'An Expression of Blatant Despotism'

Two female acquaintances have recently endured divorce, and their lives are measurably improved. The woman I know better, whose wedding and reception we attended, was married to a thuggish prison guard of a husband. You wouldn’t know it, looking at him. Handsome, well-dressed and superficially sophisticated, he has the temperament of a petulant toddler. His default manner of speech is rancorous sarcasm. He punched his wife in the face. Most likely I’ll never see him again but I’m nursing a longing to flatten this guy’s nose. 

Anton Chekhov’s oldest brother, Alexander Chekhov, was a fiction writer, as well as a journalist and editor of trade journals. He was also a bitter drunk with several common-law wives, all of whom he treated badly. The brothers had not spoken since their last meeting. On January 2, 1889, Anton writes in a letter to Alexander:

 

“I was seriously angry at you and left in anger, and this I will confess. During my very first visit I was repelled by your shocking, completely unprecedented treatment of Natalia Alexandrovna [Alexander’s second common-law wife] and the cook. Forgive me please, but treating women like that, no matter who they are, is unworthy of a decent, loving human being. What heavenly or earthly power has given you the right to make them your slaves? Constant profanity of the most vile variety, a raised voice, reproaches, sudden whims at breakfast and dinner, eternal complaints about a life of forced and loathsome labor—isn’t all that an expression of blatant despotism?”

 

And so on for three pages. In his biography of Chekhov, Donald Rayfield writes of this letter: “After this salvo, Natalia got the upper hand in her marriage: Aleksandr drank, the flat was sordid and the children unhappy, but he never abused her again. Anton was, in Natalia’s eyes, her rescuer.”    

 

(The letter to Alexander can be found in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973).