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To tell the truth, the writing of my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv,  was of such a lengthy gestation (since my days as a febrile sixteen-year-old, actually*), I can no longer tell whether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 days, Tchékhov 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.