'Hard to Find a Name in Human Speech'

After a stop in Hong Kong during his four-thousand-mile journey back to Moscow from Sakhalin Island, Chekhov’s ship encountered rough weather and high seas. Before reaching Singapore, two men had died and their bodies were thrown overboard: 

“When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth flying head over heels into the water and when you think that there are several versts [one verst = 0.66 mile] down to the bottom, you grow frightened and somehow start thinking that you are going to die too and that you too will be thrown into the sea.”

 

It’s December 9, 1890, and Chekhov is in Moscow, having has just returned from his three-month stay in the Sakhalin penal colony. He is writing to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin. In his footnote to this passage in the letter, Simon Karlinsky quotes the writer’s brother Mikhail Chekhov:

 

 “In the Indian Ocean, while the ship was moving full speed ahead, he would jump into the water from the prow and grab a towline thrown to him from the stern. This was his way of taking a swim. During one such swim he saw not far from him a shark and a school of pilot fish which he later described in his story ‘Gusev.’”

 

Readers familiar with “Gusev,” the first story he wrote after returning from Sakhalin, will recognize the raw materials Chekhov uses at the story’s conclusion – corpse in a shroud, shark and pilot fish. After the shark tears the shroud, one of the weights added to keep the body submerged “falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.” The famous closing paragraph in Constance Garnett’s 1918 translation:

 

“Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors. . . . From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it; next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured. . . .The sky turns a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech.”

 

Chekhov humanizes the ocean as he has the fish. He was skirting sentimentality, as William Maxwell did when he turns over part of the narration in So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) to a dog. Both succeed. Chekhov’s biographer Donald Rayfield refers to “Gusev” as “an awesome portrayal of nature’s indifference to death.” I think it's more than that. In the letter to Suvorin, Chekhov writes:

 

“God’s world is good. Only one thing in it is bad: we ourselves. How little justice and humility there is in us, and how poorly we understand patriotism! A drunken, frazzled, dissolute husband may love his wife and children, but what good is his love? The newspapers tell us we love our great homeland, but how do we express our love? Instead of knowledge we have insolence and arrogance beyond measure, instead of work – indolence and swinishness; we have no sense of justice, our conception of honor goes no farther than honor for one’s uniform, a uniform that usually adorns the prisoner’s dock in court. What is needed is work, and the hell with everything else. We must above all be just, and all the rest will be added unto us.”

 

[The passages from Chekhov’s letter are taken from Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973).