Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  For the stomach Chekhov advised arsenic. (He prescribed Bilibin arsenic, too; Anton and Leikin mocked Bilibin for being too cowardly to take it.)

  A reminder of his schooldays inspired Chekhov to aim higher. Viktor Bilibin drew Anton’s attention to a talented short novel, My Marriage, in the October and November 1885 issues of the monthly The Russian Herald. Using material from Taganrog gimnazia, it told of a schoolteacher who loses his idle wife, and then his beloved sister-in-law, to an actor, a fiery radical. Anton recognized the author, Fiodor Stulli, as his old geography teacher. My Marriage left an imprint on Chekhov: he was to use its title and some of its motifs years later. To be overtaken as a writer by one of his teachers spurred his ambition.

  A new eye for nature, rich experience in Moscow and Babkino, from fishing to autopsies, the training of the anatomy theatre and the historia morbi, made Chekhov stand out in Khudekov’s Petersburg Newspaper. Stories like ‘The Dead Body’, where peasants guard a corpse until the authorities come, or ‘Sergeant Prishibeev’ [Basher], about a maniac who takes the law into his own hands, have a radical outlook, and a subtlety quite uncharacteristic of the Antosha Chekhonte of old. Chekhov could risk pure pathos. ‘Grief’ (of November 1885), based on an incident at the Chikino hospital, has an old turner, himself crippled by frostbite, delivering his dying wife to hospital. It won Palmin’s admiration. ‘Anguish’ of January 1886 (a cabby, whose son has died, turns to his horse for sympathy) convinced Aleksandr of his brother’s genius. Chekhov could now be serious, not yet in his letters, but in his art, where he could be sure of hiding behind a neutral, ironical authorial persona. The most telling of the stories on the eve of his breakthrough is ‘Artistry’: a drunken peasant erects a cross on the frozen river. Typical of all Chekhov’s fiction, it is a seasonally appropriate work, timed to appear on the relevant day – the Feast of the Consecration of the Waters – but this is the first of several stories Anton was to write that show a religious mystery and work of art created by a flawed human being. This depth and range also owes much to Maupassant, widely admired in Russia; Bilibin and Chekhov discussed Bel-Ami and Une Vie in their letters. The impact of a dozen major stories published across thirty or so Monday issues of The Petersburg Newspaper softened the hostility of critics to a writer of lowly provincial origins who had, as yet, no influential patron.

  Notes

  1 Mlle Sirout [in Russian ‘I shit’] is almost certainly, like Masha’s girlfriend Josephina Pavlovna [pronounced colloquially Zhopa, ‘arse’], Anton’s invention.

  2 See OR, 331 64 20: Evdokia Efros’s three letters to Anton, 1886: 27 June.

  3 See OR, 331 36 75b: Viktor Bilibin’s letters to Anton, 1886.

  EIGHTEEN

  Acclaim

  February–April 1886

  IN THE NEW YEAR Kurepin of The Alarm Clock returned from Petersburg. He told Chekhov that the press baron Aleksei Suvorin wanted Chekhov’s stories for the Saturday supplement to New Times. Chekhov accepted with alacrity and Kurepin told the magnate. On 15 February Fragments published ‘In Alien Lands’, one of Chekhov’s best light pieces: outrageously funny and touchingly sad, it paints the predicament of a Frenchman whose Russian host has confiscated his passport, so as to turn his guest into a slave. Anton’s début with ‘Requiem’ in New Times the same day overshadowed even the impact of ‘In Alien Lands’. ‘Requiem’ outgrows the humorous genre to which at first sight it appears to belong: a grieving father insists on having his daughter commemorated as a fornicatrix. Apart from initiating Chekhov’s theme of the actress as social outcast, this story builds tragedy out of the comedy of misunderstanding. Suvorin sent Anton a telegram and insisted that he allow his real name to be printed. Chekhov reserved his real name for scientific writing. Only Nature and Field Sports had ever printed work under his real name. He consented reluctantly. Anton Chekhov consigned Antosha Chekhonte to extinction.

  Leikin gave way to the inevitable loss of his protégé: ‘I think that it is in your direct interests to write for Suvorin, because he pays almost twice as much.’ (Suvorin started Chekhov at 12 kopecks a line, and allowed him three times the length that Leikin allotted. One story might earn 100 roubles.) Leikin and Chekhov had had tiffs, and not only over his publications in Moscow. To Leikin’s boasts of potency as both man and editor, Anton responded: ‘A penis that smashes walnuts as a measure of editorial ability could be a fine theme for a dissertation.’1 From mid April, Khudekov cut Chekhov’s allocation of space on The Petersburg Newspaper to make room for ‘Current Events’. Anton transferred his loyalty to Aleksei Suvorin: he sent a congratulatory telegram to Suvorin and New Times for the paper’s tenth jubilee. Leikin was at the celebrations, where Suvorin distributed gold medals to his minions. Leikin tried to make the best of Anton’s new connection; he was flattered that Suvorin and Grigorovich were ‘infatuated’ with his protégé. Dmitri Grigorovich, the first Russian writer graphically to portray the miseries of the Russian peasant, despite four decades of resting on his laurels, was still able to open doors, so infectious was his literary enthusiasm.

  Chekhov had divined Suvorin’s tastes. New Times, like its owner, liked brooding sexuality and graphic naturalism in its reports and its fiction. Two stories Chekhov wrote for New Times in February 1886 have a highly sexed woman rebelling against her husband: the heroine of ‘Agafia’ faces a beating from her husband after a day with her lover, while in ‘The Witch’ a woman awes her elderly husband by conjuring male visitors out of a blizzard. Suvorin, Bilibin reported, was ‘simply in ecstasy’. Chekhov’s more prudish friends, the architect Franz Schechtel and Viktor Bilibin, were slightly appalled; even Grigorovich, still a notorious libertine, had reservations. At the end of March Chekhov sent Suvorin a story full of social concern, where the picture of deprivation was free of any ‘taint’: ‘Nightmare’ shows a newcomer to a country district, shocked by the poverty of the priest and the doctor. The story struck a chord in Suvorin, for the doctor’s wife washes her own linen – Suvorin’s favourite recollection of poverty was that his first wife, a teacher, did her own washing.

  Chekhov’s new departure aroused acclaim on 25 March 1886. Dmitri Grigorovich had the previous summer marvelled at ‘The Huntsman’. Now he was sure he had discovered a genius to succeed him. He talked to Aleksei Suvorin and wrote at length to Anton:

  Dear Sir, Dear Mr Chekhov, About a year ago I chanced to read a story by you in The Petersburg Newspaper; I can’t remember now what it was called; I remember being struck by its features of peculiar originality, and above all by the remarkable fidelity, truthfulness in the presentation of the characters and also in the description of nature. Since then I have read everything signed Chekhonte, although inwardly I was angry that a man should so little value himself that he thinks he has to resort to a pseudonym. Reading you, I constantly advised Suvorin and Burenin to follow my example. They obeyed me and now none of us doubt that you have a real talent – a talent that sets you far outside the circle of the new generation of writers. I am not a journalist nor a publisher; I can exploit you only by reading you; if I speak of your talent, I do so out of conviction. I am over 65; but I still have so much love of literature and follow its progress with such enthusiasm that I am always glad when I come across something alive, gifted, so that I couldn’t – as you see – hold back and I offer you both my hands. But this is not all; I want to add this: judging by various qualities of your talent, a true feeling for inner analysis, mastery of description (snowstorm, night and locality in ‘Agafia’ etc.), a feeling of plasticity, where you give a full picture in a few lines: clouds on a dying sunset: ‘like ash on dying coals’ … and so on, – your vocation is, I am certain, to write several excellent truly artistic works. You will commit a great moral sin if you do not justify these expectations. To do so you must have respect for a talent which is so rarely granted. Stop doing hack work. I don’t know how well off you are; if you are not well off, better go hungry as we used to in our time, save up your impressions for work that has
been pondered, polished, written at several sittings … The basis for your stories is often a motif with a somewhat cynical tinge, why? Truthfulness, realism not only do not exclude refinement, they are enhanced by it. You have such a command of form and such a feeling for the plastic that there is no particular need to talk, for instance, of dirty feet and twisted toenails or the sexton’s navel … Please forgive me such remarks; I decided to make them only because I truly believe in your talent and with all my heart wish it full development and full expression. Soon, I am told, a book of your stories is coming out; if it is under the pseudonym of Che-khon-te, I earnestly ask you to telegraph the publisher to put your real name to it. After the last stories in New Times and the success of ‘The Huntsman’ your name will have more success. I should appreciate confirmation that you are not angry with me for my remarks but take them to heart, just as I write to you not as an authority but in the simplicity of a pure heart. I shake your hand as a friend and wish you all the best. Yours respectfully, D. Grigorovich.

  Wary of his own father for twenty years, Anton responded with trusting affection to the father figures of Russian literature. Great writers – Leskov, Grigorovich and, later, Tolstoy – and self-made patriarchs like Suvorin aroused filial devotion in Anton. He might back away from adoring young women, but he seized hold of tributes from Grand Old Men. Anton boasted of Grigorovich’s praise to Uncle Mitrofan and to Bilibin and answered Grigorovich by return of post with unprecedented emotion:

  Your letter, my kind, ardently loved bringer of good tidings, struck me like lightning. I almost burst into tears, I was profoundly moved and I now feel that it has left a deep trace in my soul. May God calm your old age as you have comforted my youth, but I cannot find words or deeds with which to thank you. You know how ordinary people look on the elect, such as you; you can therefore judge what your letter means for my self-regard. It is greater than any diploma and, for a writer who is a beginner it is a royalty for the present and the future. I am bemused. I haven’t the strength to judge, whether I deserve this high reward or not … If I have a gift which ought to be respected, then I confess to the purity of your heart, I haven’t respected it hitherto. I have felt I had it, but have got used to considering it negligible. An organism needs only external reasons to be unjust, extremely dubious and suspicious about itself. And, as I now recall, I have plenty of such reasons. All those close to me have always been condescending about my writing and have never stopped giving me friendly advice not to change my profession, not to become a scribbler. I have hundreds of acquaintances in Moscow, a couple of dozen writers among them, and I cannot recall a single one who reads me or considers me as an artist. There is a so-called ‘literary circle’ in Moscow; talents and mediocrities of all ages and sorts gather once a week in a private room in a restaurant and let their tongues wag. If I were to go there and read just a bit of your letter, they would laugh at me to my face. My five years’ hanging around the newspapers has been enough to imbue me with this general attitude to my literary hack work, I quickly got accustomed to looking condescendingly at my work – and everything has gone to the dogs! That’s the first reason … The second is that I am a doctor and am up to my ears in medicine … I write all this only to justify my grave sin to you a little bit. Hitherto I have taken an extremely frivolous, careless, pointless view of my literary work. I don’t remember a single story on which I have spent more than twenty-four hours, while ‘The Huntsman’, which you liked, was written in a bathing hut! As reporters write their notices about fires, so I’ve written my stories: automatically, semiconsciously, not caring at all about the reader or myself … In writing I have done my utmost not to squander on a story images or pictures which, God knows why, I’ve been saving up and carefully hiding.

  The first thing that drove me to self-criticism was a very kind and, as far as I can see, sincere letter from Suvorin. I had begun to prepare to write something sensible, but I still lacked faith in my own literary sense.

  Now, out of the blue, your letter has come. Forgive the comparison, but it acted on me like a governor’s order to ‘leave town in 24 hours!’, i.e. I suddenly felt an overwhelming need to hurry, rather to get out of whatever I was stuck in … I shall free myself of hack work, but it will take time. There is no easy way to get out of the rut I have fallen into. I don’t mind going hungry, as I have before, but it isn’t just a question of me. I give my leisure time to writing, 2–3 hours a day and a bit of the night, i.e. time that can be used for small pieces. In summer, when I have more leisure and fewer expenses, I shall take up serious work.

  My only hope is the future. I’m still only 26. Perhaps I shall manage to do something, although time is passing quickly.

  Leikin still announced to Anton: ‘My house, my table are at your service.’ Anton wanted to meet his new patrons in Petersburg independently of Leikin, whose motives, after his last visit when he had been received so frostily by Suvorin and others, he now distrusted. He called Leikin ‘the uncle of lies’ to Aleksandr. Schechtel, who was drawing the cover of Motley Stories, reported: ‘There is a supposition that Leikin is undermining your interests’.

  For Easter Anton sent Suvorin his finest and most lyrical piece of prose so far, ‘On Easter Night’: a pilgrim listens to the ferryman monk mourning the death of his friend. Easter joy is tempted with lament. Chekhov’s prose is imbued with intense love of the archaic language of the liturgy which only he and Leskov could fuse into literary Russian. ‘On Easter Night’ transcends the author’s own unbelief.

  Four things, however, stood between Chekhov and a triumphal visit to Petersburg: Easter, his health, poverty and Kolia’s behaviour. Only twice, in 1878 and 1879, had Anton spent an Easter away from his parents. He stayed in Moscow until 14 April, Easter Monday. At Easter Anton’s health took on an ominous annual pattern: with spring and the rising of the sap, his lungs spurted blood. On 6 April Anton confessed to Leikin that he was spitting blood, too weak to write, but ‘afraid to submit to the soundings of my colleagues’. Family and friends gave him no respite. Giliarovsky wrote a hoax letter, saying he had a broken leg, extensive burns and wounds after a fire: Anton rushed to his bedside to find a case of St Anthony’s fire. Vania’s diarrhœa and Aunt Fenichka’s chronic cough demanded nursing and kept Anton in Moscow. He even lacked money for the fare to Petersburg, although Suvorin, unlike Khudekov, paid his authors on time. On 5 March Anton was ordered by the magistrate to pay 50 roubles of Kolia’s debts; apparently Kolia owed another 3000.

  Anton’s elder brothers were inexcusably irresponsible: they stood in his way. He lectured them both, writing to Aleksandr on 6 April:

  You write that you’re ‘being burnt, slashed, ground and blood-sucked’. You mean, you’re being dunned? My dear brother, you’ve got to pay your debts! You must at any cost, even to Armenians, even at the price of going hungry … If people with a university education and writers think debts are just forms of suffering, what will everybody else think? … Look at me, I have a family round my neck far larger than yours and groceries in Moscow cost 10 times more than where you are. Your rent is what I pay for a piano, I don’t dress any better than you.

  At the same time Anton gave Kolia an ultimatum:

  You are kind to the point of being wet, magnanimous, unselfish, you will share your last penny, you’re sincere; you don’t know envy or hate, you’re simple, you pity people and animals, you’re not spiteful or vindictive, you’re trusting … You are gifted from above with what others don’t have … on earth there is only one artist for every 2,000,000 people … You have just one fault. This is your false excuse, your grief and your catarrh of the gut. It is your extreme lack of good breeding … The lower-class flesh brought up on thrashings, wine cellars and handouts shows. It’s hard, awfully hard to overcome it.

  Well bred people in my opinion must satisfy the following conditions:

  1) They respect human personality and are always considerate, gentle, polite and yielding …

  2) … They
go without sleep … to pay for their student brothers, to buy clothes for their mother …

  3) They respect others’ property and therefore pay their debts …

  The tirade ended:

  8) They develop an aesthetic sense. They can’t go to bed in their clothes, look at cracks full of bedbugs in the wall, breathe foul air, walk on floors covered with spittle, eat out of an old paraffin can. They try as far as they can to tame and ennoble the sexual instinct … They need from a woman not bed, not equine sweat, not the sounds of urination, not a mind expressing itself in the art of deceiving you with fake pregnancy and lying non-stop. They, especially artists, need freshness, elegance, humanity, a capacity to be a mother, not a hole … They don’t knock back vodka, don’t sniff cupboards, for they know they are not pigs. They drink only when free to, on the right occasion … Come home to us, smash the vodka decanter and lie down and read … if only Turgenev, whom you haven’t read …

  You must drop your fucking conceit, because you’re not a little boy … You’ll be 30 soon! It’s high time!

  I’m waiting … We’re all waiting.

  Kolia’s delinquency affected many. Franz Schechtel had shown trust: he found Kolia work restoring icons for a new church, where, as architect, he was penalized for delays. Kolia took the money and materials. Schechtel appealed to Anton: ‘I’m tearing my hair and pulling my teeth with despair: Kolia has vanished and left not a trace: there’s no way I can get to him.’2

  Eventually, on Easter Sunday Kolia was traced, but no materials were recovered.

  Anton had done all he could. He was leaving for his second fortnight in Petersburg. Motley Stories was launched on 27 April; there were cogent financial reasons for going. If Suvorin paid 87 roubles for one story, why should not Khudekov raise his rates? Leikin encouraged Anton: ‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to come to Petersburg the week after Easter, and meet Suvorin and Grigorovich [again]. I would do that for the sake of literary connections which are essential for a writer.’ On 25 April 1886, Anton stepped out of the train in Petersburg: he was to be enthusiastically received by the Great and the Good.