This is the place in biographies and literary studies where we read of the various critical reactions to the story, but I think that besides noting that Suvorin clipped off a sentence at the end (there’s no trace of that excised sentence), there is nothing to note now except that only Chekhov could have written a story about an oafish yet grieving father that is both touching and funny.
*
He published three comic Lenten pieces in the second half of February that deal with bliny, the Russian pancakes that are traditional pre-Lenten fare. In “A Foolish Frenchman” (“Glupyi Frantsuz,” February 15) a French circus clown in a restaurant on the eve of Lent doesn’t understand the Russian custom of gorging on bliny.11 In “Bliny” (February 19): only women, according to the blathering narrator, can cook them correctly. In “On Mortality: A Carnival Tale” (“O Brennosti,” February 22), a man delightedly relishes his plate of bliny but is stricken by a stroke just as he opens his mouth.12 In these and in other stories about food, Chekhov shows he knew as well as Gogol did how to whet one’s appetite.
On February 16, Chekhov had business correspondence with Leykin about the impending book; there were rather a lot of errors in the galley, though Chekhov thought the font and page size were good. Chekhov also had excuses to make about his not having been able to finish a piece for Leykin this past week—there were too many interruptions. He explained that he had woken up early, but now he was going to bed late, as it was almost 2:00 A.M. Besides that, “The practice is picking up a bit,” and such medical work would make it harder for him to keep to Leykin’s deadlines.
He resisted pointing out that Suvorin would give him whatever time and as much room as he needed.
We know a lot about Chekhov’s friendships because we have so many of his letters. His friends and acquaintances saved them. His female friends loved, adored, and, when necessary, forgave him—and saved his letters. In his letters he was a clowning extrovert. We have a short note of his from February 17 to his friend Mikhail Dyukovskiy: “I’m writing you so that you’ll have one more autograph of a great writer… In 10–20 years you’ll be able to sell this letter for 500–1,000 rubles. I envy you.” In fact, we know M. M. Dyukovskiy today because he saved this letter. Chekhov mentioned the grand pay he now expected from New Times, but asked all the same if his friend could lend him twenty-five rubles.
On the 17th Leykin sent his congratulations to Chekhov for “The Requiem” and added that Suvorin had told him three weeks before that Chekhov would be writing for New Times. Those excuses about his medical practice demanding more of his time were, Leykin knew, just excuses. Chekhov had enough time to write for New Times but not for Fragments! It was hard to keep literary scuttlebutt from Leykin.
Though Chekhov’s relationship with Suvorin is the one that takes up more space in biographies and is ultimately more important, in these two years Chekhov’s relationship with Leykin was vastly more involving and revealing of his everyday life. Through his excuses to Leykin about why he hadn’t been able to write for Fragments, we learn all sorts of details that Chekhov didn’t normally complain about—but that normal people would have. He rarely shared, except with Leykin, the legitimate excuses about how busy he was with medicine and writing, how hectic and distracting his crowded apartment was, how sick he often felt.
On February 20, he offered Leykin two weeks’ worth of reasons for not having any new pieces for Fragments: “I cheated you, but you will forgive… I’m so tired, crazy and nuts the last couple of weeks that my head’s going in circles… In my apartment there is a neverending crowd, uproar, music… My office is cold… there are patients… and so on.”13
Mostly, usually, he would explain to friends and demonstrate to his family that he very much enjoyed the bustle of home life. He described his medical practice in such a way that he revealed his satisfaction with it; it was rewarding, fulfilling. He was enjoying the challenge of writing under the obligation of artistic creation. He did not, however, let himself complain to Leykin about the pressure he felt writing for New Times; he was in the midst of writing “The Witch” for Suvorin, but he didn’t share that information.
The writing of weekly skits no longer replenished him as an artist, and Leykin’s “demands” dogged him into completing work, but it exhausted him: “The unfinished story will be finished and sent off on time. […] Writing more than I now write, I don’t have enough time, or the push or energy, even if you knife me. […] It’s time for spring to start. I have such sleeplessness—the devil knows why—that swimming and fresh air are a pressing need.”
Chekhov wouldn’t get the swimming and perhaps not even the fresh air until May, when he and the family would pack up and leave Moscow for the summer.
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Chekhov’s correspondence with Suvorin began for good on February 18 when Suvorin wrote Chekhov about the ending that he, Suvorin, had clipped from “The Requiem” and why Chekhov really shouldn’t use a pen name. We know these details of Suvorin’s letter because Chekhov would reply to those points. We don’t have Suvorin’s letters because he had them retrieved from Maria Chekhova’s possession when Chekhov died in 1904.
Suvorin’s motive for retrieving and destroying his letters was his fear that the letters seemed to compromise his reputation as an unblinking right-winger; corresponding with Chekhov, he was much more reasonable than anyone suspected from his newspaper’s adamantly pro-autocratic government views. Fortunately, in exchange for his letters, he gave Maria all 337 of Chekhov’s letters to him.14 Chekhov eventually had a sharp falling-out with Suvorin as a result of New Times’ anti-Semitism and political propaganda, but that number of letters over the period of 1886 to 1903 works out, nonetheless, to about two letters a month.
Suvorin, born in 1834, was twenty-six years older than twenty-six-year-old Chekhov. What did they have in common, anyway, besides that they were both intelligent and independent and grandsons of serfs?15 Suvorin had built a popular newspaper, and through his support for the tsar he had obtained a monopoly on train-station book kiosks. He was at heart a literary man and did not ever require Chekhov to toe the party line. Chekhov was a forward, liberal, and modern thinker, but as he would declare to Suvorin, he didn’t want to belong to any party or have to heed anybody’s latest political views. That Suvorin’s New Times was politically right-wing was only problematical when it was.16
Pleased by Suvorin’s encouragement and attention, Chekhov replied on February 21. For the first time in this year’s correspondence Chekhov was shy, formal, deferential, accommodating. That is, he was not quite himself:
I received your letter. Thanks for the flattering comments on my work, and for the speedy printing of my story. You can judge how refreshing and even inspiring to my authorship is the kind attention of an experienced and talented man like you.
I share your opinion regarding the omission of the last words of my story, and I thank you for the helpful advice. I have been writing all of six years, but you are the first to take the trouble to advise and guide me.17
If editor Leykin had read this letter, his head would have spun around: “Advice, Anton Pavlovich? Guidance?… This means you never read my letters!”
The pen name A. Chekhonte probably sounds odd and recherche. But it was thought up at the dawn of my misty youth, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. That’s why I don’t notice how odd it is.18
He apologized for his new submission, “The Witch”: “This time I send a story that is exactly double longer than the last and… I’m afraid it’s doubly worse…”19 That sounds over-humble, but in the disparagement of his story he was completely characteristic; he never praised what he had written. He was aware of each piece’s defects. And yet, as far as we can tell from Chekhov’s letters, Suvorin never expressed any dissatisfaction or discontent with Chekhov’s submissions in these years. Suvorin only wanted more. Leykin, a very attentive and critical editor, unrestrainedly and casually disparaged particular pieces. Chekhov’s younger brothers and Leykin’s right-hand man Bilibin, too, perhaps having grown accustomed to Chekhov’s sharp assessments of their work and of his own, matter-of-factly expressed their disappointment with stories by Chekhov that they deemed subpar.