Chekhov’s medical school classmate doctor Grigory Rossolimo remembered what a good listener Chekhov was with his patients: “Chekhov did not go to work as an average medical student. He collected the elements of the case history together with surprising ease and accuracy. But it was where one had to touch on the ordinary life of the patient, uncovering its intimate details, about how the illness developed into its present state that Chekhov seemed to bowl along effortlessly without forcing himself, in contrast to many students and even doctors who find it difficult to relate to the vivid statements emerging from the unique circumstances of patients’ lives.”10
*
On May 14, Chekhov wrote to Leykin: “I got your letter [of April 24] today, dear Nikolay Aleksandrovich! It’s so hot and stuffy that I have no strength to write, but I have to write because tomorrow, the 15th, I’m returning to Moscow, and on the evening of the 17th I’ll already be in Voskresensk at the dacha.”11 He thanked Leykin for the offer of a puppy from Leykin’s dog’s litter and would come and pick it up. “There were so many impressions and so much material,” Chekhov explained, “that I’m not regretting that I’ve spent a month and a half on the trip.” Unfortunately, he was completely broke, “without a kopeck.” Could he get a loan? Could Leykin send forty rubles to him at Voskresensk? And, finally, he had to postpone his visit to Leykin’s estate until he wrote two or three stories for New Times. He would try to get there by June 10.
Chekhov arrived in Moscow on the 17th and arranged seeing his friend Schechtel, from whom he hoped to get a small loan, before he got on the train to Babkino on the 18th.
*
“Aborigines” (“Obivateli,” May 18) was the first story he wrote about his time in Taganrog, though he didn’t name it Taganrog as such (“in a town in one of the southern provinces”). A Polish officer, the invalid Ivan Lyashkevsky, “who has at some time or other been wounded in the head,” hysterically rants to his German architect companion (Chekhov was meeting with his “German” architect friend Schechtel on the very day of the story’s publication):
“Extraordinary people, I tell you,” grumbled Lyashkevsky, looking angrily at the native [townsperson outside], “here he has sat down on the bench, and so he will sit, damn the fellow, with his hands folded till evening. They do absolutely nothing. The wastrels and loafers! It would be all right, you scoundrel, if you had money lying in the bank, or had a farm of your own where others would be working for you, but here you have not a penny to your name, you eat the bread of others, you are in debt all around, and you starve your family—devil take you! […]”
[…] Lyashkevsky is gradually roused to fury, and gets so excited that he actually foams at the mouth. He speaks with a Polish accent, rapping out each syllable venomously, till at last the little bags under his eyes swell, and he abandons the Russian “scoundrels, blackguards, and rascals,” and rolling his eyes, begins pouring out a shower of Polish oaths, coughing from his efforts. “Lazy dogs, race of curs. May the devil take them!”
It’s impossible to associate Chekhov with the Pole’s further furious denunciations of Taganrog’s citizens, except that just a month before on his arrival in Taganrog, Chekhov had expressed himself similarly, only slightly more mildly (“Passing through the New Market, I could see how filthy, empty, lazy, illiterate and uninteresting Taganrog is”12). In life and letters, Chekhov didn’t let himself go like Lyashkevsky, that is, in the manner of his father and older brothers. Yet the author so well understood and described the anger and frustration of sick people that in the midst of this story we discount the denunciations that the suffering Lyashkevsky makes, most of which criticisms Chekhov wholly agreed with at the time, and sympathize only with his German friend and the inoffensive natives.
*
Ensconced at Babkino with his family, where it was unusually and uncomfortably cold, Chekhov was writing “Happiness” for New Times. “I am sitting in my autumn coat trying to produce a Saturday story, but my brains seem to be able to disgorge nothing but icicles,”13 he wrote Leykin on May 22. He was answering Leykin’s letter that was full of complaints about why when Chekhov was down south he had written for Petersburg Gazette but not for Fragments. “Your anger will turn,” Chekhov predicted, “when you find my letter from Taganrog. You’re an amazingly ungracious and cruel person! You reproach me that I, wandering through the south, didn’t write anything for Fragments.”14 It was true that he had written those six stories for the Gazette, but the family had needed the money!
Even with his sore, hurt-feelings complaints, Leykin repeated his invitation to Chekhov to visit his summer house.
On May 25, Alexander wrote from the New Times office to greet Anton after his trip. Alexander updated him on his wife’s health and on the state of the book; he asked Anton to let him include “The Examining Magistrate” in order to get the number to twenty stories. Also, couldn’t Anton modify the title of the book? “In the Twilight” seemed too dark and bleak. And, as if to avoid being overheard in a crowded room, mentioned about Suvorin: “He is distressed about the revolver business [his son’s suicide].”
Within the next week, Anton wrote back from Babkino, shrugging off the story-count: “If it’s not twenty stories, the readers won’t die.” (In reply Alexander explained that with the increased size of the book, by including that twentieth story, the volume would bypass censorship.) Chekhov justified the title and meanwhile mentioned remedies for Alexander’s wife’s post-typhus symptoms: “Milk and more milk” and various specific drops of elixirs. He would be in Petersburg on June 8–10 and then onto Leykin’s unless his legs were bothering him.
June 1887
During his work on the topic “General Larionov’s Rout of Zhloba’s Cavalry Corps,” the young historian had decided to compile a maximally precise, inasmuch as was possible, hourly account of the activity of both commanders during the month of June 20th. Many of Solovyov’s colleagues regarded that work as deliberately unachievable, so suggested for starters he write down his own hourly life in June (during the previous year, for example) and then later set his sights on events seventy-six years in the past.
—Eugene Vodolazkin, Solovyov and Larionov1
On June 1, “Volodya” appeared in the Petersburg Gazette. As I read it, I winced and gasped, wondering how Chekhov, after Aleksei Suvorin’s son Volodya had just died of suicide, could have published a story about a fragile seventeen-year-old named Volodya who kills himself. What was Chekhov, who was ever considerate, ever conscious, thinking? How could this story possibly have consoled a grieving father?
Suvorin had poured out his heart in his diary back on May 2 about his twenty-two-year-old son’s suicide. “Yesterday Volodya shot himself,” he begins. “I never was able to anticipate anything; this is my misery, my curse. I noticed that on the previous day he was somewhat especially sad after dinner, and I wanted to ask him about it, but I didn’t.”2
On May 4, Suvorin’s New Times newspaper published an account of the suicide. At 11:00 A.M. on May 1, Vladimir (Volodya) ate breakfast with his family, “was merry and lively.” He went out in his student uniform but returned shortly after and went to his room and ten or fifteen minutes later shot himself in the heart.3 Volodya left a note, blaming no one and explaining that life had become uninteresting and that existence in the other world would be incomparably more attractive; because of his religious convictions it had taken him a long time to decide on suicide. He had studied at the university only one year, but the second semester he had failed, “and this,” added the New Times article, “it is said, made a strong impression on him.” Indeed, after Suvorin’s own death, Volodya’s older brother, Aleksei Alekseevich Suvorin, would blame their father for Volodya’s tardy return to school one fall, which resulted in his failure and thus his suicide.4