1884 was a critical date in Chekhov's life. At the age of twenty-four, he set up as a general practitioner and, influenced by reading Herbert Spencer, began research on a history of medicine in Russia. Ironically, that December he had bouts of spitting blood, which his medical expertise might have diagnosed as symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis. No outside observer would have suspected that this active, well-built, handsome man was suffering from a mortal illness. Only in his last years did he become a semi-invalid and, until that time, he maintained the pretence that his symptoms were not fatal. This subterfuge was not carried on simply to allay his family's fears. He wilfully strove to ignore the forecast of his own mortality.
1884 also saw his first published collection of stories, pointedly entitled Fairy Tales of Melpomene: the muse of tragedy compressed into pithy anecdotes of the life of actors. Chekhov had found more prestigious and better- paying periodicals to take his stories and was now an expert on Muscovite life.
He had an opportunity to amplify his subject matter, when he and his family began to spend summers in the country, first with his brother Ivan, master of a village school; then in a cottage on the estate of the Kiselev family. It was during these summers that Chekhov gained firsthand knowledge of the manor-house setting he employed in so many of his plays, and made the acquaintance of officers of a battery, who turn up in Three Sisters. Chekhov's artistic horizons also expanded, for the Kiselevs, intimates of Tchaikovsky, were devoted to classical music. Another summer visitor to become a lifelong friend was the painter Isaak Levitan, whose impressionistic landscapes are the painterly equivalent of Chekhov's prose techniques.
In 1885 Chekhov's literary career took a conscientious turn upwards. On a visit to St. Petersburg, he had been embarrassed by the acclaim that greeted him, because he recognised that he had been writing sloppily: 'If I had known that that was how they were reading me,' he told his brother Aleksandr (4 January 1886), 'I would not have written like a hack'. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from D. V. Grigorovich, doyen of Russian critics, singling him out as the most promising writer of his time and urging him to take his talent more seriously. Although Antosha Chekhonte continued to appear in print for a few more years, Anton Chekhov made his first bow in the prestigious Petersburg newspaper New Times (Novoe Vremya). Its editor Aleksey Suvorin had risen from peasant origins to become a tycoon and leading influence-monger in the conservative political camp; he and Chekhov were to be closely allied, although their friendship would later founder when Suvorin promoted the anti-Semitic line during the Dreyfus affair.
During the years when he was winning recognition as a short-story writer, Chekov made two further attempts to write for the theatre. With the first, On the High Way (Na bolshoy doroge, 1885), he came up against the obstacle of the censorship, which banned it on the grounds that it was a 'gloomy, squalid play'. The other piece, the monologue On the Harmfulness of Tobacco (O brede tabake) was, like many of his early 'dramatic etudes', written with a specific actor in mind. It appeared in 1886 in a St. Petersburg newspaper, and Chekhov kept revising it, publishing the final version, almost a new work, in his collected writings of 1903. Two farces, Hamlet Prince of Denmark and The Power of Hypnotism (both 1887), never got beyond the planning stage.
Profiting from an advance from Suvorin, Chekhov returned to southern Russia in 1887, a refreshment of the memory that was productive of remarkable work. The stories that followed signalled his emergence as a leading writer of serious fiction. The publication of The Steppe {Step, 1888) took place in The Northern Herald (Severny vestnik), one of those so-called 'fat' journals that had housed the works of Turgenev and Tolstoy, and were instruments of public opinion. That same year, Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize for Literature by the Imperial Academy of Science for his collection In the Gloaming (V sumerkakh). One of the most enthusiastic instigators of this honour had been the writer Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who would later play an important role in establishing Chekhov's reputation as a dramatist.
The Northern Herald was liberal in its politics, its editor Aleksey Pleshcheyev having been a prisoner in Siberia with Dostoevsky. Typically, Chekhov was able to be friends with Pleshcheyev and Suvorin simultaneously, and he continued to write for New Times. But this reluctance to identify himself with a party exposed him to much acrimonious criticism from members of both camps, and especially from the progressive left. Katherine Mansfield has pointed out that the 'problem' in literature is an invention of the nineteenth century; one of the legacies of Russian 'civic criticism' of the 1840s was the notion that a writer had both an obligation to depict social problems and to pose a solution, making his works an uplifting tool of enlightenment. This usually meant espousing a doctrinaire political platform. Chekhov, perhaps fortified by his medical training, treasured his objectivity and steadfastly refrained from taking sides, even when his sympathies were easy to ascertain. 'God keep us from generalisations,' he wrote. 'There are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of them are professed by people who have never had any problems'.
Between 1886 and 1890, his letters chew the cud over objectivity and his 'monthly change' of opinions, which readers preferred to see as the views of his leading characters. To his brother Aleksandr (10 May 1886), he insisted that no undue emphasis be placed on political, social or economic questions in writing. The author must be an observer, posing questions, but not supplying the answers, he insisted to Suvorin (27 October 1888); it is the reader who brings subjectivity to bear. Not that an author should be cold, but his own involvement in a problem should be unglimpsed by the reader.
You reproach me for my objectivity, [he wrote to Suvorin, 1 April 1890] calling it indifference to good and evil, absence of ideals and ideas, etc. You want me to say, when I depict horsethieves: horse-stealing is a bad thing. But that's been known for a long time, without my help, hasn't it? Let juries pass verdicts on horse-thieves; as for me, my work is only to show them as they are.
The year before77ze Steppe appeared, Chekhov had at last had a play produced; the impresario Fyodor Korsh had commissioned Ivanov and staged it at his Moscow theatre on 19 November 1887. It was an outstanding if controversial success. 'Theatre-buffs say they've never seen so much ferment, so much unanimous applause-cwra-hissing, and never ever heard so many arguments as they saw and heard at my play' (To Aleksandr, 20 November 1887). It was taken up by the Alexandra Theatre, the Imperial playhouse in St. Petersburg, and produced there on 31 January 1889, after much hectic rewriting in an attempt to make the playwright's intentions clearer and to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of the new cast.