Love and literature brought Kolia and Anton to The Spectator and tied Aleksandr to The Alarm Clock. Through Anna Sokolnikova, Anton, too, within the year, became a contributor to The Alarm Clock, and through Anastasia Putiata-Golden, Anton met the editor and owner of Chiaroscuro and Talk of the World, and became a contributor to both.
The sleazy world of the Moscow weeklies and the nightclubs, such as the Salon des Varietes where the contributors congregated, gave Anton material both for personal enjoyment and literary indignation. On one occasion, he exploited a visit he made to the Salon des Varietes at the end of September 1881 with two rich cousins from Shuia, Ivan Ivanovich Liadov and his brother-in-law Gundobin, whom Chekhov nicknamed Mukhtar after the Turkish general who fought the Russians in the Caucasus. Had Anton signed his article with his real name, the doors of the Salon would have closed to all Chekhovs. In it he describes the 'hostesses' - the Blanches, Mimis, Fannis, Emmas -whose fortune-seeking in Russia ended in this sordid nightclub - while the customers, named as Kolia, Ivan Ivanovich and Mukhtar, drink and disappear into private rooms. The thrust of the article is in the end: 'Antosha Ñ advises the management that they would make more money by charging to leave, not to enter. Chekhov wrote many sallies against the Salon: perhaps he was responsible for it closing and reopening as the Theatre Bouffe in 1883. The distaste in Anton's article is at odds with Kolia's illustration, a centrefold, crowded with flirtatious hostesses, daring cancan dancers and happy punters.
In September 1881, euphoric after the family wedding, Aunt Marfa Loboda wrote to congratulate Anton on his achievements. Aunt Marfa could not have been more cruelly deceived. Taganrog did not admire Anton long. The issue of The Spectator (No. 9, 4 October 1881) that printed the Salon des Varietes, carried a double-page spread of Kolia's wicked caricatures and Anton's disrespectful text, 'The Wedding Season'. The Lobodas, the Chekhovs and Gavriil Selivanov could see their faces drawn as the various wedding guests: a noisy drunken Mitrofan; the bridegroom, Onufri Loboda, captioned 'As stupid as a cork… marrying for the dowry'; Gavriil Selivanov as 'a lady-killer…'
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The scandal broke when Aleksandr moved to Taganrog. He advised Kolia and Anton: If you two value your backs, I advise you not to go to Taganrog. The Lobodas, Selivanov, their kith and kin are all seriously furious with you for 'The Wedding' in The Spectator. Here that cartoon is seen as an expression of the blackest ingratitude for hospitality. Yesterday Selivanov came… with the following speech: 'I'll tell you that Anton and Nikolai's behaviour was caddish and in bad faith, taking material for their cartoons from houses where they were received as family… I don't know what I did to deserve this insult.' Anton was unperturbed: he replied that he disliked all issues of the Lobodas as much as they disliked issue No. 18 of The Spectator. Chekhov had a lifelong blind spot: despite his powers of empathy, he never understood the hurt of people whose private lives he had turned into comedy. Mitrofan had probably never been drunk in his life; he read The Spectator and felt betrayed: how did this barb tally with Anton's protestations of love four months before? Years passed before Aunt Marfa wrote again. Gavriil Selivanov left Anton's letters unanswered. The affectionate Lipochka Agali, probably the Hellenic beauty portrayed as 'the Queen of the Ball', also fell silent. Not for the last time were those most sure of Anton's affection embarrassed and humiliated in his fiction, and never would Anton admit, let alone repent, his exploitation.
Anton was now attacking more formidable targets. On 26 November 1881 France's most renowned actress, Sarah Bernhardt, came to Moscow, fresh from America and Vienna, and began twelve nights at the Bolshoi theatre in Dumas-fils' La Dame aux camelias. Sarah Bernhardt had a poor press from Moscow's reviewers, but nobody panned her like Anton Chekhonte in The Spectator in November and December 1881.13 Despite Bernhardt's histrionic skills, he declared her so soulless, so tedious that 'if the editor paid me 50 kopecks a line I would not write about her again'. The crux of Chekhov's reaction was: 'She has no spark, the only thing to make us cry hot tears and swoon. Every sigh of Sarah Bernhardt, her tears, her dying convulsions, all her acting is nothing but a faultlessly and cleverly learnt lesson…' The actress in Chekhov's drama - Arkadina in The Seagull - is
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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 Varietes, 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 Dosto-evsky'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 tbat 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 Ìîã Jokai.14 It stretched Chekhov's narrative ambitions.