Grigorovich’s reply to this letter suggests he may well have been offended: “You praise particularly that which I least of all thought about when I wrote.” He continued, however, very interestingly: “A true portrayal of the process of dreaming as such and its impressions occupied me incomparably less than the idea of giving the outward and social picture of a certain milieu in Petersburg […] In our profession, is it not, however, often the case that that about which one bothers comes out weakest of all, while that which has been sung unconsciously, like a bird sings, comes off best? You must have experienced this yourself more than once.”13
A month later, Chekhov would visit Grigorovich in Petersburg, when it seemed Grigorovich might be on his deathbed. And then, this very summer, Chekhov emphatically dedicated his first book of “serious” stories to him.
*
On the evening of February 15, after a gathering with Schechtel and Nikolay at home, Chekhov and Lazarev went to vespers at the church of Christ the Savior, where, according to Lazarev, they heard miraculous singers. A couple of weeks later, Lazarev wrote Ezhov about their mentor’s habits and writing routine:
He has few acquaintances, he goes rarely to the theater, and constantly writes, writes, and writes! There’s not a day when he doesn’t write or continue writing something. Now he’s so proficient that he writes the Fragments stories straight on white and without errors. I saw it myself. Every time when I’ve gone to see him I’ve found him at work, every time without exception. This Chekhov is a great talent. Little reading (he doesn’t read magazines constantly, but occasionally glances at them), that is, the little reading replenishes him with enormous observations and talent, and then perseverance. (We think about them—Chekhov and Palmin—with envy, but they work so terribly much, ten times more than we do.) His family (father, mother, sister and, it seems, student-brother) are on his hands. He says that if for a month he didn’t hold a pen in his hand, he would be bankrupt, a person destroyed by poverty. […] He also hardly reads Fragments. He doesn’t read Leykin, and it seems not even his brother does, either. “You, I read,” he told me […] as his alternate at Fragments. “You should work, become my replacement. I’m not going to work for long!” […] He complained that new forces in humor are not appearing, though of course there are talented ones.14
The same day, Chekhov heard from his friend Bilibin, Leykin’s sub-editor, who, unlike Lazarev, wasn’t impressed at all, telling Chekhov that his pieces in Fragments were “unworthy of him.” Was this a general assessment? Chekhov hadn’t published anything in Fragments in weeks, ever since “The Good German.” A new story, “An Inadvertence,” had been at the Fragments office since February 10 but would not come out until February 21, and then Bilibin and Leykin would praise it.
Anton, impatient with his brother Alexander’s reticence, goaded him in a letter on the 19th or 20th: “How come you don’t describe your work? How do you spend your time in the evenings in the [New Times] editorial office?” On the 21st Alexander was happy to oblige, explaining, in the third person, that “From one in the afternoon to five he translates foreign newspapers, helps set up the issue, reads through the correspondents’ mail and plans the chronicle. At five he goes home to eat and, having quickly eaten, leaves home at 7 in order not to be late for various groups’ meetings, the reports of which he is charged with. From the meetings he goes again to the editorial office (making sometimes ten-page finishes), writes a report and until three in the morning makes corrections, revisions, and sorts and lays out the issue. At four in the morning, sometimes later, he returns home.”15 Anton replied a few days later that Alexander’s salary was too small and that he should ask Suvorin for more money.
“An Inadvertence” (“Neostorojhnost’,” February 21) is a perfect farce, which Bilibin, Leykin, and Tolstoy would praise and enjoy. A man comes home quite drunk from a christening and drinks, by accident, a squirreled away bottle of his sister-in-law’s paraffin, which she berates him for while he is the midst of believing that he’s going to die.
His New Times story this month (February 21) was “Verochka,” about a shy twenty-nine-year-old researcher, Ivan Alexeich Ognev: “Having been in the N—District from the early spring, and having been almost every day at the friendly Kuznetsovs’, Ivan Alexeich had become as much at home with the old man, his daughter [Verochka], and the servants as though they were his own people; he had grown familiar with the whole house to the smallest detail, with the cozy verandah, the windings of the avenues, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the bath-house; but as soon as he was out of the gate all this would be changed to memory and would lose its meaning as reality for ever, and in a year or two all these dear images would grow as dim in his consciousness as stories he had read or things he had imagined.”16
Do we learn something from this next passage, seemingly personally related by the otherwise inconspicuous narrator, about feminine aspects that particularly attracted Chekhov?
Girls who are dreamy and spend whole days lying down, lazily reading whatever they come across, who are bored and melancholy, are usually careless in their dress. To those of them who have been endowed by nature with taste and an instinct of beauty, the slight carelessness adds a special charm. When Ognev later on remembered her, he could not picture pretty Verochka except in a full blouse which was crumpled in deep folds at the belt and yet did not touch her waist; without her hair done up high and a curl that had come loose from it on her forehead; without the knitted red shawl with ball fringe at the edge which hung disconsolately on Vera’s shoulders in the evenings, like a flag on a windless day, and in the daytime lay about, crushed up, in the hall near the men’s hats or on a box in the dining-room, where the old cat did not hesitate to sleep on it. This shawl and the folds of her blouse suggested a feeling of freedom and laziness, of good-nature and sitting at home. Perhaps because Vera attracted Ognev he saw in every frill and button something warm, naïve, cozy, something nice and poetical, just what is lacking in cold, insincere women that have no instinct for beauty.
I think we are hearing Chekhov’s opinion here, not just Ognev’s naïve, unconscious perceptions.
Who those “cold, insincere women” Chekhov had in mind, however, is a mystery.
Ognev is not in love with the sweet provincial Kuznetsov daughter, who is in love with him and who, at his imminent departure, declares herself.
“I… love you!”
These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera, and got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.
[…]
Telling him of her love, Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and passionately, but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would have liked to; he felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and regret that a good girl should be distressed on his account. Whether he was affected by generalizations from reading or by the insuperable habit of looking at things objectively, which so often hinders people from living, but Vera’s ecstasies and suffering struck him as affected, not to be taken seriously, and at the same time rebellious feeling whispered to him that all he was hearing and seeing now, from the point of view of nature and personal happiness, was more important than any statistics and books and truths…. And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not understand exactly where he was in fault.
After second thoughts, objective Ognev almost decides to marry her: