Chekhov’s “The Witch” and “Peasant Wives”

Lately, I have been reading and enjoying Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty (about Russian literature and history). But I’ve put it aside for now, and returned to Chekhov.

I find it hard to write about Chekhov, probably because it’s difficult to pinpoint the moments of greatness in his works—or to steal Woolf’s words about Jane Austen, he is “the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness”. With Proust, I can write about details, metaphors, or methods of characterisation. With Dickens, I can write about imagery, motifs, or the different types of characters in his novels and the way a two-dimensional character becomes three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood. With Chekhov, his stories have the deceptive appearance of simplicity—his greatness lies in his ability to capture the subtlest emotional shades, his ability to have compassion for everyone and to present characters as they are, without judgement—his techniques are subtle and elusive, almost like there are no techniques. 

For example, “The Witch” in Volume 6 is a very simple story, almost like a sketch: there is a snowstorm and, as a postman knocks on the door, the sexton, Savely Gykin, accuses his wife Raissa Nilovna of being a witch, of causing snowstorms and luring young men into the house and seducing them. The story is simple, but I love the way the characters unfold. 

“Savely angrily puffed all the air out of his chest and turned abruptly to the wall. Three minutes later he turned over restlessly again, knelt up on the bed, and with his hands on the pillow looked askance at his wife. She was still sitting motionless, staring at the visitor. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes were glowing with a strange fire.”

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

Jealous, Savely places a handkerchief over the postman’s face. 

“And settling herself more comfortably, she stared at the postman again.

It did not matter to her that his face was covered. She was not so much interested in his face as in his whole appearance, in the novelty of this man. His chest was broad and powerful, his hands were slender and well formed, and his graceful, muscular legs were much comelier than Savely’s stumps. There could be no comparison, in fact.”

Chekhov is very good at writing about female desire, and he depicts it without judgement. Throughout the story, he gets us to empathise with Raissa’s loneliness, her having a fool for a husband—it’s reminiscent of “The Chemist’s Wife” and “The Husband”—but the story takes a slight turn near the end, as Chekhov’s stories always do. 

““Witch!” he muttered indignantly. “Tfoo, horrid creature!”

Yet, waiting till she was quiet and began breathing evenly, he touched her head with his finger... held her thick plait in his hand for a minute. She did not feel it. Then he grew bolder and stroked her neck.

“Leave off!” she shouted, and prodded him on the nose with her elbow with such violence that he saw stars before his eyes.

The pain in his nose was soon over, but the torture in his heart remained.”

Thus the story ends—not much happens in it—but the husband, who so far has appeared foolish and rather cruel (for forcing the postman to leave in the middle of the snowstorm), is now pitiful. A little stroke, and Chekhov gets us to see the husband and wife differently. 

Straight after “The Witch”, Constance Garnett aptly places “Peasant Wives”, a longer, more complex story with similar themes. A man named Matvey Savitch stops for the night at the house of a landowner named Dyudya, and tells the family about how he has come to adopt the boy Kuzka: he had an affair with Kuzka’s mother when the husband was in the army.

A large part of the story is Matvey Savitch telling the story, his sanctimonious remarks echoed by Dyudya—Chekhov lets us see that Matvey Savitch is a selfish hypocrite, speaking of sin and Christian charity but having an affair with a married woman, wanting to drop her when he himself wants to get married, and betraying her—then, as Matvey Savitch finishes the story and goes to sleep, Chekhov moves away from them and gives us a glimpse of the unhappy lives of Dyudya’s daughters-in-law, Sofya and Varvara. It’s almost like he begins a new story within the same story. Sofya and Varvara are unhappy married, like Kuzka’s mother Mashenka, like the sexton’s wife in “The Witch”. 

Like Mashenka, Varvara has an affair (or affairs). 

“And she began telling in a whisper of her midnight walks with the priest’s son, and of the stories he had told her, and of his comrades, and of the fun she had with the travellers who stayed in the house. The mournful song stirred a longing for life and freedom. Sofya began to laugh; she thought it sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and she felt envious and sorry that she, too, had not been a sinner when she was young and pretty.” 

That last line is what I mean when I say Chekhov captures the subtlest shades of emotions. 

He gives us a glimpse into the women’s unhappy lives and their suffering, then drops a hint of something that might or might not happen, leaving it open. Then the two women fall asleep, and a new day begins, and Chekhov returns to Matvey Savitch and the boy Kuzka. And just before the story ends, there’s a little stroke, a little turn that reveals something about the characters or makes us see them differently: except for a little moment when Kuzka wakes up to find some wrinkled women looking at him and cries out in fright, so far he has been only in the background and we know next to nothing about him, but at the end, in just a few sentences, Chekhov perfectly conveys the relationship between him and Matvey Savitch, and the boy’s torment. 

It is masterful.