'Spring Has Come, the Weather is Warm'

“A Work of Art,” a genuinely O. Henry-ish creation, is one of the more than sixty stories Chekhov published in 1886. A young man pays the doctor who has saved his life with an antique bronze candelabra featuring “two female figures in the costume of Eve and in attitudes for the description of which I have neither the courage nor the fitting temperament.” The doctor unloads this kitschy gem (poshlust!) on a lawyer, who gives it to an actor, who sells it to a dealer in antique brass, where the original grateful young man buys it and returns it to the doctor.  

Two years earlier, Chekhov had first coughed up blood, a symptom of the tuberculosis that would kill him twenty years later. That same year, 1884, he qualified as a doctor. In his stories, doctors are seldom portrayed heroically. Neither are they villains. Chekhov renders them about as noble and foolish as the rest of us. In effect, he says nothing, shakes his head and smiles.

On this date, April 13, in 1904, Chekhov is in Yalta and writes to his friend Boris Lazarevsky, a lawyer attached to the legal branch of the Imperial Russian Navy. The Russo-Japanese War is on and Lazarevsky is stationed in Vladivostok. He had complained about the prospect of staying in Siberia for another three years. Chekhov writes:

“Your long, sad letter reached me yesterday. After reading it, I sympathized with you with all my heart. I can only suppose you are no longer in need of my sympathy because spring has come, the weather is warm, and the famous harbor has been cleared of ice. When I was in Vladivostok [in 1890, on his return from Sakhalin Island], the weather was wonderfully warm even though it was October and there was a real live whale crossing the harbor and splashing with its huge tail.”

This is a genuinely Chekhovian creation that mingles encouragement for a friend (with a clandestine suggestion of exasperation) and wonder at the world. Chekhov is now forty-four and his pep talk is backed up by hard-won experience:

“When the war is over (and it soon will be) [the peace treaty was signed in September 1905], you’ll begin to take trips to surrounding areas . . . you’ll see a host of things that you’ve never before experienced and that you’ll remember to the end of your days, you’ll meet with so much joy and suffering that you won’t even notice that the three years which now so frighten you have flashed by.”

Chekhov finishes his letter by suggesting Lazarevsky write accounts of the war, “if there’s a bombardment or something,” and sell them to newspapers or the magazine Russian Thought, in which he published much of Sakhalin Island.

Chekhov would be dead three months later.

[I’ve linked to “A Work of Art” in the translation by Constance Garnett, who included it in Love and Other Stories, published in 1920. The passages from Chekhov’s letters were translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973).]