Chekhov Becomes Chekhov

To Paul Richardson

Introduction

You should never describe yourself. It would have been better had you made Pospelov fall in love with some woman, and incorporated your feelings in her.

—To a fellow writer1

If someone offers you coffee, don’t go looking for beer in it. If I present you with the ideas of the Professor, trust me and don’t look for Chekhov’s ideas in them, thank you kindly.

—To his friend and editor Aleksei Suvorin2

Anton Chekhov’s biography in 1886–1887 is captured almost completely in the writing that he was doing. Reading the stories, we are as close as we can be to being in his company.

In 1886, the twenty-six-year-old Moscow doctor published 112 short stories, humor pieces, and articles. In 1887, he published sixty-four short stories.3 The young author was, to his surprise and occasional embarrassment, famous; admired by, among others, Russia’s literary giants Lev Tolstoy and Nikolay Leskov.4 In these two years, three volumes of his short stories were published. Meanwhile, three hours a day, six days a week, Dr. Chekhov treated patients in his office at his family’s residence, and also made house calls; he lived with and supported his parents and younger siblings. In the winter of 1886, he became engaged and unengaged to be married. He mentored other writers with matter-of-fact encouragement and brilliant criticism. He carried on lively, frank, funny correspondence with editors, friends, and his older brothers. Having written, he was exhausted, but in the midst of writing, whether venting and making jokes in letters or amusing himself and us with stories, his senses seemed fully alive, consciousness and imagination flowing together. Weary and suffering from various ailments including the tuberculosis he had contracted at twenty-four, he took a long trip south in the spring of 1887 to Taganrog, where he had grown up. He continued writing even on vacation. In his short stories he identified with a variety of characters: doctors, patients, actors, drivers, writers, artists, children, women, men, drunks, religious folk, Muscovites, Petersburgers, exiles, villagers, judges, criminal investigators, cheats, lovers, midwives, business owners, and animals. After a blue and dreary summer of 1887, he wrote a four-act play in the space of two weeks. He concluded these two years of artistic work by composing one of Russia’s most famous children’s stories, “Kashtanka.”

Chekhov’s imagination is what brought him to the world’s attention and has kept him there. His imagination—and its prodigious flowering during these years—is the focus of this biography; the facts of his life build the frame around the picture of that imagination. In 1888 until to the end of his life, the amount of his writing only slowed to a pace that any other great author would have been proud of, and he eventually curtailed his medical duties. He died in 1904, the most famous writer in Russia other than Tolstoy; posthumously his short stories and plays became in translation the English-speaking world’s model of everyday comedy and tragedy.

The stories and humor pieces that he was producing on deadline for St. Petersburg newspapers and magazines required that he keep an eye on topicality (e.g., New Year’s, Lent, Easter, spring thaws, summer dachas, return to school, winter snows, Christmas). What I did not expect to discover in researching his life in these years is that when those 178 pieces are read in chronological order and in conjunction with the personal letters to and from him, they become a diary of the psychological and emotional states of this conspicuously reserved man. For example, when he was in the midst of his frustrating and anxious engagement, young couples in his stories are continually making their rancorous way into or out of their relationships. When Dr. Chekhov was overtaxed by his medical duties, the doctor characters explode or implode. Chekhov’s talented but drunken older brothers and domineering father became transmuted into characters, but almost always Chekhov converted the circumstances of the people he knew into fictional ones at various removes: the opposite gender, a younger or older age, a different profession, a different place, a different family. His clever brothers would have recognized themselves, though not the circumstances, in many comic and serious stories. His father, born a serf to a “slave-driving” serf-father, was reputedly incapable of recognizing the similarities between himself and the brutal or ridiculous fathers in his son’s stories.

Anyone who writes about Chekhov has an easy time of it when quoting his work. Just like that, in a sentence or two, the situation and the people involved are clear to the mind’s eye and the body’s senses: “In the low-pitched, crooked little hut of Artyom, the forester, two men were sitting under the big dark ikon—Artyom himself, a short and lean peasant with a wrinkled, aged-looking face and a little beard that grew out of his neck, and a well-grown young man in a new crimson shirt and big wading boots, who had been out hunting and come in for the night. They were sitting on a bench at a little three-legged table on which a tallow candle stuck into a bottle was lazily burning” (“A Troublesome Visitor”). Chekhov continually makes us aware of our senses taking in impressions. He gives us and the characters the experience of melding those impressions into coherence. “Chekhov as an artist cannot even be compared with previous Russian writers—with Turgenev, Dostoevsky, or myself,” remarked Tolstoy. “Chekhov has his own peculiar manner, like the Impressionists. You look and it is as though the man were indiscriminately dabbing on whatever paints came to his hand, and these brush strokes seem to be quite unrelated to each other. But you move some distance away, you look, and you get on the whole an integrated impression. You have, before you, a bright, irresistible picture of nature.”5 He continually gives us the sensory atmosphere, our awareness of being or imagining ourselves being in an absolutely particular place. While Chekhov is not quotable for witty or profound statements, he is quite quotable for efficiency and depth: in an opening sentence or two, he creates each story’s shape and momentum.

To indicate instances of Chekhov’s imagination at work and at play, I quote at length from his stories and letters and provide continual biographical commentary. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that readers may become annoyed by how often I interrupt his stories with my remarks. Chekhov later wrote to Maxim Gorky, who would soon become the third most famous Russian author, that in his stories, “You are like a spectator at a play who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he cannot hear what the actors are saying and does not let others hear it. This lack of restraint is particularly felt in the descriptive passages with which you interrupt your dialogue…”6 Gorky didn’t try to justify his “lack of restraint,” so for the moment neither will I. Readers should keep in mind, however, that most of the stories I quote from can be read complete, uninterrupted, online for free in thirteen volumes of translations by Constance Garnett and in additional volumes by other competent translators.7 In Russian, there is an excellent comprehensive site.8 This biography is not about my special experience along narrow scholarly paths, I hope, but about a route anybody can take with Chekhov.

In the following few pages of the introduction, I provide some background to Chekhov’s life before I proceed to trace the day-to-day and week-to-week routines and varieties of experience of this period. Because the stories encapsulate the life of his mind, mood, and imagination, they reveal him more clearly and deeply than can any biography, chronicle,9 or collection of letters. His psychological portraits of distinct, carefully observed characters are, I show, sometimes incidental portraits of himself; the story-situations are sometimes previews or replays of the domestic, financial, and romantic problems he was trying to clarify. The reserved man who had trained himself to never break down or weep or lash out10 nevertheless always identified himself, in some detail, with his sensitive, naïve, cynical, eruptive, or fragile characters.

*

Chekhov and his siblings were well educated, though their father Pavel had been born a serf. Pavel’s father had been, unusually for a serf, literate, and became so much of a wheeler-dealer that he earned enough money to buy himself and his family out of serfdom in 1841.11 When Anton was born, the third of six children, in January of 1860, serfdom in Russia, like slavery in America, was finally on the verge of ending.

Taganrog, a southern Russian port town on the Sea of Azov, is where Chekhov was born and raised. As a boy, Anton and his two older brothers were shown off as singers in the orthodox church by their father. Pavel was artistically minded and outwardly pious but, in regard to his three oldest sons, brutal. He was an ineffective shopkeeper. Mikhail Chekhov, born five years after brother Anton, recalled:

Our father was […] fond of praying, but the more I think about it now, the more I realize that he enjoyed the ritual of religion more than its substance. He liked church services and listened to them standing reverently throughout. He even organized prayers at home, my siblings and I acting as the choir while he played the role of the priest. But the church served more as his club, a place where he could meet his friends […]

But in everyday life, our Father had as little faith as all the rest of us sinners. He sang, played violin, wore a top hat, and visited friends and family on Easter and Christmas. He loved newspapers. […] He always read newspapers out loud from cover to cover. He liked talking politics and discussing the doings of the town’s governor. I never saw him without a starched shirt on. […]

Music was our Father’s calling. He would sing or play his violin […] To satisfy this passion, he put together choirs with our family and others and we would perform at home and in public. He would often forget about the business that earned him a living […] He was also a gifted artist: one of his paintings, “John the Evangelist,” made it into the Chekhov Museum in Yalta. […] He liked philosophizing, but while Uncle Mitrofan read only books of a lofty content, our Father read and reread (always out loud) cheap French novels. Sometimes, preoccupied with his own thoughts, he would stop in the middle of a sentence and ask our Mother [Evgenia], “So, Evochka, what was it that I just read?”12

To Pavel Chekhov’s credit (which he acknowledged to himself generously), he sought opportunities for his children’s education, and the three oldest boys and then their three younger siblings all succeeded in their studies.

Alexander, the eldest child, born in 1855, survived Anton, and in a memoir explained that from Anton’s “very early childhood, owing to the beneficent influence of his mother, he could not look on with indifference when he saw animals being treated cruelly, and almost cried when he saw a driver beating his dray horse. And when he saw people being beaten, he used to tremble nervously…. But in his father’s routine, smacks on the face, cuffs on the nape of the neck, flogging were of most ordinary occurrence, and he extensively applied those corrective measures both to his own children and to his shop boys. Everyone trembled before him and were more afraid of him than of fire. Anton’s mother always rebelled against her husband, but always received the invariable answer: ‘I myself was taught like that, and you see I have turned out a man. One beaten man is worth two unbeaten ones.’ ”13

Alexander described their wearisome and unhappy choir practices and the schoolboy Anton’s duties “at the very small, cheap general store, helping his father. His impressions of carefree childhood were based on observations made from a distance. He never experienced these happy years, filled with joy and pleasant memories. He did not have time to do this because he spent most of his free time at his father’s general store. Besides, his father had rules and prohibitions regarding everything. He could not run around because, as his father told him, ‘You will wear out your boots.’ He could not jump because ‘only street bums hop around.’ He could not play games with other children because ‘your peers will teach you bad habits.’ ”14

I imagine Alexander wincing, remembering his own traumatized childhood, as he noted: “When [Anton] was older, he would tell his friends and relatives, ‘During my childhood, I did not really have a childhood.’ ” When fifteen-year-old Alexander and eleven-year-old Anton went to visit their father’s father on the steppe, “Chekhov was shocked by his Ukrainian grandmother’s revelations: privation and thrashings from Egor, in an outpost surrounded by resentful peasants, had broken her. For the first time the boys understood how their father had been formed, and that his childhood had been even worse than theirs.”15 Pavel may have broken the spirit of Alexander, who as an adult was prone to rages and alcoholism, but Anton seems to have had the temperament and composure to withstand his father.

Alexander and Mikhail became writers and editors. Nikolay, the second son, born in 1858, whom Anton thought the most talented of the family, was a painter and illustrator. Unfortunately he, like Anton, contracted tuberculosis in 1884.16 Unlike Anton, charming Nikolay succumbed to hopelessness. Two of the younger siblings, Ivan (born 1861) and the lone sister, Maria (born 1863), became schoolteachers.17 The biographer Ronald Hingley assesses Chekhov’s younger siblings as “dependable, sympathetic, conventional souls, much respected and beloved by Anton, whom all three idolized. He does not seem to have found them dull. But deadly dull they were by comparison with the two eldest boys Alexander and Nikolay: both so gifted yet so wayward, with their drunken habits, irregular love lives, and financial unreliability…. The talent, the high spirits, the verve of the two eldest sons were Anton’s, but so too were the resourcefulness and persistence of the three youngest children.”18

Even as a teenager, Chekhov was so responsible that when his father’s store went bankrupt, his parents left the sixteen-year-old Anton behind to finish high school. His presence in town covered for his family’s escape from creditors. They fled to Moscow, where the two oldest boys were attending university. Independent Anton tutored for his room and board and eventually was sending any extra money he earned to his family. In 1879, as the recipient of a Taganrog town scholarship, he moved to Moscow to rejoin his family, which he had been able to visit only once since their departure, and began his medical studies. They were living in a rough Moscow neighborhood, but Anton brought with him two student-boarders, whose contributions helped keep the family afloat. Medicine was a respectable but not necessarily lucrative career. He immediately took charge of organizing the family’s finances and through his earnings as a writer became its primary breadwinner for the rest of his life. Anton was the boss, and the family needed him to be. Hingley writes that “the other Chekhovs already looked on him as their rescuer, for little could be expected from the older members of their family. Both parents seemed defeated by poverty and disappointment…. [Pavel] was abdicating as head of his household, but without leaving any obvious successor.”19

With each passing year, Anton moved the family to better neighborhoods and healthier housing. Pavel, the bankrupted shopkeeper, was eventually working as a shop boy on the other side of Moscow; by 1886 he spent many of his nights at his son Ivan’s government-issued apartment, and only rejoined the family for occasional meals and on days off.

As kind and mild and reserved as Chekhov was with friends and acquaintances and patients, he was sometimes sharp and commanding with his siblings. It’s not clear how he spoke to his parents. “Our mother, Evgenia Yakovlevna,” remembered Alexander, “was different from our father. She was a soft and quiet woman. She had a poetic nature. By contrast to the father, who seemed very strict, her motherly care and tenderness were amazing. Later, Anton Pavlovich said very truly: ‘I have inherited the talent from the father’s side, and the soul from the mother’s side.’ ”20

Chekhov was protective of his mother, and brother Mikhail recounts instances of her doting on him: “After a few hours of writing, Anton would come to the dining room around eleven and look at the clock meaningfully. Catching this, Mother would immediately stand up from her sewing machine and begin fussing. ‘Ah, my-my, Antosha is hungry!’… After lunch Anton would usually go to his bedroom, lock himself in, and mull over his plots—if Morpheus did not interrupt him, that is. We would all go back to work from three in the afternoon until seven in the evening.”21

My favorite of Chekhov’s biographers, Ernest Simmons, writes: “The years 1885 to 1889 were among the happiest in Chekhov’s relatively short life. By the end of this brief period he had emerged from obscurity to become one of the most appreciated and discussed writers of the day…. He had brought his family from indigence to a position of material security and social acceptance…. Many publishers were bidding for the products of his pen.”22

*

To have as few failures as possible in fiction writing, or in order not to be so sensitive to failures, you must write more, around one hundred or two hundred stories a year. That is the secret.

—Letter to his brother Alexander23

In the midst of those “happy years,” March of 1886 was the most productive month of his writing life; he published fifteen short stories, a few of them among his most excellent. As soon as he finished a story, off it went in the overnight mail to St. Petersburg, and within the week it was in print. He was not writing without thinking, he was writing without blocking. There was nothing in the way between his imagination and the paper he was writing upon. For example, “Poison” (“Otrava,”24 published March 8) is not an especially good or memorable story, and yet it is interesting in the context of what I’m regarding as his creative diary: A father-in-law, instead of paying the groom a dowry, gives him a note for an overdue loan. The anxious groom discovers that the doctor-debtor, one Klyabov, won’t pay it, because the interest has fraudulently ballooned.

The palming-off of the bad debt on the son-in-law doesn’t seem to reflect very much on Chekhov’s immediate circumstances, except that Chekhov was as usual in debt and was himself at the moment a fiancé. The story’s most personal vibrations are activated when it comes to poor Dr. Klyabov, who after working all night has been roused from his sleep. These are the aggravations that Dr. Chekhov suffered:

“God knows what!” Klyabov waved his arm, getting up and making a tearful face. “I thought that you were sick, but you’re here with some nonsense… This is shameless on your side! I went to lie down at seven today, but you for some Devil knows reason wake me! Decent people respect others’ peace… I’m even ashamed for you!”25

Chekhov wrote to his editor Nikolay Leykin about “Poison”:

Having written and reread the story I sent you yesterday, I scratched my ears, raised my brows and grunted—activities every author does after having written something long and boring… I began the story in the morning; the idea wasn’t bad and the beginning came out quite okay, but the misfortune was that I came to write with interruptions. After the first page, A. M. Dmitriev’s wife came to ask for a medical certificate; after the second I received a telegram from Schechtel: Sick! I had to go treat him… After the third page—lunch and so on. But writing with interruptions is like an irregular pulse.26

And even in the midst of this letter to editor Leykin, he was interrupted: “Someone’s pulled at the bell…”; after that ellipsis, Dr. Chekhov announced, with relief, “Not for me!”27 In “Poison,” Chekhov re-experienced Dr. Klyabov’s frustrations and distractions. Who would interrupt him next?

On this day he was writing or about to write “A Story without an End.” In these two years, Chekhov seemingly had stories “without end.” This new one, about a would-be suicide, is told by an unnamed first-person narrator, whom Chekhov, putting some space between himself and the storyteller, didn’t allow to be a doctor, even though he is remarkably knowledgeable about physiology; the narrator, it turns out, is only a humor writer.

*

On my middle-aged way to learning Russian so I could read Anna Karenina in the original, I read dozens and dozens of Chekhov’s stories, some in heavily annotated editions for us Russian learners. In English I had read all of Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov, and I either didn’t notice or didn’t care that she didn’t arrange the stories chronologically. She gathered the stories the way a florist might arrange bouquets: loosely, occasionally thematically, occasionally by time-range, size, or quality. When I was reading Russian collections, however, I kept noticing that so many of my favorite stories had been published in 1886 and 1887. I loved Chekhov’s later stories too, but there weren’t so many of them. Had anyone else noticed all those 1886 and 1887 publication dates?… Of course others had! In the best book about Chekhov, read by me at least a few times since the early 1980s and “forgotten,” there is this emphatic and dead-on declaration: “Eighteen eighty-six and early 1887 brought a whole stream of stories, unprecedented in Russian literature for the originality of their form and subject matter and for their compression and concision.”28 I second that evaluation.

I chose to study the two years where Chekhov took center stage in Russian literature so that I could give myself and you, my reader, the illusion of comprehensiveness. There is no comprehensive biography of Chekhov, though there are many good biographies. Like Garnett’s story collections, they too seem to focus on a theme or aspect of his life. Rosamund Bartlett, who seems to me to have the most thoroughly knowledgeable appreciation of Chekhov’s life and work, focused her biography, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (2005), on the places where he lived and visited. Donald Rayfield’s Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997, updated and revised in 2021) is large and long but not focused on his writing. It is informative about the Chekhov family’s dynamics and is full of unexpurgated material from Chekhov’s and his correspondents’ letters that had never even been published in Russian.29 Michael C. Finke’s Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings (2021) is a good but brief biography that fairly balances the life and work. I have read all of Chekhov’s 1886–1887 letters in Russian, and there are several collections of his letters in English, which I draw on and quote from.

It’s possible to catch Chekhov in the looking-glass in the miracle years of 1886 and 1887 because he had almost no time to look away.

*

“My work is like a diary. It’s even dated like a diary.”

—Pablo Picasso30

I wish we really knew how he wrote his stories or even any single tale. In that hour or three wherein Chekhov’s hand and imagination inscribed a story, even if we watched his quick right-handed penmanship slide and scritch across his narrow notebook pages, with sometimes not even a cross out, what would we know beyond the appreciation of his speed and focus? Perhaps it would be like viewing the replayed iPad paintings of David Hockney, where in about sixty seconds the screen displays a flurry of the artist’s eyes’ and finger’s decisions: lines, shapes, colors, tones, resizings… and voilà, a beautiful tree-lined road. Chekhov’s mother Evgenia said, “When he was still an undergraduate, Antosha would sit at the table in the morning, having his tea and suddenly fall to thinking; he would sometimes look straight into one’s eyes, but I knew that he saw nothing. Then he would get his notebook out of his pocket and write quickly, quickly. And again he would fall to thinking.”31

From some such perspective we can at least imagine him at work, and certainly we can see the proof in the pudding. Chekhov’s stories are as personal as any great artist’s landscapes and portraits. David Hockney is not the trees and he is not the friends he paints. But from Hockney’s many works we know a lot more about how he sees and understands the world than we probably know about our own ways of seeing. He and Chekhov help us appreciate what can be appreciated, if only we were focused geniuses. We know from Chekhov’s thousands of pages of writing that the challenge of his life was to free himself to feel the entirety of his humanity, which meant in his case a combination of intelligence and wit and a deep well of sympathy for the weak and the vulnerable:

What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests’ hands, worshiping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before god and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance—write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.32

That fearsome “young man” who squeezed “the slave out of himself drop by drop” was of course Chekhov. This declaration, written to his closest friend and confidant of the time (1889), is the most personal revelation he ever made, but unfortunately he himself never wrote that story, though his memoirist siblings and his conscientious biographers have ever since his death tried to do so. My modest suggestion is that his own stories do tell, in pieces and flashes, that story of himself, the “real human being.”

No one has tracked his daily routines beyond what the editors of the invaluable Letopis’33 (“Chronicle”) of his life have compiled. We have a few contemporary facts about some particular days, but there isn’t an appointments calendar or a record of the patients he saw. He was on the other hand very good at keeping track of publications, sending follow-up letters and commissioning various brothers to round up the late payments from forgetful or tight-fisted editors. During my mostly happy days of research, I had the big, great obvious idea of compressing this biography of two years of his life—writer, doctor, financial provider, joker, lover, friend—into a short story, written as if by himself. It would be brilliant, amusing, and concise. We would know Chekhov from the outside through carefully selected observations and from the inside through his buzzing thoughts….

I didn’t manage to write that story.

For this biography, Chekhov would have advised me, had he been unable to dissuade me from writing it at all, to Keep it simple. Sketch the mundane everyday life and activities, but vividly. Admit what you don’t know. Be modest. Be brief! That sounds simple, but as his friend Viktor Bilibin eventually protested when Chekhov cajoled him toward greater artistry in his writing: I’m not you, Anton Pavlovich!

*

Some notes on the text: I use the present tense in describing and discussing Chekhov’s creative works; I use the past tense when describing and presenting letters and memoirs. The variations from that rule are either intentional or accidental. I use the transcription from Cyrillic method of, for example, x to kh (as in Чехов/Chekhov) and the й and ы to y (sorry, but the scholarly transcription of the й to j makes me cringe), the ю to yu, the я to ya. I ignore the ё (“yo”) in names (Kiseleva) and use the simple e. I ignore the ye pronunciation that some Russian e’s have and stick to the e (for example, not Dostoyevsky but Dostoevsky). I accept the soft sign and render it as what looks like an apostrophe (Леонтьев/Leont’ev), except in familiar names like Tatyana or Gogol. I refer to Chekhov as Anton only in discussing or presenting exchanges between him and his siblings: that is, when he was not Chekhov but Anton or Antosha. I refer to his brother Aleksandr as Alexander. I have silently corrected British-translated spellings (e.g., colour, mould, theatre) for American spellings. I have silently replaced Garnett’s and others’ tch spelling of the Russian ch (ч) as ch. That particular spelling is why we still see Tchaikovsky spelled that way, and why some translations of Chekhov before the 1920s render his name as Tchekhov. Because the translations of individual story titles vary so much into English, I indicate the Russian title in transliteration for each. In the appendix, I list in English and Russian all of the titles of the stories and skits in chronological order.

PART ONE

Chekhonte & Chekhov

January 1886

It is not up to me to permit or prohibit you to write. I referred to the need for learning to punctuate properly because in a work of art punctuation often plays the part of musical notation and can’t be learned from a textbook; it requires instinct and experience. Enjoying writing doesn’t mean playing or having a good time. Experiencing enjoyment from an activity means loving that activity.

—To a young writer1

There was a costume party at the Chekhovs’ on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1885. They lived in Moscow on the north side of the Moscow River, in a merchants’ quarter known as Yakimanka. They had moved into this apartment at the beginning of December. The apartment was damp, but for the first time Dr. Chekhov “had a room of his own: a study with an open fireplace where he worked and received his patients. The flat was on the ground floor, and that turned out to be a serious disadvantage, for the [second] floor of the house was occupied by a restaurant that was regularly let out for wakes and wedding parties.”2 This New Year’s Eve, the Chekhovs would contribute to the building’s happy noise.

Among the guests was Maria Yanova.3 She presented a photo album to Chekhov. Opening the photo album, Chekhov would have read Yanova’s inscription: “My humble gift to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in memory of saving me from typhus.” He had tended to her and to her mother and sisters when they had typhus in early December. Her mother and one sister had died, the sister with Chekhov at her bedside. Maria Yanov’s brother Alexander was a painter and had been a classmate of Chekhov’s brother Nikolay at a Moscow art institute. Yanov could not afford a doctor for his mother and sisters and Chekhov had volunteered for the dangerous and tragic job.4

He was twenty-five. He was tall, handsome, with dark brown hair; he had a trim beard and moustache, dark eyes, and in photos sometimes had a smart-alecky expression he directed at the camera.5

In 1894, Chekhov with two of his friends, Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik and Lidiya Yavorskaya. He must have made them laugh, but he had trained himself not to laugh at his own jokes. He named this photograph The Temptation of St. Anthony.

“All were captivated by his appearance and manner,” writes one biographer. “With his capacity to make friends, many, upon meeting him for the first time, felt that they had known him for years. As he talked his face grew animated, and he occasionally brushed back his shock of thick hair or toyed lightly with his youthful beard.”6 He had a baritone voice. If he had a Southern Russian accent, or a special rhythm to his phrasing, no one ever remarked on it. “Simplicity dominated his movements and gestures. All were struck by his expressive eyes set in a long, open face with well-defined nose and mouth.”

The six-foot-one doctor was also amusing. He wrote funny stories and skits for Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers and magazines, for which work he used pen names, the most common and popular being Antosha Chekhonte.

*

It had only been a few weeks before, during his first ever visit to St. Petersburg, that Chekhov discovered that Antosha Chekhonte was a very popular writer. For five years already Chekhov had been writing comic stories and cultural journalism under various pen names and anonymously for Moscow and Petersburg publications. In his most frequent venue, Fragments (a title sometimes translated into English as Splinters or Shards), Antosha Chekhonte was the star attraction. His St. Petersburg Gazette short stories, some of which were serious, were attracting the literati. Famous authors in the capital wanted to meet him and when they did, they encouraged him to write more and longer pieces. His host in Petersburg, the Fragments editor and publisher Nikolay Leykin, himself a popular humorist whom Chekhov and his brothers read growing up, had wanted to show him off but was anxious not to lose him.

From his two weeks of being recognized and admired in Petersburg, Chekhov understood that there would be new, more prestigious, and better-paying venues where he could publish his writing.

He was tied into a couple of particular formats at Fragments: paragraph-long anecdotes and jokes, or one hundred–line stories of about a thousand words. Leykin also had a heavy editing hand and didn’t hold himself back from crabbing about Chekhonte’s less inspired pieces. Chekhov provided Fragments with two or three pieces a week, among them an occasional gossipy Moscow culture column, all the while also conducting his medical practice and, ever since the spring of 1885, writing a story a week for the Petersburg Gazette.

Chekhov would joke this year and for the next few years that medicine was his wife and writing was his mistress—and that he had no trouble hopping beds. But really, it was that his mistress and wife had their own close and invigorating relationship. “There is no doubt in my mind that my study of medicine has had a serious impact on my literary activities. It significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate,”7 he told a former medical school colleague.

As New Year’s was an important publishing week, there being an uptick of readers during the holidays, Chekhov wrote six timely pieces for various publications.

The skit “The Maskers” (“Ryazhenye”) appeared in the St. Petersburg Gazette newspaper on New Year’s Day 1886. Many of the pieces Chekhov wrote from 1880 to 1886 I would call by the not necessarily demeaning word “skits,” corresponding to the wide range of humor we can find today in New Yorker magazine Shouts & Murmurs pieces or in McSweeney’s. He had probably written “The Maskers” five or six days before. Mail service was dependable and fast between Russia’s two biggest cities, about 400 miles apart.

Masking, or mumming—dressing up and acting out a pantomime—is a New Year’s tradition in some communities around the world. In “The Maskers,” Chekhov describes a parade: one person after another, one dressed as a pig, another a pepper-pot, a female fox, an entrepreneur, a chained dog. A character sketch follows of a dissipated fellow, “a talent,” who will soon have mourners and an obituary, and then an account of this “pet goose” of a drunken writer who needs quiet, quiet, quiet! “At home, when he sits alone in his room and creates ‘a new piece,’ everyone goes on tiptoe. Good lord, if it’s not 15 degrees in his room, if beyond the door a dish clinks or a child squeaks, he seizes himself by the hair and with a chesty voice, ‘Dammmmmit!… There’s nothing good to say about a writer’s life!’ When he writes, he’s performing a holy act: he wrinkles his brow, bites his pen, puffs, sniffs, and continually crosses out.”8 Chekhov was probably teasing his oldest brother Alexander, an editor, family-man, and part-time writer, whom Chekhov regularly addressed in letters as “You Goose.”

On January 2, Chekhov met with an emissary of the powerful publisher and editor Aleksei Suvorin. The journalist Alexander Kurepin asked Chekhov if he would be willing to write for New Times. Kurepin knew that Chekhov had already promised to write two pieces a week for the Petersburg Gazette and was on a one-year salary of 600 rubles with Fragments. (To give some sense of monetary value, the yearly rent on the four-bedroom, two-story house in Moscow that the Chekhovs would move into in September was 650 rubles.) Kurepin was able to report to Suvorin that Chekhov “eagerly agreed”9 to write for New Times. Most of the twenty-eight stories for New Times that he would write over the next two years paid more than 100 rubles each.

Chekhov had sent four pieces on December 28 to Leykin for Fragments for the New Year’s issue (January 4), the most important of the year for the magazine, as it inspired new subscriptions. Chekhov was dismayed about the first piece, “New Year’s Great Martyrs” (“Novogodnie Velikomucheeniki”). He told Leykin: “I wanted to write it shorter and spoiled it.”10 One such martyr, Sinkletev, recounts his drunken New Year’s Day wanderings: From Ivan Ivanich’s “to the merchant Khrymov’s to offer him my hand… I went to greet… my family… They asked me to drink for the holiday… And how not drink? You offend if you don’t drink… Well, I drank about three glasses… ate sausage… From there, to the Petersburg side to Likhodev… A good man…”11

Ellipses are a distinctive form of Chekhov’s punctuation. Usually the ellipsis is not a pause for dramatic effect. The dots usually function as a tick-tick-tick, a moment of hesitation preceding Chekhov’s next stroke of the pen. The ellipses are notable because they indicate that he wrote fast and directly, so fast that these ellipses are like pit stops for an Indianapolis 500 race car driver. His stories of the time and his letters are full of ellipses and in the scholarly edition often consist of two periods rather than three. English-language translators, if they acknowledge them, adjust them to the standard English three periods, as will I. For us, in this book, my deletions of material will be an ellipsis in brackets […]. The other ellipses are Chekhov’s own.

His other January 4 pieces are “Champagne (Thoughts from a New Year’s Hangover)” (“Shampanskoe (Mysli s Novogodnego pokhmel’ya)”), a monologue cursing the apparent beauties and joys of champagne; “Visiting Cards” (“Vizitnye Kartochki”), a list of visitors, among them “Court Counselor Hemorrhoid Dioskorovich Boat-y”12; and finally “Letters” (“Pis’ma”), wherein a reader, hounded by the magazine’s advertising promotions, writes: “You asked me to recommend your journal to my acquaintances; I did. Pay me my expenses.” That is, he took the journal’s command literally and went and recommended it to his acquaintances who happened to live far away. The second fictional letter-writer complains about receiving unwanted mail—essentially spam. The third complains that when Russia’s Julian calendar catches up to Western Europe’s, women will age twelve to thirteen days. (Here is an opportunity to mention that all the dates in this book correspond to the laggard Julian calendar, indeed in 1886–1887 twelve days behind our own. Chekhov’s January 1 was January 13 in England and the United States.) The fourth letter is an invitation to a home-performed drama night.

The first real short story of the year—one Chekhov would have considered and did consider an actual short story for length and semi-seriousness—was published in the Monday issue of the Petersburg Gazette on January 6, “Art” (“Xhudozhestvo”). (Russians then and now usually leave off the Saint from Petersburg; they also often, as Chekhov sometimes did, leave off the burg. I will use simply Petersburg.) Chekhov describes a villager known as Seryozhka who knows he is a wretch but that also, once a year, through carving and coloring ice on the river, that is, through making art, he has value—the art elevates him: “He obviously enjoys the peculiar position in which he has been placed by the fate that has bestowed on him the rare talent of surprising the whole parish once a year by his art. Poor mild Matvey [his assistant] has to listen to many venomous and contemptuous words from him. Seryozhka sets to work with vexation, with anger. He is lazy. He has hardly described the circle when he is already itching to go up to the village to drink tea, lounge about, and babble.”13

Once a year, Seryozhka is a prima donna:

Seryozhka displays himself before the ignorant Matvey in all the greatness of his talent. There is no end to his babble, his fault-finding, his whims and fancies. If Matvey nails two big pieces of wood to make a cross, he is dissatisfied and tells him to do it again. If Matvey stands still, Seryozhka asks him angrily why he does not go; if he moves, Seryozhka shouts to him not to go away but to do his work. He is not satisfied with his tools, with the weather, or with his own talent; nothing pleases him.

Every stage of making art is a challenge—but a true artist is respected and honored:

He swears, shoves, threatens, and not a soul murmurs! They all smile at him, they sympathize with him, call him Sergey Nikitich; they all feel that his art is not his personal affair but something that concerns them all, the whole people. One creates, the others help him. Seryozhka in himself is a nonentity, a sluggard, a drunkard, and a wastrel, but when he has his red lead or compasses in his hand he is at once something higher, a servant of God.

One point: Chekhov was an atheist. A second point: he was very knowledgeable about Russian Orthodox ritual. Third: he respected religion’s moral and artistic bases. Fourth and final point: while teasing his lazy, drunken, talented older brothers with this depiction of reckless, wayward Seryozhka, he was also describing his own and their own struggles and sense of fulfillment as artists.

When Chekhov faulted himself in his letters, it was often for laziness and lack of discipline. What this tells us, I think, is not that he was deluded (he wrote and did so much!) but that he was constantly having to overcome those traits. Though he usually immediately found the entrance and rhythm he needed for writing, it always took an effort. A couple of weeks after he had completed medical school back in 1884, he began working that summer at a district hospital. He wrote in his usual lively way to his then-and future-editor Leykin:

I am in fine fettle, for I have my medical diploma in my pocket. The countryside all around is magnificent. Plenty of room and no holiday-makers. Mushrooms, fishing, and the district hospital. The monastery is very romantic. Standing in the dim light of the aisle beneath the vaulted roof during an evening service, I am thinking of subjects for my stories. I have plenty of subjects, but I am absolutely incapable of writing anything. I’m too lazy…. I am writing this letter—lying down. With a book propped up on my stomach, I can just manage to write it. I’m too lazy to sit up. […] My family lives with me, cooking, baking, and roasting whatever I can afford to buy for the money I earn by my writing. Life isn’t too bad. One thing, though, is not so good: I am lazy and not earning enough… 14

In “Art,” meanwhile, Chekhov admiringly concludes the story of a slothful artist’s dazzling display on the icy river:

Seryozhka listens to this uproar, sees thousands of eyes fixed upon him, and the lazy fellow’s soul is filled with a sense of glory and triumph.

I like to think that Chekhov’s New Year’s wish was to inspire Alexander and Nikolay to experience Seryozhka’s “sense of glory and triumph.”

*

Alexander, Anton’s oldest brother and his most frequent correspondent for the next couple of years, had plenty of difficulties. For one, he was working in a customs office in the provinces and had missed the Moscow family’s New Year’s party. Alexander had a common-law wife, and they had two children; a baby who was about to arrive would be named after Anton. Though Alexander had led the Chekhov brothers into freelance work at humor periodicals, he did not have Anton’s tact, steadiness, or self-discipline. He drank too much. He could be oafish, rude, and pathetic. However, Alexander “was the only Chekhov who could match, or even outdo, Anton in wit, intelligence, and mordant irony.”15

Alexander was a touchstone for Anton about what not to do or become. When scolding another young author who simply wasn’t putting in the hours, Chekhov used Alexander as an example of premature “impotence” through lack of use:

If you go on writing so little, you will write yourself out without having written anything. As a warning you can take my brother Alexander, who was very miserly as a writer and who already feels that he has written himself out.16

In these two years of breakout success for Anton, there are forty-five letters from Chekhov to Alexander. Most are full of news, teasing, and advice; a few are only a handful of sentences, almost invariably about fees Chekhov needed Alexander to pick up from Petersburg periodicals and send—but he always included a joking brotherly insult. Alexander’s replies are lively and equally full of teasing and name-calling.

The first surviving 1886 letter of Chekhov’s was written on January 4 to Alexander. Anton wished him a happy New Year and scolded him, in the usual comically outraged tone he used only with his brothers and closest friends, for not having written: “You wretch! Raggedypants! Congenital pen-pusher! Why haven’t you written? Have you lost all joy and strength in letter-writing? Do you no longer regard me as a brother? Have you not therefore become a total swine? Write, I tell you, a thousand times write! It doesn’t matter what, just write… Everything is fine here, except for the fact that Father has been buying more lamps. He is obsessed by lamps.”17

This is one of the rare mentions between them of their father. He and Alexander preferred not to write about him, and there are only five known letters in his life from Anton to Pavel.18 On the other hand, Anton regularly emphasized keeping connections open among the siblings and with their mother.

He briefly recounted for Alexander his two-week mid-December trip to Petersburg and his stay there with Leykin: “He did me proud with the meals he fed me but, wretch that he is, almost suffocated me with his lies… I got to know the editorial staff of the Petersburg Gazette,19 and they welcomed me like the Shah of Persia. You will probably get some work on that paper, but not before the summer. Leykin is not to be relied upon. He’s trying all sorts of ways to stab me in the back at the Petersburg Gazette, and he’ll do the same with you. Khudekov, the editor of the Petersburg Gazette, will be coming to see me in January and I’ll have a talk with him then.”

Chekhov vented more about Leykin than about any other person, partly because Anton’s brothers knew him and could join him in taking their own lazy shots at him. Anton didn’t mention in this letter to Alexander, however, that he had just received a letter from Leykin complaining about Alexander’s recent work, how only one of the two stories that Alexander had sent was publishable, and even that one consisted, said Leykin, simply of various tellings-off.20

Chekhov’s letter to Alexander became a critique of his brother’s writing:

For the love of Allah! Do me a favor, boot out your depressed civil servants! Surely you’ve picked up by now that this subject is long out of date and has become a big yawn? And where in Asia have you been rooting around to unearth the torments the poor little pen-pushers in your stories suffer? For verily I say unto thee: they are actively unpleasant to read!

How many of us writers are lucky enough to have absolutely candid readers who can express their impatience while simultaneously guiding us? Anton complimented, with reservations, one particular piece: “ ‘Spick and Span’ is an excellently conceived story, but oh! those wretched officials! If only you had had some benevolent bourgeois instead of your bureaucrat, if you hadn’t gone on about his pompous rank-pulling fixation with red tape, your ‘Spick and Span’ could have been as delicious as those lobsters Yerakita was so fond of guzzling. Also, don’t let anyone get their hands on your stories to abridge or rewrite them… it’s horrible when you can see Leykin’s hand in every line…”

Alexander often made excuses about his personal behavior, but he seems to have always respected and trusted Anton’s criticisms of his writing. Even three years before, Anton had lectured him by letter regarding the distinction between subjective and objective writing. (“You must deny yourself the personal impression that honeymoon happiness produces on all embittered persons. Subjectivity is an awful thing—even for the reason that it betrays the poor writer hand over fist.”)21 Anton went on in this vein in the present: “It may be hard to resist the pressure to prune, but you have an easy remedy to hand: do it yourself, pare it down to its limits, do your own rewriting. The more you prune, the more often your work will get into print… But the most important thing is: keep at it unstintingly, don’t drop your guard for an instant, rewrite five times, prune constantly.”

The message Chekhov offered and would continue to offer to brothers and unknown writers alike was: “Keep at it unstintingly.” Make writing look effortless, make writing quick and effective. Keep at it and reread one’s own work with the same intensity one gives the best literature. Chekhov could have been a prima donna if he had wanted to, but he was determinedly modest and self-critical. He was so modest that he was amazed, he told Alexander, by his apparent renown: “I have never seen anything like the reception I got from the Petersburgers. Suvorin, Grigorovich, Burenin… they all showered me with invitations and sang my praises… and I began to have a bad conscience that I had been such a careless and slovenly writer. Believe me, if I had known I was going to be read in that way, I would never just have turned out things to order… Remember: People are reading you.” Chekhov gave lessons only about what he himself had learned from experience.

Alexander had been excusing his hasty, careless pieces partly because of his job as a customs official, where he felt he had to hide his association to humor magazines. Anton wouldn’t grant him that excuse, providing examples of other writers working for government agencies: “There are plenty of people in the Officer Corps, which has the strictest of regulations, who don’t conceal the fact that they write. There may sometimes be a need for discretion, but you shouldn’t be hiding away yourself […]. Excuse the moralizing, I’m only writing to you like this because it upsets me and makes me angry… You’re a good writer, you could earn twice as much as you do and yet you’re living off wild honey and locusts… all because of the crossed wires you have in your noodle…”

The twenty-five-year-old moved to wrap up his letter to the twenty-nine-year-old by acknowledging that his situation was different from Alexander’s: “I’m still not married, and I have no children. Life is not easy. There’ll probably be some money in the summer. Oh, if only!” The pressure to make money was relentless. The biographer David Magarshack believes these “two years were the worst years of financial worry Chekhov had ever experienced.”22

Chekhov reemphasized his letter’s main point: “Please write!” The family wanted to hear from Alexander. “I think of you often, and rejoice when I remember you are alive…” But not to get too sappy, he added: “So don’t be a fathead, and don’t forget your A. Chekhov.” In a postscript he tossed in the latest family “news”: “Nikolay is sitting on his backside. Ivan, as before, is being a real Ivan. Our sister is whirling around in a daze: admirers, symphony concerts, a big apartment…”

This most independent man coveted and created family unity.

*

The next day, January 5, Chekhov sent Leykin four new short pieces, one of which, “The Fiasco” (“Neudacha,” January 11), I will quote in its entirety as a good example of the kinds of humor stories he was writing for Fragments.23 He had probably written it in one sitting that day, a Sunday, his medical day off.

Ilya Sergeich Peplov and his wife Cleopatra Petrovna were standing by the door and ravenously listening in. Behind the door, in the little parlor, was proceeding, evidently, a declaration of love; their daughter Natashenka and the teacher of the district school were declaring themselves.

“He’s nibbling!” whispered Peplov, trembling with impatience and rubbing his hands. “Look now, Petrovna, as soon as they’re talking about feelings, right then snatch the ikon off the wall and we’ll go bless them…. We’ve got it under control…. A blessing with a holy ikon is inviolable…. He wouldn’t get away then, even if he brings a lawsuit.”

And behind the door proceeded this very conversation:

“Leave that manner aside,” said Shchupkin, lighting a match on his checked pants. “I most definitely didn’t write you letters!”

“Oh, sure! As if I don’t know your handwriting!” guffawed the girl, artificially squealing and at the same time taking glances at herself in the mirror. “I knew it right away! And what a strange one you are! A writing teacher, but your handwriting’s like a chicken’s! How can you teach writing if you yourself write so poorly?”

“Hm!… That doesn’t mean anything, miss. In calligraphy the main thing isn’t the handwriting, the main thing is that the students don’t forget. You hit one on the head with a ruler, another one on the knees…. That’s what handwriting is! A simple matter! Nekrasov was a writer, but it’s embarrassing to see how he wrote. In his Collected Works, his handwriting is shown.”

“That’s Nekrasov, but you… (sighs). It would be a pleasure to marry a writer. He’d constantly be writing verses to remember me by!”

“I could write you verses, if you wanted me to.”

“What could you write about?”

“About love… about feelings… about your eyes… You’d read them—you’d go crazy…. Tears would pour out! If I were to write you poetical verses, then would you give me your hand to kiss?”

“Big deal!… You could kiss it right now!”

Shchupkin hopped up and, widening his eyes, fell upon her plump hand, fragrant with egg-soap.

“Snatch the ikon!” said Peplov all aflutter, pale with agitation, buttoning up, and nudging his wife with his elbow.

“Let’s go! Go!”

And not hesitating a second, Peplov burst through the door.

“Children…” he muttered, raising his arms and tearfully blinking his eyes. “The Lord blesses you, my children…. Live… be fruitful… multiply…”

“And… and I bless you…” added Mommy, weeping with happiness. “Be happy, dear ones! O, you’re depriving me of my only treasure!” she said turning to Shchupkin. “Love my daughter, be kind to her…”

Shchupkin’s mouth gaped in confusion and fright. The parents’ assault had been so sudden and bold that he could not utter a single word.

“Caught, surrounded!” thought he, faint with fear. “Done for, brother! You’re not escaping this.”

And he humbly bowed his head, as if desiring to say: “Take me, I’m beaten!”

“Ble—I bless…” continued Papa and he also began crying. “Natashenka, my daughter… stand alongside… Petrovna, give me the ikon…”

But here the father suddenly stopped crying and his face winced in anger.

“Dummy!” he angrily said to his wife. “You stupid-head! But where’s the ikon?”

“Oh, Holy Fathers!”

What happened? The handwriting teacher timidly raised his eyes and saw that he was saved: In confusion Mama had snatched from the wall not the ikon but the portrait of the writer Lazhechnikov. Old Peplov and his wife Cleopatra Petrovna, with the portrait in their hands, stood in bewilderment, not knowing what to do or what to say. The handwriting teacher took advantage of the confusion and ran out.

Chekhov originally titled this skit “Busted!” (“Sorvalos’!”). Eventually, thirteen years later, in his Collected Works, he retitled it as “Neudacha” (“The Fiasco”), revising the ending so that he has the teacher skipping out of the room instead of the parents exclaiming “All is lost!” (which resembles a Gogolian curtain line).24

He wrote most of the purely farcical pieces with a restraint and focus that had to skedaddle down an expected route or fit a genre’s tone: they were apparently impersonal or, as he had described them to Alexander, objective. He certainly seems to have sympathized, however, with the cornered Shchupkin, and he himself was about to tumble into a real-life engagement.

*

He published the suspenseful but comic “A Night in the Cemetery” (“Noch na Kladbishche”) on January 8. A first-person narrator tells of a scary night that concluded with his waking up in a monuments storeroom. He announces: “My story begins, as begin in general all the best Russian stories: I was, I confess, drunk…” He eventually becomes philosophical: “It can’t be forgotten that with the new year the closer it is to death, to wider baldness, more twisted wrinkles, the wife older, more kids, less money…”25

For January 11 he wrote up a contest announcement for Fragments titled “The Contest” (“Konkurs”) that isn’t quite a joke. But Chekhov’s idea, which Leykin allowed him to try out to inspire more reader participation, doesn’t seem to have paid off; it received few responses. Another piece, “Tips for Husbands” (“K Svedeniyu Muzhei”), was blocked by censors. One possible reason for the censorship is that the “tips” aren’t really for husbands but for the Don Juans attempting to seduce those husbands’ wives.26 One of Leykin’s headaches as the editor of a humor magazine was dealing with censors, who were idiosyncratic and inconsistent. The magazine’s illustrations, which are surprisingly racy, were as much of a game for Leykin to sneak past censors as the written pieces.27 By January 12, Chekhov had selected most of the seventy-seven short stories that Leykin would publish that spring in the book Motley Stories.

The marriage theme was percolating in Chekhov’s life and fiction. He needed to borrow a jacket and vest to serve as the best man at the wedding of an acquaintance, the doctor Pavel Rozanov, on January 12. Rozanov was not from Moscow and didn’t have friends or family close by, but Chekhov and his sister Maria (often addressed or referred to as Masha), studying to become a teacher, agreed to represent Rozanov’s side.

Chekhov scheduled a “Tatyana Day” dinner with other friends the night of the midday wedding, and he got home only early the next morning. (That his brother Mikhail noted this detail means, I think, that such carousing was unusual.) Tatyana Day was an annual celebration by Moscow University students.28 Though his older brothers had drinking problems, Chekhov was a moderate drinker and none of his friends ever recounted his acting drunkenly. Two days after the wedding, Chekhov wrote and teased Rozanov that it was now Rozanov’s wife’s duty to find him a spouse: “If Varvara Ivanovna doesn’t find me a bride, I’ll definitely shoot myself.” When Chekhov expressed despair in letters to friends, he often declared this most self-dramatic act; he was continually threatening to shoot himself. In his fiction, the characters, equally self-dramatic, actually sometimes do it. He further teased Rozanov: “It’s time I was ruled with a rod of iron, as you now are…”29 He was in such sorry shape from the Tatyana Day all-nighter, as he told Rozanov, that he realized he needed to get married. “In the choice of bride, let you guide her taste, as ever since January 12 I began believing in your taste.”30

In “First Debut”31 (“Pervyi Debyut”), published on January 13, Chekhov describes a young lawyer’s awful, humiliating first day on the circuit. He leaves the district court with his driver; the winter weather is so bad, however, that they have to stop for the night at a house that the driver finds. The two lawyers who opposed him in court are already there, and he gets huffy and silent. When the water for tea has been made, they all realize he has sugar, and they have tea, but he, feeling petty and unforgiving, won’t share. He lies down by the oven; they think he’s asleep and they talk about him in ways that show their understanding of his rookie selfconsciousness. He is awake, though, and cries out his hurt to them, and they talk him around—explaining that debuts are always challenging. They help cover him from the cold with their heavy coats and they go to sleep.

Among the many observations we could make about this fine little story, one is to note how well Chekhov understands shame. It had been only a year and half since he himself had debuted as a doctor out in the countryside. Mikhail Chekhov recounts how his debuting brother lost his nerve in the midst of operating on a boy’s foreskin. Dr. Rozanov himself took over and to everyone’s relief completed the work.32

*

On January 16, Chekhov turned twenty-six.33 (He and other Christian Russians celebrated name days rather than birthdays; his name day was January 17.) He had eighteen and a half more years to live. Knowing but not admitting to others that he had tuberculosis, he might not have been surprised by that literal deadline. And though money was tight, there just had to be a big party. In his invitation to his friend Mikhail Dyukovskiy, he kidded that “I’m a poor man: my wife’s a widow, my children orphans,” and thus had a request for Dyukovskiy: to bring a dozen and a half knives and forks, teaspoons, glasses, small plates, and a cast-iron stove.34

Chekhov’s sister Maria was in a women’s higher education program, and one of her classmates and invitees to the party was the twenty-four or twenty-five-year-old Evdokiya (known to the family as “Dunya”) Isaakovna Efros. Chekhov had known Efros since at least the spring of 1885.

The longest letter of the month, besides the New Year’s letter to Alexander, was on January 18 to Viktor Bilibin, Leykin’s sub-editor, and it was long partly because it had to make up for a January 2 letter that Bilibin never received. That letter, Chekhov said, “was so big that there wasn’t a driver who would agree to take me with it to the mailbox.”35

He caught Bilibin up with what he remembered was in it, including a scolding for not having let him pay for their meal together when he was visiting Petersburg in December. He remembered having written Bilibin about the New Year’s costume party and the photo album he had been given and “how the fish in my aquarium died from a cigar thrown in their water.” He said the party had cost a bundle and that he had poisoned himself with alcohol.

À propos Christmas has cost me 300 rubles. Don’t you think I’m just crazy? Yes, it certainly is a great misfortune to have a family…. Thank goodness Christmas is over. If it had gone on for another week I should have had to go begging in the streets. At the moment I haven’t a farthing in my pocket.36

Note that if he actually spent 300 rubles, that was nearly half a year’s rent. But the big moment, shared only with his new friend Bilibin and the details of which were otherwise known only to Dunya Efros herself, was that “Last night, bringing a young lady home, I made her a proposal. I went out of the frying pan and into the fire… Bless my marriage.”

If Efros took the proposal seriously and told anybody about it, no one accounted for her ever having done so. Maria Chekhova, who outlived her brother by more than fifty years, claimed (probably disingenuously) that she had never heard of the engagement until decades later. As Chekhov devoted three most casual sentences to his engagement in the middle of a long letter to a man actually getting married, the biographer Ronald Hingley suggests that there never was an engagement. I, on the other hand, think that there was an engagement, but that it started out as a joke. That is, at the conclusion of his wild name day party, Chekhov proposed and Efros accepted… as a joke. And they played along at this together until they didn’t know themselves whether it was a joke or not.

There was marriage all around: for friends and for characters in his fiction. Why not try it himself? Even upstairs from his family’s apartment there were weddings. He wrote to Leykin the very next day about the wedding party that he was overhearing: “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 his bride this music may be pleasant, but it will stop me […] getting any sleep.”37

After more joking around with Bilibin, he got down to business. He wanted Bilibin to send him copies of Fragments that had some short stories Chekhov wanted to consider including in his book. He didn’t want to cut up his own copies of the magazine, and he included a list of those stories and the issues they had appeared in. He thanked Bilibin for that task and also for his praise of Chekhov’s recent stories in the Petersburg Gazette. He suggested that he didn’t enjoy knowing that literary people were reading him: “Before, when I didn’t know that I was being read and judged, I wrote unconcernedly, just as if I were eating bliny; now I write and I’m afraid…”

He asked when Bilibin would be in Moscow: “Here’s what you’re going to do: get married and you and your wife come to me in May at the dacha for a week or two.” He told him about the Tatyana Day festivities on the 12th and about the name day party, and that if the holidays were to go on any longer he would be done for, as he was now completely broke: “Pray for me.” He then confided that he had been invited to write for New Times, but that he didn’t want Bilibin to tell Leykin yet, as he didn’t know when that assignment would start.

*

“On the Phone” (“U Telefona,” January 19) is a skit in dialogue format about a caller’s misconnections trying to reach the Slavyansky Bazaar. A Soviet editor informs us that the first telephones in Petersburg were installed in 1882–1883.38 There are no accounts I have read of Chekhov using a phone until 1901, when Tolstoy, recuperating from various ailments in Crimea, called Chekhov, who was convalescing in the neighboring town. I would welcome a tsarist secret-police transcript of that call.

Meanwhile, Chekhov was trying to placate Leykin: “As hard as I tried, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich,” Chekhov wrote to Leykin on January 19, “I didn’t have time to send you a story by Monday.”39 He now apparently enclosed the short story “The Discovery.” “You say I write as if I want to cut things off. Why do you say that?” he asked warily. The only person in these two years that Chekhov deliberately and repeatedly deceived was editor Leykin. Chekhov did in fact “want to cut things off,” and had told others so. He was displaying the bad conscience of a boyfriend intending to dump his girlfriend. Despite their long professional and personal relationship, Chekhov didn’t tell him about the offer he had received on January 2 to write for New Times, though now would have been a fitting time.

In “Children” (“Detvora,” January 20) one recognizes Chekhov’s awareness of the sophistication of children’s feelings and relationships. The situation: While the parents are out and the servants are occupied, young children play lotto; they make their own rules and resolve their own disputes. The story is amusing, but Chekhov is strict with himself about psychology: The children talk and behave like children. It is as if he was giving a writing lesson to his brother Alexander; these children are not projections of parents’ love or created with “subjectivity”:

“I did see something yesterday!” says Anya, as though to herself. “Filipp Filippich turned his eyelids inside out somehow and his eyes looked red and dreadful, like an evil spirit’s.”

“I saw it too,” says Grisha. “Eight! And a boy at our school can move his ears. Twenty-seven!”

Illustration from “Children.”

Later, one of them hears bells:

“I believe they are ringing somewhere,” says Anya, opening her eyes wide.

They all leave off playing and gaze open-mouthed at the dark window. The reflection of the lamp glimmers in the darkness.

“It was your fancy.”

“At night they only ring in the cemetery,” says Andrey.

“And what do they ring there for?”

“To prevent robbers from breaking into the church. They are afraid of the bells.”

“And what do robbers break into the church for?” asks Sonya.

“Everyone knows what for: to kill the watchmen.”

A minute passes in silence. They all look at one another, shudder, and go on playing.

The children are not adults; they’re also not “subjective” projections of a sentimental adult; they argue and fight and recover from their disputes quickly and thoroughly:

Andrey turns pale, his mouth works, and he gives Alyosha a slap on the head! Alyosha glares angrily, jumps up, and with one knee on the table, slaps Andrey on the cheek! Each gives the other a second blow, and both howl. Sonya, feeling such horrors too much for her, begins crying too, and the dining-room resounds with lamentations on various notes. But do not imagine that that is the end of the game. Before five minutes are over, the children are laughing and talking peaceably again. Their faces are tear-stained, but that does not prevent them from smiling…40

Chekhov was a keen observer of the behavior of animals, children, sick people, family, friends, and lovers. Those who knew him well noticed how patients, children, and animals relaxed in his presence and could be themselves.

In “The Discovery” (“Otkrytie”), published on January 25, a fifty-two-year-old engineer sees a woman he was in love with decades before; she is no longer beautiful, and his thoughts about time’s toll are sour. But watch what happens as he does something Chekhov in these years almost never did, which is sit “behind his desk with nothing to do.” From his unhappy thoughts about the transience of beauty, the engineer looks down at the paper on which he has been doodling:

On the sheet of paper upon which he had mechanically dragged his pencil, by crude strokes and a scrawl, a charming womanly head peeped out, the very one he had once upon a time fallen in love with. In general the drawing was shaky, but the languid, severe look, the softness of the features, and the disordered full wave of hair were done to perfection…41

Amazed by his hidden talent, the engineer draws other things, and out they brightly appear. He remembers the respect his mother gave writers, painters, composers—kissing their hands in reverence. “And in his imagination a life was revealed not resembling millions of other lives. Comparing it with the lives of the usual mortals was absolutely impossible.” His own engineering projects? No one will know about them or care!… But if he had been a famous artist? When he goes to bed, however, looked after by his lackey, he remembers, under a warm blanket, the poverty of artists and he is happy to be as he is.

Is the engineer an unflattering future projection caricature of Chekhov himself? What if he hadn’t had artistic “talent”? Or what if his talent had remained hidden? And maybe, what if he, like the engineer, could avoid marriage? Now that he had been engaged for a few days, perhaps he was imagining himself disentangled. Like children and literary artists, Chekhov squared up to his quandaries through dramatizing them in the lives of his characters.

He also published on January 25 a clever one-page joke story, “The Biggest City” (“Samyi Bol’shoi Gorod”): Every time the touring Englishman journalist wakes up from a long nap, he and the carriage are in the city of Tim. What he hasn’t noticed is that his driver is continually climbing out of the carriage to pull it or the horses out of the mud. The journalist reports to his newspaper: “In Russia, the biggest city is neither Moscow nor Petersburg, but Tim.”42

The most famous of Chekhov’s stories this month was the last published in January: “Misery” (“Toska,” January 27). A sledge driver in midwinter is mourning the death of his son but no one will listen sympathetically to his story:

Iona looks at his fare and moves his lips…. Apparently he means to say something, but nothing comes but a sniff.

“What?” inquires the officer.

Iona gives a wry smile, and straining his throat, brings out huskily: “My son… er… my son died this week, sir.”

“H’m! What did he die of?”

Iona’s misery “is immense, beyond all bounds,” but Chekhov also shows us how and why it is awkward for the listeners, even when they make some attempt at pity: “Iona looks to see the effect produced by his words, but he sees nothing.” The customers are busy, self-occupied. They don’t want to hear or think about this. And Iona sees they can’t or won’t give him the quiet listening he needs.

He puts on his coat and goes into the stables where his mare is standing. He thinks about oats, about hay, about the weather…. He cannot think about his son when he is alone…. To talk about him with someone is possible, but to think of him and picture him is insufferable anguish….

“Are you munching?” Iona asks his mare, seeing her shining eyes. “There, munch away, munch away…. Since we have not earned enough for oats, we will eat hay…. Yes,… I have grown too old to drive…. My son ought to be driving, not I…. He was a real cabman…. He ought to have lived….”

Iona is silent for a while, and then he goes on:

“That’s how it is, old girl…. Kuzma Ionich is gone…. He said goodbye to me…. He went and died for no reason…. Now, suppose you had a little colt, and you were own mother to that little colt…. And all at once that same little colt went and died…. You’d be sorry, wouldn’t you?…”

The little mare munches, listens, and breathes on her master’s hands. Iona is carried away and tells her all about it.43

The mare is the only creature doing this human thing that all the humans are failing to do. If Chekhov had written only this story, it would still be read and appreciated today. It was translated in his own lifetime into more languages (eight) than any of his others. Years later, when his brother Alexander was grieving over the serious illness of one of his sons, he recalled details of this story and declared that “Misery” had made Chekhov “immortal.”44

Chekhov included it in the book that he was preparing, the yet untitled Motley Stories. He made few corrections from the original publication in the Petersburg Gazette, but one of them was deleting a too obvious conclusion: “There is nothing one can do better than listening to a person.”45 Chekhov’s medical friends noted that he was an excellent listener and observer. Nodding, chewing oats but otherwise silent. A critic, L. E. Obolenskiy, wrote ecstatically about the story, declaring that Antosha Chekhonte’s “loving heart sees a whole life behind it, which he is so able to understand and so love that we begin to love and understand it!”46

Before Chekhov had ever deliberately signed a story with his own name, in the single month of January 1886, he wrote two gold-star stories, “Children” and “Misery.” The author Antosha Chekhonte was already Anton Chekhov, only not quite yet in name.

*

It’s not clear what records if any Chekhov kept of his patients. As the chronology of his life is revealed in the streamlined Letopis’, that almost daily chore is scarcely mentioned, though medicine, he continued to joke, was his “wife.” The first mention of medical work in the Letopis’ of 1886 comes on January 28, when the editors note that Chekhov “treated” his friend Isaac Levitan, for what Chekhov told Leykin was psychosis.47 Earlier in the month Chekhov had tried to persuade Leykin to give Levitan, on the cusp of artistic fame as a landscape painter, an advance of forty rubles. But Leykin had had enough for the time being of Levitan and Nikolay Chekhov as illustrators. He had a good case against them: they would agree to do pieces for Fragments and then forget or put them off and be late, so he turned Chekhov down. Leykin suggested instead that Levitan submit completed drawings, for which he would indeed pay him forty rubles.

Levitan was a year younger than Chekhov, also hugely talented, but unlike Chekhov in that he was conspicuously moody and susceptible to falling in love. He was attractive and had various affairs. This summer or next, he would ask Maria Chekhova to marry him, and Chekhov disapproved of his sister’s accepting him.48 Levitan and Chekhov had a falling out in the early 1890s over a story Chekhov wrote, “The Grasshopper.” Levitan thought it too closely resembled details of an affair of Levitan’s with one of Chekhov’s former girlfriends. But they made up; Chekhov’s fallings out with friends never seemed to last. He was characteristically forgiving and regularly forgiven.

*

Nine days after his last letter to Leykin, Chekhov seemed to be trying to make up to him, but he was also preparing his editor for being left behind. He wondered in his January 28 letter to Leykin, Why are you mad? Can we take care of matters with the book? He agreed to all the conditions about the book that Leykin had mentioned in the last letter. But Chekhov wanted to clarify what his own duties would be: “All the editing I leave to your oversight, counting myself impotent in publishing. I take on myself only the choice of stories, the look of the cover and those functions that you find necessary for me on the part of the passing it to Stupin and so on. I consider myself at your command. Know that for all you give the book and time, I count the publication of my book a large kindness on the part of Fragments and I award you for this work a would-be Stanislas of the 3rd Rank.”49 (That is, a worthless honorary medal.)

He also had questions and desires about the book. He could send more stories if needed, or take some out if there were too many. He would like his friend Franz Schechtel to draw the cover. He didn’t know why, but he thought the book would be a hit. Couldn’t there be 2,500 copies instead of 2,000? These were humble enough questions, but Leykin did not take writers’ suggestions on publication matters.

And what did Leykin want to call the book, wondered Chekhov: “I’ve gone over all the botanical, zoological and all the verses and elements, but I didn’t find one. I thought up only ‘Stories of A. Chekhonte’ and ‘Trifles.’ […] The price of the book and so on, don’t ask me. I repeat, I agree with everything… However, wouldn’t it be possible to send me the latest galley?”

Leykin answered grouchily a couple of days later that he would consider Schechtel’s drawing, and this after all resulted in the use of Schechtel’s work.

The frontispiece illustration by Franz Schechtel of Motley Stories.

Finally, at the end of January, we learn that Dr. Chekhov had in fact been working “every day” and going out to treat N. S. Yanov, another brother of Maria Yanova.50

Chekhov would soon explain to his new editor Suvorin the special demands of his schedule:

I write comparatively little: no more than two or three brief stories a week. I can find the time to work for New Times, but I’m glad nonetheless that you didn’t make deadlines a condition for my becoming a contributor. Deadlines lead to haste and the feeling of having a weight around your neck. Both of these together make it hard for me to work. For me personally a deadline is inconvenient if only because I’m a physician and practice medicine. I can never guarantee that I won’t be torn away from my desk for a whole day on any given day. The risk of my being late and not finishing a story is always there.51

On top of his medical duties and weekly deadlines for two publications, he added one more, because his family “needed the money”… and because he must have wanted to see where his pen would lead him if it had no constraints on length or topics—or treatment of those topics. Despite his various duties, he would almost never miss a New Times deadline.

February 1886

Yes, I wrote to you once that you must be unconcerned when you write pathetic stories. And you did not understand me. You may weep and moan over your stories, you may suffer with your heroes, but I consider one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect.

—To a young writer1

Even when he was blue, there was spirit and tone in his letters. He seems to have felt obliged to be entertaining; this usually meant kidding around. With only a couple of exceptions, his letters are fresh, written at a dash, without drafts. He communicated fast, his mind’s eye on his correspondent, musing and joking as if aloud to this particular person.

He had met Bilibin, Leykin’s assistant editor, in Petersburg in December 1885, and took to him immediately. In the friendship’s early stages, Chekhov was especially confidential. Bilibin was getting married, and Chekhov and Dunya Efros were at least playing with the idea.

On February 1, he wrote to Bilibin about various topics, among them a visit to the poet Iliodor Palmin:

True, while talking to him, you have to drink a lot, but then you can be certain that during an entire three-or four-hour talk with him you won’t hear a single lying word or trite phrase, and that’s worth sacrificing your sobriety.2

During the next few years, Chekhov did not harp on any particular human failing except one, lying.

He recalled or created a comic turn in his and Palmin’s conversation:

By the way, he and I tried to think up a title for my book. After racking our brains for hours, all we could come up with was Cats and Carps and Flowers and Dogs. I was willing to settle for Buy This Book or You’ll Get a Punch in the Mouth or Are You Being Helped, Sir?, but after some thought the poet pronounced them hackneyed and cliché. […] I would prefer what Leykin wants, to wit: A. Chekhonte. Stories and Sketches and nothing else, even though that kind of title is suited only to celebrities […]

It seems to me Chekhov had edged himself along to what he really wanted to discuss with Bilibin:

And now a few words about my fiancée and Hymen. […] Thank your fiancée for remembering me and tell her that my wedding will most likely—alas and alack! The censor has cut out the rest…. My one and only is Jewish. If the rich young Jewess has enough courage to convert to Orthodoxy with all that this entails, fine. If not, that’s fine, too. Besides, we’ve already had a quarrel. We’ll make up tomorrow, but in a week we’ll quarrel again. She breaks pencils and the photographs on my desk because of her annoyance at being held back by religion. That is the way she is…. She has a terrible temper. There is no doubt whatsoever that I will divorce her a year or two after the wedding. But… finis.

Dunya Efros, as Maria’s friend and classmate, was a regular visitor to the Chekhovs’ home, and we learn in the next letter that Maria and her young women friends liked to sit in Chekhov’s study by the fire. My theory is that Chekhov was writing the letter while Efros was in the room with him, and she came over and sat beside him or stood over his shoulder at his desk…. She began reading what he was writing, and she squawked and pretended to or threatened to break his pencils and tear up his photos. So he wrote: “She has a terrible temper,” and further taunted her about their destined divorce. Efros, I speculate, had become his immediate audience. Chekhov took his eye off Bilibin to tease Efros. This was not a confidential message revealing deep feelings to his new friend.

When he had actual life news, he passed it along matter-of-factly to his brother Alexander or Leykin, but as far as can be told from the letters to and from those correspondents, neither confidant was aware of this engagement. Alexander was never one to hold back, and his letters contain no querying about Chekhov’s relationship with Efros.

“Probably there never was any such engagement,” writes the biographer Ronald Hingley, “for Chekhov’s letters so abound in flights of whimsy that it may have been a figment of his imagination from the start: a private joke between himself and Bilibin. As for Dunya Efros—whether briefly affianced to Chekhov or not, she later became a Mrs. Konovitser; and remained, with her husband, on friendly terms with the Chekhovs throughout the years.”3

But what about the issue of her Judaism versus his Russian Orthodoxy?… Chekhov did not note Efros being Jewish in the only previous mention in the letters. Now he did. Does that mean it wasn’t important on January 19? Was the religious issue only a new complicating narrative detail in their make-believe or semi-serious engagement?

On February 3, Anton scolded Alexander: “Remember, that if you would write stories the way you write letters you would have long been a great tremendous person.”4 Alexander’s letters were as lively and engaging as Anton’s, and perhaps even more revealing—as Alexander had been to the depths many times. Anton then repeated his message to Alexander of a month before: “I’m still not married.” There was no mention of the engagement to Efros, even though she was, possibly at this very moment in his presence: “I have now a separate room, and in the room is a fireplace, close to which Masha and her Efros—Reve-Khave [Efros’ Jewish name], Nelli and the baroness, the Yanova girls and so on often sit.”

*

“An Upheaval” (“Perepolokh,” February 3) was published in the Petersburg Gazette. A young governess, Mashenka, is, as one of the household staff, suspected of having filched her employer’s expensive brooch. Her room and things are searched: “For the first time in her life, it was her lot to experience in all its acuteness the feeling that is so familiar to persons in dependent positions, who eat the bread of the rich and powerful, and cannot speak their minds.” She is humiliated by the suspicion.

Chekhov could not bear being looked down upon. He could not bear his family being condescended to. Mashenka’s suffering and resentment are acute to him. He even imagines the humiliating position of the doctor who lives with the aristocrats:

“Come, don’t let us agitate ourselves,” Mamikov, her household doctor, observed in a honeyed voice, just touching [Madame Kushkin’s] arm, with a smile as honeyed. “We are nervous enough as it is. Let us forget the brooch! Health is worth more than two thousand rubles!”

Even though she is poor and her parents are depending on her employment, Mashenka doesn’t see how she can remain working for such people. The man of the house, a browbeaten wimp, tries to persuade her to stay, even finally confessing that he, needing money but fearing his wife’s refusal, stole the brooch. Mashenka’s exit is swift and triumphant: “Half an hour later she was on her way.” Chekhov practically cheers for the vulnerable young woman’s bravery.

“Conversation of a Drunken Man with a Sober Devil” (February 8) is a quick skit for Fragments about a drunk who is more poised and confident than the Devil. The narrator makes one uninspired marriage joke: “Even if he is not married, a devil has a pair of horns on his head.”5

In “An Actor’s End” (“Akterskaya Gibel’,” February 10), an actor has suffered a stroke (Chekhov describes the symptoms). His lone desire is to return home, far away from where the troupe is performing. His fellow actors visit him on his deathbed to offer remedies or to cheer him up: “Sigaev began comforting Shchiptsov, telling him untruly that his comrades had decided to send him to the Crimea at their expense, and so on, but the sick man did not listen and kept muttering about Vyazma…. At last, with a wave of his hand, the comic man began talking about Vyazma himself to comfort the invalid.”

In a dozen years Chekhov himself would be advised to go to Crimea for his health.

*

Sometime on or near February 10, Chekhov mailed Suvorin “The Requiem.” How anxious was he about his first submission to New Times? One short story would pay more than what Chekhov received monthly from Leykin for a dozen pieces. By the 14th, Suvorin sent Chekhov a telegram with the welcome announcement about his intention to publish it. The discombobulating news, however, was that he wanted Chekhov to use his actual name.6 While some of Chekhov’s medical colleagues did not even know he was a humor writer, now they would know he was a literary writer.

He explained the dilemma to Bilibin in a letter on February 14: “I, having thought it over, prefer the pen name and not without a basis… Family and my family arms I gave to medicine, from which I won’t leave off until the grave. Sooner or later I’m giving up literature. Secondly, medicine takes itself seriously, while the game of literature ought to have distinctive names…”7 Pen names in Russian literature were common enough, but Chekhov relented and allowed New Times to use his real name.

In the meantime, as he told Bilibin, he was busy with doctoring: “Every day I go out into the country for my medical practice. What ravines, what views!”8 Even so, he had knocked off a quick story: “Having at my disposal only 2 ½ hours, I spoiled this monologue [“Bliny”] and… I sent it not to the devil [that is, to Leykin] but to ‘Pet Gaz.’ Intentions were good, but the result was most awful.” He was rushing so much—from wife (medicine) to mistress (literature)—that he hadn’t even eaten, except imaginatively and gorgingly in the story about bliny. Then he brought up Bilibin’s marriage: “You’re going to Finland! When your honeymoon turns into ice cream in Finland, remember then my invitation and curse yourself for your faintheartedness… How much will this trip to your wild Finland cost you? A hundred rubles? And for this money you could very well travel south or, at least, to me in Moscow… Overhead, wedding music is playing now… Some donkeys are marrying and they stamp their feet like horses… They don’t let me sleep.”

He added, beginning a series of seemingly random thoughts: “About my wedding, nothing yet is known…”

*

On February 15, Chekhov made his debut in New Times, an important though right-wing St. Petersburg newspaper that had a Saturday literary section, which is where “The Requiem” appeared.9

“The Requiem” (“Panikhida”) begins:

In the village church of Verhny Zaprudy mass was just over. The people had begun moving and were trooping out of church. The only one who did not move was Andrey Andreyich, a shopkeeper and old inhabitant of Verhny Zaprudy. He stood waiting, with his elbows on the railing of the right choir. His fat and shaven face, covered with indentations left by pimples, expressed on this occasion two contradictory feelings: resignation in the face of inevitable destiny, and stupid, unbounded disdain for the smocks and striped kerchiefs passing by him.10

Chekhov has conjured up a face that is fascinating to imagine, even though it’s not attractive. Would the shopkeeper’s plumpness lead us to assume he’s doing well? He shaves; he keeps up appearances. With the pimple-dents, we know he had an unattractive face in the past. Chekhov has described such a particular human face that we understand the “two contradictory feelings” he’s expressing: 1) his resignation at what promises to become a funeral, and 2) his being distracted by others’ fashion choices at church. He himself is duded up:

As it was Sunday, he was dressed like a dandy. He wore a long cloth overcoat with yellow bone buttons, blue trousers not thrust into his boots, and sturdy galoshes—the huge clumsy galoshes only seen on the feet of practical and prudent persons of firm religious convictions.

The shopkeeper is dignified, conscious of his physical and moral stature, but Chekhov’s assessment of Andrey being “practical and prudent” and pious means that we are ridiculing Andrey’s self-assessment:

His torpid eyes, sunk in fat, were fixed upon the ikon stand. He saw the long familiar figures of the saints, the verger Matvey puffing out his cheeks and blowing out the candles, the darkened candle stands, the threadbare carpet, the sacristan Lopuhov running impulsively from the altar and carrying the holy bread to the churchwarden…. All these things he had seen for years, and seen over and over again like the five fingers of his hand…. There was only one thing, however, that was somewhat strange and unusual. Father Grigory, still in his vestments, was standing at the north door, twitching his thick eyebrows angrily.

Not only is Andrey Andreyich familiar with the church ceremonies, but so is Chekhov, obviously. Chekhov only presents as strange what the character would have thought strange. This is not about local color, though we get that, too.

“Who is it he is winking at? God bless him!” thought the shopkeeper. “And he is beckoning with his finger! And he stamped his foot! What next! What’s the matter, Holy Queen and Mother! Whom does he mean it for?”

Andrey Andreyich looked around and saw the church completely deserted. There were some ten people standing at the door, but they had their backs to the altar.

“Do come when you are called! Why do you stand like a graven image?” he heard Father Grigory’s angry voice. “I am calling you.”

This is not what he or we expected—the familiar priest angry at him.

The shopkeeper looked at Father Grigory’s red and wrathful face, and only then realized that the twitching eyebrows and beckoning finger might refer to him. He started, left the railing, and hesitatingly walked toward the altar, tramping with his heavy galoshes.

Andrey is not so dignified that he cannot be intimidated by Father Grigory, and the priest has the confidence to beckon him and expect obedience:

“Andrey Andreyich, was it you asked for prayers for the rest of Mariya’s soul?” asked the priest, his eyes angrily transfixing the shopkeeper’s fat, perspiring face.

“Yes, Father.”

“Then it was you wrote this? You?” And Father Grigory angrily thrust before his eyes the little note.

And on this little note, handed in by Andrey Andreyich before mass, was written in big, as it were staggering, letters:

“For the rest of the soul of the servant of God, the harlot Mariya.”

“Yes, certainly I wrote it…” answered the shopkeeper.

“How dared you write it?” whispered the priest, and in his husky whisper there was a note of wrath and alarm.

The shopkeeper looked at him in blank amazement; he was perplexed, and he, too, was alarmed. Father Grigory had never in his life spoken in such a tone to a leading resident of Verhny Zaprudy.

Doesn’t this perplexity on Andrey’s part make the story even more compelling? It’s like the surprise one feels in a dream: Me? You’re calling me over? Me? How could you be calling me? I didn’t do anything!

Both were silent for a minute, staring into each other’s face. The shopkeeper’s amazement was so great that his fat face spread in all directions like spilt dough.

Chekhov already gave us Andrey’s great distinctive face, and now we get to enjoy it again.

“How dared you?” repeated the priest.

“Wha… what?” asked Andrey Andreyich in bewilderment.

“You don’t understand?” whispered Father Grigory, stepping back in astonishment and clasping his hands. “What have you got on your shoulders, a head or some other object? You send a note up to the altar, and write a word in it which it would be unseemly even to utter in the street! Why are you rolling your eyes? Surely you know the meaning of the word?”

“Are you referring to the word harlot?” muttered the shopkeeper, flushing crimson and blinking. “But you know, the Lord in His mercy… forgave this very thing,… forgave a harlot…. He has prepared a place for her, and indeed from the life of the holy saint, Mariya of Egypt, one may see in what sense the word is used—excuse me…”

The shopkeeper wanted to bring forward some other argument in his justification, but took fright and wiped his lips with his sleeve.

Andrey’s fright is not the resistance or anger that we might have been expecting. He doesn’t understand why Father Grigory is so mad!

“So that’s what you make of it!” cried Father Grigory, clasping his hands. “But you see God has forgiven her—do you understand? He has forgiven, but you judge her, you slander her, call her by an unseemly name, and whom! Your own deceased daughter! Not only in Holy Scripture, but even in worldly literature you won’t read of such a sin! I tell you again, Andrey, you mustn’t be over-subtle! No, no, you mustn’t be over-subtle, brother! If God has given you an inquiring mind, and if you cannot direct it, better not go into things…. Don’t go into things, and hold your peace!”

The phrase “Don’t be subtle” is odd. The Russian has it as a colloquial “Don’t philosophize.”

“But you know, she,… excuse my mentioning it, was an actress!” articulated Andrey Andreyich, overwhelmed.

“An actress! But whatever she was, you ought to forget it all now she is dead, instead of writing it on the note.”

“Just so,…” the shopkeeper assented.

“You ought to do penance,” boomed the deacon from the depths of the altar, looking contemptuously at Andrey Andreyich’s embarrassed face, “that would teach you to leave off being so clever! Your daughter was a well-known actress. There were even notices of her death in the newspapers…. Philosopher!”

“To be sure,… certainly,” muttered the shopkeeper, “the word is not a seemly one; but I did not say it to judge her, Father Grigory, I only meant to speak spiritually,… that it might be clearer to you for whom you were praying. They write in the memorial notes the various callings, such as the infant John, the drowned woman Pelagea, the warrior Yegor, the murdered Pavel, and so on…. I meant to do the same.”

“It was foolish, Andrey! God will forgive you, but beware another time. Above all, don’t be subtle, but think like other people. Make ten bows and go your way.”

“I obey,” said the shopkeeper, relieved that the lecture was over, and allowing his face to resume its expression of importance and dignity. “Ten bows? Very good, I understand. But now, Father, allow me to ask you a favor…. Seeing that I am, anyway, her father,… you know yourself, whatever she was, she was still my daughter, so I was,… excuse me, meaning to ask you to sing the requiem today. And allow me to ask you, Father Deacon!”

“Well, that’s good,” said Father Grigory, taking off his vestments. “That I commend. I can approve of that! Well, go your way. We will come out immediately.”

Andrey Andreyich walked with dignity from the altar, and with a solemn, requiem-like expression on his red face took his stand in the middle of the church. The verger Matvey set before him a little table with the memorial food upon it, and a little later the requiem service began.

There was perfect stillness in the church. Nothing could be heard but the metallic click of the censer and slow singing…. Near Andrey Andreyich stood the verger Matvey, the midwife Makaryevna, and her one-armed son Mitka.

Who makes those little distinctive characterizations as succinctly as Chekhov? He puts us in the small world where we all know “the infant John, the drowned woman Pelagea” and this Mitka, Makaryevna’s “one-armed son.”

There was no one else. The sacristan sang badly in an unpleasant, hollow bass, but the tune and the words were so mournful that the shopkeeper little by little lost the expression of dignity and was plunged in sadness.

What Chekhov does next is maybe the only conventional turn he makes in the whole story. Touched by his feelings, Andrey “remembers” Mariya’s story and their life together. Chekhov usually conveys background information less conventionally. Or maybe this is just in the nature of narrative or maybe simply what does actually happen in real life at funerals. In reflection, in mourning, we review our history with that person:

He thought of his Mashutka,… he remembered she had been born when he was still a lackey in the service of the owner of Verhny Zaprudy. In his busy life as a lackey he had not noticed how his girl had grown up. That long period during which she was being shaped into a graceful creature, with a little flaxen head and dreamy eyes as big as kopeck-pieces passed unnoticed by him. She had been brought up like all the children of favorite lackeys, in ease and comfort in the company of the young ladies. The gentry, to fill up their idle time, had taught her to read, to write, to dance; he had had no hand in her bringing up. Only from time to time casually meeting her at the gate or on the landing of the stairs, he would remember that she was his daughter, and would, so far as he had leisure for it, begin teaching her the prayers and the scripture. Oh, even then he had the reputation of an authority on the church rules and the holy scriptures!

Andrey, so much like Chekhov’s shopkeeping, churchgoing, blunt-speaking father Pavel, is a stickler for rules and distinctions and likes formality.

Forbidding and stolid as her father’s face was, yet the girl listened readily. She repeated the prayers after him yawning, but on the other hand, when he, hesitating and trying to express himself elaborately, began telling her stories, she was all attention. Esau’s pottage, the punishment of Sodom, and the troubles of the boy Joseph made her turn pale and open her blue eyes wide.

A point for Andrey. He was a storyteller to his girl. And good at it.

Afterward when he gave up being a lackey, and with the money he had saved opened a shop in the village, Mashutka had gone away to Moscow with his master’s family….

Three years before her death she had come to see her father. He had scarcely recognized her. She was a graceful young woman with the manners of a young lady, and dressed like one. She talked cleverly, as though from a book, smoked, and slept till midday. When Andrey Andreyich asked her what she was doing, she had announced, looking him boldly straight in the face: “I am an actress.” Such frankness struck the former flunky as the acme of cynicism. Mashutka had begun boasting of her successes and her stage life; but seeing that her father only turned crimson and threw up his hands, she ceased.

She knew her father well enough to realize the cause of his dismay.

And they spent a fortnight together without speaking or looking at one another till the day she went away. Before she went away she asked her father to come for a walk on the bank of the river. Painful as it was for him to walk in the light of day, in the sight of all honest people, with a daughter who was an actress, he yielded to her request.

Is it out of place to mention that in fifteen years, Chekhov would marry an actress?

“What a lovely place you live in!” she said enthusiastically. “What ravines and marshes! Good heavens, how lovely my native place is!”

And she had burst into tears.

“The place is simply taking up room…” Andrey Andreyich had thought, looking blankly at the ravines, not understanding his daughter’s enthusiasm. “There is no more profit from them than milk from a billy-goat.”

And she had cried and cried, drawing her breath greedily with her whole chest, as though she felt she had not a long time left to breathe.

Though we judge him as having behaved harshly to her, Andrey has no shame recalling this past. He has complete confidence in his judgment of her; but still, she was his daughter. That’s as far as his sentimentality goes—and as far, really, as Chekhov lets ours go.

Andrey Andreyich shook his head like a horse that has been bitten, and to stifle painful memories began rapidly crossing himself….

“Be mindful, O Lord,” he muttered, “of Thy departed servant, the harlot Mariya, and forgive her sins, voluntary or involuntary….”

The unseemly word dropped from his lips again, but he did not notice it: what is firmly imbedded in the consciousness cannot be driven out by Father Grigory’s exhortations or even knocked out by a nail. Makaryevna sighed and whispered something, drawing in a deep breath, while one-armed Mitka was brooding over something….

“Where there is no sickness, nor grief, nor sighing,” droned the sacristan, covering his right cheek with his hand.

Bluish smoke coiled up from the censer and bathed in the broad, slanting patch of sunshine which cut across the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the church. And it seemed as though the soul of the dead woman were soaring into the sunlight together with the smoke. The coils of smoke like a child’s curls eddied around and around, floating upward to the window and, as it were, holding aloof from the woes and tribulations of which that poor soul was full.

This is the place in biographies and literary studies where we read of the various critical reactions to the story, but I think that besides noting that Suvorin clipped off a sentence at the end (there’s no trace of that excised sentence), there is nothing to note now except that only Chekhov could have written a story about an oafish yet grieving father that is both touching and funny.

*

He published three comic Lenten pieces in the second half of February that deal with bliny, the Russian pancakes that are traditional pre-Lenten fare. In “A Foolish Frenchman” (“Glupyi Frantsuz,” February 15) a French circus clown in a restaurant on the eve of Lent doesn’t understand the Russian custom of gorging on bliny.11 In “Bliny” (February 19): only women, according to the blathering narrator, can cook them correctly. In “On Mortality: A Carnival Tale” (“O Brennosti,” February 22), a man delightedly relishes his plate of bliny but is stricken by a stroke just as he opens his mouth.12 In these and in other stories about food, Chekhov shows he knew as well as Gogol did how to whet one’s appetite.

On February 16, Chekhov had business correspondence with Leykin about the impending book; there were rather a lot of errors in the galley, though Chekhov thought the font and page size were good. Chekhov also had excuses to make about his not having been able to finish a piece for Leykin this past week—there were too many interruptions. He explained that he had woken up early, but now he was going to bed late, as it was almost 2:00 A.M. Besides that, “The practice is picking up a bit,” and such medical work would make it harder for him to keep to Leykin’s deadlines.

He resisted pointing out that Suvorin would give him whatever time and as much room as he needed.

We know a lot about Chekhov’s friendships because we have so many of his letters. His friends and acquaintances saved them. His female friends loved, adored, and, when necessary, forgave him—and saved his letters. In his letters he was a clowning extrovert. We have a short note of his from February 17 to his friend Mikhail Dyukovskiy: “I’m writing you so that you’ll have one more autograph of a great writer… In 10–20 years you’ll be able to sell this letter for 500–1,000 rubles. I envy you.” In fact, we know M. M. Dyukovskiy today because he saved this letter. Chekhov mentioned the grand pay he now expected from New Times, but asked all the same if his friend could lend him twenty-five rubles.

On the 17th Leykin sent his congratulations to Chekhov for “The Requiem” and added that Suvorin had told him three weeks before that Chekhov would be writing for New Times. Those excuses about his medical practice demanding more of his time were, Leykin knew, just excuses. Chekhov had enough time to write for New Times but not for Fragments! It was hard to keep literary scuttlebutt from Leykin.

Though Chekhov’s relationship with Suvorin is the one that takes up more space in biographies and is ultimately more important, in these two years Chekhov’s relationship with Leykin was vastly more involving and revealing of his everyday life. Through his excuses to Leykin about why he hadn’t been able to write for Fragments, we learn all sorts of details that Chekhov didn’t normally complain about—but that normal people would have. He rarely shared, except with Leykin, the legitimate excuses about how busy he was with medicine and writing, how hectic and distracting his crowded apartment was, how sick he often felt.

On February 20, he offered Leykin two weeks’ worth of reasons for not having any new pieces for Fragments: “I cheated you, but you will forgive… I’m so tired, crazy and nuts the last couple of weeks that my head’s going in circles… In my apartment there is a neverending crowd, uproar, music… My office is cold… there are patients… and so on.”13

Mostly, usually, he would explain to friends and demonstrate to his family that he very much enjoyed the bustle of home life. He described his medical practice in such a way that he revealed his satisfaction with it; it was rewarding, fulfilling. He was enjoying the challenge of writing under the obligation of artistic creation. He did not, however, let himself complain to Leykin about the pressure he felt writing for New Times; he was in the midst of writing “The Witch” for Suvorin, but he didn’t share that information.

The writing of weekly skits no longer replenished him as an artist, and Leykin’s “demands” dogged him into completing work, but it exhausted him: “The unfinished story will be finished and sent off on time. […] Writing more than I now write, I don’t have enough time, or the push or energy, even if you knife me. […] It’s time for spring to start. I have such sleeplessness—the devil knows why—that swimming and fresh air are a pressing need.”

Chekhov wouldn’t get the swimming and perhaps not even the fresh air until May, when he and the family would pack up and leave Moscow for the summer.

*

Chekhov’s correspondence with Suvorin began for good on February 18 when Suvorin wrote Chekhov about the ending that he, Suvorin, had clipped from “The Requiem” and why Chekhov really shouldn’t use a pen name. We know these details of Suvorin’s letter because Chekhov would reply to those points. We don’t have Suvorin’s letters because he had them retrieved from Maria Chekhova’s possession when Chekhov died in 1904.

Suvorin’s motive for retrieving and destroying his letters was his fear that the letters seemed to compromise his reputation as an unblinking right-winger; corresponding with Chekhov, he was much more reasonable than anyone suspected from his newspaper’s adamantly pro-autocratic government views. Fortunately, in exchange for his letters, he gave Maria all 337 of Chekhov’s letters to him.14 Chekhov eventually had a sharp falling-out with Suvorin as a result of New Times’ anti-Semitism and political propaganda, but that number of letters over the period of 1886 to 1903 works out, nonetheless, to about two letters a month.

Suvorin, born in 1834, was twenty-six years older than twenty-six-year-old Chekhov. What did they have in common, anyway, besides that they were both intelligent and independent and grandsons of serfs?15 Suvorin had built a popular newspaper, and through his support for the tsar he had obtained a monopoly on train-station book kiosks. He was at heart a literary man and did not ever require Chekhov to toe the party line. Chekhov was a forward, liberal, and modern thinker, but as he would declare to Suvorin, he didn’t want to belong to any party or have to heed anybody’s latest political views. That Suvorin’s New Times was politically right-wing was only problematical when it was.16

Pleased by Suvorin’s encouragement and attention, Chekhov replied on February 21. For the first time in this year’s correspondence Chekhov was shy, formal, deferential, accommodating. That is, he was not quite himself:

I received your letter. Thanks for the flattering comments on my work, and for the speedy printing of my story. You can judge how refreshing and even inspiring to my authorship is the kind attention of an experienced and talented man like you.

I share your opinion regarding the omission of the last words of my story, and I thank you for the helpful advice. I have been writing all of six years, but you are the first to take the trouble to advise and guide me.17

If editor Leykin had read this letter, his head would have spun around: “Advice, Anton Pavlovich? Guidance?… This means you never read my letters!”

The pen name A. Chekhonte probably sounds odd and recherche. But it was thought up at the dawn of my misty youth, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. That’s why I don’t notice how odd it is.18

He apologized for his new submission, “The Witch”: “This time I send a story that is exactly double longer than the last and… I’m afraid it’s doubly worse…”19 That sounds over-humble, but in the disparagement of his story he was completely characteristic; he never praised what he had written. He was aware of each piece’s defects. And yet, as far as we can tell from Chekhov’s letters, Suvorin never expressed any dissatisfaction or discontent with Chekhov’s submissions in these years. Suvorin only wanted more. Leykin, a very attentive and critical editor, unrestrainedly and casually disparaged particular pieces. Chekhov’s younger brothers and Leykin’s right-hand man Bilibin, too, perhaps having grown accustomed to Chekhov’s sharp assessments of their work and of his own, matter-of-factly expressed their disappointment with stories by Chekhov that they deemed subpar.

Meanwhile, “Anyuta” (the same, “Anyuta”) was published February 22. Leykin had had to deal with the censor’s objections to the undisguised sexual exploitation of the good, trusting, vulnerable title character, a young, impoverished medical student’s lover and human anatomy dummy:

“These ribs are like the keys of a piano,” he said. “One must familiarize oneself with them somehow, if one is not to get muddled over them. One must study them in the skeleton and the living body…. I say, Anyuta, let me pick them out.”

Anyuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened herself up. Klochkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began counting her ribs.20

Anyuta does not know she is special. We observe her exploitation by the medical student and his friends; an artist comes by to get her to pose for him. She is a type, a body, someone intended, they feel, for their use. Chekhov feels for her, brings to light her distinctiveness, her pride, her helplessness: “In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to another, she had known five students like Klochkov. Now they had all finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of course, like respectable people, had long ago forgotten her.”21 As a former medical student himself, as the brother of and friend of artists, Chekhov was familiar with and ashamed of such behavior and of all such “respectable people.”

To not be left in the dust, Leykin wrote Chekhov with a plan: he advised him to certainly keep writing for New Times, but to submit rarely to the Petersburg Gazette, “because you say you’re not in the position to write more than you’re writing.”22 He goaded Chekhov to ask the Gazette’s editor Sergey Khudekov for more money—he would give it, Leykin assured him—but, in the meantime, he reminded Chekhov, write the story that you started for Fragments and were supposed to send by Saturday. Leykin, perhaps to make up for the lack of satisfactory pieces, said he himself would start writing two stories. Chekhov’s friend, the architect Schechtel, who had designed the frontispiece for Chekhov’s book of stories, wrote a note warning Chekhov that, after his (Schechtel’s) conversation with the book’s printer, Roman Golike, Chekhov was right not to trust Leykin. What Leykin was trying to do, Schechtel did not make clear.

On February 25, Chekhov received a gift from Leykin: a small sculpture of a dog. Was this the Trojan Horse through which Leykin would overcome Chekhov? Leykin and Chekhov loved dogs, and eventually Leykin would send Chekhov the offspring of his own adored dogs. Chekhov was moving on to a bigger literary world and Leykin was jealous and hurt.

March 1886

Doctors have disgusting days and hours; God forbid anyone experiencing them. It is true that ignoramuses and sneaks are not a rarity among doctors any more than among writers, engineers, people generally, but those disgusting hours and days of which I am speaking fall only to doctors, and because of that, in fairness, much should be forgiven them.

—Letter to Suvorin1

Though Chekhov’s first letter of March is dated February 28, he wrote it to Bilibin the night of the 28th after midnight; he wandered through various topics:

Leykin, when he writes me a letter, has the need to put on the heading not only the year and date, but even the hour of the night that he, sacrificing sleep, writes to his lazy employee. I will imitate him: it’s now 2 in the morning… Appreciate that! […] I’m busy up to my neck! […]

I write and I doctor. In Moscow typhus spreads rampantly. I’m especially afraid of this typhus. It seems to me that once I got sick from this awfulness, I wouldn’t get well, and there are occasions for infection at each step… Why aren’t I a lawyer instead of a healer? Tonight I went to a girl sick with croup, and every day I go to a Jewish schoolgirl who I am treating for the disease of Nana—small pox. […]

For the themes, merci… Oh, how I need themes! I have written about everything […] Going on 5–6 years, I won’t be in the position to write a story a year. […]2

It does sometimes seem that he wrote about “everything,” and yet from the contents of his letters we’ll see that he let a few of his own experiences go untold, among them suffering from hemorrhoids, performing surgery, conducting gynecological exams, having sexual intercourse, and using certain kinds of rough words. Of course, the mores of his times would not have allowed stories presenting those subjects to be published. Finally, he landed on the subject he only confided to Bilibin:

However, all that’s boring…. Let’s talk about marriage.

I’m still not married. With my fiancée, I broke off completely. That is, she broke off with me. But I still didn’t even buy a revolver and I don’t write journals. Everything in the world is perverse, circular, rough and relative.

This paragraph seems significant, and yet after that glum conclusion, he changed the subject to his book and again to Leykin, and finally to Bilibin’s own health. This was an especially diary-like, rambling letter by Chekhov—written after a long day of medical work before going to bed. Was he actually broken up by the breakup? He assured Bilibin he wasn’t. Was he putting a fiction to rest? That is, we pretended we were engaged, and now we’re not pretending anymore, and we’re certainly not marrying. We were kind of making it all up anyway.

I’m inclined to think that Chekhov guiltily backed away from Efros, forcing her to do the breaking up.

Why did Chekhov only talk about his engagement to Bilibin? There are no surviving letters from Chekhov to Efros. There are only two surviving letters from her to him, which we will encounter when he does.

*

The first two of fifteen stories that Chekhov published in March were about disingenuous young men. “The Big Wig” (“Persona,” March 1) describes the daydreams of an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old answering, like hundreds of others, a want ad for a big-wig scribe:

“I don’t know how to compose, Mama,” Misha sighed. “I confess I’ve already sat behind the writing desk five times, and not a line of mine has come. I want to write smartly, but it comes out simple, like you’re writing to Auntie in Kremenchug.”3

Chekhov himself would have preferred reading such “simple” writing to whatever writing Misha might think of as “smart.”

Misha sat behind the table, laid out before him a sheet of paper and set to thinking. After a long while staring at the ceiling, he took the pen and swinging his arm, as all do who venerate their own writing, began, “Your highness! I was born in 1867 in the town of K. to my father Kyrill Nikanorovich Naballashnikov and my mother Natalia Ivanovna. My father worked in a sugar factory of the merchant Podgoyskov in the office and received 600 rubles a year. Then he quit and for a long time lived without a place. Then…”

Misha, who shares his nickname and perhaps his swinging writing arm with Chekhov’s youngest brother (who was born in 1865), did not want to mention his drunken father’s death, but he does because for the sake of his poor mother he is more or less begging for a job.

Misha wrote up a whole page. He wrote sincerely, but pointlessly, without any plan or chronological order, repeating and entangling himself.

He’s sincere and any reader would want to give the innocent, earnest, and devoted boy a job. After two weeks of painful anticipation of a reply, he ventures to the Big Wig himself, who scolds him for bothering him, as he already has his scribe.

“Ivan Matveyich” (“Ivan Matveich,” March 3), is the next winning, charming, underprepared young man. Was Chekhov remembering his own earnestness and naïvete, or mostly appreciating those qualities now in his brother Ivan, a year and a half younger than Anton, who indeed had obtained a secretary job himself? Chekhov’s youngest brother Mikhail remembered that a friend “once told Anton… a story about our brother Ivan needing money so badly that he walked to the other end of the city to do dictation for the writer P. D. Boborykin, on which Anton later drew for his story ‘Ivan Matveich.’ ”4

But fifteen stories in a month! Unlike the two young men in these two stories—and in his family—Chekhov was the dreamer who realized his potential and made the most of it.

Ivan Matveyich is less disciplined than Chekhov was. He is eighteen and not unusually is late for duty with “a fairly well-known man of learning.” His tardiness this afternoon exasperates the man of learning (otherwise unnamed) to no end: “feeling a craving to vent his wrath and impatience upon someone, the man of learning goes to the door leading to his wife’s room and knocks.” He announces that is going to fire Ivan finally. The tonic, as his wife knows, is Ivan’s presence.

Chekhov enjoys describing Ivan, “with a face oval as an egg and no moustache, wearing a shabby, mangy overcoat and no galoshes.” Look at a photo of Chekhov at nineteen:

Chekhov, graduation day in Taganrog, June 1879.

We understand why the employer is charmed: “Seeing the man of learning, [Ivan] smiles with that broad, prolonged, somewhat foolish smile which is seen only on the faces of children or very good-natured people.” Ivan Matveyich is irresistible. Chekhov has superimposed for us a childish face on that of a very good-natured young man.

The man of learning corrals him to take dictation. Ivan is sloppy, and the man of learning scolds him for it. They pause for tea and cookies and Ivan happily and greedily partakes. He’s hungry. He’s a boy! He talks about growing up in the South, in the Don region, not far, actually, from Taganrog, where Chekhov grew up, and how he caught tarantulas, as coincidentally Chekhov also used to do. The man of learning, though crankily impatient, is delighted by Ivan’s disingenuous stories. He sees potential in the young man and encourages his further education. They haven’t done, after all, very much work by the time Ivan has used up his hours:

Ivan Matveyich lays down his pen, gets up from the table and sits in another chair. Five minutes pass in silence, and he begins to feel it is time for him to go, that he is in the way; but in the man of learning’s study it is so snug and light and warm, and the impression of the nice rusks and sweet tea is still so fresh that there is a pang at his heart at the mere thought of home. At home there is poverty, hunger, cold, his grumbling father, scoldings, and here it is so quiet and unruffled, and interest even is taken in his tarantulas and birds.

Both parties are grateful for the other:

Almost every evening he sits in this study and always feels something extraordinarily soft, attracting him, as it were akin, in the voice and the glance of the man of learning. There are moments when he even fancies that the man of learning is becoming attached to him, used to him, and that if he scolds him for being late, it’s simply because he misses his chatter about tarantulas and how they catch goldfinches on the Don.

Chekhov has revealed through the fictional character Ivan Matveyich his brother Ivan’s and his own attractiveness to other people—and the attraction of all three of them to culture and leisure. If we’re similar to the man of learning, it’s because we are fascinated by good-natured hopeful young people. Ivan is attracted to the professor’s refined life and in this we see something of the world’s attraction to Chekhov: his unpretentiousness, well-meaningness, and his ability to awaken our consciousness of pleasures.

*

On March 5, Chekhov had to pay the debts that his brothers Alexander and Nikolay had racked up to the merchant Semenov.5 He wrote to Leykin a few days later: “I have nearly forgotten to tell you a pleasant piece of news. I had to appear in court to answer to a summons and was ordered to pay fifty rubles. If you have ever had to pay someone else’s debts, you will appreciate what a revolution these absurd and unexpected 50 rubles have made in my small financial world.”6 What does this say about Alexander and Nikolay? They were talented, young, capable, yet out of fecklessness were willing to cheat a merchant and put their own family in financial jeopardy. Chekhov, as the moral center of the family, tried to rein them in.

While tuberculosis seemed to spur Chekhov into greater action, Nikolay’s “reaction to having been given this death sentence,” writes Rosamund Bartlett, “was to give up.”7 Yet, even before they both contracted tuberculosis in 1884, Chekhov was frustrated by Nikolay’s laziness and drinking. When Chekhov was working on his medical degree and writing weekly pieces for humor magazines, he remarked in a February 1883 letter to Alexander:

Nikolay is loafing about, as you know very well; a fine, strong Russian talent is being wasted. Another year or two and our artist is finished. He will be lost in the crowd of pub-crawlers. You know his present work. What does he do now? He does everything that is cheap and vulgar, and yet in our drawing room we have a remarkable picture of his which he does not want to finish. The Russian Theater has asked him to illustrate Dostoevsky. He promised to do so, but he won’t keep his promise, and yet these illustrations would have made his reputation and provided him with a piece of bread….8

In the youngest Chekhov brother Mikhail’s assessment, Nikolay was “highly gifted: talented on both the violin and piano, a serious painter, and an original caricaturist.”9 Ernest Simmons, in his biography, sees Nikolay as Chekhov’s closest brother:

[…] their mutual recognition of the artist’s soul in each drew Nikolay and Anton very close together during these first few years in Moscow. Both loved laughter, music, and nature. Together they bargained with editors, wandered the Moscow streets for material, sat in cheap taverns, and visited the friends they had in common. More important—they worked together, Nikolay illustrating Anton’s tales…. But [Nikolay] was completely undependable, and no urging of Anton would persuade him to fulfill a commission on time or accept one that he was not in the mood to undertake. He would prefer to talk with his brother about his love affairs—he had already acquired a mistress—and his naïve notion that any girl he cared for ought to be willing to sacrifice her hopes of marriage and a family for the sake of his art. Or he would disappear for several days on a prolonged drunk, returning home finally, late at night, to vomit all over the house; and, fully clothed, he would fall on the divan and pull a covering over his head, his feet sticking out grotesquely in filthy socks filled with holes.10

A book of Chekhov’s that Nikolay illustrated when Chekhov was twenty-two, The Prank (Shalosht’), was finished but never published. Nikolay’s illustrations are comic and racy, in the fashion of the humor magazines of the time.

Illustrations by Nikolay Chekhov from The Prank and other stories.

Then there are the photos from 1882 of the two young creative artists pretending to consider their work:

The brothers Anton and Nikolay consider one of Nikolay’s illustrations for Anton’s The Prank (1882).

On some date in March, apparently after his payment of his brothers’ debt, Chekhov wrote to Nikolay. It is the sole surviving letter to Nikolay from these two years, and it is famous enough to be included in most selections of his letters and to be quoted at length in the biographies. Nikolay otherwise appears in the communications between Anton and Alexander and the rest of the family as the worrisome brother: What’s Nikolay doing? Where is he? He was here. He just left. He might be coming next week. Now it was time for a reckoning.

My little Zabelin,

I’ve been told that you have taken offense at gibes Schechtel and I have been making.

Franz Schechtel, the architect and artist, had been a classmate of Nikolay’s at art school and became a good friend to Anton. But who told Nikolay about the gibes and who told Anton about Nikolay’s having been offended?

The faculty of taking offense is the property of noble souls alone, but even so, if it is all right to laugh at Ivanenko, me, Mishka and Nelly, then why is it wrong to laugh at you? It’s unfair…. However, if you’re not joking and really do feel you’ve been offended, I hasten to apologize.

People only laugh at what’s funny or what they don’t understand…. Take your choice. The latter of course is more flattering, but—alas!—to me, for one, you’re no riddle. It’s not hard to understand someone with whom you’ve shared the delights of Tatar caps, Voutsina, Latin and, finally, life in Moscow. And besides, your life is psychologically so uncomplicated that even a nonseminarian could understand it. Out of respect for you let me be frank. You’re angry, offended… but it’s not because of my gibes or of that good-natured chatterbox Dolgov. The fact of the matter is that you’re a decent person and you realize that you’re living a lie. And, whenever a person feels guilty, he always looks outside himself for vindication: the drunk blames his troubles [on his grief], Putyata blames the censors, the man who bolts from Yakimanka Street [where the Chekhovs were living] with lecherous intent blames the cold in the living room or gibes, and so on. If I were to abandon the family to the whims of fate, I would try to find myself an excuse in Mother’s character or my blood spitting or the like.

What’s that? Evgenia Chekhova was sacred territory. What excuse would there be in their mother’s character? Chekhov never ever said. But he wouldn’t let Nikolay blame their mother; she was Anton’s mother, too! And he couldn’t let Nikolay have the tuberculosis excuse, as he himself had it. Those were ready-made excuses, “lies,” and if Anton cut Nikolay off from those, his brother was going to have to turn back and look at himself. Doing so would reveal to him where the remedy was.

[…] You’re no riddle to me, and it is also true that you can be wildly ridiculous. You’re nothing but an ordinary mortal, and we mortals are enigmatic only when we’re stupid, and we’re ridiculous forty-eight weeks a year. Isn’t that so?11

How does one effectively argue with a sibling, talk him out of self-pity and back to decency? I don’t know of a better example than Chekhov’s:

You have often complained to me that people “don’t understand you”! Goethe and Newton did not complain of that…. Only Christ complained of it, but He was speaking of His doctrine and not of Himself…. People understand you perfectly well. And if you do not understand yourself, it is not their fault.

Chekhov was trying to shake Nikolay from his position of self-pity and egotism. He compared him to great men, with whom Nikolay would not have dreamed of comparing himself, and he aligned him with Jesus and then radically distinguished them.

Chekhov was not writing for an audience. He was writing to one absolutely particular person in the world, someone he knew better than he knew anyone else:

I assure you as a brother and as a friend I understand you and feel for you with all my heart. I know your good qualities as I know my five fingers; I value and deeply respect them. If you like, to prove that I understand you, I can enumerate those qualities. I think you are kind to the point of softness, magnanimous, unselfish, ready to share your last farthing; you have no envy nor hatred; you are simple-hearted, you pity men and beasts; you are trustful, without spite or guile, and do not remember evil….

We’ll pause here with Chekhov’s latest ellipsis. He needed Nikolay to respect himself, to appreciate himself. He needed Nikolay to trust that he saw him clearly, that he saw the best in him. His approach was through generosity, sympathy, forgiveness. And then he sprang on us (eavesdroppers!) and on Nikolay the responsibility Nikolay bore:

You have a gift from above such as other people have not: you have talent. This talent places you above millions of men, for on earth only one out of two millions is an artist. Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.

Nice touch with the toad and the Taganrog tarantula! Nikolay had something precious that needed to continue to be cultivated. Did Anton at this point foresee that his own talent in literature was the gift he would cultivate? As acts of generosity to his fellow humans, medicine fit the bill. Dr. John Coope observes that Chekhov “sometimes treats his medical work as self-evidently valuable whilst his literature was done out of self-indulgence, or justified by bringing him in an income.”12 But Chekhov’s medical talent was not one in two million. And so far, Chekhov’s literary talent has shown itself as rare as perhaps one in two billion.

You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture. Forgive me, please, but veritas magis amicitiae [truth is a better friend]…. You see, life has its conditions. In order to feel comfortable among educated people, to be at home and happy with them, one must be cultured to a certain extent. Talent has brought you into such a circle, you belong to it, but… you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate between cultured people and the lodgers vis-a-vis. It’s the bourgeois side of you coming out, the side raised on birch thrashings beside the wine cellar and handouts, and it’s hard to overcome, terribly hard.13

That is, it was their father’s side, those “birch thrashings,” that had developed Nikolay’s worst tendencies. Did Anton hate their father so much he preferred not naming him? In writing intimately to his brother, who suffered the abuse alongside him, he could refer to the events about which they and Alexander would wince. Chekhov was working like mad to ensure that such shame didn’t return.

But how is one to be a decent person? Chekhov, whom I love as a literary artist for seeming not to give us lessons, for describing irreducible situations from which there does not seem to be a solution, had, like a doctor rather than a writer, a remedy for Nikolay:

Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:

1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others.

This is what Anton had striven to attain and maintain—and his brother could not call him out on this because he and his family and friends knew it was true of him. What recent specific incidents did Anton have in mind in regard to Nikolay?

They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of India-rubber; if they live with anyone they do not regard it as a favor and, going away, they do not say “nobody can live with you.”

So we know that Nikolay did all that. What he couldn’t do was what Anton and the rest of the family could do:

They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.

Like bystanders in a restaurant or on a train (only less innocent as we have sidled right next to them on purpose), we know more than we have a right to know about the conditions in the Chekhov household. We know Nikolay had lost his temper over trifles; we know he had blamed his family rather than himself for the atmosphere in the apartment; we know what Anton himself had had to bear and forgive.

2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye does not see.14 If for instance, Pyotr knows that his father and mother are turning gray and losing sleep over seeing their Pyotr so rarely (and seeing him drunk when he does turn up), then he rushes home to them and sends his vodka to the devil. They do not sleep nights the better to help the Polevayevs, help pay their brothers’ tuition, and keep their mother decently dressed.

These were Anton’s challenges. Why did he write so much in these years? To keep the family afloat and sailing toward calmer seas. And we know that Nikolay, meanwhile, didn’t even let his anxious mother know of his whereabouts, and we know that when he did show up, he might be drunk. What could Nikolay do? Just what Anton had been doing.

3. They respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts.

Having had to pay off Nikolay’s debts to the merchant, he had the perfect right to press his bootheel on Nikolay’s toes.

4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.

Was Chekhov less merciful here to his brother than he tried to be to his dissolute characters? Perhaps, but this is a family intervention and a matter more personal than art. Anton conveyed understanding of Nikolay’s character not in artistic fashion but through expressions of care. There were specific things Nikolay could do better.

Anton was not telling Nikolay “Be like me” or “Follow my lead.” He was asserting, rather, that in the interests of independence and dignity such behavior needed to be set in stone. He believed, for now, that it was possible for Nikolay to come back to his better self. He was writing to an equal—a wavering equal who had the capacity to right himself.

5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,” or “I have become second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false….

Don’t be pathetic, Nikolay! So much of Chekhov’s character, like his art, shows restraint. It pained him to see Alexander and Nikolay letting go.

6. They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P., ecstasy over the first person they happen to meet at the Salon de Varietes, being renowned in the taverns…. If they do a pennyworth, they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred rubles’ worth, and do not brag of having the entry where others are not admitted…. The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement…. Even Krylov has said that an empty barrel echoes more loudly than a full one.

Chekhov was himself having to be leery of the thrill of getting to know (and be known by) celebrities. To his family, he did indeed exult about meeting the famous writers in Petersburg, but he did not otherwise namedrop. I would guess he believed that it was good for the family to realize that he was becoming known and that his being in the public eye was another reason they should all behave.

7. If they have a talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity…. They are proud of their talent15 and so they do not go out carousing with trade-school employees or Skvortsov’s guests, realizing that their calling lies in exerting an uplifting influence on them, not in living with them. Besides, they are fastidious.

By now, if I were Nikolay reading this letter, my head would be hanging. Maybe I would also become defensive: “What’s wrong with Skvortsov’s guests?!” I think Anton knew Nikolay would review this letter more than once, and that even if he read it and felt hurt, Nikolay was intelligent and sensitive, and he would get it, as Anton’s plan of action was clear, and the points were specific. Nikolay had “talent,” that rare valuable gift that “cultured people” must respect and honor in themselves.

8. They develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct….16 to endure her logic and never stray from her. What’s the point of it all? People with good breeding17 are not as coarse as that. What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow or horse sweat, [Soviet edition deletion] not the kind of intelligence that expresses itself in the ability to stage a fake pregnancy and tirelessly reel off lies. They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood, not a [Soviet edition deletion]. They do not swill vodka at all hours of the day and night, do not sniff at cupboards, for they are not pigs and know they are not. They drink only when they are free, on occasion…. For they want mens sana in corpore sano.

I imagine that Nikolay, who has been dead now for more than a hundred and thirty years, squirms every time someone reads this letter.

And so on. This is what cultured people are like. In order to be cultured and not to stand below the level of your surroundings it is not enough to have read “The Pickwick Papers” and learnt a monologue from “Faust.” It is not enough to hail a cab and drive off to Yakimanka Street if all you’re going to do is bolt out again a week later.

Chekhov identified one of Nikolay’s patterns: Return home, be at loose ends, and then flee.

What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will…. Every hour is precious for it…. Come to us, smash the vodka bottle, lie down and read…. Turgenev, if you like, whom you have not read…. You must drop your [Soviet edition deletion] vanity, you are not a child… you will soon be thirty. It is time! I expect you…. We all expect you….

Yours,

A. Chekhov

Now what? This is an important letter because it worked?

No, it didn’t work. Nikolay stayed away, except, as far as the record shows, for a visit to Babkino for a spell this summer and next summer. Nikolay did not produce much more with his rare artistic talent.

Is it possible that Chekhov’s letter to Nikolay closed a door between them? Had it been too much? Was it simply too late?

This is the last surviving letter Chekhov ever wrote to Nikolay.

Nikolay died in 1889, at thirty-one.

*

Chekhov’s second story for Suvorin and New Times, “The Witch,” takes an exciting turn. On the night of a snowstorm, the sexton Savely believes that his restless, sexually frustrated wife is somehow luring men to their remote cabin.

The wife tells her jealous husband: “ ‘When father was alive and living here, all sorts of people used to come to him to be cured of the ague: from the village, and the hamlets, and the Armenian settlement. They came almost every day, and no one called them devils. But if anyone once a year comes in bad weather to warm himself, you wonder at it, you silly, and take all sorts of notions into your head at once.’ ” The sexton has the self-torturing assuredness of all jealous people, but he tops off that characteristic with a bent for superstition:

“It’s not for nothing the postman is lost! Blast my eyes if the postman isn’t looking for you! Oh, the devil is a good hand at his work; he is a fine one to help! He will turn him around and around and bring him here. I know, I see! You can’t conceal it, you devil’s bauble, you heathen wanton! As soon as the storm began I knew what you were up to.”

“Here’s a fool!” smiled his wife. “Why, do you suppose, you thick-head, that I make the storm?”

She calls him out on his suspicions. If she had such power, we know and she knows, Savely would be toast.

“… Whether it’s your doing or not, I only know that when your blood’s on fire there’s sure to be bad weather, and when there’s bad weather there’s bound to be some crazy fellow turning up here. It happens so every time! So it must be you!”

And of course Savely is ridiculous: there’s no such thing as witches! And yet, once we see her in the presence of the postman, we can’t help wondering:

The postman began undoing the knot in his hood. The sexton’s wife gazed into his eyes, and seemed trying to look right into his soul.

“You ought to have a cup of tea…” she said.

The weary postman is hooked:

And the postman, not yet quite awake, not yet quite able to shake off the intoxicating sleep of youth and fatigue, was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire for the sake of which mail-bags, postal trains… and all things in the world, are forgotten. He glanced at the door in a frightened way, as though he wanted to escape or hide himself, seized Raissa around the waist, and was just bending over the lamp to put out the light, when he heard the tramp of boots in the outer room, and the driver appeared in the doorway. Savely peeped in over his shoulder. The postman dropped his hands quickly and stood still as though irresolute.

Okay, I admit the postman might also believe Raissa is a witch. And Chekhov, in this month of March, wonders here, as he will in next week’s “Agafya,” what is it, how is it that we can be “overwhelmed by a desire for the sake of which […] all things in the world are forgotten”? What does it mean that there are desires bigger than all our conscious and deliberate choices?

*

He wrote to Leykin on March 8 to compliment the proofreader who had reviewed the first galley of Motley Stories: “I didn’t find a single mistake on all of the five sheets. You’re right when you called her ideal. If of course she wouldn’t be insulted and if you advise me so, on the publication of the book I will give her something.”18 He also caught up Leykin on his brothers; namely, that Alexander “is crawling with debt and wants to get out of Novorossiysk…. The Devil knows how he arranges his life! He doesn’t drink, smoke, attend balls, but he can’t live in the provinces at 120–150 rubles a month, while I with a big family for the last 2–3 years live in Moscow at 100–120 rubles. Apparently, he lives disgustingly, eats crap!” Leykin would question Chekhov’s own financial management. It might seem to some of us that the twenty-six-year-old was managing pretty well.

Meanwhile, Chekhov told Leykin, “Today I went to Nikolay and brought him back home. He only just received the money from The Whole World Illustrated, to which he gave Aksakov’s funeral. He lives of course not just as he might. To my question if he desired to work for Fragments, he answered: ‘Of course! Tomorrow I’m sending them a drawing!’ ” Chekhov added, in case Leykin wasn’t skeptical enough already, that the “tomorrow” might mean weeks or months. Though Maria Chekhova as an editor twenty years later of her brother’s letters didn’t suggest an early or any particular March date of Chekhov’s long letter to Nikolay, the mentions of Alexander’s debts and Chekhov’s retrieval of Nikolay on March 7 from some sort of dissipated setting indicate that the letter had been sent and received, and that Chekhov was now following up and bringing Nikolay back under the family’s wing.

On Chekhov’s medical day off, Sunday, he would be writing Leykin a new piece (probably “My Conversation with the Postmaster”), “if nothing bothers me.”

By the time Chekhov wrote Leykin on March 4 about the distractions he had had while writing “Poison” (“Otrava,” published March 8), he was writing or about to write “A Story without an End” (“Rasskaz bez Kontsa,” March 10), in which an unnamed narrator tells of being awakened in the middle of the night to go check on the lodger of an old landlady next door. Confused, annoyed, he goes to investigate and finds a coffin with a body in it and discovers in the dark a man who has shot himself but is still alive. The impoverished and grieving husband Vassilyev is a suicide in all but achievement, as the bullet has passed through his ribs and out his back. The narrator, though not a doctor, neatly analyzes the wound and helps patch up Vassilyev and listens to him. (The narrator would have gone for a doctor, but the wounded man doesn’t want him to leave.)

The crummy living situation suggests to the narrator what has led to this double tragedy:

I sat silent, looking about the room into which fate had brought me so unexpectedly. What poverty! This man who was the possessor of a handsome, effeminate face and a luxuriant well-tended beard, had surroundings which a humble working man would not have envied. A sofa with its American-leather torn and peeling, a humble greasy-looking chair, a table covered with a little bit of paper, and a wretched oleograph on the wall, that was all I saw. Damp, gloomy, and gray.19

Vassilyev is irritated when the narrator recognizes him from a party in which Vassilyev was an actor “in some private theatricals”:

“I don’t understand your curiosity,” he muttered. “You’ll be asking me next what it was drove me to commit suicide!”

Before a minute had passed, he turned around toward me again, opened his eyes and said in a tearful voice:

“Excuse me for taking such a tone, but you’ll admit I’m right! To ask a convict how he got into prison, or a suicide why he shot himself is not generous… and indelicate. To think of gratifying idle curiosity at the expense of another man’s nerves!”

“There is no need to excite yourself…. It never occurred to me to question you about your motives.”

“You would have asked…. It’s what people always do. Though it would be no use to ask. If I told you, you would not believe or understand…. I must own I don’t understand it myself…. There are phrases used in the police reports and newspapers such as: ‘unrequited love,’ and ‘hopeless poverty,’ but the reasons are not known…. They are not known to me, nor to you, nor to your newspaper offices, where they have the impudence to write ‘The diary of a suicide.’ God alone understands the state of a man’s soul when he takes his own life; but men know nothing about it.”

This complaint or observation is Chekhov’s as much as it is Vassilyev’s. We outsiders assign motives and reasons to others’ actions—and yet even the person who has taken the action doesn’t know why they did it. Although Chekhov himself could have spoken Vassilyev’s next words, the narrator is skeptical; he says that Vassilyev “went on in the tone of some great professor”:

“Man will never understand the psychological subtleties of suicide! How can one speak of reasons? Today the reason makes one snatch up a revolver, while tomorrow the same reason seems not worth a rotten egg. It all depends most likely on the particular condition of the individual at the given moment…. Take me for instance. Half an hour ago, I had a passionate desire for death, now when the candle is lighted, and you are sitting by me, I don’t even think of the hour of death. Explain that change if you can! Am I better off, or has my wife risen from the dead? Is it the influence of the light on me, or the presence of an outsider?”

“The light certainly has an influence…” I muttered for the sake of saying something. “The influence of light on the organism….”

“The influence of light…. We admit it! But you know men do shoot themselves by candle-light! And it would be ignominious indeed for the heroes of your novels if such a trifling thing as a candle were to change the course of the drama so abruptly. All this nonsense can be explained perhaps, but not by us. It’s useless to ask questions or give explanations of what one does not understand….”

Besides that the narrator is an author (of humor pieces, in fact), he does not closely resemble Chekhov—except perhaps at this next moment, when he says, abruptly and to my and Vassilyev’s surprise:

“Forgive me,” I said, “but… judging by the expression of your face, it seems to me that at this moment you… are posing.”

“Yes,” Vassilyev said, startled. “It’s very possible! I am naturally vain and fatuous. Well, explain it, if you believe in your power of reading faces! Half an hour ago I shot myself, and just now I am posing…. Explain that if you can.”

But why does Chekhov then let the nearly hysterical, possibly “posing” Vassilyev make what are actually Chekhov’s own philosophical musings? He won’t let us or his narrator “explain that.” We can’t; this is one of Chekhov’s assertions about human psychology, and is not a point of argument. At his most sincere and earnest, he puts his own words into the mouth of an actor, who may or may not be posing. This is for Chekhov’s sake—not to disguise his beliefs, but to test them, to try them out in a 20situation of someone experiencing the feelings.21

About the word “posing.” The verb in Russian is risovat’—to draw, to paint, and, figuratively, to portray. As I understand it, Chekhov is talking about the self-dramatizing impulse: I feel so bad I want to kill myself. Let me prove that feeling to the world—and do it! His good friend, the painter Isaac Levitan, was something of a poser himself, continually threatening suicide.22

This story’s inspiration was not of the immediate moment, but from an incident in early January 1886 involving an acquaintance of Chekhov’s, Pyotr Kicheev, an editor at The Alarm Clock, who shot himself, but the bullet was a dud, and a few days later Kicheev was making jokes.23 (Perhaps Kicheev recognized that event in this story and resented it; in any case, in late 1887 he reviewed and panned Chekhov’s Ivanov, a play that features a “successful” suicide.)

Vassilyev anticipates his wife’s funeral the next day. From his musings, it is not after all clear to me if Vassilyev is actually an actor or just an educated person who quotes Hamlet and happened to be included in General Lukhachev’s “theatricals.”

“Ah…. Do you remember how I pranced about like a needle, like an enthusiastic ass at those private theatricals when I was courting Zina? It was stupid, but it was good, it was fun…. The very memory of it brings back a whiff of spring…. And now! What a cruel change of scene! There is a subject for you! Only don’t you go in for writing ‘the diary of a suicide.’ That’s vulgar and conventional. You make something humorous of it.”

“Again you are… posing,” I said. “There’s nothing humorous in your position.”

“Nothing laughable? You say nothing laughable?” Vassilyev sat up, and tears glistened in his eyes. An expression of bitter distress came into his pale face. His chin quivered.

“You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives,” he said [as Chekhov indeed did laugh], “but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate has cheated me! I have been deceived as no bank depositor, no duped husband has ever been deceived! Only realize what an absurd fool I have been made! Last year before your eyes I did not know what to do with myself for happiness. And now before your eyes….”

Vassilyev’s head sank on the pillow and he laughed.

“Nothing more absurd and stupid than such a change could possibly be imagined. Chapter one: spring, love, honeymoon… honey, in fact; chapter two: looking for a job, the pawnshop, pallor, the chemist’s shop, and… tomorrow’s splashing through the mud to the graveyard.”

The narrator leaves Vassilyev to get medication from the chemist’s, and returns to find Vassilyev having torn his bandages off and unconscious. In the morning, after the funeral service, the narrator accompanies Vassilyev to and from the cemetery.

The story without an ending has a break in time: “Only one year has passed since that night.” The narrator is now hosting a lively gathering that includes Vassilyev and two young women. He interrupts Vassilyev to show him the story so far—the story is everything up to what we have just read:

Always condescending about my authorship, he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an armchair and begins upon it.

“Hang it all, what horrors,” he mutters with a smile.

I imagine Chekhov in his study having handed over a manuscript to an impatient friend or brother and watching its effects.

But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face becomes. At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner.

Chekhov is famous for the open-endedness of his stories—that they reflect the title of this story and have no end. The narrator, like Chekhov, doesn’t know how or if stories of actual human beings end, if not by death.

“How does it end?” I ask him.

“How does it end? H’m….”

He looks at the room, at me, at himself…. He sees his new fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and… sinking on a chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.

“Wasn’t I right when I told you it was all absurd? My God! I have had burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant’s back; the devil knows what I have suffered—no one could have suffered more, I think, and where are the traces? It’s astonishing. One would have thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated. And yet that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left, not a scrap. It’s as though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka. Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on a humorous end, my friend!”

The would-be suicide asks how can there be no evidence remaining of that long terrible night? So many suicides… and this one, interrupted and botched, shows him or us what? Suicide is folly? Pointless? That all such shows of dramatic grief ought to be discounted? He is not saying he’s lucky—but that the grief dissipates, as if mocking us. That is the disappointment. We can end our lives on a sincere, sane impulse, and yet if we accidentally survive, we find life quite satisfactory enough to keep participating in it.

Chekhov doesn’t think that any of these questions and reflections are funny and neither does the humor-writer narrator, who, like Chekhov, recognizes the limitations of a comic or tragic denouement.

And yet the narrator wants an ending, something to settle down upon, to conclude once and for all, to give him and his readers peace of mind:

“How will it end?” I ask myself aloud.

Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the drawing room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on that man’s account on that terrible night. It is as though I had lost something….

Chekhov won’t comfort us with an answer that isn’t there. He has described what has come to be recognized as Chekhovian—a story without an end. Feelings have been roused; reflections on fate have been stirred. Are such experiences a waste?

There is, perhaps, a latter-day reflection that shows that Chekhov believed that the unsettled ending is probably, because it doesn’t lie, the closest we can come to truth. In May 1888, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin, who by then was his most serious friend and correspondent concerning literary and philosophical topics:

It seems to me that the writer of fiction should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, etc. His business is but to describe those who have been speaking or thinking about God and pessimism, how, and under what circumstances. The artist should be, not the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased witness…. My business is merely to be talented, i.e., to be able to distinguish between important and unimportant statements, to be able to illuminate the characters and speak their language…. The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it. The mob think they know and understand everything; the more stupid they are, the wider, I think, do they conceive their horizon to be. And if an artist in whom the crowd has faith decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.24

Though Chekhov and others would see this period of his life as being under Tolstoy’s influence, he was asserting something in direct opposition to the ambitions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: They were problem-solvers. They thought they could make out the world. Chekhov believed in many things, but he did not believe in his powers to comprehend human life. See it and describe it, like a doctor, like a psychologist, like a generous man, that he could do—but he was no prophet or visionary.

*

The knot that I can’t untie, but that I keep worrying over, is Chekhov’s relationship with Dunya Efros. He wrote in his usual jokey tone to Bilibin on March 11, and it seems to me he was creating his own comically unhappy and ill-matched “marriage” in contrast to Bilibin’s real one:

I’ve split from my fiancée to the farthest measure. Yesterday we saw each other, I spoke about devilish things (the devilish things we have in Moscow are modern furniture), I complained to her about being broke, but she told me that her brother-Jew drew a three-ruble note so perfectly that the illusion was complete: the cleaning woman picked it up and put it in her pocket. That’s all. I’m not going to write to you anything more about her.

Maybe you’re right saying that it’s too early for me to marry… I’m lightminded, despite that I’m only a year younger than you… I still at times dream of grammar school: an unlearned lesson and a fear that the teacher is going to call me out… Perhaps I’m a youth. […]25

And here, readers, we can squirm together, as Chekhov, commenting on Bilibin’s weakness as a humor writer, described a particular kind of lovemaking:

Your one fault—your softness […]. If you’re not afraid of the comparison, you as an essayist are similar to a lover to whom the woman says: “You do it tenderly… I need it rougher!” (À propos: a woman is just like a chicken—she loves to be beaten at the very moment.) You do it particularly tenderly…26

Well? Can we suppose that Chekhov and a lover had gone at it in a rough manner? We can wish Chekhov was as enlightened as we are in 2022 and that he would watch his language and behavior, but…! And here I also imagine Bilibin, who had been offended by the sexual suggestiveness of “The Witch,” blushing. “A Little Joke” would be published the next day. The sexuality in that story and the reference here suggest that lately, at least, Chekhov was thinking a lot about sex. That is, when he was not terrified of a doctor’s everyday danger: “In Moscow,” he told Bilibin, “typhus (spotted) is raging, taking off in a very short time six of my fellow graduates. I’m afraid! I’m not afraid of anything, but I’m afraid of this typhus… It’s as if there is something mysterious about it.”

*

On March 12, “A Little Joke” (“Shutochka”) was published in The Cricket in Moscow under the pen name “A Person without Means.” Was Chekhov purposefully hiding this story from his friends? Did he think the censors would nab it in Petersburg if he submitted it to Leykin for Fragments? He had published one story in The Cricket in January, and the next would be in September. It wasn’t his usual landing spot, but this was 1886, and he was firing off stories so quickly he later completely forgot some of them. This one he remembered and would substantially revise for the Collected Works.

“A Little Joke” is often anthologized in Russian and English; it is about a young couple sledding. I read it in Russian a few times before I started to imagine that there was more to Chekhov’s little joke than the narrator’s mischievous trick.

By medical, psychological, and literary reflex, Chekhov describes the physiological changes his characters go through. He’s being “objective.” What if one stands outside of the moral and subjective judgments and observes instead how people under stress or excitement breathe, move, and express themselves?

I’m going to quote from my own translation, rather than Constance Garnett’s perfectly good one, because my realizations about the story came in the midst of translating it from Russian. Chekhov starts some stories with a weather report, as if he needs to take one step into the setting: “A clear winter noontime…” and there he is, almost instantaneously, in its midst, able to look, hear, and smell around. He has made himself aware of his immediate surroundings. Grounded like so, he could then fly off for five or ten pages. At the end of this flight he has made a Story.

A clear winter noontime….27 A strong frost, it cracks, and Nadenka, who holds me by the arm, has silver frost covering the curls on her temples and the down on her upper lip. We stand atop a high hill. The sun is shining on the sloping surface as if on a mirror that extends from our feet to the ground below. A small sled, upholstered in bright red cloth, is beside us.

“Let’s go down, Nadezhda Petrovna!” I beg her. “Just once! I assure you that we’ll be safe and sound.”

A young man tries to persuade a young woman that they try something she fears is dangerous: “Just once!” But how can we tell he’s a young man? Is it his casualness, which is more apparent in the Russian? And how can we tell she’s a young woman? It’s a combination of her nickname, “Nadenka” for Nadezhda (“Hope”), her naïvete, and the “down on her upper lip” that the unnamed narrator notices that suggests she’s young:

But Nadenka is frightened. All that space from her little boots to the end of the icy hill seems terrifying to her, an immeasurably deep abyss. When I only suggest just sitting in the sled, her breath freezes and halts as she glances down; but what will happen if she risks flying into the abyss! She will die, she’ll go out of her mind.

“I beg you!” I say. “You don’t need to be frightened. Just understand, this is faintheartedness, cowardice!”

This is sledding down a hill, that’s all. Why is she so scared? And, as I reflect remembering what it was like to be a young man myself in the company of an attractive young woman, why is it so important to him that she take a ride with him? How big a thrill could sledding be to him, and if it’s such a big thrill, why doesn’t he, with a swagger, go himself, alone?

Nadenka finally gives in, and I see by her face she is setting out risking her life. I seat her shaking in the sled, pale, and I wrap my arm around her and together we descend into the abyss.

It’s just a sled-ride, isn’t it? Another word for abyss, bezdna in Russian, is “neverendingness.”

The sled flies like a bullet. The tearing air beats in our faces, roars, whistles in our ears, rips painfully, nips from spite, wants to tear our heads off our shoulders. From the wind pressure it’s an effort to breathe. It seems the devil himself has seized us in his paws and with a roar is dragging us into Hell. The surrounding objects slide into one long extended streak…. Here, here, one more moment and it seems—we’ll be destroyed!

“I love you, Nadya!” I say in an undertone.

The sled begins running quieter and quieter, the roar of the wind and the buzzing of the sled-runners is less terrifying, our breath comes back to life, and we finally get down. Nadenka is neither living nor dead. She’s pale, barely breathing…. I help her get up.

Quite an experience for young Nadenka! But there, not yet identified as such by Chekhov or the narrator, is the “little joke,” the narrator’s unconscious or perhaps calculated teasing declaration of love in the midst of their sensory overload. Did he mean it? Does he know?

“I’m not going another time for anything,” she says, looking at me with wide, terror-filled eyes. “Not for anything in the world! I nearly died!”

To this the narrator says… nothing! He doesn’t apologize, he doesn’t argue with her about her exaggeration of the danger. He doesn’t tell her that he knows from experience that she’ll likely want to try it again.

In a little while, she comes back to herself and is already questioningly looking me in the eyes: had I said those four words or had she only heard them in the din of the whirlwind? I stand beside her, I smoke and carefully examine my glove.

How infuriating he is. He won’t confess, he won’t disabuse her. He can pretend he didn’t say what he said or maybe he wants her to decide what she should do about that declaration. The joke for now is that the burden is on Nadenka:

She takes me by my arm, and we wander by the hill for a long while. The riddle is obviously not giving her peace. Had the words been said or not? Yes, or no? Yes, or no? This is a question of self-love, honor, life, happiness; the question is very important, the most important in the world. Nadenka impatiently, sadly, with a pronounced expression, peeks at my face, answers randomly, waits, whether I will speak.

The only passage that seems better in the original 1886 version of the story is this [the underlined phrases are identical between the versions]:

This is a question of self-love, honor… you cannot joke about this!! Nadenka continually looks me in the face, answers inattentively, impatiently presses her lips… Her face flickers with happiness, now twitches under a rueful cloud… Soon I notice a struggle in her, a wobbly feminine spirit… She stops, she apparently wants to say something, ask about something, but is completely unable to gather the strength… 28

Back to the final version:

Oh, what play on this sweet face, what play!29 I see her wrestling with herself, she needs to say something, ask about something, but she can’t find the words, she’s awkward, terrified, the joy confuses her….

“Joy”? What joy? Where has that come from? The terror has receded and exposes the undisguised thrill. We have seen this in children, their apprehension becoming appreciation. But Nadenka is a young lady.

“You know what?” she says, not looking at me.

“What?” I ask.

“Let’s go one more time… let’s ride.”

Every time I read this story now I cannot help thinking that Chekhov was playing another kind of joke on us. The humor magazines of his time were full of sexual innuendos in their illustrations and skits. I will suggest now that the narrator has introduced the hesitant Nadenka not to sledding but to lovemaking. Chekhov continually made fun of the romantic fiction that abounded; he knew that 19th century authors and readers weren’t always conscious of the sexual connotations of naïvely presented activities. He, however, was quite conscious. The ice has been broken:

We go up the staircase on the hill. I seat the pale, shaking Nadenka in the sled, and again we fly into the terrifying abyss, again the wind roars and the runners buzz, and again, at the sled’s fastest and noisiest rush, I say in an undertone:

“I love you, Nadenka!”

The narrator is taking a risk in his teasing. It is the spice he’s adding to his own experience, and he knows there is attraction he is creating in her through his indistinct but “most important” declaration.

When the sled stops, Nadenka takes a sharp glance at the hill down which we have only just sledded, then looks a long time in my face, listens to my voice, cool and passionless, and everything, everything, even her muff and hood, everything in her bearing—expresses the most extreme confusion. And on her face is written:

“What’s all this? Who pronounced those words? Did he, or was I only hearing things?”

This unknown bothers her, draws out her impatience. The poor girl doesn’t answer my questions, frowns, is ready to cry.

She is overwhelmed, she is unsure of the ground on which she stands with him, her partner.

“Shouldn’t we go home?” I ask.

“But I… I like this sledding,” she says, blushing. “Couldn’t we go down one more time?”

Not that I want to argue, but to the readers skeptical about the sexual connotations, I will only ask: Why does she blush? It’s just sledding. But maybe you argue, impatient with me, an old man, that she’s timid because she hasn’t confirmed to herself that he said, “I love you.” And I will answer that I don’t understand why her timidity would make her blush. Trying to confirm his words is not embarrassing. Admitting that she wants more of whatever you prefer to call that activity, however, is very familiar to some of us and can cause blushing.

She likes this sledding, but meanwhile, seated in the sled as the other times, she is pale, and sighing with fear, shakes.

We go down the third time, and I see how she looks at me in the face, observes my lips. But I place the handkerchief to my lips, cough, and, when we reach the middle of the hill, I successfully utter:

“I love you, Nadya!”

And the riddle remains a riddle! Nadenka goes silent, thinks about something….

Here we pause in one of Chekhov’s own ellipsis-pauses. The puzzle, the trick, the story’s explicit joke, is about the declaration, not about the thrill of this new exhausting and satisfying physical activity. The narrator’s cruelty is what makes her unhappy. The sexual or physically exciting activity, though fearful, attracts her. The words of love would, it seems, deplete some of her shame in desiring more of the activity.

I lead her home from the skating rink, she tries to go quietly, begins slowing her feet and keeps waiting for whether I will say those words to her. And I see how her soul suffers as she makes an effort on herself in order not to say:

“It can’t be that the wind said those things! And I don’t want that the wind said it!”

Chekhov was never accused of cruelty, except perhaps this coming fall by Efros herself. As an adult he pitied and sympathized with all creatures, great and small. But his narrator, as Chekhov saw later and thus modified the story, is indeed cruel—for this “little joke.”

The morning of the next day I receive a note: “If you go sledding today, come for me. N.” And after that I begin going to the skating rink every day, and each time, flying down on the sled, I recite in an undertone these very words:

“I love you, Nadya!”

Soon Nadenka is accustomed to this phrase, like to wine or morphine. She cannot live without it. Truly, flying down the hill was terrifying before, but now already the fears and danger give a special enchantment to the words of love, words that as before set up a riddle and tortured her soul. She suspects the same two: the wind and me…. Whichever of the two confesses the love to her, she doesn’t know, but to her it is all, apparently, one and the same; from whichever vessel she drinks—it is all the same from which to get drunk.

She wants the activity, and she wants the words. She gets them both. But she is like the scientist Chekhov himself was, and she has to keep testing to discover the source of “the words of love.”

An unaccounted amount of time passes after the “every day.” Chekhov begins the next paragraph:

For some reason at midday I make my way alone to the rink; mixing in with the crowd, I see Nadenka, searching with her eyes for me as she goes up to the hill…. Then she slowly ascends the steps…. It’s terrifying to go alone, oh, how terrifying! She is as pale as snow, she shakes, she goes as if to an execution, but she goes, goes without looking around, decisively. She, apparently, decided finally to test it out: Will those splendid, sweet words be heard when I’m not there? I see when she, pale, with her mouth open from terror, sits in the sled, closes her eyes and, bidding the earth goodbye forever, moving off…. “Zhhhh!”… the runners buzz. Whether or not Nadenka hears the words. I don’t know…. I only see how she gets up out of the sled incapacitated, weak. And it’s apparent by her face that she herself doesn’t know whether she heard something or not. Her fears while she was sledding down drove off her ability to hear, distinguish sounds, to understand….

And up there I encounter a problem that all interpreters of literature face: If one activity is really actually another, does that hold true in all instances, or in just the ones I want to focus on? If sledding is sex, how is the narrator witnessing this, her solo ride? I don’t have a good answer for that, and maybe Chekhov has had a joke on me.

When Chekhov was writing the story, he had just remarked on March 4 to Leykin that “We’re having absolutely springy weather. How passionately I want to take up spring themes.”

The winter story becomes a spring story:

But now begins the spring-like month of March…. The sun becomes warmer. Our ice hill darkens, loses its shine and melts finally. We stop sledding. Poor Nadenka will never again hear those words, nobody ever pronounces them, just so the wind isn’t heard, and I begin packing up for Petersburg—for a long time, most probably forever.

What? Chekhov has told us nothing of the casual narrator’s life or plans. He is about to set out for Petersburg, but where has he been? Where are we?

Somehow, two days before my departure, I am sitting at sunset in the little garden beside the yard where Nadenka lives; this garden is separated by a high fence with nails…. It’s far too cold, there is still snow atop the manure, the trees seem dead, but it already smells of spring, and the crows, getting ready for their sleep, loudly caw. I go up to the fence and look a long time through a crack.

Aha! The literary device that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, the crack in the wall or fence:

I see how Nadenka goes out on the little porch and extends her sad, miserable gaze at the sky…. The spring wind blows straight into her pale, dejected face…. It reminds her of that wind that roared at us then on the hill, when she heard those four words, and her face becomes sad, sad and a tear crawls down her cheeks…. And the poor girl extends both her arms as if asking this wind to bring her those words once more. And I, having awaited the wind, say in an undertone:

“I love you, Nadya!”

Oh, my God, what’s going on with Nadenka! She screeches, smiles across her whole face, and extends her arms in greeting to the wind, joyful, happy, so beautiful.

So there we get something of the narrator’s pleasure in and justification for the joking declaration: It has made her so happy. And maybe she’s especially happy now that she knows it’s Nature, not he, making the declaration. Life loves her, Nature loves her.

And his trick has gone full circle, with no harm done! Right?

They have had their fun, their excitement. Sex (or sledding) has been only an enlivening experience.

And I go off to pack.

But what has he been doing there? Why has he been in Nadenka’s company? Is he a doctor doing district work? He has met her because she lives next door? Is there some unaccounted-for long-term friendship between families?

This was a long time ago. Now Nadenka is already married; they married her off, she herself married—it’s all the same, a secretary of trustees of the gentry, and now she already has three children. That we went sledding together at some time and how the wind brought to her the words “I love you, Nadenka,” is not forgotten; for her now this is the most happy, most touching and beautiful memory in her life.

But now for me, when I’ve become old, I still don’t understand why I said those words, what was I joking for….

So ends the version of the story as radically revised by Chekhov in 1899.

I believe both versions of the story reveal Chekhov’s guilt, his sympathy, his half-heartedness about his various affairs. According to the 1899 narrator, his and Nadenka’s relationship, whatever its precise physical nature, was harmless, in fact all to the good, because she has since then married and had kids. In 1886, the story ends with the narrator’s revelation that he is in fact Nadenka’s husband, that all the teasing and joking led to lawful matrimony. Even if the sledding was to various degrees a metaphor for sex, the story does not resound; it’s a light piece, unengaged with and distanced by Chekhov. In revising it, he heightened the sexual suggestiveness and made the piece less of a joke, though the joke was also his having been able to slip the innuendos past various censors; in the original, the narrator doesn’t understand what his joking declaration meant about his actual feelings, and that the joke is finally on him.

Perhaps Chekhov’s proposal to Efros had been a joke on himself as much as on her. In any case, she got over their confusing engagement sooner than he, as he was still spinning over it thirteen years later.

*

In “Agafya” (just so, “Agafya,” March 15), the protagonist is Savka, the handsome lazy village bum who attracts the local women, among them Agafya.

He could read and write, and very rarely drank, but as a workman this strong and healthy young man was not worth a farthing. A sluggish, overpowering sloth was mingled with the strength in his muscles, which were strong as cords…. His old mother begged alms at people’s windows and he himself lived like a bird of the air; he did not know in the morning what he would eat at midday. It was not that he was lacking in will, or energy, or feeling for his mother; it was simply that he felt no inclination for work and did not recognize the advantage of it…. His favorite attitude was one of concentrated immobility.

This is one of Chekhov’s model stories: graceful, quiet, inhabited by interesting, sympathetic, accidentally reckless people. This is the third of three first-person stories in a row, and in this one, a most Chekhovlike narrator sits back and watches and tries not to interfere in the action and in fact fails in his attempt to prevent any drama. Savka, who has even more women than he wants, as they cause him trouble with the village authorities, prefers on this evening the company of the learned unnamed narrator.

Our hooks with live bait on them had long been in the river, and we had nothing left to do but to abandon ourselves to repose, which Savka, who was never exhausted and always rested, loved so much.

And how much Chekhov enjoyed lazily fishing on the river, and how rarely he could do so in these years!

Knowing how fond Savka was of listening, I told him all I had learned about the landrail from sportsman’s books. From the landrail I passed imperceptibly to the migration of the birds. Savka listened attentively, looking at me without blinking, and smiling all the while with pleasure. […]

“It’s interesting,” said Savka. “Whatever one talks about it is always interesting. Take a bird now, or a man… or take this little stone; there’s something to learn about all of them… Ah, sir, if I had known you were coming I wouldn’t have told a woman to come here this evening… She asked to come today.”

Savka, in his relations with women, is similar to Chekhov’s brother Nikolay and somewhere on a continuum with Chekhov:

With all his soft-heartedness and good-nature, Savka despised women. He behaved carelessly, condescendingly with them, and even stooped to scornful laughter of their feelings for himself. God knows, perhaps this careless, contemptuous manner was one of the causes of his irresistible attraction for the village Dulcineas. He was handsome and well-built; in his eyes there was always a soft friendliness, even when he was looking at the women he so despised, but the fascination was not to be explained by merely external qualities.

I’m not sure what Chekhov means by “merely external qualities.” That is, Savka’s good looks? Chekhov himself was certainly good-looking.

Apart from his happy exterior and original manner, one must suppose that the touching position of Savka as an acknowledged failure and an unhappy exile from his own hut to the kitchen gardens also had an influence upon the women.

On the other hand, no one ever looked at Chekhov as “an acknowledged failure.” The narrator finds Savka fascinating and is amused that women have a pitying attraction for him. Anxious Agafya, having sneaked over to see Savka while her husband is at work on the train, sees her time dwindling while Savka chases a leery bird. She stays the night despite her husband’s return home, and in the morning, the narrator, pitying her, watches her fearful reencounter:

In the village, near the furthest hut, Yakov was standing in the road, gazing fixedly at his returning wife. He stood without stirring, and was as motionless as a post. What was he thinking as he looked at her? What words was he preparing to greet her with? Agafya stood still a little while, looked around once more as though expecting help from us, and went on. I have never seen anyone, drunk or sober, move as she did. Agafya seemed to be shriveled up by her husband’s eyes. At one time she moved in zigzags, then she moved her feet up and down without going forward, bending her knees and stretching out her hands, then she staggered back. When she had gone another hundred paces she looked around once more and sat down.

“You ought at least to hide behind a bush…” I said to Savka. “If the husband sees you…”

“He knows, anyway, who it is Agafya has come from… The women don’t go to the kitchen garden at night for cabbages—we all know that.”

*

On the same Saturday “Agafya” was published, so was “My Conversation with the Postmaster” in Leykin’s Fragments. Chekhov paid close attention to postage and rates, occasionally advising friends, family, and editors about the most sensible practices. In this piece, the unnamed narrator engages with his acquaintance, the postmaster, about the wastefulness and inefficiencies of the postal service. The postmaster would prefer not to think about those problems: “If you get into everything […] and think about the why and wherefore, minds will jostle apart.”30 Chekhov’s narrator shows concern for mothers having to wait in long postal-service lines and being frustrated by the number of forms. The Chekhov family was continually sending money across Russia. Chekhov seems, however, never to have lost a story-manuscript in the mail. Letters, though? Yes.

Next up was another story Chekhov would exclude from his Collected Works, though it is uncharacteristically eventful and exciting, “The Wolf” (“Volk,” March 17, titled “Hydrophobia,” another term for rabies, in the only translation I have found in English). A rabid wolf gets his teeth into the protagonist, who fears the worst. He has a nightmarish vision: “The moon was reflected in the animal’s eyes; there was nothing like anger in them; they were tearful and looked human.”31 Despite a doctor’s reassurances that chances are the wolf’s poison washed out with the bloody wound or was trapped in the clothing that was bitten through, the protagonist becomes obsessed by the potential symptoms and goes to see various village healers.

There were many fearful diseases that doctors and patients could encounter in the late 19th century; the biggest fear that Chekhov, already infected with tuberculosis, ever regularly expressed was about catching typhus. But the very next story, published five days later (March 22), a comic tale for Fragments, “To Paris!” also focuses on the dangers of rabies. Two academics are bitten by a stray dog that “perhaps” has rabies. The town’s administrators order them to go to Paris to see the French scientist Louis Pasteur, just in case. But barely starting on the way there, at a station stop in Kursk, they get drunk and spend all their money and never get “to Paris.” Had Chekhov treated a case of rabies earlier this month or been reading some medical literature about it?

Early in March, Chekhov was detecting signs of spring in Moscow and wrote his own “In Spring” (“Vesnoy,” March 24) for the Petersburg Gazette about a selfconscious writer out in the sticks. The protagonist becomes bitter and resentful because he feels mocked by the townspeople for not being a great or famous writer:

“Ah, Mr. Writer!… Hello there!”

If Makar Denisych were merely a clerk or junior manager, no one would dare speak to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a “writer,” giftlessness, mediocrity!

Poor fellow! mocks the narrator: “Authorial vanity is painful, it is an infection of the soul; whoever suffers from it no longer hears the singing of the birds, nor sees the shining of the sun, nor sees the spring…”

*

It is obvious enough, even without this letter from Grigorovich, that Antosha Chekhonte would have become Anton Chekhov. But the “awakening” effect of the letter is understandable. The year 1886 marks a dividing point in Chekhov’s career.

—Sophie Laffitte32

We have come to the letter that supposedly spurred Chekhov to fulfill his genius.

Dmitry Vasil’evich Grigorovich, born in 1822, was regarded by this time, perhaps nostalgically, in the same literary circle as Tolstoy and the late Dostoevsky and Turgenev. He had shared an apartment with Dostoevsky when they were young and had published two novels himself in the 1850s that brought him renown and regard. As a friend of Suvorin, he had met Chekhov in Petersburg in December of 1885, but in his famous advice letter it is odd that he didn’t mention that. Chekhov had remembered and noted that encounter and had, probably for one of the last times in his life, been in awe at the people he was meeting because of his writing. Chekhov did not like to bow and scrape, and yet there was something in his relationship to Grigorovich that would bring him to at least bow.

Grigorovich appreciated himself at the end of his life and career as “the man who discovered Chekhov.” On March 25, 1886, Grigorovich had the experience that everybody has when we read a distinctive writer for the first time: Who is this person? How did I not know of him already? He is extraordinary…. I have made a discovery! And some of us might, from high to low or low to high, let that person know that we have discovered them. We are staking our claim, in case anyone comes asking afterward, “When did you, Brilliant Bob, announce to the world Annie’s genius?”

Dear Sir, Anton Pavlovich:

About a year ago I read by chance a story of yours in Petersburg Gazette; I do not recall its title. I remember only that I was struck by its qualities of outstanding originality and chiefly its remarkable accuracy and truthfulness in its descriptions of people and nature.

Since then I have read everything that bore the signature of Chekhonte, although I was inwardly vexed at a man who held so poor an opinion of himself as to consider the use of a pseudonym necessary.33