A Shooting Party is unjustly ignored. As in 1882, Chekhov stretched himself in a pastiche, even parody, of melodramatic stories, with decadent aristocrats on rotting estates, fatal girls in red, and wicked intriguing Poles. The novel is extraordinary: not only at 170 pages is it Chekhov's longest piece of fiction, but it anticipates Agatha Christie: the investigating magistrate, Kamyshev, is revealed, apparently by the editor of News of the Day, to be the murderer, who has framed the
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DOC: I OK i è i i, iiov main suspect. In the wild exotic'garden in a mythical south Russian landscape where all falls apart, the world of 'The Black Monk' or The Cherry Orchard is sketched out. The story is poetic, ingenious, and sensational.
Leikin was as worried by such diversions as he was pleased by Anton's reputation. Tales of Melpomene had attracted approving reviews. At the end of September Leikin paid a visit to Moscow, meeting, he told the poet Trefolev, 'the pillars of my Fragments, Chekhonte and Palmin. I boozed with them, gave them parental lectures on what I need.' Anton had ambitious plans. Abandoning his History of Sexual Authority, he assembled a bibliography for a new thesis, Medicine in Russia. This too lapsed, when his stories won attention. Anton's satire now bit harder. 'Noli me tangere' (later to be called 'The Mask'), printed in the Moscow weekly Amusement, drew Tolstoy's attention: a man at a masked ball misbehaves with impunity when he reveals his powerful identity.
The gentrification of the Chekhovs proceeded. The conductor Shostakovsky befriended Kolia after hearing him play; other musicians became family friends. From November 1884, in true bourgeois style, the Chekhovs assigned each Tuesday evening for guests and concerts. Somehow the old patriarch, or the tramontane as Aleksandr and Anton called him, was quelled into good behaviour. Masha was hostess to her brother and her parties assembled Dunia Efros and Lily and Nelli Markova for what she promised would be 'Crazy nights!' Palmin reported to the inquisitive Leikin, 'A few days ago I went to the Chekhovs' Tuesday. They have a soiree fixe.'
Leikin was proud of his own recent gentility which hard work and fame had bought: 'we don't blow our noses with our left leg,' he boasted and decided Anton was now fit to invite to Petersburg. Chekhov despatched Natalia Golden to see Leikin; she seemed to herald Anton's imminent move to Petersburg, as writer and doctor. Leikin was torn between a desire to make his protege famous and an instinct to protect his monopoly. Boasting overrode self-interest, and, although a year would pass before he summoned Anton to Petersburg, Leikin revealed to his own employer, Khudekov, editor of the prestigious daily Petersburg Newspaper, the identity of Antosha Chekhonte. Khudekov immediately commissioned from Chekhov a commentary on the Rykov fraud trial that was still dragging on in Moscow.
FIFTEEN Ô
Babkino January-July 1885 The Petersburg Gazette liked Chekhov's reportage on the Rykov fraud trial. The trial was spectacular not just for the eloquence of Plevako, Russia's most colourful defence lawyer.39 In the courtroom Anton had an ominous haemorrhage from the right lung. In May 1885 Khudekov commissioned from Chekhov a regular story for the Monday issue (the day when Leikin did not contribute) of The Petersburg Newspaper. Khudekov thought that Chekhov's prose had a salacious 'whiff', and offered only 7 kopecks a line, but The Petersburg Newspaper was a major newspaper, exempt from precensorship, and its fiction escaped the mutilations inflicted on 'lower-class' weeklies. With Leikin's 8 kopecks a line and Khudekov's 7, Petersburg gave Anton a living. He had, however, to appear in person if he was to establish himself in literary circles. He still had not given literature priority over medicine. Leikin insisted, in March 1885, that in any case Anton had to come to Petersburg if he sought a post as a doctor.
Anton played along with Palmin's gallows-humour attitude to his profession. He saw its grim side. Why concentrate on a cholera epidemic, when in Moscow alone 100 children died daily of cold and hunger? The sick were dangerous. In March 1887 Nikolai Korobov, also newly qualified, nearly died of typhus. Doctors risked cholera and diphtheria from those they tried to save.40 The worst hazard was exhaustion. Patients would drag Anton to the outskirts of Moscow on any pretext. Even those who knew him well did not think twice about calling him out. Mikhail Diukovsky wrote on a freezing December day: 'For God's sake, if you can, go and see my brother-in-law Evgraf this evening, I've just had news that he's very ill. Don't decline, I shall be eternally grateful. The address is Krasnoe village, by the Riazan gate.'41 Two days later, on New Year's Eve, Chekhov had a note from no in
DOCTOK ÑÏ I KIIOV
Palmin: 'I'm sitting drinking vodka by the window. A young man has a deep wound on his shoulder-blade. Ë carbuncle or something -deciding is the job of Mr Requiem or Mr Coffin or Mr Rest-in-peace or even Messrs Wormeaten, if not the famous (in the future) Doctor Chekhov.' Palmin might pay Chekhov with a poem, but useful recompense was rare. Banter with patients could turn to horror. In early 1885 the Ianova girls, the third set of three sisters in Anton's life, were flirtatious patients. Not for long were they three sisters: at the end of 1885, typhus struck. Their mother and one of the three sisters (clutching Anton's arm as she died) perished.42
Anton's own health worried him. On 7 December 1884, he told Leikin, he had bled again. He insisted that his lungs were sound, that only a vessel in his throat had burst. His denial to a schoolmate, the journalist Sergeenko, 'haemorrhage (not tubercular)' suggests that he knew the truth. To others he complained fulsomely of overwork. He told Lily Markova that he was in pain. In December 1884 at a spiritualist seance Turgenev's ghost apparently spoke to Anton: 'Your life is approaching its decline.' In a letter of 31 January 1885 to Uncle Mitrofan, congratulating him on election to the town council, Anton's anxiety is ill-disguised: 'In December I had a haemorrhage and decided to take money from the Literary Fund 43 and go abroad for treatment. I'm a bit better now, but I still think I shall have to make a trip.'
In early 1885 the Chekhov household became quieter, even though Saveliev, not yet qualified, lodged with the Chekhovs again and put up with Pavel's fits of temper. Pavel had expelled Aunt Fenichka from the house into her son's care, and had banished Kolia. Anton did not press Kolia to return and merely urged him to pay his debts. To Uncle Mitrofan, however, he painted a picture of domestic harmony: Even Mama, the eternal grumbler, has started to admit that in Moscow we live better than before. Nobody grudges her expenses, there is no illness in the house. It's not luxury, but nobody goes without. Vania is at the theatre at the moment. He has a job in Moscow and is pleased. He is one of the family's most decent, solid members… He's hard-working and honest. Kolia is thinking of marrying. Misha finishes school this year.
Aleksandr finally found a posting and, after squeezing payment out of Davydov, editor of the now defunct Spectator, left Moscow to
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become an Excise Officer in Petersburg. To his parents' outrage, on 26 August 1884 Anna had given birth to a boy, named after Kolia. Aleksandr despatched Anna to stay with relatives and friends in Tula. In Petersburg, Aleksandr had a pensionable job, free fuel and housing, a maid, a wet nurse, the much-travelled hound Gershka, and a baby. Leikin accepted his stories and he acted as Anton's agent, but happiness eluded Aleksandr, for he squandered his salary. After Easter 1885 Anna, eaten up with jealousy and ÒÂ, conceived again. The wet nurse went down with intermittent fever; her husband moved in; Katka, the maid, stole food. The amoeba-ridden waters of the Neva made Aleksandr ill. He told Anton: 'The flatulence is so great that I am writing you this letter by the light of a gas lamp stuck up my anus.'