He was in happy high-efficiency mode as he prepared for departure and freedom. He wrote to Maria Kiseleva and Leykin on March 21. For Kiseleva, he advised her about royalties and explained the tricks that publishers used so that their authors would not have the right to republish elsewhere. But keep in mind, he said, that publishers take all the risk, so authors should be gratefuclass="underline" “After all, a bad sparrow in hand is better than a paradise bird in paradise.”24 He teased her, as if in revenge for her criticisms of “Mire”: “Ach! In summer, reading a critic on your book, I will feel happy! As I will be gloating and maliciously rubbing my hands!” His teasing was funny and fast. She had teased him about a gift Dunya Efros had given him, which means that Efros was continuing to socialize with him. Most important, as Kiseleva’s unpaid agent, he had an update on “Larka,” Kiseleva’s story that he had submitted for her to New Times: Suvorin hadn’t read it yet. Also, Chekhov’s colleague with typhus had asked him to visit: “I’m not going!” (How would Chekhov have borne infecting his sister or mother!)
He wrote Leykin to tell him, among other things, that he had sent “Typhus” to the Petersburg Gazette. “I’m really leaving the 31st.”25 He asked Leykin to write him when he was down south, but he warned that he wouldn’t answer him. “I’ll describe for you in detail my trip, which in all probability will turn out strange and wild.” He kept trying to suggest to Leykin that their publishing relationship was essentially over but that their friendship should be fine, please!
He wrote to his Taganrog cousin Georgy Chekhov with his arrival time on April 4, but he asked him to keep it secret. On March 25 and 27 he reminded Alexander about keeping their mother informed about the health of his family; she was worried about Alexander’s children. Anton told him the typhus that Anna, Alexander’s wife, had would show its effects for one to two months. Alexander responded that Anna had been in the hospital; her typhus was less bad but she had a cough and was spitting more. But he also joked: “All the work on your book has been laid on me. [I’ll fix] places I don’t like and redo in my way the style corrections…”26
Chekhov wrote Leykin again on March 28 to give him fair warning again: “In the south I’ll be trying to write less. That means I’ll write little things from which the good half I’ll send you.” He encouraged Leykin to do better advertising for Motley Stories. Leykin denied any fault in promoting the book, however, insisting again that the only thing readers wanted then was Surovin’s Pushkin edition.27 In fact, Leykin had only placed one advertisement for Motley Stories, nearly ten months before. Was Leykin dishonest, as the Chekhov brothers complained, or just cagey? Why should Leykin, after all, help promote his star who was leaving him?
Chekhov was certainly bolting from his domestic life; in “Everyday Troubles”28 (“Zhiteyskie Nevzrody,” March 28), he describes the atmosphere of a noisy apartment: a bellowing wife with a toothache; a conservatory student banging out a piece by Liszt on the piano upstairs; a medical student next door pacing the floor while memorizing information. Amid the continual distractions, the hero focuses on doing his accounting for future earnings. Finally, he cracks. The story concludes, “In the morning they brought him to the hospital.”29
“In Passion Week” (“Na Strastnoy Nedele,” March 30) Chekhov tells in the first-person present tense the experiences of an eight-year-old, Fedya, going to confession during Lent. He and Chekhov notice signs of spring: “The roads are all covered with brownish slush, in which future paths are already beginning to show; the roofs and sidewalks are dry; the fresh young green is piercing through the rotting grass of last year, under the fences. In the gutters there is the merry gurgling and foaming of dirty water, in which the sunbeams do not disdain to bathe. Chips, straws, the husks of sunflower seeds are carried rapidly along in the water, whirling around and sticking in the dirty foam. Where, where are those chips swimming to? It may well be that from the gutter they may pass into the river, from the river into the sea, and from the sea into the ocean. I try to imagine to myself that long terrible journey, but my fancy stops short before reaching the sea.”30 The boy’s imagination about the journey fails him; Chekhov’s imagination also failed to picture what his “long terrible journey” to Taganrog and the steppe would actually be like.
The precocious eight-year-old, meanwhile, wears guilt like a heavy coat (as probably Chekhov did, too), though we see that he is actually sinless: “The Mother of God and the beloved disciple of Jesus Christ, depicted in profile, gaze in silence at the insufferable agony and do not observe my presence; I feel that to them I am alien, superfluous, unnoticed, that I can be no help to them by word or deed, that I am a loathsome, dishonest boy, only capable of mischief, rudeness, and tale-bearing. I think of all the people I know, and they all seem to me petty, stupid, and wicked, and incapable of bringing one drop of relief to that intolerable sorrow which I now behold.”
Having seen a woman ahead confessed and forgiven, the boy thinks to himself: “But how happy the man must be who has the right to forgive sins!” The unbelieving but forgiving Chekhov would have been this kind of happy man. Before the boy has his turn to confess, he has a scuffle with the local bully. After confession, he feels clean and duly reverent. The next day in church, he notices “the lady I saw yesterday looks lovely. She is wearing a light blue dress, and a big sparkling brooch in the shape of a horse-shoe. I admire her, and think that, when I am grown-up, I will certainly marry a woman like that, but remembering that getting married is shameful, I leave off thinking about it, and go into the choir […]”
Chekhov saw no shame in marrying, but he put it off himself until he was forty-one years old.
Leykin on the 29th suggested to Chekhov that his story “The Cat” (retitled “Spring”) would be better at half the length. Was Leykin baiting Chekhov or just being a good editor? It wasn’t published for another four weeks. On the 30th, Chekhov wrote back to tell Leykin the story was “at his disposal.” Chekhov’s other editors almost never suggested or demanded changes in his stories.
Meanwhile, in the offices of New Times, Alexander and Suvorin were discussing Chekhov’s collection of stories. Alexander wished Anton a peaceful journey.31 During the last two days of March, before his departure southward, Chekhov was hurrying to finish his Easter story, “The Letter,” for New Times.32
PART FIVE
To the South and Back
The sun had risen, but whether it was dancing or not Torchakov did not see. He remained silent all the way home, thinking and keeping his eyes fixed on the horse’s black tail. For some unknown reason he felt overcome by depression, and not a trace of the holiday gladness was left in his heart.
—Chekhov, “The Cossack”1
Chekhov was to be disappointed by what he found in Taganrog. He hadn’t realized how much his own perspective had changed after living in Moscow for nearly eight years. In letters and in his stories during this time, he mocked his hometown: its pace, the people, and their customs. “Threading my way through the New Bazaar, I became aware of how dirty, drab, empty, lazy, and illiterate is Taganrog,” he wrote his family shortly after his arrival for Easter weekend. “There isn’t a single grammatical signboard and there is even a ‘Rushian Inn’; the streets are deserted; the dumb faces of the dock-workers are smugly satisfied; the dandies are arrayed in long overcoats and caps. All this thrust before the eyes is so disheartening that even Moscow with its grime and typhus seems attractive.”2