Many years later Leykin claimed to be the discoverer of Chekhov’s talents, and indeed many of the promising “little stories” were written for him. But, like all talented writers, Chekhov was a reading man. He was an admiring if critical reader of Tolstoy and Turgenev: Tolstoy for his almost animal eye for the telling detail and for the portrait of Anna Karenina, Turgenev for his prose style. Dostoyevsky he despised for his “shrillness” and his prolonged irrational storms, but there are instances of Dostoyevsky’s influence. The more immediate influence at this time was the popular satirical realism of Saltykov-Shchedrin and his one masterpiece, the richest and “gloomiest” of Russian novels, The Golovlyov Family, with its classic portrait of the traditional Russian hypocrite, Iudushka. Goncharov’s famous Oblomov, the portrait of the idle Russian landowner, seemed to Chekhov a perverse hymn to idleness, the Russian curse. In his popular older contemporary Leskov, the author of the famous Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Chekhov was to have his nearest rival as a copious writer of short stories, but Leskov was religious, indeed he called himself a mystic. Chekhov was an atheist to whom the images and ceremonies of the Orthodox Church were interesting as deeply rooted manifestations of traditional art rather than of acceptable faith.
The young Chekhov was also drawn to the translations of popular French and other European novelists who were fashionable in Russia. He read them in order to parody them. There was a Romantic Hungarian novelist, Mor Jókai, who had written an extravagant novel about the erotic adventures of the daughter of a gypsy violinist in high society in Paris; there were parodies of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne and the famous French writer of detective fiction, Émile Gaboriau, whose ingenuity appealed to Chekhov, as we can see in The Swedish Match. In this story he makes rough fun of the mistakes of the inductive method of detection (it turns out that a murder has not occurred: the victim is found to be grossly asleep).
This story was followed by The Shooting Party, a combination of melodrama and full-length detective novel, which was run as a newspaper serial in 1884—the anxious year of Chekhov’s graduation as a doctor. It was translated into English by A. E. Chamot in 1926 and has recently been reissued with an admiring introduction by Julian Symons, himself a distinguished writer of detective stories. Chekhov took great pains to baffle the reader. The characters are wickedly sensational old-style villainous landowners. The tone is high-flown and lush in its eroticism, a parody of Gaboriau’s famous Monsieur Lecoq and of the Dostoyevsky of Crime and Punishment—Chekhov disliked his “spiritual” melodrama. If the style is one of romantic excess, it must be said that the particularity of landscape and lake and forest has all of Chekhov’s feeling for nature. There are glints of the Chekhov to come.
Chapter Three
During the three or four years when he was working for Leykin, Chekhov moved his family eventually into a better house in a more congenial Moscow district: a litde red house with a spiral staircase, with carpets on the floor—he had an extravagant taste for carpets—a room for his growing library of books and, at last, a study where he could work alone. We begin to notice several stories of serious merit. If they are comic, they are not crude: they have a core of serious moral insight. This is true of A Daughter of Albion, in which a gross landowner is out fishing with the English governess. She cannot speak Russian, he cannot speak English, and he thinks her cold, proud, prim—in short, very English. His line is caught on a root and, hoping to shock her, he takes off his clothes and goes naked into the river to detach it. She is quite indifferent, and when he comes out she simply baits his line for him while he talks to a neighbor. What, in his earlier work, would have been a raw joke now has an unspoken judgment on the landowner’s ignorance and coarseness. Slight as the incident is, it “tells.”
More pointed is Anyuta, in which a medical student and a painter share a poor sewing girl as a model. We see her in the medic’s dirty room. She has taken her blouse off and he is marking her ribs with a piece of chalk as he recites his lesson in anatomy: “The right lung consists of three parts…. Upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches the fourth or fifth rib.” The painter comes in to borrow the girl to model for a picture of Psyche and lectures his friend on the filth of his room and tells him that he is not living as “an educated man” and that he ought to make the girl clean up the place. The story now becomes serious. While she is away and he is on his own the medical student takes the painter’s words to heart, reflects that one day he will be a successful doctor, even a professor, and that he must get rid of the girl. But how to say this? After an hour she comes back and he blurts out in a muddled way that she knows one day they will have to part and that they’d better do it now. They have been drinking tea; she puts on her coat and with tears in her eyes says, “That’s your sugar.” This breaks him. He begs her to stay and he starts his comic anatomy lesson again— “The right lung consists of three parts….”
A neat ending to a sentimental story that might have come out of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bobèeme? Chekhov had read Murger, as well as Daudet and Maupassant. But look once more at the middle of the story, to the talk of “living like an educated man” and to the crucial moment when she goes off to sit for the painter—the point at which the story has to “turn.” The girl comes to life and snaps at “the things I have to put up with here.” Chekhov sees that a neat ending will not do. As he often said, the proper ending of a story is always the difficulty. It is solved here, as so often it is in his better work, by “returning” his fiction to real life. As she leaves we hear some unknown man shouting up the stairs of the rooming house: “Grigory! The samovar!”—the indifferent voice of everyday life outside the tale.
Does this story derive from an incident in Chekhov’s life as a medical student? It is impossible to say. He had often censured his two older brothers about their behavior to women. It does not match the only account of an early stormy love affair he is known to have had at this time. We know that his mother was eager for him to marry the daughter of the rich haberdasher Gavrilov, who employed Pavel, and that Chekhov rejected the notion with disgust. But a letter from Chekhov to a fellow journalist suggests there were other rumors about a friend of his sister’s:
Now about a fiancée and Hymen…. When I speak about a woman I like, I usually prolong the talk to nec plus ultra, to the Pillars of Hercules, a trait that has been mine since before my school days…. My she is a Jewess. Should a wealthy Jewess have enough courage to embrace Orthodox Christianity with its consequences—very well; if not, it’s not necessary. Besides we have already quarreled…. Vexed that religion is in her way, she breaks pencils on my desk and photographs—and this is characteristic. A terrible shrew. But … finis.
The fiancée, it is thought, was Dunya Efros, a friend of his sister’s. Very little is known for certain about the love affairs in Chekhov’s life and he himself said there had been very few.