In the village, near the furthest hut, Yakov was standing in the road, gazing fixedly at his returning wife. He stood without stirring, and was as motionless as a post. What was he thinking as he looked at her? What words was he preparing to greet her with? Agafya stood still a little while, looked around once more as though expecting help from us, and went on. I have never seen anyone, drunk or sober, move as she did. Agafya seemed to be shriveled up by her husband’s eyes. At one time she moved in zigzags, then she moved her feet up and down without going forward, bending her knees and stretching out her hands, then she staggered back. When she had gone another hundred paces she looked around once more and sat down.
“You ought at least to hide behind a bush…” I said to Savka. “If the husband sees you…”
“He knows, anyway, who it is Agafya has come from… The women don’t go to the kitchen garden at night for cabbages—we all know that.”
*
On the same Saturday “Agafya” was published, so was “My Conversation with the Postmaster” in Leykin’s Fragments. Chekhov paid close attention to postage and rates, occasionally advising friends, family, and editors about the most sensible practices. In this piece, the unnamed narrator engages with his acquaintance, the postmaster, about the wastefulness and inefficiencies of the postal service. The postmaster would prefer not to think about those problems: “If you get into everything […] and think about the why and wherefore, minds will jostle apart.”30 Chekhov’s narrator shows concern for mothers having to wait in long postal-service lines and being frustrated by the number of forms. The Chekhov family was continually sending money across Russia. Chekhov seems, however, never to have lost a story-manuscript in the mail. Letters, though? Yes.
Next up was another story Chekhov would exclude from his Collected Works, though it is uncharacteristically eventful and exciting, “The Wolf” (“Volk,” March 17, titled “Hydrophobia,” another term for rabies, in the only translation I have found in English). A rabid wolf gets his teeth into the protagonist, who fears the worst. He has a nightmarish vision: “The moon was reflected in the animal’s eyes; there was nothing like anger in them; they were tearful and looked human.”31 Despite a doctor’s reassurances that chances are the wolf’s poison washed out with the bloody wound or was trapped in the clothing that was bitten through, the protagonist becomes obsessed by the potential symptoms and goes to see various village healers.
There were many fearful diseases that doctors and patients could encounter in the late 19th century; the biggest fear that Chekhov, already infected with tuberculosis, ever regularly expressed was about catching typhus. But the very next story, published five days later (March 22), a comic tale for Fragments, “To Paris!” also focuses on the dangers of rabies. Two academics are bitten by a stray dog that “perhaps” has rabies. The town’s administrators order them to go to Paris to see the French scientist Louis Pasteur, just in case. But barely starting on the way there, at a station stop in Kursk, they get drunk and spend all their money and never get “to Paris.” Had Chekhov treated a case of rabies earlier this month or been reading some medical literature about it?
Early in March, Chekhov was detecting signs of spring in Moscow and wrote his own “In Spring” (“Vesnoy,” March 24) for the Petersburg Gazette about a selfconscious writer out in the sticks. The protagonist becomes bitter and resentful because he feels mocked by the townspeople for not being a great or famous writer:
“Ah, Mr. Writer!… Hello there!”
If Makar Denisych were merely a clerk or junior manager, no one would dare speak to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a “writer,” giftlessness, mediocrity!
Poor fellow! mocks the narrator: “Authorial vanity is painful, it is an infection of the soul; whoever suffers from it no longer hears the singing of the birds, nor sees the shining of the sun, nor sees the spring…”
*
It is obvious enough, even without this letter from Grigorovich, that Antosha Chekhonte would have become Anton Chekhov. But the “awakening” effect of the letter is understandable. The year 1886 marks a dividing point in Chekhov’s career.
—Sophie Laffitte32
We have come to the letter that supposedly spurred Chekhov to fulfill his genius.
Dmitry Vasil’evich Grigorovich, born in 1822, was regarded by this time, perhaps nostalgically, in the same literary circle as Tolstoy and the late Dostoevsky and Turgenev. He had shared an apartment with Dostoevsky when they were young and had published two novels himself in the 1850s that brought him renown and regard. As a friend of Suvorin, he had met Chekhov in Petersburg in December of 1885, but in his famous advice letter it is odd that he didn’t mention that. Chekhov had remembered and noted that encounter and had, probably for one of the last times in his life, been in awe at the people he was meeting because of his writing. Chekhov did not like to bow and scrape, and yet there was something in his relationship to Grigorovich that would bring him to at least bow.
Grigorovich appreciated himself at the end of his life and career as “the man who discovered Chekhov.” On March 25, 1886, Grigorovich had the experience that everybody has when we read a distinctive writer for the first time: Who is this person? How did I not know of him already? He is extraordinary…. I have made a discovery! And some of us might, from high to low or low to high, let that person know that we have discovered them. We are staking our claim, in case anyone comes asking afterward, “When did you, Brilliant Bob, announce to the world Annie’s genius?”
Dear Sir, Anton Pavlovich:
About a year ago I read by chance a story of yours in Petersburg Gazette; I do not recall its title. I remember only that I was struck by its qualities of outstanding originality and chiefly its remarkable accuracy and truthfulness in its descriptions of people and nature.
Since then I have read everything that bore the signature of Chekhonte, although I was inwardly vexed at a man who held so poor an opinion of himself as to consider the use of a pseudonym necessary.33
Grigorovich’s biographer observes that “The tone of the letter is very much de haut en bas.”34 The praise is as condescending as it is lavish:
While reading you, I continually advised Suvorin and Burenin to follow my example. They listened to me and now, like me, they do not doubt that you have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation.
By the time Grigorovich wrote this, Suvorin had already, since the beginning of January, signed Chekhov on to write for New Times. So Grigorovich was shouldering aside the man who more obviously decided that Chekhov should have carte blanche and had actually given it to him.
I am not a journalist nor a publisher. I can be useful to you only as one of your readers. If I speak of your talent, I speak out of conviction. I am almost sixty-five [he had just turned sixty-four], but I still feel so much love for literature and follow its success with so much ardor and rejoice when I find in it something living and gifted, that I cannot refrain—as you see—from holding out both hands to you.
Grigorovich sounds like another one of Chekhov’s comic windbags.
But this is by no means all. Here is what I wish to add. By virtue of the varied attributes of your undoubted talent—the precise truth of your internal analysis, your mastery of description (the snowstorm, the night, the background in “Agafya” etc.35), the plasticity of your feelings which in a few lines projects a complete picture (the clouds above the setting sun “like ashes over dying coals,” etc.)—I am convinced that you are destined to create some admirable and truly artistic works. And you will be guilty of a great moral sin if you do not live up to these hopes. All that is needed is esteem for the talent which so rarely falls to one’s lot. Cease to write hurriedly.