'Everything is Singing, Blooming and Sparkling'

In a May 4, 1889 letter to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin, Chekhov complains of taking no interest in “reviews, conversations about literature, gossip, successes, failures, high royalties,” and adds:

“[I]n short, I’ve become a damn fool. My soul seems to be stagnating. I explain this by the stagnation of my personal life. It’s not that I’m disappointed or exhausted or cranky; it’s just that everything has grown less interesting. I’ll have to light a fire underneath myself.”

Chekhov wrote almost six-hundred short stories in his forty-four years, not to mention plays and thousands of letters. Some of the early stories are trifling, little more than anecdotes written quickly for publication in newspapers. In 1889, he was just entering his mature and most prolific period. Chekhov was not by nature a depressive, nor was he given to self-pity. One senses an element of mock-misery that he could share only with a close friend.

Chekhov is writing from Sumy (heavily damaged in the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion) in northeastern Ukraine on the Psel River. He begins the letter by telling Suvorin he has just returned from “the hunt: I was out catching crayfish.” What follows is a paean to spring, beginning:

“Everything is singing, blooming and sparkling with beauty. By now the garden is all green, and even the oaks are covered with leaves. The trunks of the apple, pear, cherry and plum trees have been painted white to protect them from worms. All of these trees have white blossoms, making them look strikingly like brides during the wedding ceremony: white dresses, white flowers and so innocent an appearance that they seem to be ashamed of being looked at.”

That image reminds me of Guy Davenport’s closing lines in his essay on Eudora Welty, “The Faire Field of Enna” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981):

“An anecdote about Faulkner relates that once on a spring evening he invited a woman to come with him in his automobile, to see a bride in her wedding dress. He drove her over certain Mississippi back roads and eventually across a meadow, turning off his headlights and proceeding in darkness. At last he eased the car to a halt and said that the bride was before them. He switched on the lights, whose brilliance fell full upon an apple tree in blossom.

“The sensibility that shapes that moment is of an age, at least, with civilization itself.”

Chekhov is no mystic or Transcendentalist. He’s too much the realist, the physician, to fall for nature sentimentalism, but he retains a powerful aesthetic sense – not a combination of traits we associate with most of the great Russian writers. He shifts tone in the paragraph cited above:

“Nature is a very good sedative. It gives a person equanimity. And you need equanimity in this world. Only people with equanimity can see things clearly, be fair and work. This, of course, applies only to intelligent and honorable people; selfish and shallow people have enough equanimity as it is.” 

In closing, Chekhov writes to Suvorin: “Well, God grant you health and all the best.”

[The translators of the letter are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973).]