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 cliches: a selfish lustful widow, a villainous Polish manager, a noble peasant, a violent denouement, 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.
86
87
DIM: i îí (in KIIOV
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, hut 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?'
TWELVE Ô
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':15 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 welclass="underline" 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
88
89
DOC Mill (II I Ê IK) V 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 contributed 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 paediatrics. Here he wrote up the case of Ekaterina Kurnukova, a doomed infant, paralysed and pustulent with neonatal syphilis, whom he tended for twelve weeks.16 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
1882-3
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.17 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,18 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.