As Chekhov wrote to his friend and publisher Suvorin many years later, “What the aristocrat writers get for free from nature, intellectuals of lower birth have to pay for with their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, a former shopboy, choirboy, schoolboy, and student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss priests’ hands, and worship the thoughts of others, thankful for every piece of bread, whipped time and again, having to go give lessons without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, loving to eat at rich relatives’ houses, needlessly hypocritical before God and man, merely from a sense of his own insignificance—write a story about how this young man squeezes the serf out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking up one bright morning this young man feels that in his veins there no longer flows the blood of a slave, but the blood of a real man.”
By the time the nineteen-year-old Chekhov rejoined his parents in Moscow three years later, having secured a scholarship to study at the university, the family was living in utter poverty in grimy basement lodgings in Grachyovka, one of Moscow’s red-light districts. Anton immediately took charge and became the head and chief support of the family, a position he was to keep till the end of his life. His family nicknamed him “Papa Antosha.” He was determined to succeed, and despite the harsh reality of his situation wrote to his cousin, “I will make a fortune... that is as certain as that two and two make four.”
Chekhov began making his fortune by writing stories and vignettes for the popular Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines. According to his younger brother Michael, the moment the first installment of Antons scholarship arrived from Taganrog, he bought up all the magazines he could lay his hands on. He meticulously read through them to see what they were publishing, and then went to work. He sent in sharp, witty, innovative pieces such as “On the Train,” “Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town,” and “The Trial,” all of which were published during 1881 in the Moscow humorous magazine Zritel (Spectator). “Confession—or Olya, Zhenya, Zoya: A Letter” was published in Budilnik (Alarm Clock), and “Village Doctors” in Svet i teni (Light and Shades).
Chekhov’s pieces came as a surprise to readers of the time, for whom a story was supposed to deal with significant issues and have a clear beginning, middle, and end. It was supposed to impart the author’s ideals. Chekhov’s stories veered from this norm. “On the Train” is seemingly formless and impres-sionistic: the protagonist travels through the night on a train that then breaks down. Nothing actually happens, except that he meets a series of bizarre figures: a pickpocket, a lost peasant, a man wishing he had some chloroform so he can have his way with the girl sitting next to him. The atmosphere is oppressive—“Darkness, anguish, thoughts of death, memo-ries of childhood, oh God!”—but Chekhov constantly weaves in bright flashes of humor and comedy that give the piece its complex texture. In “Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town” Chekhov is even more innovative and daring. The story is narrated as a string of disjointed telegrams. In this period Chekhov signed his pieces “Antosha,” “Antosha Ch.,” “My brother’s brother,” “A man without a spleen,” and “Chekhonte”—the last a nickname coined for him by his former religion teacher at school, Father Pokrovsky.
Contemporaries of Chekhov described him roaming the streets, markets, taverns, and brothels of Moscow, absorbing the color and commotion of the city and working it into quick, vivid prose. His friend and fellow writer Vladimir Korolenko wrote in his memoirs that when he asked Chekhov how he wrote his stories, Chekhov laughed, snatched up the nearest object—an ashtray—and said that if Korolenko wanted a story called “The Ashtray,” he could have it the next morning.
Soon Chekhov was writing at such a pace that he was paying family and friends 10 kopecks for story ideas and 20 kopecks for plot outlines. But making ends meet remained a major problem for him throughout the 1880s, and in letters to friends he constantly laments his lack of money. In a letter to Suvorin in 1888 Chekhov wrote, “I was terribly corrupted by the fact that I was born, grew up, studied, and began to write in a milieu in which money played a shockingly large role.”
As money began trickling in from the publication of his work, Chekhov managed to move his family to better lodgings—they were to move almost a dozen times during his student years. But as he had to share his cramped living space with his parents, siblings, lodgers, and a constant flow of visiting relatives, Chekhov’s living and working conditions remained very difficult.
“In front of me sits my nonliterary work, banging mercilessly at my conscience. In the next room a visiting relatives fledgling is bawling; in the other room father is reading The Sealed Angel out loud to mother. Someone has wound up the phonograph, and La Belle Hélène is playing. I want to escape to the country, but it’s one in the morning. Can you imagine more vile circumstances for a man of letters?”
Chekhov wrote this to his new friend and publisher Nicholas Leikin in August 1883. Leikin was the owner and editor of the popular humorous St. Petersburg magazine Oskolki (Splinters), for which Chekhov was to write 162 pieces over the next couple of years. Leikin had been searching for an energetic writer who had a wild sense of humor and an innovative style—and, most importantly, who was a master of brevity. Chekhov was the ideal candidate. Oskolki had a strict editorial limit of 100 lines, which forced Chekhov to develop an inventive style concise enough to carry ideas within an extremely restrictive framework. He complained bitterly that he had to “squeeze the very pith and essence” out of his plots, but he readily complied, sending Leikin some of the most original writing of the time. Oskolki published everything from anecdotes, witty riddles, and cartoons to intricate vignettes and stories. Chekhov took these forms and expanded them into new literary genres. In one of the first pieces Oskolki published, “An Unsuccessful Visit,” a simple joke turns into what today would be classified as a short short story. It begins, “A dandy enters a house in which he’s never been.” There is a swift roll of dialogue in which the debonair young mans roguish language bounces off the sensitive, nuanced responses of a young girl “wearing a cotton dress and little white apron.” The delicate vignette ends with a one-liner that turns it right back into a comic anecdote.
In another early piece published in Oskolki, “The Cross,” Chekhov pokes a daring jab at the oppressive state censorship, which had just been granted greater power after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in March 1881. In “The Cross,” a poet enters a drawing room: “‘Well,’ the hostess turns to him, ‘how did your dear little poem do?”’ The guests hover about him, amazed and impressed that a poet should be awarded a cross for a poem. The angry poet holds up his manuscript for all to see, and the startled guests realize that the cross he was awarded is “not the kind of cross you can pin on your lapel”—it is the red ink cross of the state censor. His poem has been disallowed.
Like many of his contemporaries, Chekhov put a good deal of effort into eluding the censor. It was always chancy what would manage to slip by and what would be prohibited. The story “In Autumn,” for instance, passed the censor and was published in Budilnik in 1882. But three years later, when Chekhov adapted it as the one-act play On the High Road, a drama censor with the eye-catching name of Kaiser von Nilckheim branded it filthy and foul. It was not per-formed during Chekhov’s lifetime. The short story “To Speak or Be Silent” was also forbidden by the censor, as it warned the reader of the dangers of speaking too freely before a stranger who might well be a secret service agent.