He sleeps till twelve or one o’clock in the day, sleeps a sound, healthy sleep…. Ah! how he would sleep, what dreams he would have, how he would spread himself if he were to become a well-known writer, an editor, or even a sub-editor!
This description would have nudged his brother Alexander; Chekhov was using his connections to help Alexander settle in Petersburg and get a sub-editor job at New Times.
“He has been writing all night,” whispers his wife with a scared expression on her face. “Sh!”
No one dares to speak or move or make a sound. His sleep is something sacred, and the culprit who offends against it will pay dearly for his fault.
“Hush!” floats over the flat. “Hush!”
Chekhov was acknowledging here the kind of respect he received in his own household. A friend, Zakhar Pichugin, remembered Chekhov’s mother as her son’s sentry:
I visited the Chekhov family. As I came in, I greeted the father of Anton Pavlovich, and heard in reply the words which he whispered in a mysterious tone, “Hush, please don’t make noise, Anton is working!”
“Yes, dear, our Anton is working,” Evgenia Yakovlevna the mother added, making a gesture indicating to the door of his room. I went further, Maria Pavlovna, his sister, told me in a subdued voice, “Anton is working now.”
In the next room, in a low voice, Nikolay Pavlovich told me, “Hello, my dear friend. You know, Anton is working now,” he whispered… Everyone was afraid to break the silence, and you could see that the members of the family had a great deal of respect for the creative process of the young writer.6
And in this bit from “Excellent People” we see what Chekhov would have considered ridiculous reverence:
One winter evening Vladimir Semyonich was sitting at his table writing a critical article for his newspaper: Vera Semyonovna was sitting beside him, staring as usual at his writing hand. The critic wrote rapidly, without erasures or corrections. The pen scratched and squeaked.7
And there, reflected in the glass of the window in front of which Chekhov was sitting, was himself, writing “without erasures or corrections” (usually). The biographer Ronald Hingley writes that Maria Chekhova said “she could always tell from his mood when he was in the throes of creation. ‘His way of walking and his voice changed, a sort of absent-mindedness appeared, and he often answered questions at random…. This continued until he began writing, when he became his old self again…’ ”8
Chekhov and the narrator of “Excellent People” disdain the critic, but Chekhov as usual sees himself even in the people he mocks. Just like Vladimir the critic, Chekhov was proud of the speed at which he wrote; he could focus in such a fashion that some of his short pieces could spin along in one continuous, uncorrected strip. “He is a strange writer,” said Tolstoy. “He throws words about as though at random, and yet everything in his writings is alive. And what great understanding! He never has any superfluous details, every one of them is either essential or beautiful.”9
“The Assignment” (“Zakaz,” December 8) is a comedy that describes the situation in which Chekhov wrote so many of his stories in these busy years. Here, the freelancer Pavel Sergeich needs to finish writing a story on deadline before he joins the informal party that his wife is hosting in the next room. He keeps getting interrupted by her or by the distracting conversations he overhears. He joins the party for a few minutes and then returns to his uninspired murder story. He is either focused enough or unengaged enough that the party’s activities do not intrude into the story.
“Pavel Sergeich!” they cried out in the living room. “Come here!”
Pavel Sergeich hopped up and ran to the ladies.
“Sing a duet with Michel!” said his wife. “You sing lead, and he’ll sing second.”
“Fine! Give the key!”
Pavel Sergeich waved his pen, on which still shone some ink, tapped his toe, and, making a passionate face, sang “Thoughtless Nights” with the student.
“Bravo!” he chortled, having finished singing and seizing the student by the waist. “You and I are such young men! I would sing another something but, the devil take it, I’ve got to write!”
“But toss it aside! It’s up to you!”
“No-no-no… I promised! And there’s no hiding! The story’s got to be ready today!”10
I imagine Chekhov imagining Leykin reading that line in the Petersburg Gazette. Leykin smiles, appreciative of the writer’s dedication, while Chekhov calls out, laughing, “See, see what I have to do to produce stories for you!”
Pavel Sergeich waved his hands, ran back into his study and resumed writing […]
“The Assignment” is light, but not fine, as Chekhov, who never seemed to miss a comic opportunity, did miss some here. The tale that Pavel Sergeich writes is neither comical nor coordinated with the atmosphere in which he writes it. Chekhov is interested in the comedy of the writer being distracted; what the writer writes, however, doesn’t reflect his distractions. Could Chekhov have written the story around a dead little piece he had thrown out? A translator11 calls it a “Halloween” story, perhaps because of the murder in Pavel’s tale. At the conclusion, the party is leaving the house for a pretty drive, which doesn’t fit the time when Chekhov was submitting the story, early December. There are no variants of “The Assignment.” When Chekhov was readying his collected works he wrote on the “clerical copy”: “N.B.: it will not go in the collected works.”
Though out of its seasonal place, “The Assignment” does fit the kind of activities that were going on around Chekhov in his house. Mikhail Chekhov believed that his older brother liked very much to have social activity going on while he wrote: “Anton drew inspiration from all the sounds and people and spent a lot of time at work in his study downstairs. He would sometimes take a break to come upstairs and joke or horse around with the rest of us. During the day when everybody was otherwise occupied and there were no visitors, he would often say to me, ‘Misha, play something, would you? I can’t write like this.’ I did play for him—sometimes for half an hour straight. I’d play songs from popular musicals and did it with as much frenetic zeal as a sanguine second-year university student could muster.”12 The biographer David Magarshack adds: “In the drawing room his sister’s friends used to gather almost every evening, playing the piano and singing, and Chekhov would occasionally interrupt his work and join them upstairs.”13
Chekhov’s friend Ignati Potapenko recalled that in these years, “When he was in the presence of guests he would repeatedly slip away to his study, write two or three lines in private, and then rejoin the company a few minutes later.”14
In the next two weeks of December, Chekhov described his franticness, his feeling of being lazy, his feeling of pressure while trying to write his Christmas story for New Times.
In the midst of that unusual struggle, he wrote three other pieces, including “A Work of Art” (“Proizvedenie Iskusstva,” December 13), a clever situation-comedy episode, and “Who Was to Blame?” (“Kto Vinovat?,” December 20) for Leykin’s Fragments, and “The Anniversary” (“Yubiley,” December 15) for Petersburg Gazette.
Chekhov was like any persistent, duty-bound freelancer: he knocked off the shorter pieces that he could while chipping away at the bigger and more lucrative assignment.
Leykin wrote him on December 11 that he liked “A Work of Art,” but that the censor made him take out two words, “Paradise” (the censor objected that there shouldn’t be a snake in Paradise, with which Adam and Eve would have agreed) and “obscene.”15 That is, a young man brings a doctor “a work of art” in appreciation from him and his mother for having saved his life. The antique candelabra features two naked women. He apologizes that it’s one of an incomplete pair of candelabras. The doctor knows he can’t show it in the office or at home. He gives it away to his lawyer. The lawyer gives it to an actor. The actor sells it to an antiques dealer, where it’s bought by the woman to “complete the set,” which she then sends to the doctor.