Chekhov's Way

Chekhov, so soon to die, stayed a happy man. The letters he wrote, some four thousand that survive, show him cheerful, basically a man who liked wine, pretty women, and the sound of church bells. In the end, church bells were all that remained of his faith.

You would call his life hard. He wrote, "There was no childhood in my childhood" — a time of poverty with beatings from a harsh father, son of a serf. Chekhov had his first hemorrhage at twenty-four, the year he graduated in medicine from Moscow University. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, three years after marrying the actress Olga Knipper of the Moscow Art Theatre, from whom he lived apart, forced to seek a warm climate in the Crimea. From his thousand stories and five plays of Russian life, one is easily deceived into thinking him melancholy, depressed by life and despairing of the people in it. Tolstoy told him, "As you know I detest Shakespeare. Well, your plays are worse than his." Chekhov laughed. Aware of the pathos of existence, the loneliness, the boredom, he said, "I only wished to tell people honestly, 'Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!'" His story "Happiness," a favorite of his, says there is happiness enough in the world if you know how to find it.

In the country, where he loved to stay, he would announce, "I am a man who enjoys life," "I am thriving to the marrow of my bones." The birds sang indefatigably, the smell of freshly cut hay intoxicated him: "One has only to sit beside a haystack in order to imagine oneself in the embraces of a naked woman." In his thirties he bought a rundown estate of 675 acres in Melikhovo to escape an apartment in Moscow and the solitude he hated. ("When I'm alone, for some reason I become terrified.") Here he brought his parents, brothers, beloved sister Masha, and endless guests; here he planted cherry trees, felt joy: "At moments I am so happy that I pull myself up and remind myself of my creditors." But he spent his nights coughing.

Chekhov loved the theater, the characters in his plays and the actors who portrayed them: "So I, after dining with the star, was aware of a halo round my head for two days afterward." His wit never failed him, his love of laughter that saved him from despair. Much as he believed in the necessity of work ("You must work, you know, and never stop your whole life through"), he would drop it for a party, gathering a company of revelers round him. "When I become rich," he wrote, "I shall have a harem in which I shall keep fat naked women, with their buttocks painted green."

He had no intention of marrying, kept hidden the fact that he was coughing up blood. In 1899 he was condemned to stay most of the year in Yalta, from which with the success of The Seagull he wrote, "If I did not have to live in Yalta, this winter would be the happiest of my life." He knew he had not long to live: "My friend, you forget I'm a doctor." When he relented and became the husband of Olga Knipper, he addressed her in hundreds of letters, pouring out endearments to my unusual wife, my exquisite missus, my sweet delightful Knippschitz. "And you, why are you depressed?" he asked her. "What are you depressed about? You are living, working, hoping, drinking.... What more do you want?"

Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, written in 1904 while he struggled to stay alive, was performed as a tragedy of empty, trivial lives, a fact that hurt him, a misinterpretation of its meaning: "I call the play a comedy, in places even a farce" (though he also cried, "One must not live such a life!") An hour before his death he improvised a story that made Olga laugh heartily. The doctor came in and ordered champagne. "Ich sterbe," he whispered to the doctor. To Olga he said smiling, "It's a long while since I have drunk champagne," drained his glass to the last drop, lay back in his bed, and died.

The Happy Life

Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind,
The equal friend, no grudge, no strife;
No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthy life;
The household of continuance,
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom joined with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress;
The chaste wife, wise, without debate;
Such sleep as may beguile the night;
Contented with thine own estate,
Nor wish for death nor fear his might. — Surrey

Henry Howard, proud, haughty, fiery-tempered Earl of Surrey — not a word of this beautiful poem fitted his tragic life. As a translation of Martial, who wrote in favor of the simple life (and in disgust with Rome retired at forty-eight to the country), it corrects Martial's stoical epigram XLVII, "Ad Seipsum," reminding him that the joys of such a life include the possession of a chaste wife, which Martial almost certainly never had.

An aristocrat of royal blood who was intended to marry Princess Mary, future queen of England, Surrey was more elegant than simple, more arrogant than wise, "the most foolish and proud boy that is in England." As courtier he witnessed the downfall of his cousin Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife; saw his other cousin Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife, put to death; and with reason trembled for his own fate. ("Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years.") The powerful family of Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, whom Surrey treated as vulgar upstarts, successfully plotted his downfall as another victim of the king's wrath. Before he was thirty he was trapped among enemies in court intrigue that, through his hauteur and pride, caused his death. On frivolous, trumped-up charges — that he favored Catholics, that he had eaten meat during Lent, that he had recklessly broken windows in London — he was imprisoned in the Tower, accused of a plot to murder the king, tried for high treason, and condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. Finally, in a more honorable kind of death which befitted his rank, he was beheaded on Tower Hill.

In 1557, ten years after his death, forty of Surrey's love songs and sonnets, including this poem, "The Happy Life," were published in TotteVs Miscellany "to the honor of the English tongue." "We resteth here," he wrote, "that quick could never rest."

Saint Francis of Assisi. Maybe because it's April, now eight months since Philip's death, I think of this man. He was happy, the Poverello, so in love with life that the legends surrounding him ought to be true. One story has him singing duets with a nightingale. The bird would trill a phrase and he would repeat it, two jongleurs de Dieu lifting their voices antiphonally till Francis ran out of breath. A nightingale can...