Maria Chekhova's 1912 edition:
P.S. There is no outdoor privy here. You have to answer the call of nature in nature's very presence, in ravines and under bushes. My entire [. . .] is covered with mosquito bites.
The grammatical agreement of the verb and of the adjective in the last sentence makes it clear to a speaker of Russian that the omitted word is "backside."
Volume XIV of the twenty-volume edition, 1949: P.S. [. . .]
The extent of the license the censors took with Chekhov's letters was documented in 1954 and 1955 when Professor Gleb Struve published a series of articles on the subject in Russian emigre, British and French journals. Partly in response to the shock caused in international scholarly circles by Struve's disclosures, many (but by no means all) of the passages deleted by the censors in the 1944-51 edition were reinstated in the 196364 edition, which was published, we might recall, at the height of the de-Stalinization campaign. In the postscript from the letter to Shcheglov quoted above, for example, the first two sentences are printed in full, though the third sentence was apparently still too colorful to appear in print in the Soviet Union—even in the 1960s.
While undoing some of the damage done by the censors of the 1940s, however, the more recent edition has introduced a more subtle form of censorship. It includes more than eight hundred letters, yet omits some of the most significant: letters dealing with personal freedom, the rights of the writer and of literature, and unfavorable comparisons of life in Russia with life in Western Europe. The commentary to the present volume will point out some of the more blatant of these omissions. We have reinstated the censored words and passages wherever possible; when there was no way to re-establish them, the deletion is indicated in the text of the letter as follows: [...].
With all the shortcomings imposed from without by the censors, there is nonetheless no doubt that both the 1944-51 and 1963-64 Soviet editions of Chekhov's letters were put together by able and knowledgeable scholars. Our collection owes a deep debt of gratitude to their efforts for a large portion of our commentary. We would also like to acknowledge the help of friends and colleagues who were kind enough to share with us their competence in special fields: Dr. Roy Leeper of San Francisco on medical history and medical terminology; Professor Francis J. Whitfield on Slavic biblical texts; Dr. Erica Brendel on ornithology; and Professor Olga Raevsky Hughes, whose profound knowledge of Russian culture and Russian religious lore repeatedly saved the day after all other sources failed us. We are grateful to Father Leonid Kishkovsky of St. Innocent's Orthodox Church, San Francisco, and to Mr. Dennis Powers of the American Conservatory Theater for supplying particularly hard-to-find bits of information. Mr. Barry Jordan served as the research assistant for the project, typing numerous drafts, checking sources in at least four languages, and looking up more books, writers, plants, animals and minerals than any of us cares to remember (but none is likely to forget). His help is deeply appreciated.
M. H. H. S. K.
LETTERS OF ANTON CHEKHOV
INTRODUCTION:
THE GENTLE SUBVERSIVE
To Vladimir Nabokov
m ost people can visualize him easily enough: the dour, sickly man in a long black overcoat buttoned to the top, a black hat pulled low over his eyes, leaning wearily on his cane in a flowering Yalta garden. That photograph, taken shortly before Chekhov's death, is reproduced on the cover of Ernest J. Simmons's popular biography sold at all paperback stands. It also served David Levine as the model for his widely reproduced caricature, which appears in the New York Review of Books jigsaw puzzle and which shows Chekhov as an elongated gloomy black tapeworm. The other best-known image of Chekhov is that of the morose consumptive in an armchair, glaring balefully at the world through his pince-nez, all shaggy tweeds and shaggy gray beard. This one comes from a portrait painted in oil toward the end of Chekhov's life by a mediocre painter named Iosif Braz. An earlier portrait by Braz for which Chekhov sat looked so little like him that it was destroyed. The second try, not much more successful, ended up at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, and it is to this day the most widely reproduced portrait of Chekhov. It is the one most likely to grace the jacket of a collection of his stories or plays, or to be appended to one of the numerous biographies that have been appearing in Western languages with increasing frequency. Chekhov himself disliked the Braz portrait, thought that it made him look as if he'd been sniffing grated horseradish, and would refuse to autograph reproductions of it; those who knew Chekhov believed that this portrait falsified his appearance.
The multivolume Russian editions of Chekhov's collected writings and of his letters reproduce dozens of photographs and paintings where he looks quite different. There is the broad-shouldered, open-faced young giant of the early 1880s, who wrote hundreds of humorous stories, frequented Moscow night clubs, studied medicine and suddenly realized, at the age of twenty-six, that he was becoming an important and admired writer. There is the strikingly handsome, elegantly dressed Chekhov of thirty (a trim goatee, but still no pince-nez), who had already written some of his major masterpieces—"The Steppe," "The Duel," "A Dreary Story"—and had witnessed successful productions of his play Ivanov. This Chekhov was celebrated throughout Russia. He had traveled to Sakhalin, to Ceylon, to France and Italy, had climbed Vesuvius and gone swimming in the Indian Ocean. There is the Chekhov of the mid-1890s, the author of The Seagull, the builder of schools, the famine fighter, the bed partner of celebrated actresses and stylish literary ladies. All these different Chekhovs are there in the photographs, and in his letters, and they are all equally essential for understanding the man and his work.
The shaggy beard, the pince-nez, the funereal clothes, the exhausted look are not falsifications. They also existed, but they belonged to the last three years of Chekhov's life, when his lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis and when it was plain to everyone except himself that he was about to die. This was the Chekhov who wrote "The Bishop" and The Cherry Orchard, and this seems to be the Chekhov that the world prefers to remember. The pictures of the dying invalid of Yalta go well with the widely held view that Chekhov was a man who wrote gloomy stories and plays about unhappy, spineless people leading frustrated and melancholy lives.
This legend, like most legends, contains a small grain of truth. Chekhov was capable of being frustrated and bored, as his letters show; and he was very good at depicting these states of mind in his work. But to reduce the entire man and the content of his work to this particular dimension is like hearing a full symphony orchestra perform a Beethoven symphony and deliberately ignoring all the instruments except the cellos. The view of Chekhov as The Voice of Twilight Russia (the title of Princess Nina Andronikova Toumanova's platitudinous, cliche-filled book in English which is still widely read), as the "poet of twilight moods," was created by Russian critics at the turn of the century, when Chekhov was still alive. He hated it, thought it stupid, and made a point of leaving the room if anyone brought it up. But many people close to him were receptive to this view, including his wife Olga Knipper, who in 1901 wrote to him: "My heart aches when I think of the quiet sadness that seems to be so deeply entrenched in your heart/' To which Chekhov replied: "But, darling, that is utter nonsense! There is no sadness in me, there never was; most of the time life is bearable and when you are with me, things are really fine." (Letter to Olga Knipper, August 24, 1901.)