He wrote Leykin again on October 23 and in entertaining, scattershot fashion told him about his visit to a mutual friend, the hard-drinking poet Palmin, and about his continued financial woes: “My health is better, but my pocket still has consumption.” By the next week, Khudekov, the editor and publisher of the Gazette, offered to pay Chekhov two kopecks more per line in 1887. Chekhov, never much of a negotiator, accepted.
Chekhov’s literary mentorship of Kiseleva, however, paid quick dividends. He wrote her on October 29 and jumped right in on the fate of the short stories she had sent him:
1) “Galoshes” lies on my table and will be put into circulation only after the New Year, in a shortened, corrected way. It’s necessary to flush from it the French smell, otherwise it will come out like an adaptation, and that is no good and unfitting, as a novice it’s always better to begin with the original. If your first story is “too busy,”18 all the following ones will be seen with prejudice.
2) The story about the madwoman, titled by me “Who’s Happier” is a very sweet, warm, and gracious story. Even the dog Leykin, not knowing anybody besides Turgenev and me, found that this story is “not-bad and literary.” (Not wanting to be the sole judge, I brought it for advice to Leykin and other old literary dogs.) The most successful place for me—Peterb Gazette, but alas! Because of the fee I broke off from that periodical (I’m demanding a raise). In Fragments it’s impossible to place, as it’s not humorous. The only thing remaining—wait for it in The Alarm Clock, where in its feuilleton-pages they publish “serious” studies (for example, my “Oysters”), which I did. So, your story will be published in The Alarm Clock. Thanks to the idiotic manner of journals to mix up signed things, belonging to “names,” that is, firms (Zlatovratsky, Nefedov, Chekhov and such representatives of the fall of contemporary literature), your story will be placed not in the near future. But for you this is indifferent, as the money can be had before publication.
[…] We need to talk over many things. So, I have to justify some corrections in your stories… For example in “Who’s Happiest?” the beginning is pretty bad… It’s a dramatic story, but you begin with “shooting himself” in a humorous tone. Then the “hysterical laughter” is a much too old effect… The simpler the movements the more plausible and sincere, and therefore better… In “Galoshes” there are many mistakes of the kind as “House No. 49.” In Moscow there is no numbering of addresses… Turning to the last story, by memory by the way, that Lentovsky is completely out of place. He is very much not as popular in Moscow as Aleksei Sergeevich, who for some reason loves him.
He concluded with terrific encouragement: “judging by this first experiment, it’s possible to guarantee that within 1–2 years you will be in a strong position.”19
This was the age of literary translation; Russians could read the latest French and English novels in the literary journals and foreign translated short stories in newspapers and magazines. Chekhov’s comic August story “The First-Class Passenger” was translated into Czech on October 27.20 Moravska Orlice probably did not pay him for it.
Meanwhile, Chekhov’s financial worries had led him into writing the most problematic and longest of all his stories this year, “Mire.” Chekhov was mired indeed in anxiety: Where was his money to support the family going to come from? Could he actually obtain it through marriage? He resolved the marriage problem, unfortunately, the way, perhaps, a fourteen-year-old boy would, by blaming and ridiculing an innocent person who had just been minding her own business.
I have given up trying not to squirm over “Mire”; it is squirm-worthy. It seems, however, to have made two of Chekhov’s keenest advocates, the translators and professors Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, whose collection of his letters is the single-best presentation of Chekhov’s biography, turn the argument upside down. They counter that those who condemn the story don’t understand it:
…“Mire,” to this day [is] one of Chekhov’s least understood works. Because the story featured a Jewish seductress and because it appeared in New Times, the prominent anti-government journalist Vukol Lavrov proclaimed it reactionary and racist. […] But a closer reading of this story within the context of Chekhov’s writing of 1886–88 shows that it was one of several works written during that period which examined, possibly under the impact of his broken engagement to Dunya Efros, the reactions of sensitive Russian Jews to the discrimination and repression with which they had to live. […] The wealthy and educated Susannah in “Mire,” unlike Sarah and Solomon [in Ivanov and The Steppe], does not have to contend with overt and crude anti-Semitism. But she constantly expects it just the same and her resentment finds its expression in a series of sexual conquests of young Russian noblemen; her promiscuity is the only way she has of asserting her own worth and of defying the hostility of the neighboring Russian gentry. Ironically, the two brothers [they are cousins] who are involved with her in the course of the story are not at all anti-Jewish, but they are nevertheless victimized by Susannah’s neurotic response to her predicament, which Chekhov depicted with remarkable understanding.21
Well, I love Chekhov, too. But when do we finally admit to the errors of even the people we revere? In public, Chekhov defended Jews and called out, for example his friend and editor Bilibin’s anti-Semitic newspaper column remarks. So many of Chekhov’s friends and literary and medical colleagues were Jews. No one who knew him ever accused him of being anti-Semitic. As far as we can tell from his actions in the world he never acted prejudicially against Jews. But publishing “Mire” was in itself an act, and the other stories with anti-Semitic statements in the author’s voice are also acts, and hence I squirm.
As Chekhov would have wanted, let’s face the problem straight on. And, in an impossible act of imagination, let’s try to read it as Dunya Efros could have, if she was looking for similarities and differences. She was not, as Susanna22 is, a rich daughter of a recently deceased distillery owner. Dunya was twenty-five; Susanna is twenty-seven. Dunya did not live in a grand house in the country. Dunya was a student in Moscow at the same women’s program at the university as Maria Chekhova. Her father was alive and a lawyer. Dunya did not steal IOUs from sexually susceptible estate owners or their relatives and silence them by seducing them. Dunya was well-educated and probably would have noticed that Susanna has much less in common with her than with Circe of The Odyssey, who welcomes Odysseus and his men on their journey homeward and turns all of them except Odysseus into dull-witted animals.
On the other hand, Susanna is and Dunya was Jewish and Chekhov’s attraction to Dunya confused him, just as the protagonist of “Mire,” Sokolsky, is attracted as if against his will to Susanna:
Nothing could be seen behind the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed, somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her voice, her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.23
Only in stages, because Susanna is a con artist, does she further reveal herself, both physically and mentally. She bewitches Sokolsky with various misdirections. Before he can do so, she condemns Jews, women, and marriage. He doesn’t understand his increasing attraction to her:
“You are a woman yourself, and such a woman-hater!”
“A woman…” smiled Susanna. “It’s not my fault that God has cast me into this mold, is it? I’m no more to blame for it than you are for having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for the choice of its case. I am very fond of myself, but when any one reminds me that I am a woman, I begin to hate myself. Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress. Wait for me in the drawing-room.”