Though he became a celebrity in these two years, there was no fashion in Russia for interviewing popular authors. An interviewer’s challenge would have been to get Chekhov to discuss his stories or his private life. Even with friends and admirers he avoided talking or writing about himself:
One time a visitor rushed up to Chekhov and said, “Oh, my dear Chekhov, what artistic pleasure your last story gave us.”
But Chekhov immediately interrupted, “Tell me, where do you buy your herring? I will tell you where I get mine. At A’s; he has fat, delicate ones.”
Whenever someone talked to Chekhov about his works, he started talking about herring. He did not like to talk about his writings.3
How embarrassing this book would be to him. For one thing, I have tried to show how closely connected his own experiences are to his stories, which he adamantly (but disingenuously) denied; for another, I have tried to convey the “artistic pleasure” so many of his stories continue to give us. However rigorous he was about the “objectivity” of his writing, he suffered selfconsciousness about its achievement being discussed in front of him.
In 1901, Chekhov and Tolstoy became neighboring invalids in Crimea. Maxim Gorky, the new great young Russian writer of the time, was visiting them. He recalled an awkward discussion:
Tolstoy especially admired one of Chekhov’s short stories. He said, “This is like a fine lace, the embroidery of words. You know, in the old days there was a type of lace made only by young maidens, who wove all their dreams of happiness into its design.” Tolstoy spoke with tears in his eyes and with great emotion in his voice.
Chekhov had a fever that day. He sat next to us, his face covered with red spots, his head bent to one side; he was wiping his glasses. He was quiet for a long time, and then he muttered, embarrassed, “This story was published with quite a few typos in it.”4
Chekhov preserved his modesty and deflected praise from even the greatest writer in the world.
Pressed by an editor-friend for an account of his life in 1892, Chekhov feinted, joked and gave up:
You want my biography? Here it is. I was born in Taganrog in 1860. I finished my course at the Taganrog Grammar School in 1879. In 1884 I took my medical degree at Moscow University. In 1888 I was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a journey to Sakhalin across Siberia, returning by sea. In 1890 I made a tour in Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I was at a birthday party where I had a spree with V. A. Tikhonov [It was Tikhonov who had asked for this autobiographical sketch]. I began to write in 1879 in The Dragonfly. My books of collected stories are: “Motley Stories,” “In the Twilight,” “Stories,” “Gloomy People,” and a long story “The Duel.” I have sinned also in the drama line, but with moderation. I have been translated into all the languages, except the foreign. In fact, I have been translated into German. I am approved of also by the Czechs and Serbians, nor are the French shy of intimacy. The mysteries of love I conceived when I was thirteen. With my colleagues, medical as well as literary, I am on the best terms. Am a bachelor. Should like to have a pension. I practice medicine, to such a degree even that sometimes in the summer I hold postmortems, though I have not done so for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy…
But all this is nonsense. Write what you please. If you haven’t enough facts, make up with lyricism.5
In conclusion, without any lyricism, after 1887, Chekhov slowed down a lot, immediately. It was like a double-time job he had had, and then he or his body decided that in 1888 he wouldn’t or couldn’t or needn’t go so fast. His imagination never flagged, his commitment to the art of writing continuously evolved, but the delight of immediate and regular creation had had its time. He finished “The Steppe” in January and then he wrote seven more stories for New Times—and that was it for 1888. His brother Nikolay died the next year. Meanwhile, his stories became longer, usually, and his very long stories—what anybody but 19th-century Russians would call novels—extended the boundaries of fiction: full yet loose, intense but seemingly leisurely narratives. In 1890 Chekhov traveled all the way across Russia to conduct a health survey of all the prisoners and inhabitants of the Pacific coast island of Sakhalin. He came back and wrote a sociological study of that penal colony and more stories, but not a lot, most of them sterling, and eventually those comparatively dull plays. His tuberculosis was making him sicker and sicker and he spent more months of each year in the south of Russia and occasionally in Italy. He spent three years editing his collected works, fell in love with the actor Olga Knipper, and married her. He got sicker and sicker until the inevitable happened. He died in a German hospital with no grieving loved ones except his wife beside him—as he preferred. As noted in 1887’s “The Schoolmaster,” about the inadvertent funeral service for a fatally ill teacher, Chekhov revealed his own horror of being pitied: “at once on all the faces, in all the motionless eyes bent upon him, he read not the sympathy, not the commiseration which he could not endure, but something else, something soft, tender, but at the same time intensely sinister, like a terrible truth, something which in one instant turned him cold all over and filled his soul with unutterable despair.”
I wouldn’t want to embarrass or torture Chekhov with eulogies. The best model for praising him is in “Easter Eve,” where the narrator imagines the monk Ieronim listening to his late friend’s hymns: “I could fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending forward and hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase. All this that glided by the ears of the people standing by me he would have eagerly drunk in with his delicately sensitive soul, and would have been spell-bound to ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there would not have been a man happier than he in all the church.” Chekhov’s work from these two years has left me feeling that when I am in the midst of reading particular stories there has not been a person happier than I. He has given me the illusion of standing (or sitting) shoulder to shoulder with him while we watch, with his quiet incisive commentary, the fears, joys, disappointments, and ecstasies of us everyday humans.
When Chekhov turned twenty-eight in 1888, the date of this photo, he had just completed the most productive two years of his literary life.
The concluding image from “Misery” (published January 27, 1886), illustrated in 1903 by M. Efimov.
V. F. Vasil’ev’s illustration of “Agafya” (published March 15, 1886) shows the title character unable to yet cross the river to her husband after her rendezvous with Savka.
Alexander Chekhov (1855–1913), Chekhov’s oldest brother, was demonstrably intense and vulnerable in ways that Anton was not.
Anton and his brother Nikolay Chekhov (1858–1891) pose in review of the drawings that Nikolay has made to illustrate Anton’s little book of stories The Prank (1882).
Mikhail Chekhov (1865–1936), the youngest of six surviving Chekhov siblings, wrote an ever-interesting and admiring memoir of Anton.
Maria Chekhova (1863–1957), Chekhov’s lone sister, became a teacher and, after his death in 1904, the archivist of her brother’s writings.
Evgenia Chekhova (1835–1919), Chekhov’s tenderhearted, loving mother, in about 1880, after the family had moved to Moscow from Taganrog.
Pavel Chekhov (1825–1898), in a photo from about 1880, was born a serf. As Anton’s father, he was heavy-handed and rough-tongued. He believed in education and in the arts, though he never expressed in writing any appreciation of or interest in Anton’s stories or plays.