“Ivan Matveyich” (“Ivan Matveich,” March 3), is the next winning, charming, underprepared young man. Was Chekhov remembering his own earnestness and naïvete, or mostly appreciating those qualities now in his brother Ivan, a year and a half younger than Anton, who indeed had obtained a secretary job himself? Chekhov’s youngest brother Mikhail remembered that a friend “once told Anton… a story about our brother Ivan needing money so badly that he walked to the other end of the city to do dictation for the writer P. D. Boborykin, on which Anton later drew for his story ‘Ivan Matveich.’ ”4
But fifteen stories in a month! Unlike the two young men in these two stories—and in his family—Chekhov was the dreamer who realized his potential and made the most of it.
Ivan Matveyich is less disciplined than Chekhov was. He is eighteen and not unusually is late for duty with “a fairly well-known man of learning.” His tardiness this afternoon exasperates the man of learning (otherwise unnamed) to no end: “feeling a craving to vent his wrath and impatience upon someone, the man of learning goes to the door leading to his wife’s room and knocks.” He announces that is going to fire Ivan finally. The tonic, as his wife knows, is Ivan’s presence.
Chekhov enjoys describing Ivan, “with a face oval as an egg and no moustache, wearing a shabby, mangy overcoat and no galoshes.” Look at a photo of Chekhov at nineteen:
Chekhov, graduation day in Taganrog, June 1879.
We understand why the employer is charmed: “Seeing the man of learning, [Ivan] smiles with that broad, prolonged, somewhat foolish smile which is seen only on the faces of children or very good-natured people.” Ivan Matveyich is irresistible. Chekhov has superimposed for us a childish face on that of a very good-natured young man.
The man of learning corrals him to take dictation. Ivan is sloppy, and the man of learning scolds him for it. They pause for tea and cookies and Ivan happily and greedily partakes. He’s hungry. He’s a boy! He talks about growing up in the South, in the Don region, not far, actually, from Taganrog, where Chekhov grew up, and how he caught tarantulas, as coincidentally Chekhov also used to do. The man of learning, though crankily impatient, is delighted by Ivan’s disingenuous stories. He sees potential in the young man and encourages his further education. They haven’t done, after all, very much work by the time Ivan has used up his hours:
Ivan Matveyich lays down his pen, gets up from the table and sits in another chair. Five minutes pass in silence, and he begins to feel it is time for him to go, that he is in the way; but in the man of learning’s study it is so snug and light and warm, and the impression of the nice rusks and sweet tea is still so fresh that there is a pang at his heart at the mere thought of home. At home there is poverty, hunger, cold, his grumbling father, scoldings, and here it is so quiet and unruffled, and interest even is taken in his tarantulas and birds.
Both parties are grateful for the other:
Almost every evening he sits in this study and always feels something extraordinarily soft, attracting him, as it were akin, in the voice and the glance of the man of learning. There are moments when he even fancies that the man of learning is becoming attached to him, used to him, and that if he scolds him for being late, it’s simply because he misses his chatter about tarantulas and how they catch goldfinches on the Don.
Chekhov has revealed through the fictional character Ivan Matveyich his brother Ivan’s and his own attractiveness to other people—and the attraction of all three of them to culture and leisure. If we’re similar to the man of learning, it’s because we are fascinated by good-natured hopeful young people. Ivan is attracted to the professor’s refined life and in this we see something of the world’s attraction to Chekhov: his unpretentiousness, well-meaningness, and his ability to awaken our consciousness of pleasures.
*
On March 5, Chekhov had to pay the debts that his brothers Alexander and Nikolay had racked up to the merchant Semenov.5 He wrote to Leykin a few days later: “I have nearly forgotten to tell you a pleasant piece of news. I had to appear in court to answer to a summons and was ordered to pay fifty rubles. If you have ever had to pay someone else’s debts, you will appreciate what a revolution these absurd and unexpected 50 rubles have made in my small financial world.”6 What does this say about Alexander and Nikolay? They were talented, young, capable, yet out of fecklessness were willing to cheat a merchant and put their own family in financial jeopardy. Chekhov, as the moral center of the family, tried to rein them in.
While tuberculosis seemed to spur Chekhov into greater action, Nikolay’s “reaction to having been given this death sentence,” writes Rosamund Bartlett, “was to give up.”7 Yet, even before they both contracted tuberculosis in 1884, Chekhov was frustrated by Nikolay’s laziness and drinking. When Chekhov was working on his medical degree and writing weekly pieces for humor magazines, he remarked in a February 1883 letter to Alexander:
Nikolay is loafing about, as you know very well; a fine, strong Russian talent is being wasted. Another year or two and our artist is finished. He will be lost in the crowd of pub-crawlers. You know his present work. What does he do now? He does everything that is cheap and vulgar, and yet in our drawing room we have a remarkable picture of his which he does not want to finish. The Russian Theater has asked him to illustrate Dostoevsky. He promised to do so, but he won’t keep his promise, and yet these illustrations would have made his reputation and provided him with a piece of bread….8
In the youngest Chekhov brother Mikhail’s assessment, Nikolay was “highly gifted: talented on both the violin and piano, a serious painter, and an original caricaturist.”9 Ernest Simmons, in his biography, sees Nikolay as Chekhov’s closest brother:
[…] their mutual recognition of the artist’s soul in each drew Nikolay and Anton very close together during these first few years in Moscow. Both loved laughter, music, and nature. Together they bargained with editors, wandered the Moscow streets for material, sat in cheap taverns, and visited the friends they had in common. More important—they worked together, Nikolay illustrating Anton’s tales…. But [Nikolay] was completely undependable, and no urging of Anton would persuade him to fulfill a commission on time or accept one that he was not in the mood to undertake. He would prefer to talk with his brother about his love affairs—he had already acquired a mistress—and his naïve notion that any girl he cared for ought to be willing to sacrifice her hopes of marriage and a family for the sake of his art. Or he would disappear for several days on a prolonged drunk, returning home finally, late at night, to vomit all over the house; and, fully clothed, he would fall on the divan and pull a covering over his head, his feet sticking out grotesquely in filthy socks filled with holes.10
A book of Chekhov’s that Nikolay illustrated when Chekhov was twenty-two, The Prank (Shalosht’), was finished but never published. Nikolay’s illustrations are comic and racy, in the fashion of the humor magazines of the time.
Illustrations by Nikolay Chekhov from The Prank and other stories.
Then there are the photos from 1882 of the two young creative artists pretending to consider their work:
The brothers Anton and Nikolay consider one of Nikolay’s illustrations for Anton’s The Prank (1882).
On some date in March, apparently after his payment of his brothers’ debt, Chekhov wrote to Nikolay. It is the sole surviving letter to Nikolay from these two years, and it is famous enough to be included in most selections of his letters and to be quoted at length in the biographies. Nikolay otherwise appears in the communications between Anton and Alexander and the rest of the family as the worrisome brother: What’s Nikolay doing? Where is he? He was here. He just left. He might be coming next week. Now it was time for a reckoning.