“Ma-a-mka!” he cried, and dashed back.
He sees a light in an out-building and discovers, through a window, the doctor himself peacefully reading inside, but suddenly for some reason, Pashka collapses and passes out, and wakes up in the morning, being scolded by the doctor for his escape…. But has the operation happened? Is Pashka about to notice that he has lost an arm? Or is that grim fate still ahead of him? Chekhov doesn’t tell.
Tolstoy loved the story and read it aloud to guests.
*
Anton wrote Alexander on September 25 to ask him to go round up his fees for three stories at the Petersburg Gazette. He wanted Alexander to nudge a colleague, Burenin, about reviewing In the Twilight, which Burenin shortly thereafter did, publishing the review in New Times itself. Chekhov noted the book was selling “fairly well” in Moscow and that there would be an advertisement for it next week in the Gazette. And had Suvorin returned to the office?11 (He had, but, according to Alexander, they hadn’t yet conversed.)12
Meanwhile, Chekhov had discovered that he could knock out a play in two weeks, even with a few days off in those two weeks. There was money in plays, the way there might be money today in writing the script of a big-production movie. In Chekhov’s Russia, every performance would bring in another payday for the author. He already wrote his short stories dramatically, and his comic pieces were often simple and stagy. He knew how to control a space and fill it with interesting people talking. He had written a full-length rambling play when he was twenty. His comic skits and dialogues were quick and funny. Why couldn’t he write a successful money-making play?
He sealed himself off, and until he had proved to himself that he could do it, he seems to have told no one that he was writing Ivanov, except the contemporary he considered his literary equal, Korolenko. Korolenko came by the house to visit on September 26 or 27. It was only their second meeting. He was young, but seven years older than Chekhov. Korolenko remembered this as a business call on Chekhov to invite him to write for Northern News: “He came out of his study and held me by the arm, when I, not wanting to bother him, got ready to leave. ‘I’m actually writing and undoubtedly am going to finish writing a play,’ he said. ‘Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov… You understand? There are thousands of Ivanovs… A regular person, certainly not a hero…”13
*
Chekhov was feeling better. He wrote Maria Kiseleva on September 28 about reading reviews of In the Twilight “almost every day”; he was “as used to them as, it must be, you are already to the sound of rain.” He was proudly sending her the book.
He answered the poet Leonid Trefolev’s letter on September 30 with a denial, however, of In the Twilight being, in Trefolev’s words, worth twice its cost. Chekhov hadn’t met Trefolev but knew him by reputation and from his photo being prominent at Leykin’s and Palmin’s; and in the meanwhile, he made an offer of free medical treatment if Trefolev was ever in Moscow: “About your illness that you write, I with pleasure will take up treating you and of course I will not cure you; I take patients every day, from 12 to 3; for literary people my doors are wide open day and night. At 6 o’clock I’m always at home.”14
Chekhov’s young friend and humor-writing mentee Nikolay Ezhov later remembered dropping by Chekhov’s house unannounced one evening in late September or early October and pausing outside the ground floor window: “Chekhov was sitting alone behind the writing desk and writing something very very quickly. His pen ran across the paper. It had to be he was creating something new…”15 It could well have been Ivanov; Chekhov would soon ask Ezhov to read it. “I looked at him a long while,” writes the enamored Ezhov. “His beautiful wavy hair fell on his forehead, he steadied the pen, thought a bit, and suddenly… smiled. This smile was special, without his usual dab of irony, not humorous but tender, soft. And I understood that this was a smile of happiness—belles-lettres, creation, coming through in a fortunate style, form, phrase, and this gave him that joyful experience that only writers understand…”
However Ezhov reconstructed this pretty picture, we should appreciate his tact: “I did not want by my appearance to interfere with the work of a talented writer. I slowly redirected myself home and thought, along the way: ‘Chekhov will be a great writer! He has everything: talent and intelligence working long and hard.’ ”
PART SIX
Ivanov & Others
I failed in my attempt to write a play. It’s a pity of course. Ivanov and Lvov seemed so alive in my imagination. I’m telling you the whole truth when I say that they weren’t born in my head out of sea-foam, or from preconceived notions or intellectual presentations or by accident. They are the result of observing and studying life. They are still there in my mind and I feel I haven’t lied a bit or exaggerated an iota, and if they come out listless and blurred on paper, the fault lies not in them, but in my inability to convey my thoughts. Apparently it is too early for me to undertake playwriting.
—Letter to Suvorin1
After years of dashing off story after story and recovering from a bout of depression, Chekhov had set himself a task that would, if all went well, provide him the money so that he could slow down. At the end of September he had written Ivanov, his first major full-length play, but his hopes for it alternated with his misgivings about it. After all, Ivanov became a minor success, and he would revise it a year later. In the 1890s he resumed playwriting, having found his particular way in that line. The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard became his most famous works. In the meantime, after the flush of excitement of Ivanov’s production, he made hay and finished off the year with a series of stories that would remain popular forever after.
October 1887
“Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, full of pride and energy and enthusiasm, I worked with these hands here, and my words could move the dullest man to tears. I could weep with sorrow, and grow indignant at the sight of wrong. I could feel the glow of inspiration, and understand the beauty of romance of the silent nights which I used to watch through from evening until dawn, sitting at my worktable, and giving up my soul to dreams.”
—Ivanov
I have found myself in the midst of writing this biography sometimes reading Chekhov’s publication record like an accountant. At the end of September and the beginning of October, I worried that he certainly wasn’t writing stories.
No, my inner-artist counters, but he wrote a full-length play.
And he began writing a novel. A novel!
But then Chekhov himself looked at the accounting and realized he needed money before the play could pay, and wrote four stories that were published in the second half of October.
On the 5th of October he wrote to Ezhov: “My play’s ready. If you haven’t changed your mind to help me, then tomorrow, if you would, Tuesday, at ten o’clock in the morning. You’ll breakfast and lunch here. Be well.” The postscript: “If you won’t be here, then send.”1
Ezhov didn’t “send” and was there on the 6th: “Chekhov awaited me. On the table lay the fat notebook, clear, recopied in Chekhov’s beautiful and personal handwriting. Anton Pavlovich was silent as if in bad spirits. No one bothered us. We sat, Chekhov opposite me. I read Ivanov from beginning to end, without stopping. The reading was finished. Chekhov, dark and thoughtful, didn’t speak for a long time. Finally he spoke: ‘I’m hoping for Davydov and Kiselevsky… These artists won’t let me down.’ ”2
Ezhov doesn’t say what approving remarks he made to Chekhov about the play or those famous actors. He kept his disapproving remarks to himself, “but privately reacted ‘with amazement, since instead of the expected cheerful comedy in the Chekhov genre I found a gloomy drama crammed with depressing episodes… Ivanov seemed unconvincing.’ ”3