Chekhov and Lazarev took the train to Babkino on July 15. Lazarev was all ears, raptly taking in Chekhov’s description of the first chapter of “a novel” that Chekhov had commenced: “Imagine a quiet railroad station on the steppe, not far from the estate of a general’s widow. A bright evening. The train arrives at the platform with two steam-engines. Then, standing at the station for five minutes, one train goes on with one engine, but the other moves little by little to the platform with one cargo wagon. The wagon stops. It opens. In the wagon is a coffin containing the only son of the general’s widow.”8
Chekhov showed him his notebook and advised him “to get one like it.” (Lazarev, living in 2022, would have ordered one on his phone the first second Chekhov glanced out the window.) Lazarev writes: “the little book was in miniature size; I remember it was handmade, out of writing paper; in it were very finely handwritten themes, witty thoughts, aphorisms, things that came to Chekhov’s head. One remark was about the special barks of red dogs—‘all red dogs bark as tenors’—I soon found this on the last pages of [1888’s] ‘The Steppe.’ ”9
Lazarev remembered from his first Babkino visit that “at the time, two-three times a week, Chekhov was strictly connected to magazine-newspaper work, but in his free hours he had a reception time for sick ones, and the surrounding peasants came to Chekhov for advice. He treated them for free.”10
Chekhov was anxious about his impending book, and he was anxious about Leykin, to whom he wrote again on July 17: “Where are you, and what’s with you, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich? I positively don’t know how to explain your continued silence in answer to my last letter. It’s one of these three: either you’ve gone away, you’re sick, or you’re angry. If you went to Finland, it’s been long since you were due to return; if you were sick, I would have found out about that from Bilibin. Apparently you’re angry. If so, for what? I hope that the reasons of my not coming, laid out in my last letter (which you received by June 12), were valid enough and could not be the reason of your silence…. Why are you angry? I await your answer, and meanwhile I wish you health and I bow to your family.”11 In a postscript he said he had sent a story for Fragments to Bilibin. This was his usual peace offering, a new story.
He wasn’t accustomed to Leykin’s silence.
On July 22, Leykin answered that, yes, he was mad because Chekhov hadn’t come to Lake Ladoga.12 And it turned out Leykin didn’t like Chekhov sending the new story to Bilibin rather than to him.13
Despite their wrangling, Chekhov had a better father-son relationship with Leykin than he had with his own father, who Chekhov continued to prefer not to mention. But Pavel, like a nightmare, seemingly infused himself into Chekhov’s dissipated, infuriating characters. “A Father” (“Otets,” July 20) is about a leech whose three sons and daughter are so good and considerate that they never scold him for being a lying drunk; they support him and give him money whenever he comes begging for it. He shows up at the summer villa where his son Boris is staying to shake him down for money… and a beer. (Despite his other weaknesses, Pavel Chekhov was not a drinker.)
The father is conscious of and even amazed by what a disgusting creature he has been:
“I blackguarded you poor children for all I was worth. I abused you, and complained that you had abandoned me. I wanted, you see, to […] pose as an unhappy father. It’s my way, you know, when I want to screen my vices I throw all the blame on my innocent children. I can’t tell lies and hide things from you, Borenka. I came to see you as proud as a peacock, but when I saw your gentleness and kind heart, my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and it upset my conscience completely.”
“Hush, father, let’s talk of something else.”
“Mother of God, what children I have,” the old man went on, not heeding his son. “What wealth God has bestowed on me. Such children ought not to have had a black sheep like me for a father, but a real man with soul and feeling! I am not worthy of you!”14
There’s no evidence that Pavel ever expressed himself this way and admitted his failings to his children. Chekhov, I suspect, searched for his father’s conscience, and gave voice to it in the hopes that it did in fact exist.
What terrific children the wretched father has, though:
“You are all pure gold, you and Grisha and Sasha and Sonya. I worry you, torment you, disgrace you, rob you, and all my life I have not heard one word of reproach from you, you have never given me one cross look. It would be all very well if I had been a decent father to you—but as it is! You have had nothing from me but harm. I am a bad, dissipated man…. Now, thank God, I am quieter and I have no strength of will, but in old days when you were little I had determination, will. Whatever I said or did I always thought it was right. Sometimes I’d come home from the club at night, drunk and ill-humored, and scold at your poor mother for spending money. The whole night I would be railing at her, and think it the right thing too; you would get up in the morning and go to school, while I’d still be venting my temper upon her. Heavens! I did torture her, poor martyr! When you came back from school and I was asleep you didn’t dare to have dinner till I got up. At dinner again there would be a flare up. I daresay you remember. I wish no one such a father; God sent me to you for a trial. Yes, for a trial! Hold out, children, to the end! Honor thy father and thy days shall be long. Perhaps for your noble conduct God will grant you long life. […]”
“The Father” by P. Pinkievich.
The father brings one of his sons home, where he lives with a shrew. It could be that his wife, the children’s mother, has died of mistreatment and woe. He shows off in front of the shrew and taunts the son for thinking he’s better than his old man. The father is proud of his children, because he has done everything to make himself loathsome, but they hang in there with him.
In “A Happy Ending” (“Khoroshiy Konets,” July 25) a fifty-two-year-old passenger train guard (who describes himself as “a strict, respectable, practical man,” just as sixty-two-year-old Pavel Chekhov would have described himself) goes to a matchmaker; he wants to settle down. Noting the matchmaker’s pleasing plumpness and money-making talent, he pitches for the matchmaker herself. If Chekhov himself was still weighing marriage, it was as a joke.
At the end of July Alexander sent his brother the cover of In the Twilight, noting, however, that the publication date was still up in the air.15
Title page of In the Twilight.
August 1887
“Why write,”—he wondered—“about a man getting into a submarine and going to the North Pole to reconcile himself with the world, while his beloved at that moment throws herself with a hysterical shriek from the belfry? All this is untrue and does not happen in reality. One must write about simple things: how Peter Semionovich married Marie Ivanovna.”
—In conversation with a fellow writer1
On August 3, In the Twilight was advertised as published by Suvorin’s New Times press. It wasn’t available to buy, however, for another three days,2 and Chekhov himself would not even see a copy for another couple of weeks. Suvorin had told Alexander to hold onto Chekhov’s copies until he, Suvorin, returned to Petersburg.
Sometime early this month, Chekhov invited Lazarev to return to Babkino: “Come as soon as you receive this letter.” He gave him a list of groceries to bring: “1 pound of pork sausage, 5 lemons, 4 heads of cabbage.”3 (Lazarev wasn’t able to deliver until the 20th.)
I thought I was going to notice that now, by the end of a dull, rainy, cool summer, Chekhov had lost creative steam. I wanted to point out evidence that the stories were not drawing him out. Because I knew his full-length play, Ivanov, was on the horizon, I wanted to show that while he was professional enough to write, he had reached a plateau and needed to find something else, a new genre, a new challenge.