Suvorin was a complex figure - a man of much wit, but little humour, a supporter of autocracy in his leader articles, an anarchist in his diary. His faults were offset by virtues: the anti-Semitic ravings of New Times were countered by his private fondness for an elderly Jewish lady, his children's music teacher, who lived in the household. The worst Suvorin's enemies said of him was that he feared 'only death and a rival newspaper'. The theatre critic Kugel wrote of him:
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in his fur hat, his fur coat hanging open, carrying a big stick, I almost always saw the figure of Ivan the Terrible… Something foxy in the lower jaw, in the gape, something sharp in the line of his forehead. A Mephistopheles… The secret of his influence and his sharp vision was that, like the greatest political and philosophical geniuses, he deeply understood the bad side of human nature… The way he entertained Chekhov, looked at him, enveloped him with his eyes reminded one somehow of a rich man showing off his new 'kept woman'. Suvorin's first wife, Anna Ivanovna, died in circumstances that won even his enemies' pity. One summer evening in 1873 Suvorin, entirely unsuspecting, was summoned to a hotel room, where he found her dying of a revolver wound inflicted in a suicide pact with her lover. Three years later, Suvorin married another Anna Ivanovna, twenty-two years younger than he: she, though flirtatious, defended her husband like a tigress; he loved her, he declared, third after his newspaper and his theatre. Suvorin suffered one bereavement after another: in 1880 his daughter Aleksandra died and then his infant son Grisha, of diptheria. Two of his sons and a favourite son-in-law would also die before him. He became a lonely insomniac. Suvorin rarely went to bed before his paper came out, and spent hours alone in his office with just a cup of coffee and a chicken breast for sustenance. He strode the streets and cemeteries of Petersburg. After his bereavements began, he retreated to the country, allowing his son Aleksei, 'the Dauphin', to wrest power from him and, eventually, to undo his empire.
Like Anton Chekhov's, Suvorin's love for his many dependants could give way to irritation. Like Anton, Suvorin would long for company when alone, and for solitude when in company. Suvorin had, however, the warmth of the nepotist. Anton Chekhov was not the first alumnus of the Taganrog gimnazia he was to adopt: his legal manager, Aleksei Kolomnin, left Taganrog ten years before Chekhov, and married Suvorin's daughter. Suvorin had taken the entire Kolomnin family under his wing. Now the Chekhovs came under his aegis; Suvorin was to offer employment to Aleksandr, Vania, Masha and Misha Chekhov. Soon Anton would have his flat in the Suvorin house and be offered Suvorin's younger daughter, Nastia, then nine years old, in marriage. Forty years later Anna Suvorina would recall Anton's visit that spring: Our apartment was unusuaclass="underline" the hall was the domain of the children… In one corner stood an aviary with a pine tree where up to fifty canaries and finches lived and bred. The hall was sunlit, the birds sang loudly, the children, naturally, made a lot of noise and I must add that the dogs also took part… we sat down together on a litde sofa by the aviary. He asked the children the names of all the dogs, said he was very fond of dogs himself and then made us laugh… We talked for rather a long time… he was tall, slim, very good-looking, he had dark reddish waving hair, a little greying, he had slighdy clouded eyes that laughed subtly, and a fetching smile. His voice was pleasant and soft and, with a barely perceptible smile… Chekhov and I quickly became friends, we never quarrelled but we argued often, almost to the point of tears - or at least I did. My husband just adored him, as if Anton had bewitched him.1 Anton won the hearts of Suvorin's children (even, for a while, of the Dauphin), of his valet Vasili Iulov and the children's governess Emilie Bijon. The philosopher Vasili Rozanov, also rescued from obscurity by Suvorin, contemplated the publisher's love: 'If Chekhov had said "I now need a flat, a desk, shoes, peace and a wife," Suvorin would have told him "Take everything I have." Literally.'2
The journalists in Suvorin's entourage were jealous. One, Viktor Burenin, was Suvorin's oldest friend and perhaps his only confidant. Burenin could, with unprintable epigrams and printed barbs, destroy a sensitive writer. Twenty years earlier, when Suvorin sat on a park bench, too poor to hire a midwife for his pregnant wife, Burenin, then a student, had talked to him and insisted on giving him all the money he had. They became inseparable. Burenin's prognosis, as much as Grigorovich's enthusiasm, persuaded Suvorin of Chekhov's importance, but Burenin was allowed to attack Suvorin's favourites with impunity and soon turned on Chekhov: the spiteful New Times clique very soon germinated in Petersburg a hostility to Chekhov.
Anton had a happy spring in 1886: he hardly slept. Suppers with Suvorin, being lionized, intoxicated him. He could now write less for more money: Leikin no longer counted on a weekly contribution. That spring Chekhov gave New Times just one story of note, 'The Secret Councillor'. A touching portrayal of the disarray brought into
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a country household by the arrival of a distinguished relative, the story anticipates the pattern of Uncle Vania: a great man comes from the city and wrecks the lives of his country relatives. 'The Secret Councillor' abandoned the sensational tone that Suvorin's readers liked. It is a work that looks back to Anton's childhood in the country around Taganrog and that injects for the first time an element of nostalgia for a lost idyll, which is to colour much of Chekhov's mature prose.
Kiseliov and all Babkino were calling for Anton. Mosquitoes whined; goldfinches sang. Kolia took his paints and brushes, but left his toothbrush and his sackcloth trousers with Anna Golden. Anton hoped that the artist would win over the lover, and ignored letters from Franz Schechtel, raging at Kolia's drunken binges. By 29 April Kolia hurt Schechtel more: he forced Lentovsky, for whose theatre the architect and painter were commissioned, to disgorge another 100 roubles and promptly vanished to Babkino, making sorties to Moscow only for debauchery. Schechtel raged and despaired; he even tried to lure Kolia by putting a letter in an envelope marked 'contains 3000 roubles': 'Friend! I have two overcoats, but fuck-all money - but there'll be some soon… if you'd come and see me for a minute…'3 Schechtel complained to Anton of Levitan's dissipation, too; fornication did not stop Levitan painting, but Schechtel complained to Anton: Levitan is ploughing and sighing for his bare-bottomed beauty, but tJhe wretch is only human: what will it cost him on quicklime, disinfectant, eau de Cologne and other chemicals and how much trouble to treat his amorous slut and make her fit to receive his thoroughbred organ?… Levitan arrived late in Babkino: he was detained in the Crimea, whence he wrote to Chekhov: 'What made you assume I'd gone off with a woman? There is screwing here, but it was there before I arrived. And I'm not hunting for fine picturesque pussy, it just happened to be there (and, alas, has gone).'4 Once Kolia and Levitan were at Babkino, the fun began. On 10 May Anton reached Moscow from Petersburg; the next day he took his mother, sister and Misha to Babkino. They painted, fished, bathed, and played: Levitan would dress as a savage Chechen, or the Chekhov brothers would hold mock trials of Kolia and Levitan for drunkenness and debauchery. Anton composed 'Soft-Boiled Boots', illustrated nonsense worthy of Edward Lear, to amuse the Kiseliov children. Somehow he found time to dispense medicine, and write for Fragments, The Petersburg Newspaper and New Times - comic classics, such as 'Novel with Double Bass'. Anton wrote his first philosophical stories, such as 'The Dreariness of Life', where activists and quietists debate what a civic-minded Russian ought to do. In Chekhov's world, unlike the world of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, neither party wins the debate: there is an ideological stalemate. This summer Anton was groping for a new type of story, that would evoke the futility of words and thoughts. In 1886 he wrote far less than in 1885, but he was preparing himself for the real mastery of his prose of the following year.