[…] To your question given to my sister: Did I marry? I answer no, I’m proud of that. I’m superior to marriage!13
He was laughing and joking it off, all those weeks of real indecision about marrying Efros. He went on, friendly, personal, lively:
Now about our mutual acquaintances… Mom and Dad are alive and well. Alexander lives in Moscow. Kokosha [Nikolay] is there where he was before Babkino. Ivan prospers at the school. Ma-Pa [Chekhov’s nickname for his sister, Maria Pavlovna] sees the long-nosed Efros […]
His sister did indeed see Efros, but how and when he and Efros saw each other this fall is unknown, except for one particular nasty occasion that we’ll get to at the end of October. He added more random news about acquaintances and, watching his hand, his pen, and his sheet of paper, observed: “The end of the letter is approaching.” Having concluded with greetings to Kiseleva’s family and a glance toward next year at Babkino, we find the letter, still under his hand, not yet over:
Scarcely had I finished this letter than the bell rang and… I saw the genius Levitan. Zhul cap, French outfit, elegant look… He went two times to Aida, once to Rusalka, ordered frames, almost sold some pictures… He says that it’s misery, misery and misery…
“God knows what I would give to spend only 2 days at Babkino!” he cries, probably forgetting how he was moaning in the last days there.
Chekhov felt free in his correspondence with Kiseleva, and though at least a dozen years younger than she, he moved into the role she had asked of him, to help her develop as a writer. By the early 1890s, there was “a whole horde of young literary hopefuls who constantly sent Chekhov their efforts for advice and approval.”14 For the next year Kiseleva and then a pair of young male humor writers would be his unofficial students. Kiseleva, though, could sometimes seem like one of those students who thinks she is smarter than her teacher.
On September 29, Chekhov wrote his first literary advice letter to her.15 He tried to tread lightly, praising one of her stories: “I can say, in general and roughly speaking, that from a literary point of view it is stylishly written, lively, and succinct.”16 But as he prepared at his desk for a serious discussion of her story, he found himself drawn in to make a list of what was wrong and what she needed to do:
Of course, there is no need to assure you that I’m very glad to be your literary-agent, retailer, and guide. This duty flatters my vanity and fulfilling it will be as easy as carrying a pail for you when you return from fishing. If you have to know my conditions, take these:
1) Write as much as possible! Write, write, write… until your fingers are broken. (The main thing in life—penmanship!) Write more, having in view not so much the intelligent development of the big parts as much as the details, so that at first a fair half of your skits, due to your being unaccustomed to the “small press,” will be rejected. As for receiving rejections, I am not going to deceive you, be hypocritical or lie—I give you my word. But don’t let the rejections bother you. Even if half will receive rejections, then the work will be more profitable than the Bohemian’s in Children’s Recreation. But as for self-esteem… I don’t know about you, but I’ve been used to it a long time.
2) Write on various themes, funny and tearful, good and bad. Do stories, sketches, jokes, witticisms, puns, and so on and so forth.
3) Adaptations from foreign work—the thing is fully legal, but only in the case if your sins against the 8th Commandment don’t poke you in your eyes… (For “Galoshes” you’re going to Hell after the 22nd of January!) Flee from popular subjects. As stupid as our editors are, exposing their ignorance of Parisian literature, especially Maupassant’s, is not easy work.
4) Write in one sitting, with full belief in your pen. Honestly, I’m not speaking hypocritically: eight-tenths of the writers of the “small press” in comparison with you are shoemakers and losers.
5) Brevity is recognized in the small press as the first virtue. The best measure would be to work on stationery (the same as that which I’m writing on). As soon as you get 8–10 pages, like so—stop! And the stationery is easier to send… Those are all my conditions.
He told her he was treating Nikolay—“He’s seriously sick (stomach bleeds, tormenting him to the Devil)”—and his thoughts were straying toward an ultimate conclusion:
When I’m being serious, it seems to me that people expressing revulsion from death are not being logical. As much as I understand the order of things, life is made up only of terrors, squabbling, and stupidities, all mixed up and in alternation… 17
Even as we remind ourselves of his and Nikolay’s tuberculosis, this was a big dose of advice and news for his friend Kiseleva. She would not have assumed the Chekhov brothers had tuberculosis, but she and his other friends would have seen evidence of it.
As for Chekhov’s literary advice, what she had wanted (what most of us writers want, usually) was apparently only admiration.18 The return letter came from her husband Aleksei rather than from her. Kiselev told Chekhov he agreed with Chekhov’s suggestions and that his wife would try to follow his guidance.
October 1886
…in short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because—because—I don’t know why! At all events, remember that your failings are considered flaws only by myself (altogether unimportant flaws), and I am very often mistaken. Perhaps you are right and not I…. It happens that I have been mistaken quite often, and I have held other opinions than those I have just expressed. On occasion my criticism has proved worthless.
—To a fellow writer1
Chekhov began the month still under the stress of insufficient funds. But his first story of October let loose feelings and insights never before so painfully dramatized by him about family life; and then his last story of the month closed down with a slam any possibility of marriage with Dunya Efros.
“Difficult People” (“Tyajhelye Lyudi”), published October 7, is most definitely not about Chekhov’s family—or so he seemed to want to assert. If he had imagined we would or could suspect it was a depiction of his own family, he wouldn’t have written it or published it. Despite superficial discrepancies between the fictional family and Chekhov’s, it is obvious he knew difficult families from the inside out.
“Difficult” is the right word, but the word in Russian, tyazhelye, has the connotation of weight, heaviness. “Burdensome People” might be more accurate, but “Difficult” is good enough.
Chekhov right away distinguishes the father from his own father, as if to insist to family and friends, “This is NOT our family.” The father is a landowner, seemingly from the steppe near Taganrog, and he is not, as Pavel Chekhov was, a bankrupted Taganrog merchant.
There are only two children who figure in the story, and the oldest is the daughter. There are three younger children, but they have no role to play except as a cowering chorus of witnesses.
In small contrast, in Chekhov’s family there were six children, the lone girl being the second youngest.
In the story, the son Pyotr expects money from his father to support him at the university, because he knows his father can afford it; he knows his father very well, however, and how difficult he is going to be about the money anyway.
Chekhov figured out early on, as a teenager, that if he wanted money, he had to go earn his own. He knew never to rely on Pavel.
The memoir about Anton by Mikhail Chekhov, the fifth son and last child, is very good and interesting, but he is discreet about family troubles.
The characters in Chekhov’s stories usually do not have siblings, or the stories don’t mention them. Chekhov continually simplified his stories’ situations and sharply limited the number of characters. “You’ve got to start right off with the merchant’s daughter and then concentrate entirely on her,” Chekhov would later write to a budding writer who had sent him her stories. “Throw out Verochka, throw out the Greek girls, throw them all out except the doctor and the merchant’s offspring.”2 We hardly notice the younger siblings in “Difficult People.”