222
PARTISAN REVIEW
Life had passed without profit, without pleasure; it had gone by aim–
lessly, to no purpose. There was nothing to look forward to, and if you
looked back, there was a terrible waste of money, enough to make
your flesh creep. Why couldn't a man live without all that loss and
waste? .. .He concluded that he stood only to profit by dying: he
wouldn't have to eat, drink, pay taxes, insult people. Since a man lies
in the grave not only for one year, but for hundreds and thousands, the
profit would be enormous.. ..This conclusion was correct, of course,
but dreadfully unpalatable none the less. Why were things so strange–
ly organized in this world, when you lived only once and had nothing
to show for it?
This tragic monologue, which comes, not from the mouth of a hero
or a philosopher-prince, but from the mouth of a greedy, narrow-minded,
ignorant peasant, casts a totally different light on the opening of the story.
The greed and vulgarity are not simply revealed as a thin outer shell, which
the reader must remove in order to extract the pearl; greed, vulgarity and
pearl are one. It is as if Chekhov cast the undertaker as the tragic Prince of
Denmark. The tragic suffering, the tragic consciousness, and the protest
against cosmic order come in this story right out of the depth.
Ultimately, where and how does Chekhov plant those unspoken
understandings between writer and reader, behind the protagonist's back?
We may hear them perhaps in the nocturnal melodies played by the cof–
fin-maker when, trying to sleep in his solitary bed, he would reach for his
fiddle. At such moments, Bronze becomes both a Saul tossed by evil spir–
its and a David, who "would touch the strings, the fiddle would twang in
the dark and he would feel better."
COMING IN PH:
• Michal Govrin's
"Journey to Poland"
• Walter Laqueur,
"The Fate of a Generation"
• Mark Harman
on Beckett and Kafka
• Eugene Goodheart
reviews Tom Wolfe
• Gunther Stent
on
Fermat's Enigma
• Poetry by
W.
S. Merwin
and
David Ferry
• David Pryce-Jones
on Liberalism
