—To a young writer1
Even when he was blue, there was spirit and tone in his letters. He seems to have felt obliged to be entertaining; this usually meant kidding around. With only a couple of exceptions, his letters are fresh, written at a dash, without drafts. He communicated fast, his mind’s eye on his correspondent, musing and joking as if aloud to this particular person.
He had met Bilibin, Leykin’s assistant editor, in Petersburg in December 1885, and took to him immediately. In the friendship’s early stages, Chekhov was especially confidential. Bilibin was getting married, and Chekhov and Dunya Efros were at least playing with the idea.
On February 1, he wrote to Bilibin about various topics, among them a visit to the poet Iliodor Palmin:
True, while talking to 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.2
During the next few years, Chekhov did not harp on any particular human failing except one, lying.
He recalled or created a comic turn in his and Palmin’s conversation:
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. 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 cliché. […] 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 […]
It seems to me Chekhov had edged himself along to what he really wanted to discuss with Bilibin:
And now a few words about my fiancée and Hymen. […] Thank your fiancée 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. 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 is the way she is…. She has a terrible temper. There is no doubt whatsoever that I will divorce her a year or two after the wedding. But… finis.
Dunya Efros, as Maria’s friend and classmate, was a regular visitor to the Chekhovs’ home, and we learn in the next letter that Maria and her young women friends liked to sit in Chekhov’s study by the fire. My theory is that Chekhov was writing the letter while Efros was in the room with him, and she came over and sat beside him or stood over his shoulder at his desk…. She began reading what he was writing, and she squawked and pretended to or threatened to break his pencils and tear up his photos. So he wrote: “She has a terrible temper,” and further taunted her about their destined divorce. Efros, I speculate, had become his immediate audience. Chekhov took his eye off Bilibin to tease Efros. This was not a confidential message revealing deep feelings to his new friend.
When he had actual life news, he passed it along matter-of-factly to his brother Alexander or Leykin, but as far as can be told from the letters to and from those correspondents, neither confidant was aware of this engagement. Alexander was never one to hold back, and his letters contain no querying about Chekhov’s relationship with Efros.
“Probably there never was any such engagement,” writes the biographer Ronald Hingley, “for Chekhov’s letters so abound in flights of whimsy that it may have been a figment of his imagination from the start: a private joke between himself and Bilibin. As for Dunya Efros—whether briefly affianced to Chekhov or not, she later became a Mrs. Konovitser; and remained, with her husband, on friendly terms with the Chekhovs throughout the years.”3
But what about the issue of her Judaism versus his Russian Orthodoxy?… Chekhov did not note Efros being Jewish in the only previous mention in the letters. Now he did. Does that mean it wasn’t important on January 19? Was the religious issue only a new complicating narrative detail in their make-believe or semi-serious engagement?
On February 3, Anton scolded Alexander: “Remember, that if you would write stories the way you write letters you would have long been a great tremendous person.”4 Alexander’s letters were as lively and engaging as Anton’s, and perhaps even more revealing—as Alexander had been to the depths many times. Anton then repeated his message to Alexander of a month before: “I’m still not married.” There was no mention of the engagement to Efros, even though she was, possibly at this very moment in his presence: “I have now a separate room, and in the room is a fireplace, close to which Masha and her Efros—Reve-Khave [Efros’ Jewish name], Nelli and the baroness, the Yanova girls and so on often sit.”
*
“An Upheaval” (“Perepolokh,” February 3) was published in the Petersburg Gazette. A young governess, Mashenka, is, as one of the household staff, suspected of having filched her employer’s expensive brooch. Her room and things are searched: “For the first time in her life, it was her lot to experience in all its acuteness the feeling that is so familiar to persons in dependent positions, who eat the bread of the rich and powerful, and cannot speak their minds.” She is humiliated by the suspicion.
Chekhov could not bear being looked down upon. He could not bear his family being condescended to. Mashenka’s suffering and resentment are acute to him. He even imagines the humiliating position of the doctor who lives with the aristocrats:
“Come, don’t let us agitate ourselves,” Mamikov, her household doctor, observed in a honeyed voice, just touching [Madame Kushkin’s] arm, with a smile as honeyed. “We are nervous enough as it is. Let us forget the brooch! Health is worth more than two thousand rubles!”
Even though she is poor and her parents are depending on her employment, Mashenka doesn’t see how she can remain working for such people. The man of the house, a browbeaten wimp, tries to persuade her to stay, even finally confessing that he, needing money but fearing his wife’s refusal, stole the brooch. Mashenka’s exit is swift and triumphant: “Half an hour later she was on her way.” Chekhov practically cheers for the vulnerable young woman’s bravery.
“Conversation of a Drunken Man with a Sober Devil” (February 8) is a quick skit for Fragments about a drunk who is more poised and confident than the Devil. The narrator makes one uninspired marriage joke: “Even if he is not married, a devil has a pair of horns on his head.”5
In “An Actor’s End” (“Akterskaya Gibel’,” February 10), an actor has suffered a stroke (Chekhov describes the symptoms). His lone desire is to return home, far away from where the troupe is performing. His fellow actors visit him on his deathbed to offer remedies or to cheer him up: “Sigaev began comforting Shchiptsov, telling him untruly that his comrades had decided to send him to the Crimea at their expense, and so on, but the sick man did not listen and kept muttering about Vyazma…. At last, with a wave of his hand, the comic man began talking about Vyazma himself to comfort the invalid.”
In a dozen years Chekhov himself would be advised to go to Crimea for his health.
*
Sometime on or near February 10, Chekhov mailed Suvorin “The Requiem.” How anxious was he about his first submission to New Times? One short story would pay more than what Chekhov received monthly from Leykin for a dozen pieces. By the 14th, Suvorin sent Chekhov a telegram with the welcome announcement about his intention to publish it. The discombobulating news, however, was that he wanted Chekhov to use his actual name.6 While some of Chekhov’s medical colleagues did not even know he was a humor writer, now they would know he was a literary writer.