Anton Chekhov. A life - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Donald Rayfield (ч. 2)

By mid 1882, Anton had enough published in The Spectator and The Alarm Clock to swell the family income. (Nevertheless, he accepted an Easter job tutoring the seven-year-old son of a senator, Anatoli Iakovlev.) He was invited to write for a serious weekly illustrated magazine, Moscow, and he collaborated with Kolia on a miniature novel The Green Spit of Land, about a country house on the Black Sea. Again, the characters bear the names of real people: the artist Chekhov, Maria Egorovna (presumably Polevaeva), while the narrator, unnamed, resembles Anton, for he teaches the heroine's daughter German and goldfinch trapping. The Green Spit of Land showed that Chekhov could parody the pseudo-aristocratic pap - the 'boulevard novel' - which was then in demand; now he was challenged by Kurepin to give The Alarm Clock a pastiche tbat the reader might take for the real thing. The result, 'The Unnecessary Victory', was serialized from June until September 1882 and earned 'Antosha Chekhonte' several hundred roubles. This pastiche, too, apes the boulevard novel - a singer, exploited and then triumphant, a desperate aristocratic lover. Readers took it to be a translation of a novel by the Hungarian Ìîã Jokai.14 It stretched Chekhov's narrative ambitions.

In summer 1882, after the exams, Chekhov published in Moscow his first bid for literary renown. Called 'The Lady', the story is full of modish cliches: a selfish lustful widow, a villainous Polish manager, a noble peasant, a violent denouement, and the narrator's radical indignation. It is, nevertheless, a harbinger of better things. Anton's later stories of oppressed peasantry, and his fiction of the mid 1880s, where sexuality leads to violence, grow out of 'The Lady'.

So encouraged was Chekhov by success, that he devised more pseudonyms - Chekhonte spawned 'the Man without a Spleen' and 'Mr Baldastov'. With Kolia as illustrator, Anton compiled 160 pages of his best work to print and bind on credit. He himself would market the book (which had several titles - At Leisure, Idlers and Easygoers, Naughty Tricks). On 19 June 1882 the censor rejected the application. When a second request was submitted, pointing out that these stories had already passed the censor once, the argument was accepted, but, in an ever more repressive atmosphere, the book was banned in page proof.

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If Anton was to support the family, he would have to write a hundred stories a year for Moscow's weekly magazines. Vania was independent now and Aleksandr, as a customs officer, would receive a regular salary, hut Masha and Misha were still students, while neither Kolia nor Pavel brought much to the household. There were other dependants too: Aunt Fenichka, Korbo the whippet, and Fiodor Timofeich the tomcat. Aleksandr had brought home Fiodor as a kitten who had been abandoned in a freezing latrine. Anton was much comforted when Fiodor stretched out on his lap and to this cat he first addressed an expression he applied to himself and his brothers: 'Who would have thought that such genius would come out of an earth closet?'

TWELVE Ô

Fragmentation

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ON 25 JULY 1882, in bad debt, and not telling the Chekhovs that Anna was two months pregnant, Aleksandr, his common-law wife and her teenage son Shura left their dog with Aunt Fenichka and Korbo and caught the train south for Tula. There they stayed for a day, entrusting Shura to Anna's relatives, before travelling to Taganrog. Aleksandr saw familiar faces: 'In Tula, Antosha, I saw at the station your bride, she who is on the Grachiovka, and her mama. They say of this mama that when she got in the saddle, she broke a horse's back.' Aleksandr did not like his wife's home town, and sent Anton an anti-ode to Tula. It is similar in tone to Betjeman's poem 'Slough':15 I entered Tula with distress, My greying girlfriend would insist On dragging me, she could not see. Alas, I could not overrule her, I suffered and I went to Tula… In Taganrog, at first, all went well: Aleksandr had returned to his native town in glory - a graduate, a civil servant, and apparently married to a gentlewoman. Stopping at the Hotel Europa, Aleksandr entered Mitrofan's shop as customer, to be swamped by avuncular embraces and hospitality. Mitrofan and Liudmila (who now had four children) removed Aleksandr and his partner from the hotel, in exchange for teaching their twelve-year-old son Georgi grammar. Then they stayed with old friends, the Agalis, as paying guests. Very soon, however, Taganrog had read Anton and Kolia's skit of the Loboda wedding, and only the Chekhovs' nanny Agafia was still pleased to see Aleksandr.»

Taganrog was not on Anton's mind. All July 1882 he had to earn money in Moscow, while his mother and the younger Chekhovs were

DOC Mill (II I Ê IK) V in Voskresensk with Vania. Pavel stayed overnight at the Moscow apartment every other day, so Kolia and Anton moved to a dacha with Pushkariov and his consort Anastasia. Deserted, Pavel called his wife and younger children back from Voskresensk and then threatened to join his sons at Pushkariov's. While the friendship with Pushkariov lasted, Chekhov contributed to his journals. Talk of the World aimed high: Anton printed a story, 'Livestock', that recalls the perpetual triangle in Dostoevsky's Eternal Husband. In 'Livestock' too the lover is saddled forever with the husband of the woman he has seduced.

After the holidays, Pushkariov printed Chekhov's longest piece in a Moscow weekly: four issues of Talk of the World carried 'Belated Flowers'. (This story was dedicated to Anton's former lodger, the medical student Nikolai Korobov.) The 'belated flowers' are a patrician family fallen on hard times. The story line, though crude, is strong. The central hero shows the author's wishful thinking: a doctor of humble origins flourishes as the 'belated flowers' wilt. Chekhov re-used the story line less crassly in 'Ionych' of 1899, where a plebeian doctor likewise turns the tables on the town's patrician family.

'Livestock' and 'Belated Flowers' like 'The Lady', were impressive: they brought respect, demand and money. That year, 1882-3, was strenuous for Anton. Fourth-year medics were taught by the luminaries of Russian surgery and internal medicine. Chekhov's practicals were in paediatrics. Here he wrote up the case of Ekaterina Kurnukova, a doomed infant, paralysed and pustulent with neonatal syphilis, whom he tended for twelve weeks.16 To mix harrowing study with a social life and some hundred literary pieces needed superhuman determination and energy.

To make a name, however, a writer had to be printed in Petersburg, where periodicals printed what was considered to be serious literature. Chekhov owed his breakthrough to the poet Liodor Palmin, who wrote for both Moscow's and St Petersburg's press. When Chekhov first saw him at The Alarm Clock Palmin, at forty-one, looked like a tramp: hunched, pockmarked and dirty. A few lyrics of noble civic sentiment, some elegant translations of the classics and a talent for improvisation made him popular. He was an unusually compassionate soul in the literary world. Flitting from one tenement to another, in dingy parts of Moscow where visitors risked their lives at night, with

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his servant Pelageia, who became consort and eventually wife, Palmin took in stray dogs, cats, ducks and hens, the crippled, the blind and the mangy. He and Pelageia drank heavily.17 Chekhov was as fascinated by Palmin as by Uncle Giliai; the fascination was mutual.

In October 1882 Nikolai Leikin, editor of the St Petersburg weekly journal Fragments, came to see Palmin. They dined at Moscow's best restaurant, Testov's. As they drove away, Palmin spotted Kolia and Anton Chekhov on the pavement. He recommended them to Leikin, always in search of talent, as contributors. By 14 November Leikin had accepted three of Anton's pieces (and rejected two). He paid 8 kopecks a line, he wanted weekly contributions and he allotted Anton up to a quarter of each issue of 1000 lines. (In Russia even writers as famous as Tolstoy were paid by the line for short works and by the printer's sheet of 24 pages for longer works.) Kolia provided centrefold and cover pictures. Leikin was Russia's most prolific writer of comic sketches: every Taganrog schoolboy knew his work. As an editor he was ruthless (he rewrote without consulting his authors), but he won respect for his tenacity against the censors and drew major writers, notably the novelist Nikolai Leskov, to Fragments.

Despite a weekly correspondence, which became frank,18 Anton found Leikin's boasting and pedantry tiresome. A nouveau riche eccentric, Leikin nevertheless commanded admiration for his love of animals and children. In 1882 he adopted a baby left on his doorstep. For his two hounds, Apel and Rogulka, he hung his Christmas tree with raw meat. Anton's physical distaste for Leikin, 'the lame devil', a squat, hirsute man with tiny eyes, and his irritation with Leikin's manipulative ploys were tempered by gratitude for spotting his talent. Leikin wanted exclusivity, and Anton had to write less for the Moscow journals. This jealousy became paranoiac at the end of the year, when subscribers were deciding which magazines to take for the new year. Leikin needed to show that anyone who wanted to read Antosha Chekhonte had to buy Fragments. Leikin's motives were economic, and agreed with Anton's artistic principles on one point only: the need for precision, speed and brevity. Yet, under Leikin's and the censor's stringent tutelage, Chekhov began to show a telling, ironic turn of phrase, a gift for dialogue, for an impressionistic image.

A new rhythm started: Fragments came out every Saturday and various Chekhovs put Anton's contributions on Tuesday's midnight

I. () i I i» ii Ñ 11 Ê Ê 11 Î V mail train to Petersburg so that Lcikin could set them up, submit them to the censor and get them out in time. The discipline was stricter still when Leikin asked Chekhov to provide a weekly column called 'Fragments of Moscow Life'. This was to parade the corruption and provinciality of Moscow for the amusement of Petersburg's readers, who needed to believe that they were in Europe and Moscow was in Asia. To be exposed as the author would have made life difficult: Chekhov had a new pseudonym for these articles, 'Ruver', and, when his hand was suspected after a few months by others in Moscow's 'Grub Street', switched to 'Ulysses'. Writing less for Moscow and mocking Moscow's writers and editors lost Anton friends in the offices of The Alarm Clock, where he even used editorial conferences as material for his Fragments articles. Eight kopecks a line justified betrayal. In Moscow Anton published in The Spectator where friendly relations with the Golden sisters helped, and where Davydov also paid 8 kopecks a line. Any Moscow publication, especially at the end of the year, was to Leikin a dagger in the back. Often Leikin accused Palmin and Chekhov of losing him subscribers by their promiscuity.

Socially, Anton was moving in more refined circles. His sister Masha, whom her elder brothers had spurned as the family crybaby, had grown up to be a friend and confidante. In May 1882 she matriculated from the episcopal gimnazia and started university courses (in Russia, as in Britain, female students were taught extramurally). Enrolled on the prestigious Guerrier courses, where eminent historians such as Kliuchevsky lectured, Masha had become a kursistka (a female external student). The friends Masha brought home in autumn 1882 to her brothers were more salubrious than the editorial secretaries of the weekly magazines, let alone the landladies with whom her brothers roomed, but only the more daring girls on the Guerrier courses could breathe the Bohemian atmosphere around Kolia and Anton. Masha's fellow students rivalled Anna and Natalia Golden for Kolia's and Anton's affections. To one, Ekaterina Iunosh-eva, an entomologist, Anton sent a beetle 'which has died of desperate love', but she favoured Kolia.

Olga Kundasova, known as 'the astronomer', was a kursistka who found work at the Moscow observatory. In 1883 she and Anton became lovers, a relationship that limped on for two decades. Olga Kundasova was gawky, strong-boned, highly strung, but even in her most unhappy

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and infatuated moments too penetrating and frank for Anton to be comfortable with. More seductive was a temperamental, mordant Jewish student, Dunia Efros. Both Olga Kundasova and Dunia Efros experienced much distress before finding their places on the periphery of Anton's life. Far more complex and less Bohemian than earlier women in the three brothers' lives, they also behaved as equals. They changed Anton's perception of women. If the best stories Chekhov wrote for Fragments have psychological depth, we must thank the women whom Masha brought into Anton's life. Masha was hostess, secretary, e'prouveuse and protector of Anton's private life, and began to share with him the power in the family.

Anton's older brothers were marginalized. Kolia's dissipation, and his tuberculosis, were undermining his reputation as an artist. He now took morphine, initially for the pains in his chest, as well as consuming copious amounts of alcohol. For some time the family tried to ignore him. In Taganrog Aleksandr was half-forgotten, despite regular letters which showed that he too was unhappy. Aleksandr and Anna were hopelessly inept housekeepers and Aleksandr did not present the Customs Office with the graduation certificate necessary to receive a full salary. The salary he did receive did not pay for even food and fuel. At first, the couple were lulled by Uncle Mitrofan and Aunt Liudmila's friendliness. Anna joined a confederacy of women and Aunt Liudmila confided her intimate secrets. Aleksandr tantalized Anton: Auntie even told my better half a few things about the general bliss that uncle provides her with. Naturally, I too know these details but I shall conceal them from you, for in fact they are quite unlike the slow motion which you, Antosha, make when you fold your fingers in a certain way. Anna was clearly pregnant; the couple equivocated about christening the child. Mitrofan and Liudmila were embarrassed. In October 1882 Aleksandr, living on Kontorskaia, the street where he lived when he was a boy, begged Vania to come and stay: 'Write to me, don't let our links die. Anna is pregnant and invites you to the christening… I shall hand my offspring over to your school for you to teach, with the right to beat no more than five times a day.'19 Aleksandr attempted to lure Kolia to Taganrog in the most effective way he knew: 'Liubov Kamburova was there. She is still in love with you. For God's sake

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come and copulate with her, for she is desperately seeking what in Latin is called inter pedes…figura longa et obscura. You are besought, come.'20

To Anton, as a budding gynaecologist, Aleksandr turned for sexual advice: Anna's pregnancy left him frustrated. Anton replied to Aleksandr (with a gift of money) and told him that 'medicine, while forbidding coitus, does not forbid massage.' The quality of Anton's mercy was a little strained: he was more preoccupied with medical studies by day and writing, to Pavel's fury at the paraffin consumed, by night. He asked Aleksandr and Anna to send material for stories - descriptions of spiritualist seances in Tula, schoolboy rhymes from Taganrog, photographs. Only Pavel, horrified by Anna's pregnancy, was utterly unbending. At first Aleksandr just remonstrated: 'Dear Papa… I am saddened only that you won't send your regards to Anna, knowing full well that if we are not married, it is not my fault.' On the eve of New Year 1883 Aleksandr tried emotional blackmail on his parent: you have mercilessly poisoned the rest of the holidays for me - there is no doubt about that. All December I've been poorly, I'd begun to recover in the holidays. Your reproach upset, offended, insulted and alarmed me… Today I am confirmed in Petersburg as Head of the Imports Desk and Customs Translator. My sufferings are over… What a pity your reproach came just when for the first time I breathed freely. In mid February 1883 Anna gave birth to a daughter. Pavel would not acknowledge his first grandchild or speak to her mother. None of her uncles, even Anton, expressed any joy at the birth of Mosia, as her parents called her. Aleksandr complained that Mitrofan and Liud-mila would not be godparents to the baby. Mitrofan could not face neighbours' questions if a priest came to the house. Liudmila told Father Pokrovsky that Aleksandr and Anna had married in St Petersburg. Aleksandr accepted Mitrofan's conditions: the child must go to church daily and observe all fasts. Liudmila then declared that Pavel would not let them condone sin. Aleksandr wept.

Anton sent his brother at the end of February 1883 a harsh ten-page tirade: What do you expect of father? He is against tobacco smoking and illicit cohabitation - and you want to be friends with him? You

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might manage it with mother or aunt [Fenkhka], but not with father. He's the same flint as the dissenters, no worse, and you won't budge him… You carry your cohabitation like a stolen watermelon… You want to know what I think, what Kolia, or our father thinks?! What business is it of yours? Anton detected and disliked in both Aleksandr and in Kolia a disparity between high-minded pretensions and sordid actions. Kolia was taking on prestigious commissions - to paint the sets at Lentovsky's theatre in the Ermitage, to illustrate Dostoevsky - and doing nothing except to complain that he was misunderstood. Within a year, Anton predicted, Kolia would be finished. Both brothers, in his view, were destroyed by self-pity. He alone felt in the ascendant and triumphantly told Aleksandr on 3 February 1883: I'm becoming popular and have now read a critique of myself. My medicine is going crescendo. I know how to treat and I can't believe it. You won't find, old boy, a single disease I wouldn't undertake to treat. Exams are soon. If I get into the 5th class, then finita la commedia. The family appeared to be dissolving. Aleksandr was stuck in Taganrog. Kolia moved out to live in a sordid tenement, Eastern Furnished Rooms. Vania stayed all year in Voskresensk. Masha spent all the time she could at her courses or at girlfriends' houses. Only Misha stayed home, studying for matriculation. Anton felt untrammelled, apart from the times when Pavel spent the night on Golovin lane. Then Anton sheltered at night with the artists, Levitan and Kolia, or with Natasha Golden, to study or write, where Pavel did not moan about the cost of candles. The insolvent bankrupt lectured his sons on finance. A pencilled folio runs: Kolia and Antosha, You have left things to the last day and I told you several times that 10 roubles had to be ready to pay the rent, you know that it can't be put off and I like Punctuality. You have put me in an awkward position. To blush when the landlord comes is not right for a man of my age, I am a Person with a positive Character.21

95 TIMKTKKN Ô

The Death ofMosia

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ALEKSANDR AND KOLIA sank into maudlin drunkenness while Anton worked frenetically. In March 1883 he was writing a weekly story for Fragments and for The Spectator. At the same time Anton had a series of examinations to sit: he had a '4' (good) from Sklifosovsky for operative surgery; his gynecology was outstanding O5').22 As Tsar Alexander III was to be crowned in Moscow, a few examinations were postponed until September.

Anton could relax and turn his attention to the arts and to his family. His impatience with the feckless had not abated: he saw in actors the same weakness and lack of professionalism that he deplored in his brothers. The contemporary theatre seemed just Aleksandr and Kolia writ large, and had to be fought with, he told the dramatist Kanaev: 'our actors have everything except good breeding, culture or, if I may say so, gentility… I expressed my fears for the future of the modern theatre. The theatre is not a beer garden and not a Tatar restaurant.'

Anton forced a little gentility on his father, and, not altogether disinterestedly, Pavel acknowledged Aleksandr's family: Dear son Aleksandr! You must give Masha a briefcase for Easter, she cannot do without. I have no means to order one. Kindly send in good time what you promised. We are well, Mama has toothache. We have no letters from you. Regards to Anna, a kiss for Mosia, a blessing for you. Your loving father, P. Chekhov.23 Masha never got her briefcase, but Aleksandr received a little paternal affection. Pavel, after a few drinks, even boasted of Aleksandr's uniform in the Customs Service. Home life prospered on 60 roubles a month from Fragments: the Chekhovs kept a piano and a servant. Kolia was paid by Utkina, owner of The Alarm Clock, in kind: of Kolia's

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earnings the Chekhovs kept a desk, a candelabra and a wall clock all their lives.

Anton also helped Aleksandr at Easter 1883. He persuaded Leikin to print Aleksandr's stories; at first Leikin did not know that the author whom Anton was recommending was Aleksandr: 'Who is Agathopod Edinitsyn ("Unit")?' 1300 miles from St Petersburg, Aleksandr needed his brother's help to be a writer again. It was rumoured that civil servants were to be banned from the popular press and, as some of Aleksandr's stories were set in the Customs Service, he needed cover. Anton pointed out the miseries of journalism, mixing with rogues, earning a pittance to be devoured by dependants. Aleksandr ignored the warnings, and felt happier. He had his wife and daughter; he sent for his dog and for Nadia, Anna's daughter by her first husband, Sokolnikov; he even contemplated bringing out Aunt Fenichka to run his household. He wrote to Vania (23 April 1883): 'My little daughter is growing… and giving me much joy… I strongly resemble my Vater, Anna is becoming so attached to me that she has become inseparable and I am quite content with my fate.'

Now Anton became friendlier and broached his preoccupations with women and with sex in a long letter to Aleksandr in April 1883: Anton invited his brother to participate in a doctoral thesis he would write after qualifying - a History of Sexual Authority, modelled on Darwin's Origin of Species. Surveying the world from insects to human beings, Anton reckoned that the higher the social development in mammals the more nearly equal the sexes become, but he was convinced of the inferiority of even the educated female human being: She is not a thinker… We must help nature as man helps nature when he creates heads like Newton's, heads that approach organic perfection. If you've grasped my idea, then 1) the problem, as you see, is very real, not like the fucking-about of our female emancipationist publicists and skull-measurers… The history of universities for women. Curious: in all the 30 years they have existed, women medics (excellent medics!) haven't produced a single serious dissertation, which proves that mey are schwach in the creative line. Anton had been reading the potentially feminist arguments of Herbert Spencer and Sacher-Masoch, but his thinking is shot through with the misogyny of Schopenhauer's 'Essay on Women'. On a personal

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level Anton's difficulties with women were beginning to torment him. Not that his sexual drive was monstrous: his promiscuity stemmed from a rapid loss of interest in any one woman. Zoologists might compare Anton's sexuality with that of the cheetah, which can only mate with a stranger. Once intimacy is established, cheetahs cohabit impotently. Anton's impotence had something to do - perhaps as cause, perhaps as consequence - with his transactions with prostitutes. Not aroused by women he liked (and, worse, not liking women who aroused him), Chekhov was troubled, until he was too ill to be aroused at all. He told Aleksandr and Anna: There's no way I can tie myself to our woman, though there are a lot of opportunities… You screw her once, but the next time you can't get it in. I have all the equipment, but I don't function - my talent is buried in the ground… I fancy a Greek girl now… forgive me, jealous Anna, for writing to your patient [the sick Aleksandr] about Greek girls.24 Student pranks gave Chekhov some joy, but they too tended to have sinister outcomes. Anton, Kolia and Levitan, with another art student, bought a stallholder's oranges and sold them so outrageously cheaply to the public that the stallholder had them arrested. After the exams were over, in Voskresensk, Anton, Kolia, Vania and Misha and three young doctors from the hospital at Chikino set out on a sixteen-mile pilgrimage to the monastery of St Sawa and walked on to see a colleague, Dr Persidsky, at the hospital in Zvenigorod. At tea in Per-sidsky's garden they sang the popular, but banned, 'Show me the home, Where the Russian peasant does not suffer'. The local policeman charged them with subversion. Although a newspaper, the Russian Gazette, and powerful friends intervened, the Governor of Moscow forced Persidsky out of Zvenigorod. After Anton's first experience of injustice indignation seeps into his prose.

Summer 1883 in Voskresensk gave Anton his first footing in genteel society. If Aleksandr and Kolia dragged him down, Vania raised him up, by introducing him to the officers of the battalion stationed at Voskresensk - Lieutenants Egorov, Rudolf and Eduard Tyshko, and Colonel Maevsky and his three children. Known as Tyshko in the Headgear, Eduard Tyshko, irresistible to women, had been wounded in the Turkish war and was never seen in public without black silk .98 ?ir 1. End 1860s: sitting Efrosinia and Egor (left and centre, paternal grandparents), an Anton's Aunt Liudmila (right); standing Evgenia, Pavel, Mitrofan 2. 1874 family portrait: standing Vania, Anton, Kolia, Aleksandr, Uncle Mitrofan; sitting Misha, Masha, Pavel, Evgenia, Aunt Liudmila, cousin Georgi i êì3~4 headgear to disguise his wounds; he became a close friend of the Chekhovs. Anton's friendship with the officers was tested when Lieutenant Egorov asked for Masha's hand in marriage. She referred the proposal to Anton, who warned Egorov off. The lieutenant, not surprisingly, then behaved badly when Evgenia rented a cottage from him for the summer of 1884. She complained to Masha: 'We want to move out of this lousy flat, since Egorov has left us nothing, we'll have to move all the crockery from Moscow… He's left all the furniture locked and sealed.' Only in 1890 would Lieutenant Egorov make his peace with Anton.

Other Voskresensk friendships extended to Vania's brothers. Once, stranded at a Christmas ball by a blizzard, Vania was offered a lift home in a guest's sledge. The stranger was Aleksei Kiseliov, who owned an estate at Babkino two miles up the river Istra from Voskresensk. Aleksei Kiseliov was a very well-connected, if impoverished, aristocrat, with a nostalgia for his rakish past. His wife Maria was an amateur writer and a prude. The Kiseliovs were charmed by Masha and Anton. These Voskresensk friendships were lifelong. Anton had glimpses of new worlds - the officers' life he was to portray so expertly in Three Sisters, and the rundown Arcadia of the landowner. Babkino taught Masha how to be a lady. Anton got to know intellectuals, for instance Pavel Golokhvastov, a magistrate who was a Slavophile activist and his wife, a playwright. The IGseliovs and Chekhovs fished and played croquet together. Anton flirted with their servants and dairymaids. He joined the Russian intellectual establishment. Nevertheless, unlike Misha and Masha, Anton also had business in Voskresensk. He was useful to Dr Arkhangelsky at the Chikino clinic. The stories of summer 1884, with Vania and the Kiseliovs in Voskresensk, show newly acquired surgical, as well as social, skills.

In Anton's absence Pavel grumbled: 'Nice children you are, you've left Mother ailing, and are having fun. It's lucky that God has saved her, but you have no pity. Pavel the Long-Suffering.'

Evgenia too was soon to leave the Moscow household. Anton persuaded Aleksandr that she would be more use to him in Taganrog than Aunt Fenichka: 'Mother badly wants to visit you. Take her on, if you can. Mother still has spirit and is not as heavy going as Aunt.' Evgenia duly went to Taganrog. It was a mistake. Aleksandr's household was sunk in irremediable filth and chaos. The servants did as

DOC i oi«:n i KIIOV they liked, Aleksandr spent each month's salary within a few days, Àëïà could not do housework. Evgenia, never good at crises, did not even have her refuge of coffee and a clean bed. Mitrofan and his wife Liudmila were no support: a few days after her arrival on 26 June 1883, they went, with two of their children, to Moscow to see Pavel and then to Voskresensk. Before the week was out Evgenia was desperate: Antosha for God's sake send me just a rouble and quickly I'm afraid to ask your father I need to buy bread for my tea, not to speak of supper… When Mitrofan returns, send me money for the fare back. In any case, I can't leave while they're away. I've lent them my wicker trunk, such anguish, I'm afraid I shall fall ill… Aleksandr is as unhappy as can be, if only at least Kolia came. E. Chekhova. Please, answer and don't mention to anyone that I am complaining.2' Nobody could rely on Evgenia: she herself thirsted for protection. After a fortnight she begged her fare back to Moscow from her children.

Anton left Voskresensk for Moscow, from where it was easier to send Leikin a constant stream of prose. Aleksandr, Anna and baby Mosia had, however, followed Evgenia from Taganrog, so that to find peace Anton stayed in 'Natashevu' Golden's house or with Palmin at Bogorodskoe in the suburbs. Here he wrote. Leikin restricted Anton from experimenting with new forms, and was petulant if Chekhov made a debut in a Moscow weekly, tolerating only The Spectator as a Chekhov family concern. Leikin turned down the only long work Chekhov wrote that year, 'He Understood', a charming piece set in Voskresensk. A peasant shoots a starling, is detained for poaching and wins his release by persuading the angry landowner that his yearning to shoot is as incurable as the latter's alcoholism. At the end of 1883 Chekhov placed the story in Nature and Field Sports, under his real name for the first time.26

Two pieces written in summer 1883 stand out: one is a melancholy story for The Alarm Clock, 'The Dowry': the heroine loses her dowry to a drunken uncle and her fiance cannot help her. The story's effect lies in the narrator's ineffectual sympathy; the ending 'Where are you, Manechka?' introduces the helpless pathos of the typical Chekhovian 'hero'. The other piece, 'The Daughter of Albion', about an ugly

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English governess enduring the barbarity of her employer, was the first piece Chekhov wrote for Fragments to win renown. Russians joked about frigid Englishwomen - Chekhov himself had written that 'if the Russian evolved from a magpie and the German from a fox, the English evolved from frozen fish' - but 'The Daughter of Albion' has the nature poetry of a 'fishing' story based on Anton's summer angling at Babkino. Not for the last time, Anton's mockery of his hero and heroine is tempered by a lyrical celebration of the countryside.

Leikin wanted even more from his most popular author: 'Fragments of Moscow Life' came out every week: under two pseudonyms Anton might supply half the material for an issue. Kolia, less reliable, was Leikin's best illustrator; Leikin sent him special torchon paper from St Petersburg. As August ended and Anton's final year of medicine approached, he complained to Leikin: in the next room a baby is crying (it belongs to my brother who has come to stay), in another room father is reading mother [Leskov's] 'Sealed Angel'. Someone has wound up a musical box and I can hear 'La Belle Helene'. I'd like to run off to the country, but it's 1 in the morning… For a writer it would be hard to invent anything fouler than these surroundings. My bed is occupied by my brother who keeps on coming up to me and raising the topic of medicine. 'My daughter must have colic in the belly, that's why she's crying.' I have the great misfortune to be a medic and everyone thinks they have to 'discuss' medicine with me… I solemnly promise never to have any children. The gods took note of that promise.

Peace seemed to be restored when Evgenia came back from the country and Aleksandr and his family returned to Taganrog. In autumn 1883, once university life began, Anton and Kolia mixed with Masha's kursistki. Ekaterina Iunosheva received a joking 'Last Farewell' by Kolia. (Anton had a hand in this poem - all three eldest Chekhov brothers had the stuffed owl for a muse): As from a cigar a dreamer smokes, You float about in all my dreams, Bringing with you love's cruel strokes, And on your lips a hot smile gleams…27

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Kolia did not stay in the family home for long. He hid behind the ample skirts of Anna Ipatieva-Gohlcn from his creditors and the authorities, and Anton no longer collaborated with him.

In late November Kolia left Moscow and went to stay with Alek-sandr and Anna Sokolnikova in Taganrog. Meanwhile Pavel, horrified to discover that Aleksandr and his consort had stolen something precious from him, asked Kolia to intervene: My regards to Aleksandr. I am sorry for the ruined creature and those that live with him. He has stolen my wedding certificate and is living on it and mis grieves me. Bring it, be sure to take it off him. Those that live without the law shall perish wimout the law!28 Pavel's phrase 'shall perish without the law' became a family saying. Anton kept out of these quarrels: he was drawn to wider horizons. Leikin had been leaking hints to those in Petersburg who asked about the identity of his contributor, Antosha Chekhonte. On 8 October 1883 Nikolai Leskov, revered for his novel The Cathedral Folk and for his powerful stories, such as 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk', arrived with Leikin for five days in Moscow. Leikin could not resist introducing Leskov to Chekhov. Leskov (with Ostrovsky, the only living writer whom Pavel Chekhov respected) had surly suspicions of young writers, but took to Chekhov. Anton took Leskov on a tour of the brothels in Sobolev lane. They ended up in the Salon des Varietes. Then, as Anton told Aleksandr, Leskov and he took a cab: 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 witli 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.

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More lowly writers also saw Anton as a successor. The hack Popu-doglo (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.29 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…30 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 nux vomica, potassium bromide, daily baths, each a degree colder than the previous.31 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

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ixx i on «:in«KIIOV 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 entides us to suppose that at the moment of committing suicide Efim was, very probably, intoxicated.32

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 litde 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

1883-4

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…" 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.

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The Qualified Practitioner June 1884-April 1885 ON I6JUNE 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 / 00-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 JUNE 1884-APRiL 1885 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.34 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.35 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.36 Medical duties stopped Anton becoming more entangled with the

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Markova sisters. Released from \\\c 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, oedema 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 2 2 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 yEsculapius wouldn't hurt… Let him have arsenic or, after examining the attached patient, preJUNE 1884-APRIL 1885 scribe 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, ÒÂ 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.37 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.3S Even judophiles like Chekhov called Lipskerov a yid for his meanness. Lipskerov agreed to serialize Chekhov's first and last novel, A Shooting Party (literally 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

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DOC: I OK i è i i, iiov 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.

The gentrification of the Chekhovs proceeded. The conductor Shostakovsky befriended Kolia after hearing him play; other musicians became family friends. From November 1884, in true bourgeois style, the Chekhovs assigned each Tuesday evening for guests and concerts. Somehow the old patriarch, or the tramontane as Aleksandr and Anton called him, was quelled into good behaviour. Masha was hostess to her brother and her parties assembled Dunia Efros and Lily and Nelli Markova for what she promised would be 'Crazy nights!' Palmin reported to the inquisitive Leikin, 'A few days ago I went to the Chekhovs' Tuesday. They have a soiree fixe.'

Leikin was proud of his own recent gentility which hard work and fame had bought: 'we don't blow our noses with our left leg,' he boasted and decided Anton was now fit to invite to Petersburg. Chekhov despatched Natalia Golden to see Leikin; she seemed to herald Anton's imminent move to Petersburg, as writer and doctor. Leikin was torn between a desire to make his protege famous and an instinct to protect his monopoly. Boasting overrode self-interest, and, although a year would pass before he summoned Anton to Petersburg, Leikin revealed to his own employer, Khudekov, editor of the prestigious daily Petersburg Newspaper, the identity of Antosha Chekhonte. Khudekov immediately commissioned from Chekhov a commentary on the Rykov fraud trial that was still dragging on in Moscow.

FIFTEEN Ô

Babkino January-July 1885 The Petersburg Gazette liked Chekhov's reportage on the Rykov fraud trial. The trial was spectacular not just for the eloquence of Plevako, Russia's most colourful defence lawyer.39 In the courtroom Anton had an ominous haemorrhage from the right lung. In May 1885 Khudekov commissioned from Chekhov a regular story for the Monday issue (the day when Leikin did not contribute) of The Petersburg Newspaper. Khudekov thought that Chekhov's prose had a salacious 'whiff', and offered only 7 kopecks a line, but The Petersburg Newspaper was a major newspaper, exempt from precensorship, and its fiction escaped the mutilations inflicted on 'lower-class' weeklies. With Leikin's 8 kopecks a line and Khudekov's 7, Petersburg gave Anton a living. He had, however, to appear in person if he was to establish himself in literary circles. He still had not given literature priority over medicine. Leikin insisted, in March 1885, that in any case Anton had to come to Petersburg if he sought a post as a doctor.

Anton played along with Palmin's gallows-humour attitude to his profession. He saw its grim side. Why concentrate on a cholera epidemic, when in Moscow alone 100 children died daily of cold and hunger? The sick were dangerous. In March 1887 Nikolai Korobov, also newly qualified, nearly died of typhus. Doctors risked cholera and diphtheria from those they tried to save.40 The worst hazard was exhaustion. Patients would drag Anton to the outskirts of Moscow on any pretext. Even those who knew him well did not think twice about calling him out. Mikhail Diukovsky wrote on a freezing December day: 'For God's sake, if you can, go and see my brother-in-law Evgraf this evening, I've just had news that he's very ill. Don't decline, I shall be eternally grateful. The address is Krasnoe village, by the Riazan gate.'41 Two days later, on New Year's Eve, Chekhov had a note from no in

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Palmin: 'I'm sitting drinking vodka by the window. A young man has a deep wound on his shoulder-blade. Ë carbuncle or something -deciding is the job of Mr Requiem or Mr Coffin or Mr Rest-in-peace or even Messrs Wormeaten, if not the famous (in the future) Doctor Chekhov.' Palmin might pay Chekhov with a poem, but useful recompense was rare. Banter with patients could turn to horror. In early 1885 the Ianova girls, the third set of three sisters in Anton's life, were flirtatious patients. Not for long were they three sisters: at the end of 1885, typhus struck. Their mother and one of the three sisters (clutching Anton's arm as she died) perished.42

Anton's own health worried him. On 7 December 1884, he told Leikin, he had bled again. He insisted that his lungs were sound, that only a vessel in his throat had burst. His denial to a schoolmate, the journalist Sergeenko, 'haemorrhage (not tubercular)' suggests that he knew the truth. To others he complained fulsomely of overwork. He told Lily Markova that he was in pain. In December 1884 at a spiritualist seance Turgenev's ghost apparently spoke to Anton: 'Your life is approaching its decline.' In a letter of 31 January 1885 to Uncle Mitrofan, congratulating him on election to the town council, Anton's anxiety is ill-disguised: 'In December I had a haemorrhage and decided to take money from the Literary Fund 43 and go abroad for treatment. I'm a bit better now, but I still think I shall have to make a trip.'

In early 1885 the Chekhov household became quieter, even though Saveliev, not yet qualified, lodged with the Chekhovs again and put up with Pavel's fits of temper. Pavel had expelled Aunt Fenichka from the house into her son's care, and had banished Kolia. Anton did not press Kolia to return and merely urged him to pay his debts. To Uncle Mitrofan, however, he painted a picture of domestic harmony: Even Mama, the eternal grumbler, has started to admit that in Moscow we live better than before. Nobody grudges her expenses, there is no illness in the house. It's not luxury, but nobody goes without. Vania is at the theatre at the moment. He has a job in Moscow and is pleased. He is one of the family's most decent, solid members… He's hard-working and honest. Kolia is thinking of marrying. Misha finishes school this year.

Aleksandr finally found a posting and, after squeezing payment out of Davydov, editor of the now defunct Spectator, left Moscow to

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become an Excise Officer in Petersburg. To his parents' outrage, on 26 August 1884 Anna had given birth to a boy, named after Kolia. Aleksandr despatched Anna to stay with relatives and friends in Tula. In Petersburg, Aleksandr had a pensionable job, free fuel and housing, a maid, a wet nurse, the much-travelled hound Gershka, and a baby. Leikin accepted his stories and he acted as Anton's agent, but happiness eluded Aleksandr, for he squandered his salary. After Easter 1885 Anna, eaten up with jealousy and ÒÂ, conceived again. The wet nurse went down with intermittent fever; her husband moved in; Katka, the maid, stole food. The amoeba-ridden waters of the Neva made Aleksandr ill. He told Anton: 'The flatulence is so great that I am writing you this letter by the light of a gas lamp stuck up my anus.'

Kolia faded out from the College of Art and Architecture. With no military exemption or valid identity papers, he went underground. Only through Anna Ipatieva-Golden could he be traced. He defaulted on all undertakings. Leikin was furious. When spring came Anton was forced to intervene. He decided to take Kolia to Babkino, away from Anna Golden: 'I'll take that fraud Kolia, remove his boots and put him under lock and key.'

At Babkino the Chekhov family could live next door to their hosts, the Kiseliovs. The Kiseliovs completely refurbished the dacha that Boleslav Markevich had occupied. (Anton admitted to Leikin that he expected Markevich's ghost at night.) On 6 May 1885 Anton, Masha and their mother - Kolia, Vania and Misha were to follow - set off. The railway had not yet reached Voskresensk: it was a hard day's cart journey from the railhead. They nearly drowned fording the Istra in the dark, Masha and Evgenia screeching with fear. They found the dacha ready, with ashtrays and cigarette boxes. Nightingales sang in the bushes. Leikin disapproved of Anton's flight to the country. On 9 May Anton tried to lure him: I feel in the seventh heaven and do idle silly things: I eat, drink, sleep, fish, went shooting once. Today we caught a burbot on a long pike hook, the day before yesterday my fellow-huntsman killed a doe hare. Levitan the artist (not your [Adolf\ Levitan, but [Isaak] the landscape painter) is living with me, he's a passionate shooter. It's he who killed the hare… If you come to Moscow this summer and make a pilgrimage to New Jerusalem I promise you something you've never seen anywhere… Luxuriant nature! You could pick it up and eat it.

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Although Anton's happiest stories come from summer 1885 at Bab-kino, he could not escape his new profession. As well as the irrational Kolia, Anton took charge of Isaak Lcvitan. Levitan lived across the river with a potter at the village of Maksimovka. He was a dangerous patient. When Misha and Anton called on Levitan at night, he leapt out at them with a revolver. Anton told Leikin (who told all Petersburg): 'Something ominous is happening to the poor man. Psychosis is beginning… I was told that he'd left for the Caucasus. At the end of April he returned, but not from the Caucasus. He tried to hang himself. I've taken him with me to the country and now I'm walking him.'

Kolia, now taking opium, also needed care, but he was elusive. Pavel wrote to Aleksandr in early June: I haven't seen Kolia for a long time since our people went to Babkino. They say he's in Moscow… A woman came on behalf of Anna [Ipatieva-Golden] from the cottage at Petrovsko-Razumovskoe to fetch his linen… This is what being carried away by women does, they drive a weak man mad. Thus he is given up to idleness, drunkenness and debauchery, so that our labours and cares over his upbringing are naught to him. Woe to his mother, she is worn out with grief over him. Kolia turned up in Babkino: all June Anton dared not leave the country for more than a few hours, lest Kolia vanish back to wine, morphine and Anna Golden's bed.

Misha, the antithesis of his eldest brothers, had matriculated; his father was appeased. On 10 May Misha was lured to Babkino by Anton: 'Before my eyes stretches an extraordinarily warm, gentle landscape: the river, beyond it the forest.' Anton wrote mostly about fish - ruff, gudgeon, chub, burbot, perch, carp - and sent for more tackle. Anton's stories, plays and letters show that he was as much The Com-pleat Angler as Izaac Walton. He was not the only obsessive angler on the Istra: a peasant Nikita was arrested for unbolting railway spikes to use as sinkers for catching burbot - a single-minded character whom Chekhov put in a story 'The Evildoer'.

Fishing inspired Anton to write more lyrically: 'The Burbot' makes poetry out of an angler's obsession. Seeing landscape through Isaak Levi tan's eyes enriched Anton's work: after their long walks in May

JANUARY-JULY 1885

1885 with gun, rod, or paints and easel, landscape is as evocative in Chekhov's art as in Levitan's. The Kiseliov family, too, developed Anton: their anecdotes from the arts world and Maria Kiseliova's reading of French magazines and novels provided material for Fragments. Aleksei Kiseliov, inhibited by his wife, was animated by the bawdiness of Levitan ('Leviathan'), Anton and Kolia. On 20 September Kiseliov wrote: Thank you, dear Anton, for fulfilling my request so punctiliously and for sending an exact representation of your illegitimate children, whose similarity to you is enormous. I immediately took the postcard to Duniasha, the cattle girl, and showed her what you're capable of and what she can expect if she becomes pregnant by you and is abandoned to the mercy of fate. In January 1886 Kiseliov complained: 'The difference between my letters and yours, dear Anton, is that you can boldly read mine to young ladies, whereas I must throw yours into the stove as soon as I've read them in case my wife catches sight of them.'

Anton worked a few days as a doctor, relieving Arkhangelsky at the Chikino hospital in early June and performing an autopsy on a peasant. In mid July the madmen in Anton's care spoilt the idyll. Kolia bolted. Leikin reported: 'A few days ago your brother Kolia turned up with Aleksandr at my dacha. He pressed me for cartoon topics… A good artist, but we can't do magazine business with him for he won't keep his word.'44 A week later Kolia came, drunk, to Leikin's office in Petersburg, took the topics and an advance of 32 roubles. On 20 July he reappeared in Moscow at The Alarm Clock and then vanished. He was not seen by his brothers or their friends until mid October. By the end of June Levitan was also in Moscow, in bed with 'catarrhal fever' (as he called his ÒÂ). Íå sent Anton his gun dog Vesta to look after, and two roubles for his rent. Kolia and Levitan had collaborated in painting sets for the opera; Kolia once painted a figure on Levitan's empty landscape, and Levitan painted a skyscape over Kolia's figures. They complemented each other - Levitan an excitable workaholic, reluctant to paint human beings, and Kolia paralytically idle, with a dislike of painting nature. Reluctant as Kolia to return, Levitan made his excuses to Anton: 'Going to the country now is nonsense: it would be poisoning myself - Moscow would seem a thousand times fouler

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than now and I've got used to the city… in any case I shall soon see the dear inhabitants of Babkino and, among other things, your repulsive face.'

It was very hot at Babkino, and Anton had a haemorrhage. Nevertheless, in mid July, he went to Moscow to take leave of Aleksandr, who had been appointed Customs Chief at Novorossiisk on the Black Sea, and was passing through Moscow with Anna, baby Kolia and the dog. Vania was travelling with them, to support the ailing Anna on the iooo-mile journey beyond the Don and over the Caucasus. Aleksandr and Anton would not see each other for more than a year.

Babkino had worked its magic. Anton sent to Petersburg a story with a game-keeping background, 'The Huntsman' [Jager]. Short and unpretentious, it pays homage to Turgenev, who had died a year before and whose technique Chekhov was emulating, but it owes much to Levitan's subtle perception and to Babkino's atmosphere. Its peasant characters set the pattern for Chekhov's later love stories. A Chekhovian couple, an unresponsive male and a frustrated female, fail to communicate, while nature all around lives its own life. 'The Huntsman' came out in The Petersburg Newspaper on 18 July 1885. Petersburg took heed.

SIXTEEN Ô

Petersburg Calls August 1885-January 1886 AUTUMN 1885 brought Chekhov a social whirlwind. Among Masha's friends, the fiery Dunia Efros stood out. In Moscow, where the authorities were increasingly hostile to Jews, she would not convert, and insisted on her Hebrew name, Reve-Khave. Anton had many liaisons - with his former landlady, Mrs Golub, with the landlady of friends, Baroness Aglaida Shepping, and, it is said, Blanche, a hostess at the Ermitage. A more serious love, his Natashevu, Natalia Golden, was now thirty. She left Moscow for Petersburg, from where in spring 1885 she wrote Anton a bawdy farewell: Little bastard Antoshevu, I could hardly bear the wait for your much desired letter. I can feel you are having a merry, free-for-all time in Moscow, and I'm glad for you and envious… I haven't got married yet, but I probably shall soon and I invite you to my wedding. If you wish, you can bring with you your Countess Shepping, but you will have to bring your own sprung mattress, because here there aren't any women of such awful dimensions, and otherwise you won't have anything to be busy on. Since you have turned into a completely debauched man (since I left), you are unlikely to be able to do without - [Natalias dashes]. I can't belong to you any more, since I have found myself a suitable tiger-boy.

Today you are having a ball, I can imagine you desperately flirting with Efros and Iunosheva. Who will win, I wonder? Is it true that Efros's nose has got 2 inches longer, that's terrible, a pity, she'll be kissing you and what sort of children will you have, all that worries me frightfully. I have also heard that Iunosheva's bust has got bigger, another inconvenience!… Antoshevu, if you are irrevocably lost morally, at least don't ruin your friends, especially not the married ones. You scoundrel!

I advise you not to marry, you're still too young… You write rubbish to me, as for the main thing that interests me (more than

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anything else), your health, not a word about that. You have two diseases, amorousness and spitting blood. The first is not dangerous, but about the second I ask you to give me the most detailed information… So, Antoshevu, perhaps you haven't forgotten your little skeleton, but I believe that if you come to Petersburg, you haven't, if you don't come, you have forgotten her… I shall send you stamps, otherwise I fear that the letters will be lost. Farewell, Antoshevu. Your Natasha. I'm glad medicine is looking up, maybe you'll write less and be healthier.4' Natalia was not the last woman to send Anton stamps for a reply, but none survives. The field was clear for Dunia Efros: Anton's business in Petersburg was literary.

Anton was back at Babkino until autumn. Khudekov of The Petersburg Newspaper had not paid him, and it was cheaper living with the Kiseliovs. When he finally returned to Moscow, the Chekhovs moved from quarters that were airy, convenient and cheap. On 11 October 1885, after waiting for the landlord to stain the floors, the Chekhov family crossed the river south to the Bolshaia Iakimanka, Mrs Lebed-eva's house. After five years in one house - the longest period yet in Anton's life - peregrinations had started again. The new flat was small - too small for soirees, but cheap (40 roubles a month), and closer to Gavrilov's warehouse. Doctor A. P. Chekhov's brass plate was mounted, and here he was at home except Tuesdays, Thursday evenings and some Saturdays. A month later, Anton was complaining to Leikin: 'The new flat has turned out to be rubbish: damp and cold. If I don't leave it, I shall certainly have last year's outrage developing in my chest: coughing and spitting blood… Living with the family is horribly nasty.' There was no money for firewood: The Petersburg Newspaper took months to pay Anton. He wrote again for The Alarm Clock, and collected his fee in person.

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?'44 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

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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.'47 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'.48

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:

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uo«; I OK cm ê iiov It's not a matter of intervention,, hut In jemme. 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 [Akksandr] is also twisted round a woman's little finger. When these two women will let go, die 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 II 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 soirees resumed. Chekhov's friends, whether the louche Palmin or the flirtatious Mar-kova 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 AUGUST 1885-jANUARY 1886 and his vitriolic leader-writer, Viktor Burenin - Leikin rarely left his protege'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 Kbudekov 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.49

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, naive, 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-wool-ness': '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 1 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 main, and Masha bridesmaid. Anton borrowed 2 5 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

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i) î ñ; ã î ê ñ 11 ê ê í î v dress, off to be best man: a docttir 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.50 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 men to the Salon des Varietes… 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 i H86, after his twenty-sixth name day party Chekhov brought matters to a head.

SEVENTEEN Ô

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: Mile Sirout.'5' 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 fiancee, 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.'

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The impulse to marry Dunia Kfros 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 fiancee 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 nee [sic] plus ultra with my fiancee. 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 fiancee. 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.32 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 ïîï: 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, how

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ever, 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.'53

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 practical 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. Avery 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. 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 JANUARY l886 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 Chek-honte 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.

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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 1 5 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 debut 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 protege: '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.'54 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 protege. 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 constandy advised Suvorin and Burenin to follow my example. They obeyed

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me and now none of us doubi (Inn you have a real talent - a talent that sets you far outside the circle ol (lie 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, 1 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: Hike 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, semicon-sciously, 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

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and, as far as I can see, sincere letter from Suvorin. I had begun to prepare to write something sensible, but 1 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 diarrhoea 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 die 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 meir 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,

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DOC I Î II (È I Ê II l)V walk on lloors covered with spittle, nil 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.'55

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.

III

My Brothers'1 Keeper And Joseph nourished his father, and his brethren, and all his father's household with bread, according to their families. Genesis XLVII, 12

NINETEEN

The Suvorins April-August 1886 IN APRIL 1886 Anton Chekhov met Suvorin again. A powerful bond, built on misconceptions that would weaken it, was formed. Suvorin saw in Chekhov genius and delicacy; Chekhov saw in Suvorin sensitive authority. Twelve years would pass before Suvorin found the 'flint' in Chekhov's make-up and Chekhov detected the 'lack of character' in the publishing baron. They needed each other: New Times had no genius among its talented writers; Chekhov had no other access to Petersburg literary circles. For a decade Chekhov was frank with Suvorin as with nobody else. Suvorin responded to Chekhov with candour; they were soon equals.

A soldier's son, born in the heartland of Russia, Voronezh province, Suvorin had much in common with Chekhov: he had fought his way up as teacher, journalist, critic, playwright. He had made his name as a radical in the 1860s, as a friend of Dostoevsky at the end of 1870s and had burst into politics, making New Times a paper that was read, admired and detested - for its closeness to ruling circles, its nationalism and cynicism, its advertisements where unemployed French women 'sought a position'. Suvorin kept independent: he had a nominal editor, Fiodorov, who kept a suitcase packed, ready to spend a few months in prison for any offence Suvorin might commit. He was now becoming a major publisher and the proprietor of most of Russia's railway-station bookstalls.

Suvorin was a complex figure - a man of much wit, but little humour, a supporter of autocracy in his leader articles, an anarchist in his diary. His faults were offset by virtues: the anti-Semitic ravings of New Times were countered by his private fondness for an elderly Jewish lady, his children's music teacher, who lived in the household. The worst Suvorin's enemies said of him was that he feared 'only death and a rival newspaper'. The theatre critic Kugel wrote of him:

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in his fur hat, his fur coat hanging open, carrying a big stick, I almost always saw the figure of Ivan the Terrible… Something foxy in the lower jaw, in the gape, something sharp in the line of his forehead. A Mephistopheles… The secret of his influence and his sharp vision was that, like the greatest political and philosophical geniuses, he deeply understood the bad side of human nature… The way he entertained Chekhov, looked at him, enveloped him with his eyes reminded one somehow of a rich man showing off his new 'kept woman'. Suvorin's first wife, Anna Ivanovna, died in circumstances that won even his enemies' pity. One summer evening in 1873 Suvorin, entirely unsuspecting, was summoned to a hotel room, where he found her dying of a revolver wound inflicted in a suicide pact with her lover. Three years later, Suvorin married another Anna Ivanovna, twenty-two years younger than he: she, though flirtatious, defended her husband like a tigress; he loved her, he declared, third after his newspaper and his theatre. Suvorin suffered one bereavement after another: in 1880 his daughter Aleksandra died and then his infant son Grisha, of diptheria. Two of his sons and a favourite son-in-law would also die before him. He became a lonely insomniac. Suvorin rarely went to bed before his paper came out, and spent hours alone in his office with just a cup of coffee and a chicken breast for sustenance. He strode the streets and cemeteries of Petersburg. After his bereavements began, he retreated to the country, allowing his son Aleksei, 'the Dauphin', to wrest power from him and, eventually, to undo his empire.

Like Anton Chekhov's, Suvorin's love for his many dependants could give way to irritation. Like Anton, Suvorin would long for company when alone, and for solitude when in company. Suvorin had, however, the warmth of the nepotist. Anton Chekhov was not the first alumnus of the Taganrog gimnazia he was to adopt: his legal manager, Aleksei Kolomnin, left Taganrog ten years before Chekhov, and married Suvorin's daughter. Suvorin had taken the entire Kolomnin family under his wing. Now the Chekhovs came under his aegis; Suvorin was to offer employment to Aleksandr, Vania, Masha and Misha Chekhov. Soon Anton would have his flat in the Suvorin house and be offered Suvorin's younger daughter, Nastia, then nine years old, in marriage. Forty years later Anna Suvorina would recall Anton's visit that spring: Our apartment was unusual: the hall was the domain of the children… In one corner stood an aviary with a pine tree where up to fifty canaries and finches lived and bred. The hall was sunlit, the birds sang loudly, the children, naturally, made a lot of noise and I must add that the dogs also took part… we sat down together on a litde sofa by the aviary. He asked the children the names of all the dogs, said he was very fond of dogs himself and then made us laugh… We talked for rather a long time… he was tall, slim, very good-looking, he had dark reddish waving hair, a little greying, he had slighdy clouded eyes that laughed subtly, and a fetching smile. His voice was pleasant and soft and, with a barely perceptible smile… Chekhov and I quickly became friends, we never quarrelled but we argued often, almost to the point of tears - or at least I did. My husband just adored him, as if Anton had bewitched him.1 Anton won the hearts of Suvorin's children (even, for a while, of the Dauphin), of his valet Vasili Iulov and the children's governess Emilie Bijon. The philosopher Vasili Rozanov, also rescued from obscurity by Suvorin, contemplated the publisher's love: 'If Chekhov had said "I now need a flat, a desk, shoes, peace and a wife," Suvorin would have told him "Take everything I have." Literally.'2

The journalists in Suvorin's entourage were jealous. One, Viktor Burenin, was Suvorin's oldest friend and perhaps his only confidant. Burenin could, with unprintable epigrams and printed barbs, destroy a sensitive writer. Twenty years earlier, when Suvorin sat on a park bench, too poor to hire a midwife for his pregnant wife, Burenin, then a student, had talked to him and insisted on giving him all the money he had. They became inseparable. Burenin's prognosis, as much as Grigorovich's enthusiasm, persuaded Suvorin of Chekhov's importance, but Burenin was allowed to attack Suvorin's favourites with impunity and soon turned on Chekhov: the spiteful New Times clique very soon germinated in Petersburg a hostility to Chekhov.

Anton had a happy spring in 1886: he hardly slept. Suppers with Suvorin, being lionized, intoxicated him. He could now write less for more money: Leikin no longer counted on a weekly contribution. That spring Chekhov gave New Times just one story of note, 'The Secret Councillor'. A touching portrayal of the disarray brought into

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a country household by the arrival of a distinguished relative, the story anticipates the pattern of Uncle Vania: a great man comes from the city and wrecks the lives of his country relatives. 'The Secret Councillor' abandoned the sensational tone that Suvorin's readers liked. It is a work that looks back to Anton's childhood in the country around Taganrog and that injects for the first time an element of nostalgia for a lost idyll, which is to colour much of Chekhov's mature prose.

Kiseliov and all Babkino were calling for Anton. Mosquitoes whined; goldfinches sang. Kolia took his paints and brushes, but left his toothbrush and his sackcloth trousers with Anna Golden. Anton hoped that the artist would win over the lover, and ignored letters from Franz Schechtel, raging at Kolia's drunken binges. By 29 April Kolia hurt Schechtel more: he forced Lentovsky, for whose theatre the architect and painter were commissioned, to disgorge another 100 roubles and promptly vanished to Babkino, making sorties to Moscow only for debauchery. Schechtel raged and despaired; he even tried to lure Kolia by putting a letter in an envelope marked 'contains 3000 roubles': 'Friend! I have two overcoats, but fuck-all money - but there'll be some soon… if you'd come and see me for a minute…'3 Schechtel complained to Anton of Levitan's dissipation, too; fornication did not stop Levitan painting, but Schechtel complained to Anton: Levitan is ploughing and sighing for his bare-bottomed beauty, but tJhe wretch is only human: what will it cost him on quicklime, disinfectant, eau de Cologne and other chemicals and how much trouble to treat his amorous slut and make her fit to receive his thoroughbred organ?… Levitan arrived late in Babkino: he was detained in the Crimea, whence he wrote to Chekhov: 'What made you assume I'd gone off with a woman? There is screwing here, but it was there before I arrived. And I'm not hunting for fine picturesque pussy, it just happened to be there (and, alas, has gone).'4 Once Kolia and Levitan were at Babkino, the fun began. On 10 May Anton reached Moscow from Petersburg; the next day he took his mother, sister and Misha to Babkino. They painted, fished, bathed, and played: Levitan would dress as a savage Chechen, or the Chekhov brothers would hold mock trials of Kolia and Levitan for drunkenness and debauchery. Anton composed 'Soft-Boiled Boots', illustrated nonsense worthy of Edward Lear, to amuse the Kiseliov children. Somehow he found time to dispense medicine, and write for Fragments, The Petersburg Newspaper and New Times - comic classics, such as 'Novel with Double Bass'. Anton wrote his first philosophical stories, such as 'The Dreariness of Life', where activists and quietists debate what a civic-minded Russian ought to do. In Chekhov's world, unlike the world of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, neither party wins the debate: there is an ideological stalemate. This summer Anton was groping for a new type of story, that would evoke the futility of words and thoughts. In 1886 he wrote far less than in 1885, but he was preparing himself for the real mastery of his prose of the following year.

No sooner was Kolia rescued from Anna Golden's bed and Moscow's drinking dens, than Aleksandr burst back into Anton's life. On 21 May 1886, in Novorossiisk, Aleksandr dictated a letter for Anton: Anna added a desperate postscript of her own: For God's sake, suggest what we can do. Aleksandr suddenly went blind at 5 p.m.; after dinner he went to bed as usual, after drinking a great deal, then he woke at 5, came out of the room to play with the children and asked for water, sat down on the bed and tells me he can't see. Kolia insisted that Aleksandr was acting, but the act was convincing: Aleksandr was given leave to go to Moscow and Petersburg for treatment. On 3 June he arrived at Vania's schoolhouse in Moscow. From there Pavel wrote to Anton: I ask my children to look after their eyes above all things, do your reading by day, not by night, act sensibly, to be eyeless is bad, to beg alms and assistance is a great misfortune. Kolia and Misha, look after your eyes. You still have to live long and be useful to society and yourself. If you lose your good sight it is disagreeable to me to see. Aleksandr can see nothing, he is handed bread and a spoon and that is it. These are the consequences of wilfulness and of letting his reason incline to the bad. Aleksandr, Anna, their illegitimate sons, and Anna's elder children, who drifted in and out of her care, lasted two months with Pavel and

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Vania in the school house. Pavel kept calm. Aleksandr was drying out, and his sight was returning. On 10 July 1886 he told Anton: Imagine, after supper, I was banging away with my equine penis at the 'mother of my children'. Father was reading his Monastic Rules and suddenly decided to come in with a candle to see if the windows were locked… He solemnly went up to the window, locked it as if he hadn't noticed anything, had the sense to put out the candle and left in the dark. I even fancied he said a prayer to the icon.5 In mid July Kolia vanished again - to cousin Georgi and Uncle Mitro-fan in Taganrog. Aleksandr and his family came to Babkino. Anton was aghast: he wanted other company. He failed to lure Franz Schech-tel from Moscow, even though he exhorted him, 'living in town in summer is worse than pederasty, more immoral than buggery'. Anton moved twenty miles south to Zvenigorod, ostensibly to depute for Dr Uspensky at the hospital. After Petersburg, Chekhov felt imposed upon by his brothers. Fame brought bitter poison: the prestigious The Northern Herald reviewed Motley Tales: '[Mr Chekhov] will like a squeezed-out lemon inevitably die, completely forgotten, in a ditch… In general Mr Chekhov's book is a very sad and tragic spectacle of a young talent's suicide…' Chekhov never forgave N. K. Mik-hailovsky, to whom he attributed this review.6

The more he felt put upon, the greater his need for Masha. Now she had her diploma, she had grown confident. She had a profession for the coming twenty years: she taught part-time in Moscow in the prestigious Rzhevskaia girls' grammar school, run by a family of farmers and thus known as the 'Dairy School'. Masha was now more than an agency by which Anton could meet strong-minded, intelligent young women. Evgenia was surrendering the household to her. In early August 1886 it was Masha who left Babkino to seek a quieter flat for the family. Like many a sister in the nineteenth century, she was a handmaiden so prized by her siblings that cousin Georgi proclaimed to Anton: 'I have concluded from all the attractive stories from Misha that she is your goddess of something kind, good and precious.'7

More servant than goddess to her brothers, Masha's first conflict of interests arose in Babkino in summer 1886. Taught by Levitan, Masha was painting very fine water-colour landscapes and portraits. Levitan made hundreds of propositions to hundreds of women, but only one proposal. Seventy years later, at the age of ninety-two, Masha recalled it: Levitan dropped to his knees in front of me and - a declaration of love… All I could do was turn and run. The whole day, I sat distraught in my room crying, my head deep in the pillow. Levitan, as always, came to dinner. I stayed in my room. Anton asked everyone why I wasn't there… He got up and came to my room. 'Why are you howling?' I told him what had happened and admitted I didn't know what to tell Levitan, and how. My brother replied: 'Of course, you can marry him if you like, but remember that he wants women of the Balzac age, not girls like you.' Whenever Masha referred proposals to Anton, she received a strong negative signal. Anton never expressly forbade her to marry, but his silence and his actions, if necessary, behind the wings left her in no doubt how much he disapproved and how deeply he was dismayed.

Anton could stop his sister marrying, but he could not keep his girlfriends on stand-by. Despite chocolates from Petersburg, Dunia Efros kept her distance; Olga Kundasova fell instead for Professor Bredikhin, at the Moscow observatory. LilyMarkova vanished to Ufa, among the Bashkirs in the Urals foothills. Finally, in Petersburg, she accepted the artist Sakharov. Aleksei Kiseliov thought Anton's love life hilarious and celebrated it in verse that was recited all around Babkino. To A. P. Chekhov Sakharov got married And he was not thrilled When he found that Lily Was already drilled. Who? he'd like to know. The truth is what he's after. But Lily and Anton Can't hold back their laughter. The groom is coming, scowling, And if he gets his hands on That wretched whoring Chekhov, He'll loudly thump Anton And give him such a thrashing

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MY HKO I III lis' Ê Ê Ê PER So that he'll remember To keep off others' brides With his dripping member." Others saw Anton as a threat to the married. When Bilibin's wife, Vera, read a story Anton wrote that August for New Times, 'A Misfortune', she told her husband that the ruthless seducer of the married heroine was Chekhov himself. Vera Bilibina refused to greet Anton when he visited the house. Four years later Bilibin deserted her for Anna Arkadievna Soloviova, a secretary at Fragments. Vera always felt that Anton had exerted a pernicious influence on her husband.

TWENTY Ô

Life in a Chest of Drawers September 1886-March 1887 MASHAANDMISHA rented from a surgeon, Dr Korneev, new premises for the family: a two-storey brick house, eight rooms for 650 roubles a year, on the west side of the Moscow Garden Ring, then a country road where a horse tram passed once an hour. Anton moved in on 1 September 1886. Here the Chekhovs spent nearly four years. The only Chekhov residence in Moscow to be made into a museum, its fussy red-brick facade reminded Anton of a chest of drawers. Anton lived like a gentleman in his study and bedroom. On the ground floor was an enormous kitchen and pantry leading to the chamber maid's and cook's rooms. Upstairs Masha's room adjoined the drawing room; her guests' siren voices lured Anton up from his study. The dining room was also upstairs: the tramp of feet on the stairs never ceased. Under the stairs the ageing whippet Korbo dozed. Pavel visited daily, but slept at the warehouse or at Vania's, a few minutes' walk away.

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

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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. Oil 29 September he wrote to her again: Life is grey, no happy people to be seen… Kolia is living with me. I Ie's seriously ill (stomach haemorrhages 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. Me 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

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my guts inside out.' Doctors in the 1880s deceived ÒÂ 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 1 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.'9

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),

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MY II It (I I 11 I It S ' Ê I I! P E Ê ÂØÛë 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. (iuess which one of you three is the reason? So you all played the part of the holiday husband excellently.'10 Anton wired back: 'Angel, darling, miss you terribly, come soon… Your lover.'

I he climax of January was Anton's twenty-seventh name-day party 'with Jewgirls, Turkeys and Ianova girls'. His cousin Aleksei Dol-z.henko 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."1

Chekhov no longer felt dependent on Leikin: he told Uncle Mitro-fan, 'I am now the most fashionable writer.' Leikin tried to rein (Ihckhov 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

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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 haemorrhage: 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 Grig-orovich 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."2 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

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M Y II Ê î I 11 I H S Ê 1.1'. I» E R 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, torch-bearers, 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 Alcksandr's household, other things in Petersburg upset Anton. SomeSEPTEMBER 1886-MARCH 1887 one 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. ã.5°

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TWKNTY-ONE ô 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 Mitro-fan'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

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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 diarrhoea and haemorrhoids; 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 Taganrog 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.'

On 1 May Suvorin's fourth son, the twenty-one-year-old Vladimir, shot himself dead. Aleksandr sent a postcard, discreetly in Latin: 'Plen-issima perturbatio in redactione. Senex aegrotissimus est. Dolor communis…' Suvorin felt guilty for ignoring his son's play, An Old Eye Is No Bar to the Heart. He recalled his first wife's suicide and blamed himself for both deaths:

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MY It ÊÎ I III US ' Ê I'lli PER Yesterday Volodia shot himself… Eternally alone, eternally by himself. Yesterday I listened to his strange comedy - everywhere clever, original. He would've been a talented man. And again I failed to do a thing.13 Leikin wrote to Anton a week later: '[Vladimir] just left a note to say that he was fed up with life and supposed that the next world is better than this. Poor Suvorin, completely shattered with grief, was taken yesterday to his estate in Tula Province.' A theme of The Seagull was born. Chekhov felt for Suvorin. Suvorin's sons were as doomed as Chekhov's elder brothers - despair linked the two men.

The Chekhovs celebrated Easter loudly, but without Anton. Pavel reported: Officer Tyshko came, and Dolgov, who drank three bottles of beer and nearly smashed the piano with his heavy blows. He played well, with verve. Then Mr Korneev and Miles Ianova, Efros and Korneev's niece and in the evening Korneev's children, who amazed me with their gutter language… I remain your loving P. Chekhov. The family was reassured by Kolia: he agreed to spend the summer with them in Babkino. Aleksandr, however, sent them appeal after appeal from Petersburg. His sons had typhoid, but no hospital would take in children who had no birth certificates. Meanwhile, Aleksandr could not cope with his idle, thieving servant girls. He begged Vania and Masha to send out their mother: 'The poor children shriek, ask for the "potty" and dirty the bed. I'm out all night. Really it wouldn't be wrong for mother to come."4 Speaking for the whole family, Kolia protested to Masha: When a few years ago little Mosia fell ill in Taganrog, mother went to visit the sick little girl and look after her and what happened? Mother was exhausted, gave it up as a bad job and Aleksandr tore his hair and went to church to weep… If we send mother to Petersburg, the same will happen again, mother will be unhappy and Aleksandr's life poisoned." Whenever Aleksandr's illegitimate family called for help, the Chekhovs hardened their hearts. They detested Anna and her children by Aleksandr, and would do so until the last of them perished. Aleksandr had to fend for himself; in May his mother and sister left for the country.

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On 5 May Anton went north to the monastery at Sviatye Gory (Sacred Hills) southeast of Kharkov, where 15,000 pilgrims congregated after Easter. The monks gave him a room with a stranger, perhaps a police spy, who told Anton his life story. The impression made on Chekhov by just two days and nights at Sviatye Gory was overwhelming - the hillside forested setting, the church services, the fervent pilgrims. The stories stemming from his travels in the south are infused with a psalmodic reverence for nature, for the pathos, liturgy and clergy, if not the dogma, of Orthodox Christianity. On his way back from Sviatye Gory to Taganrog he met childhood friends: Sasha Selivanova, and Piotr Sergeenko, who would fifteen years later change his life. By 17 May Chekhov was back, penniless, in an unseasonably chilly Moscow: he summoned Schechtel for a frank conversation about the Ianova sisters and sexual frustration, and borrowed 30 roubles. Then Anton joined his mother, sister and Misha in Babkino.

Suvorin, disabled by bereavement, had neglected the publication of Chekhov's new book of stories, In the Twilight. Anton had to write more for New Times in order to pay off Suvorin's advance, and Leikin only received four small stories from him that summer. The Petersburg Newspaper, which paid better and allowed more scope, got nine stories, notably 'His First Love', which Chekhov later worked up into a study of adolescent suicide, 'Volodia'.

The need to recoup Suvorin's advance gave the motivation and the journey south the material for the finest prose of the time in Russia. The first prose-poem (a 'quasi symphony''') of steppe nature, 'Fortune', introduces the motif of the breaking string that punctuates The Cherry Orchard, an ominous mine shaft catastrophe deep beneath a doomed landscape. Chekhov could stake a claim to be Russia's first 'green' writer. Even the acerbic Burenin wrote a panegyric; copies of New Times were stolen from Petersburg's cafes. In 'Tumbleweed', the July story for New Times, the police agent that Anton met at the monastery became the baptized Jew - 'a baptized Jew, a doctored horse, a pardoned thief- all worth the same.' Here too is a 'breaking string' - a falling mine-bucket which cripples the hero.

Chekhov's rootless Jew is the culmination of a series of intelligent well-meaning unfortunates who had dominated Russian fiction, the so-called 'superfluous men' whom Pushkin and Turgenev had created. Chekhov won recognition for renovating a tired tradition, but tributes

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MY ÍÏÎ Mil H.S ' Ê II I'I Ê to his genius were loudest among musicians, who felt most acutely the musical nature of his prose in its rhythms and the sonata-like structure, where the end recapitulates the beginning after a central development. In May Tchaikovsky was struck by the ecclesiastical story, 'The Laymen' (later known as 'The Letter'): he wrote a letter, that went astray, to Chekhov and also to his brother Modest about it. Through Modest, Piotr Tchaikovsky was to meet the Moscow Chekhovs.16 Anton would not see Anna in Petersburg: he diagnosed by post from Babkino, guessing from Anna's medicines and temperature that ÒÂ underlay her typhoid. Anton made only one short trip that summer to Moscow to spend a few days with admirers such as Ezhov and (iruzinsky. Gruzinsky was the only person to recall Anton Chekhov in a rage. The Alarm Clock was printing Anton's sketch, 'The Diary of a Volatile Person', in three parts; when Anton found that they had cut his copy, he exploded like his character and left the deputy editor stunned by authorial fury. Ezhov, however, recalled a milder man: He had a weak voice. His laughter showed that Chekhov was not inclined to get angry. When writing he suddenly smiled. This smile was special, without the usual proportion of irony, not humorous, but tender and soft, a smile of authorial happiness.17 After a few days Anton had to return to Babkino. He was keeping Kolia under guard, while helping Dr Arkhangelsky with a study of Russia's psychiatric institutions - work that would bear fictional fruit five years later. At the end of July Kolia broke free. Schechtel reported from Moscow: We had a heart-to-heart and finally he admitted that he has to abandon his 'big slag' and that this is the only way of burning his boats and,… after giving his appearance, very bedraggled recently, a gendemanly veneer, to re-enter society… That same evening blood gushed, real blood, there's no doubt about it, I saw him spit it. The next day was worse - today he's sent a note; he asks me to send a doctor, he's bleeding to death. Anton did not rush to Moscow, but Kolia was moved to the Korneev house after promising not to infest it with fleas. Anton stayed at Babkino until September, picking gooseberries, raspberries and mushAPRIL-SEPTEMBER 1887 rooms. Inspired by the south, needing money from New Times, he wrote his stories of the steppes. Other pursuits were out of the question, he told Schechtel: 'I could devour a whorelet like Nadia [Ianova]… In Babkino there's still nobody to screw. So much work that there's no time even for a quiet fart.'18

In September Moscow's writers returned to their desks. Palmin boasted of implausible amorous adventures on the Volga. Anton had no love affairs to ponder. His third and last story inspired by the steppes, 'Panpipes', evoked the doomed rivers and forests of the Don basin, and irritated critics who wanted more humanity, morality and plots in fiction. Mikhailovsky, the Northern Herald's purveyor of opinions to the intelligentsia, went for Anton's collection, In the Twilight, which Suvorin had just published in book form: Questions without answers, answers without questions, stories with no beginning or end, plots with no denouement… Mr Chekhov should turn on his work lamp in his study to light up these half-lit characters and dispel the gloom that conceals their silhouettes and contours. A man whom there were few to praise, worried by debt and by his brothers, Anton fell into gloom.

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Ivanov in Moscow September 1887-Jarmaiy 1888 IN SEPTEMBER 1887 Anton wrote a letter apparently so suicidal that Aleksandr destroyed it, responding: You write that you're alone, have nobody to talk or to write to… I deeply sympathize with all my heart and soul, for I am no happier than you… One thing in your letter I can't understand: lamenting that you hear and read only lies and more lies, petty, but endless. What I can't understand is why you're hurt by it and driven to moral vomiting by an overdose of vileness. Undoubtedly you're a clever decent person, don't you realize that in our age everything lies?… I don't deserve the order of St Anna [his sick and unloved wife, Anna, and a civil service award], but it's hung round my neck and I wear it workdays and holidays. The answer, Aleksandr told his brother, was to move to Petersburg, but Anton now found Petersburg repellent. Suvorin was still in the country, mourning, while the 'Zulus' as Anton dubbed the journalists of New Times, were lambasting Darwin or Nadson. He salved his conscience by fancying that he and his brother counterbalanced the reactionaries. Suvorin saw no conflict, saying: 'Chekhov did not condemn New Times' political programme, but angrily argued with me about Jews… It New Times helped Chekhov to get on his feet, then it is good that New Times existed…''9 Suvorin never doubted that his affection for Anton was reciprocated: 'If Chekhov loved me, he did so for something serious, far more serious than money,' he was to say to Doroshevich. Nevertheless, Suvorin did not always shield Anton from his underlings' attacks, even if he sometimes defended Anton against them: 'Chekhov is a very independent writer and a very independent man… I have facts from his literary life to prove what a straight, good and independent man he is.'20 ()ther Petersburgers irritated Anton. He wrote less for Fragments:

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SEPTEMBER 1887-JANUARY l888 Leikin and Bilibin bored him, whining about each other - hen-pecked Bilibin's anaemia and anorexia; Leikin's deviousness, obesity and hysterical fits. Babkino, not least Aleksei Kiseliov's sexual frustration, was also becoming tedious.

Anton was short of money too. For 150 roubles he sold the Verner brothers, typographically Moscow's most innovative printers, the rights to fourteen of his comic stories; he was waiting for Suvorin to market a more substantial book. In Russia in the 1880s it was more profitable to write full-length plays: a playwright received two per cent of the gross takings for each act of a play. To be performed in the State theatres, a play had to pass many hurdles. In Moscow there was one reputable private theatre: Korsh's. Lily Markova had acted there, as had Daria Musina-Pushkina, Masha's friend. Chekhov made fun of a 'preposterous' drama at Korsh's theatre. Korsh challenged him: 'Why don't you write a play yourself?' Korsh's actors told Chekhov he would write well: 'You know how to get on people's nerves.'21 Chekhov agreed to write a play, and then join the Russian Society of Dramatists and Operatic Composers.

Chekhov's title, Ivanov, was a clever ploy. Ivanov is a surname as common in Russia as Smith in England, and the play could bring one per cent of the population to see their namesake. Ivanov, a bright intellectual (we are told), spends all four acts of the play in manic depression. The Jewish girl he has married and cut off from family and religion is dying of ÒÂ; he falls for the daughter of his creditors. Self-hate overcomes him. For the Korsh theatre Ivanov at least had melodramatic curtain falls: Act 2 ends with the sick wife catching her husband embracing his new love; Act 3 ends with his telling her the doctor's prognosis, and the play ends with the hero's death - by heart attack and later, Chekhov decided, by bullet. Modern audiences are more enthralled by Ivanov's conflicts with the priggish doctor who denounces him and the evil steward who eggs him on - three central male figures suggesting one multiple personality. Chekhov himself saw the play as charting a mental disease, but he was to baffle actors who wanted to know only whether Ivanov is villain or victim? Chekhov bemused them by subtitling the play 'Comedy'.

Ivanov, his 'dramatic miscarriage', was written in ten days. Chekhov shut his study door and upset Nikolai Ezhov by his 'pensive, taciturn, somehow disgruntled' mien. Ezhov was the first outsider to read the

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MY B KOI ÏÊ Its' KEEPER play out: Chekhov listened with detachment. Ezhov praised it to Chekhov's face, but privately reacted 'with amazement, since instead of the expected cheerful comedy in the Chekhov genre I found a gloomy drama crammed with depressing episodes… Ivanov seemed unconvincing.'22 Chekhov was happy: the play was: 'light as a feather, without a single longueur. An unprecedented plot'. Korsh liked it too, and Davydov, who was to play the lead part, kept Chekhov up until three in the morning, enthusing. Twenty years on, he wrote: 'I don't recall any other work captivating me like this. It was as clear as anything that I was seeing a major playwright laying new paths.'23

The first performance on 19 November 1887 launched Chekhov as a dramatist. He had produced something 'big', 'serious', though - as he saw himself - unpolished. Leikin was a mean-spirited and uncalled-for mentor: he slandered Davydov, and told Chekhov to stay away from rehearsals. The first night went awry: Chekhov was aghast. Only Davydov and Glama, who played Sarra, knew their parts, and the minor actors were drunk. Nevertheless the audience applauded and the author took three curtain calls, though the finale with Ivanov's coincidental heart attack at his second wedding bewildered them. For the second performance four days later, Chekhov tinkered with this act. Piotr Kicheev, the literally murderous editor who had never forgiven Anton for deserting The Dragonfly, went for the jugular: 'deeply immoral, cynical rubbish… the author is a pathetic slanderer of the ideals of his time. [Ivanov is] not a hero of the times we live in, but just an outright blackguard, trampling on all laws, God's and man's.' Surrounded by beer bottles and duck dung, Palmin wrote to Leikin: 'In all the scenes there is nothing comic and nothing dramatic, just horrible, disgusting cynical filth, which creates a revolting impression.'

Ivanov had one more performance in Korsh's theatre. Critics praised it only enough to ensure that the play toured the provinces. For 400 roubles Chekhov endured embarrassment which coloured his attitude to the theatre. Disapproval incited in him a love-hate relationship with drama; he would respond with plays that were time bombs for stage conventions and poison for actors. The more he was lectured on conventions, the more he would flout them. In the failure of Ivanov lie the seeds of the success of Uncle Vania.

Chekhov was to flee the city after almost every new production of his plays. Four days after the third performance of Ivanov, he went

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to Petersburg. He brought Ivanov for Suvorin to read. This time, however, he slummed with Aleksandr and his family, all recuperating from typhoid. Aleksandr's life outdid Ivanov's: Anna, facing death, missing her eldest son and her daughter, was jealous of Aleksandr, who thought only of sexual frustration. Aleksandr's household, despite two servants and the salary that Suvorin paid him, was sunk in filth and poverty; the two infant boys were retarded, locked in a world of their own. Anton wrote home, as his own high-minded character in Ivanov, Dr Lvov, might have written: 'Anna is ill (tuberculosis). Filth, stench, weeping, lying; stay a week with Aleksandr and you'll go crazy and get as filthy as a floor-rag.'

After three days he left for the Leikins, to wash, sleep and relax. From Leikin he moved to the Hotel Moskva. Living in luxury among strangers, he could make women friends, but he was also freer to make new men friends. In St Petersburg he acquired two more lifelong acolytes, as he had previously acquired Ezhov and Gruzinsky. One was Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov, the grandson of an army general, who wrote as Shcheglov ('Goldfinch'), following the fable by Krylov: 'Better to sing well as a little goldfinch, Than badly as a nightingale.' The other was Kazimir Barantsevich, a ticket inspector on Petersburg's trams, who had six children and spent his nights writing. Pathologically modest, Barantsevich had no mirrors in his house. He wrote about heroes with lives even grimmer than his own: but for Chekhov, he would never have left Petersburg.

Bilibin, Shcheglov and Barantsevich in Petersburg, Gruzinsky and Ezhov in Moscow, were not just friends and admirers; they were horrible warnings of the price of failure for a Russian intellectual. Trapped by bad luck, poverty or mediocrity into being part-time writers, they seemed to Anton like animals in a menagerie. As Vagner, a zoologist, would tell Anton, they saw Chekhov as the elephant in the zoo. Their admiration became envy only when the elephant broke out of the zoo. The other animals stayed caged, dispirited, cannibalistic. It was Suvorin, the kindly keeper who fed and doctored the menagerie, who singled out Anton for release, raising his payments from 12 to 20 kopecks a line, allowing Chekhov more space, preparing to launch him in the 'thick' literary journals. By 1888 Chekhov would enjoy the freedom to write as he wanted, and was distinct from the caged literary animal. As Chekhov reported to his family on 3

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MY íèø inns ê i: i:!• i: R December 1887, Suvorin was enthusiastic about Ivanov: 'Everyone is waiting for me to put the play on in Petersburg and is confident of success, but after Moscow I am so repelled by my play that I can't possibly make myself think about it: I can't be bothered…'

Chekhov's success in Petersburg was crowned by the wide popularity of his latest stories in New Times. The story of starving cattle, 'Cold Blood', based on a miserable business failure of a Taganrog cousin, won Anton an accolade from the Petersburg Society for the Protection of Animals. 'The Kiss', set in an artillery regiment (officers like those Chekhov invented for Three Sisters), won admiration from the military. The hero is a shy officer, kissed in the dark by a woman who mistakes him for someone else and whose identity he never discovers. Chekhov had studied the battalion in Voskresensk so well that his readers believed he must be a serving officer. The greatest sensation, however, was aroused by 'Kashtanka', the story of a dog, conscripted into a circus, that recognizes his owner in the audience. It was the first Chekhov story to be published as a book.

Anton's public was now far wider than the New Times readership. Suvorin now needed him more than vice versa. Other grand old men took a liking to Chekhov. One was the aristocratic radical, Aleksei Pleshcheev, who had mounted the scaffold with Dostoevsky, and still wrote an occasional inspirational civic poem. Pleshcheev was for his remaining years Chekhov's most perspicacious critic. Like Suvorin, Pleshcheev hinted that he would like Anton as a son-in-law, but Anton returned, unbetrothed, to Moscow on 17 December. Bilibin wrote his greetings for New Year 1888: 'Gruzinsky tells me that you are radiating all the colours of the rainbow after your Petersburg impressions.'

On Suvorin's advice, and to appease the censorship, Chekhov revised Ivanov. He now called the play a 'drama', but Act IV was intractable: How could Ivanov die a convincing death?

TWENTY-THREE Ô

The Death of Anna January-May 1888 CHEKHOV ALLOCATED all January 1888 to a masterpiece, 'Steppe'. The Northern Herald's editor Evreinova (who reminded Anton of a 'roast starling') had given him carte blanche on length, subject, and fee. Chekhov had 500 roubles as an advance and another 500 on publication for a story of 120 pages. His income was trebled: never again did the Chekhov family know penury, though they sometimes spent more than they earned. The Northern Herald was not censored: Anton was free. The pressure of weekly or fortnightly stories for three Petersburg journals receded: he fed New Times, but starved Fragments and The Petersburg Newspaper.

'Steppe' flaunts all conventions for extended prose: instead of a plot, we have a boy's journey across the Ukraine, from Taganrog to Kiev, accompanied first by a friendly priest, Khristofor, then by carters, and encountering a cross-section of humanity- an embittered Jew, a Polish countess, peasants rebellious and submissive. Nature - ponds, insects, a storm - overwhelms the boy's mind: he succumbs to a fever. The work has a musical structure: it is a symphony, with a storm and a pastorale as haunting as those in Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Spellbound by memories of his own childhood in the steppes, Chekhov also had Gogol's 'Sorochintsy Fair' and Turgenev's prose poetry in mind as bench marks. 'Steppe', unmatched until Katherine Mansfield's 'Prelude', is the first work by Chekhov that we can call a classic.

Pleshcheev read the manuscript in ecstasy. In February 1889 it was published. It left musicians, painters and writers awe-struck: Vsevolod Garshin, the most original of younger prose-writers, had met his peer. Critics, notably Ostrovsky (the playwright's brother) risked their necks in praise. Suvorin, Aleksandr reported, 'left his tea undrunk. Anna Suvorina brought him three fresh cups when I was there'. Suvorin's cronies, however, distanced themselves. Aleksandr passed on the

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MY ÍÏÎ I II I 1(s' Kill'I It comments of Burenin, the New Times journalist who was most trusted by Suvorin: Such descriptions of the steppe as yours he has read only in Gogol and Tolstoy. The storm that gathers and does not burst is the height of perfection. The characters, except for the yids, are alive. But you don't know how to write long stories… 'Steppe' is the beginning, or rather the prologue, of a big piece you will write. Leikin tried to dispirit Chekhov: 'Hanging is too good for those who advised you to write long pieces. A long piece is good when it's a novel or tale with a plot, a beginning and an end… Anyway, I stopped reading about 25 pages before the end.'

Unlike his experience with Ivanov, Anton was sociable and cheerful all the time he was writing 'Steppe', although he wondered at his story, almost unique in his work for its lack of love interest. 'I can't do without women!' he exclaimed in a letter to Shcheglov.

He found two days to write a melodramatic short story, 'Sleepy', about a skivvy who murders her mistress's baby so that she can sleep (a story that Katherine Mansfield would later plagiarize). He threw off two short plays, the Beckett-like monologue for a superannuated actor alone in the theatre, Kalkhas, later called Swansong, and the first of his fine farces, The Bear, which he later dubbed The Milch-Cow for its profitability. Friends noted Chekhov's soaring self-esteem, and other changes: his flowing hair, and quizzical smile. Gruzinsky wrote to Ezhov in February 1888: 'Chekhov really looks like Anton Rubinstein… a coolness has sprung up between Bilibin and Chekhov.' Bilibin stopped signing himself 'Your Victorina', but Anton's new friend, Ivan Shcheglov, became more affectionate: 'No Frenchwoman can caress so seductively as you can.'

Friends still called on Anton's medical skills. Grigorovich, after Chekhov had examined him, decided to stave off death in Nice: from there he sent Chekhov ideas for stories. From Petersburg Aleksandr issued desolate bulletins about Anna. Surgeons and doctors disagreed. Aleksandr was tormented by temptation as well as remorse - the secretary at New Times had soft black eyes. He asked Anton for moral guidance. Anna's terror of death overcame her inhibitions: she pleaded with her mother-in-law: I beg you, take pity on your grandchildren, come to Petersburg and JANUARY-MAY l888 stay with us. I've been ill for a long time and now the doctors think I must have an operation, that I have an abscess or echinococci [bacteria] (ask Anton he will explain) on the liver and I have to have them cut out. God knows how the operation will end, but I'm terribly afraid and at best I shall have to be in hospital for a long time. Who will be with my children then?… If I had fallen ill in Moscow I wouldn't be so afraid, but here I'm utterly alone and I am so miserable. Do me one more favour, light a candle to the martyr St Panteleimon for me in the chapel and pray to the Healer for me. My regards to Pavel Chekhov and ask him to say a prayer… I thank Anton for his sympathy…24 Botkin, the most distinguished surgeon in Petersburg, examined Anna. There was a brief remission, but by 4 March it was clear that she was dying of tuberculosis of the liver.

Kolia's existence was also threatened not just by disease but by the authorities, for he had evaded conscription. All communications, even from his brothers, went via Anna Ipatieva-Golden. Putiata, Anastasia Golden's first husband, and virtually a brother-in-law, was destitute and dying: Anton felt obliged to offer him treatment and money. The indigent and importunate spoilt Anton's mood. He wanted to go back to Petersburg so badly that, after Lucullian nights together, he shared a train compartment with Leikin. He told his brother Misha that March: I had a bad journey, thanks to Leikin the chatterbox. He wouldn't let me read, eat or sleep. All the time the bastard boasted and pestered me with questions. As soon as I drop off he touches my foot and asks, 'Did you know that my "Bride of Christ" has been translated into Italian?' At the Hotel Moskva Pleshcheev, Shcheglov and Anton's new editor, Evreinova, were waiting. The next day he moved in with the Suvorins, with mixed feelings, as he suggested to Misha: A grand piano, a harmonium, a divan with a bustle, Vasili the footman, a bed, fireplace, a chic desk - these are my conveniences. As for the inconveniences, they are beyond counting. For a start, I am deprived of the chance of coming home under the influence and in female company… before dinner a long talk with Mme Suvorina about how she hates humanity and her buying today a jacket for 120 roubles.

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After dinner a talk about migraine, then the kids can't take their eyes off me and wait for me to say something unusually clever. They think I'm a genius because I wrote the story of Kashtanka. The Suvorins have named [after the animals in the story] one dog Fiodor Timofeich, another Auntie and a third Ivan Ivanych.

From dinner to tea we have pacing of Suvorin's study from corner to corner and philosophy; the spouse interrupts the conversation out of turn and puts on a bass voice or imitates a barking hound.

Tea. At tea we talk about medicine. Finally I'm free, sit in my study and can't hear voices. Tomorrow I'm running away for the whole day: I shall be with Pleshcheev… By the way I have my own loo and back door - if I didn't I might as well lie down and die. My Vasili is dressed better than me, has a genteel physiognomy and I find it strange that he walks reverendy on tiptoe around me and tries to anticipate my wishes. On the whole it's awkward being a man of literature. I want to sleep but my hosts go to bed at 3 a.m. Anton called on Aleksandr: he was amazed to find the children fed and clean, and his brother sober. Anton climbed endless stairs to see Vsevolod Garshin. Garshin was out.25

After one week, Anton took the train to Moscow, unaware that on 19 March 1888, in a fit of depression, Vsevolod Garshin had killed himself by hurling himself down the stairs Anton had climbed. Ever since his traumatic experiences as a soldier in the Turkish wars twelve years before, Garshin had distilled his madness into stories of obsession, such as 'The Red Flower'. Marriage to Russia's only woman psychiatrist did not save him. Garshin's funeral was as grotesque as his death: Leman, an author of a manual on billiards, usurped the ceremony with an inept oration; New Times, which scorned radical writers, was represented only by Aleksandr Chekhov. A quarrel over two commemorative books sucked Chekhov into literary politics. All that came of the controversy was that Chekhov got to know one significant contemporary, Korolenko, the literary lion of Nizhni Novgorod. Garshin's prose of alienation was, however, to influence Anton's later work.

Spring made Anton yearn for the country, but Orthodox Easter was late that year - 24 April - and, Anton explained to Korolenko: 'Anyone absent during the Easter holiday is considered by my household to be in mortal sin.' He had many invitations: to explore the

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JANUARY-MAY l888 Volga with Korolenko, the far north with Leikin, or Constantinople with Suvorin. Babkino now palled. Was it proximity to importunate visitors, or boredom with prurient Aleksei Kiseliov and prudish Maria? In April, to soothe the Kiseliovs, Anton agreed to house their son Seriozha when he went to school in Moscow in the autumn, leaving him free to spend July in the Crimea at Suvorin's new seaside house outside Feodosia, before setting out with Suvorin's eldest son, 'the Dauphin', across the Black Sea to Georgia, and perhaps the Caspian to Central Asia. He would leave his family behind. The dacha he had in mind for them in May and June was in the Ukraine.

Kolia's friends at The Eastern Furnished Rooms, by the conservatoire, included two hapless musicians who were to become Anton's companions. One, Ivanenko, had come to Moscow to study piano and found all the conservatoire pianos allocated; he took up the flute, and made forays into literature, signing himself 'Little lus', a redundant letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. The other was the cellist Semashko, whose lugubrious playing was the butt of the Chekhovs' jokes. Ivanenko and Semashko came from northeast Ukraine, near the town of Sumy. They put Anton in touch with the Lintvariov family, who, like the Kiseliovs, supplemented their income by renting summer cottages. Their estate, Luka, lay outside Sumy, on the river Psiol in hilly wooded countryside, warmer than Babkino, and even better for fishing.

At Easter, Misha, on his way to Taganrog, was deputed to make a detour to Sumy and report on the Lintvariov estate. He recalled: After the stylishness of Babkino, Luka made a terribly mournful impression on me. The manor house was neglected, the courtyard had a puddle which seemed never to dry up, with the most enormous pigs wallowing in it and ducks swimming about, the park was more a wild, untended forest, and there were graves in it; the liberal Lintvariovs saw my student uniform and from the start treated me like a pariah. Anton had already invited half literary Petersburg to stay with him: he was not deterred. Pleshcheev intended to come, so did Suvorin, before taking Anton to the Crimea. Anton bought tackle: he and Suvorin would fish the Psiol together.

Despite Aleksandr's pleas, Anton refused to go to Anna's bedside, and called him a 'loathsome blackmailer':

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Urgent medical help is required- È you won't take Anna to Botkin then at least visit him yourself and explain what's the matter… I doubt if mother will come, for her health is not all that good. And she has no passport. She has the same passport as papa, that would mean long discussions with father and going to the police chief etc. The family's postscripts were no comfort: 'Greetings!!!!! N. Chekhov. Mother grieves she can't come.' and: 'My regards, I kiss you, Anna and the children, Masha.' Aleksandr painted for Anton a picture of domestic hell: The children are running wild: howling, cowering, trying to get to their mother who either cries over them or chases them away. When I get home from the office, more trouble: she demands to see the vile woman I am going to marry, who intends to poison Kolia and Antosha for the sake of her own future children. She demands this woman be searched for behind the door, in the wardrobe, under the table… Just imagine the night, the ravings, the loneliness, the impossibility of consoling her, the crazy words, the sudden transitions from laughter to crying, the children crying in their sleep after being frightened all day. Judge, you Herod's ^sculapius, what a time I'm having and what grief that mother won't come. Aleksandr's siblings showed more concern for strangers. Masha brought home a twelve-year-old boy she found begging. She and Anton gave him money, got him boots from the school where Vania worked, and gave the boy a train ticket to Iaroslavl and a letter to the local celebrity, the poet Trefolev (who looked 'like a plucked crow'). Only Pavel softened to his son: Dear Aleksandr… I sympathize with your grief, but unfortunately can send you nothing, I can only pray, and I advise you to rely on God. He will arrange everything for the best. I wish Anna a Happy Easter and with all my heart a quick recovery, I ask her to forgive me and to forget the past… Your loving father, P. Chekhov. Anton was dreaming of catching perch-pike in the Psiol, 'nobler and sweeter than making love' he told Pleshcheev. Misha was with Uncle Mitrofan: 'Mummy! I'm in Taganrog! happy, cheerful, calm, pleased.' Aleksandr despaired: 'Anna's days are numbered and the catastrophe is inevitable… Please ask our mother and her sister if they'll take the children…' But Anton was adamant in his refusal:

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JANUARY-MAY l888 If I add two rooms for the children, nurse and children's junk, then the flat will cost 900… Anyway, in any spacious flat we would be crowded. You know I have an agglomeration of adults living under one roof simply because, thanks to incomprehensible circumstances, we can't go our own ways… There's my mother, sister, the student Misha (who won't leave even when he graduates), Kolia, who is doing nothing and has been jilted by his paramour, drinks and lies about undressed, our aunt and [her son] Aliosha (the latter two just use the accommodation). Add to this Vania hanging about from 3 p.m. to the early hours and all day on holidays, while papa comes for the evenings… These are all nice, cheerful people, but they are selfish, they make claims, they are usually talkative, they stamp about, they have no money… I refuse to take on anyone else, let alone somebody who has to be brought up… Tear this letter up. You should make it a habit to tear up letters, they are scattered all over your apartment. Join us in the south in summer. It's cheap. The children, Anton suggested, could be left with Aunt Fenichka, who would live in the Korneev house, while the Chekhovs were in the country. Aleksandr had to accept these brutal terms. Anton wrote far more mildly about his dependants to his 'dear Captain' Shcheglov on 18 April: I too have a 'family circle'. For convenience I always take it with me like luggage and am as used to it as a growth on my forehead… it's a benign, not a malignant growth… Anyway, I am more often cheerful than sad though, if I think about it, I am tied hand and foot. Evgenia worried only about her summer in the country, and wrote to Misha: 'It's a pity our dacha is not a success, it's too late now, the luggage was sent at Easter… you wrote little about servants, what the prices are in Sumy, how much they're paid a month.'

On 7 May 1888 Anna took the last rites in Petersburg, while the Chekhovs reached Sumy by train and took a carriage two miles to Luka. Their hosts were friendly, the house comfortable, the weather hot and the setting unspoilt. 'Misha was talking rubbish,' Anton wrote, inviting Vania and Pavel to join them in 6 weeks' time and bring vodka. He invited Shcheglov and wrote again to Vania specifying fish hooks. To Leikin he praised the civilized Ukrainian peasantry. Here, after the diseased and degraded peasants around Babkino, he could

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forget he was a doctor. Soon the- Chckhovs were joined by guests. The arrival of the legendary Pleshcheev thrilled the Lintvariovs: for three weeks they treated him as a god. Belatedly Anton remembered his brothers. On 27 iMay he told Aleksandr to make Aunt Fenichka his children's guardian, and not to pay Anna's doctors: 'If they are waiting for the autopsy to make a diagnosis, then their visits were absurd and the money they dare to take off you cries unto heaven… iMy regards to Anna and the kids.' The next day, before this callous letter had arrived, Aleksandr sent Anton a note: Today at 4.15 a.m. Anna died. Knoch will do the autopsy tonight. After the funeral I shall immediately take the children to Auntie in Moscow and will join you in Sumy. Then we'll talk it all over. Be well for now. Regards. Yours, A. Chekhov.

TWENTY-FOUR Ô

Travel and Travails May-September 1888 THE LINTVARIOVS were very unlike the Kiseliovs. The Kiseliovs had the rakishness and the loftiness of the nobility; the Lintvariovs were principled gentry, hardworking landowners and good employers, radicals ready for self-sacrifice. All they had in common with the Kiseliovs was impecuniousness.

The head of the Lintvariov family was the mother, Aleksandra. She had five adult children, three daughters and two sons. The eldest daughter, Zinaida, impressed Chekhov. He told Suvorin: A doctor, she is the pride of the family, and the peasants say, a saint… She has a brain tumour; this has left her completely blind, she has epilepsy and constant headaches. She knows what to expect, and talks about her imminent death stoically with striking calm… here, seeing a blind woman on the terrace laughing, joking or listening to my In the Twilight being read, I start to think it odd not that the doctor will die but that we don't sense our own death. The second daughter, Elena, plain and assumed unmarriageable, was also a doctor. Natalia, the youngest, was full of song and laughter: she identified with the peasantry, and not only spoke but also taught Ukrainian (then forbidden). The elder son, Pavel, under house arrest for radical activities, was married and expecting his first child. The youngest son, George, was a pianist, enthralled by Tchaikovsky's music and Tolstoy's morality: his career was also curtailed by political activism. Letters sent to Luka, even to Chekhov, were intercepted by the secret police. The Lintvariovs expected intellectuals to devote themselves to the people. Discussions at Luka, despite Natalia's vivacity, had little of Babkino's frivolity. There were no drinking bouts, no romps with peasant girls. The innocent ambience and idyllic setting were to infiltrate a few of Chekhov's works, notably The Wood Demon, and give them a Utopian colouring.

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The house the Chekhovs rented was more habitable than Misha had suggested, despite four dogs that chased the Lintvariov pigs around the yard and burst into the guests' dining room. A Polish girl cooked for the Chekhovs; Evgenia refused to cook, because the kitchen was occupied by another holiday-maker. Anton went fishing and struck up a partnership with a local factory-worker, a keen fisherman. They fished the millponds on the Psiol. The miller's daughter was plump 'like a sultana pudding… such concupiscence, Heaven help me,' Anton wrote to Kiseliov, but gentlemen at Luka did not seduce peasant girls, and Anton was dismayed to discover that Sumy had no brothel. Luka also lacked lavatories: Chekhov's bottom was covered with mosquito bites.

None of the visitors who trekked 400 miles, a thirty-hour train journey, complained. The Ukraine appealed to Russian intellectuals, who felt a yearning for a Shangri-La they could idealize, like the Victorian English love affair with Scotland. Anton's newest acolytes - the writers Ivan Shcheglov, Kazimir Barantsevich, and the flautist Aleksandr Ivanenko - and those whom he revered happily joined him for two weeks at Luka. On 20 May the poet Pleshcheev arrived. Ivanenko played duets with Georges Lintvariov; the local girls rowed Pleshcheev on the Psiol and sang romances to him, Anton monitoring the old poet's pulse and breathing.

Early in June two of Anton's brothers, Vania and Kolia, came. Kolia was subdued, for in Moscow he had vanished with Franz Schechtel's money and materials; Schechtel, as architect for a church that Kolia was helping to restore, was facing a fine of 150 roubles for each day's delay. 'I pity myself in the extreme,' he wrote. 'Kolia is not worth pitying.' Aleksandr came to Moscow and left his infant sons with Aunt Fenichka. There, Gruzinsky reported on 21 June, order had disintegrated: 'On the steps of your apartment I saw a charming young maid with a charming young man on her knees (usually it's the other way round).'26 Aleksandr hurried to Sumy, but was quarrelsome and drunk. He mounted the stage of the little Sumy summer theatre and helped the hypnotist and the conjurors: the audience laughed, but Anton removed him. Then Aleksandr wrote a proposal of marriage to Elena Lintvariova, presuming her desperate enough to accept a widowed alcoholic with two retarded sons. Anton tore the letter up. Aleksandr stalked off to the station at two in the morning. In Moscow he accused Aunt Fenichka of poisoning his children. He took them to the Petersburg flat, which had been stripped bare by two dismissed servant girls, and there lapsed into alcoholic stupor. (Some time elapsed before the two little boys were rescued and sent for a few-weeks to Aunt Fenichka in Moscow.)

Kolia and Pleshcheev left two days after Aleksandr walked out. Kolia, after a third-class journey cramped among the household goods of other returning holiday-makers, went to his sick-bed in Anna Ipatieva-Golden's house: from here he tried to extort money from Suvorin to illustrate 'Steppe'. Pleshcheev returned (forgetting his nightshirt) first-class to his genteel apartment in Petersburg. The gap was filled by Misha, back from Taganrog, who now felt closer to Mitrofan's family than his own, particularly to his cousin Georgi.

Anton thought of buying a ranch in the Ukraine for a few thousand roubles. There, he fantasized, he could write, found a spa for other city writers, and practise medicine. Earning 500 to 1000 roubles from each new story or play, Anton could be a man of property. A farmer friend of the Lintvariovs, Aleksandr Smagin, had taken a fancy to Masha, and offered to help find Anton a property near his own estate in Poltava. The Lintvariovs harnessed four horses to their antiquated carriage: Anton with Natalia Lintvariova, her brother George and a girl from Poltava set off to the Smagin estate. Anton started a ten-day tour of the market towns of the northern Ukraine that Gogol had made famous fifty years before. For three years Anton considered properties, but every deal fell through. The 250-mile tour left Chekhov a lover of all things Ukrainian. When he returned to Sumy he was buoyant.

Nightingales hatched their young in the window frame. More visitors came. Anton had asked Gavrilov to give Pavel two weeks' leave from the warehouse. Gavrilov was happy to employ the father of a famous man: his demands on Pavel were nominal, though Pavel liked helping Gavrilov reckon his million-rouble annual profit. On 26 June Pavel arrived, to celebrate his name day jointly with Pavel Lintvariov, an event that contributed touches to Chekhov's story 'The Name-Day Party'. Of the acolytes, only Kazimir Barantsevich came for long. He and Anton caught crayfish together. Barantsevich left, forgetting his waders and a pair of trousers. He wrote a thank-you letter: 'Not a

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day passes without my thinking about suicide (except for my short stay with you).'

Anton missed Suvorin. Sending Anton his comedy The Theatrical Sparrow for comment, Shcheglov said the same: 'I occasionally have Suvorin-schmerzen; it's so wonderful to talk to him now and then -he is sensitivity itself.' After three days by train and boat, on 13 July 1888, Anton was greeted by the Suvorins at their villa in Feodosia. For nine days they bathed, lay in the sun, strolled and talked. Anton wrote neither letters nor fiction: the relationship absorbed him totally. Here they sketched out the play that would later become The Wood Demon. Anna Suvorina watched: We lay on the baking-hot sand or on moonlit nights watched the boundless sea… My husband and Anton when they were together chatted or exchanged stories all the time… We introduced Anton to Aivazovsky [the painter]… Aivazovsky's beautiful second wife, an Armenian, wore a white housecoat and her long black hair, still wet after bathing, flowed loose; lit by the moon she was sorting out roses, freshly picked and strewn over the table, into baskets. Anton said, 'It's a magic fairy tale.' Chekhov wrote nothing that summer, although he was planning a novel. Suvorin's munificence overwhelmed him: rowing boats for fishing on the Psiol, money to buy an estate, a daughter, a partnership in the publishing business, co-authorship for a new play, worldly wisdom, state secrets. Anton made light of Suvorin's offer of his eleven-year-old daughter Nastia, and borrowed a sum too small to embarrass himself, but large enough not to offend Suvorin.

Anton ignored everything else. In Moscow Vania was searching for quarters for himself and Pavel. The Korneev house was a shambles. Vania told his mother: There is a lot of dust and rubbish from well-known persons in your apartment, but what there really are a lot of are cats. For want of anything to do, Auntie talks to them, feeding the poor animals on buns and milk, all the pussy cats have names, the littlest is called Paper Bag.

At 4.00 a.m. on 23 July 1888, Anton set sail with Aleksei Suvorin junior, the Dauphin, for the Caucasus. In heavy seas Anton lost his footing and grabbed the telegraph machine to stop his fall. In the confusion on the bridge the ship, the Dir, narrowly missed another boat.27 Anton and the Dauphin set off across Georgia for the Caspian sea, aiming to reach Persia via Bukhara. A new disaster struck Suvorin. The Dauphin had telegrams: his third brother, Valerian, was ill. Valerian had turned up, complaining of headaches, at Zvenigorod, where Anton would have been working, had he accepted Kiseliov's invitation to Babkino. Here Anton's colleague, Dr Arkhangelsky, diagnosed diphtheria and ordered a trachelotomy. A call to a Moscow surgeon went astray: Valerian died in Zvenigorod on 2 August 1888.

The Dauphin and Anton raced back to the Crimea. Suvorin junior hastened to his father. Anton avoided the bereaved Suvorins and returned to the Lintvariovs and the river Psiol. The Dauphin wrote to Anton on 12 August 1888: I found our father completely shattered and tired, as if after an attack of mental illness… Now everything seems impossible, futile… My father is trying to follow common-sense prescriptions, trying to live 'a normal life', is doing the bookshop accounts, going to the building site… We expected you here, I did my best to make excuses for you. Appeals for compassion came from Moscow as well as the Crimea. Aunt Fenichka wrote to her sister on 11 August: I grieve for the children now that Anna is no more and I wake up at night and think about them… I can't bear it, when the child [little Kolia] misses his mother.' He can't talk and told me - he shows me with his hands - how mama was dressed and put in the coffin and then buried in a hole in the ground, shows me with his hands and simply I have never known such grief; I just cannot calm myself. Anna was a dear and I was quite certain that her relatives would take them in and not let them live like this. I pray that Our Father in Heaven will soften Anton's heart… poor Shura [Anna's 16-year-old son] cried a lot for his mother and fell unconscious, and the daughter [the eleven-year-old Nadid] cried a lot. Anton could not cope with any more demands on his sympathy, his living space, or his purse. His nephews, for whom he felt scarcely more affection than did Pavel, were abandoned to their drunken father, and Suvorin to his wife and surviving sons. Since 'Steppe' in March Chekhov had not maintained his

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MY ÍÏÎ I II I H,s' KF.F.PER reputation. He was ashamed of 'Lights', his second story, which was to appear in The Northern Herald. (He excluded it from his collected works.) Inspired by revisiting Taganrog, it tells the story of a successful provincial who returns to the seaside town where he grew up. The local girls pine for the boys who abandoned them for the metropolis: they endure loveless marriages. The narrator seduces a girl, Kisochka, whom he once revered. The work to which Anton devoted most thought but which never saw the light of day was an unwritten novel. The hints that survive in others' recollections and Anton's letters suggest that it was based on the life of the Lintvariovs. Perhaps it was recycled into The Wood Demon and the stories which Chekhov wrote, when inspiration returned, in the autumn. The company of writers all summer had left Anton so irritated, and the suffering of others weighed so heavily, that his novel was abandoned.

Physically and spiritually exhausted, but desperate to write, Anton returned to Luka. On 2 September 1888 he and his family returned to the Korneev house in Moscow, evicting Aunt Fenichka (who returned to her cramped quarters) and her stray cats and dogs.

TWENTY-FIVE Ô

The Prize October-December 1888 BACK IN HIS STUDY, Chekhov began a busy autumn. The house was noisier: Seriozha Kiseliov stamped upstairs when he came back from school. There was now a family retainer, the cook Mariushka Dormidontovna Belenovskaia, already over sixty, who would serve Anton for the rest of his life.

The protests about Kolia's dereliction were loud. Early in October 1888 Schechtel (who had suffered financially) voiced to Anton everyone's thoughts: That Kolia is feeling bad, and very bad, is obvious - I wouldn't give tuppence for his life expectancy. I can positively affirm that he is incorrigible. With tears in his eyes he assured me that he could see and sense the evil which his Big Slag [Anna Golden] causes him, that from this instant he is breaking with her forever, he will see people, dine, lunch, work. Excellent: I almost believed him; for a few days he behaved just like the Kolia of old, he came to see us every day. Apart from a little glass of Sauternes he drank nothing. Whom he was trying to deceive, I now can't understand. The other side of the coin: constant vodka, salami (Luxus) and Slag [Anna] every day. No inclination to work. He fancied the idea of painting my wife's portrait. All right - a mass of money has been spent - I don't know what will happen; so far the canvas is standing in a virginal state. Three weeks later, Schechtel said, Kolia had taken 100 roubles and an iconostasis: 'He definitely suffers from a mania which lets him see all his actions, some criminal, through rose-coloured glasses… I'm sorry to bother you, but what can I do?… Return the inconostasis to my messenger?

The next warning came in a note from the landlord, Dr Korneev, to Misha: Tell me where your brother the artist Kolia is sleeping. Today there

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was an incident. I caught a Icllow looking into your windows. As a vigilant landlord I gave the lad a (right… He admitted he was Kolia, that he'd taken a room in Medvedev's lodgings and, he said, he didn't know where he'd spent the nights for three weeks and he had no papers! I tell you in such detail in case there's trouble and you have to pay a fine.28 (Ihekhov appealed to Suvorin's son-in-law and legal expert, Kolomnin, to see if Kolia could get a certificate of exemption from military service. The crime of having hidden was inexpiable; none of Kolom-nin's suggestions would save Kolia. Schechtel persisted in salvaging. At the end of November he wrote: I sent two telegrams to the Big Slag - no answer. Clearly, he's not there. Has he been to see you? Just let him give me back the boards - I don't want anything else. Why does he punish me twice over! Perhaps he'll sort himself out and work; I am ready to forget everything if only he'd work. Through Aleksandr in Petersburg, Anton traced Kolia to a new woman. Not until the approach of Easter 1889, did the family hear from their black sheep again.

After he had left Sumy in a huff, Aleksandr twice wrote to Masha asking secretly whether he might marry Elena Lintvariova. Masha told Anton, who defended a vulnerable colleague and comrade, as he always felt Elena to be, from his brother. He told Aleksandr: Above all, you are an 84° proof hypocrite. You write 'I want a family, music, affection, kind words when I'm tired after… running round fires etc'… you well know that family, music, affection and kind words come not from marriage to the first woman you meet, even if she is very decent, but from love… you know Elena less than the man on the moon… As for Elena, she is a doctor, a landowner, free, independent, educated and has her own views. She may decide to get married of course, for she is just a woman, but she won't get married for a million roubles if there is no love on her part. Aleksandr capitulated. Suvorin set aside his own misery and remonstrated with Aleksandr. Aleksandr remained for some months, under Suvorin's influence, sober.