This year was dramatic for Chekhov. The Huntsman appeared in Petersburg in 1885, not in Leykin’s humorous journal but in a superior publication, The Petersburg Gazette. Chekhov, who had been despised by serious critics, was acclaimed. He was at the point when a young writer becomes more than “promising” to elders. He received a long letter from Dmitry Grigorovich, an established novelist of the older generation, who noted Chekhov’s innate sense of form and his “feeling for the plastic.” He said Chekhov had “real talent… a talent which sets you far above other writers of the younger generation.” Chekhov would be guilty of “a grievous moral sin” if he did not live up to these hopes. This was in March 1886. Chekhov respected but did not admire the work of Grigorovich, but he was grateful. He confesses, too fulsomely perhaps,
If I have a gift which one ought to respect I confess before the pure candour of your heart that hitherto I have not respected it…. In the course of the five years that I have been knocking about from one newspaper office to another … I soon got used to looking down upon my work…. This is the first reason. The second is that I am a doctor, and am up to my ears in medical work.
He admits his attitude to his work has been foolish and casual.
I don’t remember a single story over which I have spent more than twenty-four hours…. [I am] working against time.
He says nothing about the cheap journalism he was writing at the same time.
Earlier, in the autumn of 1885, Leykin advised Chekhov that the time had come for meeting the crucially important literary society of Petersburg, the capital of Russian literature. Chekhov said that he could not afford even the fare: the family eats up all his money, which is “as short as cats’ tears.” He had to pay for the running of his Moscow house, he owed rent for the summer cottage at Babkino; the sacred Christmas and Easter festivals always ruined him and, in any case, money always ran through his fingers.
A few months later he gave in, defying the dangerous December climate, and went with Leykin to meet the man who was effectively to change his life: Aleksey Suvorin, the millionaire publisher and owner of New Time (Novoe Vrem-ya), the most conservative and important newspaper in Russia, the only one that could stand comparison with the great papers of Europe. He had had his eye on Chekhov’s better stories; he would pay twice the rate Leykin paid him. Suvorin wanted the exclusive rights to Chekhov’s work, but on that Chekhov would not agree. Suvorin gave way.
Chapter Four
Chekhov’s friends were, like himself, liberals. They were appalled that he had gone over to a man notorious for his reactionary politics. How could he be so self-seeking as to give himself to the enemy? Chekhov declared that his independence was guaranteed, but for years his earnest friends were skeptical. They were even more astonished when they saw the relationship between the twenty-six-year-old writer and the rich entrepreneur in his fifties become a close friendship, and saw the older man become the attentive pupil of the younger. Both men came from the volatile south. The self-made Suvorin had started life as a humble schoolteacher. He had moved on to buying a dying provincial newspaper at the time of the Russo-Turkish War and had transformed it by getting direct vivid dispatches from the front which exposed the grievances of the officers and men. The paper became popular with the powerful military interests at once. Suvorin had been arrested for publishing unauthorized reports and had been sent to prison for a few months. On his release he took advantage of the railway age, founded New Time and saw that it was distributed at every railway station in Russia. He got the monopoly of the bookstalls and, astonishingly, started the publication of cheap editions of the Russian classics. He was an eager autodidact. He himself had tried to write novels, but seeing more money in the theater, he had turned to it and had a small success with popular plays simply because he could afford to buy the most successful actors and actresses. He had read, and met, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and—surprising in a conservative—had taken the trouble to meet and read Cher-nyshevsky, the revolutionary socialist and author of the notorious What Is to Be Done? which was the bible of the radicals. The author had been sent to prison and then exiled for a long term in Siberia.
There is commonly an element of naivete in the character of self-made men. In the long friendship between Suvorin and Chekhov, Suvorin is the earnest, hospitable man of the world, Chekhov is the bright young teacher. Chekhov stayed with Suvorin in Petersburg and, in time, traveled with him all over Europe and stayed with him and his family in his villa in the Crimea. The friendship, generous on Suvorin’s part, did not decline until, in old age, Suvorin in one of his anti-Semitic fits attacked Dreyfus and Zola.
Chekhov is one of the outstanding natural letter writers in Russian literature and his long correspondence with Suvorin is forthright, amusing and, above all, revealing. Suvorin’s replies have most unfortunately been lost. It was to Suvorin that Chekhov wrote the often quoted utterance which displays his pride:
What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try to write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests’ hands, worshipping the ideas of others and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance—write about this young man who squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and who, one fine morning, finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave but that of a real human being.
Very early Suvorin is concerned because his young genius is splitting his life in two as a doctor and a writer. Chekhov replies:
You advise me not to hunt after two hares and not to think of medical work. I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense. … I feel more confident and more satisfied with myself when I reflect that I have two professions…. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress…. There is no discipline in me.
Suvorin had a rather solemn interest in intellectual problems. For example, he complains that in The Horse Thieves Chekhov had not taken sides and solved the problem. Chekhov replies:
You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and Yevgeny Onegin not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely because all the problems are correctly stated in them.
Suvorin protests that this looks like indifference to good and evil. Isn’t horse stealing wrong? Chekhov replies there is no need for him to say horse stealing is wrong: everyone has known that for ages. His job is simply to say what these people are like.
These people are not beggars, but well-fed people with their own vocation—horse stealing for them isn’t just stealing, it’s a passion.
To depict a horse stealer in seven hundred lines is partly a matter of technique. A writer must unself himself and “must speak and think in their tone and must feel as a fellow-spirit, otherwise the images will become blurred.”