Two minor Moscow journalists.
In his fable "The Two Barrels," where a barrel filled with fine wine rolls sedately and quietly down the street, while an empty one rattles noisily over the cobblestones, attracting everyone's attention.
The name of one of Nikolai's trade-school employee friends.
Ill
SERIOUS LITERATURE
After chekhov became famous, a number of literary celebrities either claimed or were given the credit for having first discovered the magnitude of his talent. By any objective criteria, this honor should go to Nikolai Leskov, who from the vantage point of today, was, after Tolstoy, the most important living Russian writer at the time Chekhov began his literary activity. One drunken night in October of 1883, after he and Chekhov had made a tour of Moscow night clubs and possibly brothels, Leskov anointed the younger writer "the way Samuel anointed David" and predicted a great future for him. But Leskov was at the time at the very nadir of his literary reputation, following almost two decades of vilification by the utilitarian critics. Chekhov may have been pleased by his words and by being offered inscribed copies of Leskov's finest novel, Cathedral Folk, and of his now famous experimental story "The Left- Handed Blacksmith," but in his letter to his brother Alexander (Letter of October 15-20, 1883) he treated the whole thing as a joke, referring to Leskov as "my favorite scribbler" (and not writer, as the Western biographers of Chekhov inevitably mistranslate his term pisaka).
Chekhov's joyous reaction to the letter of acclaim he received three years later from Dmitry Grigorovich, on the other hand, shows that even he, for all the independence of his judgment, was not entirely immune to the reputation-making powers of literary criticism. Grigorovich, who is little read and rarely reprinted even in the Soviet Union, was undeservedly overpraised by Belinsky for his philanthropic stories of peasant life originally published in the 1840s, and from that time until the end of the nineteenth century he was regarded as the equal of Turgenev and Tolstoy by the majority of literate Russians, a view that can only raise eyebrows today. Still, the renown that the name of Grigorovich enjoyed at the time makes Chekhov's response understandable, even though the very existence of Grigorovich elicited the somewhat comical disbelief of Thomas Mann in the oddly out-of-focus essay on Chekhov he wrote at the end of his life.
And yet, gracious as Leskov's statement and Grigorovich's letter may have been, they were no more than private gestures. The man, however, who backed his recognition of Chekhov's talent with concrete action and who did more than anyone else to launch him on a major career in serious literature was the writer and publisher Alexei Suvorin. It was Suvorin's publication of Chekhov's stories in his newspaper New Times and his subsequent securing of Chekhov's nomination for the Pushkin Prize that gained Chekhov entry into serious literary journals and brought him to the attention of important editors, of Lev Tolstoy, and of the literate reading public. Chekhov's friendship with Suvorin was one of the most significant and intimate relationships in his entire life. His letters to Suvorin are the frankest and most revealing letters Chekhov ever wrote to anyone and they provide us with indispensable insights into the mind of this frequently reticent writer. And yet, for peculiarly Russian reasons, unimaginable in any other literature, Chekhov's relationship with Suvorin has been systematically downgraded, obscured and distorted by Chekhov's Russian biographers and commentators.
When Chekhov began to contribute stories to New Times, it was generally regarded as a conservative, pro-government publication. By the turn of the century, the newspaper's stand on the Dreyfus affair and on Russian students' uprisings and its chauvinistic baiting of Poles, Finns and Jews made Suvorin's name arid that of his newspaper odious to most liberal Russians. The view of Suvorin that was formed at the beginning of the twentieth century has been summed up by Lenin in a statement that is inevitably brought up in Soviet criticism and historiography whenever Suvorin's name is mentioned: "A poor man, a liberal and even a democrat at the beginning of his life's road, a millionaire and a smug, shameless eulogizer of the bourgeoisie, groveling before every change of official policy at the end of that road." The existence of this Lenin text on Suvorin has made it mandatory for Chekhov's Soviet biographers to minimize the closeness of the relationship and to ascribe dishonest or devious motives to all of Suvorin's dealings with Chekhov. Writing in 1933, Mikhail Chekhov was still able to give Suvorin a modicum of credit for the things he had done for his brother. But Maria Chekhova's book of memoirs, which she dictated in the early 1950s, had to bow to the general trend and to depict Suvorin as a crafty hypocrite, subtly luring the gullible Anton Pavlovich into his reactionary nets.
Chekhov disagreed with Suvorin strongly on many issues, both before and after the Dreyfus case, which is usually represented as the breaking point in their friendship, and he was eventually to come to see many of the older man's shortcomings and unattractive qualities. But he valued Suvorin's literary advice and he never forgot Suvorin's early help. Chekhov's typical disregard for labels and categories enabled him to form a friendship with the revolutionary writer Vladimir Korolenko shortly after beginning his association with Suvorin, and to see and appreciate the good things each of these men had to offer.
The first appearance of Chekhov's work in New Times coincided with a major breakthrough in the development of his talent. Eighteen eighty- six and early 1887 brought a whole stream of stories, unprecedented in Russian literature for the originality of their form and subject matter and for their compression and concision: "The Requiem," "Heartache," "The Witch," "The Chorus Girl," "Agafya," "A Calamity" and numerous others. One of the most controversial of them was "Mire," to this day one of Chekhov's least-understood works. Because the story featured a Jewish seductress and because it appeared in New Times, the prominent anti- government journalist Vukol Lavrov proclaimed it reactionary and racist. A recent American book on Chekhov described "Mire" as a study of an amoral nymphomaniac. But a closer reading of this story within the context of Chekhov's writing of 1886-88 shows that it was one of several works written during that period which examined, possibly under the impact of his broken engagement to Dunya Јfros, the reactions of sensitive Russian Jews to the discrimination and repression with which they had to live. Sarah in Ivanov is crushed by the non-Jewish world into which she has married and which does not want her. Solomon, in the Jewish inn episode in "The Steppe," expresses his resentment of the stereotype of the money- mad Jew in which society has cast him by burning his share of the family inheritance and by incoherent harangues which no one around him can understand, including his brother Moses (who gets along as best he can by playing the comical role of an obsequious Jewish Uncle Tom). The wealthy and educated Susannah in "Mire," unlike Sarah and Solomon, does not have to contend with overt and crude anti-Semitism. But she constantly expects it just the same and her resentment finds its expression in a series of sexual conquests of young Russian noblemen; her promiscuity is the only way she has of asserting her own worth and of defying the hostility of the neighboring Russian gentry. Ironically, the two brothers who are involved with her in the course of the story are not at all anti-Jewish, but they are nevertheless victimized by Susannah's neurotic response to her predicament, which Chekhov depicted with remarkable understanding.