Nikolay Leykin.
Earlier in their relationship, Chekhov could and did explain the difficulties he had crafting comic stories to size. Though a proud professional, Chekhov always had an artist’s sense of proportion, and he sought space and the allowance for his own discretion about topics. Even at the age of twenty-three, Chekhov had stood up for himself to Leykin:
I must confess that an imposed limit “from here to there” does cause me a great deal of trouble. It is not always easy to accept such a limitation. For instance, you do not want any stories of over a hundred lines, and you may have a good reason for it. Now, I get a subject for a story and sit down to write it, but the thought of one hundred and no more interferes with my writing from the very start. I condense as much as I can and keep cutting it down, sometimes (as my literary sense warns me) to the detriment of my subject and, (above all) to the story’s form. Having strained and compressed it, I begin to count the lines, and having counted 100, 120, 140 (I never wrote more than that for Fragments) I begin to get frightened and I don’t send it. Very often I have to rewrite the ending of the story in a hurry and send you something I should not ordinarily have liked to send you. As soon as I get over the fourth page of small note-paper I begin to be assailed by doubts…. I should therefore like to ask you to increase the length of my stories to 120 lines. I am sure I shall not avail myself of this concession too frequently, but the knowledge that I have been granted it will save me a lot of worry.
Leykin replied: “While I rely on you not to misuse it, I willingly give you my blessing on 120, 140, and even 150 lines, only please send me something without fail for every issue of the magazine.”24
The biographer David Magarshack well narrates the pair’s evolving and yet fraying relationship. By October 1885, Magarshack explains, Chekhov “had already made up his mind to cut adrift from Leykin”:
The only thing that stopped him was his fear of insecurity: he could always get an advance from Leykin and he was sure of his monthly check. […] Leykin, too, realized that unless he found a market for Chekhov’s longer stories, Chekhov would sooner or later find one himself and quite possibly give up writing for Fragments. He therefore had a talk to Sergey Khudekov, the owner and editor of the Petersburg Gazette, to which he was a regular contributor himself, and arranged with him to publish a weekly story by Chekhov. “I have had an offer from Khudekov for you. Would you be willing to write each Monday a story for the Petersburg Gazette? But having agreed to write every Monday, you must not let the paper down and must send your story punctually every Saturday. You will paid seven kopecks a line.” Chekhov […] was overjoyed at the offer. […] “I shall be glad to write for the Petersburg Gazette, and I promise to be as punctual as possible.”25
The biographer Ronald Hingley adds that “however much Chekhov might from time to time rail against Khudekov and his [Petersburg Gazette], the plain fact is that they freed him from a double tyranny exercised by Leykin: the compulsion to be funny.”26
Freedom! Chekhov’s opportunity to stretch himself led to greater artistic development. After five years, writing for Fragments had become a chore. In 1885 he kept up with his new deadlines for the Petersburg Gazette but occasionally played hooky from Fragments. Leykin took this badly: “I was very angry indeed about your failure to send me your stories regularly. Two of your stories have been published in the Petersburg Gazette and I was half minded to stop their publication and I was sorry I ever recommended you there. I am still sorry I did it, because I am sure that now you will be even less punctual with your contributions because of the Petersburg Gazette. I must always have one of your stories in reserve—remember that. It’s the only way I can make sure that you won’t leave me in the lurch, especially in the summer months when it is so confoundedly difficult to get contributors to send in their stories in time.”27
If we could only see their testy but close relationship the way Chekhov would have in a short story. In such a story, for all of Leykin’s orneriness, despite his bad leg, despite his suspicions that Chekhov was shirking his magazine in deference to the others, he would become a sympathetic if comic character. Leykin naturally wanted the professional and most excellent Chekhov to keep writing for him.
Biographer Magarshack, impatient to get Leykin off the stage, writes, inaccurately, that Chekhov “summed up his final opinion of Leykin in a letter to Suvorin in November 1888: ‘Leykin is a good-natured and harmless man, but a bourgeois to the marrow of his bones. If he goes to see someone or says something, there is always something at the back of his mind…. A fox is always in fear for his life, and so is he. A subtle diplomatist!… In his letters to me he always warns me, frightens me, advises me, reveals all sorts of secrets to me. Poor limping martyr! He could have lived happily for the rest of his life, but some evil genius doesn’t let him.’ ”28 Chekhov didn’t have a “final opinion” of Leykin. Summing up and disposing of a friend wasn’t his style as a writer or a man. They continued to correspond and meet until 1900. Leykin died in 1906.
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In “Ladies” (“Damy,” April 19), a school district director tries to be generous to a teacher who has lost his voice; he cannot, however, defeat the “ladies,” who push for a particular handsome but vapid young man to take the suitable job the director has found for, and more or less promised to, the disabled teacher. The story’s setup and resolution seem to have been based on a joke or an offhand word about the influence of “ladies” on government appointments. Their patronage can overwhelm even a conscientious official.
In “Strong Impressions” (“Sil’nye Oshchushcheniya,” April 21), members of a jury who are having to spend the night together “decided that before going to sleep, each one of them should ransack among his memories and tell something that had happened to him. Man’s life is brief, but yet there is no man who cannot boast that there have been terrible moments in his past.” This is not as common a setup for a story in Chekhov’s work as for his French contemporary Guy de Maupassant’s, but proceeding this way enabled Chekhov to provide a casual first-person speaking voice courtesy of “a foppishly dressed, fat little man.” The little man’s memory returns to what perhaps was Chekhov’s present, or at least the present of those of Chekhov’s friends who were marrying left and right: “I was not more than twenty-two or twenty-three when I fell head over ears in love with my present wife and made her an offer. Now I could with pleasure thrash myself for my early marriage, but at the time, I don’t know what would have become of me if Natasha had refused me. My love was absolutely the real thing, just as it is described in novels—frantic, passionate, and so on.”29 He recalls a philosophical argument with a lawyer friend at the time of his engagement about the persuasiveness of a “talented” speaker:
“As I listen to an orator I may perhaps grow sentimental and weep, but my fundamental conviction, based for the most part on unmistakable evidence and fact, is not changed in the least. My lawyer maintained that I was young and foolish and that I was talking childish nonsense. In his opinion, for one thing, an obvious fact becomes still more obvious through light being thrown upon it by conscientious, well-informed people; for another, talent is an elemental force, a hurricane capable of turning even stones to dust, let alone such trifles as the convictions of artisans and merchants of the second guild. […] One simple mortal by the power of the word turns thousands of convinced savages to Christianity […] All history consists of similar examples, and in life they are met with at every turn; and so it is bound to be, or the intelligent and talented man would have no superiority over the stupid and incompetent. […]