IVAN ORLOV (1851-1917) was a doctor. He and Chekhov became friends in the Melikhovo period.
ALEXEI PLESHCHEYEV (1825-1893) was a poet and essayist. He was an early admirer of Chekhov's. He started out as a radical, inherited a fortune and moved to Paris.
GRIGORI ROSSOLIMO (1860-1928), a fellow student of Chekhov's at medical school, was a neuropathologist who taught at Moscow University. Chekhov had great respect for him as a scientist and great affection for him as a man.
PYOTR SERGEYENKO (1854-1930) is best known for his book on Tolstoy. He went to school with Chekhov in Taganrog.
ELENA SHAVROVA (1874-1937), Mme. Just, was a writer and an actress. She met Chekhov at a picnic in 1889 and asked him to read a story she had written. Chekhov sent the story to Suvorin, who printed it in "New Times."
VASILI SOBOLEVSKI (1846-1913) was the author of a number of articles on finance, economics and dipIomacy. His common-Iaw wife was the millionaire patroness of the arts, Varvara Morozova.
KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKI (1863-1938) was born Konstan- tin AIexeyev. (The Russians were great name changers.) His father, and his father's friends, were the rich upper class Mus- covites who were rapidly taking over the prerogatives of the
Russian aristocracy. The Alexeyevs were theatre and opera patrons—one grandmother had been the famous French actress, Varley—and Stanislavski made his first appearance at the age of three in family theatricals. He organized his brothers and sisters into an acting group of rather extraordinary standards: when, for e.vample, they planned to produce "The l\Iikado," Japanese acro- bats were invited to live on the family estate and give instruction in military drill, Japanese dancing, proper use of the fan, etc. Stanislavski was deeply influenced, as was most of Europe, by the Meiningen court theatre and, shortly after the Russian tour of that great company, he and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theatre "... against bathos, overacting ... the star system ... the farcical repertoire which was ... the Russian stage." The brilliance of the Moscow Art Theatre's productions of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gorki, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Hauptmann changed the modern theatre. The revolution they brought about in acting, stage lighting, stage music and stage designing is the proof that Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko were the two great theatre men of modern times. On the night of the Kazanski Square massacre in St. Petersburg, Stanislavski was playing Dr. Stockman in "The Enemy of the People." He was so convincing an actor that when he reached the famous line, "You can't put on a new coat when you go out to fight for freedom and truth," the entire audience rose from their seats and rushed upon the stage to thank him for his bravery.
LEOPOLD (LEV) SULErJiTSKI (1872-1916) was an artist and writer. He was thrown out of the Academy for revolutionary speeches. He was sent to an insane asylum for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Czar, and was then exiled to Central Asia. He organized, with Tolstoy, the emigration of the Dukho- bors to Canada.
ALEXEI SUVORIN (1834-1912) was the editor of the powerful, conservative, St. Petersburg newspaper, "New Times." He was an interesting, worldly man, a close friend of Chekhov's, although Chekhov never seemed to have any illusions about Suvorin's love of money and power. The friendship broke up in a fight over Zola and the Dreyfus case.
ANNA SUVORINA (no dates), Suvorin's second wife, was a lively and imaginative woman. She wrote a book about Chekhov.
MODEST TCHAIKOVSKI (1850-1916), brother of the composer, wrote librettos. He was a great admirer of Chekhov's and called himself a "Chekhist."
JOASAPH TIKHOMIROV ( ? -1908) was an actor in the Moscow Art Theatre.
VLADIMIR TIKHONOV (1857-1914) was a dramatist, fiction writer, and editor of several literary magazines.
ALEXANDER VISHNEVSKI (1863-1943) was an actor in the Mos- cow Art Theatre. He was a schoolmate of Chekhov's in the early Taganrog days.
VLADIMIR YAKOVENKO (1857-1933) was a distinguished psy- chiatrist. He and Chekhov were very much interested in local government councils (zemstvos).
YEVGRAF YEGOROV (no dates) was the leader of a community in the Nizhni-Novgorod district.
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF
ANTON CHEKHOV
1885-1890
This collection of letters begins in 1885 when Chekhov was twenty-five years old. His literary output was already enormous and while the early work cannot be compared with what came later, many of the early stories are very good and all of them are interesting comments on Russian life.
Chekhov had been doing every kind of grubby literary work to support his family. He had even been writing a kind of gos- sip column. But in 1885 he began to move away from hack work. He gave up the pseudonym of Antosha Chekhonte with which he had signed the early humorous stories and came forth as Anton Chekhov, a modest and earnest young man who was about to take his first steps as a serious writer.
St. Petersburg was the cultural center of Russia—Moscow was the merchants' city—and to be published in St. Petersburg was of great importance to a young writer. Chekhov was already known to the St. Petersburg magazines by his humorous stories, but now the serious stories began to be commented on and
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praised. Chekhov, on his first visit to St. Petersburg in 1885, was surprised to find himself the literary toast of the town. It was on this visit that Alexei Suvorin, editor of the powerful, con- servative, pro-government New Times, invited Chekhov to be- come a regular contributor. The newspaper was important, the pay was better than Chekhov had ever had before and his new friend, Suvorin, was a man of great prestige and influence.
The year 1885 marked other changes in his life. Financially, things were a little easier and his social life was pleasanter. He liked his friends, the Kiselevs, and when they offered to rent him a small house on their beautiful estate at Babkino he jumped at the chance. The Kiselevs were cultured people and they kept open house for the most interesting intellectuals in Russia. The summer guests came and went through days and evenings of charming picnics and brilliant talk and excellent music. Life on the Kiselev estate was on a far higher level than Chekhov had ever known before and he flourished in it.
The years 1885 to i8go were probably the most important of Chekhov's life. They do not include his most important work, but they lay the pattern for everything that was to come. It was in these years that the stones of the character were set into place, the design of the man took shape. The future was in these years, the good and the bad of it. The first signs of tuberculosis appeared, he became a serious writer and a serious man, and he became famous. The extravagant early praise of the critics and the literary public turned, as it usually does, into extrav- agant attack. Now they said that he had no philosophy, that he reported life without interpreting it. A critic of great impor- tance, Mikhailovsky, accused him of aimlessness. His connec- tion with Suvorin and the reactionary, anti-Semitic New Tim.es was looked upon with suspicion and distaste.
But nobody had taken the measure of the man as well as the man himself. Chekhov looked at his work with clarity and humility. He was on his way to himself, so to speak, and because he knew he would find himself, he was not to be hurried or pushed or bullied. True, the charge of aimlessness bit deep and he turned this way and that, smarting under it.
One of the ways he turned—and then turned back again— was toward Tolstoyism. Chekhov was never a member of the Tolstoy inner circle and even in his most enthusiastic period he disliked the ascetic side of Tolstoy's teachings, but many of the stories written at this time are under the influence of the Mas- ter: the vanity-of-earthly-goods theme in "The Bet," and the non-resistance-to-evil theme in "The Meeting." These were also the years of his first full-length play. The short plays, the vaude- villes, were already popular—they showed the great instinctive knowledge he had for theatre technique—but Ivanov was his first attempt at a large work for the stage. Much of Ivanov is interesting, particularly the first half of the play, but most of it is muddled and overstated and repetitive. It was written by a man. who thought clearly, but the play is without clarity. Chekhov discovered—his later plays show how well he learned from the mistakes of Ivanov—that characters in a play cannot be written as if they were characters in a story or a novel. He learned, too, that writing for the stage is primarily the tech- nique of paring down.