'The Feeling of His Irrevocable Loss'

In nineteenth-century Russian fiction, people seem to get sick more often than in other literatures. Dostoevsky’s Kirilov and Turgenev’s Bazarov are consumptives, and Ivan Ilyich is fatally ill with a nameless malady. The sole physician of the group, Chekhov, commonly treated those infected with tuberculosis, typhoid and typhus, the scourges of the nineteenth century. Typhus is caused by bacteria spread by fleas and lice, and reliable treatments with antibiotics were not available for another seventy years. Among his patients were family friends, the three Ianova sisters and their mother. In 1885, typhus killed one of the girls and her mother. In 1887, Chekhov published “Typhus” (The Party and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, 1917), a story in which the titular disease is mentioned only two times – “spotted typhus” – and only on the final page. If we already know Chekhov’s work, the opening of the story leads us to expect social comedy:

“A young lieutenant called Klimov was travelling from Petersburg to Moscow in a smoking carriage of the mail train. Opposite him was sitting an elderly man with a shaven face like a sea captain’s, by all appearances a well-to-do Finn or Swede.”

The Finn is a boor and a bore with “a broad idiotic grin” who “continually puffed at his stinking pipe.” In the next sentence we’re told Klimov “for some reason did not feel well.” Dr. Chekhov reels off the symptoms:

“[Klimov’s] mouth felt dry and sticky; there was a heavy fog in his brain; his thoughts seemed to be straying, not only within his head, but outside his skull, among the seats and the people that were shrouded in the darkness of night. Through the mist in his brain, as through a dream, he heard the murmur of voices, the rumble of wheels, the slamming of doors.”

“Heavy fog” and “mist” suggest Chekhov may have known that “typhus” is rooted in the Greek tûphos meaning “hazy.” Perhaps Russian writers find disease useful because it permits them to explore alternate states of consciousness. As Klimov grows feverish, reality accelerates and seems to melt and flow like wax on a stove. His senses are hyperacute and yet nothing makes sense. At home he is greeted by his aunt and his sister Katya. He collapses in bed and “when he recovered consciousness he found himself in bed, undressed.” The doctor is there, and his orderly, Pavel. He is weak but his fever has broken:

“His chest and stomach heaved with delicious, happy, tickling laughter. His whole body from head to foot was overcome by a sensation of infinite happiness and joy in life, such as the first man must have felt when he was created and first saw the world. Klimov felt a passionate desire for movement, people, talk.”

His aunt appears and Klimov asks to see his sister. Here, the story turns more conventional, as though written by a grimmer-minded O. Henry. The aunt tells him Katya contracted typhus from him and was buried two days earlier. The story’s final line reads: “And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life and the feeling of his irrevocable loss.” "Typhus" reads as though Chekhov had taken a step or two into twentieth-century fiction, into the mind itself, and then retreated. It was only 1886, he was twenty-sex years old and he hadn’t yet written his best fiction.