A Visit to the Pushkin Club . . . destination 46 Ladbroke Grove W11

Of course, her first emotion, when she learned her husband was living with his Russian interpreter, was utter relief.  No longer was he to be found brooding in his garden room, amber decanter glinting by his side, wearing that wintry smile whenever their eyes met.
          Then new feelings of resentment seized her. Looking from her study window to his room below, she could see, under the lattice of the glass roof, her husband’s whorled crown of dark shaggy hair – thinning in the centre, she noticed – where he had slumped forward, beard on chest, feigning sleep.  Playing possum was invariably his ruse when unwelcome questions remained unanswered.  And those he had answered had been matters-of-fact, cursorily conveyed with his face turned from her.  
          He had said no more than that he was living in his unleased town flat with a young woman named Nadezhda. He called her Nadia, a Russian from Saratov who had never visited the West before. He said she was unworldly, and in the city she was endangered by a childlike inexperience. At heart, he said, she was an unsophisticated, provincial girl who was prey to primitive superstitions. Without too much thought he had bestowed on her his protection. 
          ‘All that you imagine is probably true,’ Leon had said. Beyond that he would say nothing more.
          She slammed the window and saw his eyelids flicker. So be it, she decided, if he chose to retreat behind a carapace of calculated indifference, then she would contrive her manner to be no different from his – yet, she vowed, before the week was ended it would be her intention to unbeard a lifetime of manifold deceptions.

Under the heading of Russian mentalität, Miriam wrote, Izlivat
dushu – ‘pouring out of the soul; the mingling of two lovers’ souls,
for example’;   Stradanyie – ‘mental suffering due to unrequited love
or coarseness of lover or spouse’; Toska – ‘melancholy homesickness’;
Grekh – ‘a sense of sin only removed when sinner reaches a state of
highly emotional repentance’; and, finally,  Tyomniye sili – ‘dark
or sinister, evil forces’; the latter she thrice underlined.

•

The evening was cool so the out-of-season dark wool cape she threw over her shoulders granted her a plausible concealment to melt into the dusk.  Thus seven-o’clock saw Miriam striding after two distant linked shadows as they crossed Leinster Square.  This quarter of London was familiar to Miriam and she found no difficulty in keeping pace with the couple as they turned the corner of the Westbourne terraces and entered Ladbroke Grove.
          She halted and drew back at the gateway of a peeling townhouse set in a neglected garden.  A doorbell sounded and Miriam heard a gutteral murmur in Russian as her husband and his paramour were admitted by a hulking grizzled usher.  
          When the door closed Miriam inspected the illuminated bell escutcheon. ‘The Pushkin Club.’
          Standing in an angle of the garden, in a quadrant of shade, Miriam found she could observe – through a slit in the shutters – the company of discussants within.

          This is what she saw.  A fine, high-ceilinged drawing room with flaking lemon coloured plaster. (She thought: ‘ “Lemon Peel” - wasn’t that the title of an unwritten sketch by Chekhov?’ It was.)  There was a large copper samovar on the sidetable and a framed photograph of Osip Mandelstam.  A frayed electrical flex holding a shaded bulb was suspended from the ceiling’s crumbling plaster rose. 

          Sub rosa, in front of the vast library stacks which formed the far wall, a half circle of ill-assorted chairs had been drawn up to face the window.  A row of émigrés with expectant faces drank tea from unmatched china teacups which appeared to be the only items they’d saved from their country houses before their decadent burzhuaznyi drawing rooms were converted by the Bolsheviks into grain stores. 
          There was much laughter and clapping when an actor wearing side-whiskers and an old, worn frock coat darted between the chairs and stood before the window. 
          ‘A monologue in one act by Anton Pav’lich Chekhov,’ he announced in a heavily accented, corncrake rasp.  There was scattered applause.  The mock lecture commenced.
          Leon’s hand, she saw, was resting on Nadia’s thigh, but when the actor came to the passage where the deranged hen-pecked soi-disant lecturer wrings his hands and rails across the footlights (‘ ... my wife runs a boarding school. Well, not exactly a boarding school, but something in the nature of one. My wife doesn’t give parties and never has anyone to dinner. She’s a very stingy, bad-tempered, shrewish kind of lady, so no-one ever comes to see us. If only I could run away from that stupid, petty, spiteful harridan of a wife who’s made my life a torment ...’) Miriam saw her husband reach out and grip his mistress’s knee. Nadia, however, did not smile. 

•

Crossing the lobby, Miriam’s husband laid his hand on Nadia’s shoulder and gave a coarse laugh. 
          ‘In the right hands it could be hilarious,’ Leon said, and snickered once more.
Nadia disengaged his hand as she opened the door.
          ‘Tell me, Lvyonok,’ said Nadia, inconsequentially, pronouncing the words thickened, as though her teeth were grinding on ice, ‘who is that Amerikanetz whose name sounds like a sneeze?’  They closed the outside door before Miriam heard Leon’s answer.

•

From the garden room below Miriam heard Leon’s discreet, suppressed sneeze.  The sound grated. The truth was that the frequent muffled explosions did, indeed, sound remarkably like Kissinger! and, in time, the apprehension as one waited for the next convulsion began to attack one’s nerves.

•

On the telephone she could hear Laurence riffling the pages, then he quoted, ‘She was carrying some of those repulsive flowers,’ and crowed in recognition. ‘It’s an ugly colour,’ he read, ‘that’s because it’s Russki semiotics for an unfaithful woman, it’s central to the text, don’t you see?’ Then she heard a carillon of mordant laughter. ‘Forgive the emotional histrionicism, but I warned Leon ...’  But Miriam hung up.

•

She had taken her secateurs and gone straightaway into the garden.  First the Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and plumes of Golden Rod, then the yellowish Lilies (Enchantment), and finally she chose the yellow Aster ; not the species plant but the low-bred cultivars that had strayed to the kitchen door – the Asterasters – for these she considered the most fitting tribute of all from the philosophaster, poetaster and cinéaster she knew herself to be.

Extracts from The Cheated Eye,

Part Six of Sister Morphine by

Catherine Eisner (2008)

See The Girl on the Number 52 Omnibus . . . destination Ladbroke Grove . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-girl-on-number-fifty-two-omnibus.html

•

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, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

D-r Tchékhov: A Textbook Case . . . Prof. Yanychev’s Three-Cornered Duel

I have mentioned on a number of occasions the existence of the manuscript, A Textbook Case, putatively by Chekhov, which fell into the possession of my father at the end of WWII, and whose pages relate 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.  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html       
        Evidently, my father believed the ms to be the long-lost novel to which Chekhov referred in a letter to Pleshcheev on 9 Feb. 1888; understood by scholars to be a fugitive work in progress but never found: ‘Ah, if you knew what a plot I have in my noddle! What marvellous women! What funerals . . . !’

        
        Well, a funeral there was, for this extract from the ms – An Unwreathed Burial – may be read here . . . 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
        . . .  but, before a funeral there must be a death, and that passage from the ms has yet to be seen by a wider readership. So here it is, with an expanded exegesis on my father’s part to explain D-r Tchékhov’ allusion to The Three-Cornered Duel Problem posed by Professor Grigoriy Yevseyevich Yanychev (1804-1867), mathematician and leading 19th Century proponent of probability theory (his gifted young protégé was the distinguished algebraist, A. A. Markov the elder).
        Note: the idiosyncratic orthography throughout is my father’s.

A Textbook Case

In the dead of winter, for a Muscovite medico-anthropologist to stumble across a tableau mort frozen rigid in an attitude of heroic redundancy was to bow to an unwelcome knowledge that the catalogue of diseases inhabiting the General’s ill-favoured region was apparently not complete.
  “Make way!” shouted the komendant. “Field-surgeon forward!”
   Under the doctor’s generalship the party advanced.
   “A textbook case,” mused the General. “A perfect diagramma for a duel imprinted on the snow.”
  The undertaker crew halted a sazhen from the corpse.
   Again was uttered another dreadful dissyllable.  “Umer!” Anton heard an ensign exclaim. “Dead!” O! Nicolai Chudotvórets! Wonder Worker! Saint of God!”
  Anton thought of the morgue under the Moscow Medical Faculty building. 
  “Alas,” he reflected, “what is terrible is not the corpses, but the fact that I am no longer terrified of them.”
  “We must live by the quick and not with the dead.”  The General answered the unspoken thought.
  “First we’ll review the stricken field. A posthumous procès-verbal may well be required to satisfy our masters. That job falls to you,” the General ordained. 
  “HQ’s going to have me strung up for this, but,” and he gripped Anton’s shoulders compellingly, “while a noose is still running there’s still time to pray.”
  He broke away with a bitter laugh.
  “There’s the barriere.” He pointed to an odd shaped piece of wood stuck in the snow.
  “Take note. Cannoneer Kulikov’s shin-guard for a starting post.”
  In the moonlight the impressed footsteps were quite clear. The old frontier scout essayed a rapid reconstruction of the victim’s last moments, intent upon unriddling the monomachian rituals performed by insulter and insulted, by slayer and slain. 
  This was not the first time the General had smelled powder. 
  “Eight paces. Trod by the Offender. The Challenger proposes distance so, naturally, the Prince faces the butts – to be sure he gains the advantage of a co-ordinate. It assists the eye to draw a bead on a marker. Then it’s . . .  ‘Stations, Gentlemen, Attend!’ The Prince would have conceded to Pomidorchik. So Kulikov steps forward. ‘Aim! Fire!’  The Offender fires first.  The Aggressor has to make himself as small as possible – remember Mychetzky?* – by standing sideways, right hand on his chest, presenting the most difficult target. Dammit! Then what?  This problem is worse than Professor Yanychev’s Three-Cornered Duel!”
   There was a muffled report as the General blew his nose and resumed.
  “According to the Duello honour code, the rôles would then reverse, and the Prince would’ve returned fire whilst Kulikov stood his ground. Unless it was a lucky first shot I can’t believe Kulikov’s marksmanship could strike a mortal blow from that distance. He’d never handled a rod until today. Look! Five steps to the barriere, his pace is unbroken, he doesn’t pause to fire, just keeps walking in the return direction!  There’s the puzzle!” 
  Reluctantly, the General’s eyes swept the combat area until his gaze rested on the dark enigma that broke the surface of the field.
  “Khvatit! Dovol'no! No more! Enough!” groaned the General. “Proceed, mon cher docteur, let our post-mortem begin.” 
        Anton braced himself, eyes half-shut, resisting full immersion in his drug-induced repose. He knew with certainty, as he struggled to withstand the narcotic’s serpentine embrace, that chance was beckoning him to draw near to witness one of the last and purest fountainheads of the empire’s accursed sentimental morbidity, frozen forever at its furthermost source ; that providence suffered him – and he alone – to be present in such close attendance at the pallida Mors of panslavonic Wertherism; to witness the fleurettes and gasconnades of an age of literary flâneurs wither in the Russian snows; to certify once and for all their extinction in all their tragic pathos.
       A doctor, as everyone should know, enjoys being at a duel. 


* For the General’s recollections of duels between the cadet Mychetzky and his classmate Nezlobin, see Winter Rules and Le Diable Boiteux at :
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html       

[ End of extract. ]  

Lèse-majesté – Yanychev’s Three-Cornered Duel.

Following the death of Aleksandr Pouschkin in a duel (January, 1837) fought with his wife Natalya’s admirer, Baron D’Anthès, the brilliant young mathematician, Grigoriy Yevseyevich Yanychev devised the satirical problem of the three-cornered duel, incorporating Aleksandr Pouschkin [A], the Baron [B] and, a second anonymous lover, the Count [C ]. This squib was considered by the Tsarist Court to have defamed the aristocracy and, in consequence, Yanychev was banished as a poselenets to Archangel (an exile-settler status for transgressors who did not fall into the harsher category of katorzhnik or convict).

Pistols for Three

“It is highly probable,” said Natalya to her lover, “that in a three-cornered duel only one of my three admirers will survive. Therefore, my dear Baron, so you alone may live, I beseech you to miss with your first shot.”

(1) Natalya began by assuming that the Baron was acquainted with the relative proficiency of his rivals.  This is how she calculated that B would be the sole surviver, and not A, her husband or C, her rejected lover : 

(a) If B kills A, it is C’s turn to fire.  There is a 3/4 chance that he will  kill B.  If he misses, the Baron has a second shot. There is a 2/3 chance that he will now kill the Count and secure the love of Natalya. 

(b) If B misses Aleksandr, C will fire at A next. (This is certain, because if C fires at B and kills him, he will next be killed in turn ; while if C fires at B and misses him, A will equally kill C next, as the more dangerous of his opponents.) 

     (i) If C misses A, Aleksandr will kill C.  Now the Baron, with his second shot, has a 2/3 chance of being the sole survivor.

     (ii) If C kills A.  B again has a 2/3 chance of being the sole survivor.

 Summarising these chances, the Baron’s chances of being sole survivor

 are :      ⅔   •  ¼   •   ⅔  (a)

     plus  ⅓   •  ¼   •   ⅔  (b)  (i)

     plus  ⅓   •  ¾   •   ⅔  (b)  (ii)

               i.e. are ⅓ in all. 

(2) Natalya, of course, also calculated the Baron’s chances of survival were he so foolish as to fire first at the Count.

     (a) If the Baron kills the Count, he is forthwith killed by Aleksandr.

     (b) If the Baron misses the Count, the Count fires (as before) at                         Aleksandr.  The Baron’s chances are now as in (i) (b) above :                         i.e. 2/9 in all.

(3) A secret smile then plays on Natalya lips as the logical conclusion finally dawns on her. Suppose the Baron makes sure of missing!  Now, since the Count will next (as before) fire at Alexandr first, the Baron’s chances of survival become 2/3.  Hence, Natalya’s message to Baron D’Anthès was to make sure of missing her husband with his first shot.

Precursor of The Three-Cornered Duel.

Incidentally, Yanychev claimed, in his defence to spare his banishment, that this puzzle was inspired not by Pouschkin but by a Three-Cornered Duel fought between a midshipmen, a boatswain and a purser's steward, described by an English seafarer. It is indeed a fact that such a duel was published in 1836, a year before Pouschkin’s death. [An extract follows.]

       “You have grossly insulted this gentleman,” said Mr Biggs, in continuation; “and notwithstanding all your talk of equality, you are afraid to give him satisfaction—you shelter yourself under your quarter-deck.”
       “Mr Biggs," replied our hero, who was now very wroth, “I shall go on shore directly we arrive at Malta. Let you and this fellow put on plain clothes, and I will meet you both—and then I'll show you whether I am afraid to give satisfaction.”
       “One at a time,” said the boatswain. 
       “No, sir, not one at a time, but both at the same time — I will fight both, or none. If you are my superior officer, you must descend,” replied Jack, with an ironical sneer, "to meet me, or I will not descend to meet that fellow, whom I believe to have been little better than a pickpocket.”
       This accidental hit of Jack’s made the purser's steward turn pale as a sheet, and then equally red. He raved and foamed amazingly, although he could not meet Jack’s indignant look, who then turned round again.
       “Now, Mr Biggs, is this to be understood, or do you shelter yourself under your forecastle?”
       “I'm no dodger,” replied the boatswain, “and we will settle the affair at Malta.” . . . 
       . . . Mr Biggs having declared that he would fight, of course had to look out for a second, and he fixed upon Mr Tallboys, the gunner, and requested him to be his friend. Mr Tallboys, who had been latterly very much annoyed by Jack’s victories over him in the science of navigation, and therefore felt ill-will towards him, consented; but he was very much puzzled how to arrange that three were to fight at the same time, for he had no idea of there being two duels; so he went to his cabin and commenced reading. Jack, on the other hand, dared not say a word to Jolliffe on the subject; indeed there was no one in the ship to whom he could confide but Gascoigne: he therefore went to him, and although Gascoigne thought it was excessively ‘infra dig’ of Jack to meet even the boatswain, as the challenge had been given there was no retracting: he therefore consented, like all midshipmen, anticipating fun, and quite thoughtless of the consequences.

“Equal angles subtended by equal sides.”

The second day after they had been anchored in Valette Harbour, the boatswain and gunner, Jack and Gascoigne, obtained permission to go on shore. Mr Easthupp, the purser’s steward, dressed in his best blue coat, with brass buttons and velvet collar, the very one in which he had been taken up when he had been vowing and protesting that he was a gentleman, at the very time that his hand was abstracting a pocket-book, went up on the quarter-deck, and requested the same indulgence, but Mr Sawbridge refused, as he required him to return staves and hoops at the cooperage. Mesty also, much to his mortification, was not to be spared. This was awkward, but it was got over by proposing that the meeting should take place behind the cooperage at a certain hour, on which Mr Easthupp might slip out, and borrow a portion of the time appropriated to his duty, to heal the breach in his wounded honour. So the parties all went on shore, and put up at one of the small inns to make the necessary arrangements.
       Mr Tallboys then addressed Mr Gascoigne, taking him apart while the boatswain amused himself with a glass of grog, and our hero sat outside teasing a monkey.
       “Mr Gascoigne,” said the gunner, “I have been very much puzzled how this duel should be fought, but I have at last found it out. You see that there are three parties to fight; had there been two or four there would have been no difficulty, as the right line or square might guide us in that instance; but we must arrange it upon the triangle in this.”
       Gascoigne stared; he could not imagine what was coming.
       “Are you aware, Mr Gascoigne, of the properties of an equilateral triangle?”
       “Yes,” replied the midshipman, “that it has three equal sides — but what the devil has that to do with the duel?”
       “Everything, Mr Gascoigne,” replied the gunner; “it has resolved the great difficulty: indeed, the duel between three can only be fought upon that principle. You observe," said the gunner, taking a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and making a triangle on the table, "in this figure we have three points, each equidistant from each other: and we have three combatants—so that, placing one at each point, it is all fair play for the three: Mr Easy, for instance, stands here, the boatswain here, and the purser’s steward at the third corner. Now, if the distance is fairly measured, it will be all right.”
       “But then,” replied Gascoigne, delighted at the idea; “how are they to fire?” 
       “It certainly is not of much consequence,” replied the gunner, “but still, as sailors, it appears to me that they should fire with the sun; that is, Mr Easy fires at Mr Biggs, Mr Biggs fires at Mr Easthupp, and Mr Easthupp fires at Mr Easy; so that you perceive that each party has his shot at one, and at the same time receives the fire of another.”
       Gascoigne was in ecstasies at the novelty of the proceeding, the more so as he perceived that Easy obtained every advantage by the arrangement.
       "Upon my word, Mr Tallboys, I give you great credit; you have a profound mathematical head, and I am delighted with your arrangement. Of course, in these affairs, the principals are bound to comply with the arrangements of the seconds, and I shall insist upon Mr Easy consenting to your excellent and scientific proposal.”
       Gascoigne went out, and pulling Jack away from the monkey, told him what the gunner had proposed, at which Jack laughed heartily.
       The gunner also explained it to the boatswain, who did not very well comprehend, but replied—
       “I dare say it’s all right—shot for shot, and d—n all favours.” The parties then repaired to the spot with two pairs of ship’s pistols, which Mr Tallboys had smuggled on shore; and, as soon as they were on the ground, the gunner called Mr Easthupp out of the cooperage. In the meantime, Gascoigne had been measuring an equilateral triangle of twelve paces—and marked it out. Mr Tallboys, on his return with the purser’s steward, went over the ground, and finding that it was “equal angles subtended by equal sides,” declared that it was all right. Easy took his station, the boatswain was put into his, and Mr Easthupp, who was quite in a mystery, was led by the gunner to the third position.
       “But, Mr Tallboys,” said the purser's steward, “I don’t understand this. Mr Easy will first fight Mr Biggs, will he not?”
       “No," replied the gunner, “this is a duel of three. You will fire at Mr Easy, Mr Easy will fire at Mr Biggs, and Mr Biggs will fire at you. It is all arranged, Mr Easthupp.”
       “But,” said Mr Easthupp, “I do not understand it. Why is Mr Biggs to fire at me? I have no quarrel with Mr Biggs.”
       “Because Mr Easy fires at Mr Biggs, and Mr Biggs must have his shot as well.”
       “If you have ever been in the company of gentlemen, Mr Easthupp," observed Gascoigne, “you must know something about duelling.”
       “Yes, yes, I've kept the best company, Mr Gascoigne, and I can give a gentleman satisfaction; but —”
       “Then, sir, if that is the case, you must know that your honour is in the hands of your second, and that no gentleman appeals.”
       “Yes, yes, I know that, Mr Gascoigne; but still I’ve no quarrel with Mr Biggs, and therefore, Mr Biggs, of course you will not aim at me.”
       “Why you don’t think that I am going to be fired at for nothing,” replied the boatswain; “no, no, I'll have my shot anyhow.”
       “But at your friend, Mr Biggs?”
       “All the same, I shall fire at somebody; shot for shot, and hit the luckiest.”

[Please forgive the lengthy extracts but I have followed the Oulipoian principle of the footnotes being of substantially greater depth than the cited text.)

============================================

For other excerpts from Tchékhov’s as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see:
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

‘Carol’ . . . In the Heat of the Moment and Other Febrile Automata

How curious to read that the genesis of Carol (the current acclaimed movie adapted from the famously transgressive novel, The Price of Salt, 1952) is to be found in a fever induced by chicken pox, the symptomatic high temperature under which Patricia Highsmith plotted her synopsis of a story that soon ‘flowed from the end of my pen as if from nowhere,’ as she later wrote.

Patricia Highsmith

Works That Write Themselves.

From which flows another curious thought because this distinguished American novelist prompts a memory of her eminent compatriot, William James, Doctor of Medicine (1870) and psychologist (and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience) who so subtly observed, ‘For aught we know to the contrary, 103 or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favourable temperature for truths to geminate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.’

How true. In the feverish heat of the moment certainly a number of great works of the imagination have been brought forth. One thinks also of Sir Walter Scott who, in 1819, under the influence of laudanum wrote The Bride of Lammermoor and claimed afterwards, on reading the proofs, that he did not recognise a single character, incident or conversation found in the book. 

Detektiv ‘Zherebets’ Houyhnhnmkin.

My as-yet-unpublished novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, was written in the same mood of involuntary volition, and similarly transcribed from an undisputed source. Englished in the spirit of the original, the often bawdy text makes great play of the young doctor’s febrile condition, his senses betrayed by a dangerous rise in body temperature akin to that of the rectal temperature of a horse having just undergone routine exercise:

Anton reflected that perhaps, after all, he had overlooked his affinity with horses; certainly, as the forenoon approached, his temperature was again rising to meet that of an average healthy horse which, if he were not mistaken, was some two degrees higher than that intermittent phenomenon, his own normal body heat.                                                                 He had hæmorrhaged again only the month past – profoundly from his right lung – practically a shtoff of disembogued blood pouring over his beard.                                                                                                                           He had recently in the mornings become aware of his unnaturally low temperature on rising, his excessive fatigue and his progressive failure of appetite. Yet now, as afternoon approached, his temperature had risen (a febrile state exceeding 40 degrees Celsius) and pulse quickened to over a hundred beats per minute. Under his jacket, sweat trickled from his armpit.  Profuse axillary sweating embarrassed him and he feared his condition smelt.                                                                                                               As for his excessive body heat, the ætiology of the cauma and desudation he knew intimately; long ago the prognosis had held that his compensatory emphysema would grow worse by remedy, and any remissions he could expect in the variations associated with the chronicity of his disease were now complicated by his intestinal catarrh, caused by a change in the water.     

In a grim diversion to displace the pain, Tchékhov feverishly imagined the very real prospect of his personal physician, D-r Klebnikov, surviving him to compose a waspish clinical footnote to his obituary for the edification of his medical colleagues: 

‘Manifestly, the observation has not been made in hagiographical writing on Tchékhov that the symptomatological signs of his two conditions – pulmonary tuberculosis and acute morphinism – were inextricably combined and compounded.  The co-existing conditions were presented, for example, in feelings of tremendous heat and sensations of terrifying cold, particularly during periods of withdrawal from the opiate. The giddiness to which Tchékhov on occasion referred could well have been a mild case of cinchonism brought about by an overdose of quinine, which, in the absence of an informed dual diagnosis, was not identified.  His meconeuropathia was further complicated by hyperæsthesiæ  induced by mood-elevating morphine derivatives.’

Tchékhov’s eyes are not closed to the truth of his opiate dependancy. In characteristically rueful condemnation of his elevated temperature,  Tchékhov at his lowest ebb begins to style himself Detektiv Zherebets [‘Stallion’] Houyhnhnmkin, evidently a bitter self-lacerating commentary on his drug-impaired virility. (If Tchékhov in this passage of D-r Tchékhov Detektiv assumes the sardonical appellation, ‘Stallion’ or ‘Stud’, then we must assume the reference recalls those envious jottings in his published literary notebook : ‘A vet. belongs to the stallion class of people.’ )

Fate Knocks at the Door.

And in the same opiate-induced fever, of course, Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, a poem revealed to him as fully conceived, requiring merely its automatic transcription, until – at Line 54 – the notorious Person From Porlock arrived to knock on the door and break the spell.

This fateful distraction from the sublime oneiric prosody granted a dope-fiend reminds me of my good friend, The Great Poet, who wrote to tell me he had altered his will . . .

Have been making some small adjustments to my Will, and have added that you are to have first crack at my poetry books. [He was at Westminster School and won the Gumbleton Prize for English Verse.] No big deal [he added] but you might find something of interest, but not yet a while hopefully.

I wrote at once to record my appreciation . . .

I am genuinely flattered, but in my present mood I fear I shall predecease you. Should this not be the case, however, I shall make every effort to seek out your forwarding address and have your books sent on to you.                You will have a forwarding address, won’t you?                                               In Ghana it is believed that a person who dies prematurely can appear in a distant town and continue their life there.                                              Saman twén-twén the Ghanaians call them. Custom asserts that the ‘Dead-but-Leaving-People’ can be met only by someone who has not heard of their death.                                                                                                       So an accommodation address in Porlock might be the thing.                        This explains why so many people swear they saw X ‘only the other day’ and learn to their horror that X died some months before.                            Why is life made so mysterious when the explanations are really very simple? I shall be in Porlock if I predecease you.                                                       Should you lose your memory then we can meet there because you will not remember you heard of my death.                                                                  It is possible, though, that a poet even with a seriously impaired memory will remember that fateful person from Porlock . . .

It was on these terms that we agreed to meet in the Afterlife, an agreement, I may add, sealed during the worst bout of flu I’ve ever endured in my life, when I was in the throes of a high fever and running a barely tolerable temperature practically off the scale at 103°F.  

The tragedy is that my dear poet friend predeceased me, as he predicted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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. 

For the origins of this text see my previous posting, D-r  Tchékhov, Detektiv.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html

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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. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

The Irreconcilable Sententiousness of Libertine Old Masters . . .

In the collected works of Anton Chekhov the short story, Imeniny (The Name-Day Party), is often singled out as a remarkably faithful portrait of a pregnant woman: the highs and lows of a loyal, sensitive wife betrayed by a heedless, self-regarding husband.

However . . . never mind that this tale has been described by Chekhovian scholars as a most profound ‘tour de force’ for his account of the psychopathology of the late stages of the third trimester – the discomfort, the hypersensitivity, the gravid leadenness – we should first remember that Dr. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a male clinician and even his talent for empathetic vraisemblance had obvious boundaries.

On the other hand, his profound empathy cannot be doubted in the shadow-twin of this story, Pripadok (An Attack of Nerves), both published in the same year . . . significantly, Year Zero, as defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values) of 1888.

Compare the two. It’s a striking contrast, as though one story has prompted the other. In the former, the fallow connubial bed cannot excuse the stirrings of infidelity in a swaggering indifferent husband; in the latter, a virginal young law student, Vassilyev, reluctantly on a night’s carouse with two comrades intent on inducting him into the ‘pleasures’ of brothels, experiences a moral crisis, and asks: ‘Is the debauching of prostitutes not a crime? Is it not as great an evil as slave-owning, rape or murder?’  

With strict adherence to his anti-pedagogic method, Chekhov follows his own advice and asked the questions without seeking answers to them: his stories thence characteristically become exercises in propositional logic strewn with premises but deficient of any conclusions.

In my novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, I seek mischievously  to correct this tendency towards moral ambivalence with the syllogistic reasoning of my conflicted antihero sometimes pursued to unwelcome logical proofs that appear axiomatic, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html

Tchékhov paid the ferriage for the rivercrossing and the survey party embarked, stumbling in the unearthly stealing polar dusk.
   ‘There is no hurry,’ Anton remarked breezily, as the ferryman took his arm. ‘Charon waits for all!’
   A putrid smell arose as the waves sucked at the stern ; for the river had been turbulent in recent months and, as it flowed along, like a ferocious animal, it gnawed and ate away the fast-ice clutching the banks.
   Small chunks of ice rapped on the hull. Shuddering as the northerly shook him by the throat, Anton clenched the forward-rail and searched the midafternoon murk for a closing shore.
   (‘Finita la commedia!’ his heart cried, ‘and end this burdensome daylong travail.’)
   A wreath entwined with withered leaves of laurel was sucked by on the swirling current. A melancholy syllogism occurred to him :

Man is composed of 60% water ;

water strives to seek its own level ; 

60% of a man’s soul desires to plunge at once over the side of a ferry boat.

Also, for more probings into this field of enquiry, see the contradictions hitherto unremarked in the ‘classic prose’ of an eminent English syllogistic rationalist at this link:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012_04_01_archive.html

Do As I Say. Not As I Do.

So lately I’ve found Chekhov’s abbreviated propositional method has grown tiresome and his ‘classic prose’ is now seen, to my jaundiced eye, to express a sort of inverted sententiousness.

I invite you, therefore, to examine closely the following passage from Chekhov’s An Attack of Nerves and the additional quotations that follow; with the challenge that you, too, reader-of-literary-old-masters, should consider a revaluation of values.

[Vassilyev thought] ‘. . . What is the use of their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of [the two] brigands [who] murdered a beggar in a forest . . . After murdering a man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were [still observing a holy fast]. In the same way [these student comrades], after buying women, go their way imagining that they are artists and men of science. . . .’ 
    ‘Listen!’ he said sharply and angrily. ‘Why do you come here? Is it possible you don't understand how horrible it is? Your medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you! Can’t you understand that? Isn't it horrible to murder, two of you, three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! . . .’ 

Two years earlier (1886), one should recall, Chekhov wrote a cautionary letter to his brother Nikolai reprimanding him for his pleasure-seeking in Moscow’s lower depths, counselling him to become a more cultured person since he had within him the talent to be at ease in the company of ‘educated people . . . Talent has brought you into such a circle, you belong to it, but … you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate between cultured people and [drinking cronies] . . .’ Anton implores Nikolai to ‘smash the vodka bottle . . .’

Anton continues to moralise with self-referential gravity on the duties of a cultured artist.

They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct . . . What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow … They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood . . .  For they want mens sana in corpore sano.

Mens sana in corpore sano? Did Anton Chekhov truly believe that for a supreme artist the ennobling of the sexual instinct was an attainable ideal? Certainly, the innumerable amatory adventures – including his own – of so many old masters do not bear close scrutiny in support of his proposition.

Chekhov’s Formula for Extrapolating the Mortality of Fallen Women. 

According to a Los Angeles Times reviewer, Georges Simenon created a scandale à la mode by telling two different interviewers that from age 13 he had slept with 10,000 women, of whom 8,000 were prostitutes. By applying Chekhov’s equation, we can calculate that Simenon, the master of homicidal psychopathology, had himself, before his death aged 86, killed at least sixteen women.


Chekhov expresses his computation thus: ‘If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you!’

On this sensitive matter, a Chekhov aficionado states in the London Guardian daily of 1 March 2013: 

It starts in 1873, when the teenage Chekhov visited a brothel in his home town of Taganrog and continues until 1898 when his relationship with the actress Olga Knipper began . . . The picture that emerges is of a man who, over the course of a couple of decades, enjoyed at least two-dozen love affairs of varying intensity – some extremely passionate, some casual, some lasting many years, and some that were clearly going on simultaneously – and who, it’s also clear from his letters, continued to be a regular visitor to brothels in Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

I am reminded of this confraternity of literary men consecrated to unswerving faith in the undemanding tenets of their irreconcilable sententiousness when I attended a wedding recently and heard from the altar, at the bridegroom’s request, a recitation of Siempre (‘Always’) by Pablo Neruda.

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

This boast invites a challenge, coming as it does from an arch philanderer and from a husband who in pursuit of other women abandoned an inconvenient wife and their ailing infant daughter, a choice of moral worth little different from that of Rainer Maria Rilke whose daughter was similarly abandoned before the age of one.

More than this, these proponents of doublethink, propagating their creed of irreconcilable sententiousness, appear to give little thought to the consequences of their libertinage.

As it is, 125 years have elapsed since Chekhov first posited his theory of venereal disease in terms of quantifiable culpability, and medical research into its incidence and prevention has advanced apace. Nevertheless, screening in Great Britain in the last decade suggests that as many as one in 10 sexually active men has the sexually transmitted infection Chlamydia without knowing it. The figures are in line with similar studies of sexually active young women, which indicate that one in 10 also has the infection without knowing it. 

‘Man Wants Woman! Every Man Wants a Woman! So Natural!’

Possibly One in 10 has the infection without knowing it. It would follow, then, that with the level of promiscuity that Neruda embraces in his magnanimous welcome to the 1,100 lovers of the Love-of-His-Life (‘Bring them all to where I am waiting for you . . .’) over one hundred of them, and undoubtedly his inamorata, will be infected.

Cervical smear showing Chlamydia trachomatis in the vacuoles. 

Mens sana in corpore sano? To return to first principles and the irreconcilability of sententiousness attendant on the licentiousness of old masters. Question. Were the nostrums Dr Chekhov prescribed for the world swallowed merely by his adulatory readers and never dispensed to the great man himself?

Even today, controversy rages in Yalta concerning rumours of Chekhov’s predilection for prostitutes. 

In the November 22 1997 edition of the London Guardian can be read an account of an argument between a Yalta sanatorium doctor, Dr Yuri Zinenko and his wife, Valentina, a neurosurgeon: ‘Nyet! Nyet! Prostitut! Of course he visited prostitutes! Man wants Woman! Every man wants a woman! So natural!’

From a medical standpoint, the surgeon’s husband believed that Dr Chekhov’s degeneration through tuberculosis would not have stopped him: ‘His consumption was the most severe kind, but this can just make a tubercular patient more active.’

A cordon sanitaire, therefore, is better drawn over this sensitive matter, when even medico-compatriots can’t agree, aside from their separate views, as husband or wife. 

Come with a hundred men in your hair,
Come with a thousand men between your breasts.
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A Moral Undrawn.

No moral can be drawn from these musings, obviously. That would be most un-Chekhovian. 

And yet . . . many devotees have commented that in his care for others Chekhov neglected to cure himself, a point made in a sly authorial backhanded observation by a character in Nabokov’s novel The Gift: ‘I wouldn’t have been treated by Dr Chekhov for anything in the world.’

Prostitutes soliciting in Moscow in the late Twentieth Century.

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, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html