The Cripple

1 “The Cripple” (“Калека”) is a beginning and nothing more. Chekhov wrote out the opening of a story, headed it with a Roman numeral I – the mark of a piece he expected to run to several chapters – and stopped in the middle of a sentence. He did not go back to it and did not publish it; the text comes down among his papers. This edition places it in 1898, the year of “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries” and “Ionych,” and the year in which the tuberculosis confirmed after his hemorrhage of March 1897 began to organize his life around Yalta and the search for a warm winter. Read beside the finished stories of that season, the fragment shows the same machinery in its first, unhurried gear.

2 What survives is a domestic evening rendered at Chekhov’s most unemphatic. A man misses the six o’clock train, hires a cab, and reaches his sister’s dacha after the christening is over and the guests have gone back to town; the lamps are already being put out, an old nurse is calling a child in to his soured milk, and a four-year-old watches her uncle without blinking, “like an expensive doll.” Nothing is announced. Only at the very end does the piece show its hand – the sister’s chatter about why she did not ask her brother to stand godfather turns out to be about the girl he is expected to marry, the narration turns to say he had known all along that this conversation was waiting for him, and there the sentence stops. The figure the title names never appears. Whether the cripple was someone he had still to meet, or the man himself under an injury the story had not yet reached, the fragment does not say, and that unanswered title is the most interesting thing about it.

3 Some notes on the rendering. The Russian title word, “калека,” is blunt and ordinary – the plain noun for a maimed or crippled person, carrying neither a clinical nor a sheltering shade – and it is given here as the equally plain English word rather than a modern softening, since this edition renders the register actually on the page. Anyuta is a “воспитанница,” given as “ward”: an orphan girl taken into a family and brought up in it without the legal standing of adoption, a common enough arrangement in Russian households, and the reason Chekhov specifies in his second breath that she is not Alexander Ivanovich’s sister by blood.

4 Anyuta’s long speech turns on a piece of Orthodox canon law that has no English equivalent: standing as godparents to the same child made two people кум and кума to each other, a spiritual kinship that barred them from marrying. Her verb “покумиться” is opened out here into “become godparents together,” because the whole of her teasing depends on a reader seeing the impediment. Two smaller things are kept exactly as Chekhov set them down: her husband’s name in its clipped conversational form, Sergei Nikolaich rather than the full Nikolaevich, and the verb of speech she drops altogether when she quotes him (“when my Sergei Nikolaich suddenly:”), a shrug of the shoulders that a tidier English would smooth away. The dash at the end is his. Nothing has been supplied to close the sentence.