So that we don’t take Vanka for a simpleton, Chekhov adds: “Then he scratched his head, thought a little, and added: Konstantin Makarich. Glad that he had not been prevented from writing, he put on his cap and, without putting on his little greatcoat, ran out into the street as he was in his shirt…. The shopmen at the butcher’s, whom he had questioned the day before, told him that letters were put in post-boxes, and from the boxes were carried about all over the earth in mailcarts with drunken drivers and ringing bells. Vanka ran to the nearest post-box, and thrust the precious letter in the slit….”
Vanka mailing his letter to his grandfather.
Chekhov, meanwhile, had mailed off in the slit two comic pieces for Fragments’ Christmas issue, and no doubt they were better addressed than Vanka’s letter, as they were received and published on December 27. “The Person: A Bit of Philosophy” (“Chelovek: Nemnozhko Filosofii”) is about a philosopher of life who is seemingly above everything; however, when a beautiful woman orders him to bring her some water, he hops to and gets it. “Who Was She?” (“To Bila Ona?”) is a longer tale about an old coot who tells the young ladies a story of his long-ago “affair” in a haunted house. He disappoints them—revealing their hypocrisy—by telling them the mysterious woman was his wife. So he switches back and says no, it was his steward’s wife, which pleases them. I won’t mention the unpleasant remarks about Jews that the old man makes.22
Chekhov answered his brother Alexander’s complimentary December 26 letter sometime in the next few days. He in return was abrupt and scolding: he didn’t like Alexander’s new story and was annoyed that Alexander didn’t inform the Moscow family about his family’s new apartment in Petersburg and his new job at New Times:
You write me about your goose, about Tan’ka, about the fiancée without a profile, but you don’t say a word about your new place, about the new people and so on.
Right this minute write me everything from beginning to end, not leaving anything out and not reducing it. I’m waiting with impatience and I’m not writing to you until you send me a letter.
[…] Don’t sign the trifles by your full name. “Theme by Al. Chekhov.” What’s that for? You want to be ashamed?
That is, the Chekhov brothers were only to use pen names in Fragments.
*
We have reached the end of 1886. Did Chekhov take stock of what he had done? Or did he only feel it in his head and bones? Was he wondering when he could slow down? Did he assume, as other young people have, that he could keep burning through life, that if his family needed him for financial support and stability, then that’s just what he would have to keep doing? As a doctor, he recognized stress and exhaustion. He knew his own illnesses and afflictions. He could not keep going like this. He had to find a new way or other ways to bring in the money and ease the pace.
PART FOUR
Friends and “Enemies”
Having so thoroughly followed in Chekhov’s footsteps during 1886, I blinked and blanked at the prospects of the year ahead, as if I no longer knew any better than Chekhov did what was going to happen in 1887. Maybe this happens whenever we reread a long novel. We know what’s coming, but so immersed are we in the present-day of the novel that it feels as if we don’t have knowledge of the future. We hope, for example, that things will get better for Anna Karenina, that Elizabeth Bennet will have a chance to make up for her mistakes, or that Karl Ove will find peace and contentment. For Chekhov in 1887, I hope he gets some rest. (He will.) I hope he finds someone to fall in love with. (He won’t.) I hope his financial worries disappear. (Not quite.) I hope he somehow keeps writing great stories. (He will.) I hope he stays healthy. (Nope.) I hope there are no more anti-Semitic references or jokes. (I’m not sure. Wait, I just remembered Ivanov, his play. Ivanov’s put-upon wife is Jewish.)
I have a note from an earlier draft of this book that says, “in the second half of 1887 something happened, and Chekhov wasn’t interested in writing freshly about romantic relationships.”
What happened?
Chekhov, 1887.
January 1887
I was always amused when I heard conversations about Chekhov’s purported indifference, or about his cold-bloodedness, his apathy or homochromatism: I, for one, knew how brilliant and crafty this striking artist was under his modest exterior, who spent his entire lifetime mercilessly training and drilling just one pupil—himself.
—Dina Rubina1
New Year’s Day was spent at home in conversation with a young writer (only a year younger than Chekhov), Alexander Lazarev (pen name, Gruzinskiy), the journalist Vladimir Gilyarovskiy, and A. Kurepin, The Alarm Clock’s editor. Lazarev and Kurepin were keeping company with Chekhov for the first time (Lazarev had met him in March at the Alarm Clock office).2 The Letopis’ notes: “Conversations about Fragments, about N. A. Leykin, V. V. Bilibin, A. V. Nasonov. In an argument with Kurepin, Chekhov ‘showed that it’s necessary to well investigate the Tolstoyan theory of resistance to evil, but then it’s impossible to honestly speak for or against it…’ ”3 Tolstoy insisted that one must commit oneself to nonresistance to evil; Chekhov would show in various stories that he was attracted to the idea, or to the people who committed to that idea, but that for many reasons such nonresistance was impractical or constraining.
I’m guessing that the topic of Leykin occupied more of their time and most definitely more of their enjoyment. Leykin was one of those bosses who the people who work for them like to complain about. This New Year’s, when Leykin was in Petersburg or at his estate across the river from the capital, his ears, which seem to have been sensitively tuned to gossip, were probably burning. The young men would all have agreed that Leykin was exasperating and frustrating, nudgy and persistent. He published young writers, but he paid them a pittance.
Chekhov treated Lazarev like a little brother, encouraging him and teasing him and scolding him forward on his literary path. Lazarev wrote: “I sat at his place the whole long winter’s night until 12:00. The impression produced on me for this first meeting with Chekhov was unusual. I was shaken. Returning home I began remembering our conversations, Chekhov’s words, his laugh, his smile, and I didn’t sleep until morning.”4
What Chekhov knew of Lazarev’s previous writing is not stated, but Lazarev says that Chekhov recommended he “write something for New Times.” The biographer David Magarshack describes a joshing moment of that evening: “Chekhov said, pointing to the furniture, the aquarium and the piano: ‘It’s good to be a writer: literature has given me all that!’ And seeing how greatly impressed his visitor was, Chekhov laughed and explained that the piano was on hire and that part of the furniture Nikolay had received in payment for his illustrations in The Alarm Clock.”5
Lazarev and his friend, Nikolay Ezhov, revered their mentor.6 Ezhov remembered: “Chekhov treated me and Lazarev very warmly; he guided our work, gave advice, pointing out and underlining successes and mistakes, and all this he did with special Chekhovian simplicity and delicacy.”7
Chekhov received New Year’s greetings from Alexander in Petersburg, who passed along a remark Suvorin made in conversation to him and Bilibin and Golike: “Why does Anton Pavlovich write so much? It’s very very dangerous.”
Chekhov wrote to Bilibin and his uncle Mitrofan this New Year’s week, but these letters haven’t survived.
January’s stories seem dark and unhappy, even those that are comical.
In “New Year’s Torture” (“Novogodnyaya Pitka,” January 4), Chekhov writes, unusually, in the second person about making required New Year’s calls around Moscow: to the narrator’s wife’s rich but boring uncle; to a friend to whom they owe money; on the sly to a girlfriend; then to his wife’s brother’s; and finally to a drinking friend. The story begins: “You deck yourself out in a tailcoat, you put, if you have one, a Stanislaus [medal] on your neck, you spritz a handkerchief with cologne, twist up your moustache—and all this with such angry, fitful movements, as if you were dressing not yourself but your most vicious enemy.”8 At the end the narrator glumly returns to his shrewish wife. If you were to ask what this had to do with Chekhov’s life, I would shrug…. And then, I might point out that when Mikhail, the narrator, is at his brother-in-law Petya’s, Petya’s desperate pleas for a loan sound a lot like Chekhov’s: “Before the holidays, you understand, I spent all my money, and now I’m without a kopeck… It’s a disgusting situation… You’re my only hope… If you don’t give me 25 rubles, you’re stabbing me without a knife…”