Chekhov’s lone surviving letter of the month was to Leykin, who had poked his nose into this very story. And just as in the story, there was terrible weather at Babkino: “rain, rain, rain… wind, cold and dark clouds.”10
Chekhov had, as usual, to apologize for his lack of contributions to Fragments:
I didn’t send a story for the last issue as, sincerely and honestly speaking, I didn’t have topics. I thought and thought and thought up nothing, and I didn’t want to send nonsense and it’s boring. So I got the word of Agafopod [Alexander], who was staying with us, that he was required to send you a story and communicate to you that I wouldn’t be sending anything to this issue.
He told Leykin about the family’s new rental in Moscow on Sadovaya and its price, 650 rubles a year. “If my sister’s to be believed, it’s good.” He asked Leykin to loan him seventy rubles so he could pay for the two months’ rent—and as usual Leykin immediately came through.
He concluded by kidding Leykin about how his editing resulted in an unintended tiny benefit for him, the writer:
You lengthened the end of “A Pink Stocking.” I am not opposed to receiving the extra 8 kopecks for the extra line, but in my opinion, “the man” didn’t go well at the end… The conversation goes only about the women… However, it’s all the same…
*
Chekhov kept trying to imagine marital situations. In “Martyrs” (“Stradal’tsy,” August 18), the wife is a hypochondriac who loves imagining herself dying:
Lizochka draws a mental picture of her own death, how her mother, her husband, her cousin Varya with her husband, her relations, the admirers of her “talent” press around her death bed, as she whispers her last farewell. All are weeping. Then when she is dead they dress her, interestingly pale and dark-haired, in a pink dress (it suits her) and lay her in a very expensive coffin on gold legs, full of flowers. There is a smell of incense, the candles splutter. Her husband never leaves the coffin, while the admirers of her talent cannot take their eyes off her, and say: “As though living! She is lovely in her coffin!” The whole town is talking of the life cut short so prematurely. But now they are carrying her to the church. The bearers are Ivan Petrovich, Adolf Ivanich, Varya’s husband, Nikolay Semyonich, and the black-eyed student who had taught her to drink lemon squash with brandy. It’s only a pity there’s no music playing. After the burial service comes the leave-taking. The church is full of sobs, they bring the lid with tassels, and… Lizochka is shut off from the light of day for ever, there is the sound of hammering nails. Knock, knock, knock.
Lizochka shudders and opens her eyes.11
Chekhov lets readers recognize that she is perfectly fine, at most suffering an upset stomach. The doting husband, however, is sincerely anxious. Patiently having been taken care of for two days and two nights, she awakens, ready for rehearsals, as good and prima donnish as ever, and he is finally able to return to work. Because this is a slight and comic story, it will be no surprise to readers that when he gets to the office, he discovers that he is sick; his boss sends him home.
Sometime in the midst of or just after writing “Martyrs,” Chekhov wrote to Bilibin, his chosen expert and confidant concerning marriage, for advice. All that is known of this letter is Bilibin’s reply at the end of the month.
I keep expecting more of Bilibin. I expect him to have been more appreciative of the amazing quality of the stories Chekhov was cooking up. Instead, there was the shrugging acknowledgment of them or, occasionally, as now, criticism—here of “A Misfortune”: “My wife asked me to ask you if you weren’t describing yourself in the perspective of Ilyin. […] She also says that it’s impossible to write belles-lettres from a ‘medical point of view.’ ” Bilibin felt that the story’s husband was “a caricature,” and that the protagonists “did not arouse sympathy.” Bilibin did not like the story’s “one-sided direction.” He cursed to the Devil all that “poetic side of love.” As for Chekhov’s request for advice about marriage, he seemed to discourage it: a married man, wrote Bilibin, accommodates the wife; an unmarried man accommodates literature.12 (The accommodating Bilibin would leave his wife for another woman a few years later.)
During the last week of August, Leykin wrote Chekhov to complain that Chekhov must not have read the lousy stories that Alexander had sent for the magazine: “It’s not possible to replace your presence in Fragments with them.”13
Chekhov seems to have submitted the story “Talent” at this time. Bilibin would inform Chekhov that it was too long to run in Fragments’ final August issue. And though it wasn’t published until September 6, it has relevance now concerning Chekhov’s contemplations about marriage. The protagonist, a young, lazy, dissipated painter, is leaving the dacha he has been renting all summer from a widow. Only he hasn’t paid her for some time, and the widow’s daughter, who worships him, regrets his departure. As if echoing Bilibin’s self-serving wisdom, Yegor tells her:
“I cannot marry.”
“Why not?” Katya asked softly.
“Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is out of the question. An artist must be free.”
“But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvich?”
“I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general…. Famous authors and painters have never married.”14
Yegor and his artist friends believe in their pending fame, and so infatuated Katya does, too.
His fancy pictured how he would become great. He could not imagine his future works but he could see distinctly how the papers would talk of him, how the shops would sell his photographs, with what envy his friends would look after him. He tried to picture himself in a magnificent drawing room surrounded by pretty and adoring women; but the picture was misty, vague, as he had never in his life seen a drawing room. The pretty and adoring women were not a success either, for, except Katya, he knew no adoring woman, not even one respectable girl. People who know nothing about life usually picture life from books, but Yegor Savvich knew no books, either. He had tried to read Gogol, but had fallen asleep on the second page.
If Chekhov was mocking anybody besides himself and his friend Isaac Levitan, who would indeed experience fame, he was mocking his “talented” brother Nikolay:
To listen to them it would seem they had the future, fame, money, in their hands. And it never occurred to either of them that time was passing, that every day life was nearing its close, that they had lived at other people’s expense a great deal and nothing yet was accomplished; that they were all bound by the inexorable law by which of a hundred promising beginners only two or three rise to any position and all the others draw blanks in the lottery, perish playing the part of flesh for the cannon…. They were gay and happy, and looked the future boldly in the face!
Besides marriage, it seems that fame and celebrity were on Chekhov’s mind. Some little time preceding Chekhov’s exchange of correspondence with Bilibin, Chekhov, the most famous young literary star in Russia, wrote “The First-Class Passenger” (“Passazhir 1-go Klassa,” August 23). On the train, two men strike up a post-dinner conversation. One begins:
“… The question that is occupying my mind at the moment, sir, is exactly what is to be understood by the word fame or celebrity. What do you think? Pushkin called fame a bright patch on a ragged garment; we all understand it as Pushkin does—that is, more or less subjectively—but no one has yet given a clear, logical definition of the word…. I would give a good deal for such a definition!”