I am trying to imagine Chekhov’s face as he read and reread this paragraph. Is it expressing “two contradictory feelings” as Andrey Andreyich’s did in “The Requiem”? Chekhov smiles as it is dawning on him that famous people are reading him and talking about him. But there is also a grimace at being prematurely reproached. Though Chekhov would scold his brother Alexander using some of Grigorovich’s very ideas about responsibility to one’s talent, Chekhov would write to his brother as an equal and not as a prince to a pauper. And Chekhov, at this time a speedy genius, would later, when he was slower, refute Grigorovich about speed; that is, Chekhov would assert that speedy writing is a good thing, all things being equaclass="underline" “Potapenko is an extraordinary man. He can write 16 pages a day without a single correction. Once he earned 1,100 rubles in five days. In my opinion, writing at a terrific speed is not, as Grigorovich thinks, a blemish but a special gift.”36
Grigorovich goes on:
I do not know what your financial situation is. If it is poor, it would be better for you to go hungry, as we did in our day, and save your impressions for a mature, finished work, written not in one sitting, but during the happy hours of inspiration.
Hmph! Two things: (1) Grigorovich had some idea of Chekhov’s financial situation and knew the young man needed the money; (2) Grigorovich remembered himself as one of those “inspired” artists who in the midst of maturing their masterpieces dined on air and rocks. If Grigorovich had included a check for a thousand rubles, we could forgive him for his presumption.
It gets worse:
One such work will be valued a hundred times higher than a hundred fine stories scattered among the newspapers at various times. In one leap you will reach the goal and will gain the notice of cultivated people and then all the reading public.
One thing I have learned in my research for this book is that Chekhov, that is, Antosha Chekhonte, appearing weekly in Fragments and the Petersburg Gazette, already had an immense “reading public.” Was that public “cultivated”? No. But among his readers was Tolstoy himself, who appreciated Chekhov’s comic sensibility as one of the rarest of artistic gifts. Grigorovich sniffed:
Why is it that you often have motifs with pornographical nuances at the basis of your tales? Truthfulness and realism not only do not exclude refinement but even gain from it.
Was Grigorovich scandalized by “The Witch”? Was he offended by Agafya’s passion for the big lunk Savka? Though a notorious womanizer, Grigorovich was, as regards literature, a prude. Some of the heat and power of Chekhov’s arguments about art and its acceptable subjects (that is, there is nothing unclean in nature) are going to redound in January 1887 on the head of one of his proteges, Maria Kiseleva, rather than back on Grigorovich’s noggin, where they would have bounced off anyway.
You have such a powerful sense of form and a feeling for the plastic, that you have no special need, for example, to speak about dirty feet with turned-in toenails or a clerk’s navel. These details add exactly nothing to the artistic beauty of a description and only spoil the impression among readers of taste. Have the generosity to forgive such observations, for I resolved to make them only because I sincerely believe in your talent and with all my soul desire its fullest development.
How Chekhov must have cringed at the phrase “readers of taste”! And yet… Grigorovich was in the high-end literary game, and his words were flattering and his practical advice as to publishing was, Chekhov decided, worth heeding:
Several days ago I was told that you are publishing a book of tales. If it is to appear under the pseudonym of CHE-KHON-TE, I beg you earnestly to telegraph the publishers to print it under your real name. After your recent stories in New Times and the success of “The Huntsman” [1885], the book will also have great success. It would be agreeable to have some assurance that you are not angry over my remarks, but that you accept them in the spirit that I write—not as an authority but out of the simplicity of an old heart.
If Chekhov forgave Grigorovich his presumption, why can’t I? Chekhov was young, modest, generous, and respectful. Maybe Grigorovich was right about some things. The old man had ridden in a lot of rodeos. Grigorovich was trying to be nice and was. The biographer Donald Rayfield has a theory: “Wary of his own father for twenty years, Anton responded with trusting affection to the father figures of Russian literature. Great writers—Leskov, Grigorovich and, later, Tolstoy—and self-made patriarchs like Suvorin aroused filial devotion in Anton.”37
Chekhov, humble and cowed, but not at all filial, replied on March 28:
Your letter, my kind, fervently beloved bringer of good tidings, struck me like a flash of lightning. I almost burst into tears, I was overwhelmed, and now I feel it has left a deep trace in my soul! May God show the same tender kindness to you in your age as you have shown me in my youth! I can find neither words nor deeds to thank you. You know with what eyes ordinary people look at the elect such as you, and so you can judge what your letter means for my self-esteem. It is better than any diploma, and for a writer who is just beginning it is payment both for the present and the future. I am almost dazed. I have no power to judge whether I deserve this high reward. I only repeat that it has overwhelmed me.38
He never wrote another letter as humble and deferential as this one. He would defer to Suvorin for the first year or so of their working relationship, but he would not bow this far. Notice, if possible, that there is scarcely a piece of correspondence that Chekhov ever wrote that does not contain a joke. There are no jokes in this long, humble, grateful letter. In the next paragraph Chekhov even sniffed back pretentiously and did dirt on his friends and relatives who did know that Chekhov as an author was the real deal. The photostatic reproduction of the first page of this letter shows it is handwritten neatly, well-spaced, with no cross-outs—suggesting that Chekhov recopied it from a draft:39
If I have a gift which one ought to respect, I confess before the pure candor of your heart that hitherto I have not respected it. I felt that I had a gift, but I had got into the habit of thinking that it was insignificant. Purely external causes are sufficient to make one unjust to oneself, suspicious, and morbidly sensitive. And as I realize now I have always had plenty of such causes. All my friends and relatives have always taken a condescending tone to my writing, and never ceased urging me in a friendly way not to give up real work for the sake of scribbling. I have hundreds of friends in Moscow, and among them a dozen or two writers, but I cannot recall a single one who reads me or considers me an artist. In Moscow there is a so-called Literary Circle: talented people and mediocrities of all ages and colors gather once a week in a private room of a restaurant and exercise their tongues. If I went there and read them a single passage of your letter, they would laugh in my face. In the course of the five years that I have been knocking about from one newspaper office to another I have had time to assimilate the general view of my literary insignificance. I soon got used to looking down upon my work, and so it has gone from bad to worse. That is the first reason. The second is that I am a doctor, and am up to my ears in medical work, so that the proverb about trying to catch two hares has given to no one more sleepless nights than me.
But… but… but! Upon reflection, for the rest of his life, Chekhov concluded again and again in his letters and conversations that the medical duties did not block him in his literary endeavors and only made him a better writer.