Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  He turns to me half drunk and asks: ‘Do you know what I am?’ ‘I do.’ ‘No you don’t. I’m a mystic’ ‘I know.’ He stares at me with his old man’s popping eyes and prophesies. ‘You will die before your brother.’ ‘Perhaps.’ ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David … Write.’

  Despite Anton’s agnosticism and Leskov’s Orthodox faith, the two writers were very close in spirit: no other of Leskov’s successors had his gift for narrative voice, for showing environment making character, for maintaining an ironical, but mystical appreciation of nature and fate. However inauspicious the future encounters of Leskov and Chekhov (for Leskov hated doctors and Anton was never to be fully at ease in Petersburg), this meeting settled Chekhov’s fate: he was to be Leskov’s successor.

  More lowly writers also saw Anton as a successor. The hack Popudoglo (who at the age of thirty-seven was mortally ill) marvelled that Anton alone understood his disease and, when he died on 14 October 1883, left him all his books.8 Liodor Palmin was very attached to Anton, although, like Leskov, he abhorred his profession. Palmin’s affection came in doggerel missives:

  I sit in silence like an outcaste.

  Meanwhile Kalashnikov’s good beer,

  Gives me humoristic cheer,

  Sparkling in my empty glass.

  Forgive this naughty fleeting rhyme,

  Like logarithms for arithmetics,

  I always find one just in time …9

  Every few months Palmin informed ‘Mr Rest-in-peace’, as he called Chekhov, of his new address, for instance: ‘By the Dormition on the Gravelets (don’t think it is Dead Lane, Coffin House, Cross-Kisser’s Flat, which is for any doctor, especially a young doctor, a suitable address).’

  In his final year Chekhov became well acquainted with morbidity: he took charge of cases from registration to death or cure. He had to write a full case history for his professor in the clinic for nervous diseases, and in the internal medicine clinic for Professor Ostroumov (whose patient he would one day become). The final exams began in the winter and were harrowing: a medical student then had to retake all previous exams in his final year; this made a total of seventy-five examinations, as well as course assessment. Chekhov’s conduct of a ‘nervous’ case shows him conforming to the tenets of the time. A young railway clerk, Bulychiov, was admitted for six weeks with impotence, spermatorrhoea and psychosomatic back pain: Chekhov concluded that they were due to frequent masturbation during adolescence, and prescribed Bulychiov mix vomica, potassium bromide, daily baths, each a degree colder than the previous.10 A modern mind would ascribe Bulychiov’s state to fear of the consequences of onanism, but Chekhov and his professors saw masturbation as a morbid habit for which prostitutes, cold baths and sedatives were the remedy.

  The autopsy that Anton carried out at a Moscow police station on 24 January 1884 was more acute. Professor Neuding awarded it only ‘3+’, but the report was the germ for several stories:

  On 20 January 1884 he visited the baths. Returning home he had tea and supper, then went to bed. At 8 a.m. on 21 January he said that he would go, as usual, to town, but at about 9 a.m. he was found dead, hanging by a sash in the latrine of Osipov’s house. The corpse was dressed in the deceased’s usual clothes. One end of the sash was wound around his neck, the other was tied to a wooden beam 8 feet above the floor … to determine Efimov’s state of mind at the time he committed the crime of suicide, we have only very few data: the smell of spirits on opening the skull, chest and abdominal cavities entitles us to suppose that at the moment of committing suicide Efim was, very probably, intoxicated.11

  Forensic exercises had their literary parallel. To Leikin’s annoyance, Chekhov earned himself 39 roubles from The Dragonfly with a detective story that they printed in their annual ‘almanac’. It is highly original, like all Chekhov’s experiments in the genre, which was popular at the time in Russia. As in France, the Russian legal system used an independent investigating magistrate, a more plausible hero than the private detectives of English fiction. In ‘The Safety Match’ Chekhov took his friend Diukovsky’s name for a Clouseau-like investigator who follows up the clue of a safety match, and finds the corpse alive and well, hiding with a girlfriend.

  In January 1884, just before Anton wrote up his autopsy, telegrams came from Taganrog: baby Mosia stopped feeding, became comatose, then half paralysed. The Taganrog doctors injected her with calomel, pepsin and musk; they gave her cold compresses and potassium bromide. The prescriptions that Anton wired back were useless. In the early hours of 1 February, while Anton and Masha were at a ball in Moscow, Mosia died in convulsions. Aleksandr wrote to Anton:

  I can’t bear it. Inside and outside me everything shouts one thing: Mosia! Mosia! Mosia! … Anna has gone mad. She doesn’t think, isn’t aware, but senses the loss. Her whole face is a mirror of suffering.

  The undertaker came. We haggled by the little corpse … the discussion was about an oval or an ordinary coffin, brocade or satin lining.

  Aleksandr and Anna got no sympathy. ‘Those that live without the law shall perish without the law.’ Pavel wrote to Anton on 20 February:

  Antosha, Be so kind as to turn your attention to Aleksandr, persuade him to leave Anna, it’s time he recovered from his madness, … you have more influence over him, persuade him to leave this Burden. It’s easy to leave Anna now, the child has died and they’re not married. If he values my life and respects me as his own Father, then he can overcome himself … He doesn’t seem to understand that offending one’s Father and Mother is a grave sin. Sooner or later he will have to pay for this before God. It’s no laughing matter to pick up such a Cabbage and bring her unasked into our family, to disturb peace and order in the house … So God has taken the child he loved, therefore his deeds are wrong, he must follow a decent path, as an enlightened man who understands what is bad and what is good. To act out a Comedy and make a novel out of his life is quite unsuitable. We are insulted by this horrible Crime and Misfortune.

  Aleksandr’s unpublished diaries My Daily, Ephemeral and Generally Fleeting Thoughts show he was thinking on similar lines:

  25 January 1884: Anna … has never understood me and never will. 1 February 1884: I cannot live with Anna without Mosia …12

  Pavel swallowed his hostility. In spring Aleksandr was transferred to Moscow ‘on the grounds of his father’s ill health’. He, Anna – and the Sokolnikov children Shura and Nadia – came to live first in Moscow, then with the Chekhovs in Voskresensk. Aleksandr’s diaries augured ill for Anna:

  25 March 1884: Neither my wife nor her children were with me, i.e. around me, for a whole day. How I celebrated this day! I chattered to my heart’s delight with Anton on learned subjects, with Nikolai about art, I argued with Ivan!

  But compassion, as he put it, kept Aleksandr with Anna until death. She was now four months pregnant with Aleksandr’s second child.

  Anton was more affected than he showed. In an album given him a year or two later by a grateful patient Anton kept a photograph of little Mosia.

  Notes

  1 A little of Anton’s studies can be gleaned from E. Meve, Meditsina v tvorchestve … Kiev, 1989.

  2 See OR, 331 81 13: Pavel’s letters to Aleksandr Chekhov, 1874–94: 22 Mar. 1883.

  3 This passage (13 May 1883) was cut from PSSP: see Kuranty, 8 Sept. 1993, 9.

  4 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia’s letter to Anton, 2 July 1883.

  5 Sabaneev, brother of Chekhov’s chemistry lecturer, edited Nature and Field Sports. He paid Chekhov nothing.

  6 See PSSP, XVIII, 82–3.

  7 See OR, 331 81 15: Pavel to Nikolai Chekhov, 2 Dec. 1883.

  8 Unfortunately, Popudoglo’s books were unusable and, except for an antiquarian compendium of naval terms which Chekhov found useful for comic purposes, were given to a junk dealer.

  9 See OR, 331 55 8: Liodor Palmin’s letters to Anton, 1883–6.

  10 See RGALI, 549 1 10: Chekhov’s case notes, with a commentary (c. 1920) by Dr Rossolimo.r />
  11 See A. B. Derman, ed., A. P. Chekhov: Sbornik dokumentov …‚ 1947, 20–3.

  12 Quote in PSSP, 2, 473.

  FOURTEEN

  The Qualified Practitioner

  June 1884–April 1885

  ON 16 JUNE 1884 the University Rector gave Chekhov a certificate of General Practitioner: it released him from military service and poll tax and gave him some of the privileges of a gentleman. Anton wanted to graduate as a writer, too. He chose his best work and, with Leikin’s help, ordered 1200 copies of Tales of Melpomene from the printers, the 200-rouble costs to be paid four months after publication. The book made Chekhov 500 roubles – ten times what Leikin had paid him in May. It also won critical attention, but to make a mark in St Petersburg Anton needed 100 roubles for his fare and hotel. But Leikin did not consider Chekhov was yet ready for St Petersburg. Instead he invited him to come with Palmin and tour the lakes of Karelia. Anton did not go.

  In May Chekhov had seen a lot of Palmin, often with Kolia and the Golden sisters. He had exercised his diagnostic skills studying Palmin, his consort and their appalling cuisine and, on the eve of his last exam, told Leikin that Palmin would soon die of alcoholism. Perverse to the last, Palmin married his Pelageia and lived seven more years.

  At Babkino the aristocratic novelist Boleslav Markevich was less lucky. In June 1884 Chekhov lived by the monastery of New Jerusalem, fishing, writing and gathering mushrooms, helping Dr Rozanov at Voskresensk hospital every other day. Markevich occupied a comfortable dacha on the Kiseliov estate nearby. Anton told Leikin in August: ‘This Kammerjunker has angina and will probably give you material for an obituary.’ In November Markevich compliantly died and the Kiseliovs offered the Chekhovs his dacha.

  Shadows darkened the summer at Voskresensk. Kolia, the devil in paradise, cost Vania his job. At Easter, using his Taganrog bell-ringing skills, to the delight of the children at Vania’s school, Kolia played a carillon on some musical pots he had bought from a drunken potter. The school’s governor passed by and dismissed Vania on the spot for blasphemy. Kolia moved to stay with Pushkariov and two of the Golden sisters, before going on to bedevil Pavel in Moscow. His next prank was in July. With Aleksandr’s help, Kolia composed a letter in Pavel’s name to their mother:

  Evochka! … It’s a pity we have started keeping pigs, they are shitting everywhere. Fenichka sends her regards. Kolia has taken all the money that Aliosha has brought her and she can’t buy anything or get anything from the shop … Glory to God … Come home, jam has to be made. P. Chekhov.

  Next week Kolia had gone too far, and Pavel did write a letter – to Anton. To meet Kolia’s debts the bailiffs were holding an auction of his possessions at the house. Pavel nailed Anton’s doctor’s plate to the door, but to no avail. He and Aunt Fenichka had to endure public humiliation. Anton paid off the bailiffs and Kolia grovelled to his father:

  Dear, sweet Papa … I’ve only just learnt what vile dishonest people exist in the world. My inexperience and trusting nature is the reason for everything. I very much wanted for the family’s sake (especially for Masha’s) to furnish the flat as elegantly as possible … What did the dishonest Utkina do? For that money she sent me not what I’d chosen but old junk, she didn’t give me the blinds or curtains &c. I had bought.1

  Kolia’s last tatters of credibility were gone.

  Kolia and Anton had new company to distract them. After the Goldens, three more sisters entered their lives, the Markova sisters, Elena, Elizaveta and Margarita, who were staying with their aunt, Liudmila Gamburtseva, at a dacha near Zvenigorod.2 To Kolia and Anton they were Nelli, Lily and Rita and a flirtatious relationship built up. Nelli was a rival to Anna Golden for Kolia’s affection; Lily, until she became Mrs Sakharova in 1886, was an actress in Korsh’s theatre at Moscow but stayed friends with Kolia and Anton for years to come; Rita married and became Baroness Spengler, but she still frequented Masha and Anton. The Markova sisters shook the sway of the Golden sisters. Kolia had a fling with Nelli, before Anna Golden reclaimed him. Anton took Lily’s virginity.3

  Medical duties stopped Anton becoming more entangled with the Markova sisters. Released from the hospital by Rozanov to earn a little extra by carrying out autopsies, Anton told Leikin:

  I’ve been driving a fast troika with a decrepit coroner, barely breathing and too ancient to be any use, a kind little grey-haired creature, who’s been dreaming for 25 years of becoming a judge. I and the district doctor did the autopsy in the open country under the greenery of a young oak, on a cart track … The deceased is ‘not local’ and the peasants on whose land the body was found begged us in the name of Christ and with tears in their eyes not to do the autopsy in their village. ‘The women and children won’t sleep for fear.’ … The corpse, covered with a sheet, is wearing a red shirt, new trousers. There’s a towel and an icon on top. We ask the elder for water … There is water – a pond nearby, but nobody will provide a bucket: we would pollute it … The results of the autopsy are 20 breaks in the ribs, œdema in one lung, a smell of spirits in the stomach. Violent death from strangulation. The drunk was crushed in the chest by something heavy, probably a good peasant knee.

  A story of 1899, ‘On Official Business’, was to condense fifteen years of such autopsies.

  Rozanov, later the authority on suicide in Russia, was a fine doctor. Two other doctors became long-term friends: Dr Arkhangelsky of Chikino hospital north of Voskresensk and Dr Kurkin at the village clinic in Zvenigorod – not that Anton’s skills impressed them. On 22 July a boy with an undescended testicle was brought to the Voskresensk clinic: the child squirmed, Anton lost his nerve and summoned Rozanov, who finished the operation. Anton could laugh at incompetence: in ‘Surgery’ a story for Fragments that August, a student pulls the wrong teeth, while Rozanov calmly advises: ‘Keep pulling out healthy ones until you get to the bad one.’

  Anton returned to Moscow to write and practise medicine. In Moscow a doctor could earn 10,000 roubles a year, charging 5 roubles a visit, enough to keep the horse and carriage needed for these rounds. Anton earned little when he opened his practice in autumn 1884. His patients, pleading poverty or presuming on friendship, paid him with a picture, a foreign coin or an embroidered cushion. Palmin was typically exploitative: ‘The bearer of this letter is my cook’s husband, a sickly man whom the advice of an Æsculapius wouldn’t hurt…. Let him have arsenic or, after examining the attached patient, prescribe him something of the kind.’ Leikin pestered Chekhov with accounts of insomnia and pains, lists of his medicines. In September Anton asked Leikin, privy to the plans of Petersburg city, to tell him of any vacancy for a council doctor.

  In Russia every doctor’s address was available at any chemist. Patients found Anton. Coping with typhoid, TB and dysentery, frightened of killing his patients or infecting himself, Anton trembled. Patients became attached, and, unlike the doctors in his fiction, he could not shake them off. A typical patient writes:

  Most kind Dr Chekhov! I ask you very urgently to allow just an hour for a visit to me and to calm my nerves. I need to consult you, I hope you will be so kind as not to refuse my request. My maid is ill, I’m afraid the illness might be catching, I sent her to the clinic, but she is so dim, she didn’t ask anything, you know I have children whose lives are dearer than anything in the world to me. I haven’t slept for two nights, my thoughts are all ‘gloomy’. I expect you this evening, whereby you will greatly oblige Yours Respectfully, Liubov Dankovskaia.4

  Anton took up social medicine: with two colleagues and a sheaf of questionnaires, he toured the brothels of Sobolev Lane. Other ways of supporting indigent Chekhovs had to be found. Anton urged Vania, still in search of a post, to set up in Moscow, and pool ‘your salary, my pittance’. Anton approached the loathsome Lipskerov, editor of Moscow’s sleazy News of the Day, or, as Chekhov called it, Screws of the Day.5 Even judophiles like Chekhov called Lipskerov a yid for his meanness. Lipskerov agreed to serialize Chekhov’s first and last novel, A Shooting Party (liter
ally Drama at the Hunt), over thirty-two issues from August 1884 to April 1885, at 3 roubles an instalment. The money was rarely paid; Misha, whom Chekhov detailed to dun Lipskerov, was offered instead a theatre ticket or a pair of trousers from Lipskerov’s tailors.

  A Shooting Party is unjustly ignored. As in 1882, Chekhov stretched himself in a pastiche, even parody, of melodramatic stories, with decadent aristocrats on rotting estates, fatal girls in red, and wicked intriguing Poles. The novel is extraordinary: not only at 170 pages is it Chekhov’s longest piece of fiction, but it anticipates Agatha Christie: the investigating magistrate, Kamyshev, is revealed, apparently by the editor of News of the Day, to be the murderer, who has framed the main suspect. In the wild exotic garden in a mythical south Russian landscape where all falls apart, the world of ‘The Black Monk’ or The Cherry Orchard is sketched out. The story is poetic, ingenious, and sensational.

  Leikin was as worried by such diversions as he was pleased by Anton’s reputation. Tales of Melpomene had attracted approving reviews. At the end of September Leikin paid a visit to Moscow, meeting, he told the poet Trefolev, ‘the pillars of my Fragments, Chekhonte and Palmin. I boozed with them, gave them parental lectures on what I need.’ Anton had ambitious plans. Abandoning his History of Sexual Authority, he assembled a bibliography for a new thesis, Medicine in Russia. This too lapsed, when his stories won attention. Anton’s satire now bit harder. ‘Noli me tangere’ (later to be called ‘The Mask’), printed in the Moscow weekly Amusement, drew Tolstoy’s attention: a man at a masked ball misbehaves with impunity when he reveals his powerful identity.