Letters of Anton Chekhov

ANTON CHEKHOV 1890

-KTTERS OF ANTON CHEKHOV Vanslated by Michael Henry Heim i collaboration with Simon Karlinsky [election, Commentary and Introduction by iimon Karlinsky

'his is not only the first adequate selection f Chekhov's letters to appear in English (Con- tance Garnett's, now out of print, drew on :ss than half the letters now available in Russian), ut also the first to provide the full text, un- larred by editorial omission or Russian censor- hip, of each letter chosen. From over four lousand extant letters, the editors have newly -anslated nearly two hundred. The emphasis f the selection is on Chekhov's public life, and ic letters intimately reflect his preoccupations s a writer, doctor, social reformer and observer f men and women. They are divided into fteen sections which follow his career chrono- )gically. There are short introductions to each action, and in some cases to individual letters, nd footnotes provide needed background in­sulation. Professor Karlinsky's valuable ltroduction discusses Chekhov's running attle with the literary critics and the censors, nd his deeply held views on literature, religion, olitics and sex - often startlingly modern, for e believed in 'the most absolute freedom im- ginable, freedom from violence and from lies', nd in his concern for ecology and minority roups he was well in advance of his time.

> 470 10661 x

Chekhov and Pushkin are the two greatest .ussian letter-writers. Chekhov's range of itercsts is enormous, his touch is invariably ght, and bv his insistence on considering any uestion in human rather than theoretical ?rms, he succeeds in being perpetually fresh nd subversive.

£5*oo net

in u.k. only

Professor Karlinsky is head of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of California at Berkeley. Professor Heim teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jacket by michael harvey

Photograph on back panel: chekhov in 1888. Photograph by permission of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR.

BODLEY

9 bow street, covent garden, london

HEAD

Letters of

Translated from the Russian

Selection, Commentary

london sydney toronto

ANTON CHEKHOV

by Michael Henry Heim

in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky

and Introduction by Simon Karlinsky

THE BODLEY HEAD

letters of anton chekhov.

Copyright © 1973 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. isbn 0-370-10661-x

Printed in the United States of America for The Bodley Head Ltd 9 Bow Street, London w с 2 e 7 a l First published in Great Britain 1973

CONTENTS

Foreword ix

introduction: the gentle subversive i

i. the taganrog metamorphosis 33 ii. the medical student who wrote

for humor magazines 38

iii. serious literature 53

iv. success as a playwright: "ivanov" 68

v. a sense of literary freedom 87

vi. the journey to sakhalin 152

vii. western europe 183

viii. the busy years 201

ix. settled life 248

x. "the seagull" 280

xi. the inescapable diagnosis 29o

xii. nice. the dreyfus case 305

yalta 321

"three sisters." marriage 385 xv. "the cherry orchard" 44o

epilogue 475

Bibliography 479

Index 483

FOREWORD

To our knowledge there have been four previous publications of Anton Chekhov's letters in English. Constance Garnett's two volumes (Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends and Letters of Anton Chekhov to Olga Knipper), Louis S. Friedland's Anton Chekhov's Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics, and The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, translated and edited by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson, all appeared in the early twenties. They were fol­lowed thirty years later by The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, edited by Lillian Hellman and translated by Sidonie Lederer, which is now, in paperback, the most readily available source of Chekhov's letters for the general reader.

A comparison of these editions with Chekhov's Russian originals has left us with a lasting sense of admiration for Constance Garnett's talent as a translator. Despite occasional misreadings she manages to convey both the tone and spirit of the letters with a resourcefulness and fidelity no one else has matched. Unfortunately, she did her translations at a time when fewer than half the letters presently available in Russian had been pub­lished; moreover, her prunings and abridgments frequently reduced the text to a mere skeleton of the original. In contrast to Garnett, the Kotelian- sky-Tomlinson translation often misses the mark stylistically; its excessive adherence to the letter of the original makes many of its passages needlessly ambiguous or simply incomprehensible. Louis Friedland's 1924 volume, recently reissued with a new introduction by Ernest J. Simmons, is a not very coherent patchwork of snippets accompanied by a regrettably unin­formed commentary (which among other blunders places the heroes of the most famous comedies of Gogol and Griboyedov in a melodrama by Alexei Suvorin and confuses Thoreau with the Russian woman novelist Yevgenia Tur). The Hellman-Lederer volume, which is widely quoted in studies of modern drama, abounds in mistranslations and arbitrary cuts of crucial passages. These are the factors which convinced us of the need for a new, enlarged edition of Chekhov's letters in English.

Out of the more than four thousand published letters of Anton Chekhov we have tried to select those that give a comprehensive picture of his literary, social and scientific interests and views. To put together a coherent intellectual portrait, we have found it necessary to sacrifice several groups of letters emphasized by our predecessors: the vituperative, painfully humorous letters to Chekhov's older brother Alexander; the letters to his sister Maria from the Ukraine and Siberia (the latter are mostly identical in content to his series of articles "Across Siberia," which is available in English in a fine translation by Avrahm Yarmolinsky in the collection The Unknown Chekhov); and the flirtatious letters to various women who were of no real importance in his life. On the other hand, letters dealing with medical and biological topics, usually omitted in non-Russian editions of Chekhov's letters, receive their full due.

D. S. Mirsky, the noted Russian literary historian, justly calls Chekhov one of the three finest letter writers in the Russian language (Mirsky's other two paragons are Alexander Pushkin and the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov). We have accordingly decided to print every letter we have selected in its entirety, preferring the practice of elucidating occasional trivial detail in footnotes to that of making the whimsical and often dis­torting cuts which all our predecessors have allowed themselves. And because maximal comprehension of the letters requires that the reader have some idea of the people to whom and about whom Chekhov is writing, we have provided more detailed annotations than the usual "X was a writer who lived in St. Petersburg" sort of thing.

We have taken particular pains to identify the frequent quotations which Chekhov liked to incorporate into his letters. His principal sources are the Bible, Alexander Griboyedov's verse comedy The Misfortune of Being Clever (1828), the fables of the Russian neoclassical poet Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) and the plays of William Shakespeare (in early nine­teenth-century Russian translations, usually those of Nikolai Polevoy). The biblical quotations, cited by Chekhov in Russianized Old Church Slavic, are given in their standard King James equivalents, the Griboyedov and Krylov lines in our own translation.

The letters are arranged in sections, each of which is preceded by an introduction outlining the literary and biographical background for that particular group. For the most part, they appear in chronological order, but in a few instances, when their contents so dictated, we have taken them out of sequence. These instances are indicated in the annotations.

In line with our principle of presenting complete and undoctored texts, we have aimed at producing a translation that respects the original. When Chekhov repeats a word, we do not make him more eloquent by casting about for synonyms. When he uses an ambiguous phrase, we do not make up his mind for him by smoothing it over. When he writes a long or con­voluted sentence, we do not explicate him by breaking it up into easily digestible morsels. Repetition, ambiguity and sentence structure combine to form a writer's style, and though style is commonly associated with talent, it may also be influenced by such external factors as haste (the bugaboo of Chekhov's early period) and illness (which plagued him from the late nineties on).

For the sake of accuracy and authenticity we have retained the Julian calendar (to calculate the date of any letter according to the Gregorian calendar, now in use throughout the world, add twelve days to nineteenth- century dates and thirteen days to twentieth-century dates); the centigrade temperature scale (according to which 36.6 degrees is normal body temper­ature); Russian weights and measures (one pood equals about 40 pounds, one verst equals 3,500 feet, one arshin equals 28 inches, one sazhen equals three arshins, one dessiatine equals 2.7 acres) and monetary units (the ruble was worth slightly more in purchasing power than the American dollar was at that time; a common laborer was paid twelve rubles a month and a qualified factory worker got thirty). We have converted the typo­graphical term pechatny list, which corresponds to the English signature in octavo and consists of sixteen printed pages, to the actual number of pages involved. When an addressee is known by a name other than his real name, we give his real name and then his pseudonym in parentheses. Finally, we have tried to be especially precise in our renditions of plant and animal nomenclature—another area in which previous translators have been notoriously lax—because Chekhov's involvement in medicine and the natural sciences clearly warrants it (for an example of Chekhov's concern over the correct name of a plant, see Letter 161).

No complete, unexpurgated edition of Chekhov's letters is available in any language. To obtain maximally complete texts, however, we have collated the versions presented by the three most complete collections to appear in his native country:

The pre-revolutionary six-volume edition published by his sister Maria between 1912 and 1916.

Volumes XIII-XX of the twenty-volume edition of Chekhov's com­plete works published between 1944 and 1951 by special decree of the

Soviet government to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

3. Volumes XI and XII of the twelve-volume edition of collected works published in 1963 and 1964.

We have also taken several letters from Volume 68 of Literary Heritage (Moscow, 1960), a regularly appearing miscellany specializing in literary documents and documentary studies.

Passages considered censorable vary considerably from one edition to the next, with the mode and extent of variation reflecting the development of Russian cultural attitudes. Chekhov's sister brought out her edition during the period after the abortive 1905 revolution, when Russian censors interfered less with literature than in almost any other period of recent history. She could accordingly include passages of political and religious commentary that would have had a hard time passing the censor in Chekhov's own lifetime. For many of the most important letters her edition remains the least-impaired source.

But Maria Chekhova was handicapped by the fact that most of the people Chekhov discussed in his letters were still alive when her edition appeared. Some of them were personal friends or members of the family. To spare their feelings, she found it desirable to eliminate numerous passages.

By the 1940s, however, there was no longer any need for such delicacy, and many of the passages Maria Chekhova had deleted were restored in the 1944-51 edition. In addition, the editors gathered together several thousand previously unpublished letters and provided the entire corpus with a scholarly apparatus of astounding scope and thoroughness. Theoret­ically, then, the eight volumes of letters in this edition are the fullest and most complete collection of Chekhov's letters ever published.

At the same time, however, they are a monument to the ruthlessness of Stalinist censors, to their mania for tampering with texts and rewriting history—even, as in Chekhov's case, when dealing with an officially ap­proved national classic. There is no other instance on record of a com­parable procedure being applied to a major nineteenth-century Russian writer on such a scale, which of itself speaks for the deeply felt, if un­acknowledged, subversive potential of Chekhov's views within the Soviet context.

Literally hundreds of deletions come to light when the 1944-51 Soviet edition is set beside the 1912-16 Maria Chekhova edition. There are cuts made for political and nationalistic considerations, as when Chekhov makes too much of life in Western Europe or fails to sound patriotic enough to suit the Stalinist censor. There are cuts of passages that men­tion Jews, because the word he uses for "Jew" is zhid. Though ugly and highly pejorative when used by a present-day anti-Semite, this happened to be the normal word for Jew in the South Russian dialect Chekhov grew up speaking. (When Chekhov does in fact wish to use an anti-Jewish epithet, he chooses a different word, shmul, which was also carefully deleted throughout the edition.) Even a passage that compares newly hatched nightingale fledglings to naked Jewish children was not allowed to appear in print. Also excluded were all passages that might have seemed offensive to the Soviet Union's allies in the late 1940s—the Chinese and Yugoslavs, for example; occasional derogatory references to the Germans and French, on the other hand, were allowed to stand.

Since Soviet neo-Victorian prudery abhors all references not only to sex but to many other normal bodily functions such as childbirth and digestion, many letters underwent extensive bowdlerizing. Here is one example from several dozen, the postscript to a letter Chekhov wrote to his friend Ivan Shcheglov from a village in the Ukraine on May 10, 1888.

Maria Chekhova's 1912 edition:

P.S. There is no outdoor privy here. You have to answer the call of nature in nature's very presence, in ravines and under bushes. My entire [. . .] is covered with mosquito bites.

The grammatical agreement of the verb and of the adjective in the last sentence makes it clear to a speaker of Russian that the omitted word is "backside."

Volume XIV of the twenty-volume edition, 1949: P.S. [. . .]

The extent of the license the censors took with Chekhov's letters was documented in 1954 and 1955 when Professor Gleb Struve published a series of articles on the subject in Russian emigre, British and French jour­nals. Partly in response to the shock caused in international scholarly circles by Struve's disclosures, many (but by no means all) of the passages deleted by the censors in the 1944-51 edition were reinstated in the 1963­64 edition, which was published, we might recall, at the height of the de-Stalinization campaign. In the postscript from the letter to Shcheglov quoted above, for example, the first two sentences are printed in full, though the third sentence was apparently still too colorful to appear in print in the Soviet Union—even in the 1960s.

While undoing some of the damage done by the censors of the 1940s, however, the more recent edition has introduced a more subtle form of censorship. It includes more than eight hundred letters, yet omits some of the most significant: letters dealing with personal freedom, the rights of the writer and of literature, and unfavorable comparisons of life in Russia with life in Western Europe. The commentary to the present volume will point out some of the more blatant of these omissions. We have reinstated the censored words and passages wherever possible; when there was no way to re-establish them, the deletion is indicated in the text of the letter as follows: [...].

With all the shortcomings imposed from without by the censors, there is nonetheless no doubt that both the 1944-51 and 1963-64 Soviet editions of Chekhov's letters were put together by able and knowledgeable scholars. Our collection owes a deep debt of gratitude to their efforts for a large portion of our commentary. We would also like to acknowledge the help of friends and colleagues who were kind enough to share with us their com­petence in special fields: Dr. Roy Leeper of San Francisco on medical history and medical terminology; Professor Francis J. Whitfield on Slavic biblical texts; Dr. Erica Brendel on ornithology; and Professor Olga Raevsky Hughes, whose profound knowledge of Russian culture and Russian reli­gious lore repeatedly saved the day after all other sources failed us. We are grateful to Father Leonid Kishkovsky of St. Innocent's Orthodox Church, San Francisco, and to Mr. Dennis Powers of the American Con­servatory Theater for supplying particularly hard-to-find bits of information. Mr. Barry Jordan served as the research assistant for the project, typing numerous drafts, checking sources in at least four languages, and looking up more books, writers, plants, animals and minerals than any of us cares to remember (but none is likely to forget). His help is deeply appreciated.

M. H. H. S. K.

LETTERS OF ANTON CHEKHOV

INTRODUCTION:

THE GENTLE SUBVERSIVE

To Vladimir Nabokov

m ost people can visualize him easily enough: the dour, sickly man in a long black overcoat buttoned to the top, a black hat pulled low over his eyes, leaning wearily on his cane in a flowering Yalta garden. That photograph, taken shortly before Chekhov's death, is reproduced on the cover of Ernest J. Simmons's popular biography sold at all paperback stands. It also served David Levine as the model for his widely reproduced cari­cature, which appears in the New York Review of Books jigsaw puzzle and which shows Chekhov as an elongated gloomy black tapeworm. The other best-known image of Chekhov is that of the morose consumptive in an arm­chair, glaring balefully at the world through his pince-nez, all shaggy tweeds and shaggy gray beard. This one comes from a portrait painted in oil toward the end of Chekhov's life by a mediocre painter named Iosif Braz. An earlier portrait by Braz for which Chekhov sat looked so little like him that it was destroyed. The second try, not much more successful, ended up at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, and it is to this day the most widely reproduced portrait of Chekhov. It is the one most likely to grace the jacket of a collection of his stories or plays, or to be appended to one of the numerous biographies that have been appearing in Western languages with increasing frequency. Chekhov himself disliked the Braz portrait, thought that it made him look as if he'd been sniffing grated horseradish, and would refuse to autograph reproductions of it; those who knew Chekhov believed that this portrait falsified his appearance.

The multivolume Russian editions of Chekhov's collected writings and of his letters reproduce dozens of photographs and paintings where he looks quite different. There is the broad-shouldered, open-faced young giant of the early 1880s, who wrote hundreds of humorous stories, frequented Mos­cow night clubs, studied medicine and suddenly realized, at the age of twenty-six, that he was becoming an important and admired writer. There is the strikingly handsome, elegantly dressed Chekhov of thirty (a trim goatee, but still no pince-nez), who had already written some of his major masterpieces—"The Steppe," "The Duel," "A Dreary Story"—and had witnessed successful productions of his play Ivanov. This Chekhov was celebrated throughout Russia. He had traveled to Sakhalin, to Ceylon, to France and Italy, had climbed Vesuvius and gone swimming in the Indian Ocean. There is the Chekhov of the mid-1890s, the author of The Seagull, the builder of schools, the famine fighter, the bed partner of celebrated actresses and stylish literary ladies. All these different Chekhovs are there in the photographs, and in his letters, and they are all equally essential for understanding the man and his work.

The shaggy beard, the pince-nez, the funereal clothes, the exhausted look are not falsifications. They also existed, but they belonged to the last three years of Chekhov's life, when his lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis and when it was plain to everyone except himself that he was about to die. This was the Chekhov who wrote "The Bishop" and The Cherry Orchard, and this seems to be the Chekhov that the world prefers to remember. The pictures of the dying invalid of Yalta go well with the widely held view that Chekhov was a man who wrote gloomy stories and plays about unhappy, spineless people leading frustrated and melancholy lives.

This legend, like most legends, contains a small grain of truth. Chekhov was capable of being frustrated and bored, as his letters show; and he was very good at depicting these states of mind in his work. But to reduce the entire man and the content of his work to this particular dimension is like hearing a full symphony orchestra perform a Beethoven symphony and deliberately ignoring all the instruments except the cellos. The view of Chekhov as The Voice of Twilight Russia (the title of Princess Nina Andronikova Toumanova's platitudinous, cliche-filled book in English which is still widely read), as the "poet of twilight moods," was created by Russian critics at the turn of the century, when Chekhov was still alive. He hated it, thought it stupid, and made a point of leaving the room if anyone brought it up. But many people close to him were receptive to this view, including his wife Olga Knipper, who in 1901 wrote to him: "My heart aches when I think of the quiet sadness that seems to be so deeply en­trenched in your heart/' To which Chekhov replied: "But, darling, that is utter nonsense! There is no sadness in me, there never was; most of the time life is bearable and when you are with me, things are really fine." (Letter to Olga Knipper, August 24, 1901.)

None of the major literary figures of his time who were Chekhov's friends and who loved him as a writer ever accepted this reductionist concept—not Lev Tolstoy, not Nikolai Leskov, not Ivan Bunin. But Kon- stantin Stanislavsky was certainly influenced by it in everything he wrote about Chekhov, and so were some of Chekhov's close personal friends, whose reminiscences occasionally reflect the prevailing critical views at the turn of the century, rather than their own memories and observations. Basically, the image of Chekhov as the melancholy bard of a vanishing Russia represents the final success of Russian nineteenth-century critics in their determined effort to label and pigeonhole a major writer who did not fit their traditional and simplistic recipes for classifying writers. And, of course, Stanislavsky's drawn-out, elegiac productions of Chekhov's plays, with which Chekhov disagreed and which he disliked but which set the pattern for later generations, also served to contribute to that particular image.

Chekhov's quarrel with the critical establishment of his time is one of the central facts of his literary biography. The issues debated and the posi­tions taken are enormously important, and they touch the very mainsprings of Russian cultural life both in nineteenth-century Russia and in the present-day U.S.S.R. The circumstances of Chekhov's advent as a serious writer have almost no precedent in Russian or any other literature. His acclaim by the reading public of the 1880s and '90s, the recognition of his talent by the finest older writers of his time were accompanied by a steady stream of jeremiads by leading literary critics, lamenting Chekhov's lack of human concern and of moral principles, warning their readers that this writer was dangerous and that by writing the way he did he was betraying the humanitarian traditions of his native literature. When fifteen years of this sort of attack failed to halt the spread of Chekhov's reputation, a new generation of critics managed to reduce the complexities of Chekhovian concern and compassion to their own moaning and melancholy level and thus at last to co-opt him into the very tradition to which he was so alien and so opposed. His second co-optation came in the 1930s and '40s, when orthodox Stalinist Soviet critics like Vladimir Yermilov created the even more false and fraudulent image of the optimistic, quasi-revolutionary Chekhov, whose main aim in writing what he wrote was to indict the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes. To understand the causes for all this requires at least a minimal glance at the Russian cultural history of the past century and a half.

The epoch of the Great Reforms of the 1860s looms particularly large in forming Chekhov's attitudes and the attitudes of his detractors, and it frequently comes up in his correspondence. Chekhov was a small child when the reforms took place, but their impact on his life was crucial. Most of the important Russian writers of the nineteenth century were born into families which, whether affluent or impoverished, belonged to the nobility. Anton Chekhov, on the other hand, was born into a family of emancipated serfs. Ilis grandfather, his father, his uncles had all known existence as human chattels owned by other men. The future writer was slightly more than one year old when Emperor Alexander II, reacting to Russian defeat in the Crimean War, initiated the most sweeping of his several major reforms, the emancipation of all serfs. With one stroke of the tsar's pen, some fifty-two million slaves became free human beings. Other reforms, almost as momentous, followed. Trials by jury replaced the horrors of the archaic judicial system based on written procedures kept secret from the parties to the case and under which the court was not even required to inform the accused of the exact nature of the charges. A net­work of semi-autonomous, elective local administrative units called zemstvos was instituted and given considerable powers to establish schools and hospi­tals, to build roads and to provide veterinary and insurance services at the local level. Under the zemstvo system, tsarist Russia was one of the first countries in the world to offer its citizens free medical, dental and surgical care in its village hospitals. Anton Chekhov was frequently involved in the zemstvo system and its hospitals in one capacity or another, and many of his stories and private letters contain fascinating insights into the workings of this often-forgotten institution.

There was a great deal that went wrong with the implementation of the reforms of Alexander II, and it has become customary in the West to dismiss them as partial solutions that did not change the basically oppres­sive system. But their results on the local level, as seen and described by Chekhov, brought an increase in freedom to millions of formerly enslaved human beings and provided them with better education and medical care and with a chance of getting a fair trial in the courts. Chekhov was not one to dismiss or to ridicule this kind of achievement.

But the epoch of the sixties left Russia with another legacy, one that directly affected literature. For all his reforming, Alexander II did not authorize anything resembling real freedom of the press or any sort of open criticism of the government, even when it came from a loyal oppo­sition, such as had by then become customary in most Western European monarchies. And, as most of the literate segment of society realized, many aspects of life in post-reform Russia deserved to be criticized. Many artic­ulate people wanted to express their disapproval in something more durable and widely disseminated than an illegal anti-government leaflet. In the liberalized atmosphere of the 1860s a very special kind of literary criticism was developed to deal with this predicament.

The precedent for this sort of criticism and for many of its basic methods had already been established in the 1840s by the fiery Romantic critic Vissarion Belinsky. To outwit the censor, Belinsky was the first to exploit the device of pretending to criticize the reality depicted in a work of fiction while actually telling his readers what he thought of the state of affairs in the country. It was also Belinsky who began the practice of dis­torting the content and the meaning of a work of literature or even the stated social views of a given writer when he felt it necessary for the pur­pose of his political sermon. Thus, in his influential series of articles on Gogol, Belinsky turned that most fantastic and surrealistic of Russian writers into a photographic realist, because such an approach enabled him to use Gogol's work for an indictment of existing Russian customs; further­more, Belinsky managed to read into Gogol's stories and plays a subver­sive, anti-government message, which the politically conservative Gogol had never intended and which horrified him. All objective facts notwithstand­ing, Belinsky's image of Gogol prevailed in Russian criticism until the end of the nineteenth century, and although the Symbolist and Formalist critics of the first three decades of our century did brilliant work in estab­lishing and asserting the full complexity and uniqueness of Gogol's genius, the simplistic Belinskian view has been forcibly revived in the Soviet Union in recent decades and has remained compulsory there ever since.

Despite Belinsky's excesses and his ruthless hounding of several fine writers who to this day have lesser reputations than they deserve merely because Belinsky could not find suitable texts for sermons in their work, his love for literature was genuine, and it earned him the friendship and respect of such men as Turgenev, Herzen and the young Dostoyevsky. His successors of the 1860s, the men who set the tone for all Russian literary criticism in Chekhov's time—Nikolai Chernyshevsky and his two young disciples, Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Dmitry Pisarev—were social critics who were forced to write about literature and art because that was the only way they could get around the censor.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky's battle against tsarist tyranny was a beautiful and courageous thing to behold. His notions of literature, however, were primitive, oppressive and ultimately irrational. Literature and the other arts were for Chernyshevsky inferior substitutes for real life. Their only useful aspect was their hypnotic power to show people the desirable direc­tions for society to take and to warn them against taking wrong paths by providing cautionary examples. Once these aims had been accomplished, art itself could be safely discarded. Chernyshevsky also postulated a pe­culiarly quantitative criterion for judging artistic quality: a large edition of a book by Gogol was artistically superior to Gogol's original manuscript of the same work and a full-dress production of an opera (any opera, presumably) was on an artistically higher level than a performance of a string quartet.

It was Lenin himself who best described the critical method of Cherny- shevsky's disciple Dobrolyubov. "He turned his discussion of Oblomov into a battle-cry, into a call to activism and revolutionary struggle," Lenin wrote admiringly, "and he turned his analysis of On the Eve into a genuine revolutionary manifesto, written in such a way that it remains unforgotten to this day." Of course even Lenin knew that these novels by Goncharov and Turgcnev did not contain the ideas that Dobrolyubov read into them or derived from them.

The third member of the critical trinity of the 1860s, Pisarev, Chekhov's particular bete noire, but actually the most readable and, in the long run, the most logical of the three, took the basic attitudes of his age to their ultimate conclusion and indicted all imaginative literature as frivolous and superfluous.

"Never, it would seem, was more scorn heaped upon literature generally, nor were people more eager to put literature in its place, to puncture its illusions, if not destroy it altogether," wrote Hugh McLean of this period in his masterful examination of the development of modern Russian literature. McLean summarizes the respective attitudes of the critics of the 1840s and 1860s as follows: "Belinskv had said that art should be a textbook of life; Chernyshevsky would make it a second-rate surrogate for reality; Pisarev would abolish it."

Dobrolyubov and Pisarev both died very young. The government man­aged to make a national martyr out of Chernyshevsky by putting him on trial on insufficient evidence, framing him with false testimony and banish­ing him to Siberia. But for most Russian critics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and for their readers, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky were literary figures as important as Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy. Their prestige was unassailable, their opinions and pronouncements not to be questioned, and they managed to change the literary outlook of many generations of Russians. During the more repressive decades of the seventies and the eighties, literary criticism remained in the hands of their successors and erstwhile associates. These men could not match the by then canonized radical saints of the sixties in their revolutionary fervor, but they reiterated the demand that literature express simplistic political and sociological clichcs, and above all they continued the tradition of negating and vilifying all literature that did not conform to their insistence on easv didacticism.

The available histories of Russian literature usually overlook one basic fact of late-nineteenth-century intellectual life, with which Chekhov, like all Russian writers from the 1860s on, had to contend: the existence of two separate but equally repressive systems of censorship in the country. The de jure censorship of the tsarist government still had considerable powers in the 1880s. Its job was to weed out all expression of anti-govern­ment sentiments and to watch out for anv excessive liberties in the religious and sexual areas. The government censors could temporarily bar the pub­lication of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, and one of them managed to ban outright Chekhov's early play On the High Road because it was to his way of thinking "gloomy and filthy." But the censors' powers were visibly dwindling throughout the course of Chekhov's writing career, and if he could still worry in 1891 about the feasibility of making an ex-revolutionary the hero of a short story (Letter 63), a few years later sympathetic por­trayals of active revolutionaries became quite acceptable, as the publication of Tolstoy's Resurrection in 1899 eloquently demonstrated.

Far more powerful and, in the long run, even more oppressive was the de facto unofficial censorship by the anti-government literary critics, who not only ceaselessly demanded that all writers be topical, obviously relevant and socially critical, but also prescribed rigid formal and aesthetic criteria to which all literature was supposed to conform. Because a soberly realistic depiction of Russian life had been assumed since the days of Belinsky to be the most effective way of exposing social shortcomings, the critics of the 1860s, '70s and '8os fought an unending battle against fantasy, imagin­ation, poetry, mysticism, against excessive depth in psychological percep­tion, against all joy and humor that was not topical or satirical, and above all against any formal or stylistic innovations in literature and literary craftsmanship in general. Their rationale was that all these things could detract from the ideological message which was the sole aim of literature. The radical utilitarians would also have liked to attack religion and the Orthodox Church, but in this one area government censorship remained adamant and rigid. In matters of sex, however, the anti-government utilitar­ians were even more puritanical than the official censors. Pisarev was out­raged and revolted by the character of Lensky in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin because he mentions his fiancee's shoulders and bosom to a close friend, and Saltykov-Shchedrin was so shocked by the gynecological and sexual aspects of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that he ridiculed the work as a "genito­urinary novel." The power of these critics to enforce their prejudices and taboos was awesome, and they used this power ruthlessly and often vindic­tively. There is no doubt that recognition of Dostoyevsky's true stature was delayed for decades because of Belinsky's disappointment in him after The Double and by the asininities that Dobrolyubov and Pisarev wrote about his later novels. Literary hacks like Zlatovratsky and second-raters like Gleb Uspensky enjoyed great and undeserved reputations as a result of the efforts of their utilitarian champions, while a writer of the stature of Nikolai Leskov was read out of Russian literature for the rest of the nine­teenth century because of an early novel in which he had satirized a socialist commune. Afanasy Fet, one of the greatest Russian poets of the century, was treated as a criminal and a public enemy by several generations of

Russian critics because he openly declared that he was neither willing nor able to discuss social issues in his poetry. And, of course, the sad decline of Russian poetry in the 1870s and '8os is directly attributable to the savage hounding and ridicule with which the critical fraternity of the period greeted the appearance of any poet of originality or technical ability.

One of the best fictional reflections of the effect that decades of utilitarian brainwashing had on many intelligent and socially aware Russian readers is to be found in Chekhov's short novel "Three Years" (1895), which contains the following literary discussion at the home of a wealthy intellectual of merchant-class origin:

"Л work of literature cannot be significant or useful unless its basic idea contains some meaningful social task/' Konstantin was saying, looking at Yartscv angrily. "If the book protests against serfdom or if the author indicts high society and its trivial ways, then it is a significant and useful piece of writing. But as for those novels and tales where it's oh and ah and why she fell in love with him, but he fell out of love with her,—such books, I say, are meaningless and to hell with them."

"I quite agree with you, Konstantin Ivanych," said Yulia Sergeyevna. "One writer describes a lovers' tryst, another describes infidelity, a third one —a reunion after separation. Can't they find any other subjects? There are, after all, many people who are ill, unhappy, worn out by poverty, who must be disgusted to have to read about such things."

Laptev was disturbed to hear his wife, a young woman of not quite twenty-two, speak of love so seriouslv and coldlv. He could guess why this was so.

"If poetry does not solve the problems that you consider important," said Yartsev, "why don't you try books on technology, on police and financial law or read scientific essavs? Whv should Romeo and Juliet have to deal with academic freedom or with sanitary conditions in prisons, instead of with love, when you can find any number of articles and handbooks 011 these other subjects?"

"But look here, you exaggerate!" Konstantin interrupted him. "We are not speaking of such giants as Shakespeare or Goethe. We speak of scores of talented and average writers who would be of much more use were they to leave love alone and take up indoctrinating the masses with knowledge and humanitarian ideas."

Some of the central issues of Russian intellectual history arc encapsu­lated in this brief dialogue. Konstantin's views 011 the uses of literature arc a minute summary of one of the basic theses of Peter Lavrov's Historical Letters (1870, final version 1891), which is perhaps the most representa­tive, influential and widely read single document of Russian nineteenth- century anti-government dissent (it is available in English in a brilliantly idiomatic translation by James P. Scanlan, who has also contributed an illuminating introductory essay). Yulia's reasons for rejecting literature that deals with love (and, by implication, with other personal and psycho­logical themes) are a simple-minded paraphrase of the reasons advanced by the Populist critics of Chekhov's time when they dismissed Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as socially irrelevant. Yartsev's mention of Shakespeare is a dodge, used repeatedly since Belinsky's time, to appeal to the prestige of recognized foreign classics in order to secure some freedom of expression for Russian literature. This dodge never worked, however: it was all very well for E. T. A. Hoffmann to write fantasies, because he was a foreign writer acknowledged throughout Western Europe, but a Russian writer, Vladimir Odoyevsky, who tried treating subjects similar to Hoffmann's, was condemned to literary death on the spot by Belinsky. Later on, in the 1870s, the defenders of Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Snow Maiden (it was attacked not for its insipid and mawkish poetry, but for bringing mythological creatures to the stage, which was contrary to the principles of realism) unsuccessfully cited the precedents of Shakespeare's The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream, but were told by the utilitarians that a man of Shakespeare's stature could permit himself a few aberrations; Shakespeare, after all, did not have the obligation to help the downtrodden Russian people which every Russian writer automatically had.

It was easy enough to see that the literary views of Russian radical utilitarians were primitive and simplistic. Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyev- sky all saw and said as much. But Chekhov saw more. He saw that the men whom most of his contemporaries considered champions of freedom and giants of literary criticism were not any kind of literary critics at all, and that this whole critical dynasty, with the possible exception of Belinsky, neither liked nor understood literature. While the entire Russian intelligent­sia, save for its most reactionary segment, worshiped these critics and their tradition because of their opposition to the tsarist regime, Chekhov almost alone seemed to realize that men who fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means and who pursue their goals with ruthless and single-minded fanaticism are not likely to further the cause of freedom and bring about democracy in literature or in any other area. It took both courage and vision to discern this oppressive strain in the main­stream of Russian radical dissent, although even Chekhov could not fore­see the catastrophic effect on twentieth-century Russian literature and its writers of the officially imposed revival of radical-utilitarian criteria and literary ethics in Soviet times (backed by state-supported judicial enforce­ment of these views).

Chekhov's quarrel with the presuppositions of his epoch was fought in subdued and civilized tones, without ranting and without proselytizing. He preferred his literary work to speak for itself and reserved his polemics for his private correspondence and for an occasional editorial article, published, as a rule, anonymously. His natural mode of expression was understatement rather than diatribe. In fact, he would again and again overestimate the perceptive powers of his reading audience and even of close personal friends and have to explain his views and intentions all over after having stated them precisely and clearly in a story or in a personal letter. The total mis­understanding of the meaning of the play Ivanov by many people closely associated with its production is only the most spectacular example of this sort of thing in Chekhov's correspondence. Chekhov's letters of the late 1880s are particularly rich in intellectual drama because he has to articu­late his private ideas on the rights of the individual and of literature and on personal freedom to friends who in literary matters live and breathe the utilitarian traditions of their age, regardless of their social position or political orientation. The wealthy and mystical-minded society lady Maria Kiselyova, in objecting to "Mire" (Letter 9) used the same didactic-utili­tarian approach that the liberal editor Vukol Lavrov was to take a few years later in condemning Chekhov's "lack of principles." Indeed, for all the political polarization in nineteenth-century Russian society, by Che­khov's time the demand that all literature be didactic and contain some instantly obvious and certifiably relevant social idea became the norm for everyone, moderates and conservatives included. In Chekhov's story "In the Landau," a snobbish aristocratic young army officer, who moves in circles close to the imperial court, offhandedly condemns Turgenev for not having written about "freedom of the press or about social conscious­ness." And, in real life, a committee of three liberal professors of literature who were asked in 1899 by the management of the government-owned Imperial Theaters to judge the suitability of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya for presentation in official theaters turned the play down, among other reasons, for its lack of social relevance.

As long as Chekhov published his humorous and satirical early stories in humor magazines, serious and influential critics could afford to ignore him. But in 1886-88, when his startlingly original, seriously conceived mature stories began to appear in the leading literary journals, an alarm was sounded. The structural originality of "Heartache," "Anyuta" and "The Steppe" was seen as an affront to Russian realism, a betrayal of the most cherished traditions of Turgenev, Grigorovich and the simplistically under­stood Gogol. Above all, Chekhov's eschewing of all easily paraphrasable social tendentiousness, his preference for dealing with social realities rather than with social theories, was seen as subversive to their cause by the en­trenched utilitarians.

The principal keepers of the Belinskian-Chemyshevskian flame in the 1880s were the facile and prolific Populist hack Alexander Skabichevsky (1838-1910) and the more serious political thinker and journalist Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842-1904). Because of their doctrinaire differences with the Russian Marxists and with Lenin, these men are styled "Populist critics" in Soviet literary histories and reference books and are denied the adulation accorded their predecessors of the 1860s, who are now described as "Revolutionary Democrats." But in actual fact, Skabichevsky and, to a lesser degree, Mikhailovsky form an important bridge between the utili­tarians of the sixties and Russian Marxist criticism, both before and after the October Revolution. Reading Skabichevsky's sarcastic articles on War and Peace and Anna Karenina, with their sneers at Tolstoy's lack of social awareness and purpose and their insistence that a few changes in the political system could instantly solve all of Anna's and Vronsky's emotional problems, today's Soviet readers should have an overwhelming sense of deja vu: this is exactly the tone, the method and the literary ethics of all those denunciatory articles that they have been reading for the last five decades about Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and so many others. And, since the main source of Soviet-Marxist aesthetics is Chernyshevsky and his various successors rather than anything Marx or Engels ever wrote, the similarities have logical and obvious causes.

Skabichevsky's initial comment on Chekhov's more serious work was that this writer was a mindless literary clown who would eventually die in the gutter, forgotten by everyone. Skabichevsky lived long enough to wit­ness Chekhov's later popularity and the general acceptance of his work; he accordingly toned down his hostility, especially when the impact of Chekhov's views had been neutralized by his being represented by the reductionist critics as the elegiac bard of a vanishing social order. But Mikhailovsky, the most popular and influential critic of the period, staked his entire literary reputation on discrediting Chekhov in the eyes of en­lightened and liberal readers; his failure to achieve this goal was the most momentous failure of the entire tradition he represented, and it was this failure that probably opened the door for the eventual liberation of Russian literature from utilitarian dictatorship during the Symbolist and Futurist periods. It is typical of Chekhov's personality that he managed to maintain cordial personal relations with Mikhailovsky and even nominated him for election to the Russian Imperial Academy. In an age when the views of Nikolai Mikhailovsky represented for the majority of thinking Russians the ultimate in literary wisdom (this is perceptively stressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in several episodes in August 1914) it was Chekhov who, in the course of a conversation with a young radical student, formulated the truest possible characterization of this critic: "Mikhailovsky is an im­portant sociologist and a failed critic; by his very nature he is incapable of understanding what imaginative literature is."

Mikhailovsky's stubborn rejection of Chekhov, his refusal to recognize that there was a humanitarian side to Chekhov's literary art, is usually regarded in Chekhov scholarship as a grotesque failure of literary taste, especially since Mikhailovsky was later to acclaim Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev as being socially aware in ways that Chekhov for him was not. Yet perhaps in sticking to his guns to the last Mikhailovsky showed more honesty and more perception of Chekhov's true significance than did his successors of the turn of the century, who preferred to love a mourn­ful and despondent Chekhov created in their own image rather than face the full implications of what Chekhov actually represented. For, in his own quiet and gentle way, Chekhov is one of the most profoundly sub­versive writers who ever lived. He is as subversive of the sociological pre­suppositions of a Russian Populist such as Mikhailovsky as of the Christian mysticism of a Lev Shestov, whose widely circulated essay on Chekhov draws heavily on Mikhailovsky's earlier articles and cites some of the same examples to indict Chekhov from a position of Christian metaphysics.

The letters in the present volume provide numerous examples of the ways in which Chekhov's adherence to his "holy of holies . . . the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and from lies" (Letter 23) could undercut the fundamental assumptions of the Russian Empire, its dissident critics and, in fact, the very basis of Western Judeo-Christian civilization. In this respect the letters themselves are eloquent enough. However, in order to point out the essential affinity between the views expressed in the letters and Chekhov's stories and plays, it might be worth­while to concentrate for a moment on the reflection in his creative writing of the three spheres of human activity which have always supposedly been safer to practice than to discuss: religion, politics and sex. Twentieth- century thinkers, such as Aldous Huxley in The Devils of Loudun and H. Rattray Taylor in Sex and History, have convincingly demonstrated that the basic human impulse from which religious, political and sexual ac­tivities all spring is often one and the same, and they have gone a long way toward explaining why repression in any one of these areas inevitably leads to repression in the other two. A study of the various forms of censorship exercised over Russian literature for the past two centuries should convince anyone that every curtailment of political expression and every liberalization is sure to be followed or accompanied by a correspond­ing increase or decrease of freedom in dealing with religious and sexual topics as well.

"Between the statements 'God exists' and There is no God' lies a whole vast field, which a true sage crosses with difficulty. But a Russian usually knows only one of these two extremes; what lies between them is of no interest to him and he usually knows nothing or very little." This maxim is to be found in Anton Chekhov's private notebooks not once, but several times. The tyrannical and pharisaic religious upbringing which Chekhov's father forced on his children resulted in a loss of faith by every single one of them once they became adults. While Anton did not turn into the kind of militant atheist that his older brother Alexander eventually became, there is no doubt that he was a nonbeliever in the last decades of his life. But his early religious upbringing never quite left him and it is very much in evidence both in his correspondence (with its frequent quotations from the Bible and from Orthodox prayers and its lapses into an ecclesiastical Old Church Slavic style for purposes of either solemnity or irony) and in the religious themes of many of his short stories. The Russian clergy appear in Chekhov's stories as frequently as do other social groups. In this Che­khov differs markedly from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who, for all their pre­occupation with religion, never thought of making an Orthodox priest, deacon or monk a central character in a work of fiction as Chekhov did in "The Bishop," "On Easter Eve," "Saintly Simplicity," "A Nightmare" and so many other stories. Most of these men of the Church are presented as full-blooded human beings with their own joys and problems; but we also find in Chekhov an occasional mean, dehumanized cleric, such as the heartless priest who appears briefly toward the end of "In the Ravine" or the nasty and vicious one who provides the comic element in "It Was Not Fated."

Chekhov's own favorite among the hundreds of stories he wrote was "The Student," a very brief story that, in moving and utterly simple terms, states the case for the importance of religious traditions and religious experience for the continuation of civilization. In Chekhov's last prose masterpiece, "The Bishop," the churchman-hero, sustained by his faith, faces the prospect of his own death with understanding and dignity, whereas a man much closer to Chekhov's own spiritual outlook, the pro­fessor of medicine in "A Dreary Story," who has no faith to lean on, deteriorates and withdraws from the life around him. The religious solace sought and found by Sonya in Uncle Vanya and by Yulia in "Three Years" are depicted by Chekhov with the utmost sympathy and understanding. And it was the nonbeliever Chekhov who, in the character of Lipa in "In the Ravine," created one of the most persuasive portraits of a meek Christian saint in Russian literature, comparable only to the similar crea­tion of another nonbeliever, Turgenev's Lukeria in "The Living Relic."

Yet, for all these examples, religion, Christianity and the Church in Chekhov's work are totally divorced from the very things they are tradi­tionally supposed to promote in Western civilization: morality, kindness and ethical treatment of fellow human beings. There are people in Che­khov's stories who are naturally good and kind, and religious belief or going to church are not shown to affect their natural goodness in one way or the other. But the unkind and the uncharitable in Chekhov's work, the ex­ploiters and the manipulators, can and do use religion self-righteously and with impunity to further their selfish ends. The closest we come to an out- and-out villain in Chekhov's writings is the pious, churchgoing peasant Matvei in "Peasant Women," who uses religious teachings and prayers to rid himself of the woman he has seduced, to betray her, to frame her for a crime she probably did not commit and, after her death, to exploit and terrorize her small son. Another churchgoing Christian, the shopkeeper Andrei in "The Requiem," condemns his actress daughter as a harlot and is enabled by his religious beliefs to persist in this condemnation even after his priest explains to him how wrong he is. A whole gallery of cul­tivated upper-class ladies in Chekhov's stories use their church-sanctioned positions as Christian wives and mothers to humiliate other human beings (the professor's wife in "A Dreary Story"), to assert their own smug superiority (Maria Konstantinovna in "The Duel") or to bludgeon another person into submission (the wife in "The Chorus Girl"). The wise old professor in "A Dreary Story" drives this point home when he remarks that "virtue and purity are little different from vice when they are prac­ticed in the spirit of unkindness."

While Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky both believed that Christian faith was the main source of moral strength for the impoverished and ignorant Russian peasants, Chekhov's much more closely observed and genuinely experienced picture of peasant life shows nothing of the sort. In the poverty- ridden world of "The Peasants," religion and the Church do nothing what­soever to raise the moral or ethical level of the benighted peasantry, whose religious expression takes the form of superstition or of empty and mean­ingless ritual (this story so contradicted everything Tolstoy believed about Russian peasant religiosity that he called it a "sin against the Russian people"). In Chekhov's most brutal and violent story, "The Murder," a family of peasant religious fanatics are led by their search for God to hate and brutalize each other and to commit a religiously motivated murder.

In a literature that had produced Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Leskov, the view that Christianity and religion in general are morally neutral is startling enough. This view is clearly subversive from the point of view of all established churches, but Chekhov's simultaneous insistence that religious experience can be tremendously enriching and rewarding when it brings consolation and spiritual profundity into people's lives sits very badly with his Soviet commentators and annotators, who are duty- bound to represent all religion as exploitative and reactionary. Chekhov's view of sex, however, is even more startling, coming as it does from a writer raised in the second half of the nineteenth century. For Chekhov, sex, like religion, is also a morally neutral quantity, whose moral and ethical impli­cations depend on the circumstances and the attitudes of the people involved. Had Chekhov stated such a view openly and militantly in the midst of the Victorian age in which he was living, he would have been dismissed as a crackpot by almost everyone. Because of his usual gentle and subdued mode of presentation, he was able to make his point without shocking too many people—but it was at the cost of having his views in this area almost overlooked.

In the eighteenth century, and especially during the reign of Catherine the Great, Russian literature enjoyed considerable freedom in treating sexual themes. Alexander Pushkin, who was the last nineteenth-century Russian writer to have profound ties with eighteenth-century traditions, was also the last to write openly and without guilt about the joys of sexual love. Pushkin's remarkably free treatment of sexual themes (including an early poem about female masturbation and a verse epistle addressed to a homosexual friend whom Pushkin invited for a visit, with the assurance that, although he himself was not available, he would be happy to intro­duce the visitor to some like-minded young men) was no longer possible when the long night of Victorian repression of all sexuality descended on Russia, as it did on other European countries. The change of sexual at­titudes is reflected in Pushkin's outlook as compared with that of Nikolai Gogol, who was only ten years younger. When the young Pushkin con­tracted gonorrhea, he informed some of his friends of the fact in a tone of puckish humor and with a touch of pride about having thus confirmed his full manhood. But when Gogol's mother, less than two decades later, mis­took a skin rash described in one of his letters for a venereal disease symp­tom, Gogol replied in a hysterical letter that if he had had such a loathsome disease he would have banished himself from the company of all decent men and never dared to see his mother again. It is highly instructive to compare Chekhov's nonjudgmental, matter-of-fact discussion of syphilis in Letter 91 to the just-cited letters of Pushkin and Gogol. Gogol might well be a special case, obsessed as he was by fear of the exposure of his homo­sexuality and by his terror of sexually available women. Because of all this, he shrouded the considerable sexual content of his work in such a mist of symbols and surrealist fantasies that it took the twentieth-century sensibility to discern it at all.

By mid-century, Victorian sexual taboos were fully operative in Russian literature and in Russian culture in general. For Dostoyevsky, the whole of the sexual sphere was sinful, depraved and threatening, albeit secretly at­tractive and fascinating, especially in its possibilities for mutual humiliation of the partners. It was clearly the sado-masochistic aspects of sex, its po­tential for human degradation, that interested Dostoyevsky most of all; and also its paradoxical role as a steppingstone toward redemption, as the ordeal of Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment was meant to demonstrate. For Tolstoy, on the other hand, sexuality, and especially fe­male sexuality, was a sin pure and simple. If at the time of War and Peace sexual relations could be justified for Tolstoy by procreation and by build­ing up a family, for the post-conversion Tolstoy, who wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection, all sexuality, including sex within marriage, was an abomination that could lead only to total perdition. Against this back­ground of fear, guilt and sexual repression, Chekhov's attitudes toward sex come as a refreshing breath of sanity.

Of course, Anton Chekhov was a man of his time. He did not try to write of sexual love with the same freedom that Pushkin enjoyed and that he himself occasionally displayed in his private letters (making some of them unpublishable in Russian to this day). Nor could he permit himself the open treatment of the less-usual forms of sexuality which had been possible in the eighteenth century and became briefly possible again in the first two decades of the twentieth for certain Russian writers of the Symbol­ist period. But his ideal of the utmost literary objectivity prevented him from overlooking this basic human drive, from substituting the subjec­tively desirable in this sphere for that which actually exists, and from im­posing moralizing sanctions and inflicting morally motivated penalties on his "transgressing" (i.e., sexually liberated) characters, as had been the custom in the literature of his time.

In 1886, the year that marks Chekhov's attainment of full literary ma­turity, he wrote four masterful stories that show young women of various social strata in out-of-wedlock sexual involvements. In "Agafya," the young peasant wife of a railroad switchman is caught by her husband when she fails to return in time from a trvst with her lover; "Anvuta" is about an

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urban proletarian girl, who cohabits with a succession of university students; "The Chorus Girl" is another lower-class woman, active as a call girl in addi­tion to her job as an entertainer; and in "A Calamity," the wife of a well-to- do lawyer discovers hitherto unsuspected sexual desires within herself when an old family friend suddenly starts pursuing her with his attentions. What interested Chekhov in these stories is not that his heroines are having sexual experiences not sanctioned by the morality of the times, but rather what is done to them by others and what they do to themselves in con­nection with these experiences. Agafya comes to grief not because she has betrayed her husband, but because she needs her lover more than he needs her and because he refuses to take an interest in the consequences for her of their involvement. Anyuta is shown as an appealing, almost saintly creature, whose educated temporary lover is too tied down by social prej­udices and cultural stereotypes to appreciate her selfless kindness. The same prejudices and stereotypes, mechanically accepted by everyone in­volved, enable the client and his self-dramatizing, bitchy wife to subject the heroine of "The Chorus Girl" to undeserved humiliation and actually to rob her, with her own guilty compliance, of her few pieces of jewelry. And, while Sofya in "A Calamity" finds her newly discovered sexuality alarming and distasteful, it is because her discovery brings out the discrepancy be­tween the bourgeois wife and mother she thinks herself to be and her true self, and also because her sexual drive becomes obsessive, robbing her of the ability to decide freely on a course of action.

The very concepts of "adultery," "adultress," "the fallen woman," so very important in Russian literature of the Victorian age, simply do not exist as far as Chekhov is concerned. The fact that a man and a woman not married to each other may sleep together has no moral or immoral dimensions or value in his stories and plays. When sex is degrading in Chekhov (as it is in "A Calamity" or in "Ariadne"), it is because the people involved have degraded it, not because degradation is intrinsic to it as it so often is in Dostoyevsky. Nor does Chekhov accept the facile notion, made popular by Dobrolyubov in his celebrated essay on Ostrovsky's play The Thunderstorm, that in tsarist Russia marital infidelity could be a form of social protest. Even though the educated heroines of "The Duel" and "An Unknown Man's Story" tend to regard themselves as socially and politically liberated because they have left their husbands and are openly living with their lovers, Chekhov gently exposes their attitudes as wishful illusions, stemming from the same set of taboos and prohibitions that would have branded them "adultresses" or "fallen women" in the work of most of his contemporaries. Where a reader of Anna Karenina or of Resur­rection cannot forget for one moment that out-of-wedlock sex was the main cause of the troubles and sufferings of their heroines, the last and greatest of Chekhov's plays, The Seagull, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, make a point of depicting attractive, believable women whose unconventional sex lives have no bearing on his or our evaluation of their ethics and morals.

Nor is there even a vestige of the double sexual standard in the mature Chekhov. The courtship of the married Yelena by both Uncle Vanya and Dr. Astrov (which so outraged Tolstoy that he insulted one of the actors after a performance of Uncle Vanya) is presented in the same objective, nonjudgmental manner as the fact that Lyubov Ranevskaya is about to return to her kept lover at the end of The Cherry Orchard (which caused Vladimir Korolenko to protest that Chekhov should have exposed her as an "aristocratic slut" instead of enveloping her in a romantic aura). The husband in Tolstoy's Family Happiness puts his wife into a purgatory be­cause for a brief moment she considered the possibility of betraying him. Prince Andrei in War and Peace is unable even to imagine the possibility of forgiving the cheated and repentant Natasha, who had planned to be­tray him but actually did not. In contrast, Chekhov's Layevsky in "The Duel" is able to rise to the realization that it was his own selfish and callous behavior that drove his mistress into other men's arms and to beg for her forgiveness; his Kulvgin in Three Sisters is unimaginative and faintly ridiculous, but kind and magnanimous in his understanding and forgive­ness of his wife's extramarital love affair; above all, his generous and appealing Dr. Dymov in "The Grasshopper" is not in the least concerned with his own hurt pride as he tries to alleviate his wife's pain and suffering over her break with her lover. It is this kind of realization, common to eighteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, but rarely found in the nine­teenth, that women are as subject to sexual desires, obsessions and whims as men and should be judged by the same standards, that made the moti­vations of Layevsky in "The Duel" incomprehensible to Chekhov's elderly poet-friend Pleshcheyev. A similar thesis, embodied in Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto for Mozart's Cost fan tutte, outraged the nineteenth-century minds of both Beethoven and Wagner and, despite all the glories of Mozart's music, made that masterpiece the least performed of his operas throughout the nineteenth century.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir singled out Stendhal as the only major writer who understood the particular situation of women in a male-dominated world. Twenty years later, Kate Millett was to proclaim that Jean Genet's special vantage point as a homosexual, outcast and criminal enabled him to perceive the specific situation of women better than male writers blinded by their machismo. But had the work of Anton Chekhov been read in the West as it is written, rather than through the prism of inherited Russian critical distortions, many of his stories would surely be in the canon of the women's liberation movement. What other writer so habitually showed his female characters robbed of their individual­ity by the traditional roles society forces upon them? What better image of a woman reduced to the level of an inanimate object is there in litera­ture than the self-abnegating Anyuta, shivering from cold at the beginning of the story, while her lover, a medical student, uses her as an anatomical aid in studying for an exam, and later allows a friend to borrow her for a few hours, despite her objections, to serve without pay as a nude model? Chekhov's stories dealing with similar themes are too many to enumerate, but a few can be cited to demonstrate the nature of his concern and its depth. In "Big Volodya and Little Volodya" we are shown in the space of a few pages the plight of an intelligent young woman, recently married to a high-ranking army officer much older than herself, trying to share her religious and intellectual interests with her husband and, getting no re­sponse, turning to a young literary scholar who was her childhood friend. But the younger man (he has the same first name as her husband) refuses to take her genuine intellectual and spiritual hunger seriously and utilizes her despair to effect an easy sexual conquest. The military husband and the academic-intellectual lover both see the heroine's dissatisfaction as a symptom of hysteria and make no effort to understand it. The hopeless­ness of her situation is further emphasized by the two other female char­acters in the story, her closest friends, one of whom becomes an acid- tongued, disillusioned old maid loathing herself for her failure to find a husband, while the other gives up all worldly ambitions and withdraws to a convent.

A somewhat similar constellation of characters appears in another story from Chekhov's last period, "A Visit with Friends," which also depicts an upper-class group of three women and two men. There is an older sister, a beautiful and intelligent woman, who allows her own and her younger sister's property to be squandered by her husband, a fraud, a poseur and a wastrel, adored and pampered by all the women in the story. The visiting bachelor lawyer, from whose vantage point the story is told, wonders at this woman's uncritical devotion to her husband and her two little daughters and at her total absorption in her homemaking:

... he found it strange that this healthy, young, by no means stupid woman, who was in fact such a powerful and complex organism, should expend all of her energy, all of her life forces on such primitive, petty work as the building of this particular nest, which in any case had already been built.

"Perhaps this is how it should be," he thought, "but it is neither interesting nor intelligent."

The younger sister spends all her time yearning for the kind of domestic arrangements in which her older sister is caught. She longs for a marriage proposal from the visiting lawyer, not, Chekhov carefully makes clear, because she loves him or feels close to him, but because his proposal would enable her to fulfill what she has been brought up to believe is her bio­logical destiny. An alternative to the situation of these two sisters is repre­sented by their friend, a woman doctor who is independent and self- supporting, but crushed by loneliness and poverty. At the end of the story, the lawyer, bored by the matrimonial moonings of the younger sister, dreams of another kind of woman, the kind who could tell him "something fascinating and new, not related to either love or happiness, or else if she should speak of love, that it would be a call for a new way of life, lofty and rational, on the brink of which we might be living, the advent of which we might perhaps sense now and then."

The heroine of "Ariadne" has been brought up on the notion that the aim of a girl's life is to please men and to appeal to their sexual appetites. She grows into a calculating, cold-blooded predator, unable to enjoy any human relationship or even sex, preoccupied solely with the material ad­vantages her victims can provide. But, because of the naked selfishness and pettiness of her approach to life, Ariadne fails to make it as a big-time femme fatale. At the end of the story she seems to be headed for marriage with a dull, aged lecher. In an outburst of moral preaching, unique in the mature Chekhov, the author allows one of Ariadne's male victims to blame it all on the education that women get in Western societies:

"Yes, sir, it is all the fault of our education, my good man. In the cities the entire upbringing and education of a woman comes down es­sentially to converting her into a human animal, that is, to have her please the male and to teach her how to conquer this male. Yes, sir," Shamokhin sighed. "What is needed is to have the girls brought up and educated to­gether with the boys, to have both of them together at all times. A woman should be brought up to realize when she is wrong, just as a man is, because otherwise she is sure that she is always right. Convince a little girl from the cradle on that a man is not primarily a suitor, a prospective bridegroom, but a fellow human being equal to her in every way. Get her accustomed to think logically, to generalize, and stop assuring her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she may remain indifferent to the sciences, the arts, to cultural tasks in general. A young boy who is an apprentice shoemaker or housepainter also has a smaller-sized brain than an adult man, but he nevertheless takes part in the general struggle for survival, he works, he suffers. And we'd better drop this manner of blaming everything on physiology, pregnancy and childbirth, because first of all, a woman does not give birth every month, secondly not all women give birth, and thirdly a normal peasant woman works in the fields right up to the day before she gives birth, and is not harmed in any way. Also, we should achieve the most complete equality imaginable in our daily life. If a man offers the lady a chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped,—why, let her repay him in kind. I would not object if a girl of good family were to help me put on my overcoat or bring me a glass of water."

The inability of even educated and well-to-do women to attain personal freedom and independence without a man's help is a major theme of Chekhov's, recurring constantly in his work. It is present, in a muted and subdued form, in Three Sisters, but it is given a much more overt and eloquent treatment in such stories as "Lights," "A Woman's Kingdom" and "Anna on the Neck." In "The Darling," we are shown a woman who by choice gives up all her individual qualities and derives whatever existence or dimensions she may possess from the males in her life. Chekhov intended her as a humorous creation, but Lev Tolstoy saw in her the embodiment of some of his own most cherished notions about what a woman should be. In a very significant little critical article on "The Darling," Tolstoy argued that Chekhov accomplished the very opposite of what he had in­tended in this story, depicting, instead of the laughable creature he had in mind, a beautiful, saintly and totally fulfilled woman.

An instance of a woman genuinely liberating herself from the compul­sory biological and social roles which society and her family relentlessly impose on her and achieving an independent existence as an inwardly free individual is described in the very last story Chekhov wrote, "The Bride" (also known in English as "The Betrothed"). This story has become the traditional prize exhibit of orthodox Soviet critics, who are out to prove that at the end of his life Chekhov was moving toward espousing the cause of violent revolution. Although the text of the story does not state the exact future path that the heroine of "The Bride," Nadya, will follow, it is invariably assumed by the commentators in Soviet editions of Chekhov that in Nadya he has portrayed an upper-class girl who is about to become a revolutionary. This is the reasoning that underlies the commentary to "The Bride" in the twelve-volume Soviet edition of Chekhov's complete works, which states that this story is the most important thing Chekhov ever wrote. It must also explain why a recent American translator of "The Bride" renders the key phrase "to change the course of your life" (pere- vernut' zhizn') as "to revolutionize your life" every time it occurs in the story.

But to reduce "The Bride" to the cliches and platitudes that are com­pulsory in Soviet criticism is to deprive a unique and remarkable story of its particular and profound meaning. As was the case with Misail Poloznev in Chekhov's "My Life" (in some ways Misail is Nadya's male counter­part), Nadya's first step toward her personal liberation is taken when she begins to question the values of her family—her mother and her grand­mother in this case. Her distant cousin Sasha, a consumptive young revo­lutionary, adds fuel to her resolve to escape by preaching the imminence of a social revolution which will instantly change men into demigods and cover the face of the earth with beautiful buildings and fountains. A further degree of freedom is achieved by Nadya when she rejects the com­fortable marriage into which her entire culture is pushing her. When she escapes to St. Petersburg, her liberation from the small town where she was raised is complete. At this point the Soviet commentators prefer to stop; but in the text itself Chekhov takes his heroine still further in her quest for inner freedom. After living independently in St. Petersburg for a year, Nadya lias another encounter with the revolutionary Sasha. She is still attached to him and grateful for his help in her escape, but she has by now traveled beyond the stage of sloganeering, where he still remains: ". . . and now there was about Sasha, about his smile, about his entire figure something outmoded, old-fashioned, something that had had its day and had perhaps already gone to its grave." A revolution based on the promise of material affluence and on humanity reduced to a standardized common denominator rather than on freedom of thought and universal equality now holds as little attraction for Nadya as it did for Chekhov himself. "The Bride" is certainly as subversive of Soviet society today as it was of the society of Chekhov's day; hence the orthodox Leninist glosses in the Soviet commentaries and hence the hypnotic reiteration of the word

"revolutionary" and the avoidance of all mention of Nadva's achievement

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of an intensely personal inner liberation.

The principal implications of "The Bride" pertain not only to sexual politics, but to politics pure and simple. It is Chekhov's socio-political views, such as they are, that many of his Russian commentators have tried hardest to overlook or to distort. If Chekhov undercuts the traditional views on religion and sexuality by denying that these two areas have any inherent ethical or moral dimensions, politically the most subversive aspect of his thinking is his systematic demonstration of the illusory nature of all labels, categories and divisions of human beings into social groups and social classes, which are the starting point of all political theories of his time and ours. Chekhov's repeated insistence that "labels and trademarks" such as "liberal," "conservative," "Populist" or "neurotic," when used as a total description of any one person, are nothing but superstitions which keep people from perceiving the deeper moral and human realities implies a reasoned rejection of the political thinking that has been one of the mainstays of Russian literature and literary criticism from the 1840s on.

It is hard for foreign audiences to realize the determined audacity, bordering on insolence, with which Chekhov flies in the face of the cherished stereotypes of the Russian intelligentsia when he makes the pro­gressive and enlightened Dr. Lvov the villain of Ivanov, and yet shows the professional soldier Lieutenant Colonel Vershinin in Three Sisters as a socially aware idealist and the rising capitalist Yermolai Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (who takes over the heroine's estate) as a complex and ap­pealing human being, who is, furthermore, on friendly and affectionate

terms with the revolutionarv-minded Petva Trofimov. It is this same kind

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of Chekhov-inspired rejection of stereotypes that makes the confrontation between the perceptive tsarist officer Colonel Vorotvntsev and the frightened, young radical Sasha Lenartovich in Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 so startling and convincing. In the Soviet Union, where the labeling and compartmentalizing of groups of people is the basis of an entire cul­ture, this aspect of Chekhov would be explosive indeed if anyone dared to bring it out into the open. The parable of litigation between the tavern keeper and the poor peasant, in which the jury of enlightened intellectuals decides in favor of the peasant solely because their culture assumes every tavern keeper to be an exploiter and every poor peasant a hero, appears in Chekhov's notebooks and is used in his story "The Name-Day Party." This parable is a beautiful illustration of the politically induced disregard of facts and the impairment of moral judgment that arise in any deeply polarized society. A recognizable present-day parallel would be a shootout between a white policeman and a black militant: regardless of how or why it happened, large groups of people would instantly want to believe that it must have been the black militant's fault, while other large groups, equally predictably, would want to blame it on the policeman. This is precisely what Chekhov's objection to labels and trademarks is all about.

Chekhov was almost as good as Tolstoy at puncturing the prevailing political illusions of the nineteenth century. He took on the illusion that industrialization is always beneficial in "A Woman's Kingdom" and "A Case from a Doctor's Practice"; the illusion that Russian peasants were a breed of Rousseauist saints in "The Phonies" (Svistuny in Russian), "The Village Elder" and "The Peasants"; and the Dostoyevskian notion of Russian messianism in "Three Years." But, unlike Tolstoy, he was not given to creating his own social myths and illusions. The principal docu­ment on Chekhov's socio-political views is of course his magnificent letter to Pleshchevev (Letter 23), which expresses his basic credo better than a whole volume of commentary could. Numerous insights into his political views and their evolution are to be found in other letters included in the present volume. However, since he did occasionally indulge in politically oriented polemics in his stories and plays, it may be worthwhile to point out a few such instances in his imaginative writing which may enhance and amplify the material found in the letters.

While Chekhov had little interest in political theories, programs and parties, he was tremendously sensitive to and aware of the human and moral realities that might underlie them. In his immature early stories, written for a quick ruble, he would occasionally serve up the kind of social and political satire for which the editors of humor magazines, general readers and the leading critics of the time all had a limitless appetite. As well as anyone, he could go through the motions of indicting corrupt high officials, hypocritical and groveling civil servants, harebrained society ladies, dishonest merchants and bribe-taking policemen. But, while still in his humor-magazine period, Chekhov managed to create one of the most profound political archetypes in all Russian literature, the figure of Sergeant Prishibeyev in the story of that name (1885). Prishibeyev is the quintes­sential authoritarian, an almost biologically depicted representative of the elderly human male, who is naturally convinced that people do not know what is good for them and need constant supervision if they are not to cause trouble, while he, the sergeant, knows what is right and has a God- given mission to tell everyone else what to do. Thirteen years later Chekhov provided Sergeant Prishibeyev with a companion figure in the person of the schoolteacher Belikov (in the story "The Man in a Shell"), the quintes­sential conformist, who is both the reverse of Prishibeyev's coin and his Siamese twin in the universal political landscape. Where Prishibeyev needs to run other people's lives, Belikov requires to be guided by rules and regu­lations devised by others. Not only does he require it for himself, but he needs to force everyone around him to conform to restrictions imposed from the outside, no matter how useless or nonsensical these restrictions may be.

It is easy to regard Prishibeyev and Belikov as satirical representations of political types peculiar to the tsarist Russia of Chekhov's time. But to do so is to miss the entire point of these two archetypes, both of which became instantly proverbial in Russia. Prishibeyev represents the embodi­ment of a widespread, recognizable human instinct (in Chekhov's story, he is actually put on trial for exercising unlawful authority), while Belikov, embodying an equally recognizable opposite instinct, complements Prishi­beyev the way a masochist complements a sadist and a criminal in Jean Genet's novels complements a policeman. Both types are observable in every kind of society, democratic as well as totalitarian. Both types are traditionally involved in political activity and, in fact, the more oppressive a given society, the more scope it affords its Prishibeyevs and Belikovs. But it took Chekhov's particular insight to detect them in their embryonic stage and to show that they were present not only in the official regime of his country, but in its revolutionary movement as well. The character of the idealistic, ideologically committed Dr. Yevgeny Lvov in Ivanov is a case in point. Moved by the most decent and humanitarian motivations imaginable, Lvov ends up treating those around him cruelly and unfairly because he insists on seeing everyone as a reflection of his ideological stereo­types instead of as an individual and fallible human being (see Letter 14 for Chekhov's own commentary on Dr. Lvov's character).

Even more telling is the character of the socially and politically active young girl, Lida Volchaninova, who appears in one of the most poetic stories of Chekhov's maturity, "The House with a Mansard." In his book on Chekhov, Kornei Chukovskv, a perceptive and knowledgeable Soviet critic, pretended to be puzzled why the do-gooder Chekhov depicted Lida so harshly and her idle younger sister with so much kindness and sympathy. "Hypnotized by Chekhov's magical craftsmanship, all of Russia fell poet­ically in love with this spineless, weak girl and came to despise her older sister for the very deeds and actions which not in literature, but in real life were so dear to Chekhov," Chukovsky wrote (the italics are his). "The Chekhov we know from innumerable memoirs and letters,—the district physician, the founder of libraries, the builder of schools—had he met Lida not in literature, but in life, would undoubtedly have become her faithful ally; but in literature he is her indicter and enemy."

In a book published in the Soviet Union, this is as far as Chukovsky could go in making his point, but the story itself tells us more. Yes, there is no doubt that Lida's social-improvement program parallels Chekhov's own. But this outwardly civilized partisan of civil rights is in her private life an authoritarian who keeps her mother and sister in fear and subjuga­tion. She is also a political fanatic. When her political convictions are brought into question and challenged by the artist-narrator with whom her sister is in love, Lida steps in and brutally breaks up their love affair. The very act of questioning her cherished political views is seen by Lida as a threat to her dominant position in the family—and she strikes out at her opponent with every ethical and unethical means she can muster. In this story, political fanaticism is as inhuman and as destructive as religious fanaticism was in "Peasant Women" and "The Murder."

Unlike Lida and Dr. Lvov, other Chekhovian characters who are com­mitted to revolutionary change are not necessarily dehumanized by rigid fanaticism and the dogmatic classification of all mankind into "us" and "them." There is the appealing Sasha in "The Bride," the naively idealistic Petya Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard and Vladimir, the intellectual would-be terrorist who narrates "An Unknown Man's Story" ("An Anony­mous Story" in Constance Garnett's English version). Vladimir could agree to commit a political assassination in principle, but he was unable to bring it off once he came to see his intended victim as an individual human being rather than an abstract political cipher. With the hindsight of the second half of the twentieth century, it is not difficult to imagine this entire group of dedicated, revolutionarv-minded young people succeeding in their efforts to overthrow the old regime and to redress its wrongs. But the next step would inevitably be for Dr. Lvov and Lida Volchaninova to purge the individualistic Sasha, the excessively idealistic Petya Trofimov and the ideologically unstable hero of "An Unknown Man's Story" to impose their own simple-minded dogmatism on everyone else and call the results the ultimate liberation. Yes, perhaps stubborn old Nikolai Mikhailovsky, who so persistently accused Chekhov of slandering the ideals of the Russian revolutionary movement, was more perceptive and honest than the official

Soviet criticism of our day, with its compulsory eulogies of the progressive Chekhov.

While Chekhov valued and appreciated the many genuinely liberating and democratic trends that the enlightened anti-government intelligentsia of his time was helping to further, his idea of social involvement and of activism was basically different from theirs. For Chekhov's contemporaries, as for many Western commentators on Russian literature today, the standard examples of socially involved turn-of-the-century writers are Tolstoy with his defiance of the government, his excommunication from the Orthodox Church and defense of persecuted religious sects, and the young Maxim Gorky, with his support of the revolutionary movement and his fund-raising campaigns for outlawed political parties. Such actions are remembered because they are dramatic; their effect depends on dramatizing current political issues by deliberately attracting public attention to them. But in its own way Anton Chekhov's life was probably more filled with direct involvement in valid social and human­itarian activity than that of any other writer one could name. His life was one continuous round of alleviating famine, fighting epidemics, building schools and public roads, endowing libraries, helping organize marine- biologv laboratories, giving thousands of needy peasants free medical treatment, planting gardens, helping fledgling writers get published, raising funds for worthwhile causes, and hundreds of other pursuits designed to help his fellow man and improve the general quality of life around him. If Chekhov's foreign admirers usually think of his trip to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin as the one exceptional humanitarian act of his life, it is because this trip has been misrepresented by commentators to look like an act of open political defiance, such as Western readers have traditionally come to expect of Russian writers.

There are two main reasons why Chekhov's social activism has not been sufficiently stressed by his commentators and biographers (Kornei Chukovsky's book is the only one that emphasizes this aspect of Chekhov and does it ably and forcefully). One reason is that the genuinely modest Chekhov avoided personal publicity and would select causes not likely to attract sensation-seeking journalists. But the more important reason is that the basic outlook of the Russian liberal intelligentsia was derived from the field of the social sciences, humanities and, in some important in­stances, religion, while Chekhov's continuous commitment to medicine and the biological sciences in general gave him an entirely different set of priorities, both in his life and in literature. For his Russian contemporaries, Chekhov's efforts to prevent a cholera epidemic, his involvement in census taking both on Sakhalin and at his own estate of Melikhovo, his concern for the mistreatment of the Tatars, Gilyaks and Ainus, his alarm over the disappearance of wildlife were simply not as interesting as Tolstoy's or Gorky's open defiance of the tsarist government. This attitude is still evident in various Western biographies, television programs and biograph­ical plays, which project the same tired stereotypes of the dynamic activist Gorky contrasted with the withdrawn, sad and resigned Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. But perhaps we are at long last ready to perceive the true value of Chekhov's wider-ranging and, in the long run, more realistic humanitar­ian concerns, which are focused on the physical and biological realities of man's existence and future rather than on the topical political passions of a particular decade.

Chekhov himself was well aware of the paramount importance of his training in the biological sciences for his general outlook and for his forma­tion as a literary artist (Letter 130). This training and his constant reading of Darwin, of books by travelers and explorers such as Nevelskov and Przhevalskv, and of Russian biological scientists enabled him to bring to Russian literature dimensions and methods that were very much at odds with most of its previous assumptions. Instead of starting from a precon­ceived moral, sociological or religious position, Chekhov begins with scru­pulously unbiased observations of the life around him, and he refrains from deriving sweeping social generalizations from an insufficient body of observable facts. Whereas the attempts of Chekhov's French con­temporaries, especially Zola and Maupassant, to apply the methodology of the biological sciences to literary art sometimes reduced their peasant and proletarian characters to the level of laboratory animals subjected to vivisec­tion, Chekhov's unfailing humanity and compassion led him to an ap­proach closer to that of a doctor observing his patients for symptoms. However, Chekhov refrained from prescribing a cure—his vocation as a writer did not entitle him to prescribe panaceas for humanity's ills, some­thing that all too many Russian novelists and especially critics have had no qualms about doing.

Chekhov's very profound involvement with biology and its role as a key to much of his art have been noted by two Soviet critics of the Formalist generation, Boris Eichenbaum and Leonid Grossman (their articles are included in the fine collection of Chekhov criticism in English edited by Robert Louis Jackson for the Twentieth Century Views series). But, by and large, this important topic has not received the critical attention it requires and neither has the problem of the stylistic affinity of Chekhov's writing with the books of Russian nineteenth-century explorers and biol­ogists, to whom he felt so close and from whom he learned so much. The orientation of Chekhov's literary art toward the empirical sciences rather than toward intuitively grasped social theories, moral preaching or religious revelation presaged the later appearance of such similarly oriented twen­tieth-ccntury Russian writers as Vladimir Nabokov, equally well grounded in biology, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose training in physics and mathematics brings to his art a precision and objectivity that make his indignation and passion all the more persuasive.

Teaching courses on Chekhov at American universities in the second half of the 1960s was a particularly rewarding experience, because during those years the intellectual life of the Western world was gradually catch­ing up with many of Chekhov's insights and preoccupations which his contemporaries had chosen to overlook. His views on the situation of women provides one of the more spectacular examples of this. Another is his constant theme of the threatened environment and industrial pollution, with which he was concerned as early as the 1880s. This theme appears in "The Steppe" in the character of the cart driver Vasya, who is almost uncannily attuned to nature and to all living creatures (he goes into senti­mental ecstasies on observing a fox and is morally hurt when one of his colleagues wantonly kills a snake) and whose jaw is hideously swollen from the chemical poisoning resulting from his work at a match factory. In "The Reed Flute" (SvireV in Russian), one of the most crucial earlier stories, unaccountably omitted from most English-language collections of his work, Chekhov describes, in the highly poetic form of a colloquy be­tween an aged village shepherd and the steward of a nearby estate, the effect of the poor management of natural resources and laments the pol­lution of rivers and lakes and the predictable disappearance of wild animals and birds. Two years later, in 1889, he made this topic one of the central themes of the most openly polemical of his full-length plays, The Wood Demon. The attractive, positive hero of this play (the only instance of a character in Chekhov's plays who clearly expresses the author's views and has the author's full support) is the young landowner with a medical degree, Mikhail Khrushchev, whose main passion is saving the local forests and wildlife from senseless destruction. Khrushchev's conservationist efforts and his selfless medical aid to the surrounding peasants are regarded with suspicion by the other characters in the play because they cannot find a reductionist political or sociological label to pin on his activities. The most hostile attitude of all is taken by Alexander Serebryakov, a professor of literature, whose catch phrase for socially useful action is "delo delat' nado," which can mean both "you must do something useful" and, in the context of Chekhov's time, "you must do something for the cause." Coming from Serebryakov, the implication of the phrase is that writing articles of literary pseudo-criticism in the radical-utilitarian tradition is of more value for the Russian people than Khrushchev's program of medical and con­servationist action. Serebryakov's daughter Sonya (a character vastly differ­ent in The Wood Demon from the Sonya of Uncle Vanya) loves Khru­shchev and dramatically liberates herself at the end of the play from her father's cliche-ridden thinking, resolving to consider her loved one's actions on their own merits only.

The Wood Demon was an artistically unsatisfactory play in many ways, and Chekhov later discarded it, salvaging many of its characters, themes and portions of its actual text for his later and much more nearly perfect play, Uncle Vanya. The somewhat idealized Mikhail Khrushchev was replaced by the hard-drinking and cynical Dr. Astrov. But Astrov retained his prototype's conservationist interests and he is made to repeat verbatim Khrushchev's impassioned speech about the destruction of forests:

"Yes, I can see it when you cut down forests out of need, but why exterminate them? The forests of Russia are groaning under the ax, billions of trees perish, the dwellings of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers run shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes disappear forever and all because the lazy man doesn't have the sense to pick his fuel up from the ground [the use of peat is meant]. (Turning to Yelena) Isn't that true, madam? One has to be a mindless barbarian to burn this beauty in one' stove, to destroy what we cannot create. Man was granted reason and creative abilities to increase that which was given him, but until now he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, the rivers dry up, wild animals are dying out, the climate is ruined and with each passing day the earth is becoming poorer and uglier."

This theme is given additional focus in the third-act scene between Astrov and Yelena (there was no corresponding scene in The Wood Demon) in which he shows her colored maps documenting the land spoliation and systematic disappearance of various species of wildlife. And yet the con­trast between the reality and value of nature conservation on the one hand and the sterility of simplistic social theorizing on the other, which is one of the main themes of Uncle Vanya, usually goes unperceived during the frequent productions of this play in Western countries. So does the irony of Professor Serebryakov's exit line, "You must all do something useful."

Chekhov returned to the ecological theme in one of his very last stories, "In the Ravine," which, because of the complexity and profundity of the questions it raises and the perfection of its technical realization, may well be the most impressive story he ever wrote. Here, the vivid picture of unchecked industrial pollution that poisons and disfigures the country­side, described in the opening pages, sets the scene for the examination of human greed, venality and corruption which are the subject of the story.

Chekhov's ideas on various topics that were subversive within the culture of his time and which might remain so in our day are not what made him the very great writer he is. His greatness lies more in the radically new ways he had discovered of perceiving and expressing the human pre­dicament and in the dazzlingly original literary forms he devised for con­veying his perceptions. These facets of Chekhov will not be found in his letters and neither will his great personal leitmotifs that flow from story to story and from play to play: the semantic tragedy that arises from the inability or unwillingness of human beings to communicate fully and from the inadequacy of language itself as a means of communication; and the changes in the texture of time's fabric which cause every attained goal to be different from what it was at the planning stage and which make a teleological approach to any undertaking or any personal relationship an absurdity. But a good understanding of the ideological underpinnings of his creative writing should enhance the understanding of his letters, just as the letters provide an essential key to the unstated implications of many of his stories and plays. In terms of illustrating Chekhov's views and atti­tudes, the artistically inferior plays of the middle period, such as Ivanov and The Wood Demon, are more revealing than the dramatic masterpieces of his last years, which he no longer bothered to infuse with his current ideological preoccupations.

Chekhov's libertarian views, his moral relativism, his recognition that there could be a variety of acceptable and valid approaches to many funda­mental issues, his hatred and resentment of dividing people into categories and pinning simplistic labels on them were clearly at variance with much of the Russian culture of his day and would be most unwelcome, were they to be openly recognized, in the Soviet Union. The uniqueness of his views within the Russian intellectual tradition has led to much distortion, both deliberate and unconscious, of Chekhov's attitudes by modern Russian commentators. Remarkably few Russians who have written on Chekhov have shown the perception and acceptance of his modes of thinking that we can find in the better discussions of his work by the more understanding foreign critics. There is nothing in Russian critical literature that for empathy and penetration could be placed next to the journals of the French critic Charles Du Bos (who understood Chekhov better than any other critic who ever lived, but who refrained from writing a book on him for fear that he didn't understand him enough), "The Russian Point of View" by Virginia Woolf or "Seeing Chekhov Plain" by Edmund Wilson. Crea­tive Russian writers and Russian poets, on the other hand, have been able to see into Chekhov with a freshness and spontaneity that seem beyond the grasp of Russian critics. So, by way of summary, three views of Chekhov by three of Russia's most outstanding twentieth-century poets are hereby offered.

In 1914, the twenty-one-year-old Vladimir Mayakovsky commemorated the tenth anniversary of Chekhov's death with a jaunty, irreverent little essay called "The Two Chekhovs." Written at a time when Mayakovsky was one of the leaders of Russian Futurism, the essay, for all its youthful desire to shock, remains to this day one of the most intelligent appraisals of Chekhov's role in Russian literature. In its level-headed insistence that Chekhov is important as an innovative literary artist rather than as a sociological phenomenon, Mayakovsky's Chekhov essay was the signal for the soon-to-develop Formalist school of Russian criticism (which was closely allied with Mayakovsky and his Futurists). Its concluding passages read:

Chekhov's language is as precise as "Hello!" and as simple as "Give me a glass of tea/' In his method of expressing the idea of a compact little story, the urgent cry of the future is felt: "Economy!"

It is these new forms of expressing an idea, this true approach to art's real tasks, that give us the right to speak of Chekhov as a master of verbal art.

Behind the familiar Chekhovian image created by the philistines, that of a grumbler displeased with everything, the defender of "ridiculous people" against society, behind Chekhov the twilight bard we discern the outlines of the other Chekhov: the joyous and powerful master of the art of literature.

In 1929, Boris Poplavsky, one of the finest poets of the Russian emigra­tion, the author of brilliant surrealist and at times mystical poems, made this entry in his personal journal:

Dostoeysky cannot help us live, he can only help us when we quarrel, separate, die. Tolstoy perhaps could, but how revolting is his eulogizing of bourgeois prosperity,—the Levins, the end of W. and P. Now Chekhov— yes, Chekhov can help us live, he and Lermontov.

A few pages later we read:

Chekhov teaches me to endure in my own spccial way, not to give up, to keep hoping, for there is much in Chekhov that is Roman, there is-much of some kind of "no matter what happens," of quand тёте.

And still further:

Chekhov is the most [Russian] Orthodox of Russian writers or more correctly the only Orthodox Russian writer. For what is Russian Orthodoxy if not absolute forgiveness, absolute refusal to condemn.

And in the early 1950s, Boris Pasternak's hero in Doctor Zhivago, who, like Chekhov, combined literature with medicine, wrote the lines that could not help but be the expression of the author's view as well:

Of things Russian, I love now most of all the Russian childlike quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy lack of concern over such momentous matters as the ultimate aims of mankind and their own salvation. They understood all that very well, but they were far too modest and considered such things beyond their rank and position. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky prepared for death, worried, searched for meaning, drew final conclusions, but those two were to the end distracted by the current private interests of their artistic calling and in this preoccupation lived out their lives also as a private matter of no concern to anyone else. And now, this private matter turns out to be of general concern and, like apples removed from the tree to ripen, keeps filling of itself in posterity with ever greater sweet­ness and meaning.

No, these three major Russian poets did not see Chekhov as a prophet of despair, as that jigsaw puzzle's ugly and morose tapeworm. All three would have agreed with Charles Du Bos, who wondered why so many people found depressing instead of bracing Chekhov's combination of an unflinching look at life's realities with a deep compassion. Perhaps the readers of Anton Chekhov's letters selected for this volume will also come to see this supreme realist in life and in literature as Mayakovsky, Pop- lavsky, Pasternak and Du Bos were able to see him, rather than as that hazy twilight creature of created legend who has been usurping the real Chekhov's place for so long.

Simon Karlinsky

THE TAGANROG METAMORPHOSIS

The most decisive development in the spiritual and intellectual formation of Anton Chekhov took place during the least well-documented period of his life, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Left alone in his native city of Taganrog after his father's bankruptcy forced the rest of the family to move to Moscow, supporting himself by tutoring younger students at the school he attended, reading voraciously at the Taganrog public library, the young Anton gradually replaced the patriarchal peasant and merchant-class values in which he had been brought up with their very opposite, the intellectual and ethical values of the liberal nineteenth- century intelligentsia. Chekhov's two older brothers, Alexander and Nikolai, had gone through similar transformations somewhat earlier when they went off to study in Moscow, but Anton's spiritual metamorphosis was both less violent in its expression and more thoroughgoing than that of his brothers. Typically, Chekhov's liberation from the traditions and values of his parents did not take the form of a violent rebellion against his parents and against the entire social structure of his country, as had been the case with so many young Russians of his time. The actual process was later described by Chekhov with exemplary objectivity and precision in the much-quoted passage from his letter to Suvorin (Letter 15 in the present collection) about the young man, son of a serf, a former grocer, who rids himself of the servile thinking instilled by his upbringing, and by squeezing the slave out of himself, drop by drop, awakes one fine morning feeling that the blood flowing in his veins is no longer that of a slave but that of a real human being.

The earliest set of Chekhov letters we have are the ones he wrote from

Taganrog to his Moscow cousin Mikhail Chekhov. Anton's initial reply to Cousin Mikhail's offer to correspond provides us with a glimpse of the pre-transformation Chekhov. The servile and self-deprecating tone is most uncharacteristic of Chekhov as we know him: "You were the first to hint at the possibility of a fraternal friendship between us. It was an impertinence on my part to have allowed this. The younger person is duty-bound to beg for friendship first, not the older one. Therefore I beg you to forgive me" (Letter to Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov, December 6, 1876). This tone disappears in the letters written to the same addressee in 1877. Chekhov came to write to his brother Mikhail in the spring of 1879 on the subject of personal dignity and of his literary preferences, his meta­morphosis was complete. Letter 2 is the earliest authentically Chekhovian document we have: neither the tone nor the ideas of that letter would be imaginable in the milieu of Chekhov's father, uncles and cousins. At nine­teen, Chekhov had already gained that freedom of thought and independ­ence of spirit that were later to cause the young Maxim Gorky to remark after meeting the famous writer that Anton Chekhov was the first genuinely free human being he had ever encountered.

1. To Mikhail (Mikhailovich) Chekhov¹

Taganrog, May 10, 1877

Dearest Cousin Misha,

Not having had the fortune of seeing you again, I take up my pen. First, let me give you a fraternal vote of thanks for everything you did for me throughout my stay in Moscow.² Second, I am delighted we parted such intimate friends and brothers, and therefore dare to hope and trust that the twelve hundred versts that may long stand between two letter- writing brothers who have come to know each other well will prove but a trifling distance for the long-term maintenance of our good relations. Now I have a request which I imagine you will carry out because it is so insignificant: if I send my mother letters through you, will you give them to her secretly, when there's no one else around? There are certain things in life that can be said to only one trustworthy individual. It is for this reason that I am forced to write Mother in secret from the others, whom my secrets (I have a special kind of secrets, and I don't know if you're interested in them or not; if you like, I'll reveal them to you) do not interest in the least or rather do not concern. My second and last request will be somewhat more serious. Could you continue to comfort my mother? She is physically and morally crushed and has found in you much more than merely a nephew. My mother's nature is such that she has a very strong positive reaction to any kind of moral support coming from another person. A ridiculous request, isn't it? But you'll come to understand it, especially since I've asked for your "moral," in other words, spiritual support. In this archmalicious world there is nothing dearer to us than our mother, and therefore you will much oblige your humble servant by comforting his half-moribund mother. We will carry on a good, steady correspondence, won't we? And let me assure you in passing that you won't be sorry for having told me all those things. All I can do is thank you for your confidence in me. I want you to know that I value it highly. Good-bye and best wishes. My regards to Liza and Grisha⁸ and to your friends.

Your cousin,

A. Chekhov

Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov (1851-1909) was the son of Pavel Yegor- ovich Chekhov's older brother Mikhail. He was apprenticed at the age of twelve at a warehouse owned by a wealthy Moscow merchant and he worked there as a clerk for the rest of his life. While much can be said against Pavel Chekhov's ideas of upbringing, it is to his everlasting credit that his insistence on as much education as possible for every one of his children enabled them to become literary figures and educators. The children of his less stern brothers Mikhail and Mitrofan never rose beyond the station of salesmen, seamstresses and warehouse attendants. The young Chekhov was quite at­tached to his cousin Misha and corresponded with him during his school years. In the early 1880s Misha succeeded in obtaining a job for Chekhov's father at the warehouse where he worked. By that time, the contact between Anton and Cousin Misha had dwindled. The warehouse where Misha worked and its employees served as the models for the warehouse and employees in Chekhov's "Three Years"; Misha himself appears in that novel, slightly cari­catured, as the warehouse clerk Pochatkin.

During the Easter recess in March, 1877, Chekhov visited his family in Moscow and met his cousin Misha in person after exchanging several sentimental letters with him.

Cousin Misha's younger sister and brother.

2. To Mikhail (Pavlovich) Chekhov[1]

Taganrog, between April 6 and 8, 1879

Dear Brother Misha,

I got your letter while sitting around yawning by the gate at the height of a horrible fit of boredom, so you can imagine how perfectly timed it seemed—and so enormous too. You have a good handwriting, and I didn't find a single grammatical error anywhere in the letter. There is one thing I don't like, though. Why do you refer to yourself as my "worthless, insignificant little brother"? So you are aware of your worth - lessness, are you? Not all Mishas have to be identical, you know. Do you know where you should be aware of your worthlessness? Before God, perhaps, or before human intelligence, before beauty or nature. But not before people. Among people you should be aware of your worth. You're no cheat, you're an honest man, aren't you? Well then, respect yourself for being a good honest fellow. Don't confuse "humility" with "an awareness of your own worthlessness." Georgy[2] has grown. He's a nice boy. I often play knucklebones with him. He's received your packages. You do well to read books. Get into the habit of reading. You'll come to appreciate it in time. So Madame Beecher Stowe brought tears to your eyes? I thumbed through her once and read her straight through for scholarly purposes six months ago, and when I was done I experi­enced that unpleasant sensation that mortals are wont to feel when they've eaten too many raisins or dried currants.[3] The hawfinch[4] I promised you has escaped, and little is known of his present place of residence. I'll figure out something else to bring you. Take a look at the following books: Don Quixote (complete, in all seven or eight parts). It's a fine work written by Cervantes, who is placed on just about the level of Shakespeare. I recommend Turgenev's "Hamlet and Don Quixote" to our brothers if they haven't read it already. As for you, you wouldn't understand it. If you feel like reading an entertaining travelogue, try Goncharov's Frigate Pallada/» etc. I send Masha special regards. Don't all of you feel bad that I'm coming late. Time flies no matter how bored you brag you are. I'm bringing a lodger along who will pay twenty rubles a month and be under our personal supervision. I'll soon be off for a bargaining session with his mother. Pray for my success![5] However, even twenty rubles is not much, considering Moscow prices and Mother's character—she'll give him good honest food. Our teachers get three hundred fifty rubles a head, and they feed the poor boys on the blood drippings from their roasts, like dogs.

A. Chekhov

Chekhov's Taganrog cousin, the son of his Uncle Mitrofan.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin enjoyed tremendous pres­tige in Russia. In Turgenev's novel Smoke, the reputation of an exiled Rus­sian radical among his fellow dissidents is instantly ruined when his enemies spread the rumor that he had been slapped in the face by Mrs. Beecher Stowe —no one even bothers to ask why she did it; the man is simply ostracized. Tolstoy could think of no higher praise for his favorite Dostoyevsky novel, Notes from the House of the Dead, than to compare it to Uncle Toms Cabin. The similarity of the book's abolitionist message to the theme of such classics of Russian anti-serfdom literature as Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches made any questioning of its literary value unthinkable. No respectable Russian critic of the period would have dared point out in print the book's melo­dramatic sentimentality, as the nineteen-year-old Chekhov is doing here, for fear of being thought obscurantist and reactionary.

This bird (dubanos in Russian) for some reason proved to be a stumb­ling block for the earlier translators of Chekhov's letters into English. Mrs. Garnett preferred to omit this entire passage, while Koteliansky decided that dubanos must be a dog.

Chekhov's interest in Ivan Goncharov's book of travel impressions, which records among other things his visits to China, Japan and Eastern Siberia, is the earliest instance of his preoccupation with the Far East. This interest was to be echoed sporadically in his later reading and correspondence and to find its climax in his voyage to Sakhalin.

In the spring of 1879, while preparing for a set of elaborate examina­tions that were required for graduation from the Taganrog school and ar­ranging to be accepted by the Medical School of Moscow University, Chekhov showed remarkable resourcefulness in trying to help alleviate his mother's financial burdens. He persuaded the parents of two of his fellow students, also headed for Moscow University, to let his mother take them in as paid lodgers. Also, without any help from his relatives or teachers, he got himself nominated for the newly instituted twenty-five-ruble-a-month fellowship that the city administration of Taganrog decided to award to one of the city's natives interested in continuing his education.

THE MEDICAL STUDENT WHO WROTE FOR HUMOR MAGAZINES

When anton chekhov came to Moscow from Taganrog in order to enroll at the university, he almost immediately found himself in the role of head of the family. His two elder brothers led independent lives and his once-authoritarian father had a job away from home and saw his family only on Sundays. Mikhail Chekhov's book A round Chekhov gives a vivid account of the changes which the practical-minded and energetic young Anton instituted in the lives of his mother and younger siblings upon arrival. He made them move from the tenement basement apartment where he found them to more wholesome quarters; he made his mother buy only the groceries she immediately needed for cash, instead of in bulk and on credit, and thus freed her from constant and humiliating indebted­ness at the corner grocery store; and he set about re-educating his younger brothers, Ivan and Mikhail, and his sister Maria in his newlv found wavs of personal dignity and inner freedom. He rapidly became a father figure for these three and established a personal closeness with them that was to last for the rest of his life. His older brothers, however, proved beyond his educational reach, which explains the bitterness, rancor and sermonizing that we find in his letters to Alexander and to Nikolai. (The letter to Nikolai, from Chekhov's student period, is presented in this section, in violation of the chronological sequence.)

Chekhov began his studies at medical school in September of 1879. In his first year, which corresponded to premedical studies, he took courses in physics, inorganic chemistry, botany, zoology, mineralogy, anatomy and religion. In the next four years, he followed this with a solid program of specifically medical subjects. Some of Russia's finest biological scientists and medical specialists were among his teachers. He remained on cordial terms with some of them after leaving the university, and he kept track of their scholarly publications. In his later years, Chekhov was to renew some of the friendships he had formed with a few fellow medical students at the university. During his university years, however, he seems to have been on closer terms with the fellow students of his brother Nikolai, who was studying at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Among Chekhov's closest personal friends of this period, Isaak Levitan and Konstantin Korovin were later to become celebrated painters and Franz Schechtel a renowned architect. Korovin, who is known in the West mostly for the sets and costumes he designed for the Sergei Diaghilev and Anna Pavlova ballet companies, wrote two delightful memoirs about his early friendship with Chekhov, which are also the most vivid record we have of Chekhov's university years (these memoirs have been mostly ig­nored by Chekhov's Western biographers). One of them contains an account of the young Chekhov's encounter with several dogmatic activist students, full of quotations from Chernyshevsky and Mikhailovsky, who berated him for writing nonideological humorous stories and publishing them under a comical pen name. As Korovin tells it, Chekhov's amused and tolerant reaction to all this was: "These students will make excellent doctors. They are lovely people and I envy them having their heads full of ideas."

Chekhov's publications in humor magazines initially came about for reasons that had nothing to do with the art of literature. While he was still at school in Taganrog, his brothers Alexander and Nikolai had stumbled upon the possibility of augmenting their income by selling stories and, in Nikolai's case, cartoons to the numerous lowbrow publica­tions which proliferated in Moscow and bore names like Dragonfly, Spec­tator and Alarm Clock. Within months after coming to Moscow, Anton was submitting sketches and stories to several of these magazines, and on December 24, 1879, he made his debut in print when Dragonfly published his short piece "Letter to a Learned Neighbor," a remarkably old-fashioned piece of writing that imitated the form and standard devices of Russian eighteenth-century satirical journals. In the next five years Chekhov pub­lished several hundred pieces in these magazines under at least a half- dozen different pen names (the best known of these—Antosha Chekhonte —was originally a humorous nickname given Chekhov by his teacher of religion back in Taganrog) and ranging in size from one-line cartoon captions to his two early full-length novels. The first of these novels, Useless Victory (1882), was written on a bet and was intended to parody the melodramatic cliches of the popular high-society novels of the Hun­garian novelist Мог Jokai; it was eventually made into two Russian silent films, one before and one right after the Revolution. The other novel of Chekhov's student years, the somewhat Dostoyevskian murder mystery The Shooting Party (the original Russian title was Drama During a Hunt) of 1884, had an even more distinguished career; its basic narrative structure was borrowed by none other than Agatha Christie for one of her novels and after World War II it was made into a Hollywood movie called Summer Storm. Even though scholarly studies have been written about these two works, the truth of the matter is that they both were frank pot­boilers, hastily written for money by a bright medical student, and that no one would have ever heard of them again had they not been written by Chekhov.

Throughout the period of his medical studies, Chekhov kept regarding his writing as nothing more than an additional source of money needed to support his family and put himself through medical school. And yet it was in the course of these five years that he gradually learned his craft as a writer. There is a world of difference between the melodramatic and moralizing productions of 1880-82, such as "For Little Apples" or "The Lady of the Manor," with their total reliance on secondhand traditions and second-rate devices and the concise, masterful little stories Chekhov could write by 1885, such as "The Malefactor" or "Sergeant Prishibeyev," with their unhackneyed observation of life and their taut economy of form. The size limitations and requirements imposed by various humor magazines were particularly important in training Chekhov to rely on careful organ­ization rather than on the traditional eventful plot for producing the impact he wanted.

With his full program of medical studies combined with a full-time literary career, Chekhov had understandably little time for personal cor­respondence during his university years. Some of his more informative letters for that period were addressed to Nikolai Leykin, publisher of the St. Petersburg-based humor magazine Fragments, for which Chekhov worked as a columnist and in which many of his stories of 1883-85 ap­peared. Author of numerous novels and stories about life among Russian merchant families (their wide popularity with less-literate readers rapidly dwindled at the beginning of the twentieth century), owner of his own publishing firm, Leykin was of considerable help to the young Chekhov and to his two older brothers, both editorially and financially. In subse­quent years, with the spread of Chekhov's fame, Leykin repeatedly claimed to have been the first to discern his talent. But, as his published diaries demonstrate, he was actually incapable of appreciating Chekhov's mature work and, like many Russians to this day, admired the early humorous sketches, such as "Surgery" and "A Horsy Name," while being quite baffled by The Seagull and "The Lady with the Dog."

Chekhov completed his medical studies in the spring of 1884. In the fall of that year he was awarded the title of District Physician, which en­titled him to practice medicine in the Russian provinces. To complete the requirements for his M.D. degree he still had to produce a dissertation. A year earlier he had tried to get his brother Alexander interested in a joint research project on the subject of "Sexual Authority," which was designed to prove, on the basis of wide reading in zoology and anthropol­ogy, that the inequality in strength and intelligence that is observable between the males and the females of certain species is attributable to their breeding and brooding methods and that this inequality is likely to disappear in species which will evolve in the future, since "nature abhors in­equality" (Letter to Alexander Chekhov, April 17-18, 1883). But this teleological, Herbert Spencer-inspired project failed to interest Alexander and all that remains of it is Chekhov's initial outline of research. After the termination of his studies, Anton chose as his dissertation topic "The History of Medicine in Russia," and embarked on his research all alone. In 1885 ^an<^ ^J886 ^геа^ ^{a num}ber of medieval Russian chronicles and some memoirs dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century, look­ing for evidence of medical practices in these documents. But, as the years advanced, he found his time more and more occupied by creative literary work, for which from 1886 on there was considerable demand.

3. To Nikolai Leykin

Moscow,

between August 21 and 24, 1883

Dear Nikolai Alexandrovich,

This batch is one of the less successful. The column is pallid, and the story rough and awfully shallow.¹ I have a better topic and would gladly have written and earned more, but fate is against me this time. I'm writing under abominable conditions. Before me sits my nonliterary work pummeling mercilessly away at my conscience,² the fledgling of a visiting kinsman is screaming in the room next door,³ and in another room my father is reading "The Sealed Angel"⁴ aloud to my mother. . . . Someone has wound up the music box, and I can hear La Belle Helene. ... It makes me want to slip off to the country, but it's already one in the morning. It would be hard to think up a more abominable setting for a writer. My bed is occupied by the visiting kinsman, who comes up to me now and then and starts discussing medicine. "My daughter must have colic. That's what's making her yell. ..." I have the misfortune of being a medic, and there isn't a man alive who doesn't think it necessary to "have a little chat" with me about medicine. And if they get tired chatting about medicine, they change the subject to literature.

The surroundings are matchless. I keep kicking myself for not having sneaked off to the country where I could probably have had a good night's sleep, written a story for you, and above all pursued medicine and literature in peace.

In September I'm going to sneak off to Voskresensk,⁵ weather permitting. I was utterly delighted by your last story.

The fledgling is howling away!! I promise myself never to have children. . . . The reason the French have so few children is probably that they spend all their time in their studies writing stories for L'Amusant. I hear they're trying to get them to have more children, a cartoon subject for L'Amusant and Fragments: "The Situation in France." A police commissioner enters a home and demands that the parents start making children.

Good-bye. I'm trying to figure out how and where to catch a few winks.

I have the honor of remaining

Respectfully yours,

A. Chekhov

At that time Chekhov supplied Leykin's magazine Fragments with a monthly column "Fragments of Moscow Life," in which he reported recent trials, financial scandals, new stage productions, etc. The story in question is Chekhov's "Intercession" (Protektsiya) (1883).

Reference to Chekhov's medical studies.

Alexander Chekhov, the writer's older brother, came for a visit from St. Petersburg, bringing his current mistress and their baby daughter.

A short story by Nikolai Leskov.

A town near Moscow, where Chekhov's younger brother Ivan had a spacious house that went with his job as schoolmaster and where Chekhov was to begin practicing medicine after his graduation.

4. To Nikolai Leykin

Moscow, May 20, 1884

Dear Nikolai Alexandrovich,

I received both your letter and the enclosure.¹ I've read the letter and this is my answer. As for the enclosure, I have passed it on to the party in question with your advice to write about life among customs officials.

A trip to Petersburg is one of my oldest dreams. I gave my word to myself that I would visit your imperial city in early June, but now I'm taking my word back. The reason is financial, damn it. The trip requires a hundred to a hundred fifty rubles, and the other day I had the pleasure of running all my holdings through the wringer of life. I had to cough up fifty rubles for the summer cottage, paid twenty-five for my tuition and as much again for my sister's and so on and so forth. Add to that the paucity of my recent earnings, and you'll understand the state of my pockets. By the first of June I should have a free fifty rubles, but you can't get very far on that. The trip will have to be postponed indefinitely, and I'll have to be content with the journey to the summer place and back. Wild Palmin² was planning to go with me. He and I agreed to leave on the second or third of June, but ... he came over a few days ago shaking his head and announcing he wouldn't be able to go to Petersburg. He is tormented by something murky which finds expression in the form of extremely vague and undecipherable memories that come out as "My childhood . . . my youth." You'd think he'd com­mitted a murder back in Petersburg.

He gave me a long exposition of the reasons for his antipathy toward his native city, but I didn't understand a word of it. Either he's trying to wiggle out of it to avoid the expense (between you and me, he's something of a tightwad) or there is actually something peculiar about his Petersburg past. He's coming for dinner on Friday. . . . We'll have some drinks, and toward nightfall we'll go to his summer cottage in Petrovsko-Razumovskoye, and maybe have a bit of a spree. Just as he is about to raise his wiry finger and talk to me of "riberty, equarity, and fraternity," when his emotion is reaching its acme, I'll start telling him about the charms of a trip to Valaam³ and trying to convince him to go. ... I just might succeed. If we go together, we'll probably need no more than a hundred rubles apiece. That's a good argument too. And he really needs to be aired out a bit. Even if his fine talent doesn't require it, hygiene very definitely does. He drinks much too much; in that respect he's incurable. But there are so many other things that can be cured. What a hell of a way to live! He's always shabbily dressed and he never sees sunlight or people. I've never seen what he eats, but I'd be willing to bet it's real junk. (His wife doesn't give the impression of being a wise housekeeper.) All in all, I have the feeling he's going to die soon. His system is so run down that it is a wonder that such a versifying mind can be lodged in such a sick body. The man definitely needs to be aired out. He told me he was going to take a trip down the Volga, but that's hard to believe. He won't get any farther than his shed of a summer cottage. I'll let you know how Friday's conversation turns out. If I don't go myself, at least I'll get him going.

Tomorrow I have my last exam, and the day after my person will represent what the crowd honors with the title of "doctor" (provided, of course, I pass the exam tomorrow). I am ordering a "doctor" shingle with a pointing finger, not so much for my medical practice as for putting the fear of God in janitors, mailmen and the tailor. When the inhabitants of Yeletsky's house call me—a writer of comic piffle—doctor, I am so unused to it that it grates on my ears. My parents, on the other hand, enjoy it. My parents are noble plebeians who have always looked on Aesculapians as something grimly arrogant and official, something that doesn't receive you without being announced and then charges you five rubles. They can't believe their eyes. Am I an impostor, a mirage, or an honest-to-goodness doctor? They are showing me the sort of respect they'd show me if I had become a police captain. They imagine that thousands of rubles will pass through my hands in the very first year. Fyodor Glebych, my patient tailor, is of the same opinion. They all have to be disillusioned, the poor things.

Exams are over, so there's nothing left to hold me back from applying for admission to the select few. I'll be sending you something every issue. I haven't quite settled down into my new routine yet, but in four or five days I'll be lifting my eyes heavenward and starting to think up new subjects. I'm going to spend the summer at the New Jerusalem monastery⁴ writing on and off. The only thing that scares me is high-minded passion; I find it worse than any exam. Enclosed you will find "Vacation Hygiene," a seasonal piece. If you like it, I'll work up a few more along the same lines: "A Hunter's Rules and Regula­tions," "A Forester's Rules and Regulations" and so on. I want to write a Fragments statistical survey: population, death rate, occupations and so on. It will be a little long, but if it works, it will be quite lively. (I got the idea from cramming for medical statistics recently.) I would now enjoy writing a satirical medical text in two or three volumes. First of all, I'd get my patients into a laughing mood, and only then would I begin to treat them. Moscow is having rainy weather: it's too cold for a summer coat and too hot for a winter one. The state of my health is not dazzling; at times I'm fine, but at times I'm in pain. I drink and then stop drinking. ... As yet there's nothing definite in sight.

I'm sitting down to read. Good-bye.

Your respectful contributor,

A. Chekhov

Is it true that The Cause⁵ is on its way out? If so, then good riddance! I never liked that journal, sinner that I am. It irritated me. Of course, even The Cause could have served a purpose, considering the present paucity of journals.

The enclosure consisted of a story by Alexander Chekhov, which Leykin rejected and returned to Anton Chekhov with the suggestion that Alexander, who had obtained a temporary job as a customs official, describe his new surroundings in his next story.

Iliodor (or Lyodor) Palmin (1841-91) made a certain name for him­self as a writer of civic and political verse during the politically permissive period of the 1860s. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Palmin's dog­gerel had been deservedly forgotten and his name remained in literary history only because of his friendship with the young Chekhov, whom he introduced to Leykin (it was at Palmin's urging that Leykin first invited the three Che­khov brothers—Alexander, Nikolai and Anton—to become contributors to Fragments). Since the 1930s, in line with the officially imposed revival of all nineteenth-century civic poetry regardless of its quality, Palmin's verse has been repeatedly reissued and anthologized in the Soviet Union.

A well-known monastery, which was also a popular excursion site.

In the town of Voskresensk, where Chekhov began his medical practice that summer.

A liberal political journal that was temporarily closed down due to cen­sorship troubles, but which was able to resume publication soon afterward.

5. To Viktor Bilibin¹

Moscow, February i, 1886

Kindest of humorists and law clerks and least bribable of secretaries,[6] Viktor Viktorovich,

Five times I've begun to write you and five times I've been inter­rupted. I've finally nailed myself to the chair and am writing [several words are crossed out in the originall which offended you and me and which with your permission I now declare closed, though it hasn't be­gun yet in Moscow. I wrote Leykin about it and received an explanation. I've just returned from a visit to the well-known poet Palmin. When I read him the lines from your letters that pertain to him, he said, "I respect this man. He is very talented." Upon which His Inspiration raised the longest of his fingers and deigned to add, with an air of profundity of course, "But Fragments will ruin him! Have some spiced vodka."

We talked for a long time and about many things. Palmin is a typical poet, if you admit the existence of such a type. He is a poetical individual, easily carried away and packed from head to toe with subject matter and ideologies. Talking with him is not tiring. True, while talking with him, you have to drink a lot, but then you can be certain that during an entire three- or four-hour talk with him you won't hear a single lying word or trite phrase, and that's worth sacrificing your sobriety.

By the way, he and I tried to think up a title for my book. After racking our brains for hours, all we could come up with was Cats and Carps and Flowers and Dogs.² I was willing to settle for Buy This Book or You'll Get a Punch in the Mouth or Are You Being Helped, Sir?, but after some thought the poet pronounced them hackneyed and cliche. Why don't you think up a title for me? As far as I'm concerned, all titles with a (grammatically) collective meaning belong in a saloon. I would prefer what Leykin wants, to wit: A. Chekhonte. Stories and Sketches and nothing else, even though that kind of title is suited only to celebrities, not — oo's like me. Varicolored Stories would also do. There you have two titles. Choose one of them and let Leykin know. I am relying on your taste, though I realize that by placing demands on your taste, I'm placing demands on you too. But don't be annoyed. When, God willing, your house is on fire, I'll send you my fire hose.[7]

Many thanks for the trouble you took to have the original clipped and sent to me. So as not to be in your debt (monetarily), I am sending you for the postage a thirty-five-kopeck stamp that you once sent me with a fee and that I have never been able to get rid of. Now you can be stuck with it.

And now a few words about my fiancee and Hymen. With your permission I will postpone these two items until next time when I am free from the inspiration communicated to me by my talk with Palmin. I'm afraid of saying too much—too much nonsense, that is. When I speak of women I like, I tend to draw out what I say until it reaches the ne plus ultra, the Pillars of Hercules—a trait that has remained with me since my school days. Thank your fiancee for remembering me and tell her that my wedding will most likely—alas and alack! The censor has cut out the rest. . . . My one and only is Jewish.[8] If the rich young Jewess has enough courage to convert to Orthodoxy with all that this entails, fine. If not, that's fine too. Besides, we've already had a quarrel. We'll make up tomorrow, but in a week we'll quarrel again. She breaks pencils and the photographs on my desk because of her annoy­ance at being held back by religion. That's the way she is. . . .⁵ She has a terrible temper. There is no doubt whatsoever that I will divorce her a year or two after the wedding. But . . . finis.

Your gloating over the censors' prohibiting my "Attack on Hus­bands"⁶ does you honor. Let me shake your hand. But it would have been more pleasant just the same to have earned sixty-five rather than fifty-five rubles. To take revenge on the censors and all those who gloated over my misfortune, my friends and I are forming a Cuckolding Society. The constitution has already been submitted for approval. I was elected chairman by a majority of fourteen to three.

There is an article called "Humor Magazines" in the first issue of Ears of Grain.⁷ What's going on? And speaking of that . . . once when you, your Аапсёе and I were talking about young writers, I brought up Korolenko. Remember? If you want to get to know him, get hold of the fourth or fifth issue of the Northern Herald and read his article "The Vagabonds." I recommend it.

Give my regards to Roman Romanych.⁸ My ambassador, Schech- tel,⁹ the artist and Moscow celebrity, visited him the other day and told him more than the longest letter could possibly have told him.

I have to write, but there are no suitable topics. What should I write about?

But it's time for bed. I send you my regards and a handshake. Every day I go out into the country for my medical practice. What ravines, what views!

Yours, A. Chekhov

Why haven't you said anything about the summer cottage? You complain of bad health and then don't give a thought to the summer. . . . Why, you'd have to be a pretty dry, wiry, immobile crocodile to spend all summer in the city! Two or three good months of tranquillity are certainly worth giving up your work or anything else for that matter.

By this seal and signachur¹⁰ I do certify that I have received in full the sum of fifty-five rubles, seventy-two kopecks.

A. Chekhov, Nongovernment doctor

sister Maria. Dunya Efros later married Chekhov's friend and correspondent, the Jewish lawyer and publisher Efim Konovitser. She and her husband re­mained on friendly terms with the Chekhov family in subsequent years.

The situation between Chekhov and Dunya fefros, as outlined in this letter, may have served as the prototype or perhaps as a future projection of the situation between the hero and Sarah in Chekhov's play Ivanov.

From this humorous badinage, Daniel Gilles (in his book Chekhov. Observer Without Illusion) derived a melodramatic scene of a lovers' spat, traditional for the genre of biographie romancee. According to the informa­tion of Gilles, Dunya Efros-Konovitser left Russia after the Revolution, lived in Paris and eventually died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1943, when she was past eighty.

This was the name by which Bilibin in his letter referred to Chekhov's story "For the Information of Husbands," which had trouble passing the censorship. Because of the censor's cuts, Chekhov's fee from the magazine was reduced by ten rubles.

The January issue of the popular science magazine Ears of Grain, pub­lished in St. Petersburg, contained an angry critique of Russian humor maga­zines, which included personal attacks on Leykin and Bilibin.

Roman Golicke was Leykin's co-publisher of Fragments.

Franz Schechtel (1859-1926) was a fellow student of Nikolai Chekhov at the art school. He eventually became a famous architect and he designed, among other projects, the Chekhov Memorial Library in Taganrog and the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov must have used a freer vocabulary in his letters to Schechtel than to any of his other correspondents, since most of his letters to his "ambassador" are censored in all available editions beyond all recognition or coherence.

Phonetic spelling replaces Chekhov's deliberately illiterate declension (in the wrong gender) of the word for signature.

6. To Nikolai Chekhov¹

Moscow, March, 1886

My little Zabelin,²

I've been told that you have taken offense at gibes Schechtel and I have been making. The faculty of taking offense is the property of noble souls alone, but even so, if it is all right to laugh at Ivanenko, me, Mishka and Nelly,³ then why is it wrong to laugh at you? It's unfair. . . . However, if you're not joking and really do feel you've been offended, I hasten to apologize.

People only laugh at what's funny or what they don't understand. . . . Take your choice.

The latter of course is more flattering, but—alas!—to me, for one, you're no riddle. It's not hard to understand someone with whom you've shared the delights of Tatar caps, Voutsina,⁴ Latin and, finally, life in Moscow. And besides, your life is psychologically so uncompli­cated that even a nonseminarian could understand it. Out of respect for you let me be frank. You're angry, offended . . . but it's not because of my gibes or of that good-natured chatterbox Dolgov.⁵ The fact of the matter is that you're a decent person and you realize that you're living a lie. And, whenever a person feels guilty, he always looks outside him­self for vindication: the drunk blames his troubles, Putyata⁶ blames the censors, the man who bolts from Yakimanka Street with lecherous intent blames the cold in the living room or gibes, and so on.⁷ If I were to abandon the family to the whims of fate, I would try to find myself an excuse in Mother's character or my blood spitting or the like. It's only natural and pardonable. It's human nature, after all. And you're quite right to feel you're living a lie. If you didn't feel that way, I wouldn't have called you a decent person. When decency goes, well, that's another story. You become reconciled to the lie and stop feeling it.

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

You often complain to me that people "don't understand" you. But even Goethe and Newton made no such complaints. Christ did, true, but he was talking about his doctrine, not his ego. People under­stand you all too well. If you don't understand yourself, then it's nobody else's fault.

As your brother and intimate, I assure you that I understand you and sympathize with you from the bottom of my heart. I know all your good qualities like the back of my hand. I value them highly and have only the greatest of respect for them. If you like, I can even prove how well I understand you by enumerating them. In my opinion you are kind to the point of fault, magnanimous, unselfish, you'd share your last penny, and you're sincere. Hate and envy are foreign to you, you are open-hearted, you are compassionate with man and beast, you are not greedy, you do not bear grudges, and you are trusting. You are gifted from above with something others lack: you have talent. This talent places you above millions of people, for there is only one artist for every two million people on earth. It places you in a very special position: you could be a toad or a tarantula and you would still be respected, because talent is its own excuse.

You have only one failing, the cause of the lie you've been living, your troubles, and your intestinal catarrh. It's your extreme ill breeding. Please forgive me, but Veritas magis amicitiae. The thing is, life lays down certain conditions. If you want to feel at home among intellec­tuals, to fit in and not find their presence burdensome, you have to have a certain amount of breeding. Your talent has brought you into their midst. You belong there, but . . . you seem to yearn to escape and feel compelled to waver between the cultured set and your next-door neigh­bors. It's the bourgeois side of you coming out, the side raised on birch thrashings beside the wine cellar and handouts, and it's hard to over­come, terribly hard.

To my mind, well-bred people ought to satisfy the following conditions:

They respect the individual and are therefore always indul­gent, gentle, polite and compliant. They do not throw a tantrum over a hammer or a lost eraser. When they move in with somebody, they do not act as if they were doing him a favor, and when they move out, they do not say, "How can anyone live with you!" They excuse noise and cold and overdone meat and witticisms and the presence of others in their homes.

Their compassion extends beyond beggars and cats. They are hurt even by things the naked eye can't see. If for instance, Pyotr knows that his father and mother are turning gray and losing sleep over seeing their Pyotr so rarely ( and seeing him drunk when he does turn up ), then he rushes home to them and sends his vodka to the devil. They do not sleep nights the better to help the Polevayevs,⁸ help pay their brothers' tuition, and keep their mother decently dressed.

They respect the property of others and therefore pay their

debts.

They are candid and fear lies like the plague. They do not lie even about the most trivial matters. A lie insults the listener and debases him in the liar's eyes. They don't put on airs, they behave in the street as they do at home, and they do not try to dazzle their inferiors. They know how to keep their mouths shut and they do not force uninvited confidences on people. Out of respect for the ears of others they are more often silent than not.

They do not belittle themselves merely to arouse sympathy. They do not play on people's heartstrings to get them to sigh and fuss over them. They do not say, "No one understands me!" or "I've squan­dered my talent on trifles! I am [. . .1" because this smacks of a cheap effect and is vulgar, false and out-of-date.

They are not preoccupied with vain things. They are not taken in by such false jewels as friendships with celebrities, handshakes with drunken Plevako,⁹ ecstasy over the first person they happen to meet at the Salon de Varietes,¹⁰ popularity among the tavern crowd. They laugh when they hear, "I represent the press," a phrase befitting only Rod- zeviches and Levenbergs.¹¹ When they have done a penny's worth of work, they don't try to make a hundred rubles out of it, and they don't boast over being admitted to places closed to others. True talents always seek obscurity. They try to merge with the crowd and shun all ostenta­tion. Krylov himself said that an empty barrel has more chance of being heard than a full one.¹²

If they have talent, they respect it. They sacrifice comfort, women, wine and vanity to it. They are proud of their talent, and so they do not go out carousing with trade-school employees or Skvort- sov's¹³ guests, realizing that their calling lies in exerting an uplifting influence on them, not in living with them. What is more, they are fastidious.

They cultivate their aesthetic sensibilities. They cannot stand to fall asleep fully dressed, see a slit in the wall teeming with bedbugs, breathe rotten air, walk on a spittle-laden floor or eat off a kerosene stove. They try their best to tame and ennoble their sexual instinct . . . [. . .] to endure her logic and never stray from her. What's the point of it all? People with good breeding are not as coarse as that. What they look for in a woman is not a bed partner or horse sweat, [. . .] not the kind of intelligence that expresses itself in the ability to stage a fake pregnancy and tirelessly reel off lies. They—and especially the artists among them—require spontaneity, elegance, compassion, a woman who will be a mother, not a [. . .]. They don't guzzle vodka on any old occa­sion, nor do they go around sniffing cupboards, for they know they are not swine. They drink only when they are free, if the opportunity hap­pens to present itself. For they require a mens sana in corpore sano.

And so on. That's how well-bred people act. If you want to be well-bred and not fall below the level of the milieu you belong to, it is not enough to read The Pickwick Papers and memorize a soliloquy from Faust. It is not enough to hail a cab and drive off to Yakimanka Street if all you're going to do is bolt out again a week later.

You must work at it constantly, day and night. You must never stop reading, studying in depth, exercising your will. Every hour is precious.

Trips back and forth to Yakimanka Street won't help. You've got to drop your old way of life and make a clean break. Come home. Smash your vodka bottle, lie down on the couch and pick up a book. You might even give Turgenev a try. You've never read him.

You must swallow your [. . .] pride. You're no longer a child. You'll be thirty soon. It's high time!

I'm waiting. . . . We're all waiting. . . .

Yours, A. Chekhov

Nikolai Pavlovich Chekhov (1858-89) was the second son of Pavel and Yevgenia Chekhov. As a child he showed talents for both art and music and was considered the most gifted of the Chekhov children. He was later a student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he associated with some of the most promising young Russian artists of the time. However, he never completed his studies owing to chronic alcoholism and a fatal attraction for the Moscow equivalent of skid row, where he would disappear for weeks on end. Nikolai died at thirty-one of tuberculosis ag­gravated by alcoholism.

Zabelin was the name of the Zvenigorod town drunk.

The flutist Alexander Ivanenko was for many years a close friend of the entire Chekhov family; Mishka is Chekhov's brother Mikhail, according to whose memoirs Nelly (her full name was Yelena Markova) was a pretty girl with whom Nikolai was once involved romantically, the niece of a hospi­table lady to whose villa in the city of Zvenigorod all Chekhov brothers were frequently invited.

Nicholas Voutsina was an ex-pirate who operated a Greek school in Taganrog which Nikolai and Anton attended for one year in their childhood, with rather disastrous results.

The pianist Niktopoleon Dolgov was Ivanenko's usual accompanist.

A Moscow journalist.

The Chekhov family resided on Yakimanka Street at the time; "the man who bolts" from there is Nikolai Chekhov.

At the time of publication of the twenty-volume edition of Chekhov's works in 1944-51, Maria Chekhov informed the editors that she remembered the Polevayevs as a family which had "played a negative role" in the lives of her brothers Alexander and Nikolai.

Fyodor Plevako was a celebrated trial lawyer of the period.

A Moscow night club, which also functioned as a pickup point for ladies of the night. Chekhov described it in a memorable piece of journalism that appeared in Spectator in October of 1881 with illustrations by Nikolai Chekhov.

Two minor Moscow journalists.

In his fable "The Two Barrels," where a barrel filled with fine wine rolls sedately and quietly down the street, while an empty one rattles noisily over the cobblestones, attracting everyone's attention.

The name of one of Nikolai's trade-school employee friends.

Ill

SERIOUS LITERATURE

After chekhov became famous, a number of literary celebrities either claimed or were given the credit for having first discovered the magnitude of his talent. By any objective criteria, this honor should go to Nikolai Leskov, who from the vantage point of today, was, after Tolstoy, the most important living Russian writer at the time Chekhov began his literary activity. One drunken night in October of 1883, after he and Chekhov had made a tour of Moscow night clubs and possibly brothels, Leskov anointed the younger writer "the way Samuel anointed David" and predicted a great future for him. But Leskov was at the time at the very nadir of his literary reputation, following almost two decades of vilification by the utilitarian critics. Chekhov may have been pleased by his words and by being offered inscribed copies of Leskov's finest novel, Cathedral Folk, and of his now famous experimental story "The Left- Handed Blacksmith," but in his letter to his brother Alexander (Letter of October 15-20, 1883) he treated the whole thing as a joke, referring to Leskov as "my favorite scribbler" (and not writer, as the Western biog­raphers of Chekhov inevitably mistranslate his term pisaka).

Chekhov's joyous reaction to the letter of acclaim he received three years later from Dmitry Grigorovich, on the other hand, shows that even he, for all the independence of his judgment, was not entirely immune to the reputation-making powers of literary criticism. Grigorovich, who is little read and rarely reprinted even in the Soviet Union, was undeservedly overpraised by Belinsky for his philanthropic stories of peasant life origi­nally published in the 1840s, and from that time until the end of the nineteenth century he was regarded as the equal of Turgenev and Tolstoy by the majority of literate Russians, a view that can only raise eyebrows today. Still, the renown that the name of Grigorovich enjoyed at the time makes Chekhov's response understandable, even though the very existence of Grigorovich elicited the somewhat comical disbelief of Thomas Mann in the oddly out-of-focus essay on Chekhov he wrote at the end of his life.

And yet, gracious as Leskov's statement and Grigorovich's letter may have been, they were no more than private gestures. The man, however, who backed his recognition of Chekhov's talent with concrete action and who did more than anyone else to launch him on a major career in serious literature was the writer and publisher Alexei Suvorin. It was Suvorin's publication of Chekhov's stories in his newspaper New Times and his subsequent securing of Chekhov's nomination for the Pushkin Prize that gained Chekhov entry into serious literary journals and brought him to the attention of important editors, of Lev Tolstoy, and of the literate reading public. Chekhov's friendship with Suvorin was one of the most significant and intimate relationships in his entire life. His letters to Suvorin are the frankest and most revealing letters Chekhov ever wrote to anyone and they provide us with indispensable insights into the mind of this frequently reticent writer. And yet, for peculiarly Russian reasons, unimaginable in any other literature, Chekhov's relationship with Suvorin has been system­atically downgraded, obscured and distorted by Chekhov's Russian biog­raphers and commentators.

When Chekhov began to contribute stories to New Times, it was generally regarded as a conservative, pro-government publication. By the turn of the century, the newspaper's stand on the Dreyfus affair and on Russian students' uprisings and its chauvinistic baiting of Poles, Finns and Jews made Suvorin's name arid that of his newspaper odious to most lib­eral Russians. The view of Suvorin that was formed at the beginning of the twentieth century has been summed up by Lenin in a statement that is inevitably brought up in Soviet criticism and historiography whenever Suvorin's name is mentioned: "A poor man, a liberal and even a democrat at the beginning of his life's road, a millionaire and a smug, shameless eulogizer of the bourgeoisie, groveling before every change of official policy at the end of that road." The existence of this Lenin text on Suvorin has made it mandatory for Chekhov's Soviet biographers to minimize the closeness of the relationship and to ascribe dishonest or devious motives to all of Suvorin's dealings with Chekhov. Writing in 1933, Mikhail Chekhov was still able to give Suvorin a modicum of credit for the things he had done for his brother. But Maria Chekhova's book of memoirs, which she dictated in the early 1950s, had to bow to the general trend and to depict Suvorin as a crafty hypocrite, subtly luring the gullible Anton Pavlovich into his reactionary nets.

Chekhov disagreed with Suvorin strongly on many issues, both before and after the Dreyfus case, which is usually represented as the breaking point in their friendship, and he was eventually to come to see many of the older man's shortcomings and unattractive qualities. But he valued Suvorin's literary advice and he never forgot Suvorin's early help. Chekhov's typical disregard for labels and categories enabled him to form a friendship with the revolutionary writer Vladimir Korolenko shortly after beginning his association with Suvorin, and to see and appreciate the good things each of these men had to offer.

The first appearance of Chekhov's work in New Times coincided with a major breakthrough in the development of his talent. Eighteen eighty- six and early 1887 brought a whole stream of stories, unprecedented in Russian literature for the originality of their form and subject matter and for their compression and concision: "The Requiem," "Heartache," "The Witch," "The Chorus Girl," "Agafya," "A Calamity" and numerous others. One of the most controversial of them was "Mire," to this day one of Chekhov's least-understood works. Because the story featured a Jewish seductress and because it appeared in New Times, the prominent anti- government journalist Vukol Lavrov proclaimed it reactionary and racist. A recent American book on Chekhov described "Mire" as a study of an amoral nymphomaniac. But a closer reading of this story within the con­text of Chekhov's writing of 1886-88 shows that it was one of several works written during that period which examined, possibly under the im­pact of his broken engagement to Dunya Јfros, the reactions of sensitive Russian Jews to the discrimination and repression with which they had to live. Sarah in Ivanov is crushed by the non-Jewish world into which she has married and which does not want her. Solomon, in the Jewish inn episode in "The Steppe," expresses his resentment of the stereotype of the money- mad Jew in which society has cast him by burning his share of the family inheritance and by incoherent harangues which no one around him can understand, including his brother Moses (who gets along as best he can by playing the comical role of an obsequious Jewish Uncle Tom). The wealthy and educated Susannah in "Mire," unlike Sarah and Solomon, does not have to contend with overt and crude anti-Semitism. But she constantly expects it just the same and her resentment finds its expression in a series of sexual conquests of young Russian noblemen; her promiscuity is the only way she has of asserting her own worth and of defying the hostility of the neighboring Russian gentry. Ironically, the two brothers who are involved with her in the course of the story are not at all anti-Jewish, but they are nevertheless victimized by Susannah's neurotic response to her predicament, which Chekhov depicted with remarkable understanding.

Among the numerous readers and scholars who misunderstood or mis­read "Mire" was Chekhov's friend and frequent hostess, the amateur writer Maria Kiselyova. The spirited and detailed letter Chekhov sent her in defense of "Mire" is another basic Chekhovian document, with its clear statement of his views on the uses and limitations of literature and on the dangers of subjective censorship.

7. To Alexei Suvorin¹

Moscow, February 21, 1886

Dear Sir,

I have received your letter. Thank you for writing such flattering words about my work and printing my story so promptly.² You can judge for yourself what a refreshing and even inspiring effect the kind atten­tions of as experienced and talented a person as you have had on my ambitions as a writer.

I agree with your opinion that I threw away the end of my story, and I thank you for this useful piece of advice. I've been writing for six years now, and you are the first person who ever took the trouble to give me suggestions and then motivate them.

The pen name A. Chekhonte probably sounds odd and recherche. But it was thought up at the dawn of my misty youth,³ and I've grown accustomed to it. That's why I don't notice how odd it is.

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

The fee you have proposed is fully satisfactory for the present. If you could arrange to have the newspaper sent to me regularly—I rarely get a chance to see it—I will be very grateful.

This time I'm sending you a story that is exactly twice as long as the previous one, and, I fear, twice as bad.⁴

I remain

Yours truly,

A. Chekhov

Alexei Suvorin (1834-1912) was, like Chekhov himself, of peasant origin. He began his career as a village schoolmaster. During the reform era of the 1860s, he became a popular muckraking journalist and earned a six- month prison sentence for one of his anti-government exposes. At the time of the Russian-Turkish War of 1878 he purchased the newspaper New Times, which until then owed its circulation primarily to its domestic-help advertise­ments. Because of his friendly relations with Prince Milan of Serbia, Suvorin was able to send detailed dispatches from the front to New Times, and the newspaper quickly became the favorite reading of the Russian military, who were often kept in the dark by their own command about the progress of the war in which they were engaged. This made Suvorin's fortune, and it also determined the subsequent conservative orientation of the newspaper, since in later years army officers and civil servants, both active and retired, formed a large segment of its subscribers.

Suvorin later branched out into book publishing (he was the first pub­lisher to put out cheap editions of Russian classics) and book selling (he held a monopoly on book stands at all Russian railroad stations). He was a mil­lionaire by the time Chekhov met him. He was also a novelist and something of a literary scholar (his essay on Griboyedov was much admired by Alexan­der Blok), and he wrote a series of flashy plays, which, although devoid of literary merit, were popular with actresses for providing them with showy starring roles. After the turn of the century, Suvorin's energies were mainly devoted to the theater which he privately organized and operated in St. Peters­burg and for which he engaged some of the biggest acting names of the period.

The excerpts from Suvorin's private journal which were published after the Revolution in 1923 with the avowed purpose of exposing his hypocrisy and corruption show a man of broad culture, with access to the centers of political power, who is helping to prop up the regime which he sees as neither honest nor just. In addition to numerous chunks of back-stairs gossip, Suvorin's journal contains fascinating accounts of his dealings and en­counters with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Tchaikov­sky, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky and a number of other literary and political figures of the last forty years of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the often gossipy and cynical tone of the journal, Suvorin writes of his encounters with Chekhov in tones of warmth and friendship that seem otherwise untypi­cal of this hardheaded, powerful and frequently lonely man.

"The Requiem," which was submitted by Chekhov on February 10, and which appeared on February 15. This was his first work to appear in New Times and also the first to be published under his real name instead of one of his pen names.

"At the dawn of my misty youth" is the first line of a popular song by the peasant poet of the Romantic period, Alexei Koltsov. For Chekhov's high opinion of this poet, see Letter 17.

"The Witch."

8. To Dmitry Grigorovich¹

Moscow, March 28, 1886

Your letter,² my kind and dearly beloved bearer of glad tidings, struck me like a thunderbolt. I was so overwhelmed it brought me to the brink of tears, and even now I feel it has left a deep imprint on my innermost being. May God comfort your old age as you have befriended my youth; I can find neither words nor deeds to thank you enough. You know how ordinary people look upon the favored few such as yourself, and so you can imagine what your letter does for my pride. It is worth more than the highest diploma, and for the neophyte writer it is tanta­mount to royalties for his present and future. I've been walking about in a daze. I lack the acumen to judge whether or not I deserve this great reward. I can only repeat that I am thunderstruck.

If I do have a gift that warrants respect, I must confess before the purity of your heart that I have as yet failed to respect it. I felt I had one, but slipped into the habit of considering it worthless. Purely external factors are sufficient to cause an organism to treat itself with excessive mistrust and suspicion. I've had my share of such factors, now that I think of it. All my friends and relatives have looked down on my work as an author, and they never stop giving me friendly advice against giving up my real life's work for my scrawling. I have hundreds of friends in Moscow, about twenty of whom are writers, and I can't remember even one of them ever reading my things or considering me an artist. There exists in Moscow a so-called "literary circle"; talents and mediocrities of all ilks and ages gather once a week in a specially reserved restaurant dining room to air their tongues. If I were to go there and read the least snippet from your letter, they would laugh in my face. In the five years I've spent hanging around newspaper offices, I've become resigned to the general view of my literary insignificance, soon took to looking down on my work, and kept plowing right on. That's the first factor. The second is that I am a doctor and up to my ears in medicine. The saying about chasing two hares at once has never robbed anybody of more sleep than it has me.

The only reason I am writing all this is to justify my grievous sin in your eyes to some small degree. Until now I treated my literary work extremely frivolously, casually, nonchalantly, I can't remember working on a single story for more than a day, and "The Huntsman," which you so enjoyed, I wrote while I was out swimming.³ I wrote my stories the way reporters write up fires: mechanically, only half-con- sciously, without the least concern for the reader or myself. While writing, I would do my best not to waste images and scenes I liked on the story at hand. Heaven knows why, but I would carefully put them away and save them for later.

What impelled me to take a critical look at my works was Su­vorin's⁴ very gracious and, as far as I can tell, sincere letter. I began making plans to write something worthwhile, yet I still had no faith in my own literary worth.

But there out of the blue was your letter. Please forgive the com­parison, but it had the same effect on me as a governor's order to leave town within twenty-four hours, that is, I suddenly felt an uncontrollable urge to hurry and extricate myself from the spot where I was stuck.

I agree with you on all points. I myself felt the improprieties you point out when I saw "The Witch" in print. If I had taken three or four days to write the story instead of one, they wouldn't be there.

I will try to stop writing for a deadline, but this cannot be done at once. There's no way for me to get myself out of the rut I've fallen into. I have nothing against going hungry as I have in the past, but I'm not the only one involved. I write in my spare time, two or three hours a day and a small chunk of the night, that is, stretches suitable only for minor production. During the summer when I have more spare time and expenses are down, I'll undertake something more serious.

I can't put my real name on the book because it's too late: the cover design is ready and the book has already been printed. Even before you, many people in Petersburg advised me not to spoil the book with a pen name, but I wouldn't listen to them, perhaps out of pride.⁵ I am very dissatisfied with the book. It's a hodgepodge, an indiscriminate conglomeration of the tripe I wrote as a student, plucked bare by the censors and humor-sheet editors. I'm sure that many people will be dis­appointed once they've read it. Had I known that I was being read and that you were keeping track of me, I would never have let it be published.

All my hope lies in the future. I'm still only twenty-six. I may still manage to accomplish something yet, though time is flying.

Please forgive this long letter and don't hold it against a man for daring the first time in his life to indulge himself in the pleasure of writing a letter to Grigorovich.

If possible, send me a photograph of yourself. You have shown me such kindness and so exhilarated me that I feel I could write you a whole ream instead of just a page. May God grant you health and happiness. Please trust the sincerity of your deeply respectful and grateful

A. Chekhov

The leonine and sociable Grigorovich (1822-99) was one of the major Russian literary celebrities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Today, he is remembered not for his own writings, but because of the provi­dential role he happened to play in the biographies of two great Russian writers. In 1844, the young Grigorovich shared an apartment with an engi­neering student named Fyodor Dostoyevsky. With his encouragement, Dos- toyevsky wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which Grigorovich then brought to the attention of the poet-publisher Nekrasov and the celebrated critic Belin­sky. Belinsky's acclamation of Dostoyevsky as "the new Gogol" inaugurated the great novelist's literary career. Now, forty-two years later, Grigorovich's recognition of Chekhov's talent had almost as momentous an impact on the literary evolution of the young man who in many ways became Dostoyevsky's very antipode in the Russian literary tradition.

On March 25, Grigorovich wrote Chekhov a long letter telling him that he had the most outstanding talent of all the writers of the younger genera­tion and predicted for him a great literary future, if he learned to work slowly, carefully and conscientiously. Grigorovich also advised Chekhov to avoid excessively naturalistic detail and warned him against "pornographic subjects," which he believed he had discerned in some of Chekhov's stories.

V kupaVne was translated as "in a bathing-shed" by Koteliansky and by Garnett and appears as "in a bath house" in the Hellman-Lederer volume. Actually it is a wooden-fenced enclosure on a river or a lake, built to allow nude swimming (usually segregated by sex).

Grigorovich claimed in his letter that he was the one who brought Chekhov to Suvorin's attention in the first place.

Like Suvorin, Viktor Bilibin and several of Chekhov's other literary friends, Grigorovich advised Chekhov to drop his humor-magazine pen name of Antosha Chekhonte and to publish his forthcoming book of short stories under his own name. Because the book was already typeset, Chekhov could not follow this advice. For his work that appeared in serious "thick" journals, Chekhov dropped his earlier pen names, but he reverted to them occasionally in his humor-magazine publications until the end of his life.

9. To Maria Kiselyova¹

Moscow, January 14, 1887

Your "Larka"² is quite charming, dear Maria Vladimirovna. It has its bumpy spots, but its brevity and virile style make up for every­thing. Not wishing to be the sole judge of your creation, however, I am sending it to Suvorin, a true connoisseur in such matters. I will let you know what he has to say in due course. And now allow me to take a snarl at your criticism. Even your praise of "On the Road" has failed to mellow my auctorial wrath, and I am eager to take my revenge for "Mire."³ Careful, now. And hold fast to the back of your chair so you won't fall into a faint. Well, here I go. . . .

Critical articles, even the unjust, abusive kind, are usually met with a silent bow. Such is literary etiquette. Answering back goes against custom, and anyone who indulges in it is justly accused of excessive vanity. But since your criticism has an "evening talks on the Babkino wing-porch or the main-house terrace in the presence of Ma-Pa, the Counterfeiter and Levitan"⁴ sort of flavor to it, and since it passes over the story's literary aspects to concentrate on more general ground, I will not be violating the laws of etiquette if I permit myself to continue our talk.

First of all, I have no more love for literature of the school we have been discussing than you do. As a reader and man in the street I try to stay clear of it. But if you ask me my sincere and honest opinion about it, I must say that the issue of whether it has a right to exist or not is still open and unresolved by anyone, even though Olga Andrey- evna⁵ thinks she has settled it. Neither you nor I nor all the critics in the world have any hard evidence in favor of denying this literature a right to exist. I don't know who is right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and the ancients as a group, who, while not afraid of digging around in the "manure pile," were morally much more stable than we are, or our contemporary writers, prudish on paper, but cold and cynical down deep and in life. I don't know who is in bad taste: the Greeks, who were not ashamed to celebrate love as it actually exists in all its natural beauty, or the readers of Gaboriau, Marlitt and Pierre Bobo.⁶ Just like the problems of nonresistance to evil, free will and so on, this problem can only be settled in the future. All we can do is bring it up; any attempt at resolving it would involve us in spheres outside the realm of our competence. Your reference to the fact that Turgenev and Tolstoy avoid the "manure pile" throws no light on the matter. Their squeamish- ness proves nothing; after all, the generation of writers that came before them condemned the description of peasants and civil servants beneath the rank of titular councilor as filth, to say nothing of your "villains and villainesses." And anyway, one period, no matter how glorious it is, does not give us the right to draw conclusions in favor of one or another school. Your reference to the corrupting influence of the school under discussion does not solve the problem either. Everything in this world is relative and approximate. There are people who can be corrupted even by children's literature, who take special pleasure in reading all the little piquant passages in the Psalter and the Book of Proverbs. And there are people who become purer and purer the more they come into contact with the filth of life. Journalists, lawyers and doctors, who are initiated into all the mysteries of human sin, are not known to be par­ticularly immoral, and realist writers are more often than not of a higher moral caliber than Orthodox churchmen. And anyway no liter­ature can outdo real life when it comes to cynicism. You're not going to get a person drunk with a jigger when he's just polished off a barrel.

Your statement that the world is "teeming with villains and villainesses" is true. Human nature is imperfect, so it would be odd to perceive none but the righteous. Requiring literature to dig up a "pearl" from the pack of villains is tantamount to negating literature altogether. Literature is accepted as an art because it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is the truth, unconditional and honest. Limiting its functions to as narrow a field as extracting "pearls" would be as deadly for art as requiring Levitan to draw a tree without any dirty bark or yellowed leaves. A "pearl" is a fine thing, I agree. But the writer is not a pastry chef, he is not a cosmetician and not an entertainer. He is a man bound by contract to his sense of duty and to his conscience. Once he under­takes this task, it is too late for excuses, and no matter how horrified, he must do battle with his squeamishness and sully his imagination with the grime of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter as a result of squeamishness or a desire to please his readers were to limit his descriptions to honest city fathers, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroadmen?

To a chemist there is nothing impure on earth. The writer should be just as objective as the chemist; he should liberate himself from everyday subjectivity and acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones.

Writers are men of their time, and so, like the rest of the public, they must submit to the external conditions of life in society. There is therefore no question but what they must keep within the bounds of decency. That is all we have a right to demand of the realists. But since you have nothing to say against the execution or form of "Mire," I must have remained within the bounds.

I must admit I rarely consult my conscience as I write. This is due to habit and the trivial nature of my work. Consequently, when­ever I expound one or another view of literature, I always leave myself out of consideration.

You write that if you were my editor you would return the story to me for my own good. Why not go even further? Why not put the editors on the carpet for publishing this kind of story? Why not address a strongly worded reprimand to the Bureau of Press Affairs for not banning immoral newspapers?

The fate of literature (both major and minor) would be a pitiful one if it were at the mercy of personal opinions. Point number one. And number two, there is no police force in existence that can consider itself competent in matters of literature. I agree that we can't do without the muzzle or the stick, because sharpers ooze their way into literature just as anywhere else. But no matter how hard you try, you won't come up with a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience. People have been at it since the beginning of creation, but they've invented nothing better.

Now you would have me lose 115 rubles and give an editor a chance to embarrass me. Others, including your own father, are de­lighted with the story. And still others are sending Suvorin vituperative letters, rabidly denouncing both the newspaper and me, etc. Well, who is right? Who is the true judge?

6. You also write I should leave such stories for hacks like Okreyts, Pince-nez and Aloe,⁷ who are poor in spirit and have been short­changed by fate. Allah forgive you if you mean those lines sincerely! To write in such scornful, condescending accents about little people just because they're little does the human heart scant honor. The lower ranks are just as indispensable in literature as they are in the army; that's what your head tells you, and your heart should tell you even more.

Now I've gone and worn you out with my long and drawn-out taffy. ... If I had known my criticism would go on for so long, I wouldn't have started in the first place. . . . Please forgive me!

We are coming. We wanted to leave on the fifth, but ... we were held up by a medical congress. Then came St. Tatyana's Day,⁸ and on the seventeenth we're having a party: it's "his"⁹ name day!! It will be a dazzling ball with all sorts of Jewesses, roast turkeys and Yashen- kas.¹⁰ After the seventeenth we'll fix a date for the Babkino trip.

So you've read my "On the Road" . . . Well, how do you like my audacity? I'm no longer afraid to write about things intellectual. In Petersburg it caused quite a raucous uproar. When I dealt with non- resistance to evil a short while ago, I also surprised my public.¹¹ The New Year's editions of all the papers ran complimentary remarks, and the December issue of Russian Wealth, the journal Lev Tolstoy publishes in, is carrying an article by Obolensky¹² (thirty-two pages) entitled "Chekhov and Korolenko." The good fellow goes into ecstasies over me and sets out to prove that I'm more of an artist than Korolenko. He's probably wrong, but I'm nevertheless beginning to feel I've earned one distinction: of all those who write only newspaper trash and don't pub­lish in thick journals I'm the only one who has won the attention of the

long-eared critics—this is the first time that's ever happened. The Ob­server reviled me—and did they catch it! As 1886 came to end, I felt like a bone that had been tossed to the dogs.

Vladimir Petrovich's¹³ play is being published by Theater Library, and will be sent around to all major cities by them.

I've written a four-page play.¹⁴ It will take fifteen to twenty minutes to perform, the shortest drama on earth. Korsh's famous actor Davydov will act in it. It will be published in The Season and will there­fore make the rounds. Its much better as a rule to write short works than long ones: fewer pretensions and more success. . . . What else could you ask for? My play took me an hour and five minutes to write. I started another one, but I didn't finish it, because I had no time.

Г11 write Alexei Sergeyevich¹⁵ when he gets back from Volo­kolamsk. My sincere regards to everyone. You'll forgive me, won't you, for having written such a long letter? My hand ran away with me.

Happy New Year to Sasha and Seryozha.¹⁶

Does Seryozha receive Around the World?¹⁷

Your devoted and respectful

A. Chekhov

capable of finding this pearl, so why do we get only a manure pile? Give me that pearl, so that the filth of the surroundings may be effaced from my memory; I have a right to demand this of you. As for the others, the ones who are unable to find and to defend a human being among the quadruped animals—I'd just as soon not read them. Perhaps it might have been better to remain silent, but I could not resist an overpowering desire to give a piece of my mind to you and to your vile editors who allow you to wreck your talent with such equanimity. If I were your editor, I would have returned the story to you for your own good. No matter what you may say, the story is utterly disgusting! Leave such stories (such subjects!) to hacks like Ok- reyts, Prince-nez, Aloe and tutti quanti mediocrities, who are poor in spirit and have been short-changed by fate."

Ma-Pa is Chekhov's sister Maria Pavlovna. Counterfeiter was the name of Maria Kiselyova's dog. The painter Isaak Levitan, a close friend of Che­khov's, was a frequent guest at Babkino.

The amateur playwright Olga Golokhvastova, a friend of the addressee.

Some forgettable literary lights of the time. Emile Gaboriau was a French writer of popular detective novels, Marlitt was a pen name of a Ger­man lady who wrote pulp fiction, and Pierre Bobo was the nickname of the prolific and facile Russian novelist Pyotr Boborykin.

Stanislav Okreyts was a rabidly anti-Semitic journalist and publisher, whom Chekhov satirized several times in humor magazines; Pince-nez was a pen name of Maria Kiselyova herself and Aloe that of Chekhov's brother Alexander.

St. Tatyana was the patron saint of Moscow University, designated as such by its founder Ivan Shuvalov in honor of his mother, whose name was Tatyana. The feast day of this saint was traditionally celebrated by all the loyal alumni of Moscow University (cf. also Letter 17).

I.e., Anton Chekhov's own name day.

This was Chekhov's nickname for the two surviving sisters of the painter and stage designer Alexander Yanov. Shortly after Chekhov began to practice medicine, Yanov's mother and three sisters all came down with typhus. Yanov, who was a classmate of Nikolai Chekhov's at the art school, was unable to pay a doctor and Anton Chekhov volunteered to look after the stricken family. Despite his efforts, the mother and one of the sisters died. According to Mikhail Chekhov, the experience of losing two patients so early in his medical practice prompted Anton Chekhov to reduce his medical acti­vities to a minimum and to concentrate on literature. The two Yanov sisters whose lives he managed to save became good friends of the entire Chekhov family; an album on the cover of which one of them embroidered in gold thread the legend "In Remembrance of Saving Me from Typhus" is now on display at the Chekhov Museum in Yalta.

Reference to the story originally published in New Times as "The Sister," but subsequently renamed "Good People" by Chekhov.

The critic Leonid Obolensky managed within the same year (1886) to compare Chekhov favorably to Korolenko in a signed article in Russian

Wealth and to pan Chekhov's collection Varicolored Stories in an unsigned review he published in the Observer, which Chekhov mentions below.

The play by the addressee's father, Vladimir Begichev, which was called Firebird.

Chekhov's one-act play Calchas, also known as The Swan Song.