As the family thinned out rows because fewer. Misha, starting Law at Moscow University, received on 11 August, Masha’s name day, Pavel’s last rocket: ‘In Moscow instead of the educated boy who studied so long at the gimnazia you have turned out a lout, your character in Moscow has become not modest but impatient and rude, what is your education for?’2 Pavel seemed to mellow. He sent Masha (who lingered at Babkino) an affectionate letter and a 5-rouble note: he even corresponded with Aleksandr, Anna and their illegitimate child, Kolia, in Novorossiisk. Vania had come back from Novorossiisk. Aleksandr and Vania gave their father good reports about each other. Aleksandr was so touched by paternal forgiveness that he sent a fond letter, giving information, so dear to Pavel, on the price of every product and the liturgy of the church services in Novorossiisk. Anna too felt emboldened: ‘I hurry to use the permission you gave me to write a few lines to you … Aleksandr is not drinking vodka and on your advice just drinks a little wine. Come and see us next summer.’3 Aleksandr’s letters to his brothers are not so rosy. Inducing Vania to come for a job in the Novorossiisk customs or to open a private school, he painted instead a horrific picture of his life in this newly founded port. In hopeless debt, he lived worse than in Taganrog, where relatives helped in crises. Here he had ‘no table, no chairs, just bare walls and Kolka’s shitty nappies, which are the towels’. Out of scrap Aleksandr made a bedstead and a chair, which broke. Only the job was undemanding:
By 8 p.m. I am drunk and asleep … I drink so much that even I am ashamed … I catch gobius fish in the mornings. I hired a servant and sacked her after three days … I have instructed people only to shit in the outside latrine, and I recommend pissing in the open … Instead of two young girls I’ve hired a servant woman, but such a woman that I swear to God one night I shall make a mistake and climb on her instead of Anna. I don’t mean to be vulgar, I’m expressing my amazement at her figure. A real Titian woman from a picture of Weib, Wein und Gesang.
Aleksandr told Anton how badly doctors were needed in Novorossiisk, how little land cost, how much people would pay for treatment or accommodation. Yet Aleksandr’s description of his squalor was so graphic that it beggars belief that he thought he could attract Anton. Vania and Anton refused their brother’s invitations to Novorossiisk. Even their sister was not spared the details. Aleksandr told Masha on 18 December 1885 that he wanted ‘to start another life, where one wouldn’t be nagged day and night, or harassed by an old man’s cough and by torn stockings with dirty toes showing through them’.4
Kolia lay low, living on quick caricatures for The Alarm Clock and on Leikin’s money. (Palmin had vanished from Anton’s and Leikin’s purview since March.) Anton answered Leikin’s protests about Kolia’s cheating on 14 September:
It’s not a matter of intervention, but la femme. Woman! The sexual instinct is a worse obstacle to work than vodka … A weak man goes to a woman, tumbles into her duvet and lies with her until they get colic in their groins … Kolia’s woman is a fat piece of meat who loves to drink and eat. Before coitus she always drinks and eats, and it’s hard for her lover to hold back and not drink and eat pickles (it’s always pickles!) The Agathopod [Aleksandr] is also twisted round a woman’s little finger. When these two women will let go, the devil knows.
The family was now Anton, Evgenia, Masha, Misha, Aunt Fenichka and, when he was not lodging overnight at Gavrilov’s warehouse, Pavel. Kolia had left Anna Ipatieva-Golden for a sordid rooming house. By 11 April 1886, in the primary school where he was head teacher, Vania had a flat on the Arbat with five rooms, free fuel and light, a servant and, to Pavel’s delight, a tricorn and tunic. Aleksandr was out of sight in Novorossiisk. At the end of November the Moscow Chekhovs moved out of Lebedeva’s damp, cold house to spacious quarters on the same Iakimanka: Klimenkov’s house opposite the Church of St John the Warrior. For the first time each member of the family had a room of their own. Here the Tuesday soirées resumed. Chekhov’s friends, whether the louche Palmin or the flirtatious Markova sisters, liked these hospitable apartments. The drawback was one floor up: Chef Piotr Podporin’s dining rooms for weddings, balls and funerals, constant dancing, drinking, and the laughter or weeping of strangers.
By the end of 1885 Leikin felt personally attached to Anton, who became one of his very few confidants. He wanted to show off his palatial house and the estate he had bought outside town where the river Tosna joined the Neva, surrounded by pine forests, and raided by wolves. Leikin’s letters to Moscow were a torrent equal to the letters and stories that Anton sent to Petersburg. Leikin gave advice on every subject: he told Anton to treat Kolia’s morphine addiction with milk. Finally he pressed Anton to make his first visit to Petersburg.
On 10 December 1885 Anton set off for Petersburg to stay a fortnight with Leikin. Although Leikin introduced Anton to men who would change his life – the elderly novelist Grigorovich, doyen of living Russian writers, the newspaper tycoon and publisher Suvorin and his vitriolic leader-writer, Viktor Burenin – Leikin rarely left his protégé’s side. Petersburg’s literary circles sneered at Leikin, and Chekhov’s reception suffered. On this first visit Suvorin and Grigorovich received him coolly, and he was even stood up by Khudekov of The Petersburg Newspaper. The only tangible benefit from this first journey to Petersburg was that Leikin agreed to publish a collection of Chekhov’s tales entitled Motley Stories.5
One friendship came of this fortnight in Petersburg: Viktor Bilibin, a newly qualified barrister and Post Office official, Leikin’s editorial secretary and, as ‘Ygrec’, leader-writer. Bilibin was a year older than Anton, naïve, curious and generous. Trust sprang up between them, though Bilibin had none of Anton’s Bohemianism and was too gentle a writer for Chekhov, who in March 1886 criticized his ‘cotton-woolness’: ‘As a columnist you are like a lover to whom a woman says “You take me too tenderly … You must be rougher!” (By the way, women are just like chickens, they like to be hit at that particular moment.)’ However tenderly, Viktor Bilibin played Virgil to Anton’s Dante in Petersburg’s literary circles. To Bilibin alone Anton confided his doubts about Dunia Efros as a possible consort.
Bilibin had no illusions about his employer, Leikin, and he warned Anton of Leikin’s duplicity: Leikin might be happy to show Chekhov off to Petersburg’s publishers, but he had no intention of letting him escape. Anton passed on the warning to Aleksandr: ‘Living with Leikin, I experienced all the agony about which it is said in Scripture: “I have endured unto the end.” … Don’t rely on Leikin. He is putting every spanner in the works for me and The Petersburg Newspaper.’
Anton washed away the flavour of Leikin’s hospitality by celebrating Christmas, the New Year, University celebrations on Tatiana’s day (12 January) and his name day (17 January), very wildly. At twenty-six he was taking leave, if not of his senses, then of his youth.
Friends’ weddings were a pretext for weeks of hedonism. Dr Dmitri Saveliev was tied and Dr Nikolai Korobov soon would be. In the New Year the artist Aleksandr Ianov in Moscow, Dr Rozanov from Voskresensk and Viktor Bilibin in Petersburg all announced their weddings. Dr Rozanov asked Anton to be best man, and Masha bridesmaid. Anton borrowed 25 roubles and a morning coat. On Rozanov’s wedding morning he wrote to Leikin: ‘Today is Tatiana’s day [Moscow University’s day]. By evening I’ll be legless. I’m putting on morning dress, off to be best man: a doctor is marrying a priest’s daughter – a combination of killer and undertaker.’ On Tatiana’s day Kiseliov wrote and prescribed an open-air sexual encounter and an obscene purgative as a cure for the inevitable hangover.6 Kiseliov was not far off the mark. Chekhov wrote to the groom two days later:
I still haven’t recovered from Tatiana’s day. I really stuffed myself at your wedding, showing my belly no mercy. Then I went with Dr Uspensky to the Ermitage, then to Velde’s restaurant and then to the Salon des Variétés … The result: an empty purse, somebody else’s galoshes, a heavy head, spots in the eyes and desperate pessimism. No-o-o, I’ve got to get married.
/> Kiseliov pretended that he was more shocked by Anton than envious of him: ‘There are no limits to your debauchery, after the great mystery of marriage you end up in an unused hotel room and take up fornication.’ Before his head cleared, in the early hours of 18 January 1886, after his twenty-sixth name day party Chekhov brought matters to a head.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 62 27: Natalia to Anton, a sheet from a notebook, marked 1885 by Chekhov.
2 See OR, 331 73 10: Pavel’s letter to Misha 11 Aug. 1885.
3 See OR, 331 31 1: Anna’s postscript to Aleksandr’s letter to Pavel, 13 Aug. 1885.
4 See OR, 331 82 2: Aleksandr’s letters to Maria Chekhova 1883–7.
5 Chekhov was at a loss for a title: he talked to Leikin’s second-in-command, Bilibin: they came up with Leikin-like titles: Cats and Carp, Flowers and Dogs. Leikin himself suggested In the Maelstrom or Dolls and Masks. Chekhov in despair pondered Buy the book or I smash your face.
6 See OR, 331 47 45b: A. S. Kiseliov’s letters to Anton, 1886.
SEVENTEEN
Getting Engaged
January 1886
MARRIAGE WAS TO PREOCCUPY CHEKHOV for fifteen years before he took the plunge. His behaviour reminds us of Gogol’s comedy Marriage and its hero Podkolesin [‘under the wheels’], who, when finally confronted with the betrothal he seeks, jumps out of the window. Chekhov was a close observer of marriage. He watched his parents’ marriage for forty years. He studied well Aleksandr’s and Kolia’s liaisons. Ever the best man, never the groom, Anton drifted in his friends’ wake. He wrote on 14 January 1886 to Dr Rozanov two days after the wedding:
If Varvara [Mrs Rozanova] doesn’t find me a bride, I’ll certainly shoot myself … It’s time I was ruled with a rod of iron, as you now are … Do you remember? A finch in a cage, a new tap on the samovar and scented glycerine soap are the signs indicating a married man’s flat … Three of my friends are getting married.
Once Anton’s head cleared, he wrote a dramatic monologue On the Harm of Tobacco and told Bilibin: ‘I’ve just got to know a very striking French girl, the daughter of poor but decent bourgeois … Her name is not quite decent: Mlle Sirout.’1 Four days later Anton wrote again to Bilibin: ‘Seeing a certain young lady home, I made her a proposal … I want to get out of the frying pan into the fire … Wish me luck for my marriage.’
Only to Bilibin did Anton reveal this engagement. Masha, a close friend of the fiancée, Dunia Efros, only suspected. To Leikin Chekhov dismissed all thought of marriage. Overhead, on 19 January, a wedding party was in full swing: ‘Somebody banging their feet like a horse has just run over my head … Must be the best man. The band is thundering … For the groom who is going to screw the bride this music may be pleasant, but it will stop me, an impotent, getting any sleep.’ The impulse to many Dunia Efros was not her dowry: her family were not rich. Nor did Anton have a desire for progeny (except for a puppy from Leikin’s Apel and Rogulka). Aleksandr described with pride how he witnessed the birth of his second son, whom he named Anton, and then declared that after this spectacle he could never make love to Anna again. Aleksandr’s picture of philoprogenitive domesticity in Novorossiisk in January 1886 was a deterrent. Aleksandr advised Anton in his next letter: ‘You still aren’t married. Don’t … I’ve forgotten when I last slept.’
Anton’s engagement to Dunia Efros was short and secret. His letters to Bilibin trace stormy ups and downs. On 1 February, Anton, with Kolia and Franz Schechtel, went to a ball at the barracks where Lieutenant Tyshko was now stationed. His fervour for Dunia cooled, and he told Bilibin:
Thank your fiancée for the mention and the consideration and tell her that my marriage is probably alas and alack! The censor won’t pass it … My she is a Jewess. Does a rich Jewgirl have the bravery to take Orthodoxy and the consequences – all right, she doesn’t – and there’s no need to … And anyway, we’ve already quarrelled … Tomorrow we’ll make it up, but in a week we’ll quarrel again … She’s so annoyed that religion gets in the way that she breaks pencils and smashes photographs on my desk – that’s typical … She’s a terrible shrew … I shall divorce her 1–2 years after the wedding, that’s certain.
Dunia’s violent spirit attracted and repelled Anton, and would infiltrate the highly sexed and assertive heroines of his stories that year.
On 16 February 1886 Anton told Bilibin: ‘Nothing is certain about my marriage yet’, and on 11 March:
I have split up to nec [sic] plus ultra with my fiancée. Yesterday we met … I complained to her of having no money and she told me that her Jewboy brother drew a 3-rouble note so perfectly that the illusion was complete: the chambermaid picked it up and put it in her pocket. That’s all. I shan’t write about her to you again.
By early April Bilibin stopped asking about Chekhov’s fiancée. Troubled by Anton’s licentiousness, Bilibin questioned him on love and sex in literature and reality. As for his own love life, Chekhov would only say that ‘he thawed like a Jewboy before a gold rouble’ at the ‘flowerbed’ of beautiful women surrounding Masha. Dunia Efros remained a family friend, although she quarrelled with Masha two years later. In her letter from a North Caucasian spa that summer, four months after breaking with Anton, her conciliatory tone set the pattern for Anton’s discarded lovers:
I was thinking of a rich bride for you, Anton, even before I had your letter. There’s a very loving merchant’s daughter here, not bad-looking, rather plump (your taste) and fairly daft (also a virtue). She is desperate to get away from mummy’s supervision which oppresses her terribly. Once she even drank 4 gallons of vinegar to be pale and scare mummy. She told us that herself. I think you’ll like her. There’s lots of money.2
Dunia’s Jewishness was certainly instrumental in bringing her and Anton together and in sundering them. Like many southern Russians, Anton admired and liked Jews. Always a defender of Jews, he asked Bilibin why he used the word ‘yid’ three times in one letter? Yet he himself used the word ‘yid’ both neutrally and pejoratively and, like many southern Russians, Anton felt Jews to be a race apart with irredeemably unacceptable attitudes. ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew’ were categories in which he classified every new acquaintance, even though his utterances and his behaviour make him, by the standards of the times, a judophile.
We can infer Anton’s cynicism about love and marriage from two items he offered to Fragments in January 1886. One was a readers’ competition:
The writer of the best love letter will win: a photograph of a pretty woman, a certificate signed by the editor and the judges that he has won and a free subscription for this or next year, as he wishes … Terms: 1) Only males may take part; 2) The letter must be sent to the office of Fragments no later than 1 March and bear the author’s address and surname; 3) The author’s letter is to be a declaration of love, showing that he really is in love and suffering, with parallels between infatuation and real love … 4) Conditio sine qua non: the author must be literate, decent, gentle, playful and poetic … Ladies are appointed as judges.
Chekhov’s other piece, ‘For the Information of Husbands’, gave six methods to seduce wives. It was banned: ‘Despite its jocularity, however, the topic’s immorality, the indecently voluptuous scenes and cynical hints lead the censor to forbid it.’ Bilibin, engaged to marry, told Chekhov that the skit was an affront (22 January): ‘So the censor wouldn’t pass “The Attack on Wives”! Eh? … You deserved it. And to think that you’re about to be married.’3
In any case Anton wanted a career more than he wanted Dunia Efros. In 1885 he had written some hundred pieces, as much in bulk as he would write in his ten last and finest years. By 1886, a regular contributor to Khudekov’s Petersburg Newspaper, he was attracting attention among serious readers and writers. Leikin’s Fragments was unrewarding, for Leikin had no time for polished work. He wrote his fair copy straight out and thought others should do the same. Fragments was so strictly censored in 1885 that its existence, and Anton’s income, were threatened. There were pr
actical as well as creative reasons for Anton to move to Khudekov’s paper, although Chekhov conceded to Bilibin (who had no illusions) that Leikin had merits: ‘Where else would you find such a pedant, such a manic letter-writer, such a runner to the censorship committee?’ As a literary mentor, however, Leikin was redundant, although he could charm as well as irritate with his egocentric trivia, writing to Chekhov on 26 February 1886:
I am still bothered with my stomach. It must be a serious catarrh. And bismuth hasn’t helped. I’ve added a grain of codeine to 10 powders (1/10) … Yesterday I bought a cow for 125 roubles. A very fine cow. I meant to send it to my country estate, but I couldn’t bear to and placed it until Easter in my town house, all the more since I have a spare stable. Now we are drinking genuine milk.
Anton Chekhov Page 16
