I am writing all this to you in order to excuse this grievous sin a little before you. Hitherto my attitude to my literary work has been frivolous, heedless, casual. I don’t remember a single story over which I have spent more than twenty-four hours, and “The Huntsman,” which you liked, I wrote in the bathing-shed! I wrote my stories as reporters write their notes about fires, mechanically, half-unconsciously, taking no thought of the reader or myself…. I wrote and did all I could not to waste upon the story the scenes and images dear to me which—God knows why—I have treasured and kept carefully hidden.
Don’t we already see those “carefully hidden” “scenes and images” in Chekhov’s nature passages? I think so. And he had experienced as all fruitful artists do that the more images he created, the more images he discovered.
The first impulse to self-criticism was given me by a very kind and, to the best of my belief, sincere letter from Suvorin. I began to think of writing something decent, but I still had no faith in my being any good as a writer. And then, unexpected and undreamed of, came your letter. Forgive the comparison: it had on me the effect of a Governor’s order to clear out of the town within twenty-four hours—i.e., I suddenly felt an imperative need to hurry, to make haste and get out of where I have stuck….
Chekhov was certainly documenting that Suvorin was there first, and also, I admit, validating Grigorovich’s claim that he guided Chekhov to the path of “literature”:
I agree with you in everything. When I saw “The Witch” in print I felt myself the cynicism of the points to which you call my attention. They would not have been there had I written this story in three or four days instead of in one.
And yet, given a dozen years and various publications of the story, Chekhov scarcely modified “The Witch” a hair.
I shall put an end to working against time, but cannot do so just yet.40… It is impossible to get out of the rut I have gotten into. I have nothing against going hungry, as I have done in the past, but it is not a question of myself.
I sincerely hope that Grigorovich woke up at that phrase—that young Dr. Chekhov was supporting not just himself but others. (I think of “A Nightmare,” the story Chekhov published the very next day and so must have finished that very week, before receiving Grigorovich’s letter, about the contempt and disgust a government official feels for the nearly starving priest who at tea bewilderingly squirrels away the offered cookies.)
Meanwhile, Chekhov humbly went on:
…I give to literature my spare time, two or three hours a day and a bit of the night, that is, time which is of no use except for short things. In the summer, when I have more time and have fewer expenses, I will start on some serious work.
I cannot put my real name on the book because it is too late: the design for the cover [of Motley Tales] is ready and the book printed. Many of my Petersburg friends advised me, even before you did, not to spoil the book by a pseudonym, but I did not listen to them, probably out of vanity. I dislike my book very much. It’s a hotch-potch, a disorderly medley of the poor stuff I wrote as a student, plucked by the censor and by the editors of comic papers. I am sure that many people will be disappointed when they read it. Had I known that I had readers and that you were watching me, I would not have published this book.
Chekhov was insincere here. After Motley Stories came out this spring, he would himself note to his uncle the many tales that he especially valued,41 and finally, in 1899, he would include most of them in his rather selective Collected Works. On the other hand, Grigorovich’s advice did lead him to ask Leykin on March 31 to add his real name to his pseudonym on the title page. And so it was.
I rest all my hopes on the future. I am only twenty-six. Perhaps I shall succeed in doing something, though time flies fast.
Forgive my long letter and do not blame a man because, for the first time in his life, he has made bold to treat himself to the pleasure of writing to Grigorovich.
Those and the following were the kinds of phrases that Chekhov was trying to purge from his everyday speech and thought:
Send me your photograph, if possible.42 I am so overwhelmed with your kindness that I feel as though I should like to write a whole ream to you. God grant you health and happiness, and believe in the sincerity of your deeply respectful and grateful
A. Chekhov.
*
On March 29 Chekhov published three pieces: “A Lot of Paper,” a series of serious reports, each with a “happy news” ending, similar to network TV news stories today; “The Rook,” a dialogue between an “I” and a bird, who moralizes in a manner that Chekhov usually shunned: “I’ve lived 376 years and I never once saw rooks fight among themselves and kill each other, but you don’t remember a year in which there wasn’t a war”;43 and the excellent “A Nightmare” (referred to, above, in Chekhov’s reply to Grigorovich), about a young, privileged government official who is sent to a town in the provinces, where he is disgusted by a young, desperate, slovenly priest:
By now Kunin almost hated Father Yakov. The man, his pitiful, grotesque figure in the long crumpled robe, his womanish face, his manner of officiating, his way of life and his formal restrained respectfulness, wounded the tiny relic of religious feeling which was stored away in a warm corner of Kunin’s heart together with his nurse’s other fairy tales. The coldness and lack of attention with which Father Yakov had met Kunin’s warm and sincere interest in what was the priest’s own work was hard for the former’s vanity to endure….44
The government official recommends that Father Yakov be fired, and only then he finds out the selfless priest’s desperate financial circumstances.
Chekhov knew the faults of shoddy workers, but he was a very conscientious defender of those engaged in social work; if they were teachers, doctors, and priests working for the government or church, they were most usually poorly paid. Though I pointed out in “The Rook” Chekhov’s customary reluctance to speak out directly on social issues, in “A Nightmare,” Chekhov’s narrator is so disheartened by the incomprehending official’s lack of imagination concerning the overburdened priest that he ends the story with a blunt point: “So had begun and had ended a sincere effort to be of public service on the part of a well-intentioned but unreflecting and over-comfortable person.”45
Finally, to close out his extraordinary month of fiction, Chekhov wrote “On the River” (“Na Reke”), subtitled “Spring Pictures” (March 31), an essay-like story about people on a bridge watching the river-ice break apart while adventurous peasants are floating down on a raft. Their tricky navigation of the river is blocked by a footbridge that a factory owner has laid across it for his workers. Frustrated, the peasants have to take apart the raft and walk it around.
Though Chekhov had been looking forward to spring, writes Dr. John Coope, he “connected the melting of the river with his renewed bleeding.”46 This was one of the times of the year where Chekhov’s tuberculosis especially manifested itself.
PART TWO
“Hymns of Praise”
Chekhov’s world had changed forever. He was being recognized and celebrated as an emerging literary star in a most literary Russia. His work was continually being evaluated. In the glare of attention, he could have granted himself allowances and abandoned his commitments to Fragments and the Petersburg Gazette. He could have closed the door to his medical practice. Easing up, however, would have left his financially dependent family floundering. Who would support them? He had to keep going with his overwhelming schedule and, if possible, increase his output. He accepted that he would have to work in haste, but he would demand of himself an increased artistic rigor.