Part 3: At Home with Family and Fame
1 Pis’ma. Vol.1. 255. [Letter to Leykin, July 30, 1886.]
2 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 107.
3 Here is one remark, from Yuriy Sobolev’s “Tchekhov’s Creative Method,” though I have been unable to date the letter: “ ‘It is pleasanter to read than to write,’ he wrote to Suvorin. ‘I think that if I could live another forty years and read, read, read, and learn to write with talent, that is, concisely—at the end of the forty years I would fire on you all from so huge a canon that the heavens would shake. But now I am but a Lilliputian, like the rest.’ ” (In Koteliansky’s Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences. 23.)
4 Simmons. Chekhov: A Biography. 108.
5 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 107.
6 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 150.
7 Ibid.
September 1886
1 Personal correspondence. March 19, 2021.
2 Translation by Constance Garnett.
3 Works. Vol. 5. 312.
4 Translation by Constance Garnett.
5 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 259–260. [To Leykin, September 20, 1886.]
6 Letopis’. 264. [September 27, 1886.]
7 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 265–266. [To Leykin, September 30, 1886.]
8 Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik, “Young Years”: “He was constantly teasing me, but all of it was in a very friendly way, and he always made me laugh. I knew that Anton Pavlovich only teased people whom he liked.” In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 67.
9 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 260–262. [To Kiseleva, September 21, 1886.]
10 Translation by Constance Garnett. Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends. 48. [To Kiseleva, September 21, 1886.]
11 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 260–262.
12 Translated by Constance Garnett.
13 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 260–262.
14 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 206.
15 There are thirty-five known letters from Chekhov to Kiseleva, and thirty-one from her to him. Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 544.
16 Translated by Rosamund Bartlett. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. 71–73.
17 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 264.
18 Letopis’. 265. [October 1, 1886.]
October 1886
1 Translated by Louis S. Friedland. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics. [To Leont’ev (Shcheglov), January 22, 1888.]
2 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 206. [To Shavrova, September 16, 1891.]
3 Translated by Constance Garnett.
4 Rayfield. Chekhov: A Life (2021). 328.
5 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. 98. [To Georgy Chekhov, June 23,1887.]
6 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 15. [To Alexander Chekhov, January 2, 1889.]
7 In A. P. Chekhov: Entsiklopediya. Edited by V. B. Kataev. 196.
8 Works. Vol. 5. 573.
9 Ibid., 340.
10 Translated by Constance Garnett.
11 A pood is a Russian farming unit of weight of approximately thirty-six pounds.
12 Works. Vol. 5. 353.
13 Translated by Constance Garnett.
14 Pis’ma. 456.
15 Ibid., 266. [To Leykin, October 7, 1886.]
16 Letopis’. 267. [October 12–13, 1886.]
17 Pis’ma. 267. [To Schechtel, October 19, 1886.]
18 Chekhov uses the unusual word khapanniy (хапанный).
19 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 269–271. [Letter to Kiseleva, Oct. 29, 1886.]
20 Works. Vol. 5. 691.
21 Translated by Heim and Karlinsky. Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. 51.
22 As Constance Garnett renders her name.
23 Translated by Constance Garnett.
24 I thank Donald Rayfield for providing me with the link.
25 Pis’ma. 271.
26 Rayfield. Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997). 125.
27 Chekhov i Evrei (Chekhov and the Jews) by Mark Ural’skiy. In “From Susanna to Sarra: Chekhov in 1886–1887,” Helena Tolstoy writes most groundedly and most thoroughly about Efros and Chekhov, and she makes the same kind of disappointed observations I have been inclined to make. His relationship with her over the year is the only time I see Chekhov where he seems like any young man prone to defensiveness and self-justification and pettiness. He was smitten but got cold feet about her. He could have married her. She was well off (but not rich, says Rayfield), she was attractive—but he called her names and teased her and wrote other people about her as if he didn’t really like her. The stories that seem to reveal his feelings and experiences about her are “The Witch,” “The Joke,” and indeed “Mire.” Helena Tolstoy calls him out about the differences between Susanna of “Mire” and Efros, that such differences were his disingenuous way to plausibly deny it was about her—but everyone who knew her and him recognized her in the descriptions of her looks and scent and wiriness. Helena Tolstoy explains how he tried to make up for his rudeness and meanness to Efros. She is convincing. See also Leonid Livak: “Chekhov’s correspondence attests to the consistent function of ‘the Jews’ in his imagination as a negative marker for a wide range of phenomena. This function exists quite independently from the writer’s own experience of dealing with individuals of Jewish origin and is most probably conditioned by the unselfconscious Judeophobia of the Christian milieu in Chekhov’s native Taganrog.” (The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature. 23.)
28 Letopis’. 269. [October 29, 1886.]
29 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 272. [To Leykin, October 31 or November 1, 1886.]
November 1886
1 Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov. 273. [To Menshikov, January 28, 1900.]
2 Works. Vol. 5. 388.
3 Pis’ma. Vol. 2. [To Leykin, November 6, 1886.]
4 Translated by Constance Garnett.
5 Translated by A. E. Chamot. 139–142.
6 Translated by Constance Garnett.
7 Works. 589. In “Tchekhov’s Creative Method,” Yuriy Sobolev recounts: “ ‘Good God!’ his friends used to say indignantly, ‘his manuscripts should be taken away from him. Otherwise he will reduce his stories only to this: that they were young, fell in love, then married and were unhappy.’ ” In Koteliansky, Reminiscences. 21–22.
8 Letopis’. 271. [November 21, 1886.]
9 Translated by Constance Garnett.
10 Translated by Constance Garnett.
11 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 154.
12 Pis’ma. 278. [To Kiseleva, December 13, 1886.]
December 1886
1 Nina Drozdova, “Memories of Chekhov.” In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 63.
2 Works. Vol. 5. 439.
3 Letopis’. 273. [December 5, 1886.]
4 Translated by Constance Garnett.
5 Alexander Kuprin recorded this in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov. 94.
6 Zakhar Pichugin. In Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. 27–28.
7 “Excellent People.” Translated by Constance Garnett.
8 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 204.
9 A. B. Goldenweizer. Talks with Tolstoy. 96.
10 Works. Vol. 5. 440–446.
11 Peter Sekirin, in A Night in the Cemetery and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense. 158.
12 Mikhail Chekhov. Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir. 107.
13 Magarshack. Chekhov: A Life. 108.
14 Hingley. A Life of Chekhov. 204.
15 Letopis’. 274. [December 11, 1886.]
16 Pis’ma. Vol. 1. 277–278. [To Kiseleva, December 13, 1886.]
17 Ibid., 281. [To Suvorin, December 21, 1886.]
18 Letopis’. 277. [December 26, 1886.]
19 Pis’ma. 282. [To Leykin, December 24, 1886.]
20 Translated by Constance Garnett.
21 Translated by Constance Garnett.
22 Isaac Goldberg and Henry T. Schnittkind’s translation of “To Byla Ona!” is from 1918.
January 1887
1 Dina Rubina. “Preface: Chekhov’s Blotter.” In Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics. 241.
2 Letopis’. 233. [March 6–7,1886.]