The Undiscovered Chekhov

INTRODUCTION

BY PETER CONSTANTINE

“WRITE AS MUCH AS you can!! write, your fingers break!” This advice, which Anton Chekhov sent to Maria Kiselyova in a letter in 1886, was the motto by which he lived and worked. He was twenty-six, and had already published over four hundred short stories and vignettes in popular magazines, as well as two books of stories, with a third in the making. He had written his first series of plays, Fatherlessness, Diamond Cut Diamond, The Scythe Struck the Stone, Why the Hen Cackled, The Clean-shaven Secretary with the Pistol, and The Nobleman (none of which have come down to us), and Platonov and On the High Road, and he was about to begin writing Ivanov, his first major theatrical success.

Throughout this period Chekhov was also energetically studying medicine at Moscow University, from which he graduated in June 1884. The nameplate on the Chekhov family’s door now read “Dr. A. P. Chekhov.”

The stories and vignettes in The Undiscovered Chekhov are from this period, the most prolific of Chekhov’s life. They are some of the works that helped make him a literary star and contributed to his receiving the Pushkin Prize in 1888. None of these works has appeared in any English-language Chekhov collection, and all but two have never before been translated into English. (“To Speak or Be Silent: A Tale” appeared in the Nation in 1954, and “The Good German” in the Quarterly Review of Literature in 1962.)

For Chekhov, these early years were extremely difficult. The Russian literary giants of the nineteenth century—Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky—had all come from the nobility. Chekhov was the grandson of a serf. His father had run a ramshackle grocery store in Taganrog, in southern Russia. When Chekhov was sixteen, his father went bankrupt and left town in a hurry. He took the whole family, including the two elder sons, with him to Moscow—everyone, that is, except for young Anton, who was left destitute and penniless to fend for himself in Taganrog.

As Chekhov wrote to his friend and publisher Suvorin many years later, “What the aristocrat writers get for free from nature, intellectuals of lower birth have to pay for with their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, a former shopboy, choirboy, schoolboy, and student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss priests’ hands, and worship the thoughts of others, thankful for every piece of bread, whipped time and again, having to go give lessons without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, loving to eat at rich relatives’ houses, needlessly hypocritical before God and man, merely from a sense of his own insignificance—write a story about how this young man squeezes the serf out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking up one bright morning this young man feels that in his veins there no longer flows the blood of a slave, but the blood of a real man.”

By the time the nineteen-year-old Chekhov rejoined his parents in Moscow three years later, having secured a scholarship to study at the university, the family was living in utter poverty in grimy basement lodgings in Grachyovka, one of Moscow’s red-light districts. Anton immediately took charge and became the head and chief support of the family, a position he was to keep till the end of his life. His family nicknamed him “Papa Antosha.” He was determined to succeed, and despite the harsh reality of his situation wrote to his cousin, “I will make a fortune... that is as certain as that two and two make four.”

Chekhov began making his fortune by writing stories and vignettes for the popular Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines. According to his younger brother Michael, the moment the first installment of Antons scholarship arrived from Taganrog, he bought up all the magazines he could lay his hands on. He meticulously read through them to see what they were publishing, and then went to work. He sent in sharp, witty, innovative pieces such as “On the Train,” “Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town,” and “The Trial,” all of which were published during 1881 in the Moscow humorous magazine Zritel (Spectator). “Confession—or Olya, Zhenya, Zoya: A Letter” was published in Budilnik (Alarm Clock), and “Village Doctors” in Svet i teni (Light and Shades).

Chekhov’s pieces came as a surprise to readers of the time, for whom a story was supposed to deal with significant issues and have a clear beginning, middle, and end. It was supposed to impart the author’s ideals. Chekhov’s stories veered from this norm. “On the Train” is seemingly formless and impres-sionistic: the protagonist travels through the night on a train that then breaks down. Nothing actually happens, except that he meets a series of bizarre figures: a pickpocket, a lost peasant, a man wishing he had some chloroform so he can have his way with the girl sitting next to him. The atmosphere is oppressive—“Darkness, anguish, thoughts of death, memo-ries of childhood, oh God!”—but Chekhov constantly weaves in bright flashes of humor and comedy that give the piece its complex texture. In “Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town” Chekhov is even more innovative and daring. The story is narrated as a string of disjointed telegrams. In this period Chekhov signed his pieces “Antosha,” “Antosha Ch.,” “My brother’s brother,” “A man without a spleen,” and “Chekhonte”—the last a nickname coined for him by his former religion teacher at school, Father Pokrovsky.

Contemporaries of Chekhov described him roaming the streets, markets, taverns, and brothels of Moscow, absorbing the color and commotion of the city and working it into quick, vivid prose. His friend and fellow writer Vladimir Korolenko wrote in his memoirs that when he asked Chekhov how he wrote his stories, Chekhov laughed, snatched up the nearest object—an ashtray—and said that if Korolenko wanted a story called “The Ashtray,” he could have it the next morning.

Soon Chekhov was writing at such a pace that he was paying family and friends 10 kopecks for story ideas and 20 kopecks for plot outlines. But making ends meet remained a major problem for him throughout the 1880s, and in letters to friends he constantly laments his lack of money. In a letter to Suvorin in 1888 Chekhov wrote, “I was terribly corrupted by the fact that I was born, grew up, studied, and began to write in a milieu in which money played a shockingly large role.”

As money began trickling in from the publication of his work, Chekhov managed to move his family to better lodgings—they were to move almost a dozen times during his student years. But as he had to share his cramped living space with his parents, siblings, lodgers, and a constant flow of visiting relatives, Chekhov’s living and working conditions remained very difficult.

“In front of me sits my nonliterary work, banging mercilessly at my conscience. In the next room a visiting relatives fledgling is bawling; in the other room father is reading The Sealed Angel out loud to mother. Someone has wound up the phonograph, and La Belle Hélène is playing. I want to escape to the country, but it’s one in the morning. Can you imagine more vile circumstances for a man of letters?”

Chekhov wrote this to his new friend and publisher Nicholas Leikin in August 1883. Leikin was the owner and editor of the popular humorous St. Petersburg magazine Oskolki (Splinters), for which Chekhov was to write 162 pieces over the next couple of years. Leikin had been searching for an energetic writer who had a wild sense of humor and an innovative style—and, most importantly, who was a master of brevity. Chekhov was the ideal candidate. Oskolki had a strict editorial limit of 100 lines, which forced Chekhov to develop an inventive style concise enough to carry ideas within an extremely restrictive framework. He complained bitterly that he had to “squeeze the very pith and essence” out of his plots, but he readily complied, sending Leikin some of the most original writing of the time. Oskolki published everything from anecdotes, witty riddles, and cartoons to intricate vignettes and stories. Chekhov took these forms and expanded them into new literary genres. In one of the first pieces Oskolki published, “An Unsuccessful Visit,” a simple joke turns into what today would be classified as a short short story. It begins, “A dandy enters a house in which he’s never been.” There is a swift roll of dialogue in which the debonair young mans roguish language bounces off the sensitive, nuanced responses of a young girl “wearing a cotton dress and little white apron.” The delicate vignette ends with a one-liner that turns it right back into a comic anecdote.

In another early piece published in Oskolki, “The Cross,” Chekhov pokes a daring jab at the oppressive state censorship, which had just been granted greater power after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in March 1881. In “The Cross,” a poet enters a drawing room: “‘Well,’ the hostess turns to him, ‘how did your dear little poem do?”’ The guests hover about him, amazed and impressed that a poet should be awarded a cross for a poem. The angry poet holds up his manuscript for all to see, and the startled guests realize that the cross he was awarded is “not the kind of cross you can pin on your lapel”—it is the red ink cross of the state censor. His poem has been disallowed.

Like many of his contemporaries, Chekhov put a good deal of effort into eluding the censor. It was always chancy what would manage to slip by and what would be prohibited. The story “In Autumn,” for instance, passed the censor and was published in Budilnik in 1882. But three years later, when Chekhov adapted it as the one-act play On the High Road, a drama censor with the eye-catching name of Kaiser von Nilckheim branded it filthy and foul. It was not per-formed during Chekhov’s lifetime. The short story “To Speak or Be Silent” was also forbidden by the censor, as it warned the reader of the dangers of speaking too freely before a stranger who might well be a secret service agent.

In “Intrigues,” Chekhov anticipates modernism. He builds up, element by element, a psychological portrait of an eccentric physician who is about to face his colleagues at the Medical Association after a string of scandals that could mean the end of his career. Chekhov uses his medical training in an analytic tour-de-force, showing the doctor going through a series of mental gyrations as he prepares to leave his house for the fateful meeting.

Almost a century has passed since Chekhov’s death, and it is surprising that so many of these early masterpieces have not been translated into English. As Chekhov specialist Julie de Sherbinin points out in a letter to Harper’s Magazine (February 1998), “The gaps in English translation of his early work can be attributed to various factors: these stories were long considered products of an ‘immature writer, they are rich in colloquialisms and wordplay and thus are hard to translate, and they often depend on cultural context for their humor.”

Since Chekhov’s death in 1904 there have been many translations of his other prose pieces. During the Bloomsbury years, Constance Garnett established his position as an international literary figure by publishing seventeen volumes of her Chekhov translations—201 stories. The quantity of Chekhov’s work was so great that Garnett had to make a selection, and her selections have subsequently remained largely uncontested. Consecutive generations of Chekhov translators have not veered far from her choice of stories, only occasionally introducing new, untranslated material.

In many of his letters throughout his life Chekhov down-played his stories, calling them “little trifles,” even “literary excrements” that were written “half-consciously.” He playfully confided that he wrote things off the cuff, as if he were eating bliny. “I don’t love money sufficiently for medicine, and I don’t have enough passion, that is, talent, for literature.” Chekhov’s natural self-irony in talking about his work misled many people who knew him, and later most of his biographers; but there is evidence that behind closed doors he was always a painstakingly careful writer. His friend Nikolai Yozhov, for instance, was both shocked and amazed at catching him one day transcribing a story by Tolstoy. Chekhov told him that he often did this, that it was just an exercise—he was rewriting the story, editing it down. (Yozhov was outraged.) Chekhov wrote in an earnest letter of advice to his older brother Alexander, also a writer, “Most important of all: keep watch, observe, huff and puff, rewrite everything five times, condensing and so on, always remembering that all of Petersburg follows the work of the Chekhov brothers!”

It is a widely accepted myth that Chekhov initially saw writing as the road to a quick ruble, that he spent the first part of his career as a hack writer for the gutter press, and that it was only in midlife that he miraculously found literature. A closer look at the quality of his early work refutes this.

Thomas Mann, in an essay published in Sinn und Form in 1954 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death, was one of the first to point out that Chekhov’s diffident public attitude toward his writing had misled subsequent generations into a distorted view of his work. “In my eyes,” Mann wrote,

the reason Chekhov has to a large extent been undervalued in Europe and even in Russia is due to his extremely sober, critical, and skeptical stance towards himself, and the dissatisfaction with which he regarded his accomplishments—in short, his modesty. This modesty was an extremely appealing trait, but it was not designed to exact respect from the world and, one could say that it set the world a bad example. For, the view we have of ourselves is not without influence on the image that people have of us, and can taint that image and possibly adulterate it. Chekhov the short-story writer was convinced for far too long of his artistic unworthiness and the insignificance of his capabilities. It was only slowly and with great difficulty that he gained a modicum of belief in himself—the belief that cannot be absent if others are to believe in us. To the end of his life he showed no trace of the literary grand seigneur, and even less of the sage and prophet.^*

Another important factor that led earlier generations of scholars to deprecate Chekhov’s early work was his own selection of stories for the ten-volume Sobranie Sochinenii (Collected Works, 1899-1902). It was felt that the pieces Chekhov chose not to include were in his eyes not up to par. And until quite recently the general scholarly trend of thought has been to agree with him. Stories told in minimalist telegrams? Absurdist vignettes opening with “I was chased by 30 dogs, 7 of which were white”? How could one compare these wild pieces with the multilayered style of The Cherry Orchard or “The Lady with the Lap Dog,” a style that has served as a model for many writers of the twentieth century?

Scholars today are taking a broader view in assessing the scope of Chekhov’s early work. Pieces such as “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician,” until recently dismissed as “scurrilous sketches” and “impenetrably vacuous balderdash,” are now viewed as important experimental works. Thomas Venclova, for instance, discusses Chekhov’s early prose as a major precursor of the Russian absurdist writers of the late 1920s and Eugène Ionesco.

My work on this book began two years ago in the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library. I was looking through a heavy bound volume of Budilnik issues from 1880. The magazines had a very progressive, almost late Edwardian look, much like early issues of the British magazine Punch. The drawings were colored, which surprised me, and after the middle of 1880 the lettering on the tide pages was flushed with gold. Just as I was wondering how a fin-de-siècle printer could have managed that, I noticed a short story signed “A. Chekhov”—Alexander Chekhov, Anton’s older brother. In the next few issues there were more “A. Chekhov” signatures, and quite a few “Arteopod,” an alias Alexander often used.

And then came the first stories by Antosha Chekhonte—Anton Chekhov.

To my surprise, the New York Public Library has all the Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines in which Chekhov was first published: Budilnik, Strekoza (Dragonfly), Oskolki. As I began reading Chekhov’s early stories in context, a very different image of him jumped off the page. The initial picture in my mind of the sedate literary elder with monocle and cane (the picture of Chekhov on most book covers) disappeared, and a younger, livelier, more energetic image of the writer took its place. I soon found that the New York Public Library has one of the best collections of turn-of-the-century and earlier Russian material in the world. Some of its rare books are not even available in the Russian State Library. It houses almost 400,000 books, manuscripts, and periodicals, including volumes from the libraries of twenty-six members of the Romanov dynasty—some items dating back to the fourteenth century. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, a Chekhov scholar and translator, who served as chief of the Slavic and Baltic Division, had traveled to Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, buying up the libraries of the Romanovs and the former aristocracy. It was quite an experience working on this book surrounded by such Imperial Russian treasures.

The Undiscovered Chekhov brings to English-speaking readers a new body of Chekhov’s work that deserves a wider audience. I chose these stories as representative pieces out of the large body of Chekhov’s writing spanning the period from 1880 to 1887. His work from that time is largely unknown outside Russia. Without it, one cannot have a full picture of Chekhov as a writer.

I have arranged the stories chronologically in order to show the direction of Chekhov’s development. The second section, “This and That,” brings together some of the shorter humorous vignettes that Chekhov published in magazine columns tided “This and That,” “Something,” or “Thoughts and Aphorisms.”

In The Undiscovered Chekhov, one sees exuberance and energy, but also the technique of a young writer of genius. These are the stories that made Chekhov famous in his day.

^* From “Versuch ueber Tschechow,” by Thomas Mann, written July 15, 1954. The essay ini' rially appeared in the German literary magazine SINN UND FORM, and was included in Thomas Mann’s GESAMMELTE WAKE (S. Fischer, 1960). Excerpt translated by Peter Constantine with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Acknowledgments

My warmest thanks to Anneta Greenlee for her scholarly input and for checking my translations. Her knowledge of nineteenth-century Russian literature and the nuances of the language of the time was invaluable. I would also like to thank the Chekhov specialist Julie de Sherbinin for her recommendations. Her advice on the fine points of Chekhov’s early work were especially helpful. I am grateful to Barbara Jones, senior editor of Harper’s Magazine, for her editorial advice on the stories that appeared in the magazine, to Linda Asher for her editorial advice on the story “On Mortality: A Carnival Tale,” which appeared in the New Yorker, and also to Bradford Morrow, who made many extremely helpful suggestions. Edward Kasinec, chief of the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library, and Tatiana Gizdavcic, librarian, for their help in locating often-hard-to-find material.

I am very grateful to my agent, Jessica Wainwright, who enthusiastically encouraged me, and to my editor, Dan Simon, for his help and support.

My very special thanks to Burton Pike, who inspired me to begin this project, and encouraged, helped, and advised me throughout it.