Aggrieved at' the patent injustice of the contract and its unprofitability for him, Chekhov's friends .mplored him to pay the penalty and break the contract, but he demurred, arguing that he should take responsibii ty for his actions.82 Quite apart from the increasing bitterness with which Chekhov regarded the contract with Marx, the task of gathering together and prepar jig his collected works for publication proved extraordinarily burdensome. Hundreds of stories had first of all to be sought out in the ephemeral journals in which he had published in the early 1880s, and friends in Moscow and Petersburg had to be enlisted to help with this enormous undertaking. Marx had reckoned on Chekhov's collected works running to a few volumes; he was amazed by the sheer quantity of stories which were now unearthed, even after most of them had been discarded by the1r author as being of insufficiently high quality for inclusion. Then came revision of some works, ana endless proof-reading.
Chekhov did not form a friendship with his new publisher, as he had with Suvorin, and their correspondence was restricted to business. On 11 June 1899, he met Marx for the first time when he travelled to St Petersburg to discuss how his plays should be pub1: shed. The weather was vile, and he returned to Moscow the same day after having had his photograph taken. In May 1903, he made his final visit to the capital in order to try to remonstrate with his German jail-keeper. Although he was very sick, he proudly refused the offer of 5,000 roubles to pay for treatment abroad; all he came away with was 66 kilograms of beautifully bound books.83
Born into the family of a German ciock maker, the fifth of nine children, Adolf Marx had developed a passion for books from a young age. He had moved from Berlin to St Petersburg when he was twenty- one (the year before Chekhov was born), thinking he would stay for a couple of years. However, he ended up settling into the 100,000-strong German community in St Petersburg, and remained in the Russian capital for the rest of his life. From lowly beginnings, his achievement was to build up a publishing empire that would transform the reading habits of most of the Russian population, founding both the publish.ng house of A. F. Marx and a spectacularly popular journal. When he died in Russia in October 1904 at the age of sixty-six, just a few months after Chekhov died in Germany, one obituary proclaimed that his name should be written in gold letters in the history of Russia's enlightenment. Siuce nearly everyone had at least one of his publications on their shelves at home, the obituarist declared that all Russian people should be sincerely grateful to him.84 At the time of his death, by which time he had been elevated into the hereditary Russian nobility, there were about a thousand people employed at his headquarters in Malaya Morskaya Street in downtown Petersburg and at Irs press a little further out on Izmailovsky ProspeKt. Among the many novels published by A. F. Marx was Tolstoy's Resurrection.
Marx obtained permission to publish a journal in 1869, and it became the jewel in his crown. Although the Russian wed niim simply implies a field that has been ploughed (with the stress on the first syllable - the opposite of the river Neva which flows through St Petersburg), the journal's name is usually translated as The Cornfield or The Meadow. It was nothmg like a trad'tional Russian 'fat' journal. Modelled on a popular German journal called The Summerhouse (Die Gartentauhe), t had pictures, it came out weekly, and besides literature it included photo journalism, articles on scientific and medical subjects and features on world geography and 1 storical events. The Meadow was also intended as family reading tor Russia's burgeoning middle class and the pro\ ncial intelligentsia.86 One cannot help but wonder, therefore, what readers made of the novella Chekhov published in 4s pages in the autumn of 1896, whi e he was undergoing his ordeal with the The Seagull. It was hardly reassuring reading: an educated young man living in a provincial town falls out with his domineering father over his disdain for middle-class values and goes to live as a labourer, experiencing a failed marriage and the collapse of his Utopian ideals along the way. True to form, Chekhov challenged conventions with 'My Life', a story in which he enters into dialogue with Tolstoy's radical ideas about how people should live. Much to his chagrin, this tale of dysfunction and social apostasy was subjected to quite severe censorship. By the middle of the 1890s, publishing in a Petersburg journal had become a comparatively rare event for Chekhov, whose main allegiance was now with Moscow journals and newspapers. He did, however, publish one other story n The Meadow - another classic study in pro\ ncial unhappiness, written in 3 898, entitled 'Ionych'.
Adolf Marx proved expert at marketing The Meadow, its circulation rose from under 10,000 in its first year of publicat :>n to over 200,000 by the time Chekhoy's story appeared - a figure that was completely unheard 'of in Russia. The average circulation of most of the monthly literary journals, after all, was under 5,000. What made The Meadow so successful, apart from its low price (only re\gious .ournals were cheaper), was the free gi/e-aways which Marx pioneered with special permission from the Ministry of the Interior in 1879. These included pictures, maps, photographs, calendars and, from 1894, the collected works of great Russian wx iters. To make this last venture economically viable, he merely raised the cost of the ournal's annual subscription a little. In return, Russ'an readers got an incredible bargain, especially when Marx started ;ssuing the collected works of Chekhov ;n 1903. The publishing house of A. R Marx had already published a ten-volume edition of Chekhov's writings between 1899 and 1902, with a print-run of 20,000. At a cost of one and a half roubles per voiume (or two roubles if you wanted the handsome calico binding), plus postage and packing, you could have books sent to wherever vou lived ;n the empire. But it proved far cheaper simply to subscribe to The Meadow and pay the optional extra rouble for the .iterary supplement. Because of postal restrictions, the contents of this second edition of Chekhov's collected works were spread over sixteen volumes, beginning with the 20 January 1903 issue of The Meadow. It even included some stories onr.tted from the first edilion for various reasons, so subscr ">ers got an even better deal. No other publisher could have disseminated Chekhov's writings to such a wide audience. Chekhov's collected works were sent to 235,000 subscribers across the country.87
Chapter 10 A DREAM OF MOSCOW
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