to terrify the body-snatching crew) the General sang, in his staunchest basso profundo, a verse by Nekrasov :

            In the sepulchres, King Winter said,
            With flowers of ice I deck the dead ;
            I freeze the blood in the living veins,
            And in living heads I freeze the brains.

And, as he sang, Anton’s blood, too, seemed to turn to ice as the party struck out from the shelter of the garrison and stepped into the teeth of a north wind.
     ‘In cold like this it’s Winter Rules!’ the General shouted grimly.
      Anton painfully limped ahead, outstripped the column, and drew abreast of the General who linked arms.  The two men put their heads down to face the whip of the wind.
     ‘Ten paces is the minimum but the Prince would have been perfectly within his rights to shoot at eight. At minus twenty degrees your hand’s so palsied by the chills, and the light’s so dim, that – even if you were to find a line of sight to guide your aim – you’d be more likely to wing the other fella’s second!’
     The path – lined with stunted birch and pine – began to fall away sharply. Tchékhov realised the solid going underfoot was due to successive squads of cadets beating a path to the exercise grounds which lay ahead. A deceptive surface was sprinkled with a powdering of diamond-glinting snow.  
     Beneath his feet was a skin of trodden ice which covered the tangled dead sedges, dried cotton grass and other reliquiæ of a muskeg.
     They crossed a boundary rail polished by friction from generations of Academy cadets. Anton noticed the General’s eyes never ceased to search the snow for signs of the duellists’ trail.
     The General found his second wind and, to pass the time, began to tell of sporting contests he had witnessed when he was a cadet. 
     ‘There was young Nezlobin – a very small youth – who had a dispute with his classmate Mychetzky, who was very stout. Words ran high on both sides, so little Nezlobin calls him out. Mychetzky, however, won’t have it. You are so little, he said, that I might fire at you a dozen times without hitting, whereas, the chance is that you may shoot me at the first fire.’ To convince you I don’t want to take advantage of you, says little Nezlobin, you shall chalk my size upon your body, and all hits out of the ring shall go for nothing! 
     Anton laughed with delight. The General paused and offered a swig from his hip-flask which Anton declined.
     ‘My God, you’re an incorporated temperance society!’ exploded the General. 
     But, under the pretext of coughing into his handkerchief, Anton managed to take a deep pull from Old Vańuška’s berézovka.  
      Soon his veins were on fire.
      ‘They were always sparring,’ resumed the General. ‘Mychetzky broke his ankle once, falling off his horse. Blamed Nezlobin for crossing his path on an exercise so they set to wrangling once more. So Nezlobin challenges him and Mychetzky accepted.  But being very lame, Mychetzky requests that he might have a prop. Suppose, says he, I lean against this road sign. Nezlobin, then points to a farther sign at a cross-roads a verst distant and says, With pleasure, on condition that I may lean against the next.’  The joke settled the quarrel. A pity the same could not be said of the Prince.’


Le Diable Boiteux.

Curiously, at that moment, they, too, reached a junction where their path joined a corduroy road from the forest which led to the garrison by a lower route. Here, at last, two sets of footprints were visible, entering and leaving a gate giving on to the exercise grounds.   
     The old frontier scout released a grunt of satisfaction.
     ‘The Prince’s footsteps. Small heels. Impression of spurs in the deeper places. Let’s follow the scent.’
      The single set of tracks leading to the butts was regularly paced yet the returning tracks were of a different character, suggesting the dragging left foot of a limping man, so the General concluded.
     ‘Le Diable Boiteux!’ Anton whispered.
     Most fascinating of all, the two sets of tracks became three at a point where they passed close to a prostrate pine and other fagotage and led beyond, across a terrain broken by hairy tussocks and the fallen shafts of reed clumps. 
     To Anton, the springiness of their prints on the quaggy snow suggested the mossy ground and slippery pine needles underneath.
     ‘Ahah!’ exclaimed the General. ‘Enter Kulikov.’
     ‘How can you be so sure?’ urged Tchékhov, immediately rushing to the defence of the young Class-Lance-Corporal Pomidorchik.  
     The bearer party halted.
     ‘Understand this, Antosha,’ the General knelt beside the meeting place, ‘the first set of tracks pauses here, heels close together, then continues in the same direction, suggesting the acknowledgement by a senior of a junior officer’s salute.’ 
     ‘And...?’
     He straightened, stiffly, and continued.
     ‘Do-ye-see? Kulikov takes the shortcut through the forest, meets up with his adversary, salutes, crosses the tracks from the rear and joins the Prince on the lefthand side.’
     ‘I don’t see how...’
     ‘Regulations. Quote : When officers are walking together, the junior officer should at all times position himself on the left so the senior officer’s saluting arm is disengaged. See?’
     ‘Perfectly. Our Imperial Table of Ranks is even written on the remotest Russian snow.’
     Anton rubbed his eyes. He saw only – imperfectly – that the muddle of the tracks in the snow was like a profusion of those slovenly typographical misprints on a galley proof with which he was so familiar – and which he was too fatigued to correct. 
     And Kulikov?  Where was he?
     ‘In quod. Under lock and key.’

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*    In fact, as was later proved, the right lung was badly affected, and emphysema was found to have spread to the left lung. At the end of Tchékhov’s life a relapse of pleurisy was complicated by an intestinal catarrh which indicated that the tuberculosis had spread to the abdominal region.

†    ‘Father of Excellence” - see Samuel xxiii, 9.