Read The Life of an Unknown Man for Free Online Page A

doctors, petty gentry, eternal students and…”
    “But hold on, those were people who suffered! He shows how society broke their dreams, how the mediocrity of their period suffocated them…”
    “That’s true… But you see, Léa, Chekhov died in 1904 and very shortly after that, some fifteen, twenty years later, in fact, in the very same country where his heroes had spent their time cursing their woes in the shade of cherry orchards in bloom… In that same country, millions of human beings were brutally exterminated, without any humanist worrying about their ‘broken dreams,’ as you call them.”
    “Sorry, Ivan. You’ve lost me there. You’re surely not going to blame Chekhov for everyone who died in the Gulag?”
    “Why not?… Well, no. Certainly not! Only, after what’s happened in my country, I think I have the right to say this to Chekhov: by all means weep, dear Master, for your petty noblemen, refined and sensitive as they are, but leave us to weep for our millions of wretched yokels!”
    He fell silent, then mumbled in conciliatory tones: “I should have put that a bit differently…”
    The Chekhov story, “Vanka,” that had entranced Léa was one of Shutov’s favorites. But to talk about it over this dinner, which was a replica of their evenings in the old days… No! Léa had been using young Vanka as a backdrop for her masquerade of affection. “Perhaps this is how she wants to take her leave of me. An amicable divorce in an elegiac setting, to avoid a brutal breach. In fact, she set me a trap and I walked straight into it. Poor old writer! What a hopeless expert in the human psyche! An ill-shod shoemaker, indeed…”
    “Look, Ivan, you’ve got it all wrong. That story’s not about a petty nobleman at all. It’s about a little peasant boy sent away to be an apprentice in the city and his master maltreats him. All he’s got is his grandfather. He writes to him. Not knowing the address, he writes on the envelope: ‘To my grandfather, Konstantin Makarych. The country.’ He posts the letter and waits for the reply. That scene bowled me over! What shocks me is your lack of sensitivity. You’re Russian but that story is totally lost on you…”
    “I’m not Russian, Léa. I’m Soviet. So you see I’m filthy, stupid, and vicious. Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about. Sorry…”
    She stared at him with a stubborn, hostile air, her tone of voice refusing to acknowledge Shutov’s rueful smile.
    “That’s just it. Your generation of Russians were so programmed by the totalitarian regime that it’s no longer possible to communicate with you. Even on a mundane level, I mean. You’ve never learned the slightest tolerance. Everything’s all black or all white. In the end it gets tiring. I knock myself out trying to make you see…”
    Léa went on with her speech for the prosecution and he sensed that at any minute now the verdict would be delivered: she would tell him she was leaving. She would not even need to argue her case, he had just made himself a sitting target… The attic without her? “Just a little more pain might make my life unbearable…”
    He ran through all the routes for retreat in his mind: apologize, laugh, feign contrition, admit to being genetically modified by communism… Meanwhile she was saying: “As long as you cling to your past in Soviet slavery…” (In a brief moment of distraction Shutov glanced at Léa’s arms: “She’ll never know how beautiful her arm can be”). “. . . And if you don’t feel free you crush other people. You don’t respect anyone’s inner feelings. I find Vanka writing to his grandfather really upsetting. But you couldn’t give a damn. Well, look, I think we need to have a serious talk because, quite honestly…”
    He choked from the pressure of words held back and, to begin with, his voice was a whisper, broken, expressionless: “Of course, Léa. We’ll have a