The Bishop

"The Bishop" is a 1902 short story by Anton Chekhov, first published in the April 1902 issue of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh. The story, telling about the last days of a terminally ill priest, in many ways reflects the psychological state of the author, who was at the time full of premonitions of his own inevitable demise, and in that respect is considered to be partly autobiographical. Publication Chekhov promised to Viktor Mirolyubov to write a story for Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh in a December 1899 letter. But he set to work upon it much later, judging by his 16 March 1901 letter to Olga Knipper, in which he wrote: "Now I am writing a story called 'The Bishop', based upon a plotline that had been sitting in my head for some fifteen years." In July of that year Mirolyubov reminded Chekhov about his old promise to the journal's subscribers. Chekhov in a 3 August letter assured him that the piece was in the pipeline, but in October had to apologise for some further delays. He sent the story to the magazine only on 20 February 1902 with apologies, explaining the delay with his deteriorating health, and with a kind of warning, that he'd be "challenging the censors for every single word" and won't let the badly mangled text published. There were indeed severe censorial cuts, not to mention gaping proofreader's blunders, which took Chekhov another month to fix. Finally, "The Bishop" was published in the No.4, April 1902 issue of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh. In a slightly revised version, it was included into Volume 12 of the 1903, second edition the Collected Works by A.P. Chekhov, published by Adolf Marks. It then appeared in Volume 11 of the posthumous, 1906 third edition. Plot Pyotr, the Bishop at the Staro-Petrovski Convent feels weak and unwell. During the evening service, on the eve of Palm Sunday, while distributing the pussy willow shoots, he sees in the crowd a woman who looks like his mother whom he had not seen for nine years. For no particular reason tears start flowing from his eyes... Tired and in a kind of haze, he returns to his monastery bedroom, then learns from Father Sysoi, a visiting monk, that his mother indeed had come to visit him, bringing with her Katya, an eight-year old niece. This brings him great joy, he spends the night in reveries... But he is unable to sleep also because his conditions worsens, and he seems to be in a fever.