Chekhov Becomes Chekhov

The doctor began seeing the patients. He sat in his little room, and called up the patients in turn. Sounds were continually coming from the little room, piercing wails, a child’s crying, or the doctor’s angry words:

“Come, why are you bawling? Am I murdering you, or what? Sit quiet!”

The doctor knows what’s what and he cannot hold himself back from expressing his frustration. We should regard him as a bad guy. But he actually has Chekhov’s sympathy. When the doctor realizes Pashka’s situation, he blows up at the mother, who, we have learned, is husbandless, and, we will learn, very poor:

The doctor examined his elbow, pressed it, heaved a sigh, clicked with his lips, then pressed it again.

“You ought to be beaten, woman, but there is no one to do it,” he said. “Why didn’t you bring him before? Why, the whole arm is done for. Look, foolish woman. You see, the joint is diseased!”

“You know best, kind sir…” sighed the woman.

“Kind sir…. She’s let the boy’s arm rot, and now it is ‘kind sir.’ What kind of workman will he be without an arm? You’ll be nursing him and looking after him for ages. I bet if you had had a pimple on your nose, you’d have run to the hospital quick enough, but you have left your boy to rot for six months. You are all like that.”

The doctor lighted a cigarette. While the cigarette smoked, he scolded the woman, and shook his head in time to the song he was humming inwardly, while he thought of something else.

Chekhov knows you can’t say “You are all like that.” It’s not true. It’s prejudiced…. It’s certainly not true! But the doctor knows that if it’s not the fault of life itself, it’s the hard-pressed impoverished mother’s fault. Knowing the doctor’s situation, providing care every day to all and sundry, we cannot blame him for his agonized and accusatory response. Unlike the doctor in last month’s “The Doctor,” this doctor is “good” with children. He knows how to speak to them:

“You stop with me, Pashka,” said the doctor, slapping Pashka on the shoulder. “Let mother go home, and you and I will stop here, old man. It’s nice with me, old boy, it’s first-rate here. I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Pashka, we will go catching finches together. I will show you a fox! We will go visiting together! Shall we? And mother will come for you tomorrow! Eh?”

Pashka looked inquiringly at his mother.

“You stay, child!” she said.

“He’ll stay, he’ll stay!” cried the doctor gleefully. “And there is no need to discuss it. I’ll show him a live fox! We will go to the fair together to buy candy! Marya Denisovna, take him upstairs!”

The doctor, apparently a light-hearted and friendly fellow, seemed glad to have company; Pashka wanted to oblige him, especially as he had never in his life been to a fair, and would have been glad to have a look at a live fox, but how could he do without his mother?

Unfortunately, knowing how to speak to children also means the doctor knows how to lie to them. Pashka is fed well and well-bedded, better than he has ever known. He observes the other patients, old and sick and damaged, and something of the direness of his situation seems to be dawning on him. A patient dies in the night, and amid the bustle of the hospital staff hauling the man away, Pashka and some of the other patients awaken.

We already know that Chekhov, according to his little brother Mikhail, had a fear of the dark and preferred having someone sleep in the same room or close by. Mikhail was that someone sleeping in an adjoining ground floor room at the house on Sadovaya in Moscow. “I positively cannot live without guests,” Chekhov later wrote Suvorin. “When I’m alone, for some reason I become terrified, just as though I were alone in a frail little boat on a great ocean.”10 The following scene could have been inspired by one of his own nightmares:

“Ma-a-mka!” he moaned […].

And without waiting for an answer, he rushed into the next ward. There the darkness was dimly lighted up by a night-light and the ikon lamp; the patients, upset by the death of Mihailo, were sitting on their bedsteads: their dishevelled figures, mixed up with the shadows, looked broader, taller, and seemed to be growing bigger and bigger; on the furthest bedstead in the corner, where it was darkest, there sat the peasant moving his head and his hand.

Pashka, without noticing the doors, rushed into the smallpox ward, from there into the corridor, from the corridor he flew into a big room where monsters, with long hair and the faces of old women, were lying and sitting on the beds. Running through the women’s wing he found himself again in the corridor, saw the banisters of the staircase he knew already, and ran downstairs. There he recognized the waiting-room in which he had sat that morning, and began looking for the door into the open air.

The latch creaked, there was a whiff of cold wind, and Pashka, stumbling, ran out into the yard. He had only one thought—to run, to run! He did not know the way, but felt convinced that if he ran he would be sure to find himself at home with his mother. The sky was overcast, but there was a moon behind the clouds. Pashka ran from the steps straight forward, went around the barn and stumbled into some thick bushes; after stopping for a minute and thinking, he dashed back again to the hospital, ran around it, and stopped again undecided; behind the hospital there were white crosses.

“Ma-a-mka!” he cried, and dashed back.

He sees a light in an out-building and discovers, through a window, the doctor himself peacefully reading inside, but suddenly for some reason, Pashka collapses and passes out, and wakes up in the morning, being scolded by the doctor for his escape…. But has the operation happened? Is Pashka about to notice that he has lost an arm? Or is that grim fate still ahead of him? Chekhov doesn’t tell.

Tolstoy loved the story and read it aloud to guests.

*

Anton wrote Alexander on September 25 to ask him to go round up his fees for three stories at the Petersburg Gazette. He wanted Alexander to nudge a colleague, Burenin, about reviewing In the Twilight, which Burenin shortly thereafter did, publishing the review in New Times itself. Chekhov noted the book was selling “fairly well” in Moscow and that there would be an advertisement for it next week in the Gazette. And had Suvorin returned to the office?11 (He had, but, according to Alexander, they hadn’t yet conversed.)12

Meanwhile, Chekhov had discovered that he could knock out a play in two weeks, even with a few days off in those two weeks. There was money in plays, the way there might be money today in writing the script of a big-production movie. In Chekhov’s Russia, every performance would bring in another payday for the author. He already wrote his short stories dramatically, and his comic pieces were often simple and stagy. He knew how to control a space and fill it with interesting people talking. He had written a full-length rambling play when he was twenty. His comic skits and dialogues were quick and funny. Why couldn’t he write a successful money-making play?

He sealed himself off, and until he had proved to himself that he could do it, he seems to have told no one that he was writing Ivanov, except the contemporary he considered his literary equal, Korolenko. Korolenko came by the house to visit on September 26 or 27. It was only their second meeting. He was young, but seven years older than Chekhov. Korolenko remembered this as a business call on Chekhov to invite him to write for Northern News: “He came out of his study and held me by the arm, when I, not wanting to bother him, got ready to leave. ‘I’m actually writing and undoubtedly am going to finish writing a play,’ he said. ‘Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov… You understand? There are thousands of Ivanovs… A regular person, certainly not a hero…”13

*

Chekhov was feeling better. He wrote Maria Kiseleva on September 28 about reading reviews of In the Twilight “almost every day”; he was “as used to them as, it must be, you are already to the sound of rain.” He was proudly sending her the book.

He answered the poet Leonid Trefolev’s letter on September 30 with a denial, however, of In the Twilight being, in Trefolev’s words, worth twice its cost. Chekhov hadn’t met Trefolev but knew him by reputation and from his photo being prominent at Leykin’s and Palmin’s; and in the meanwhile, he made an offer of free medical treatment if Trefolev was ever in Moscow: “About your illness that you write, I with pleasure will take up treating you and of course I will not cure you; I take patients every day, from 12 to 3; for literary people my doors are wide open day and night. At 6 o’clock I’m always at home.”14

Chekhov’s young friend and humor-writing mentee Nikolay Ezhov later remembered dropping by Chekhov’s house unannounced one evening in late September or early October and pausing outside the ground floor window: “Chekhov was sitting alone behind the writing desk and writing something very very quickly. His pen ran across the paper. It had to be he was creating something new…”15 It could well have been Ivanov; Chekhov would soon ask Ezhov to read it. “I looked at him a long while,” writes the enamored Ezhov. “His beautiful wavy hair fell on his forehead, he steadied the pen, thought a bit, and suddenly… smiled. This smile was special, without his usual dab of irony, not humorous but tender, soft. And I understood that this was a smile of happiness—belles-lettres, creation, coming through in a fortunate style, form, phrase, and this gave him that joyful experience that only writers understand…”

However Ezhov reconstructed this pretty picture, we should appreciate his tact: “I did not want by my appearance to interfere with the work of a talented writer. I slowly redirected myself home and thought, along the way: ‘Chekhov will be a great writer! He has everything: talent and intelligence working long and hard.’ ”

PART SIX

Ivanov & Others

I failed in my attempt to write a play. It’s a pity of course. Ivanov and Lvov seemed so alive in my imagination. I’m telling you the whole truth when I say that they weren’t born in my head out of sea-foam, or from preconceived notions or intellectual presentations or by accident. They are the result of observing and studying life. They are still there in my mind and I feel I haven’t lied a bit or exaggerated an iota, and if they come out listless and blurred on paper, the fault lies not in them, but in my inability to convey my thoughts. Apparently it is too early for me to undertake playwriting.

—Letter to Suvorin1

After years of dashing off story after story and recovering from a bout of depression, Chekhov had set himself a task that would, if all went well, provide him the money so that he could slow down. At the end of September he had written Ivanov, his first major full-length play, but his hopes for it alternated with his misgivings about it. After all, Ivanov became a minor success, and he would revise it a year later. In the 1890s he resumed playwriting, having found his particular way in that line. The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard became his most famous works. In the meantime, after the flush of excitement of Ivanov’s production, he made hay and finished off the year with a series of stories that would remain popular forever after.

October 1887

“Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, full of pride and energy and enthusiasm, I worked with these hands here, and my words could move the dullest man to tears. I could weep with sorrow, and grow indignant at the sight of wrong. I could feel the glow of inspiration, and understand the beauty of romance of the silent nights which I used to watch through from evening until dawn, sitting at my worktable, and giving up my soul to dreams.”

—Ivanov

I have found myself in the midst of writing this biography sometimes reading Chekhov’s publication record like an accountant. At the end of September and the beginning of October, I worried that he certainly wasn’t writing stories.

No, my inner-artist counters, but he wrote a full-length play.

And he began writing a novel. A novel!

But then Chekhov himself looked at the accounting and realized he needed money before the play could pay, and wrote four stories that were published in the second half of October.

On the 5th of October he wrote to Ezhov: “My play’s ready. If you haven’t changed your mind to help me, then tomorrow, if you would, Tuesday, at ten o’clock in the morning. You’ll breakfast and lunch here. Be well.” The postscript: “If you won’t be here, then send.”1

Ezhov didn’t “send” and was there on the 6th: “Chekhov awaited me. On the table lay the fat notebook, clear, recopied in Chekhov’s beautiful and personal handwriting. Anton Pavlovich was silent as if in bad spirits. No one bothered us. We sat, Chekhov opposite me. I read Ivanov from beginning to end, without stopping. The reading was finished. Chekhov, dark and thoughtful, didn’t speak for a long time. Finally he spoke: ‘I’m hoping for Davydov and Kiselevsky… These artists won’t let me down.’ ”2

Ezhov doesn’t say what approving remarks he made to Chekhov about the play or those famous actors. He kept his disapproving remarks to himself, “but privately reacted ‘with amazement, since instead of the expected cheerful comedy in the Chekhov genre I found a gloomy drama crammed with depressing episodes… Ivanov seemed unconvincing.’ ”3

I myself remembered Ivanov as livelier than any of the other long plays. I remembered that I understood how Chekhov might have been amused by it and why it also could have been confusing to everyone in the audience. The translation I have read three times is by Marina Brodskaya, and she used the version Chekhov revised at the end of 1888 and was performed in 1889. The differences between the version of 1887 and Chekhov’s revision do not seem of consequence to me.

Following Ezhov, I sit down to read Ivanov from beginning to end. Envying Ezhov, I decide to imagine that Chekhov is my friend and mentor, too. I, however, will be rereading it while pretending I have never read it before.

Scene: I walk into Chekhov’s study, we shake hands, he asks about my sister, whose cough he treated last week, and he asks me to sit down. He nods to the chair at his desk. I sit and glance at the bookshelves. Am I sitting in his chair? I start to get up, I tell him he should sit in his own chair. He shakes his head and says he wants me to be comfortable. He’ll sit across from me. I notice the lamp that he has been mentioning in his September letters. It shines onto a stack of manuscripts. Start? He nods. I make a humble smile. He doesn’t smile. I try now to keep my expression blank and avoid his eyes as I read.

As a teacher, as a friend, as a writer, I know what it is to sit with someone while they read my work or I read theirs. And even though I am in Chekhov’s presence, I am a reader first of all; I zone in, fully focused on the pages, but within a few minutes, I am wondering why Ivanov seems so dull. Without opening my mouth, I start to criticize and summarize: The play reflects Ivanov’s and Chekhov’s disenchantment with women, who represent life, yet the “comedy” is that a bunch of difficult, unpleasant men know they’re bums and that they’re unworthy of the women. Anna/Sarra, the rich Jewish wife who converted to Christianity to marry Ivanov, but consequently lost her inheritance, is sympathetic but not interesting, and neither is Sasha, the young rich neighbor who is sadly in love with Ivanov. Does Chekhov not understand that his characters, untied from and unenlivened by his narration, are as dull as they think themselves to be? Should I say something?… Oh, and combined with the men’s misogyny is the anti-Semitism again! Ivanov declares: “My dear friend, you left college last year, and you are still young and brave. Being thirty-five years old I have the right to advise you. Don’t marry a Jewess or a bluestocking or a woman who is queer in any way. Choose some nice, commonplace girl without any strange and startling points in her character.”4

By the end of Act 1, the questions the unsympathetic Dr. Lvov asks Anna/Sarra are, unfortunately, the ones I am asking myself. Why am I here, wasting my time with these people?

LVOV: […] Why are you here? What have you in common with such a cold and heartless—but enough of your husband! What have you in common with these wicked and vulgar surroundings? With that eternal grumbler, the crazy and decrepit Count? With that swindler, that prince of rascals, Misha, with his fool’s face? Tell me, I say, how did you get here?

In Act 2, it seems to me that the characters are sometimes only Chekhov talking to himself. For example:

1) MARTHA [Martha is properly known as Babakina in Brodskaya’s translation]. [Aside] Heavens! This is deadly! I shall die of ennui.

2) SASHA: Oh, dear! There is something wrong with you all! You are a lot of sleepy stickin-the-muds! I have told you so a thousand times and shall always go on repeating it; there is something wrong with every one of you; something wrong, wrong, wrong!

3) SASHA: [To Ivanov] What makes you so depressed today?

IVANOV: My head aches, little Sasha, and then I feel bored.

My imagination about reading this in front of Chekhov while he observes me begins to fail me. In real life, I realize it’s evening, and I’m tired. What if I stop reading halfway through? I manage to rouse my imagination enough to picture Chekhov sighing, not saying anything though, as I clear my throat and apologize for my weariness. I ask him if he wouldn’t mind if I came back tomorrow to finish. He looks glum but nods.

When I return in my imagination the next morning, I arrive at Chekhov’s and knock and learn from a servant, a plump-faced young woman, that Anton Pavlovich is seeing a patient in his study, but that he has left instructions to lead me to his bedroom desk. I overhear the patient. She is a middle-aged woman by the sound of her voice; she goes on about a pain in her heel. She can’t put pressure on it; pain shoots from the foot into her calf. Chekhov says, “Your shoe.”

She says, “Lovely, aren’t they?”

“Would you please take off that shoe?”

I sit down at his desk in front of the manuscript and take a glance around Chekhov’s bedroom, sniffing the scent of books, tobacco, musty warmth. I sit up straight as the servant enters, bringing me a cup of tea. I thank her and resume reading.

I have been prepared for the worst, but Act 3 isn’t so bad! I occasionally smile. I wonder if it has become better because the situation now has enough context and if my expectations have been properly diminished. Still, no character is sympathetic, and the humor is dry.

In the middle of Act 3 I think: Okay, here is the play. That is, here is the internal monologue, beyond which there is no need for any of the rest of the play:

IVANOV: I am a worthless, miserable, useless man. Only a man equally miserable and suffering, as Pavel is, could love or esteem me now. Good God! How I loathe myself! How bitterly I hate my voice, my hands, my thoughts, these clothes, each step I take! How ridiculous it is, how disgusting! Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, full of pride and energy and enthusiasm. I worked with these hands here, and my words could move the dullest man to tears. I could weep with sorrow, and grow indignant at the sight of wrong. I could feel the glow of inspiration, and understand the beauty and romance of the silent nights which I used to watch through from evening until dawn, sitting at my worktable, and giving up my soul to dreams. I believed in a bright future then, and looked into it as trustfully as a child looks into its mother’s eyes. And now, oh, it is terrible! I am tired and without hope; I spend my days and nights in idleness; I have no control over my feet or brain. My estate is ruined, my woods are falling under the blows of the axe. [He weeps]

The speech, soliloquy, whatever you want to call it, goes on another… what, 300 words! It further describes Ivanov’s shame, concluding with what is lately an all too typical refrain: “I can’t, I can’t understand it; the easiest way out would be a bullet through the head!” (Yes, a bullet would be the easiest way, and in Chekhov’s revision next year, instead of Ivanov bringing down the curtain with a fatal heart attack, he does it with a shot to the head.)

As I sit at the desk, frowning over his manuscript, I wonder what my imaginary friend and mentor Chekhov is working out of his system. I go on:

IVANOV: Sarah, stop at once and go away, or else I shall say something terrible. I long to say a dreadful, cruel thing. [He shrieks] Hold your tongue, Jewess! [Brodskaya’s translation: “I’m itching to say something dreadfully insulting… (He yells) Stop it, you Yid!…”]

Why does Chekhov have Ivanov throw the anti-Semitism in her face?5

The air is still. I look over my left shoulder, and Chekhov is standing there, leaning on the door-frame. Did he see me shake my head in disappointment?

I’m to Act 4, and feel as unhappy as the critic in “Drama.” All that character did when the woman wouldn’t stop reading her boring play was smash her in the head with a paperweight!… It’s my own head I want to smash. I feign a smile at Chekhov, but inwardly wince as I read on through another of Ivanov’s speeches. This time he is addressing his fiancée, as between Acts 3 and 4 his wife has died of tuberculosis. Chekhov, smoking a cigar, sits down across from me. Everyone says he’s inscrutable, but he’s not. He knows my feelings by my expressions and my quiet sighings; I read him while he reads me. He knows I’m hating his play!

IVANOV: […] We love each other, but we shall never be married. It makes no difference how I rave and grow bitter by myself, but I have no right to drag another down with me. My melancholy robbed my wife of the last year of her life. […] Wherever I go, whether hunting or visiting, it makes no difference, I carry depression, dullness, and discontent along with me. […] When I murmur at my fate everyone who hears me is seized with the same disgust of life and begins to grumble, too. […]

Chekhov, I suspect again, was analyzing the play as he wrote it. I grumble to myself that it’s not my fault I agree with the characters’ self-assessments!

I turn over the last page and I smile.

“That bad, huh?” says Chekhov.

“No!…” Because, who am I to say? I love this guy! He is one of the greatest writers in the history of the world. In the English-speaking world, no one’s plays except Shakespeare’s are as admired and as often performed as his. Looking at my watch, I say, “Oh, my God! My wife’s expecting me—the kids… they’re supposed to call and… The play’s great, Anton Pavlovich! Thanks for letting me read it.”

Chekhov laughs. He sees me to the door and claps me on the back as I, ashamed of my cowardice, depart.

*

When Ivanov with slight revisions went into rehearsal at the end of 1888 in Petersburg, Chekhov wrote in exasperation to Suvorin: “The director sees Ivanov as a superfluous man in the Turgenev manner. Savina asks why Ivanov is such a blackguard. You write that ‘Ivanov must be given something that makes it clear why two women throw themselves at him […]’ If all three of you have understood me this way, it means my Ivanov is a failure. I must have lost my mind and written something entirely different from what I had intended.”6

All right, why shouldn’t Chekhov have erred once in a long while? In the midst of the play’s new production in Petersburg in January 1889, Chekhov reflected about the play: “I would very much have enjoyed delivering a paper to the Literary Society on where I found the idea for writing Ivanov. I would have publicly admitted my guilt. I cherished the audacious dream of summing up everything written thus far about whining, despondent people and of having my Ivanov put a stop to this sort of writing.”7

But now in October 1887, Anton wrote to Alexander to ask him if New Times could put in a notice about Ivanov in the theater chronicle.8 He told Alexander about chatting with Korolenko for three hours.

Writing to Leykin on October 7, he didn’t tell him about having written Ivanov. That was his accomplishment of the last couple of weeks, and he wanted it advertised soon, but he didn’t want Leykin to know. Instead, he pretended he hadn’t been writing anything: “You’re probably mad I’m not sending you stories. Alas, I sent them nowhere! I’m sick, then depressed, time wastes away, there’s no money.” He complimented Leykin’s recent story and did mention he had sold old stories for a book to be published by the Verner Brothers, Innocent Speeches.

Why didn’t he want Leykin to know about Ivanov? He didn’t want Leykin’s advice or he didn’t want his envy? He hadn’t told him in early 1886 about his new relationship with New Times, either. To inform Leykin about his other publishing opportunities was to tell him there would not be time to produce stories for Fragments—but that was a message he was continually trying to get across anyway. So why not fess up?

He wrote again on October 10 or 12 to Alexander, to whom he would continue to write frequently in the next two months: “Your letter is received; so as not to lie in bed and spit at the ceiling, I sit myself down at the table to answer.”9

Chekhov’s energy was often, understandably, depleted:

I am ailing and depressed, like the son of a hen. The pen falls from my hand, and I do not write at all. I am expecting bankruptcy in the immediate future. If the play doesn’t save me, then I am lost in the bloom of my years. The play may bring me 600 or 700 rubles, but not before the middle of November, and what will happen until that middle I know not. I cannot work, and everything I write turns out rubbish. My energy—fuit! […]

I am scratching a Saturday feuilleton, but merely so-so, and on an unattractive theme to me. [“The Cattle-Dealers”] will turn out bad, but still I will send it. […]

I wrote the play Ivanov unexpectedly, after a talk with Korsh. I went to bed, thought out a theme, and wrote it. I spent a fortnight on it, or, rather, ten days, for there were days in the fortnight when I did not work or wrote something else. […] It is a pity I cannot read the play to you. You are a lightminded man and have not seen much, but you are much fresher and keener-eared than all my Moscow praisers and accusers [the false-praising Ezhov and I would have to agree]. Your absence is no small loss to me.

Not only had weary, depressed Chekhov written Ivanov, he had composed, he told Alexander, a very long story:

Ask Suvorin or Burenin whether they will publish a thing of 1,500 lines. If so, I will send it, although personally I am against dailies publishing long dossiers and bringing over the train in the next number. I have a love story of 1,500 lines, not a tedious one, but no good for a serious monthly, for there figure in it a president and members of a military high court—that is, they are not Liberals. Ask them, and answer soon. On hearing from you I will make a clean copy and send it off.

Alexander replied on October 18 that “Suvorin was even amazed that you would ask about this.”10 Of course New Times would publish it. The editors of the Collected Works note that Chekhov’s long story, a novel, was never found.

Sometime after October 10, Chekhov asked his friend Vladimir Gilyarovskiy if he wanted to go to the circus with him and his brother Ivan. Chekhov enjoyed the circus a lot, more than the fictional dog Kashtanka would in his upcoming Christmas story.

Chekhov wrote Korolenko on October 17: “it seems to me that if you and I live another ten or twenty years in this world, we shall not fail to find points of contact in the future. Among the Russians who are happily writing at the present day I am the most lightminded and least serious. I am under warning; poetically speaking, I have loved my pure muse but I have not respected her. I have been unfaithful to her more than once and taken her places unfit for her. But you are serious and sound and true.”11 He also told Korolenko about Thoreau’s Walden, which was coming out in translation in an edition by New Times.12 Chekhov had interesting and intelligent reservations about Walden: “The first chapter promises a great deal; he has ideas, freshness and originality, but he is hard to read. The architecture and composition are impossible. Ideas, beautiful and ugly, light and cumbrous, are piled on top of each other, crowded together, squeezing the juice out of each other, and at any moment the pressure may make them squeal.”

On the same day, Chekhov wrote his cousin Georgy to apologize about the delay in communicating. He was busy writing “all day long” and his hand got tired. “I don’t go to the theater or on visits, so Mama and Auntie call me homebound ‘Grandpa.’ ”13 (But he had gone quite a lot to Korsh’s theater and he had just been to the circus!) Unusually, he mentioned his father: “With each year he becomes softer and kinder.” Pavel was still working as a shop employee on the other side of Moscow and usually slept at Chekhov’s brother Ivan’s. Pavel’s softening would have been information Georgy shared with his father, Anton’s Uncle Mitrofan. Anton asked about everyone’s health and set to rights all the family communications.

By the 19th, Chekhov was eager to assure Leykin: “In the last week I was fine, didn’t feel depressed and worked”;14 he would submit a story again soon, if his health remained fine. (It did and within a couple of days he sent Fragments a semi-comic doctor story.) He also mentioned, perhaps suspecting that Leykin had already found out, that he had written a four-act play for Korsh. Wondering about Leykin’s recent silence, he asked: “Isn’t there any news about the literary world?”

*

Chekhov had managed to send Petersburg Gazette “A Problem” (“Zadacha,” October 19). The problem, in a nutshell:

The other side of the door, in the study, a family council was being held. The subject under discussion was an exceedingly disagreeable and delicate one. [Twenty-five-year-old] Sasha Uskov had cashed at one of the banks a false promissory note, and it had become due for payment three days before, and now his two paternal uncles and Ivan Markovich, the brother of his dead mother, were deciding the question whether they should pay the money and save the family honor, or wash their hands of it and leave the case to go for trial.

To outsiders who have no personal interest in the matter such questions seem simple; for those who are so unfortunate as to have to decide them in earnest they are extremely difficult. The uncles had been talking for a long time, but the problem seemed no nearer decision.

Chekhov liked to remind his readers that it takes a lot of thought, information, and imagination to appreciate the dynamics of a problem. If troubling family matters look simple to us, we’re simply blind to all the circumstances.

In “A Problem,” each uncle is confident and sure of himself and persuasive. The young man is a wretch, but Chekhov seems to not be taking sides:

The maternal uncle, kind-hearted Ivan Markovich, spoke smoothly, softly, and with a tremor in his voice. He began with saying that youth has its rights and its peculiar temptations. Which of us has not been young, and who has not been led astray? To say nothing of ordinary mortals, even great men have not escaped errors and mistakes in their youth. Take, for instance, the biography of great writers. Did not every one of them gamble, drink, and draw down upon himself the anger of right-thinking people in his young days?

The family council goes on for hours, the resolution to let him go to trial breaks down and is reconsidered, and finally he is “forgiven.”

His kindly uncle gives the conditions: repentance and reformation. Sasha, forgiven, immediately proves incorrigible.

*

A detail of Chekhov’s biography that gets repeated again and again is his winning of the Pushkin Award in 1888. It’s true that’s the date of the award, but he knew this month, a year ahead of time, that he had won it. In response to Alexander’s news, which had come to Alexander from Suvorin, who had the insider Grigorovich’s knowledge of the voting, he replied on October 21:

The Pushkin Prize cannot be given to me. That’s first. Secondly, were it given to me, which I cannot believe, so many rebukes will come to me, in Moscow particularly, so many worries and perplexities will arise that even the 500 rubles won’t make up for it. I could accept the prize only if it were divided between me and Korolenko; but now, when it is still uncertain who is the better, when only ten or fifteen Petersburgians see talent in me, while all Petersburg and all Moscow see it in Korolenko, to give the prize to me would be to please a minority and to prick a majority. Don’t say this to Suvorin, for he, as far as I know, does not read Korolenko, and therefore will not understand me.15

He gave his brother details about Ivanov’s future performances and payoffs: “If the censorship should not pass it, which is doubtful, then… most likely I will not shoot myself, though it will be bitter.” He teased Alexander: “Please do my commissions without blinking. You will be superbly rewarded: the future historian will mention you in my biography: ‘He had a brother Aleksei, who ran his errands, whereby he contributed not a little to the development of his talent.’ My biographer is not obliged to know your right name, but from the signature ‘Al. Chekhov’ it will not be difficult for him to guess that your name is Aleksei.”

Alexander replied on October 23 with an account of his conversation with Suvorin, wherein he had passed along Chekhov’s wishes not to have his book entered in the Pushkin Prize contest. Suvorin told Alexander: “Don’t worry, you, I’ll write him myself. What a fellow! He wrote a play in 10 days! Truly, what a fellow!”16

Chekhov wrote Alexander again on October 24, having learned to his relief that the Pushkin Prize wouldn’t be announced until the next year. He also gave Alexander this stern advice: “Damp for children is as dangerous as hunger. Hack this on your nose and find a drier apartment.”17

You invite me to stay in your flat…. Rather! Everybody should be pleased to give shelter to a man of genius! Well, I’ll do you that favor. But one condition: cook for me soup with herbs, which you do nicely, and offer me vodka not before 11 P.M. I am not afraid of the children’s singing.

*

Chekhov wrote “Intrigues” (“Intrigi,” October 24) for Leykin. A conniving doctor plans to slander his way out of a hearing—but his face seems to be betraying him. Chekhov’s recent doctor characters have been frustrated or difficult. In Ivanov, most of the characters despise Dr. Lvov, whose moral bearing is correct but insufferable. In “Intrigues,” Dr. Shelestov may well be the most competent of doctors, but he is also a cheat. Chekhov tells the story from Shelestov’s point of view; Shelestov regards himself as superior to the doctors intriguing against him. He imagines his cool unruffled response to “a whole series of new accusations […] being leveled against me”:18

At this point, carelessly twirling a pencil or a chain, he would say that yes, in actual fact it was true that during consultations he had sometimes been known to raise his voice and attack colleagues, regardless of who was present. It was also true that once, during a consultation, in the presence of doctors and family members, he had asked the patient, “Who was the idiot who prescribed opium for you?” Rare was a consultation without incident… But why was this? The answer was simple! In these consultations he, Shelestov, was always saddled with colleagues whose knowledge left much to be desired. There were thirty-two doctors in town, most of whom knew less than a first-year medical student.

Shelestov continues imagining his unflustered, condescending self-defense: “He would go on expounding, and his supporters would applaud and clasp their hands together in exultation.” But when he is finally about to set out for the actual meeting, Shelestov loses his composure before the mirror.

Shelestov looks at his face, flies into a rage, and begins sensing that his face is plotting against him. He goes out into the hall, and as he is putting on his coat, his galoshes, and his hat, he feels that they are intriguing against him, too.

Chekhov leaves it to us to imagine how the meeting will go.

*

While he was proud of and anxious about the publication of In the Twilight, Chekhov was defensive and embarrassed about the content of and the chintzy payment he received for Innocent Speeches, which was published on October 27. He downplayed his involvement in it. While the brothers Evgeny and Mikhail Verner, the editors of The Cricket, one of the humor periodicals Chekhov used to contribute to, had asked him to select a dozen stories, which Chekhov variously described as a dozen or fifteen or a dozen and a half, Chekhov gave them eventually twenty-one stories, which he lightly edited. The Verners’ payment was only slightly more than he would receive for a typical story at New Times. Still, 150 rubles was something, rent, for example, for almost three months. The only money Chekhov seemed to pass up in these years was for his medical work.19

Even to Alexander, he disparaged the contents of Innocent Speeches: “the stories are so bad you have the right to hit me on the back of the head”; he blamed himself and the Verners for exploiting his “poverty”; he asked Alexander to put the kibosh on any request by the Verners for notice of the book in New Times. “In silence I see the greatest favor.”20 Alexander replied that in fact two of his colleagues wanted to review the book.

Despite Chekhov’s momentary embarrassment, most of the stories went into the Collected Works, which inclusion a dozen years later had to survive Chekhov’s steely criticism. Perhaps this fall he was embarrassed about exploiting his own fame—In the Twilight was very recent and popular—or about the Verners exploiting his fame, or that he was not (and never would be) a good negotiator, only receiving 150 rubles.

On the other hand, Chekhov had so many fine stories in his archives, so why not publish them while they were wanted?

*

Chekhov had pep in his step when he wrote to first reader Ezhov on October 27: “You, as the groomsman of my Ivanov, I regard it as not out of place to communicate the following: Ivanov will definitely go on at the end of November or early December.”21 Ivanov would be played by Davydov, with whom Chekhov had sat until three in the morning the night before. Davydov had told Chekhov he had done by instinct all that makes a play correct. Chekhov beamed: “From this comes the moral: ‘Don’t be shy, young people!’ ”

And so, Ezhov’s friend and mentor continued, “Of course it’s bad that you’re lazy and write little. You’re a ‘beginner’ in the full meaning of that word and ought not to forget under the fear of a death sentence that each line in the present establishes capital for the future. If now you don’t train your hand and your head to discipline and forced marches, if you don’t hurry and tune yourself, in 3–4 years it will be already too late.” He scolded him and Lazarev for not making hay: “You both work too little.” He pestered Ezhov to submit pieces to every issue of Fragments. As a sidenote, he confided: “For example, my brother Agafopod [Alexander] wrote meagerly and now already feels written out…. You know that whoever’s a little and lazy cockroach begins impotence early. I say this to you on a scientific basis.” He invited little lazy Ezhov, who was teaching outside of Moscow, to visit at Christmas. Chekhov, meanwhile, had persuaded Lazarev to start working on a play about Hamlet with him; Chekhov had started it, all Lazarev had to do was finish it.22

Lazarev wrote Ezhov about this conversation, and then years later wrote it up in a memoir:

On one of my latest meetings with him, he gave me “Hamlet, Prince of Danes.”

“Take the play with you to Kirzhach, A. S.! I began, but I’m too lazy to finish it. I’m too busy and tormented by Ivanov. Write the end, we’ll work it over together.”

I countered that I had never written a play and I was afraid I could not justify the hopes that he raised on me as a playwright.

“Nonsense, nonsense! You have to begin, my dear. Plays—they’re the bread for our brother. Write twenty plays, they’ll make you a fortune!”23

What’s compelling about this recollection is hearing Chekhov’s energetic, encouraging, irrefutable voice: his boldness about taking on projects. The joint manuscript was lost, but Lazarev’s description of the play sounds plausible and modern:

The play’s action took place behind scenes at a provincial theater at the time of rehearsing Hamlet. […] The first act began with preparing for the rehearsal. […]

The first act was supposed to end with a scandal and general confusion.

In the second act it was suggested to give a scene from “Hamlet.”

Thinking over the first act, I sketched out some combinations and a plan for the first act to the end. […] Making for myself a copy of the original Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, together with my sketches, I sent them to Chekhov […]

Chekhov replied in the middle of November with several comments and directives.

*

If one writes to a confidant about one’s mood, perhaps the mood is likely to be low? On October 27, the same day he wrote cheerfully to Ezhov, he wrote to Alexander, kvetching about Alexander not having yet sent a fee from the Petersburg Gazette; he didn’t have any money! “I’ve fallen into a depression again; I’m not working. I sit all day in my armchair looking at the ceiling. However, there’s the practice.”24 By which, did Chekhov mean that being a doctor was comparatively satisfying? Alexander invited him to come to Petersburg for a couple of months and liven up.

Chekhov’s distraction was Ivanov. Rehearsals were starting.

*

On October 29, “The Old House: A Story Told by a Houseowner” (“Stariy Dom”) was published. In this sociological tale of poverty and criminality, Chekhov is unrelenting. Surveying the rooms in the house that is about to be knocked down to be replaced by a new house, the narrator grimly notes:

The door at the end of the corridor leads to the wash-house, where by day they washed clothes and at night made an uproar and drank beer. And in that flat of three rooms everything is saturated with bacteria and bacilli. It’s not nice there. Many lodgers have died there, and I can positively assert that that flat was at some time cursed by someone, and that together with its human lodgers there was always another lodger, unseen, living in it.25

He recalls the funeral of a mother and relates the pitiful story of her family, who lived in that flat:

It seemed to me that he [the widower] himself, his children, the grandmother and Yegorich, were already marked down by that unseen being which lived with them in that flat. I am a thoroughly superstitious man, perhaps, because I am a houseowner and for forty years have had to do with lodgers. I believe if you don’t win at cards from the beginning you will go on losing to the end; when fate wants to wipe you and your family off the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its persecution, and the first misfortune is commonly only the first of a long series…. Misfortunes are like stones. One stone has only to drop from a high cliff for others to be set rolling after it.

This narrator is unusual. An older man, he likes the way he sounds: he concludes there with a nice folksy, wise summation. He writes quotably. Chekhov determinedly resisted writing fine quotable sentences. Wit and wisdom were to be suppressed in the service of description, so that only the description left its impression.

The father of the family loses his job, becomes a drunk, the family disintegrates.

Chekhov in his service as a doctor saw such lodgings; witnessing such poverty, he despaired.

*

“The Cattle-Dealers” (“Kholodnaya Krov,’ ” October 31 and November 3): Over the course of several days a father and son ride railroad cars with the cattle they’re bringing to a city. Malahin, the father, has to keep bribing railroad officials, track inspectors, everyone who has anything to do with letting the eight cattle-cars pass. He’s a drinker, but he is meticulous in teaching his son Yasha the ropes of this peculiar business.

Malahin, laying out a complaint in the midst of the frequently delayed journey, seeks to achieve as a storyteller what only an artist can give a sense of: “he wants to describe in the protocol not any separate episode but his whole journey, with all his losses and conversations with station-masters—to describe it lengthily and vindictively.”

The primary description of “his whole journey,” could Malahin have done it, is this:

The van is quite full. If one glances in through the dim light of the lantern, for the first moment the eyes receive an impression of something shapeless, monstrous, and unmistakably alive, something very much like gigantic crabs which move their claws and feelers, crowd together, and noiselessly climb up the walls to the ceiling; but if one looks more closely, horns and their shadows, long lean backs, dirty hides, tails, eyes begin to stand out in the dusk. They are cattle and their shadows. There are eight of them in the van. Some turn around and stare at the men and swing their tails. Others try to stand or lie down more comfortably. They are crowded. If one lies down the others must stand and huddle closer. No manger, no halter, no litter, not a wisp of hay….

Malahin (usually referred to as “the old man”) has to metaphorically grease the wheels to get the train moving:

“God be my judge, I have reckoned it and even jotted it down in a notebook; we have wasted thirty-four hours standing still on the journey. If you go on like this, either the cattle will die, or they won’t pay me two rubles for the meat when I do get there. It’s not traveling, but ruination.”

The guard raises his eyebrows and sighs with an air that seems to say: “All that is unhappily true!” The engine-driver sits silent, dreamily looking at the cap. From their faces one can see that they have a secret thought in common, which they do not utter, not because they want to conceal it, but because such thoughts are much better expressed by signs than by words. And the old man understands. He feels in his pocket, takes out a ten-ruble note, and without preliminary words, without any change in the tone of his voice or the expression of his face, but with the confidence and directness with which probably only Russians give and take bribes, he gives the guard the note. The latter takes it, folds it in four, and without undue haste puts it in his pocket. After that all three go out of the room, and waking the sleeping guard on the way, go on to the platform.

(The story was too long to fit into the space in that Saturday’s literary section of New Times, so its conclusion, when Malahin’s cattle’s journey ends, followed three days later.)26

At last the bullocks are sold to a dealer. Malahin hires drovers. The cattle are divided into herds, ten in each, and driven to the other end of the town. The bullocks, exhausted, go with drooping heads through the noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and last time in their lives. The tattered drovers walk after them, their heads drooping, too. They are bored…. Now and then some drover starts out of his brooding, remembers that there are cattle in front of him entrusted to his charge, and to show that he is doing his duty brings a stick down full swing on a bullock’s back. The bullock staggers with the pain, runs forward a dozen paces, and looks about him as though he were ashamed at being beaten before people.

Having read only this one story, the Russian literary world would have had to sit up straight and wonder, “Who’s this Chekhov? Whatever outhouse he emerged from, he’s a genius!” Titled “Cold Blood” in Russian, “The Cattle-Dealers” “won an accolade from the Petersburg Society for the Protection of Animals.”27

*

From the end of October to November 19, Chekhov attended four rehearsals of Ivanov.28 An actor remembered his presence at one: “I saw a mechanical toy moving across the floor at me, and I noticed Anton Pavlovich walking toward us. The other actors told me later that all of Chekhov’s pockets were packed with mechanical toys. Anton Pavlovich explained, apologizing, that he was a doctor, and that earlier that day he had some children among his patients, and that they stuffed his pockets with toys. ‘Look at this! I have too many toys…’ ” Alexandra Glama-Mesherskaya, who played Sarra, says that during rehearsals, Chekhov “never interrupted the director’s work. He never made a single remark on the actors at all. I never saw a more humble author in my life.”29

November 1887

To the question of what he would do, if he became rich, Chekhov answered with perfect seriousness: “I would write the tiniest possible stories…”

—Reminiscences1

Trust the action, not the words. In the first week of November, Chekhov and his brother Alexander began giving out copies of Innocent Speeches to friends and family.2 It was a well-designed, good-looking volume, in Chekhov’s opinion,3 and full of funny stories that had enjoyed a wide audience. A book’s publication has been known to soften an author’s view of it.

Cover of Innocent Speeches.

At Korsh’s request, he went to the theater on November 2 to answer the actors’ questions about Ivanov, and the next night he watched a rehearsal. He wrote to Leykin on November 4: “Forgive me, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich, that for so long I didn’t answer your letter. My play, of the highest expectations—that it be simple!—has so taken me and tormented me that I lost the ability to orient the time, it knocked me off my legs, and probably I’ll soon become a psycho. Writing it was not hard, but putting it on demands not only expenditures on cabs and time, but so much nervous work.”4 He complained, in a comically outraged list, about his unhappiness with Moscow, actors, Korsh, the women in Korsh’s troupe. He had wanted to take his play back, so he said, but Korsh wouldn’t let him.

Maria Kiseleva, having received his invitation to the premiere performance, wrote him on November 4: “I’m worried for you and imagine—if the play is liked and they call you up—how you will bow. Your forelock will fall on your head… Will you be embarrassed? I’m already embarrassed to death, though I desire that you are often and much called up…”5 Kiseleva’s attraction to Chekhov seems beyond latent to me. Virginia Llewellyn Smith writes that Kiseleva “took a vicarious interest in Chekhov’s flirtations. In a letter to Chekhov of 1887 [Nov. 4] she wrote: ‘The other day I dreamt of you as Dunya’s bridegroom. Your face was sad and you admitted that you didn’t want to marry, but Mama Efros commanded it… they dragged you both to the synagogue, and I was so sorry I wept…’; but, Kiseleva added, had it been real, she would have laughed and said: ‘He got what was coming to him! Serves him right!’ Chekhov in her opinion had carried the flirtation far enough to warrant Dunya’s having some claim on him: but he had not intended to commit himself to her.”6

*

The only story Chekhov published this month was “Expensive Lessons” (“Dorogie Uroki,” November 9), which is about a dull, self-deceiving twenty-six-year-old who decides he should learn French (“For a cultivated man to be ignorant of foreign languages is a great inconvenience. Vorotov became acutely conscious of it when, after taking his degree, he began upon a piece of research work”);7 Chekhov liked to make fun of himself for not knowing foreign languages. A young and pretty French-Russian woman comes to Vorotov’s house, expecting to teach a child; she agrees to teach the man, because, like Chekhov, she needs the money:

“French grammar has twenty-six letters. The first letter is called A, the second B…”

“Excuse me,” Vorotov interrupted, smiling. “I must warn you, mademoiselle, that you must change your method a little in my case. You see, I know Russian, Greek, and Latin well…. I’ve studied comparative philology, and I think we might omit Margot [a textbook] and pass straight to reading some author.”

And he explained to the French girl how grown-up people learn languages.

“A friend of mine,” he said, “wanting to learn modern languages, laid before him the French, German, and Latin gospels, and read them side by side, carefully analyzing each word, and would you believe it, he attained his object in less than a year. Let us do the same. We’ll take some author and read him.”

The French girl looked at him in perplexity. Evidently the suggestion seemed to her very naïve and ridiculous. If this strange proposal had been made to her by a child, she would certainly have been angry and have scolded it, but as he was a grown-up man and very stout and she could not scold him, she only shrugged her shoulders hardly perceptibly and said:

“As you please.”

Some of us who have tried to learn a new language after leaving school will recognize ourselves in Vorotov.

With a good-natured smile, breathing hard, he spent a quarter of an hour over the word “Mémoires,” and as much over the word de, and this wearied the young lady. She answered his questions languidly, grew confused, and evidently did not understand her pupil well, and did not attempt to understand him. Vorotov asked her questions, and at the same time kept looking at her fair hair and thinking:

“Her hair isn’t naturally curly; she curls it. It’s a strange thing! She works from morning to night, and yet she has time to curl her hair.”

After several lessons, wherein he has only learned the word “memoir,” he decides she doesn’t know what she’s doing. (Is it possible she doesn’t know what she’s doing? Or is it more likely that he’s hopeless?… I ask, unrhetorically, because I had Russian tutors who thought the same about me: “Idiot!” And my only way out was to accept my hopelessness and nevertheless slowly stumble toward being regarded by them as “very slow” or “as competent grammatically as a little boy.”) He resolves to give her a week’s pay and fire her. But when he notices that she, having guessed his intentions, is upset, and that she must really count on the money, he changes his mind. Like distracted students everywhere, he amuses himself as he can:

The lessons began again. Vorotov felt no interest in them. Realizing that he would gain nothing from the lessons, he gave the French girl liberty to do as she liked, asking her nothing and not interrupting her. She translated away as she pleased ten pages during a lesson, and he did not listen, breathed hard, and having nothing better to do, gazed at her curly head, or her soft white hands or her neck and sniffed the fragrance of her clothes.

He is smitten, but she has absolutely no interest in him. He continues to pay her for her incomprehensible, useless lessons of reading and translating to him.

Though the neat, clever, amusing, story resounds for me as a teacher and student, there does not seem to be any special or immediate biographical connection to Chekhov. He would have earned sixty rubles from the Petersburg Gazette for it. What he and “Alice,” the French teacher, needed was money, whether or not readers were paying attention to a good story.

*

He followed up on his first invitation to the Kiselevs to the November 19 premiere of Ivanov in Moscow with another, to Aleksei Kiselev, on November 10: “If you don’t come I’ll give you such a pill in the newspapers shaming you that you’ll flee to America. Important reasons for not appearing might be: a) dysentery, b) rivers overflowing the banks, c) bankruptcy, d) people’s unrest, e) doomsday and f) a visit to Babkino by the shah of Persia. I don’t recognize other reasons. Hear that? […] If Maria Vladimirovna doesn’t come, then I, first, will not give her story to Spring, and, second, I will my whole life campaign against children’s magazines.”8

He also wrote to Alexander on November 10, the day of Ivanov’s first staging in distant Saratov, to ask him to send him the payment as soon as possible for “The Cattle-Dealers.” He was out of money. He wouldn’t get paid for out-of-town performances of Ivanov until he joined (for fifteen rubles) the Society of Playwrights. (He did so on November 16.)9

Chekhov was abuzz with Ivanov and queried a confused and insecure Lazarev about how he was doing with their “vaudeville” Hamlet. They needed, he wrote Lazarev on November 15, to “pound while the iron is hot.” If all went well, the Korsh actors could begin performing it by January. Among Chekhov’s suggestions for Lazarev was that there be a “a complete jumble,” “each person has to be a character and speak in his own language,” “continuous movement,” roles for eleven actors, and “no longwindedness.” “In expectation of your quick answer, I recommend to you, kind sir, to lie down on the bed, take your brain in your hands, and partake in contemplation; after a long contemplation, sit at the table and sketch out your plan.”

On November 15 he also wrote to Leykin:

Forgive me, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich, for not sending you a story this time around. Wait a bit. My play is opening on Thursday, and as soon as that is over with, I’ll sit myself down and hack away.10

After the apology and promise, he took to testy argument:

Your lines about production of plays puzzle me. You write that the author only gets in the production’s way, makes the actors uncomfortable, and more often than not contributes only the most inane comments. Let me answer you thusly: (1) the play is the author’s property, not the actors’; (2) where the author is present, casting the play is his responsibility; (3) all my comments to date have improved the production, and they have all been put into practice, as I indicated; (4) the actors themselves ask for my comments […]

You write that Suvorin agrees with you. I’m surprised. Suvorin wrote me not long ago that I should “take my actors in hand” and advised me how to go about the in-hand-taking process.

In any case, thank you for bringing up the subject. I’ll write Suvorin and raise the question of the limits of an author’s competence in such matters.

You also write, “Why the blazes don’t you forget about your play?” An eye for an eye: “Why the hell don’t you forget about your shareholding operations?” Dropping the play means dropping my hopes for a profitable deal.

But since all this whining of mine must be getting on your nerves, let’s move on to more timely affairs.

Of those “timely affairs,” wrote Chekhov, “We have a lot to talk about.” He would be arriving in Petersburg at the end of the month. “I don’t know what to say to your remark about Davydov [the actor playing Ivanov]. Maybe you’re right [Leykin had written that Davydov wasn’t to be trusted]. My opinion about him is based not so much on my personal impression as on Suvorin’s recommendation. ‘You can trust Davydov,’ he writes.”

Leykin had to know he had been supplanted.

Opening night for Ivanov poster.

November 19 was Ivanov’s opening night. Anton reported on the action to Alexander the next day:

Well, the first performance is over. I will tell you all about it in detail. To begin with, Korsh promised me ten rehearsals, but gave me only four, of which only two could be called rehearsals, for the other two were tournaments in which messieurs les artistes exercised themselves in altercation and abuse. Davydov and Glama were the only two who knew their parts; the others trusted to the prompter and their own inner conviction.

Act One.—I am behind the stage in a small box that looks like a prison cell. My family is in a box of the benoire and is trembling. Contrary to my expectations, I am cool and am conscious of no agitation. The actors are nervous and excited, and cross themselves. The curtain goes up… the actor whose benefit night it is comes on. His uncertainty, the way that he forgets his part, and the wreath that is presented to him make the play unrecognizable to me from the first sentences. Kiselevsky, of whom I had great hopes, did not deliver a single phrase correctly—literally not a single one. He said things of his own composition. In spite of this and of the stage manager’s blunders, the first act was a great success. There were many calls.

Act Two.—A lot of people on the stage. Visitors. They don’t know their parts, make mistakes, talk nonsense. Every word cuts me like a knife in my back. But—o Muse!—this act, too, was a success. There were calls for all the actors, and I was called before the curtain twice. Congratulations and success.

Act Three.—The acting is not bad. Enormous success. I had to come before the curtain three times, and as I did so Davydov was shaking my hand, and Glama, like Manilov, was pressing my other hand to her heart. The triumph of talent and virtue.

Act Four, Scene One.—It does not go badly. Calls before the curtain again. Then a long, wearisome interval. The audience, not used to leaving their seats and going to the refreshment bar between two scenes, murmur. The curtain goes up. Fine: through the arch one can see the supper table (the wedding). The band plays flourishes. The groomsmen come out: they are drunk, and so you see they think they must behave like clowns and cut capers. The horseplay and pothouse atmosphere reduce me to despair. Then Kiselevsky comes out: it is a poetical, moving passage, but my Kiselevsky does not know his part, is drunk as a cobbler, and a short poetical dialogue is transformed into something tedious and disgusting: the public is perplexed. At the end of the play the hero dies because he cannot get over the insult he has received. The audience, grown cold and tired, does not understand this death (the actors insisted on it; I have another version). There are calls for the actors and for me. During one of the calls I hear sounds of open hissing, drowned by the clapping and stamping.

On the whole I feel tired and annoyed. It was sickening though the play had considerable success. […] Theater-goers say that they had never seen such a ferment in a theater, such universal clapping and hissing, nor heard such discussions among the audience as they saw and heard at my play. And it has never happened before at Korsh’s that the author has been called after the second act. […]11

Chekhov’s account of the performance is for me (and maybe for Ezhov) incomparably more amusing than the actual play. He asked Alexander to tell his fellow editor Burenin that as soon as the play ended he sat down to work on his next New Times short story, which he didn’t finish until December 13, “The Kiss.”

Lazarev, who couldn’t make it to the premiere of Ivanov, sent Chekhov his work on “Hamlet, Prince of Danes” on November 21.12 Ezhov, Nikolay Chekhov, and Isaac Levitan made it to the second performance of the play on November 23. Anton wrote Alexander on November 24; his report on the second night was briefer:

Well, dearest Gusev, the dust has finally settled and everything has calmed down. Here I am as usual, sitting at my desk and placidly writing stories. You can’t possibly imagine what it was like! The devil only knows what they’ve made out of so insignificant a piece of junk as my miserable little play. […]

The second performance went well […] Reading the play won’t tell you what all the excitement was about; you won’t find anything special in it.13

He asked Alexander to note the performance in New Times and congratulated him on his promotion to Suvorin’s secretary. Chekhov would be arriving in Petersburg on November 30.

Finally, he apologized: “Have I been getting on your nerves? I’ve felt like a psychopath all November. […] Keep well and forgive the psychopathy. I’m over it now. Today I’m normal.” He signed himself “Schiller Shakespearovich Goethe.”

*

On November 26 Chekhov was dealing with Lazarev’s collaboration on their play. He didn’t like it: “1) Your ‘Hamlet’ consists entirely of dialogues that don’t have organic connections. The dialogues are unthinkable. […] 5) The end of the first act is stilted. You can’t end it that way. […]… 8) I’m afraid I’m making you sick of me and you will curse me as a swine in a yarmulke… But I take comfort in the thought that fussing with vaudeville will be useful to you. You have your hands full. 9) After the play I was so tormented that I lost the ability to rightly think or to speak sensibly.”14

This was the end of their work together, and the manuscript disappeared.

Chekhov got on the train in Moscow on November 29. He wrote to his sister the next day to say he would be sending money. He was at Alexander’s dirty, stinky, stuffy apartment, and Alexander’s wife Anna was sick.

December 1887

The Lord gave you a kind and tender heart, so why not put it to good use? Write with a gentle pen and a carefree spirit. Don’t think about the wrongs that have been done you…. Be objective, take a look at everything with the eye of a good, kind man, with your own eye, I mean, and sit down and write a story or play about life in Russia—not a criticism of Russian life, simply a joyous song, the song of the Goldfinch, about Russian life and life in general. Our life comes only once, and there is no point, honestly there isn’t, in wasting it… Dear Jean, be fair for once to yourself and your talent…. Forgive everyone who has offended you, forget about them, and, I repeat, sit down and write.

—Letter to a friend1

Chekhov was free, clear of Moscow, clear of his domestic responsibilities, clear of the pressures of Ivanov. He wrote to Davydov on December 1 to thank him for his portrayal of Ivanov and to share his misgivings and pride about the play and about how it was being discussed and reviewed there in Petersburg.

He wrote to his family on December 3 about what a great time he was having, despite staying in Alexander’s filthy apartment; at least Anna was getting better and the children were well. The night before, he had had a respite from Alexander’s and had eaten and stayed at Leykin’s.

He was meeting sometimes with Korolenko and every day with Suvorin: “I feel I’m in seventh heaven.” The food, the people, the “ladies,” the encouragement for him to bring Ivanov to the capital. “How I wish I could live here always!” He would be leaving on December 15.

It was probably on December 3, when he was sitting in the Fragments office writing to his family, that he submitted “The Lion and the Sun” (“Lev i Solntse,” December 5). There is nothing final or significant about this good comic story, but it was in fact the last story Chekhov would write for Fragments until 1892. Chekhov had arrived in Petersburg and been feted, and in “The Lion and the Sun” a Persian magnate arrives in a Russian town, where he is similarly feted by a medal-hungry mayor:

It is well known that the more orders and medals you have the more you want—and the mayor had long been desirous of receiving the Persian order of The Lion and the Sun; he desired it passionately, madly. He knew very well that there was no need to fight, or to subscribe to an asylum, or to serve on committees to obtain this order; all that was needed was a favorable opportunity. And now it seemed to him that this opportunity had come.2

Like Chekhov, the mayor is not a linguist; he doesn’t understand Persian or French, but he still lays on his welcome pretty thick:

“The frontiers of Persia”—Kutsyn continued the greeting he had previously learned by heart—“are in close contact with the borders of our spacious fatherland, and therefore mutual sympathies impel me, so to speak, to express my solidarity with you.”

The illustrious Persian got up and again muttered something in a wooden tongue. Kutsyn, who knew no foreign language, shook his head to show that he did not understand.

“Well, how am I to talk to him?” he thought. “It would be a good thing to send for an interpreter at once, but it is a delicate matter, I can’t talk before witnesses. The interpreter would be chattering all over the town afterward.”

And Kutsyn tried to recall the foreign words he had picked up from the newspapers.

“I am the mayor of the town,” he muttered. “That is the lord mayor… municipalais… Vwee? Kompreney?”

He wanted to express his social position in words or in gesture, and did not know how. A picture hanging on the wall with an inscription in large letters, “The Town of Venice,” helped him out of his difficulties. He pointed with his finger at the town, then at his own head, and in that way obtained, as he imagined, the phrase: “I am the head of the town.” The Persian did not understand, but he gave a smile, and said:

“Goot, monsieur… goot….” Half-an-hour later the mayor was slapping the Persian, first on the knee and then on the shoulder […]

The mayor shows the Persian quite a good time and eventually secures himself the coveted medal.

In “A Problem,” the uncles let off their criminally inclined nephew, but in “In Trouble” (“Beda”), which Chekhov wrote for the Petersburg Gazette (December 7), an auditor who apparently innocently (at least negligently) signed off on fraudulent deals does not anticipate being charged with fraud himself. But he is charged and his life falls apart: “His conscience was clear, and he ascribed his position to mistake and misunderstanding; to his mind, it was all due to the fact that the officials and the examining magistrates were young men and inexperienced. It seemed to him that if he were to talk it over in detail and open his heart to some elderly judge, everything would go right again.”3 It doesn’t “go right again.” His bewilderment keeps him calm throughout a trial, though his insides churn. Convicted, he is exiled to Tobolsk.

Chekhov on the other hand was eating well and would have enjoyed being exiled to Petersburg. He was seemingly only socializing and writing. He made friends fast. He met a new lifelong friend Ivan Leont’ev (his pen name was Shcheglov) on December 9. Within fifteen minutes, Leont’ev recalled, “I was already conversing from the heart with Chekhov, just as if with someone I had known for ten years.”4 By the time they said goodbye that first night, “he was calling me ‘Jean’ and I was calling him ‘Antoine.’ ”

A day or two later, and within a half-hour of meeting sixty-three-year-old Aleksei Pleshcheev, the famous poet “was fully taken captive,” remembered Leont’ev, as “Chekhov quickly went into his customary philosophical-humorous mood. If someone had happened to glance in at Pleshcheev’s room then, he would have thought that two close old friends were chatting.”5

Chekhov showed Leont’ev “The Kiss” (“Potseluy”) on December 13 before submitting it to New Times, where it was published December 15. The story concerns an officer in a brigade in the countryside. Leont’ev had been an artillery captain in the late 1870s, and Chekhov wanted to know if he had got the military details right. He had.

Unusually, the time-setting of the beginning of the story, May 20, does not correspond to the issue date of “The Kiss.” Chekhov, perhaps, had had this one up his sleeve for a while or, possibly, he had freed himself of the obligation to write to the season. A reserve artillery brigade is out in the field near a remote village doing maneuvers one evening when the officers are invited by a servant to go have tea at the local estate. The officers grumble, because they had this experience the year before, being invited to an estate, but then having to spend all night listening to their host’s “anecdotes of his glorious past.”

But this landowner is different:

The General shook hands with everyone, made his apologies, and smiled, but it was evident by his face that he was by no means so delighted as their last year’s count, and that he had invited the officers simply because, in his opinion, it was a social obligation to do so. And the officers themselves, as they walked up the softly carpeted stairs, as they listened to him, felt that they had been invited to this house simply because it would have been awkward not to invite them; and at the sight of the footmen, who hastened to light the lamps in the entrance below and in the anteroom above, they began to feel as though they had brought uneasiness and discomfort into the house with them. In a house in which two sisters and their children, brothers, and neighbors were gathered together, probably on account of some family festivity, or event, how could the presence of nineteen unknown officers possibly be welcome?6

Another way that “The Kiss” is unusual is that Chekhov has decided to fill it with a lot of people. His principle for at least the last couple of years has been simplicity and limitations… two people, three, rarely more than four. Maybe Ivanov had changed his orientation about that. Or he was newly confident or eager to experiment: If Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Gogol and Pushkin could fill their pages with crowds, why couldn’t he?

“Gentlemen, there are so many of you that it is impossible to introduce you all!” said the General in a loud voice, trying to sound very cheerful. “Make each other’s acquaintance, gentlemen, without any ceremony!”

The officers—some with very serious and even stern faces, others with forced smiles, and all feeling extremely awkward—somehow made their bows and sat down to tea.

The most ill at ease of them all was Ryabovich—a little officer in spectacles, with sloping shoulders, and whiskers like a lynx’s. While some of his comrades assumed a serious expression, while others wore forced smiles, his face, his lynx-like whiskers, and spectacles seemed to say: “I am the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade!” […]

In an another unusual move, Chekhov has held off any appearance or indication of the story’s hero, until now, about four pages in. And what an unlikely hero of what the title promises to be a romantic story!

We observe the scene with the shy man’s eyes and Chekhov’s understanding:

Von Rabbek and his family skillfully drew the officers into the discussion, and meanwhile kept a sharp lookout over their glasses and mouths, to see whether all of them were drinking, whether all had enough sugar, why some one was not eating cakes or not drinking brandy. And the longer Ryabovich watched and listened, the more he was attracted by this insincere but splendidly disciplined family.

This is a story where nothing is going to happen, except by accident.

The piano struck up; the melancholy strains of a valse floated out of the wide open windows, and every one, for some reason, remembered that it was spring, a May evening. Everyone was conscious of the fragrance of roses, of lilac, and of the young leaves of the poplar.

(Was it Chekhov’s imagination that, having conjured the sounds of the piano, set off the chain of thoughts that reminded him, too, that in the story it is May, not December?)

Dancing began…. Ryabovich stood near the door among those who were not dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm around the waist of a respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the sight of all take a girl he did not know around the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the consciousness that he was timid, that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers, had deeply mortified him, but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, looking at his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful.

And now Chekhov has activated our suspicions about how the story could unfold.

When the host leads a couple of officers to the billiards room, Ryabovich tags along. He watches, grows bored, is ignored, and decides to go back and observe the dancing. He gets lost:

[…] he found himself in a little dark room which he had not seen on his way to the billiard-room. After standing there a little while, he resolutely opened the first door that met his eyes and walked into an absolutely dark room. Straight in front could be seen the crack in the doorway through which there was a gleam of vivid light; from the other side of the door came the muffled sound of a melancholy mazurka. Here, too, as in the drawing room, the windows were wide open and there was a smell of poplars, lilac and roses….

So many smells! Characters’ perception of flower-scents is often in Chekhov associated with sex:

Ryabovich stood still in hesitation…. At that moment, to his surprise, he heard hurried footsteps and the rustling of a dress, a breathless feminine voice whispered “At last!” And two soft, fragrant, unmistakably feminine arms were clasped about his neck; a warm cheek was pressed to his cheek, and simultaneously there was the sound of a kiss. But at once the bestower of the kiss uttered a faint shriek and skipped back from him, as it seemed to Ryabovich, with aversion. He, too, almost shrieked and rushed toward the gleam of light at the door….

At first, having returned to the drawing room, he is embarrassed. And then, realizing no one is looking at him or thinking of him, Chekhov gives him the gift of fulfillment:

[…] as he became convinced that people were dancing and talking as calmly as ever, he gave himself up entirely to the new sensation which he had never experienced before in his life. Something strange was happening to him…. His neck, around which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops, and the more he rubbed the place the more distinct was the chilly sensation; all over, from head to foot, he was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger…. He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to laugh aloud…. He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an “undistinguished appearance” (that was how his appearance had been described by some ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard). When Von Rabbek’s wife happened to pass by him, he gave her such a broad and friendly smile that she stood still and looked at him inquiringly.

“I like your house immensely!” he said, setting his spectacles straight.

The General’s wife smiled and said that the house had belonged to her father; then she asked whether his parents were living, whether he had long been in the army, why he was so thin, and so on…. After receiving answers to her questions, she went on, and after his conversation with her his smiles were more friendly than ever, and he thought he was surrounded by splendid people….

Are we in a Pushkin story? Or in a Tolstoy novel?

Ryabovich is sensible and it takes him only a little while to solve the situational part of the mystery of the kiss. During the dinner he then tries but cannot figure which of the women it was who accidentally kissed him. The family bids the officers goodbye.

In bed in a hut that he shares with two other officers, Ryabovich wonders more who she is. But it’s who he now is that matters:

Ryabovich pulled the bedclothes over his head, curled himself up in bed, and tried to gather together the floating images in his mind and to combine them into one whole. But nothing came of it. He soon fell asleep, and his last thought was that someone had caressed him and made him happy—that something extraordinary, foolish, but joyful and delightful, had come into his life. The thought did not leave him even in his sleep.

Everybody has an imagination. As the brigade sets out the next day, Chekhov shows us what Ryabovich can manage with his:

When it was moving along the road by the granaries, Ryabovich looked at the house on the right. The blinds were down in all the windows. Evidently the household was still asleep. The one who had kissed Ryabovich the day before was asleep, too. He tried to imagine her asleep. The wide-open windows of the bedroom, the green branches peeping in, the morning freshness, the scent of the poplars, lilac, and roses, the bed, a chair, and on it the skirts that had rustled the day before, the little slippers, the little watch on the table—all this he pictured to himself clearly and distinctly, but the features of the face, the sweet sleepy smile, just what was characteristic and important, slipped through his imagination like quicksilver through the fingers.

He is uninterested in and bored by what he actually sees around him as the brigade slowly moves on. He has seen it all before. But he has never paid attention to his imagination like this, apparently:

At first when the brigade was setting off on the march he tried to persuade himself that the incident of the kiss could only be interesting as a mysterious little adventure, that it was in reality trivial, and to think of it seriously, to say the least of it, was stupid; but now he bade farewell to logic and gave himself up to dreams…. At one moment he imagined himself in Von Rabbek’s drawing room beside a girl who was like the young lady in lilac and the fair girl in black; then he would close his eyes and see himself with another, entirely unknown girl, whose features were very vague. In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned on her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with his wife, children….

What is imagination? Is it simply making pleasing pictures? Why is it hard to maintain it and fix it as precisely as a fiction writer can?

“Brakes on!” the word of command rang out every time they went downhill.

He, too, shouted “Brakes on!” and was afraid this shout would disturb his reverie and bring him back to reality….

But now that Ryabovich has started this pleasing exercise of his imagination, it’s hard to stop! As Chekhov knows:

As they passed by some landowner’s estate Ryabovich looked over the fence into the garden. A long avenue, straight as a ruler, strewn with yellow sand and bordered with young birch-trees, met his eyes…. With the eagerness of a man given up to dreaming, he pictured to himself little feminine feet tripping along yellow sand, and quite unexpectedly had a clear vision in his imagination of the girl who had kissed him and whom he had succeeded in picturing to himself the evening before at supper. This image remained in his brain and did not desert him again.

And the gift of imagination, is it also a mixed blessing?

“All I am dreaming about now which seems to me so impossible and unearthly is really quite an ordinary thing,” thought Ryabovich, looking at the clouds of dust racing after the general’s carriage. “It’s all very ordinary, and everyone goes through it…. That general, for instance, has once been in love; now he is married and has children. Captain Vahter, too, is married and beloved, though the nape of his neck is very red and ugly and he has no waist…. Salmanov is coarse and very Tatar, but he has had a love affair that has ended in marriage…. I am the same as every one else, and I, too, shall have the same experience as every one else, sooner or later….”

And the thought that he was an ordinary person, and that his life was ordinary, delighted him and gave him courage. He pictured her and his happiness as he pleased, and put no rein on his imagination.

And the difference between what we have in our imagination and what we can describe to others—that’s the challenge and disappointment of art, the disappointment for Chekhov in what he had intended in Ivanov and what many others saw.

That evening…

[…] Ryabovich, whose head was confused from dreaming all day long, drank and said nothing. After three glasses he got a little drunk, felt weak, and had an irresistible desire to impart his new sensations to his comrades.

“A strange thing happened to me at those Von Rabbeks’,” he began, trying to put an indifferent and ironical tone into his voice. “You know I went into the billiard-room….”

He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence…. In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning. Listening to him, Lobytko, who was a great liar and consequently believed no one, looked at him sceptically and laughed. Merzlyakov twitched his eyebrows and, without removing his eyes from the Vyestnik Evropi, said:

“That’s an odd thing! How strange!… throws herself on a man’s neck, without addressing him by name…. She must be some sort of hysterical neurotic.”

No, no, no. The story is all spoiled in front of those other men. Ryabovich, possessed by and possessing imagination, feels the disappointment of an artist.7 But he restores it, privately, to himself:

In the evenings when his comrades began talking of love and women, he would listen, and draw up closer; and he wore the expression of a soldier when he hears the description of a battle in which he has taken part. And on the evenings when the officers, out on the spree with the setter—Lobytko—at their head, made Don Juan excursions to the “suburb,” and Ryabovich took part in such excursions, he always was sad, felt profoundly guilty, and inwardly begged her forgiveness….

Three months later he returns with part of the brigade to the area. He anticipates going back into the dark room in the house and something happening.

The “inner voice,” which so often deceives lovers, whispered to him for some reason that he would be sure to see her… and he was tortured by the questions, Whether she had forgotten the kiss? If the worst came to the worst, he thought, even if he did not meet her, it would be a pleasure to him merely to go through the dark room and recall the past….

He anticipates another invitation from the family. But it doesn’t come and he goes for a walk:

And everything on the near side of the river was just as it had been in May: the path, the bushes, the willows overhanging the water… but there was no sound of the brave nightingale, and no scent of poplar and fresh grass.

Which way will the story go? When did Chekhov decide with Ryabovich that believing in one’s imagination was folly?

Now that he expected nothing, the incident of the kiss, his impatience, his vague hopes and disappointment, presented themselves in a clear light. It no longer seemed to him strange that he had not seen the General’s messenger, and that he would never see the girl who had accidentally kissed him instead of some one else; on the contrary, it would have been strange if he had seen her….

The water was running, he knew not where or why, just as it did in May. In May it had flowed into the great river, from the great river into the sea; then it had risen in vapor, turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was running now before Ryabovich’s eyes again…. What for? Why?

And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovich an unintelligible, aimless jest…. And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and colorless….

When he went back to his hut he did not find one of his comrades. The orderly informed him that they had all gone to “General von Rabbek’s, who had sent a messenger on horseback to invite them….”

For an instant there was a flash of joy in Ryabovich’s heart, but he quenched it at once, got into bed, and in his wrath with his fate, as though to spite it, did not go to the General’s.

I never did like that ending.

*

Chekhov had a goodbye meal with Shcheglov, Bilibin, and Leykin on December 15 before leaving on the 8:30 P.M. train for Moscow.8

From Moscow, within the next few days, he wrote to Shcheglov:

Dear Captain! I sit here at my table and work, I see before my eyes hearth and home, but my thoughts are still in Peter.

First of all, thank you for becoming acquainted with me. Beyond that thanks for the geniality and for the books. All’s good and sweet with you: books and nerves and conversation and even the tragic laugh, which I now at home parody, but not successfully.

I send you two photo-cards: one to keep for yourself, the other give to the boyar Aleksei.

I await a photo and letter from you.

As this letter in all probability after my death will be published in a collection of my letters, I ask you to stick in some puns and sayings.9

Shcheglov refrained and left the humor as is to Chekhov.

*

“Boys” (“Mal’chiki,” December 21) may have been written while he was still in Petersburg. Or maybe he wrote it immediately after his seventeen days away and he was back at his familiar desk; on his return on December 16 he would have been greeted by his anxious and happy family. “Boys” is after all a winter holiday story about a schoolboy who within days of his return wants to leave again:

“Volodya’s come!” someone shouted in the yard.

“Master Volodya’s here!” bawled Natalya the cook, running into the dining-room. “Oh, my goodness!”

The whole Korolyov family, who had been expecting their Volodya from hour to hour, rushed to the windows. At the front door stood a wide sledge, with three white horses in a cloud of steam. The sledge was empty, for Volodya was already in the hall, untying his hood with red and chilly fingers. His school overcoat, his cap, his snowboots, and the hair on his temples were all white with frost, and his whole figure from head to foot diffused such a pleasant, fresh smell of the snow that the very sight of him made one want to shiver and say “brrr!”10

Volodya’s big surprise is that he has brought home with him for the holidays a classmate, his friend Lentilov. Everyone is delighted, except, it seems, the boys (Chekhov does not specify their age):

“Well, Christmas will soon be here,” the father said in a pleasant sing-song voice, rolling a cigarette of dark reddish tobacco. “It doesn’t seem long since the summer, when mamma was crying at your going… and here you are back again…. Time flies, my boy. Before you have time to cry out, old age is upon you. Mr. Lentilov, take some more, please help yourself! We don’t stand on ceremony!”

Volodya’s three younger sisters “noticed that Volodya, who had always been so merry and talkative, also said very little, did not smile at all, and hardly seemed to be glad to be home.”

He and his “morose” friend have ambitions: to maraud their way to California.

On his former holidays Volodya, too, had taken part in the preparations for the Christmas tree, or had been running in the yard to look at the snow mountain that the watchman and the shepherd were building. But this time Volodya and Lentilov took no notice whatever of the colored paper, and did not once go into the stable. They sat in the window and began whispering to one another; then they opened an atlas and looked carefully at a map.

“First to Perm…” Lentilov said, in an undertone, “from there to Tiumen, then Tomsk… then… then… Kamchatka. There the Samoyedes take one over Bering’s Straits in boats…. And then we are in America…. There are lots of furry animals there….”

“And California?” asked Volodya.

“California is lower down…. We’ve only to get to America and California is not far off…. And one can get a living by hunting and plunder.”

Volodya’s sisters are in awe and curious:

At night, when the boys had gone to bed, the girls crept to their bedroom door, and listened to what they were saying. Ah, what they discovered! The boys were planning to run away to America to dig for gold: they had everything ready for the journey, a pistol, two knives, biscuits, a burning glass to serve instead of matches, a compass, and four rubles in cash. They learned that the boys would have to walk some thousands of miles, and would have to fight tigers and savages on the road: then they would get gold and ivory, slay their enemies, become pirates, drink gin, and finally marry beautiful maidens, and make a plantation.

The boys interrupted each other in their excitement. Throughout the conversation, Lentilov called himself “Montehomo, the Hawk’s Claw,” and Volodya was “my pale-face brother!”

Despite tearful misgivings by Volodya, who after all sort of likes being home and feels sorry for how his mother will feel, the boys set out on Christmas Eve day. When their disappearance is noticed, the family is frantic; a search party goes out. The boys spend the night in the train station, and the police find them on Christmas Day and bring them home.

As it was published in 1887, however, Chekhov concluded the story without the boys actually leaving the house.11 Volodya is so wrought up that his sisters, overhearing his tears, begin bawling themselves and thus awaken the mother, to whom they spill the beans.12

Chekhov was glad to be home for Christmas, but he was growing up, longing to see the world, just as the boys are. Chekhov never made it to California or even America. But he did occasionally make plans to do so.

*

“Kashtanka” (“Kashtanka,” December 25) is about a little red dog (kashtan means “chestnut”) who, separated from her owner, is taken in by a “mysterious stranger” who has his own menagerie: a cat, a goose, and a pig. The stranger eventually trains Kashtanka, having dubbed her “Auntie,” to participate in his circus act. At the circus, her former owner’s son recognizes her, and she eagerly rejoins the boy and his father.

The story’s original ironical title was “In Learned Society,” a phrase that does not occur in the story; Chekhov was annoyed when Suvorin referred to it as “Kashtanka” in its run-up to book publication. Chekhov understood that the multipart story, about 5,000 words divided into four chapters, would make an attractive book for children. In its original form, “In Learned Society” was not designated as a children’s story, but for the book he was pleased to modify it to make it more so. Several years later, having written another “children’s” tale, “Whitebrow,” he commented in a letter: “I lack the ability to write for children; I write for them once every ten years. I don’t like what is known as children’s literature; I don’t recognize its validity. Children should be given only what is suitable for adults as well…. It is better and more to the point to learn to choose the correct medicine and to prescribe the correct dosage than to try to dream up some special medicine just because the patient is a child.”13

It took four years for Suvorin to start moving on the book, however, as he doubted it would have much of a sale. The usually savvy publisher was quite wonderfully wrong; it was immediately popular in 1892 (Suvorin’s own children gawked with amazement at Chekhov when he visited their home; this was the man who had created such a wonder, and they had named their own pets after the story’s animals), and “Kashtanka” is still popular now. There are several editions in Russian in print. There are two full-length Russian-language cartoons of it as well as a good live-action Soviet-era feature available on YouTube. When I taught “Kashtanka” this past semester to my Brooklyn community college students, a young woman who had grown up in Haiti told me she had read the story already and that it was her little sister’s favorite. (She was referring to the out-of-print picture book, translated and slightly adapted by Ronald Meyer, and gorgeously illustrated by Gennady Spirin.)

Between its publication in New Times and the book’s publication, Chekhov divided the four chapters into seven and added a completely new episode that increased the length by twenty percent. As regards phrasing (or “dosage” as he put it in his metaphor about children’s literature), he changed the original’s only very slightly. In a scene wherein Kashtanka’s new owner, the clown, is rehearsing the goose to pull a string attached to a pistol, he goads the bird, “Now imagine: You have a passionately beloved wife. You return home from the club and find a friend with her.”14 Chekhov changed that situation to this: “Now imagine that you are a jeweler and you sell gold and diamonds. Imagine now that you go into your shop and find thieves in it.” It is the book’s only substantial rephrasing.

The greatest and most mysterious thing that happened to “In Learned Society” when it became “Kashtanka” is Chekhov’s addition of a new episode, one of the most eerie and affecting scenes in all of his many volumes of creative work: the death of the goose Ivan Ivanych. In the original, the goose is disabled by having been stepped on by a horse during one evening’s performance. He does not die, but his injury leads to the clown substituting Kashtanka (now “Auntie”) to take the goose’s place at the performance, which then brings the dog into the coincidental view of her former owner. In the revised version, Ivan Ivanych’s death is slow and painful, and the animals react with apprehension:

When the master left and carried the light out with him, the darkness started again. It was frightening to Auntie. The goose was not crying out, but she again began to feel that in the darkness there was a stranger standing there. Most terrible of all was that it was impossible to bite this stranger, as he was invisible and formless. For some reason she thought that tonight there had to be something very bad coming for sure. Fyodor Timofeyich was also very disturbed. Auntie heard how he fussed on his mattress, yawned, and shook his head.

Somewhere outside there was a knocking at a gate, and the pig grunted in the shed. Auntie began to whine, stretched out her front paws and laid her head on them. In the knocking of the gate, in the grunting of the pig, who for some reason was not sleeping, in the darkness and quiet, she felt something as miserable and frightening as Ivan Ivanych’s cry. Everything was upset and anxious, but why? Who was this stranger that couldn’t be seen?

In 1887 Chekhov still wasn’t expressing his apprehensions of that deathly “stranger” to his friends or family. By 1892, Kashtanka’s and his own fears became more and more conscious.

I discovered the answer or an answer to something my students had asked about: If Kashtanka was kicked, cursed, and harshly pranked by the joiner Luka Aleksandrych and his son Fedyushka, and was then happy in her new environment with the clown, why does she go back to them?

I didn’t have a good answer for my students or myself except that she’s a dog, and all of us know humans who willingly, if resignedly, go back into abusive relationships and jobs. As I crawled back and forth over the story to translate it for a dual-language edition, I finally gleaned the depth of the pleasure of Kashtanka’s life at the joiner’s: “She remembered Luka Aleksandrych, his son Fedyushka, the comfortable little spot under the workbench… She remembered that in the long winter evenings when the joiner was planing or reading the newspaper aloud, Fedyushka usually played with her…” I also realized that Kashtanka’s new life of fame and applause at the circus has not actually been fun; she is overwhelmed by the trumpeting of the elephant, the shock of the light, the roar of the crowd, and is unnerved by the music.

Fame for Chekhov was, perhaps, not all that pleasurable, either.

*

“A Lady’s Story” (“Rasskaz Gospojhi N. N.,” December 25) is an oddity. Told in the first person by a “lady,” it is, for one thing, not a Christmas story. It begins:

Nine years ago Pyotr Sergeyich, the deputy prosecutor, and I were riding toward evening in hay-making time to fetch the letters from the station.15

She remembers that on their storm-threatened ride to her estate, Pyotr declared his love for her. She lived with her father and brother.

When I went to bed I lighted a candle and threw my window wide open, and an undefined feeling took possession of my soul. I remembered that I was free and healthy, that I had rank and wealth, that I was beloved; above all, that I had rank and wealth, rank and wealth, my God! how nice that was!… Then, huddling up in bed at a touch of cold which reached me from the garden with the dew, I tried to discover whether I loved Pyotr Sergeyich or not,… and fell asleep unable to reach any conclusion.

Her reminiscing voice, from the very first phrase, is off-putting. She sounds like an actor reciting lines:

And what happened afterward? Why—nothing. […] I had rank and wealth, while he was poor, and he was not even a nobleman, but only the son of a deacon and a deputy public prosecutor; we both of us—I through my youth and he for some unknown reason—thought of that wall as very high and thick […]

We don’t know Pyotr, who worked for her now deceased father, but on the basis of her reminiscences, I believe he has dodged a bullet:

I thought of the past, and all at once my shoulders began quivering, my head dropped, and I began weeping bitterly. I felt unbearably sorry for myself and for this man, and passionately longed for what had passed away and what life refused us now. And now I did not think about rank and wealth.

I broke into loud sobs, pressing my temples, and muttered:

“My God! My God! My life is wasted!”

She uses the phrase “rank and wealth” (znatna i bogata) five times in the story. Perhaps someone of “rank and wealth” spoke this very phrase and it stuck in Chekhov’s craw.

*

Anton wrote Alexander a Christmas-day letter with the usual greetings and jokes. And could Alexander pick up his latest payment?: “I don’t have any money.”16 He asked him to also buy for Anna some cookies from a Polish shop near Nevsky Prospect (“with my money”). He followed up two days later with a line-count on his stories for the Petersburg Gazette and the total fee. “Add it to the New Times fee and send it to me. […] The family and I need to eat.” The Soviet editors say that this last phrase parodied Chekhov’s father.17

On December 27, Chekhov wrote a New Year’s greeting to Leykin that contained apologies and excuses: “I am guilty before you up to my throat and sincerely recognize that. I gave you a promise, there were topics, but I couldn’t write them. Up to Christmas I didn’t sit down to write as I thought you didn’t especially need my stories. I remembered that in the editorial office at my promise to send you Christmas stories, you answered me, in front of Bilibin, somewhat inconclusively and indeterminately. Receiving your letter during the holidays, I sat down to write and wrote something so nonsensical that I was ashamed to send it. You write that it’s all the same to you what the story is, but I don’t share this view. […] In any case, this time don’t be angry and put yourself in my situation. […] In my immobility with which I work for you, for the Creator’s sake, don’t look for bad intent, don’t think that I’m shirking Fragments. No, no! Fragments is my christening font and you are my godfather.”18

He was absolutely shirking Fragments, though he and his “godfather” remained for years in occasional and friendly contact.

*

He had completed three stories for New Times this month, the last, “A Story without a Title,” was published on New Year’s Day, 1888. He wrote it, apparently, after his return from Petersburg. Had he been saving the idea of it since his trip to Holy Mountains? Or was it inspired by a joke he had heard or told? When Lazarev was visiting at Christmastime, Chekhov read “A Story without a Title” aloud to him and Ivan Chekhov.

It begins soberly, seemingly a historical Christian religious tale. If we had been listening outside the door, we might have wondered whose work it was:

In the fifth century, just as now, the sun rose every morning and every evening retired to rest. In the morning, when the first rays kissed the dew, the earth revived, the air was filled with the sounds of rapture and hope; while in the evening the same earth subsided into silence and plunged into gloomy darkness. One day was like another, one night like another. From time to time a storm-cloud raced up and there was the angry rumble of thunder, or a negligent star fell out of the sky, or a pale monk ran to tell the brotherhood that not far from the monastery he had seen a tiger—and that was all, and then each day was like the next.

The Father Superior of these monks is an organ master and a marvelously moving sermonist:

If he were moved to anger or abandoned himself to intense joy, or began speaking of something terrible or grand, then a passionate inspiration took possession of him, tears came into his flashing eyes, his face flushed, and his voice thundered, and as the monks listened to him they felt that their souls were spell-bound by his inspiration; at such marvelous, splendid moments his power over them was boundless, and if he had bidden his elders fling themselves into the sea, they would all, every one of them, have hastened to carry out his wishes.

The only such person Chekhov would have known about, or felt the similar affect of, was Tolstoy:

His music, his voice, his poetry in which he glorified God, the heavens and the earth, were a continual source of joy to the monks. It sometimes happened that through the monotony of their lives they grew weary of the trees, the flowers, the spring, the autumn, their ears were tired of the sound of the sea, and the song of the birds seemed tedious to them, but the talents of their Father Superior were as necessary to them as their daily bread.

The monks are in heavenly dull Eden:

Dozens of years passed by, and every day was like every other day, every night was like every other night. Except the birds and the wild beasts, not one soul appeared near the monastery. The nearest human habitation was far away, and to reach it from the monastery, or to reach the monastery from it, meant a journey of over seventy miles across the desert. Only men who despised life, who had renounced it, and who came to the monastery as to the grave, ventured to cross the desert.

A visitor arrives. He scolds them for isolating themselves from the hellish town. Why aren’t they there in the town trying to save lost souls?

The Father Superior… yes, this is now sounding like a long joke… is awakened by the visitor’s message and decides to go and do God’s work. He is gone three months and when he returns he is so shaken he can’t even speak to his anxious monks. After a week of silence he addresses them, furiously denouncing the vice and sin he has witnessed:

The old man, growing more and more incensed and weeping with wrath, went on to describe what he had seen. On a table in the midst of the revelers, he said, stood a sinful, half-naked woman. It was hard to imagine or to find in nature anything more lovely and fascinating. This reptile, young, long-haired, dark-skinned, with black eyes and full lips, shameless and insolent, showed her snow-white teeth and smiled as though to say: “Look how shameless, how beautiful I am.” Silk and brocade fell in lovely folds from her shoulders, but her beauty would not hide itself under her clothes, but eagerly thrust itself through the folds, like the young grass through the ground in spring. The shameless woman drank wine, sang songs, and abandoned herself to anyone who wanted her.

Then the old man, wrathfully brandishing his arms, described the horse-races, the bull-fights, the theaters, the artists’ studios where they painted naked women or molded them of clay. He spoke with inspiration, with sonorous beauty, as though he were playing on unseen chords, while the monks, petrified, greedily drank in his words and gasped with rapture….

Even if we clever listeners can guess now how the story ends, there is, as in all elaborate comic stories, pleasure in having our expectations fulfilled.

There is no dialogue. Did Chekhov read it with a special voice or voices? Did he pause when Lazarev and Ivan, his brother, laughed? Or did he, as he usually preferred, read it deadpan? It would have taken him about fifteen minutes to read it all the way through. The story concludes: “After describing all the charms of the devil, the beauty of evil, and the fascinating grace of the dreadful female form, the old man cursed the devil, turned and shut himself up in his cell…. When he came out of his cell in the morning there was not a monk left in the monastery; they had all fled to the town.” As Lazarev recounts the evening’s reading, it seems as if Chekhov immediately had his youngest brother Mikhail run the manuscript to the station to send it on the overnight train to New Times.

The Chekhov family liked parties. There are no details, however, about how he and his parents and siblings celebrated New Year’s Eve, 1887.

Conclusion

Chekhov: “Do you know for how many years I shall be read? Seven.”

“Why seven?” I asked.

“Seven and a half, then.”

—Conversation with a fellow writer1

In the years 1886 and 1887, in full command of his literary powers, Chekhov had written more short stories in total than he would in the rest of his productive life. But by 1888 he was no longer amazed or enlivened by his literary activity and success. The giddiness had worn off. “Before, I wrote the way a bird sings,” he told Grigoriy Petrov. “I sit down and write. I don’t think about how or about what. It went all by itself. I could write whenever it pleased me. Writing a sketch, a story, a skit, it didn’t cost me any trouble. Like a little lamb or colt let loose into the open, I hopped, cavorted, kicked, wagged my tail, shook my head funnily. It was fun to me and from the outside it must have appeared very funny. I myself sometimes take up the old stories, read them and laugh. I think, ‘I wrote like that.’ ”2

Though he became a celebrity in these two years, there was no fashion in Russia for interviewing popular authors. An interviewer’s challenge would have been to get Chekhov to discuss his stories or his private life. Even with friends and admirers he avoided talking or writing about himself:

One time a visitor rushed up to Chekhov and said, “Oh, my dear Chekhov, what artistic pleasure your last story gave us.”

But Chekhov immediately interrupted, “Tell me, where do you buy your herring? I will tell you where I get mine. At A’s; he has fat, delicate ones.”

Whenever someone talked to Chekhov about his works, he started talking about herring. He did not like to talk about his writings.3

How embarrassing this book would be to him. For one thing, I have tried to show how closely connected his own experiences are to his stories, which he adamantly (but disingenuously) denied; for another, I have tried to convey the “artistic pleasure” so many of his stories continue to give us. However rigorous he was about the “objectivity” of his writing, he suffered selfconsciousness about its achievement being discussed in front of him.

In 1901, Chekhov and Tolstoy became neighboring invalids in Crimea. Maxim Gorky, the new great young Russian writer of the time, was visiting them. He recalled an awkward discussion:

Tolstoy especially admired one of Chekhov’s short stories. He said, “This is like a fine lace, the embroidery of words. You know, in the old days there was a type of lace made only by young maidens, who wove all their dreams of happiness into its design.” Tolstoy spoke with tears in his eyes and with great emotion in his voice.

Chekhov had a fever that day. He sat next to us, his face covered with red spots, his head bent to one side; he was wiping his glasses. He was quiet for a long time, and then he muttered, embarrassed, “This story was published with quite a few typos in it.”4

Chekhov preserved his modesty and deflected praise from even the greatest writer in the world.

Pressed by an editor-friend for an account of his life in 1892, Chekhov feinted, joked and gave up:

You want my biography? Here it is. I was born in Taganrog in 1860. I finished my course at the Taganrog Grammar School in 1879. In 1884 I took my medical degree at Moscow University. In 1888 I was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a journey to Sakhalin across Siberia, returning by sea. In 1890 I made a tour in Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I was at a birthday party where I had a spree with V. A. Tikhonov [It was Tikhonov who had asked for this autobiographical sketch]. I began to write in 1879 in The Dragonfly. My books of collected stories are: “Motley Stories,” “In the Twilight,” “Stories,” “Gloomy People,” and a long story “The Duel.” I have sinned also in the drama line, but with moderation. I have been translated into all the languages, except the foreign. In fact, I have been translated into German. I am approved of also by the Czechs and Serbians, nor are the French shy of intimacy. The mysteries of love I conceived when I was thirteen. With my colleagues, medical as well as literary, I am on the best terms. Am a bachelor. Should like to have a pension. I practice medicine, to such a degree even that sometimes in the summer I hold postmortems, though I have not done so for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy…

But all this is nonsense. Write what you please. If you haven’t enough facts, make up with lyricism.5

In conclusion, without any lyricism, after 1887, Chekhov slowed down a lot, immediately. It was like a double-time job he had had, and then he or his body decided that in 1888 he wouldn’t or couldn’t or needn’t go so fast. His imagination never flagged, his commitment to the art of writing continuously evolved, but the delight of immediate and regular creation had had its time. He finished “The Steppe” in January and then he wrote seven more stories for New Times—and that was it for 1888. His brother Nikolay died the next year. Meanwhile, his stories became longer, usually, and his very long stories—what anybody but 19th-century Russians would call novels—extended the boundaries of fiction: full yet loose, intense but seemingly leisurely narratives. In 1890 Chekhov traveled all the way across Russia to conduct a health survey of all the prisoners and inhabitants of the Pacific coast island of Sakhalin. He came back and wrote a sociological study of that penal colony and more stories, but not a lot, most of them sterling, and eventually those comparatively dull plays. His tuberculosis was making him sicker and sicker and he spent more months of each year in the south of Russia and occasionally in Italy. He spent three years editing his collected works, fell in love with the actor Olga Knipper, and married her. He got sicker and sicker until the inevitable happened. He died in a German hospital with no grieving loved ones except his wife beside him—as he preferred. As noted in 1887’s “The Schoolmaster,” about the inadvertent funeral service for a fatally ill teacher, Chekhov revealed his own horror of being pitied: “at once on all the faces, in all the motionless eyes bent upon him, he read not the sympathy, not the commiseration which he could not endure, but something else, something soft, tender, but at the same time intensely sinister, like a terrible truth, something which in one instant turned him cold all over and filled his soul with unutterable despair.”

I wouldn’t want to embarrass or torture Chekhov with eulogies. The best model for praising him is in “Easter Eve,” where the narrator imagines the monk Ieronim listening to his late friend’s hymns: “I could fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending forward and hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase. All this that glided by the ears of the people standing by me he would have eagerly drunk in with his delicately sensitive soul, and would have been spell-bound to ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there would not have been a man happier than he in all the church.” Chekhov’s work from these two years has left me feeling that when I am in the midst of reading particular stories there has not been a person happier than I. He has given me the illusion of standing (or sitting) shoulder to shoulder with him while we watch, with his quiet incisive commentary, the fears, joys, disappointments, and ecstasies of us everyday humans.

When Chekhov turned twenty-eight in 1888, the date of this photo, he had just completed the most productive two years of his literary life.

The concluding image from “Misery” (published January 27, 1886), illustrated in 1903 by M. Efimov.

V. F. Vasil’ev’s illustration of “Agafya” (published March 15, 1886) shows the title character unable to yet cross the river to her husband after her rendezvous with Savka.

Alexander Chekhov (1855–1913), Chekhov’s oldest brother, was demonstrably intense and vulnerable in ways that Anton was not.

Anton and his brother Nikolay Chekhov (1858–1891) pose in review of the drawings that Nikolay has made to illustrate Anton’s little book of stories The Prank (1882).

Mikhail Chekhov (1865–1936), the youngest of six surviving Chekhov siblings, wrote an ever-interesting and admiring memoir of Anton.

Maria Chekhova (1863–1957), Chekhov’s lone sister, became a teacher and, after his death in 1904, the archivist of her brother’s writings.

Evgenia Chekhova (1835–1919), Chekhov’s tenderhearted, loving mother, in about 1880, after the family had moved to Moscow from Taganrog.

Pavel Chekhov (1825–1898), in a photo from about 1880, was born a serf. As Anton’s father, he was heavy-handed and rough-tongued. He believed in education and in the arts, though he never expressed in writing any appreciation of or interest in Anton’s stories or plays.

The Chekhovs in Taganrog in 1874, when Anton was fourteen. Standing: brother Ivan, Anton, brother Nikolay, brother Alexander, Uncle Mitrofan Chekhov. Sitting: brother Mikhail, sister Maria, father Pavel, mother Evgenia, Aunt Liudmila, cousin Georgy.

Chekhov, armed only with a giant quill, was well enough known as a young writer to be parodied in magazines. (Illustrator unknown.)

Nikolay Chekhov, a talented but irresponsible artist, never finished this oil painting of Anton that he began in 1884. Anton’s right ear awaits completion.

Isaac Levitan (1860–1900), one of Russia’s most renown landscape painters, was introduced to the Chekhov family by his art-school classmate Nikolay. He became particularly close to Anton and Maria. This sketch was drawn by Aleksey Stepanov in 1888.

Dmitry Grigorovich (1822–1900) is better known today as what he wasn’t, “the man who discovered Chekhov,” than for what he was, a novelist considered at the time in the same league as Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.

The artist and architect Franz Schechtel (1859-1926) was among Chekhov’s closest friends in the mid-1880s. He designed the frontispiece of Chekhov’s first big collection, Motley Stories (1886).

The wealthy right wing publisher of New Times, Aleksei Suvorin (1834–1912), opened his newspaper’s literary supplement to Chekhov’s contributions in 1886, and a few years later became Chekhov’s best friend and confidant.

The frontispiece of Motley Stories (Piostrye Rasskazy), most of which were stories originally published in Moscow and St. Petersburg humor magazines in 1884–1885, was drawn by Chekhov’s friend Franz Schechtel.

The children’s story author Maria Kiseleva (1847–1922) was Chekhov’s first writing mentee. Though she resisted much of his advice and rejected many of his opinions about literature, she cultivated and valued their friendship.

The Chekhov House Museum, located on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street in Moscow, faces a busy boulevard today.

Chekhov hesitated to post the nameplate (“Doctor A. P. Chekhov”) on the door of the house when he became overwhelmed by patients and deadlines in the fall of 1886.

Chekhov’s study as recreated in his Moscow house museum.

The primary characters of “The Dependents” (September 8, 1887): Mikhail Petrovich Zotov, the dog Lyska, the unnamed “priceless steed.” Illustration by N. Nikonov (1903).

In “Vanka,” Chekhov’s 1886 Christmas story, illustrated here by S. S. Boim, the nine-year-old, apprenticed to a shoemaker in the city, writes to his grandfather “in the village.”

The anonymous illustrator of “Enemies” lingers over the deathbed scene of Dr. Kirilov’s only son.

The composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky delighted in Chekhov’s short stories. Meeting in 1889, Tchaikovsky suggested they write an opera libretto together (this suggestion did not bear fruit).

Alexander Lazarev (1861–1927) was a humor writer (pen name Gruzinskiy) mentored by Chekhov in 1887.

The author Ivan Leont’ev (pen name, Shcheglov, nicknamed “Jean” by Chekhov) met Chekhov in St. Petersburg in December 1887, when they became fast, lifelong friends.

The November 19, 1887 opening night poster announcement of Chekhov’s Ivanov. It was performed in Moscow’s Korsh Theater’s “Barbershop Hall.”

Though embarrassed about the modest fee he collected for the second-level stories in Innocent Speeches (Nevinnye Rechi), Chekhov acknowledged the high quality of the volume’s artistic production. The book’s cover illustration is by Nikolay Chekhov; the author is “A. Chekhonte.”

The actor Olga Knipper (1868–1959) became Chekhov’s wife in 1901. She performed in Chekhov’s plays in Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater.

Chekhov in 1904, in the last photograph of him before his death in July.

Chekhov’s grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Photograph by Ross Robins (2009).

Appendix

All the stories in 1886–87 in chronological order with their translated and Russian titles.

A Chronological List of Chekhov’s Work in 1886–1887

The unbracketed first title is that given by Constance Garnett in one of her 13 volumes of translations unless noted [not in CG]; the bracketed subsequent differing titles are those by the listed translator. If the titles are nearly identical, I do not list the other translators. Sources: David Magarshack, Chekhov: A Life; the Collected Works (30-volume Soviet Edition); Wikipedia (“Anton Chekhov Bibliography”); Prospero’s Isle (“The complete (530) stories of Anton Chekhov: synopses, comments and ratings”).

DATE OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATION

RUSSIAN TITLE IN THE SOVIET

COLLECTED WORKS EDITION

The Maskers [no translation]

1 Jan 1886

Ряженые

New Year’s Great Martyrs

[not in CG] [Pimenoff, Small Fry and Other Short Stories]

4 Jan 1886

Новогодние Великомученики

Champagne: Thoughts from a New Year’s Hangover [no translation]

4 Jan 1886

Шампанское (Мысли с новогоднего похмелья)

Visiting Cards [no translation]

4 Jan 1886

Визитные Карточки

Letters [no translation]

4 Jan 1886

Письма

Art

6 Jan 1886

Художество

A Night in the Cemetery [not in CG] [Sekirin, A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense]

8 Jan 1886

Ночь на Кладбище

A Blunder [Foiled! (Pitcher, Chuckle with Chekhov)]

11 Jan 1886

Неудача

The Contest [no translation]

11 Jan 1886

Конкурс

Tips for Husbands [not in CG]

{This story was refused publication by the censor; it was not published in Russian until 30 Oct 1927 as “Boa Constrictor and Rabbit.”} [See FitzLyon and Zinovieff, The Woman in the Case and Other Stories.]

[censored 11 Jan 1886]

К Сведению Мужей

His First Appearance [not in CG] [FitzLyon and Zinovieff, The Woman in the Case and Other Stories.]

13 Jan 1886

Первый Дебют

On the Telephone [not in CG] [Pitcher, Chekhov: The Comic Stories]

19 Jan 1886

У Телефона

Children [Kids (Pitcher, Early Stories)]

20 Jan 1886

Детвора

The Biggest City [no translation]

25 Jan 1886

Самый большой город

The Discovery [no translation]

25 Jan 1886

Открытие

Misery [Anguish, Pevear and Volokhonsky, Fifty-two Stories]

27 Jan 1886

Тоска

An Upheaval [A Commotion, Pevear and Volokhonsky, Fifty-two Stories]

3 Feb 1886

Переполох

Conversation of a Drunken Man with a Sober Devil [not in CG] [Sekirin, A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense]

8 Feb 1886

Беседа пьяного с трезвым чертом

An Actor’s End

10 Feb 1886

Актерская гибель

The Requiem

15 Feb 1886

Панихида

The Stupid Frenchman [not in CG] [Lydia Razran-Stone, Chtenia: 2010]

15 Feb 1886

Глупый француз

Bliny [not in CG] [translators Robert Greenall and Mikhail Ivanov, Russian Life Magazine, Apr 1996]

19 Feb 1886

Блины

Anyuta

22 Feb 1886

Анюта

On Mortality: A Carnival Tale [not in CG] [Constantine, The Undiscovered Chekhov]

22 Feb 1886

О бренности

The Big Wig [no translation]

1 Mar 1886

Персона

Ivan Matveyich

3 Mar 1886

Иван Матвеич

The Witch

8 Mar 1886

Ведьма

Poison [no translation]

8 Mar 1886

Отрава

A Story Without an End

10 Mar 1886

Рассказ без конца

A Joke [The Little Joke, Pitcher, Early Stories]

12 Mar 1886

Шуточка

Agafya

15 Mar 1886

Агафья

My Conversation with the Postmaster [no translation]

15 Mar 1886

Мой разговор с почтмейстаром

Hydrophobia (The Wolf) [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Unknown Chekhov]

17 Mar 1886

Волк

In Paris! [no translation]

22 Mar 1886

В Париж!

Spring [not in CG] [Pevear, Fifty-two Stories]

24 Mar 1886

Весной

A Nightmare

29 Mar 1886

Кошмар

The Rook [not in CG] [translator unnamed, The Works of Anton Chekhov (1929)]

29 Mar 1886

Грач

A Lot of Paper [no translation]

29 Mar 1886

Много Бумаги

On the River [not in CG] [Chamot, Anton Chekhov: Short Stories]

31 Mar 1886

На реке

Grisha [not in CG] [Fell, Stories of Russian Life]

5 Apr 1886

Гриша

Love

7 Apr 1886

Любовь

Easter Eve

13 Apr 1886

Святою ночью

Ladies

19 Apr 1886

Дамы

Strong Impressions

21 Apr 1886

Сильные ощущения

About Women [no translation]

26 Apr 1886

О Женщинах

A Fairy Tale [no translation]

3 May 1886

Сказка: Посвящ.<ается> балбесу, хвастающему своим сотрудничеством в газетах

A Gentleman Friend [An Acquaintance, Koteliansky, The Bet and Other Stories]

3 May 1886

Знакомый мужчина

A Happy Man

5 May 1886

Счастливчик

The Privy Councillor

6 May 1886

Тайный советник

A Literary Table of Ranks [no translation]

10 May 1886

Литературная табель о рангах

A Day in the Country

19 May 1886

День за городом

In a Pension [no translation]

24 May 1886

В пансионе

At a Summer Villa

25 May 1886

На даче

Nothing to Do: A Dacha Story [no translation]

26 May 1886

От нечего делать

Tedium Vitae [not in CG] [Chamot, Anton Chekhov: Short Stories]

31 May 1886

Скука жизни

Romance with Double-Bass [not in CG] [Pitcher, Early Stories]

7 June 1886

Роман с контрабасом

List of People Having the Right to Travel Free on the Russian Railroad [no translation]

7 June 1886

Список лиц, имеющих право на бесплатный проезд по русским железным дорогам

Panic Fears

16 June 1886

Страхи

The Chemist’s Wife

21 June 1886

Аптекарша

Not Wanted

23 June 1886

Лишние люди

A Serious Step [not in CG] [Constantine, The Undiscovered Chekhov]

28 June 1886

Серьёзный шаг

The Chorus Girl

5 July 1886

Хористка

A Glossary of Terms for Young Ladies [not in CG] [Constantine, The Undiscovered Chekhov]

12 July 1886

Словотолкователь для «барышень»

The Schoolmaster

12 July 1886

Учитель

A Troublesome Visitor

14 July 1886

Беспокойный гость

A Rare Bird [no translation]

19 July 1886

Rara Avis

Other People’s Misfortune [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Unknown Chekhov]

28 July 1886

Чужая беда

Women Make Trouble [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Unknown Chekhov]

4 Aug 1886

Ты и вы

The Husband

9 Aug 1886

Муж

A Misfortune [A Calamity, Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov]

16 Aug 1886

Несчастье

A Pink Stocking

16 Aug 1886

Розовый чулок

Martyrs

18 Aug 1886

Страдальцы

The First-class Passenger

23 Aug 1886

Пассажир 1-го класса

Talent

6 Sept 1886

Талант

The Dependents

8 Sept 1886

Нахлебники

The Jeune Premier

13 Sept 1886

Первый любовник

In the Dark

15 Sept 1886

В потемках

A Trivial Incident

20 Sept 1886

Пустой случай

A Shining Character: The Story of an “Idealist” [no translation]

25 Sept 1886

Светлая личность: Рассказ «идеалиста»

Drama [no translation]

25 Sept 1886

Драма

A Tripping Tongue

27 Sept 1886

Длинный язык

The unbracketed first title is that given by Constance Garnett in one of her 13 volumes of translations unless noted [not in CG]; the bracketed subsequent differing titles are those by the listed translator. If the titles are nearly identical, I do not list the other translators. Sources: David Magarshack, Chekhov: A Life; the Collected Works (30-volume Soviet Edition); Wikipedia (“Anton Chekhov Bibliography”); Prospero’s Isle (“The complete (530) stories of Anton Chekhov: synopses, comments and ratings”).

DATE OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATION

RUSSIAN TITLE IN THE SOVIET

COLLECTED WORKS EDITION

A Trifle from Life

29 Sept 1886

Житейская мелочь

Difficult People

7 Oct 1886

Тяжелые люди

Oh, My Teeth! [no translation]

9 Oct 1886

Ах, зубы!

In the Court

11 Oct 1886

В суде

Revenge [not in CG] [Pitcher, Early Stories]

11 Oct 1886

Месть

Whining: A Letter from Far Away [no translation]

12 Oct 1886

Нытьё: Письмо издалека

Statistics [no translation]

18 Oct 1886

Статистика

The Proposal: A Story for Young Ladies [no translation]

23 Oct 1886

Предложение: Рассказ для девиц

A Peculiar Man

25 Oct 1886

Необыкновенный

My Domostroy [no translation]

26 Oct 1886

Мой Домострой

Mire

29 Oct 1886

Тина

The Lodger [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Unknown Chekhov]

1 Nov 1886

Жилец

A Bad Night: Sketches [not in CG] [Sekirin, A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense]

3 Nov 1886

Недобрая ночь: Наброски

Kalkhas (Calchas) [no translation] [adapted by Chekhov into the one-act monologue “The Swan Song,” Fell, Plays by Anton Tchekoff]

10 Nov 1886

Калхас

Dreams [Daydreams, Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov]

15 Nov 1886

Мечты

Hush!

15 Nov 1886

Тссс!

At the Mill [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov]

17 Nov 1886

На мельнице

Excellent People

22 Nov 1886

Хорошие люди

An Incident

24 Nov 1886

Событие

Dramaturge [no translation]

27 Nov 1886

Драматург

The Orator

29 Nov 1886

Оратор

The Disaster [no translation]

1 Dec 1886

Беда

Assignment [not in CG] [Sekirin, A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense]

8 Dec 1886

Заказ

A Work of Art [The Objet d’Art, Pitcher, Early Stories]

13 Dec 1886

Произведение искусства

The Anniversary [no translation]

15 Dec 1886

Юбилей

Who Was to Blame?

20 Dec 1886

Кто виноват?

On the Road

25 Dec 1886

На пути

Vanka

25 Dec 1886

Ванька

The Person: A Bit of Philosophy [no translation]

27 Dec 1886

Человек: Немножко философии

Who Was She? [not in CG] [Goldberg and Schnittkind, Nine Humorous Tales by Anton Chekhov]

27 Dec 1886

То была она!

1887

1887

1887

New Year’s Torture [no translation]

4 Jan 1887

Новогодняя пытка

Champagne (A Wayfarer’s Story)

5 Jan 1887

Шампанское (рассказ проходимца)

Frost

12 Jan 1887

Мороз

The Beggar

19 Jan 1887

Нищий

Enemies

20 Jan 1887

Враги

The Good German [not in CG] [Constantine, The Undiscovered Chekhov]

24 Jan 1887

Добрый немец

Darkness

26 Jan 1887

Темнота

Polinka

2 Feb 1887

Полинька

Drunk

9 Feb 1887

Пьяные

An Inadvertence

21 Feb 1887

Неосторожность

Verotchka

21 Feb 1887

Верочка

Shrove Tuesday

23 Feb 1887

Накануне поста

A Defenseless Creature

28 Feb 1887

Беззащитное существо

A Bad Business

2 Mar 1887

Недоброе дело

Home

7 Mar 1887

Дома

The Lottery Ticket

9 Mar 1887

Выигрышный билет

Too Early!

16 Mar 1887

Рано!

An Encounter [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov]

18 Mar 1887

Встреча

Typhus

23 Mar 1887

Тиф

Everyday Troubles

28 Mar 1887

Житейские Невзгоды

In Passion Week

30 Mar 1887

На страстной неделе

A Mystery

11 Apr 1887

Тайна

The Cossack

13 Apr 1887

Казак

The Letter

18 Apr 1887

Письмо

Boa Constrictor and Rabbit [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Unknown Chekhov]

20 Apr 1887

Удав и кролик

Spring: The Monologue of a Cat [no translation]

25 Apr 1887

Весной

The Critic [no translation]

27 Apr 1887

Критик

An Adventure

4 May 1887

Происшествие

The Examining Magistrate

11 May 1887

Следователь

Aborigines

18 May 1887

Обыватели

Volodya

1 June 1887

Володя

Happiness

6 June 1887

Счастье

Bad Weather

8 June 1887

Ненастье

A Play

13 June 1887

Драма

One of Many

15 June 1887

Один из Многих

First Aid [not in CG] [Constantine, The Undiscovered Chekhov]

22 June 1887

Скорая помощь

An Unpleasant Story

29 June 1887

Неприятная История

A Transgression

4 July 1887

Беззаконие

From the Diary of a Violent-tempered Man [Notes from the Journal of a Quick-Tempered Man, Pitcher, Early Stories]

5 July 1887

Из записок вспыльчивого человека

Uprooted

14 July 1887

Перекати-поле

A Father

20 July 1887

Отец

A Happy Ending

25 July 1887

Хороший конец

In the Coach-house

3 Aug 1887

В сарае

The Malefactors [no translation]

8 Aug 1887

Злоумышленики

Before the Eclipse [no translation]

9 Aug 1887

Перед затмением

Zinochka

10 Aug 1887

Зиночка

The Doctor

17 Aug 1887

Доктор

The Siren [not in CG] [Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov]

24 Aug 1887

Сирена

The Pipe [The Reed-Pipe, Pitcher, Early Stories; The Shepherd’s Pipe, Pevear and Volokhonsky, Fifty-Two Stories]

29 Aug 1887

Свирель

An Avenger

12 Sept 1887

Мститель

The Post

14 Sept 1887

Почта

The Wedding [no translation]

21 Sept 1887

Свадба

The Runaway

28 Sept 1887

Беглец

A Problem

19 Oct 1887

Задача

Intrigues [not in CG] [Constantine, The Undiscovered Chekhov]

24 Oct 1887

Интриги

The Old House

29 Oct 1887

Старый дом

The Cattle-Dealers

31 Oct 1887

Холодная кровь

Expensive Lessons

9 Nov 1887

Дорогие уроки

The Lion and the Sun

5 Dec 1887

Лев и Солнце

In Trouble [Misfortune, Constantine, The Undiscovered Chekhov]

7 Dec 1887

Беда

The Kiss

15 Dec 1887

Поцелуй

Boys

21 Dec 1887

Мальчики

Kashtanka

25 Dec 1887

Каштанка

A Lady’s Story

25 Dec 1887

Рассказ госпожи NN

A Story Without a Title

1 Jan 1888

Без заглавия

Acknowledgments

I thank my wife, Suzanne Carbotte, for listening, on our daily COVID-relief walks, to my excited “discoveries,” which for the most part were rediscoveries of just how exciting and interesting Chekhov’s stories are and how much they show about the amazing person he was. I could not have kept researching and writing without her patience and interest. I am most grateful to my mentor Max Schott, who read pieces and parts and sections at various times and finally the whole thing and continually offered unreasonably kind encouragement. Kia Penso, the best reader I know, helped me figure out what I was trying to do and in the final draft made many useful corrections and suggestions. Caroline Allen, John Wilson, Ross Robins, Howard Kaplan, and Matthew Flamm read drafts of sections and provided me with helpful criticism and queries. I enjoyed discussing Chekhov with my children, Max and Odette Blaisdell. I learned a lot from discussing Chekhov with my friends Jack Wolkenfeld, Elizabeth Gold, Michael Denner, Sandy Frazier, Jed Shahar, Enid Stubin, Lea Fridman, and Malik Atdadzhanov. Erin Stoodley provided help with formatting the penultimate draft. At Pegasus, Jessica Case again and again helped me understand what I was trying to show about Chekhov in his miraculous years of work. I am grateful to Drew Wesley Wheeler, Pegasus’s copy editor, who neatened many phrases and caught many errors; I also need to thank Victoria Flickering for her detection and correction of numerous mistakes and inconsistencies in spelling and style. The stray mistakes and various excesses that have slipped through are all mine. I thank Maria Fernandez for her lovely design of the pages and Meghan Jusczak for publicizing and promoting the book. My editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boris Dralyuk, who is also the finest translator from Russian that I know, pointed me toward the renowned Russian Chekhov critic Vladimir Kataev. In 2021, Fiona Hallowell and Janet Kopito at Dover Publications kindly guided my selection of Chekhov’s love stories to publication. Paul Richardson at Russian Life has for years generously given me pages to indulge in my admiration of Chekhov and has helped make my attempts at translating Chekhov’s prose more readable. I thank April Austin at the Christian Science Monitor for allowing me to put in my two cents about Chekhov translations, and to all the other editors over the decades who have allowed me to review books about Chekhov and write about his life. Finally, I owe this book to all of the previous biographers of Chekhov. Donald Rayfield and Rosamund Bartlett, today’s deans of research and writing about Chekhov, politely responded to my email queries.

About the Author

BOB BLAISDELL is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough Community College and the author of Creating Anna Karenina and Well, Mr. Mudrick Said…: A Memoir. He has reviewed books for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Russian Life, and the Christian Science Monitor, and is the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections, including a collection of Chekhov’s love stories. He lives in New York City.

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Creating Anna Karenina

Well, Mr. Mudrick Said… A Memoir

Endnotes

Introduction

1 Chapter 1 A New Order of Things. Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 219. [To Leont’ev (Shcheglov), February 22, 1888.]

2 Translated by Rosamund Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 194. [To Suvorin, October 17, 1889.]

3 This is how Vladimir B. Kataev, the editor of the Russian-language A. P. Chekhov Entsiklopediya (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2011. 14), and the editors of the Collected Works count them. More numbers from Kataev: “more than 130 pieces” in 1883, “more than 100” in 1884, “more than 130” in 1885, and only 12 (eight of them short stories) in 1888.

4 I use, for the most part, the standard transliteration of Russian names, most prominently among them Lev (rather than Leo) Tolstoy.

5 Quoted by Gleb Struve in “On Chekhov’s Craftsmanship” (472) from Yu. Sobolev’s Chekhov (Moscow, 1930).

6 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 333. [To Maxim Gorky, November 16, 1898.]

7 For free and downloadable translations by Constance Garnett of Chekhov’s stories, see the splendid “201 Stories by Anton Chekhov”: https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/ or other Internet sites. The other translators of out-of-copyright or Internet-accessible stories are listed in the bibliography, page 407.

Except for several in Garnett’s last volume, Love and Other Stories, almost all of the 201 stories she translated were the ones that Chekhov selected for his Collected Works in 1899–1901. Chekhov was choosier than most of his readers would have been, and this means that part of my project has been reading in Russian all the pieces from these years that he chose not to include in the Collected Works. Eventually I discovered that many of the stories I thought I was discovering on my own in Russian had already been translated, just not by Garnett.

8 This site, Chehov-lit.ru, has the complete Collected Works and supplementary materials. I am grateful to the original Soviet editors of the Collected Works and to the unnamed coordinators of this 21st century Russian site who made those volumes and supplements accessible.

9 L. D. Gromova and N. I. Gitovich. Letopis’ Zhizni i Tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova [Chronicle of the Life and Works of A. P. Chekhov]. Volume 1, 1860–1888. Moscow: Nasledie, 2000. Hereafter, this work will be noted as Letopis’.

10 “The worse the rows, the more the family longed for Anton, the one member of the family never to shout, hit out or weep.” Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 78.

11 Chekhov’s grandfather, Egor Chekhov, bought his and his family’s freedom from the aristocratic grandfather of Tolstoy’s late-in-life closest friend, Vladimir Chertkov. (See Rayfield’s Chekhov: A Life. [2021]. 2, 471.)

12 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 7–8.

13 Quoted in Koteliansky, Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences. xxiv.

14 In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 16.

15 Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 25.

16 The biographies agree that Chekhov and Nikolay contracted tuberculosis in 1884: “The first discharge from the lungs had occurred in 1884,” writes Dr. John Coope. “He had been attending the Moscow District Court as a part-time reporter…. Suddenly he was aware that blood was pouring into his mouth, and it seemed to be coming from his right lung every time he coughed. It continued on and off for four days. He did not seek further advice but he must have realized at once that such a symptom could have a very serious significance. There was known tuberculosis in his family.” Dr. Coope explains: “He tried to talk himself into ignoring the signs of disease that he would immediately have recognized in a patient.” (John Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 133–134.)

17 “After I finished high school, my brother paid for me to take Ladies’ Teachers Education Courses, a kind of teaching program. […] After completing the Teachers Courses, I got a job as a history and geography teacher at a private school in Moscow.” Maria Chekhova, “My Memories.” In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 19.

18 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 30.

19 Ibid., 29.

20 Alexander Chekhov. In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 12.

21 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 180.

22 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 200.

23 Translated by Sidonie K. Lederer, The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. 243. [May 11, 1899.]

24 I mention the transliterated Cyrillic title of each story, as the translated titles widely vary. This particular story, “Отрава,” was not translated by Constance Garnett, so I have translated the excerpt.

25 A. P. Chekhov. Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy i Pisem [Collected Works and Letters]. Works, Vol. 5. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka.” 1976. 9. Hereafter, his creative works (stories and plays) from the thirty-volume Soviet edition will be noted as Works.

26 A. P. Chekhov. Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy i Pisem (Collected Works and Letters). Vol. 1. Moscow. 1974. 209–210. [To Nikolay Leykin, March 4, 1886.] Hereafter, his letters, which comprise twelve volumes of the thirty-volume Soviet edition (the letters are labeled Volumes 1–12; the creative works are labeled Volumes 1–18), will be noted as Pis’ma.

27 Leykin replied, “ ‘Poison’ really turned out bad, but all the same it’s being published in No. 10. I don’t even understand why it’s called ‘Poison.’ ” Leykin later told Chekhov he had taken out “the recollection of the advocate,” and because there’s no surviving manuscript, there’s no sign of which passage that was. Despite Leykin’s harping at it (and if it truly was bad, Leykin would have squashed it), when Chekhov was sorting through all of his stories thirteen years later for his Collected Works, he had forgotten its existence or where it had been published until a bibliographer found it and brought it to his attention. Having reread it, Chekhov wrote across the top: “It doesn’t go in the Collected Works.”

28 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 55.

29 Compared to English and Americans, the Russians are prudish about publishing details about their classic authors’ sex lives. In the relatively open, pre-Putin days of the 1990s, the British scholar Donald Rayfield was able to delve into previously inaccessible Chekhov materials in Russian libraries. His biography has been translated into Russian and is frequently cited by Russian scholars.

30 John Richardson. A Life of Picasso: The Early Years, 1881–1906. New York: Random House, 1991. 3.

31 Alexander Kuprin recorded Evgenia Chekhova’s words. See Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov by Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kuprin, and I. A. Bunin. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.

32 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 85. [To Aleksei Suvorin, January 7, 1889.]

33 The single-most important book in writing this biography beyond the Collected Works edition of Chekhov’s works and letters is the Letopis’ Zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (Chronicle of the Life and Work of A. P. Chekhov), edited by L. D. Gromova and N. I. Gitovich (2000).

January 1886

1 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 300. [To Rimma Vashchuk, March 28, 1897.]

2 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 91.

3 How old was she, then? Unknown. Her brother, the artist Aleksandr Stepanovich Yanov, a friend of Chekhov’s brother Nikolay, was born in 1857. Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 572.

4 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 65. See also: “In agony, the dying sister grabbed Anton’s hand just before she passed away. Her cold handshake instilled such feelings of helplessness and guilt in Anton that he contemplated abandoning medicine altogether.” (Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. Translated by Eugene Alper. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.)

5 In Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, Michael C. Finke makes much of Chekhov’s habit of facing the camera.

6 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 113. At the age of nineteen, departing from Taganrog, on his official “ticket of leave” for study in Moscow, his height was listed as 6′1″ and his characteristics as “dark auburn hair and eyebrows, black eyes, moderate nose, mouth and chin, long unmarked face, special marks: scar on forehead under hairline.” (Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life. 1997. 69.)

7 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 367. [To Grigory Rossolimo, October 11, 1899.]

8 Works. Vol. 4. 276–278.

9 Letopis’. 216. [January 1, 1886.]

10 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 174.

11 Works. Vol. 4. 279–281.

12 (Gemorroy Dioskorovich Lodkin.)

13 Translation by Constance Garnett.

14 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 76. [To Leykin, June 25, 1884.]

15 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 56.

16 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 131. [To Ezhov, October 27, 1887.]

17 Translated by Rosamund Bartlett. Chekhov: A Life in Letters. This and the subsequent quotations from the letter to Alexander come from pages 48–51.

18 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 569.

19 Rosamund Bartlett, whose excellent translation I am quoting here, uses “Newspaper” for Gazette. Since the original Russian title of the newspaper is Gazette (“Gazeta”), and I refer to it as the Petersburg Gazette throughout, I have rendered her Newspaper as Gazette here and beyond.

20 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. Moscow: 1974. 402–403.

21 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 55. [To Alexander Chekhov, April 1883.]

22 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 10.

23 Published on the Russian Life blog for Chekhov’s 162nd birthday (January 29, 2022). When I translated it I didn’t realize that Constance Garnett had already translated “The Fiasco” perfectly well as “The Blunder.” (My blunder.)

24 There is a lively, seven-and-a-half-minute video version of “Neudacha” (Russian) starring Anna Tambova available on YouTube (youtube.com/watch?v=elK1f4mXSdk) that carries what I think Chekhov would think is an appropriate tone and energy, a full-blast farce with an impressive soundtrack (“La donne è mobile” from Rigoletto). The director switches up the buffoonery so that it’s the father rather than the mother who botches the blessing by grabbing instead of the ikon a still-life of a watermelon. There are other changes, but the basic situation, parents hoping to trap a suitor into a legal engagement, remains.

25 Translation by Peter Sekirin.

26 Chekhov rewrote “Tips for Husbands” as “Boa Constrictor and Rabbit” in the spring of 1887.

27 An illustration by Nikolay Chekhov.

28 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 405. Rosamund Bartlett explains: “Tatyana’s Day, on January 12, marked the date of the foundation of Moscow University in 1755 and the commencement of the winter vacation. It was celebrated by students, faculty and alumni with much revelry, a tradition revived in 2004.” (Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 79.)

29 Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 123.

30 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 181. [To Rozanov, January 14, 1886.]

31 This story, translated by Kathleen Cook-Horujy, can be found in Anton Chekhov: Complete Works in 5 Volumes. Vol. 2: Stories 1886–1887. Moscow: Raduga Publishers. 1988. “Complete,” however, is a misrepresentation in the series’ title. There are many stories gone missing, particularly the ones sympathetic to religious feelings.

32 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 95–96.

33 Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 9, 685.

34 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 182. [To Dyukovskiy, January 16, 1886.]

35 Ibid., 183–185. [To Bilibin, January 18, 1886.]

36 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 100. [To Bilibin, January 18, 1886.]

37 Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 123 [To Leykin, January 19, 1886.]

38 Works. Vol. 4. 511.

39 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 185. [January 19, 1886.]

40 Translation by Constance Garnett.

41 Works. Vol. 4. 321–324.

42 Ibid., 325.

43 Translation by Constance Garnett.

44 Works. Vol. 4. 544.

45 Ibid., 543.

46 Ibid., 543–544.

47 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 188. [To Leykin, January 28, 1886.]

48 Levitan proposed to Maria Chekhova at Babkino; Levitan never married. (See Laffitte. Chekhov, 1860–1904. 100.)

49 Pis’ma. 187. [To Leykin, January 28, 1886.]

50 Letopis’. 223. [End of January 1886.]

51 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 56. [To Aleksei Suvorin, February 21, 1886.]

February 1886

1 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 97–98. [To Avilova, April 29, 1892.]

2 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 46. [To Viktor Bilibin, February 1, 1886.]

3 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 72–73.

4 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 192–194. [To Alexander Chekhov, February 3, 1886.]

5 Translation by Peter Sekirin, A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense. 148–150.

6 Letopis’. 226. [By February 14, 1886.]

7 Pis’ma. 195–197. [To Bilibin, February 14, 1886.]

8 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 47. [To Bilibin, February 1, 1886.]

9 Chekhov was nervous, suggests Rosamund Bartlett, about the notoriety of New Times’ right-wing news slant: “whatever its politics, New Times was considerably more prestigious as a place to publish than The St. Petersburg Newspaper [Gazette]. And it provided him with a greater creative freedom than he had enjoyed elsewhere. […] But he also felt uneasy about contributing to a publication that was held in derision by the liberal intelligentsia, and immediately began to worry that he would be barred from publishing in literary journals as a result.” (Bartlett, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, 144.)

10 Translated by Constance Garnett.

11 The only English translation, by Lydia Razran Stone, is excellent, published in Chtenia. (Vol. 3, No. 4, 2010.)

12 Works. Vol. 4. 364.

13 Pis’ma. 200–201. [To Leykin, February 20, 1886.]

14 Letopis’. 228. [Around February 18, 1886.]

15 Laffitte. Chekhov, 1860–1904. 89.

16 Chekhov’s behavior and social activities were forever “liberal” and progressive, and yet he always sought independence from any political movement. He preferred to be free to write and act as he liked. New Times, for all its autocratic propaganda, granted him that. The biographer Michael C. Finke observes: “Chekhov’s political sentiments clearly leaned left, but they were also largely private. He addressed suffering, injustice, and governmental brutishness with a clinical eye for what he might actually do to help rather than an ideological perspective that told him what he should write and say. He did his part to create change through private philanthropy and unrecompensed medical practice, but he avoided public statements, propagandistic art, and membership in any party.” (Finke, Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings. 141–142.)

17 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 38. [To Suvorin, February 21, 1886.]

18 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 56. [To Suvorin, February 21, 1886.]

19 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 202.

20 Translation by Constance Garnett.

21 Translation by Constance Garnett.

22 Letopis’, 229–230. [February 23–24, 1886.]

March 1886

1 To Suvorin (the second letter of August 18, 1891), quoted in Richard Carter, “Anton P. Chekhov, MD (1860–1904): Dual Medical and Literary Careers.” 1557.

2 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 203–206. [To Bilibin, dated February 28, 1886, written March 1.]

3 Works. Vol. 4. 365–368.

4 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 57.

5 Letopis’. 233. [March 5, 1886.] Also, as recounted by Magarshack: “at the beginning of March he received a summons from another shopkeeper from whom Alexander and Nikolay had taken goods (presumably drinks) on credit in his name.” (Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 101–102.)

6 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 101–102. [To Leykin, March 8, 1886.]

7 Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 74.

8 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 107.

9 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 14–15.

10 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 46.

11 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 49.

12 Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 107.

13 As Garnett skipped over the last sentence of the paragraph, I quote there from Heim and Karlinsky, 50.

14 These two sentences are translated by Heim and Karlinsky (as Garnett skipped over one phrase and fractured the one after that).

15 Heim and Karlinsky’s translation of the rest of this point follows here, as Garnett skipped over it.

16 A Soviet edition deletion here, as well as a walk-over by Garnett.

17 Garnett translates “good breeding” as culture.

18 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 211. [To Leykin, March 8, 1886.]

19 Translated by Constance Garnett.

20

21 Logan Speirs, discussing the ideas expressed by Chekhov’s characters, observes: “An argument is impressive only if the person who uses it is.” (Tolstoy and Chekhov. 160.)

22 Mikhail Chekhov: “Levitan occasionally suffered from depression. During these bouts, he would either take his shotgun and leave home for a week or two or sit at home, silent and sullen and all alone.” (Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 111.)

23 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. [To Leykin, January 12, 1886.]

24 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 58–59. [To Aleksei Suvorin, May 30, 1888.]

25 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 212–214. [To Bilibin, March 11, 1886.]

26 Or as translated by Rayfield: “As a columnist you are like a lover to whom a woman says ‘You take me too tenderly… You must be rougher!’ (By the way, women are just like chickens, they like to be hit at that particular moment.)” Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 142.

27 To repeat: Chekhov’s frequent use of pauseful, slowing ellipses are often ignored by translators, but I’m going to use all of them. Chekhov had frequent chances in various editions to take them out if he didn’t after all want them, but he left them in.

28 Works. Vol. 5. 490.

29 Two other translations of that sentence: “Oh, the emotions that play across that dear face” [Miles and Pitcher]; “Oh, the play of feeling on that sweet face!” [Garnett]; theirs are better (clearer), but, in my defense, Chekhov does not use the word “feeling” or “emotions.”

30 Works. Vol. 5. 36.

31 Translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky as “Hydrophobia” in The Unknown Chekhov. 99.

32 Laffitte. Chekhov, 1860–1904. 83.

33 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 95–97.

34 Pursglove. D. V. Grigorovich: The Man Who Discovered Chekhov. 96.

35 There should be a semicolon between “the snowstorm” and “the night,” as there is no snow in summery “Agafya”; Grigorovich might be referring to the snowstorm in “The Witch.”

36 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 271. [To Suvorin, n.d., 1891.] Grigorovich’s remark stuck with Chekhov, who refuted it at least once more: “In my opinion, this express-train writing is not at all a drawback, as Grigorovich thinks, but a peculiarity of talent. One village wench will thrash around like a sturgeon for two days before she gives birth; for another, to give birth is like running into a lavatory.” [To Suvorin, November 28, 1893.] (Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 298.)

37 Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 153.

38 Translated by Constance Garnett.

39 See Letters. Vol. 1. 217.

40 Rayfield translates it this way: “I shall free myself of hack work, but it will take time.” (Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life [2021]. 154.)

41 See his letter of January 18, 1887. (Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 17.)

42 Koteliansky and Tomlinson note that Chekhov had this inscribed photograph (“From an old writer to a young talent”) on the wall of his Yalta house at the time of his death (The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 75). The inscription itself is quoted from Letopis’, 241. [April 2, 1886.]

43 Works. Vol. 5. 75.

44 Translation by Constance Garnett.

45 Translation by Constance Garnett.

46 Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 138.

April 1886

1 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 75. [To Alexander Chekhov, April 6, 1886.]

2 Letopis’. 241. [April 2, 1886.]

3 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 226. [To Bilibin, April 4, 1886.]

4 Richard Carter. “Anton P. Chekhov, MD (1860–1904): Dual Medical and Literary Careers.” 1559.

5 Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 136–137. [To Suvorin, November 13, 1891.]

6 Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 137. Michael C. Finke usefully adds Dr. Robert Coles’ similar and exasperated point on this matter: “Look, he was a doctor and he had an illness that is not silent and secret. I know as a physician what tuberculosis is. I treated some tuberculous patients many years ago in medical school, and you know when you have tuberculosis. You cough up blood. You feel chest pain. There is an illness there—we’re not talking about something spreading like cancer cells for a long time that aren’t even known. This is a tangible, physical, concrete, palpable phenomenon of the body that Chekhov knew; he knew it as a physician, and he also knew it because at that time tuberculosis was a major prevalent illness. Of course he knew it. He knew that he was dying. He knew he was dying as a human being knows.” (Finke. Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings. 133.)

7 Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 138. [Quoted from Suvorin’s diary, c. April 1897.]

8 Translated by Marian Fell.

9 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 73–76. [To Alexander Chekhov, April 6, 1886.]

10 Translated by Constance Garnett.

11 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 233–234.

12 “Being a doctor was Chekhov’s unalloyed gift to the poor and to friends and family,” writes Dr. Coope. (Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 28.)

13 Translated by Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 65.

14 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 23.

15 Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 13.

16 Laffitte. Chekhov: 1860–1904. 24. [To Suvorin, February 6, 1889.]

17 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 235. [To Leykin, April 13, 1886.]

18 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 101–102. [To Leykin, April 13, 1886.]

19 Letopis’. 245. [April 13, 1886.]

20 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 238. [To Leykin, April 19, 1886.]

21 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 154.

22 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 40.

23 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 153.

24 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 64. [To Leykin, January 1883.]

25 Ibid., 66. [To Leykin, April 24, 1885 and April 18, 1885.]

26 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 58.

27 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 67. [From Leykin to Chekhov, May 19, 1885.]

28 Ibid., 68. [To Suvorin, November 3, 1888.]

29 Translated by Constance Garnett.

30 Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 149.

31 Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 102.

32 Chekhov would repeat this line in an August 1887 letter to his brother Alexander.

33 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 238–239. [To Mikhail Chekhov, April 25, 1886.]

34 Ibid., 241. [To Maria Chekhova, May 6, 1886.]

35 Unpublished as yet. Editorial director Rosamund Bartlett’s complete edition of the previously untranslated earliest stories is in the hands of a publisher as of May 2022. (Personal communication.)

May 1886

1 Translation by Marina Brodskaya. Five Plays. 85.

2 Letopis’. 248. [May 3, 1886.]

3 Ibid., [May 6, 1886.]

4 Translated by Constance Garnett.

5 Letters, Vol. 1. 241–242. [To Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886.]

6 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 129.

7 Works. Vol. 5. 632.

8 Letopis’. 249. [May 11 or 12, 1886.]

9 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 85. [To Leykin, April 28, 1885.]

10 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 243. [To Leykin, May 24, 1886.]

11 In Cyrillic: A.П. Чехов—“На даче.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YcqKHUpRN4&t=94s.

12 Titled “Out of Sheer Boredom” and translated by April FitzLyon and Kyril Zinovieff. 107.

13 Translated by FitzLyon and Zinovieff. 111. “ ‘Nature herself,’ Mikhail writes, describing Chekhov’s life at Babkino, ‘provided Chekhov with innumerable subjects and purely Babkino stories emerged from his pen. The moonlit garden in ‘Verochka’ with the wisps of mist floating through it is the Babkino garden…. ‘The Witch’ was suggested by the lonely church and its caretaker’s lodge near the highway in the big Babkino forest. In almost all his stories of that period, some traces of the Babkino landscape or some figure from Babkino itself or from the neighboring villages can be detected.” (Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 87–88.)

14 The translators FitzLyon and Zinovieff entitled the story “Taedium Vitae” in The Woman in the Case and Other Stories. London: John Calder, 1913. 149–162. (The translators spell the estate name as Jenino. Otherwise I have left their words as they are.)

15 There’s a reproduction of the handwritten manuscript in the Russian edition with Chekhov’s note on it. Works. Vol. 5. 167.

16 The only discussion in English that I have found about it is Gitit Shimon’s excellent “Old Age as a Reflection to Everyday Life: A Deliberation on Two Stories by Anton Chekhov,” on her website: Things Chekhov Never Told O. Henry. http://www.chekhov-ohenry.com/old-age-as-a-reflection-to-everydays-life-a-deliberation-on-two-stories-by-anton-chekhov/?lang=en.

June 1886

1 Quoted in Gleb Struve. “On Chekhov’s Craftsmanship.” (Boris Pasternak. Dr. Zhivago. New York: Pantheon, 1958. 285.)

2 Letopis’. 252. [June 1 or 2, 1886.]

3 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 248. [Letter to Leykin from Nikolay Chekhov, not earlier than June 5, 1886.]

4 “I write under the most abominable conditions. In front of me sits my nonliterary work drumming away at my conscience. The child of a visiting relative is screaming in the next room. Nearby my father is reading aloud to my mother from ‘The Sealed Angel’ [Leskov] and someone has wound up the musical box and I can hear strains of La Belle Helene. It makes me want to flee into the country. You can hardly imagine more difficult conditions for a writer. My bed is taken by a visiting relative who comes along now to ask my medical advice. ‘My daughter must have colic to make her scream like that.’ I have the misfortune of being a medical student and everyone thinks they can come and have a little chat about medicine. And when they are tired of medicine they want to talk about literature.” Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 24–25. [To Leykin, August 1883.]

5 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 283. [To Ivan Leont’ev (Shcheglov), March 22, 1890.]

6 Quoted in Chekhov i Evrei (Chekhov and the Jews) by Mark Ural’skiy. 307–308.

7 Translated by Constance Garnett.

8 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 1952. 88.

9 Translated by Constance Garnett.

10 Translated by Constance Garnett.

11 Translated by Peter Constantine.

12 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 249–251. [To Leykin, June 24, 1886.]

13 Ural’skiy. Chekhov i Evrei. n.p.

14 According to the Soviet editors of the Collected Works, Kiseleva was born “about 1859” (Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 544). According to Rosamund Bartlett, Kiseleva was born in 1859 (A Life in Letters, lvi). Donald Rayfield (2021), having little patience for Kiseleva, calls her a “prude” (115) and accepts her birth-year as 1847. Ernest Simmons, who also never met her, says, “She was a beautiful, vivacious, strong-minded woman” (83). In Chekhov. Dokumenty. Fotografii. (Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1984), her birth year is given as “about 1850.” The photo that Vladimir Kataev uses of Maria Kiseleva in the A. P. Chekhov Entsiklopediya (383) is labeled in A. P. Chekhov v Portretakh, Illyustratsiyakh, Dokumentakh as Sasha Kiseleva, Maria’s daughter, in the 1890s. (A. P. Chekhov v Portretakh, Illyustratsiyakh, Dokumentakh. Edited by E. M. Prokof’eva. Leningrad. 1957. 102.) Kataev’s Chekhov encyclopedia sets her birth in 1847, in accordance with the “Russian Writers” reference series (Gitovich, Russkie Pisateli, 1800–1917). There are thirty-five known letters from Chekhov to her; thirty-one from her to him…. Tchaikovsky wrote her a letter, in verse!, in 1876 [http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Letter_460]. She was the only child from her father’s first marriage. Her mother died. Her father remarried in 1866…. Mikhail Chekhov says Kiseleva’s stepmother was jealous of her beauty. So, 1847 makes sense.

July 1886

1 Sergei Yakovlev, “Memories of A. P. Chekhov,” in Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 22.

2 Translated by Constance Garnett.

3 Kenneth Branagh’s reading and performance of the story (translation by Garnett) is superb. Read/hear In the Ravine and Other Stories (CD). Then compare, if you will, two Russian-language very short film versions of the story. The first one is as dreary as could be, with nothing of Chekhov’s spirit. The second, bawdy, loud, over-the-top, would have pleased him. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hN1tX3J6Sg&t=631s

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9EbtcYGD2k

4 Letopis’. 257. [July 5, 1886.]

5 Ibid., 257. [July 8, 1886.]

6 Translated by Constance Garnett.

7 Finke. Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings. 193.

8 Translated by Constance Garnett.

9 Translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.

10 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 254–255. [To Leykin, July 30, 1886.]

August 1886

1 Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics, 65. [To Lidia Avilova, October 6, 1897.]

2 Translated by Constance Garnett.

3 Cited by Armin Arnold in “D. H. Lawrence, the Russians, and Giovanni Verga,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1965). Letter to Rhys Davies in Collected Letters II. 1109.

4 Translated by Thomas Marullo. About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony by Ivan Bunin. xxx. [To Suvorin, July 24, 1891.]

5 Translated by Constance Garnett.

6 I made a few minor emendations to Garnett’s translation in a new edition of Chekhov’s love stories, The Lady with the Dog and Other Love Stories (Dover, 2021), and I repeat one here: I changed Garnett’s “making love to” to “wooing” to prevent misunderstandings by my fellow 21st-century Americans.

7 Finke, in Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings: “Rayfield’s 1997 biography of Chekhov, where every ambiguous remark in letters to or from Chekhov is interpreted as evidence of a liaison.” 214.

8 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 11.

9 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 39.

10 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 256–257. [To Leykin, August 20, 1886.]

11 Translated by Constance Garnett.

12 Letopis’. 261. [August 28–30, 1886.]

13 Ibid. [August 25, 1886.]

14 Translated by Constance Garnett.

Part 3: At Home with Family and Fame

1 Pis’ma. Vol.1. 255. [Letter to Leykin, July 30, 1886.]

2 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 107.

3 Here is one remark, from Yuriy Sobolev’s “Tchekhov’s Creative Method,” though I have been unable to date the letter: “ ‘It is pleasanter to read than to write,’ he wrote to Suvorin. ‘I think that if I could live another forty years and read, read, read, and learn to write with talent, that is, concisely—at the end of the forty years I would fire on you all from so huge a canon that the heavens would shake. But now I am but a Lilliputian, like the rest.’ ” (In Koteliansky’s Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences. 23.)

4 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 108.

5 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 107.

6 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 150.

7 Ibid.

September 1886

1 Personal correspondence. March 19, 2021.

2 Translation by Constance Garnett.

3 Works. Vol. 5. 312.

4 Translation by Constance Garnett.

5 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 259–260. [To Leykin, September 20, 1886.]

6 Letopis’. 264. [September 27, 1886.]

7 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 265–266. [To Leykin, September 30, 1886.]

8 Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik, “Young Years”: “He was constantly teasing me, but all of it was in a very friendly way, and he always made me laugh. I knew that Anton Pavlovich only teased people whom he liked.” In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 67.

9 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 260–262. [To Kiseleva, September 21, 1886.]

10 Translation by Constance Garnett. Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends. 48. [To Kiseleva, September 21, 1886.]

11 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 260–262.

12 Translated by Constance Garnett.

13 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 260–262.

14 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 206.

15 There are thirty-five known letters from Chekhov to Kiseleva, and thirty-one from her to him. Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 544.

16 Translated by Rosamund Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 71–73.

17 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 264.

18 Letopis’. 265. [October 1, 1886.]

October 1886

1 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. [To Leont’ev (Shcheglov), January 22, 1888.]

2 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 206. [To Shavrova, September 16, 1891.]

3 Translated by Constance Garnett.

4 Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 328.

5 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 98. [To Georgy Chekhov, June 23,1887.]

6 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 15. [To Alexander Chekhov, January 2, 1889.]

7 In A. P. Chekhov: Entsiklopediya. Edited by V. B. Kataev. 196.

8 Works. Vol. 5. 573.

9 Ibid., 340.

10 Translated by Constance Garnett.

11 A pood is a Russian farming unit of weight of approximately thirty-six pounds.

12 Works. Vol. 5. 353.

13 Translated by Constance Garnett.

14 Pis’ma. 456.

15 Ibid., 266. [To Leykin, October 7, 1886.]

16 Letopis’. 267. [October 12–13, 1886.]

17 Pis’ma. 267. [To Schechtel, October 19, 1886.]

18 Chekhov uses the unusual word khapanniy (хапанный).

19 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 269–271. [Letter to Kiseleva, Oct. 29, 1886.]

20 Works. Vol. 5. 691.

21 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 51.

22 As Constance Garnett renders her name.

23 Translated by Constance Garnett.

24 I thank Donald Rayfield for providing me with the link.

25 Pis’ma. 271.

26 Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 125.

27 Chekhov i Evrei (Chekhov and the Jews) by Mark Ural’skiy. In “From Susanna to Sarra: Chekhov in 1886–1887,” Helena Tolstoy writes most groundedly and most thoroughly about Efros and Chekhov, and she makes the same kind of disappointed observations I have been inclined to make. His relationship with her over the year is the only time I see Chekhov where he seems like any young man prone to defensiveness and self-justification and pettiness. He was smitten but got cold feet about her. He could have married her. She was well off (but not rich, says Rayfield), she was attractive—but he called her names and teased her and wrote other people about her as if he didn’t really like her. The stories that seem to reveal his feelings and experiences about her are “The Witch,” “The Joke,” and indeed “Mire.” Helena Tolstoy calls him out about the differences between Susanna of “Mire” and Efros, that such differences were his disingenuous way to plausibly deny it was about her—but everyone who knew her and him recognized her in the descriptions of her looks and scent and wiriness. Helena Tolstoy explains how he tried to make up for his rudeness and meanness to Efros. She is convincing. See also Leonid Livak: “Chekhov’s correspondence attests to the consistent function of ‘the Jews’ in his imagination as a negative marker for a wide range of phenomena. This function exists quite independently from the writer’s own experience of dealing with individuals of Jewish origin and is most probably conditioned by the unselfconscious Judeophobia of the Christian milieu in Chekhov’s native Taganrog.” (The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature. 23.)

28 Letopis’. 269. [October 29, 1886.]

29 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 272. [To Leykin, October 31 or November 1, 1886.]

November 1886

1 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 273. [To Menshikov, January 28, 1900.]

2 Works. Vol. 5. 388.

3 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. [To Leykin, November 6, 1886.]

4 Translated by Constance Garnett.

5 Translated by A. E. Chamot. 139–142.

6 Translated by Constance Garnett.

7 Works. 589. In “Tchekhov’s Creative Method,” Yuriy Sobolev recounts: “ ‘Good God!’ his friends used to say indignantly, ‘his manuscripts should be taken away from him. Otherwise he will reduce his stories only to this: that they were young, fell in love, then married and were unhappy.’ ” In Koteliansky, Reminiscences. 21–22.

8 Letopis’. 271. [November 21, 1886.]

9 Translated by Constance Garnett.

10 Translated by Constance Garnett.

11 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 154.

12 Pis’ma. 278. [To Kiseleva, December 13, 1886.]

December 1886

1 Nina Drozdova, “Memories of Chekhov.” In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 63.

2 Works. Vol. 5. 439.

3 Letopis’. 273. [December 5, 1886.]

4 Translated by Constance Garnett.

5 Alexander Kuprin recorded this in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. 94.

6 Zakhar Pichugin. In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 27–28.

7 “Excellent People.” Translated by Constance Garnett.

8 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 204.

9 A. B. Goldenweizer. Talks with Tolstoy. 96.

10 Works. Vol. 5. 440–446.

11 Peter Sekirin, in A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense. 158.

12 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 107.

13 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 108.

14 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 204.

15 Letopis’. 274. [December 11, 1886.]

16 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 277–278. [To Kiseleva, December 13, 1886.]

17 Ibid., 281. [To Suvorin, December 21, 1886.]

18 Letopis’. 277. [December 26, 1886.]

19 Pis’ma. 282. [To Leykin, December 24, 1886.]

20 Translated by Constance Garnett.

21 Translated by Constance Garnett.

22 Isaac Goldberg and Henry T. Schnittkind’s translation of “To Byla Ona!” is from 1918.

January 1887

1 Dina Rubina. “Preface: Chekhov’s Blotter.” In Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics. 241.

2 Letopis’. 233. [March 6–7,1886.]

3 Ibid., 280. [January 1, 1887.]

4 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 345.

5 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 107–108.

6 According to Mark Ural’skiy, there are thirty-eight letters in existence from Chekhov to Ezhov; there are 114 from Ezhov to Chekhov. There are thirty-three letters from Chekhov to Lazarev; there are sixty-one from Lazarev to Chekhov. (Chekhov i Evrei, 572, 577.)

7 Letopis’. 280–281. [January 1, 1887.]

8 Works. Vol. 6. 7–11.

9 Translated by Constance Garnett.

10 Letopis’. 284. [January 11, 1887.]

11 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 69.

12 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 8–9. [To Leykin, January 12, 1887.]

13 Ibid., 347. The rest of the letter is translated by Heim and Karlinsky in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 64–65.

14 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 82. The majority of the rest of the letter is translated by Constance Garnett, except where noted.

15 Garnett deletes “wing-porch [for lodge] or the main-house terrace in the presence of Ma-Pa [Maria Pavlovna Chekhova], the Counterfeiter and Levitan sort of flavor to it.” (Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 61.)

16 Garnett deletes this: “even though Olga Andreyevna [Golokhvastova] thinks she has settled it.” (Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 61.)

17 Garnett’s footnote: Bobo is P. D. Boborykin.

18 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. 64. [To Aleksei Suvorin, April 1, 1890.]

19 See p. 331 of Vol. 5 in Collected Works for the title page of Rasskazi (“Stories”), 1888. The collection includes “Mire” and Chekhov has scrawled a message to Kiseleva on it.

20 This paragraph is translated by Heim and Karlinsky. (Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 63.)

21 “Kalkhas,” retitled as “Swansong.”

22 Translated by Constance Garnett.

23 Letopis’. 285–286. [January 14 and 16, 1887.]

24 Letters of Anton Chekhov. Translated by Yarmolinsky. 44. [January 17, 1887.]

25 “Pavel’s phrase ‘shall perish without the law’ became a family saying.” Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 119.

26 Letopis’. 288. [January 23, 1887.]

27 Translated by Constance Garnett.

28 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 86. [To Mitrofan Chekhov, January 18, 1887.]

29 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 19. [January 18, 1887.]

30 Letopis’. 288. [January 1, January 24, 1887.]

31 Translated by Constance Garnett.

32 I’ll run that sentence now through an online Russian dictionary: “On the bed, near the window, lay a boy with open eyes and a surprised expression on his face.” Fine, but it has to be “the boy” rather than “a boy,” because we all know who that boy is.

33 Works. Vol. 6. 629–630.

34 Coope. Doctor Chekhov: A Study in Literature and Medicine. 123.

35 Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment. Translated by, who else, Constance Garnett.

36 Translated by Peter Constantine. 157.

37 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 20. [Letter to Leykin, January 26, 1887.]

38 Ibid., 22. [Letter to Alexander Chekhov, January 26, 1887.]

39 Letopis’. 289. [January 29, 1887.]

40 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 24. [Letter to Alexander Chekhov, January 31, 1887.]

February 1887

1 Oliver Sacks. In The River of Consciousness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. 147.

2 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 25. [Letter to Alexander Chekhov, early February 1887.]

3 Translated by Constance Garnett.

4 Translated by Constance Garnett.

5 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 27–28. [To Suvorin, February 10, 1887.]

6 Letopis’. 291. [February 6, 1887.]

7 Gleb Struve. “On Chekhov’s Craftsmanship.” 467.

8 In the draft of the letter, Chekhov deleted and rephrased various sentences, including this one, perhaps for being too obsequious: “Oh, I’m sorry I’m a bad critic and can’t express my impressions in all their completeness.” (Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 360–361.) See also the facsimile of the first manuscript page (Pis’ma, Vol. 2, 29).

9 Translation by Constance Garnett.

10 This point (1), I translated. Garnett overlooked it.

11 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 170. [To Aleksei Suvorin, January 6, 1889.]

12 Ibid., 98.

13 Gleb Struve. “On Chekhov’s Craftsmanship.” 470.

14 Letopis’. 297–298. [March 10, 1887.]

15 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 362.

16 Translated by Constance Garnett.

17 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 35. [To Leykin, February 25, 1887.]

18 Letopis’. 295. [February 28, 1887.]

19 Ibid. [February 27, 1887.]

20 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 40.

21 Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 117.

22 Letopis’. 296. [February 1887.]

March 1887

1 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 206. [To Shavrova, September 16, 1891.]

2 Translated by Constance Garnett.

3 Letopis’. 296. [March 2, 1887.]

4 Translated by Constance Garnett.

5 I believe it was in a friendly effort to downplay his astounding productivity that Chekhov told Korolenko, “ ‘Would you like to know how I write my short stories? Here, observe.’ He glanced at my writing desk and picked up the first object that he saw. It was an ashtray. Placing it on the desk right in front of me, he said, ‘If you wish, by tomorrow, I will write a short story. Its title will be “An Ashtray.”’ ” Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 39.

6 Letters. Vol. 2. 33.

7 Translated by Constance Garnett.

8 Translated by Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 87.

9 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 36–37.

10 Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 174.

11 Yarmolinsky. Letters of Anton Chekhov. 45. [To Schechtel, March 11–14, 1886.]

12 Eventually I found an English translation of “An Encounter” in Yarmolinsky’s The Portable Chekhov. Why did Chekhov leave it out of his Collected Works? In the Russian there’s an epigraph, which isn’t in Yarmolinsky’s translation, by a poet named Maximov: “Why do his eyes shine, why has he small ears, a short and almost round head, like a savage predatory animal?”

13 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 99. [To Shcheglov, January 1, 1888.] Also, Alexander Kuprin describes the study at Chekhov’s house in Yalta: “The room smells of very fine scents of which A. Pavlovich was very fond.” (Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. 43.)

14 Letopis’. 303. [April 3, 1887.]

15 “While Anton’s cull disposed of his weaker humorous stories, and his revisions cut the purple passages from many stories, very often he reacted to some fine work with a distaste that is unaccountable, unless the work that he rejected had some private unhappy associations,” writes Donald Rayfield in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 488.

16 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 38. [To the Chekhov family, March 13, 1887.]

17 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 39–40. [To Kiseleva, March 17, 1887.]

18 The Letopis’ repeats Chekhov’s mention of sixteen but names seventeen stories. Letopis’. 299. [March 18, 1887.]

19 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 41–42. [To Suvorin, March 18, 1887.]

20 Ibid., 368–369.

21 Ibid., 39–40. [To Kiseleva, March 17, 1887.]

22 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 269–270. [To Shavrova, February 28, 1895.]

23 My translation was published in Russian Life on April 23, 2020, with editor Paul Richardson’s helpful corrections.

24 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 46.

25 Ibid., 47.

26 Ibid., 372.

27 Ibid.

28 “Zhiteyskie Nevzrody” has never been translated into English, as far as I can find.

29 Works. Vol. 6. 140.

30 Translated by Constance Garnett.

31 Letopis’. 301. [March 29–30, 1887.]

32 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 53, 373. [To Leykin, April 30, 1887.]

Part 5: To the South and Back

1 Translated by Constance Garnett.

2 Translated by Sidonie K. Lederer. The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. 30. [To the Chekhov family, April 7–19, 1887.]

April 1887

1 Translated by Sidonie K. Lederer. The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. 25. [To the Chekhov family, April 7–19, 1887.]

2 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 53.

3 Translated by Constance Garnett.

4 The last four sentences are translated by Sidonie K. Lederer. The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov. 31.

5 Letopis’. 303. [April 3, 1887.]

6 Translated by Yarmolinsky. Letters of Anton Chekhov. 46. [April 7, 1887 to Leykin.]

7 Letopis’. 305. [April 7, 1887.]

8 Translated by Constance Garnett.

9 Translated by Constance Garnett.

10 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 68. [To the Chekhov family, April 14–19, 1887.]

11 Ibid., 70. [To Leykin, April 17, 1887.]

12 Alexander Serebrov-Tikhonov, “About Chekhov”: “ ‘What a wonderful sport, fishing!’ Chekhov told me while baiting his hook. ‘It is a sort of quiet insanity. You are happy with life, you are happy with yourself, and you are not a danger to anyone. And the most marvelous thing is that life is good.’ ” In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 95.