To his surprise, as much as to his delight, in the autumn of 1888 he received the Academy's Pushkin Prize for distinguished literary achievement. He was tasting the full sweetness of recognition. But there were times when he felt that he did not deserve it. "The Steppe" he had worked at slowly, "the way a gourmet eats woodcock." And yet, although its publication cen- tered all eyes on him, he suspected that there was something radically wrong with it: it was not an organic whole, but a sequence of tableaux. "The Name-Day Party," which he wrote the same year, he had killed with hurry. He had a father and mother, a sister and younger brothers on his hands, living together in a two-story house that had to be kept up, and to pay his bills he had to meet deadlines. Shortly after he had received the prize he was writing to a friend that his literary activity had not yet begun in earnest. He was a mere apprentice, worse, "a complete ignoramus." He must start from scratch, learn everything from the be- ginning. If he were to spend forty years reading and studying, then perhaps he might fire such a cannon at his public that the skies would tremble. "As it is, I am a lilliputian like everybody else," he concluded.
Novoye vremya, the daily to which Chekhov began contributing in 1886, was an organ of reactionary opin- ion. He had no scruples about appearing in its pages, and he contracted a close friendship with its owner and editor, the renegade liberal, Alexey Suvorin. During his school and university years he had remained untouched by the radicalism that flourished among the students. He moved largely in conservative circles and shared the prejudices current there against socialists, "trouble- makers," and even, to some extent, against Jews. A couple of years after the beginning of his association with Suvorin's paper, he was writing for the mon^^es, which belonged to the opposite camp. He was com- mencing to abandon political conformity, as he had earlier rid himself of the coarseness, servility, and hy- pocrisy to which he had also been bred. And yet he was far from having achieved a consistent outlook. He was on the hither side of thirty when he observed that he changed his political, religious, and philosophical Weltanschauung every month. He seems to have been at this time under the spell of Tolstoy's ideas. Some traces of this influence, which lasted several years, are to be found in his works.
But Chekhov was not the stuff of which disciples are made. In reaction against the authoritarian spirit of his upbringing, he developed a skeptical independence of judgment. In the end he discovered that he couldn't share Tolstoy's faith. He put his trust in science; he loved culture, by which he meant, he wrote on one occasion, carpets, carriage with springs, wit. Between being whipped as a matter of course and not being whipped there was a gulf that compelled him to be- lieve in progress. He came to feel that there was more love of one's fellow men in steam and electricity than in chastity and vegetarianism. Once the spell of Tol- stoy's influence was broken, he was in the position of a man whose house, as he put it, was left empty. No new tenant came to occupy it. His mind was not doctrinal, much less dogmatic. The nearest he came to formulating a positive credo was in a letter to a friend in which he remarked casually: "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and false- hood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves."
He had come by freedom the hard way and he prized it all the more highly. It was one of the few certainties in a world of shifting values, a firm principle, a guide for the perplexed. And freedom seemed to him to be menaced not so much from the Right as from the Left. It was this camp, he felt, that harbored a spirit of parti- sanship and intolerance that he recognized as a threat to his liberty both as man and writer. In a mood of prophecy, rare with him, he remarked that a time would come in Russia when "toads and crocodiles," giv- ing lip service to "science, art and free thought" would outdo the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.
He might have added another article to his credo. He put no stock in classes or institutions, he had no faith in the intelligentsia or the proletariat, or for that matter in the peasantry, although he shared the populists' bf'- lief in the essential moral soundness, indeed superiority, of the masses. It was in the individual that he put his trust. For him a man's own conscience was the sole arbiter of right and wrong. Little of the rebel as there was in him, he learned not merely to hate coercion in private relations, but to look quizzically at government itself. He saw no reason why the State should be ex- cused from the decencies required of its subjects. In any case, as a writer of fiction he was little concerned with social questions and less with political matters. It should be noted that the greater part of his work was produced in the period of discouragement with political action following upon the failure of the inchoate radical movement of the seventies which culminated in the assassination of Alexander II. A sensitive writer could not help taking on to some degree the color of this twi- light age.
Without being political-minded, Chekhov was yet fully aware of social evils and had a strong sense of civic responsibility. Here too he felt that what counted was individual initiative, personal effort. This attitude makes intelligible a somewhat puzzling episode in his life. In the spring of 1890 he abandoned his manuscripts and his practice, his family and his friends, and traveled six thousand miles by train, by boat, by sledge, by coach, under the most exhausting and sometimes dan- gerous conditions—this was before the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad—to reach the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. He spent over three months there, visiting practically every settlement—in fact, he claimed that single-handed he took a census of the population—and returned home via the Indian Ocean with material for a book. This was published between boards five years later. It is a hodge-podge of statistics, anecdotes, detailed geographical and historical data, thumbnail portraits, hardly redeemed by some pages that rival Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the Dead House in the candor with which they depict the degradation to which man can be reduced. Chekhov was glad to have written the book and proud to think of "this coarse convict's garb" hanging in his literary wardrobe. But was it for this satisfaction that he had endured the hardships of the trip to and of the sojourn on Sakhalin? Before he left he had given his friends an assortment of reasons for his enterprise. His real reason seems to have been to arouse public interest in the tragic lot of the convicts, for which he felt himself, with all his com- patriots, responsible. It was in vain that he had gone freely where others were driven. His gesture was a quixotic one: the book did not rouse the public and seems not to have helped the convicts. It can only be surmised that it helped Chekhov to feel that he had attempted to pay his debt to society.
He made other attempts in that direction. Early in 1892 he traveled into the famine-stricken provinces to organize relief, and was nearly lost in a blizzard. Later in the year, when central Russia was threatened with cholera, he acted as medical supervisor of the district in which he was living. With characteristic candor he con- fessed to a friend that he was in the vexing position of being able to read of nothing but cholera, to think of nothing but diarrhoea, while feeling indifferent to the people he was treating. It was equally characteristic that he should give up every other activity for an entire summer in order to help them. He took an active part in the building of village schools near his home and interested himself in a project of founding a settlement house in Moscow. In 1897 he was a volunteer census- taker, going from one log cabin to another, in spite of illness.