Leykin is out of fashion now. I have taken his place. In Petersburg I am now in great fashion, and I do wish you were not straggling behind. […]
[…] Do remember, now: work on your stories. I can judge by experience. Write. Write to Mother. […]
He encouraged Alexander to hold onto his job until the fall, and then he would use his connections to help him get editorial work in Petersburg.
Chekhov also wrote Leykin on April 6, but about Motley Stories, over which they were still negotiating the final contents and the number of copies to be printed. Chekhov admitted to Leykin that he was in poor health:
Spitting of blood and weakness. I am not writing anything…. If I don’t sit down to write tomorrow, you must forgive me—I shall not send you a story for the Easter number. I ought to go to the South but I have no money.
[…] I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues. I am inclined to think it is not so much my lungs as my throat that is at fault…. I have no fever.
Leykin replied with annoyance about Chekhov not allowing “A Nightmare” and his New Times stories to be included in the collection.
In “Love” (“Lyubov’,” April 7), the narrator has a writing experience that makes me wonder how often Chekhov enjoyed such a feeling himself: “I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of one’s study and communes with one’s own daydreams while the spring night looks in at one’s window.”10 Coughing blood, Chekhov was not feeling such leisurely pleasure just now.
On April 11, Chekhov wrote his uncle Mitrofan, who was more of a father figure than Chekhov’s own father, Mitrofan’s brother. Letters to Mitrofan, down in Taganrog, were always newsy and informative, with Chekhov knowing that Mitrofan would share the news with relatives this Easter season:
Forgive me that it’s been so long I haven’t written you. You yourself write a lot, and so you understand a person who writes from sunrise to sunset: there’s no time! When there’s a free minute, you try to give over to reading or something else. Yes, speaking sincerely, I don’t understand writing to dear, close people which you write by obligation, but not in a moment of a good mood, when you’re not afraid of sincerity or the reason of the letter.11
He recalled Mitrofan’s visit the past winter and caught him up on family news and health (though not about his own), including that he had just treated his maternal aunt and his brother Ivan: “Having a doctor in the house—a big comfort!”12
My writing is a full-time activity, undertaken with order. I’m already working on the big Petersburg newspaper—in New Times, where they pay me 12 kopecks a line. Last night I received from this newspaper for 3 not-big stories, appearing in three issues, 232 rubles. A miracle! I simply with my own eyes don’t believe it. But the little Petersburg Gazette gives me 100 rubles a month for 4 stories.
In letters to his uncle, he often gave the kinds of financial details that would satisfy the curiosity of a fond, proud relative and businessperson:
Mama is very happy that Ivan has got a job in a state school in Moscow, where he will be his own boss. He has a government apartment with five rooms. Servants, firewood, and lighting are also all paid for by the state … Papa is delighted that Ivan has bought himself a peaked cap with a cockade, and has ordered a professional morning frock-coat with bright buttons.
Nikolay is working very hard now, but has trouble with his eyes. […]
What a pity you can’t also be with us for Easter! We’ll have plenty to break the fast with. We would sing together, as we will on our return from the midnight service.
The bells have just rung at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.13
Maybe it’s not a lie to suggest to one’s uncle that one’s immediate family is doing great, just great!
*
For publication in New Times on the eve of Easter, April 13, Chekhov wrote “Easter Eve.”
Mikhail Chekhov remembered their childhood in Taganrog: “We were not allowed to miss a single Saturday-night vigil or Sunday liturgy, which explains why Anton exhibited such a thorough knowledge of church services in his story ‘Easter Eve’ and others.”14
Despite the physical abuse with which their father enforced their church and choral attendance and participation, Chekhov loved Easter and church bells. He respected respectable priests and monks. He knew the Bible, he appreciated unselfishness. He shed trappings that did not seem to him to have a moral or practical basis, and he wouldn’t lie and pretend to believe what he didn’t believe, but he was a model of someone ever striving toward moral behavior.
Chekhov wrote so many great stories that it’s easy for even some of us fervent admirers to have overlooked or never even read dozens of gems. “Easter Eve” is one that I had completely forgotten until I started reading for this biography.
It begins:
I was standing on the bank of the River Goltva, waiting for the ferry-boat from the other side.
Is the “I” of Chekhov’s first-person narrated stories ever himself?… The story will point toward the idea that the narrator’s experience is only important to the extent that it is a reliable source of observation and judgment about the meaning of someone else’s experience. Chekhov insisted that the subjects of the stories were not himself and tried to make sure in circumstantial details that they were not, and yet he, like this narrator, was a good traveler and evoked the pleasures and weariness of travel as well as anyone. The narrator describes the flooded stream and the night sky:
The world was lighted by the stars, which were scattered thickly all over the sky. I don’t remember ever seeing so many stars. Literally one could not have put a finger in between them.
So simple! We are indeed in the narrator’s shoes looking up at the sky and lifting our hand and pointing our index finger. How does a writer present perspective? Chekhov does it this way, sometimes. He engages the reader’s physical imagination. And such an imagination also shifts to look before him.
The sky was reflected in the water; the stars were bathing in its dark depths and trembling with the quivering eddies.
The narrator remains nameless throughout the story, because, as Chekhov might say, the narrator knows who he is. He now realizes he has company on the riverbank, and he asks the unnamed peasant about the ferry. The peasant says the ferry is due, but he himself is not waiting for it. The peasant is there to watch the light and fireworks across the way at the monastery. The peasant calls out through the darkness to the ferryman, the monk Ieronim.
The first peal of the bell is heard, followed by a celebratory cannon shot. How Chekhov savored the bells of Easter! He tomcatted for them every year. Donald Rayfield writes: “During his adult life, right up until his death, Chekhov would rarely spend an Easter night in bed; instead he would wander the streets, listening to the church bells.”15
Before the vibrations of the first peal of the bell had time to die away in the air a second sounded, after it at once a third, and the darkness was filled with an unbroken quivering clamor.
For a while, there is no sign or sight of Ieronim, and the narrator is impatient.
[…] but behold at last, staring into the dark distance, I saw the outline of something very much like a gibbet. It was the long-expected ferry. It moved toward us with such deliberation that if it had not been that its lines grew gradually more definite, one might have supposed that it was standing still or moving to the other bank.
How have I never noticed before how active Chekhov makes our imagination? He creates our perspective so efficiently: those lines growing “gradually more definite.” The ferry arrives and Ieronim, unlike a bus driver, apologizes:
“Why have you been so long?” I asked jumping upon the ferry.
“Forgive me, for Christ’s sake,” Ieronim answered gently. […]
Chekhov has immediately inclined us in Ieronim’s favor, though we are taking in the story from the narrator’s perspective. Chekhov has us rely on the narrator’s observations to reveal not the narrator’s inner life but that of the person he is observing.