The actress in Chekhov’s drama – Arkadina in The Seagull – is likewise an egocentric exhibitionist who has to be curbed. This review of Bernhardt is the first shot in a war that Chekhov as dramatist and later Stanislavsky as director were to wage against the stars of the stage and their pretensions. Like the Salon des Variétés, actresses were frequented by Anton in private and denounced in public.
Chekhov was becoming a journalist. Frequenting The Alarm Clock he got to know Moscow’s most fearless reporter, Giliarovsky (‘Uncle Giliai’), the linchpin of Moscow’s best newspaper, the Moscow Gazette. Kolia and Anton had been invited to become founder members of Moscow’s gymnastic society (in 1882 Anton was muscular and broad-shouldered). Their first sight in the gym was Russia’s champion boxer, Seletsky sparring with the bear-like Uncle Giliai. Giliai represented for a while Anton’s ideal of versatility. True, Anton did not frequent thieves in the slums around the Khitrovo market, drink spirits by the gallon, uproot large trees without a spade, stop a speeding cab by grabbing hold of the rear of the carriage, break the test-your-strength machine at the Ermitage, tame a horse so vicious that it had been expelled from the cavalry, lift friends bodily off the platform onto a departing train, nor perform any other of Giliarovsky’s legendary feats, but in his later determination to be a journalist, an explorer and a farmer, as well as a doctor and writer, Anton was to emulate Uncle Giliai.
As much as a nervous censorship allowed, Chekhov wrote of crime. In 1881–2 three scandals rocked Russia: a railway crash at Kukuevka on 30 June 1882, on the line to Moscow from Kursk (and Taganrog), where an embankment collapsed and entombed hundreds of passengers; the Rykov affair (which lasted until 1884), the embezzlement by a bank’s directors of millions of roubles; and the arrests of Taganrog merchants and customs officials, for smuggling. In all cases the accused were punished so leniently, that the stench of corruption hung in the air. After the Kukuevka affair everyone feared for their lives on Russia’s jerry-built railways: the government forbad further discussion of accidents. Kukuevka injected into Chekhov’s stories the same morbid distrust of railways that we find in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
The Taganrog customs scandal affected the Chekhovs most. In June 1882 Aleksandr graduated from Moscow university. He wanted to set up house with Anna Sokolnikova and escape Pavel’s strictures, so he applied for one of the posts vacated by Taganrog’s imprisoned officials.
By mid 1882, Anton had enough published in The Spectator and The Alarm Clock to swell the family income. (Nevertheless, he accepted an Easter job tutoring the seven-year-old son of a senator, Anatoli Iakovlev.) He was invited to write for a serious weekly illustrated magazine, Moscow, and he collaborated with Kolia on a miniature novel The Green Spit of Land, about a country house on the Black Sea. Again, the characters bear the names of real people: the artist Chekhov, Maria Egorovna (presumably Polevaeva), while the narrator, unnamed, resembles Anton, for he teaches the heroine’s daughter German and goldfinch trapping. The Green Spit of Land showed that Chekhov could parody the pseudo-aristocratic pap – the ‘boulevard novel’ – which was then in demand; now he was challenged by Kurepin to give The Alarm Clock a pastiche that the reader might take for the real thing. The result, ‘The Unnecessary Victory’, was serialized from June until September 1882 and earned ‘Antosha Chekhonte’ several hundred roubles. This pastiche, too, apes the boulevard novel – a singer, exploited and then triumphant, a desperate aristocratic lover. Readers took it to be a translation of a novel by the Hungarian Mór Jókai.6 It stretched Chekhov’s narrative ambitions.
In summer 1882, after the exams, Chekhov published in Moscow his first bid for literary renown. Called ‘The Lady’, the story is full of modish clichés: a selfish lustful widow, a villainous Polish manager, a noble peasant, a violent dénouement, and the narrator’s radical indignation. It is, nevertheless, a harbinger of better things. Anton’s later stories of oppressed peasantry, and his fiction of the mid 1880s, where sexuality leads to violence, grow out of ‘The Lady’.
So encouraged was Chekhov by success, that he devised more pseudonyms – Chekhonte spawned ‘the Man without a Spleen’ and ‘Mr Baldastov’. With Kolia as illustrator, Anton compiled 160 pages of his best work to print and bind on credit. He himself would market the book (which had several titles – At Leisure, Idlers and Easygoers, Naughty Tricks). On 19 June 1882 the censor rejected the application. When a second request was submitted, pointing out that these stories had already passed the censor once, the argument was accepted, but, in an ever more repressive atmosphere, the book was banned in page proof.
If Anton was to support the family, he would have to write a hundred stories a year for Moscow’s weekly magazines. Vania was independent now and Aleksandr, as a customs officer, would receive a regular salary, but Masha and Misha were still students, while neither Kolia nor Pavel brought much to the household. There were other dependants too: Aunt Fenichka, Korbo the whippet, and Fiodor Timofeich the tomcat. Aleksandr had brought home Fiodor as a kitten who had been abandoned in a freezing latrine. Anton was much comforted when Fiodor stretched out on his lap and to this cat he first addressed an expression he applied to himself and his brothers: ‘Who would have thought that such genius would come out of an earth closet?’
Notes
1 Anastasia’s husband, Putiata shared the editorship of Chiaroscuro with Pushkariov.
2 Despite the marital links that bound the Goldens to the Chekhovs, Anton’s younger brothers and his sister obliterated the Golden name from history.
3 Many an Anna Ivanovna pined for a Chekhov: we shall call her Anna Sokolnikova.
4 See OR, 331 82 12: A. I. Khrushchiova-Sokolnikova, née Aleksandrova, documents.
5 Chekhov’s opinions coincided with those of two men whom he venerated, Turgenev and his future publisher Aleksei Suvorin, but he would not know this until five years later.
6 The Unnecessary Victory has generated four screenplays this century.
TWELVE
Fragmentation
1882–3
ON 25 JULY 1882, in bad debt, and not telling the Chekhovs that Anna was two months pregnant, Aleksandr, his common-law wife and her teenage son Shura left their dog with Aunt Fenichka and Korbo and caught the train south for Tula. There they stayed for a day, entrusting Shura to Anna’s relatives, before travelling to Taganrog. Aleksandr saw familiar faces: ‘In Tula, Antosha, I saw at the station your bride, she who is on the Grachiovka, and her mama. They say of this mama that when she got in the saddle, she broke a horse’s back.’ Aleksandr did not like his wife’s home town, and sent Anton an anti-ode to Tula. It is similar in tone to Betjeman’s poem ‘Slough’:1
I entered Tula with distress,
My greying girlfriend would insist
On dragging me, she could not see.
Alas, I could not overrule her,
I suffered and I went to Tula …
In Taganrog, at first, all went well: Aleksandr had returned to his native town in glory – a graduate, a civil servant, and apparently married to a gentlewoman. Stopping at the Hotel Europa, Aleksandr entered Mitrofan’s shop as customer, to be swamped by avuncular embraces and hospitality. Mitrofan and Liudmila (who now had four children) removed Aleksandr and his partner from the hotel, in exchange for teaching their twelve-year-old son Georgi grammar. Then they stayed with old friends, the Agalis, as paying guests. Very soon, however, Taganrog had read Anton and Kolia’s skit of the Loboda wedding, and only the Chekhovs’ nanny Agafia was still pleased to see Aleksandr.
Taganrog was not on Anton’s mind. All July 1882 he had to earn money in Moscow, while his mother and the younger Chekhovs were in Voskresensk with Vania. Pavel stayed overnight at the Moscow apartment every other day, so Kolia and Anton moved to a dacha with Pushkariov and his consort Anastasia. Deserted, Pavel called his wife and younger children back from Voskresensk and then threatened to join his sons at Pushkariov’s. While the friendship with Pushkariov lasted, Chekhov con
tributed to his journals. Talk of the World aimed high: Anton printed a story, ‘Livestock’, that recalls the perpetual triangle in Dostoevsky’s Eternal Husband. In ‘Livestock’ too the lover is saddled forever with the husband of the woman he has seduced.
After the holidays, Pushkariov printed Chekhov’s longest piece in a Moscow weekly: four issues of Talk of the World carried ‘Belated Flowers’. (This story was dedicated to Anton’s former lodger, the medical student Nikolai Korobov.) The ‘belated flowers’ are a patrician family fallen on hard times. The story line, though crude, is strong. The central hero shows the author’s wishful thinking: a doctor of humble origins flourishes as the ‘belated flowers’ wilt. Chekhov re-used the story line less crassly in ‘Ionych’ of 1899, where a plebeian doctor likewise turns the tables on the town’s patrician family.
‘Livestock’ and ‘Belated Flowers’ like ‘The Lady’, were impressive: they brought respect, demand and money. That year, 1882–3, was strenuous for Anton. Fourth-year medics were taught by the luminaries of Russian surgery and internal medicine. Chekhov’s practicals were in pædiatrics. Here he wrote up the case of Ekaterina Kurnukova, a doomed infant, paralysed and pustulent with neonatal syphilis, whom he tended for twelve weeks.2 To mix harrowing study with a social life and some hundred literary pieces needed superhuman determination and energy.
To make a name, however, a writer had to be printed in Petersburg, where periodicals printed what was considered to be serious literature. Chekhov owed his breakthrough to the poet Liodor Palmin, who wrote for both Moscow’s and St Petersburg’s press. When Chekhov first saw him at The Alarm Clock Palmin, at forty-one, looked like a tramp: hunched, pockmarked and dirty. A few lyrics of noble civic sentiment, some elegant translations of the classics and a talent for improvisation made him popular. He was an unusually compassionate soul in the literary world. Flitting from one tenement to another, in dingy parts of Moscow where visitors risked their lives at night, with his servant Pelageia, who became consort and eventually wife, Palmin took in stray dogs, cats, ducks and hens, the crippled, the blind and the mangy. He and Pelageia drank heavily.3 Chekhov was as fascinated by Palmin as by Uncle Giliai; the fascination was mutual.
In October 1882 Nikolai Leikin, editor of the St Petersburg weekly journal Fragments, came to see Palmin. They dined at Moscow’s best restaurant, Testov’s. As they drove away, Palmin spotted Kolia and Anton Chekhov on the pavement. He recommended them to Leikin, always in search of talent, as contributors. By 14 November Leikin had accepted three of Anton’s pieces (and rejected two). He paid 8 kopecks a line, he wanted weekly contributions and he allotted Anton up to a quarter of each issue of 1000 lines. (In Russia even writers as famous as Tolstoy were paid by the line for short works and by the printer’s sheet of 24 pages for longer works.) Kolia provided centrefold and cover pictures. Leikin was Russia’s most prolific writer of comic sketches: every Taganrog schoolboy knew his work. As an editor he was ruthless (he rewrote without consulting his authors), but he won respect for his tenacity against the censors and drew major writers, notably the novelist Nikolai Leskov, to Fragments.
Despite a weekly correspondence, which became frank,4 Anton found Leikin’s boasting and pedantry tiresome. A nouveau riche eccentric, Leikin nevertheless commanded admiration for his love of animals and children. In 1882 he adopted a baby left on his doorstep. For his two hounds, Apel and Rogulka, he hung his Christmas tree with raw meat. Anton’s physical distaste for Leikin, ‘the lame devil’, a squat, hirsute man with tiny eyes, and his irritation with Leikin’s manipulative ploys were tempered by gratitude for spotting his talent. Leikin wanted exclusivity, and Anton had to write less for the Moscow journals. This jealousy became paranoiac at the end of the year, when subscribers were deciding which magazines to take for the new year. Leikin needed to show that anyone who wanted to read Antosha Chekhonte had to buy Fragments. Leikin’s motives were economic, and agreed with Anton’s artistic principles on one point only: the need for precision, speed and brevity. Yet, under Leikin’s and the censor’s stringent tutelage, Chekhov began to show a telling, ironic turn of phrase, a gift for dialogue, for an impressionistic image.
A new rhythm started: Fragments came out every Saturday and various Chekhovs put Anton’s contributions on Tuesday’s midnight mail train to Petersburg so that Leikin could set them up, submit them to the censor and get them out in time. The discipline was stricter still when Leikin asked Chekhov to provide a weekly column called ‘Fragments of Moscow Life’. This was to parade the corruption and provinciality of Moscow for the amusement of Petersburg’s readers, who needed to believe that they were in Europe and Moscow was in Asia. To be exposed as the author would have made life difficult: Chekhov had a new pseudonym for these articles, ‘Ruver’, and, when his hand was suspected after a few months by others in Moscow’s ‘Grub Street’, switched to ‘Ulysses’. Writing less for Moscow and mocking Moscow’s writers and editors lost Anton friends in the offices of The Alarm Clock, where he even used editorial conferences as material for his Fragments articles. Eight kopecks a line justified betrayal. In Moscow Anton published in The Spectator where friendly relations with the Golden sisters helped, and where Davydov also paid 8 kopecks a line. Any Moscow publication, especially at the end of the year, was to Leikin a dagger in the back. Often Leikin accused Palmin and Chekhov of losing him subscribers by their promiscuity.
Socially, Anton was moving in more refined circles. His sister Masha, whom her elder brothers had spurned as the family crybaby, had grown up to be a friend and confidante. In May 1882 she matriculated from the episcopal gimnazia and started university courses (in Russia, as in Britain, female students were taught extramurally). Enrolled on the prestigious Guerrier courses, where eminent historians such as Kliuchevsky lectured, Masha had become a kursistka (a female external student). The friends Masha brought home in autumn 1882 to her brothers were more salubrious than the editorial secretaries of the weekly magazines, let alone the landladies with whom her brothers roomed, but only the more daring girls on the Guerrier courses could breathe the Bohemian atmosphere around Kolia and Anton. Masha’s fellow students rivalled Anna and Natalia Golden for Kolia’s and Anton’s affections. To one, Ekaterina Iunosheva, an entomologist, Anton sent a beetle ‘which has died of desperate love’, but she favoured Kolia.
Olga Kundasova, known as ‘the astronomer’, was a kursistka who found work at the Moscow observatory. In 1883 she and Anton became lovers, a relationship that limped on for two decades. Olga Kundasova was gawky, strong-boned, highly strung, but even in her most unhappy and infatuated moments too penetrating and frank for Anton to be comfortable with. More seductive was a temperamental, mordant Jewish student, Dunia Efros. Both Olga Kundasova and Dunia Efros experienced much distress before finding their places on the periphery of Anton’s life. Far more complex and less Bohemian than earlier women in the three brothers’ lives, they also behaved as equals. They changed Anton’s perception of women. If the best stories Chekhov wrote for Fragments have psychological depth, we must thank the women whom Masha brought into Anton’s life. Masha was hostess, secretary, éprouveuse and protector of Anton’s private life, and began to share with him the power in the family.
Anton’s older brothers were marginalized. Kolia’s dissipation, and his tuberculosis, were undermining his reputation as an artist. He now took morphine, initially for the pains in his chest, as well as consuming copious amounts of alcohol. For some time the family tried to ignore him. In Taganrog Aleksandr was half-forgotten, despite regular letters which showed that he too was unhappy. Aleksandr and Anna were hopelessly inept housekeepers and Aleksandr did not present the Customs Office with the graduation certificate necessary to receive a full salary. The salary he did receive did not pay for even food and fuel. At first, the couple were lulled by Uncle Mitrofan and Aunt Liudmila’s friendliness. Anna joined a confederacy of women and Aunt Liudmila confided her intimate secrets. Aleksandr tantalized Anton:
Auntie even told my
better half a few things about the general bliss that uncle provides her with. Naturally, I too know these details but I shall conceal them from you, for in fact they are quite unlike the slow motion which you, Antosha, make when you fold your fingers in a certain way.
Anna was clearly pregnant; the couple equivocated about christening the child. Mitrofan and Liudmila were embarrassed. In October 1882 Aleksandr, living on Kontorskaia, the street where he lived when he was a boy, begged Vania to come and stay: ‘Write to me, don’t let our links die. Anna is pregnant and invites you to the christening … I shall hand my offspring over to your school for you to teach, with the right to beat no more than five times a day.’5 Aleksandr attempted to lure Kolia to Taganrog in the most effective way he knew: ‘Liubov Kamburova was there. She is still in love with you. For God’s sake come and copulate with her, for she is desperately seeking what in Latin is called inter pedes … figura longa et obscura. You are besought, come.’6
To Anton, as a budding gynæcologist, Aleksandr turned for sexual advice: Anna’s pregnancy left him frustrated. Anton replied to Aleksandr (with a gift of money) and told him that ‘medicine, while forbidding coitus, does not forbid massage.’ The quality of Anton’s mercy was a little strained: he was more preoccupied with medical studies by day and writing, to Pavel’s fury at the paraffin consumed, by night. He asked Aleksandr and Anna to send material for stories – descriptions of spiritualist seances in Tula, schoolboy rhymes from Taganrog, photographs. Only Pavel, horrified by Anna’s pregnancy, was utterly unbending. At first Aleksandr just remonstrated: ‘Dear Papa … I am saddened only that you won’t send your regards to Anna, knowing full well that if we are not married, it is not my fault.’ On the eve of New Year 1883 Aleksandr tried emotional blackmail on his parent:
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