Chekhov on dying

 In Chekhov’s story “The Bishop,” the title character is on his deathbed.

He recalls that old Father Simeon, small and gentle, had a lout of a son who abused the cook, calling her Jehud’s ass. The bishop remembered that Father Simeon had not intervened and was embarrassed only because he could not remember where such an ass was mentioned in the Bible.

As Peter Orner observed in a penetrating essay, this is not epic deathbed stuff simply because there is no epic deathbed stuff. At the end, the bishop just had a parade of thoughts, one following the other. 

Tolstoy thought dying should be different: “An animal simply dies, but a human should return its soul to its creator.”

It’s as if the soul were a library book that’s due.

• Sources: “The Bishop” is in Anton Chekhov, Peasants and Other Stories; New York Review of Books, 1997. Peter Orner’s essay is in Am I Alone Here?; New York: Catapult, 2016. The observation by Leo Tolstoy is in A Calendar of Wisdom; New York: Scribner, 1997, p. 159.