Suvorin paid three times as much and gave twice as much space as the Moscow editors to the writers who filled his paper’s Wednesday and Saturday supplements. His readers were more sophisticated, too: they, like their editor, had a salacious streak, they wanted dangerous women and wicked Jews in their stories; but they were prepared to have ambiguity and lyricism and to do without mockery and flippancy. Suvorin’s newspaper was once compared to a zoo whose animals were fed and watered by a kindly keeper: Chekhov was the elephant in this zoo, and the only animal encouraged to take walks abroad.
Many Russian writers, especially the radical left, regarded with distaste Chekhov’s alliance with the Suvorin family – the alliance weakened only at the end of the 1890s, when Suvorin and his heir’s anti-semitism became embarrassing. Quips flew through St Petersburg: ‘Suvorin the father, Suvorin the son and Chekhov the Holy Ghost.’ But from Suvorin’s paper it was possible for Chekhov to graduate, belatedly, to the conventional avenue for a novice Russian writer: the thick monthly journals to which the intelligentsia and gentry subscribed. Only then, from 1888 with the publication of ‘The Steppe’ could Chekhov have the freedom to write at as much length as he chose, for a fee which allowed him to write at his own pace. To survive as a writer for the Moscow weeklies, Chekhov would have had to go on writing two or three stories a week under various pseudonyms. Under Suvorin he could live like a bourgeois on a story a week; on the monthly journals, two or three longer tales a year were sufficient to raise the writer’s income to that of a gentleman.
Suvorin was not only a deus ex machina who found work and pensions for Chekhov as well as his parents and siblings; he was a friend who for several years tried to persuade Chekhov to marry his daughter (at first as a child of eleven) and share the family fortune. Here Chekhov began to show his mettle, what Suvorin called his flint, against what Chekhov called Suvorin’s ‘weak character’. Never was a Dr Faust better defended against a Mephistopheles: one of Chekhov’s mistresses had happened to be a certain Lily Markova, who had been the Suvorin family governess: Chekhov knew all Suvorin’s terrible secrets. Because he understood – and shared – Suvorin’s depression, this was a basis for a friendship almost unique between publisher and writer. Suvorin was also an influence – if only by reaction, for his salacious stories and anti-semitic plays evoked in Chekhov a powerful retort. Furthermore, Suvorin and his family served as material to Chekhov, to the amusement of Suvorin’s second wife, to the indignation of his sons and hangers-on. The lonely professor of ‘A Dreary Story’, like Professor Serebryakov of Uncle Vanya tormenting his young wife, is only one example of the use to which Chekhov could put his friends: the most extreme, perhaps, was the suicide of Suvorin’s young son, Volodya, in 1887, which Chekhov reworked in a story of that name and again in The Seagull.
Suvorin and his cronies had recognized in Chekhov’s Moscow stories an extraordinary evocation of nature, a gift for a single brush-stroke to convey a picture. Under Suvorin, Chekhov now developed a psychology for his heroes, and particularly his heroines. The fourth story in this volume, ‘Verochka’, is not Chekhov’s best-known story, but it is a landmark in its sensitive use of the non-encounter for a story. Russian dramatists had always distinguished themselves by their ability to remove from classical comedy its key element: the wedding bells for the young couple in the final act. In Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit (1827), a variation of Molière’s The Misanthropist and the most remarkable verse comedy ever written inside or outside Russia, the heroine is publicly humiliated while her admirer calls for a carriage to take him far away. The hero of Gogol’s Marriage leaps through a second-floor window rather than go through with the betrothal which his friend has worked so hard to arrange for him. Turgenev’s Home of the Gentry (A Nest of Gentlefolk), where the heroine goes to a nunnery instead of marrying the hero, is another precedent. Never, however, had Russian literature achieved such a touching tragi-comedy of non-communication, of the failure of the male to fulfil his role of hunter and decision-maker, as in Chekhov’s ‘Verochka’: the strength of the story is in its complete absence of moralizing or even morality, in the way that nature seems to predetermine the failure of the encounter, even to symbolize the mystery of non-motivation in the mist that pervades the air.
Chekhov had found his scene. Although he was to become a landowner and gardener only six years later, the garden is in his work, as in medieval romance or in Turgenev’s novels, the setting for the crucial events and non-events in human life. In Chekhov’s case one can go further: his stories take their indirect lines and fuzzy boundaries not from literary, but from horticultural technique. In gardens, paths should lead you circuitously back to an exit which was your entrance; the boundaries between the artificial garden and the natural landscape should be invisible. Thus the protagonists of ‘Verochka’, as of many Chekhov stories and plays, end up in the same predicament with which they began, only now with a knowledge of the circularity in their existence. Chekhov has found a pattern for a story, a couple thrown together – a feckless but well-meaning male visitor to a provincial girl, literally leading her up the garden path and then failing to utter the expected words that will bring the story to an end. We will encounter this pattern again and again, but with ever subtler variations: it is there in the sub-plot of ‘A Dreary Story’; it is the primary theme, much more cruel, in ‘A Visit to Friends’; it is to be found in the plays – Dr Astrov and Sonya in Uncle Vanya, Lopakhin and Varya in The Cherry Orchard.
At the end of 1887, the same year and in the same newspaper – Suvorin’s New Times, in which ‘Verochka’ was printed – Chekhov published ‘The Kiss’. Here, too, at the end the hero deliberately refuses to take the opportunity to make sense of a brief encounter, when he decides to sleep alone in a peasant hut rather than accept the invitation to the general’s house where, on his last visit, he was kissed by a mysterious young woman in the dark, by mistake. The mood of ‘Verochka’ is pathetic – we feel for the heroine who is given no explanation. In ‘The Kiss’ the erotic encounter was a mistake, no forsaken woman is suffering, and the situation is touchingly comic. The lonely hero’s name Ryabovich, ‘pock-marked’, mutes our sympathy for his obsessive reaction; moreover we see him as one of a group of unmarried, unhappy and dull officers. Yet Ryabovich is the victim of the same forces as the hero of Verochka’s If the autumnal mists cool the ardour of Verochka’s admirer, Ryabovich is compelled by the smell of spring in the poplar trees, the lilacs and the roses, to a frenzy of erotic introversion (Chekhov’s acute sense of smell, which reminds one of the decadent sympathies of a Huysmans, shows itself in the importance of scents in determining the reactions of his characters.)
‘The Kiss’ met with a very positive response – partly because of Chekhov’s extraordinary ease in conveying a military milieu, something he was not to attempt again until the play Three Sisters. Mainly, perhaps, such stories evoked a positive reaction because they reminded the Russian reader of Maupassant. Chekhov’s work of the mid 1880s has much in common with Maupassant: extraordinary economy of language, an ability to penetrate the inner life of another social element (Maupassant too could write about officers), a fondness for highly sexed heroines, a love of rivers, seascapes and fishing. ‘The Kiss’ has the symmetry of a Maupassant story and, if it lacks the melodrama or violent action so characteristic of Maupassant, that lack was yet to be appreciated by Chekhov’s readers as a positive advance. We will find Maupassant often mentioned, even loudly praised, in Chekhov’s fiction; Maupassant’s fine tale, A Life, where a patrician estate falls into ruin and is sold to the heroine’s exploiters, was to provide much material for The Cherry Orchard. For a while, too, Chekhov shared Maupassant’s modest view of the modern writer as an honest artisan providing workmanlike prose for an era in which the great writers (whether Flaubert and Stendhal, or Turgenev and Dostoyevsky) had become canonized and new genius was still to be born.