Anton was spending more than he earned. He pawned his watch and the gold Turkish lira the Ianovs gave him after their typhus. His short pieces at this period show him preoccupied with status. A story, ‘The First Class Passenger’ is told by an engineer whose mistress, a mediocre actress, gets all the attention when the bridge he built is opened. Anton, too, felt he deserved better. His skit, ‘A Literary Table of Ranks’, ranks writers on the 13-point scale of the Russian civil service: the highest rank of ‘Actual State Councillor’ is vacant. Next highest are Tolstoy and Goncharov, followed by the gruesome satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin and the defender of the peasants Grigorovich. Below them come the playwright Ostrovsky and novelist Leskov, together with the melodramatic poet Polonsky. The New Times journalists – Burenin and Suvorin – are ranked with a real genius, the young story writer Vsevolod Garshin. At the bottom, the anti-Semitic Okreits, known to Chekhov as Judophob Judophobovich, is left with no rank at all.
Women guests exerted demi-monde charm, but Anton’s correspondence for the year to come shows that, for once, he was unresponsive. Only Maria Kiseliova evoked any reaction: she rebuked him for his dissipation and lubricious stories. On 21 September he undid any illusions she might have about his hedonism:
I am living in the cold with fumes from the stove … the lamp smokes and covers everything with soot, the cigarette crackles and goes out, I burn my fingers. I could shoot myself … I write a lot and take a lot of time over it … I’ve ordered the doctor’s sign taken down for the time being! Brrr … I’m afraid of typhus.
On 29 September he wrote to her again:
Life is grey, no happy people to be seen … Kolia is living with me. He’s seriously ill (stomach hæmorrhages that exhaust him to hell) … I think that people who feel revulsion for death are illogical. As I understand the logic of things, life consists just of horrors, quarrels and vulgarities …
The Kiseliovs, too, were desperate: they could not pay off their children’s governess. Aleksei Kiseliov wrote on 24 September 1886:
I sat my writer-wife down and made her write a tearful letter to the Aunt in Penza, saying save me, my husband and children, save us from this hissing hag [the governess]. Perhaps she’ll take pity and send not just 500 to pay her off but enough to buy us all sweets.
This letter sowed seeds for The Cherry Orchard, where Gaev appeals for money to an aunt in Iaroslavl and spends his fortune on boiled sweets.
The Chekhov family is reflected in Anton’s fiction of autumn 1886. He acknowledged Pavel’s touchy obstinacy, for he sensed it in himself. His story for New Times in October 1886, ‘Difficult People’, relives appalling rows between father and son: they admit that they share a tyrannical temperament. In Anton’s second story for New Times that month, ‘Dreams’, a sick convict trudges to Siberia, while his guards know that he will soon die. Anton was thinking of Kolia, if not himself. Kolia had crawled home after writing a desperate note: ‘Dear Anton I’ve been in bed for five days … vomiting mercilessly and turning my guts inside out.’ Doctors in the 1880s deceived TB patients that the blood they coughed was from the stomach or throat, not from the lungs: ‘I even thought I had consumption,’ Kolia told Anton. Kolia was hiding from death in the arms of Anna Golden or of his mother, or fled them all to his student haunts. Within days Kolia ran away again.
Aleksandr threw himself on Suvorin’s mercy. Suvorin gave him work as a copy editor and a freelance reporter, and found him a second job editing Russian Shipping. From the latter Aleksandr was soon dismissed, but he was paid enough by Suvorin to bring his family from Tula, where Anna’s relatives lived, for the Christmas goose. Aleksandr, as Anton’s agent in Petersburg, collected royalties and gossip. He hoped to edit New Times, if Fiodorov went to prison, but Suvorin was too canny: Aleksandr remained a hack.
Petersburg, however bad its air for the lungs and its water for the gut, had in spring lifted Anton’s spirits: the company of Suvorin, successful writers and lively actresses excited him. At the end of November he went for a third visit, this time taking Masha with him: her gratitude and joy were vehement. In Petersburg Chekhov’s new stories were sensations: stories of lost children, such as ‘Vanka’, or of a lone man and a child (‘On the Road’), quenched the public’s thirst for Dickensian Christmas sentiments, yet dumbfounded critics with their desolation. Acclaim restored Anton’s self-esteem: ‘I am becoming as fashionable as [Zola’s] Nana!’ Literature was like fornication. Soon Anton saw himself as an unholy trinity, ‘Antonius and Medicine Chekhov, Medicine the wife and Literature the mistress’.
After Petersburg Anton met the festivities in Moscow, from Christmas to his name day, in gayer spirits. Grigorovich visited the Chekhovs then. Vamped by laughing women, he walked the actress Daria Musina-Pushkina, to her home, and recalled his youth, when he was notorious for seducing the wife of the poet A. K. Tolstoy on a garden swing. In Petersburg Grigorovich told Anna Suvorina, ‘My dear, if you only knew what it’s like at the Chekhovs: Bacchanalia, my darling.’1
Men as well as women were attached to Anton. Bilibin wrote ‘I must secretly tell you, I love you,’ but as ‘the husband of a learned wife’ he was tugged out of Chekhov’s circle. Unhappy with Vera and with Leikin (for whom he worked until the latter’s death in 1906), Bilibin presented tedious psychosomatic symptoms, and was passed over for new acolytes. Chekhov’s new disciple was Aleksandr Lazarev, who signed himself Gruzinsky. A provincial seminary teacher, who aspired to be a writer, Gruzinsky visited the Chekhovs on New Year’s Day 1887. He brought with him another schoolteacher-writer, his close friend, Nikolai Ezhov, who worshipped Chekhov just as fervently. The affection of Ezhov, as prickly as his name ‘Hedgehog’, was to sour in a few years, as he resented Chekhov’s ascent and his own obscurity.
An old admirer came to stay: Sasha Selivanova, Anton’s pupil in Taganrog, who now taught in Kharkov. Back home, she wrote to Anton, Vania and Misha: ‘My heart is torn to pieces, I miss you so much. But I can’t say it’s torn into three even pieces. One is bigger. Guess which one of you three is the reason? So you all played the part of the holiday husband excellently.’2 Anton wired back: ‘Angel, darling, miss you terribly, come soon … Your lover.’
The climax of January was Anton’s twenty-seventh name-day party ‘with Jewgirls, Turkeys and Ianova girls’. His cousin Aleksei Dolzhenko brought violin and zither. Over the holidays Anton produced only one story with any literary impact or personal input, ‘Enemies’: a bereaved doctor is tricked into an unnecessary visit and conceives a violent hatred of mankind. Chekhov placed a story in the Moscow weekly The Alarm Clock. Once again Leikin was furious with Chekhov for giving Fragments nothing in December, when new subscribers had to be lured. Before turning up at Anton’s name-day party, he wrote: ‘You really have stabbed Fragments in the back. Of course, you’re not a journalist, you can’t fully understand what you have done to me.’3
Chekhov no longer felt dependent on Leikin: he told Uncle Mitrofan, ‘I am now the most fashionable writer.’ Leikin tried to rein Chekhov in: ‘Your last piece in New Times is weak, in general your little pieces [for Leikin] are more successful’. He tried to bind Anton closer, suggesting a tour of the northern lakes or the southern provinces together – a proposal that Chekhov evaded for a decade – promising him a puppy, pestering him with his hypochondria. Leikin was worried about his obesity. Frivolously, Chekhov prescribed two weeks’ fasting. Eventually, in May 1888, fed up with Leikin’s and Bilibin’s hypochondriac missives, he would order: ‘Take a French maid, 25–26, and, when you’re bored, screw her as hard as you can. That’s good for the health. And when Bilibin comes, let him screw the maid too.’ Leikin, Russia’s most prolific humorist, did not understand such quips, but he forgave Anton and raised his fee to 11 kopecks a line.
At the same time Anton’s illusions about Suvorin were dented. In New Times Burenin attacked a dying man, the poet Nadson, the darling of radical students, for ‘pretending to be bedridden, so as to live at his friends’ expense’. Nadson had
a fatal hæmorrhage: Burenin was called a murderer. At the same time Suvorin staged a coup by selling out 40,000 copies of a ten-volume set of Pushkin’s work a few days after the copyright expired. Kicking a dying man and exploiting an expired copyright earned Suvorin both obloquy for opportunism and admiration for acumen. Anton was dismayed. He thought Nadson ‘greater than all other living poets together’; he found that Suvorin had not reserved for him a single set of the Pushkin edition Anton had promised to friends and relatives.
Chekhov began to wonder, too, what his new admirers in Petersburg might want from him. On 29 January 1887 Aleksandr told Anton: ‘You are expected – they don’t know what – but they expect. Some demand big and thick, others serious, yet others real polish, while Grigorovich is afraid your talent might be changed into petty cash.’ Maria Kiseliova was wrestling with New Times for Anton’s soul. In early January, revolted by Anton’s sensational story ‘The Slough’ and its heroine, a nymphomaniac Jewish swindler, she wrote: ‘I’m personally upset that a writer of your sort, i.e. gifted by God, shows me just “a dunghill” … I had an unendurable urge to swear at you and your foul editors who don’t care that they are ruining your talent.’4 Anton defended at length his right to poke about in dunghills: ‘A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must renounce subjectivity in life and know that dunghills play an important part in the landscape and evil passions are as much part of life as good ones.’ But Maria Kiseliova had hit her mark. The lubricious, Zolaesque sequence of New Times stories came to an end. In February 1887 Chekhov published little, then began a new direction. One story, ‘Verochka’, in New Times, met both Kiseliova’s and Suvorin’s tastes: the hero has come to a country district and is about to leave; Verochka, the girl whose family has looked after him, is quietly but desperately in love with him, but he lacks the emotional energy to respond to her. Their parting and the hero’s failure to propose at the traditional encounter in the garden are scenes that will recur through Chekhov’s work, up to The Cherry Orchard. The sense of futile waste makes ‘Verochka’ a story we can call archetypically Chekhovian.
Despite all the poetry in ‘Verochka’, Anton felt his well running dry. He longed to revisit the south, the scenes of his childhood: he had not seen Taganrog since the Loboda wedding in June 1881. Overlooking Anton’s misbehaviour then, Uncle Mitrofan and cousin George in Taganrog, and the Kravtsovs, Gavriil and Petia, in their steppes, pressed him to come. A break from his immediate family and his editors would be a search for new material.
To travel Anton needed an advance from Suvorin, and for that he needed to visit Petersburg. His elder brother’s cry for help provided a less transparent pretext for the journey. Aleksandr felt a pariah: Suvorin had forbidden him to sign his work for fear of readers confusing two A. Chekhovs. Although he was offering Kolia a refuge from creditors, vice and police in Petersburg, Aleksandr was himself so penniless that he purloined Vania’s coat. He then telegraphed to Moscow that he was fatally ill. On 8 March Anton took the night train. From a hotel room on the Nevsky Avenue Anton wrote to the family:
Naturally I travelled as tense as could be. I dreamt of coffins, torchbearers, I fancied typhus, typhoid, doctors etc … Generally, a vile night … My only consolation was my darling precious Anna (I mean Karenina) who kept me busy all the way … Aleksandr is perfectly well. He was depressed, frightened and, imagining he was ill, sent that telegram.
Anton’s journey achieved its real aim. He and Suvorin talked from nine in the evening to one in the morning: Anton left with an advance of 300 roubles, and then wrote to Franz Schechtel, who would get him a free railway ticket to Taganrog and back. ‘Whatever happens, even earthquakes, I’m going, because my nerves can’t stand it any more.’ He collected fees, but told Masha: ‘I’d ask you to spend as little as possible. I don’t know when I’m coming. Aleksandr with his depression and tendency to hit the bottle can’t be left until his lady recovers …’ After cementing his friendship with Suvorin, Anton went to see Grigorovich, diagnosed arterial sclerosis, kissed him and divulged a prognosis of imminent death only to Suvorin. Apart from Aleksandr’s household, other things in Petersburg upset Anton. Someone stole his overcoat, so that he froze on the streets. Typhoid was raging: it killed Leikin’s porter. By 17 March Anton was back from ‘the city of death’ in Moscow, determined to leave for the south within the fortnight.
Anton’s brothers begged for his attention. Schechtel wrote on 26 March: ‘Kolia writes that he’s very ill, spitting blood … Shouldn’t we get together at his place tonight?’ On 29 March Aleksandr appealed again from Petersburg:
Anna is in hospital, ward three, Annushka [the servant] in ward 8, typhoid, Kolia [the elder son] is in Oldenburg’s clinic, Antosha [the younger son] is being visited daily by a woman doctor. I and my Tanka [the other servant] are the only ones on their feet.
Anton had had enough and would not be dragged back to Anna’s or Kolia’s bedside. On 2 April 1887, swearing his Taganrog cousin Georgi to secrecy, he took the train south.
Notes
1 See Masha’s account, Vokrug Chekhova, 231.
2 See OR, 331 58 31: A. L. Selivanova-Krause’s letters to Anton, 1887–95.
3 See OR, 331 50 1d: Leikin’s letters to Anton, 1887.
4 See OR, 331 47 48: Maria Kiseliova’s letters to Anton, 1886–1900.
TWENTY-ONE
Taganrog Revisited
April–September 1887
AS FRANZ SCHECHTEL became a successful architect, he became more careful with his reputation and his money. He got Anton a third-class single to Taganrog – mean payment for the medical attention he had enjoyed. Anton slept, like his cat, ‘boots under nose’. At 5.00 a.m. on the first morning he woke in Oriol, and posted a letter telling the family to obey Vania, as the ‘positive man of character’. On the third morning, Easter Saturday, the train reached the sea. Anton, Mitrofan and his clan went to all-night Easter service.
Taganrog disillusioned Chekhov; he wrote to Leikin:
60,000 inhabitants do nothing but eat, drink, reproduce and have no other interests. Wherever you go, Easter cakes, eggs, Santurini wine, suckling babies, but no newspapers or books anywhere … The town’s location is beautiful in all respects, a splendid climate, masses of fruits of the earth, but the inhabitants are hellishly inert. Everyone is musical, gifted with imagination, highly strung, sensitive, but it’s all wasted. There are no patriots, no businessmen, no poets, not even any decent bakers.
After six years’ increasing gentility in Moscow, Anton found Mitrofan’s house foul. ‘The lavatory is in the back and beyond, under the fence,’ he told the family. ‘… There are no spittoons, no decent washstand … the napkins are grey, Irinushka [the servant] is grubby and gross … so you could shoot yourself it’s so bad!’ He went to see the house where he had spent the last five Taganrog years and reported: ‘Selivanov’s house is empty and neglected. It’s a dreary sight and I wouldn’t have it at any price. I’m amazed: how could we live in it?!’
For eight years Anton had not been parted for so long from his mother and sister. He wrote a diary of this sentimental journey and posted it in instalments. He saw old teachers – Diakonov, the deputy-head, still ‘as thin as a viper’, Father Pokrovsky now ‘the thunder and lightning’ of the church. He asked after girlfriends – a jealous husband kept one away; other girls had eloped with actors. He visited the wives of his Moscow colleagues, Saveliev and Zembulatov; he drank wine with local doctors, now trying to turn the town into a seaside spa. He hid from the police informer Anisim Petrov, who was now a member of Mitrofan’s Brotherhood.
Dirt and stress brought on diarrhœa and hæmorrhoids; the weather, bronchitis. Running from Anisim, Anton was almost crippled by a varicose vein on his left leg; drinking with an old school friend, Dr Eremeev, made him too ill to appreciate Taganrog’s girls. Only cousin Georgi pleased Anton: he rarely went to church, he smoked, talked of women and worked hard at a shipping company.
Two weeks’ celebrity in Taganr
og was enough for Anton, and he left for the steppe town of Novocherkassk, to be best man at the wedding of Dr Eremeev’s sixteen-year-old Cossack sister. First he stayed with the Kravtsovs at Ragozina Gully. Riding and shooting, drinking sour milk and eating eight times a day, he could ‘cure 15 consumptions and 22 rheumatisms’. At the wedding, in borrowed clothes, he teased the girls, drank the local pink champagne and stuffed himself on caviar. The journey from Ragozina Gully to Novocherkassk and back was slow; he waited eight hours for a connection. On the way there he slept in a siding, on the way back, ‘I went out for a pee and pure miracles outside: the moon, the boundless steppe with its barrows and wilderness; the quiet of the grave, the carriages and rails stand out in the twilight – you’d think the world had died.’ At Ragozina Gully he rode fifteen miles to fetch the post. It did not make him homesick. Leikin reported on Palmin’s misfortunes and was annoyed that Chekhov should complain of his own diseases: ‘For a doctor that is not good at all. Your illness, though a nuisance, is not at all dangerous. As for my health, turpentine helps to expel the gases.’
Anton Chekhov Page 19
