Ivanov had one more performance in Korsh's theatre. Critics praised it only enough to ensure that the play toured the provinces. For 400 roubles Chekhov endured embarrassment which coloured his attitude to the theatre. Disapproval incited in him a love-hate relationship with drama; he would respond with plays that were time bombs for stage conventions and poison for actors. The more he was lectured on conventions, the more he would flout them. In the failure of Ivanov lie the seeds of the success of Uncle Vania.
Chekhov was to flee the city after almost every new production of his plays. Four days after the third performance of Ivanov, he went
SEPTEMBER 1887-JANUARY 1888
to Petersburg. He brought Ivanov for Suvorin to read. This time, however, he slummed with Aleksandr and his family, all recuperating from typhoid. Aleksandr's life outdid Ivanov's: Anna, facing death, missing her eldest son and her daughter, was jealous of Aleksandr, who thought only of sexual frustration. Aleksandr's household, despite two servants and the salary that Suvorin paid him, was sunk in filth and poverty; the two infant boys were retarded, locked in a world of their own. Anton wrote home, as his own high-minded character in Ivanov, Dr Lvov, might have written: 'Anna is ill (tuberculosis). Filth, stench, weeping, lying; stay a week with Aleksandr and you'll go crazy and get as filthy as a floor-rag.'
After three days he left for the Leikins, to wash, sleep and relax. From Leikin he moved to the Hotel Moskva. Living in luxury among strangers, he could make women friends, but he was also freer to make new men friends. In St Petersburg he acquired two more lifelong acolytes, as he had previously acquired Ezhov and Gruzinsky. One was Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov, the grandson of an army general, who wrote as Shcheglov ('Goldfinch'), following the fable by Krylov: 'Better to sing well as a little goldfinch, Than badly as a nightingale.' The other was Kazimir Barantsevich, a ticket inspector on Petersburg's trams, who had six children and spent his nights writing. Pathologically modest, Barantsevich had no mirrors in his house. He wrote about heroes with lives even grimmer than his own: but for Chekhov, he would never have left Petersburg.
Bilibin, Shcheglov and Barantsevich in Petersburg, Gruzinsky and Ezhov in Moscow, were not just friends and admirers; they were horrible warnings of the price of failure for a Russian intellectual. Trapped by bad luck, poverty or mediocrity into being part-time writers, they seemed to Anton like animals in a menagerie. As Vagner, a zoologist, would tell Anton, they saw Chekhov as the elephant in the zoo. Their admiration became envy only when the elephant broke out of the zoo. The other animals stayed caged, dispirited, cannibalistic. It was Suvorin, the kindly keeper who fed and doctored the menagerie, who singled out Anton for release, raising his payments from 12 to 20 kopecks a line, allowing Chekhov more space, preparing to launch him in the 'thick' literary journals. By 1888 Chekhov would enjoy the freedom to write as he wanted, and was distinct from the caged literary animal. As Chekhov reported to his family on 3
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MY íèø inns ê i: i:!• i: R December 1887, Suvorin was enthusiastic about Ivanov: 'Everyone is waiting for me to put the play on in Petersburg and is confident of success, but after Moscow I am so repelled by my play that I can't possibly make myself think about it: I can't be bothered…'
Chekhov's success in Petersburg was crowned by the wide popularity of his latest stories in New Times. The story of starving cattle, 'Cold Blood', based on a miserable business failure of a Taganrog cousin, won Anton an accolade from the Petersburg Society for the Protection of Animals. 'The Kiss', set in an artillery regiment (officers like those Chekhov invented for Three Sisters), won admiration from the military. The hero is a shy officer, kissed in the dark by a woman who mistakes him for someone else and whose identity he never discovers. Chekhov had studied the battalion in Voskresensk so well that his readers believed he must be a serving officer. The greatest sensation, however, was aroused by 'Kashtanka', the story of a dog, conscripted into a circus, that recognizes his owner in the audience. It was the first Chekhov story to be published as a book.
Anton's public was now far wider than the New Times readership. Suvorin now needed him more than vice versa. Other grand old men took a liking to Chekhov. One was the aristocratic radical, Aleksei Pleshcheev, who had mounted the scaffold with Dostoevsky, and still wrote an occasional inspirational civic poem. Pleshcheev was for his remaining years Chekhov's most perspicacious critic. Like Suvorin, Pleshcheev hinted that he would like Anton as a son-in-law, but Anton returned, unbetrothed, to Moscow on 17 December. Bilibin wrote his greetings for New Year 1888: 'Gruzinsky tells me that you are radiating all the colours of the rainbow after your Petersburg impressions.'
On Suvorin's advice, and to appease the censorship, Chekhov revised Ivanov. He now called the play a 'drama', but Act IV was intractable: How could Ivanov die a convincing death?
TWENTY-THREE Ô
The Death of Anna January-May 1888 CHEKHOV ALLOCATED all January 1888 to a masterpiece, 'Steppe'. The Northern Herald's editor Evreinova (who reminded Anton of a 'roast starling') had given him carte blanche on length, subject, and fee. Chekhov had 500 roubles as an advance and another 500 on publication for a story of 120 pages. His income was trebled: never again did the Chekhov family know penury, though they sometimes spent more than they earned. The Northern Herald was not censored: Anton was free. The pressure of weekly or fortnightly stories for three Petersburg journals receded: he fed New Times, but starved Fragments and The Petersburg Newspaper.
'Steppe' flaunts all conventions for extended prose: instead of a plot, we have a boy's journey across the Ukraine, from Taganrog to Kiev, accompanied first by a friendly priest, Khristofor, then by carters, and encountering a cross-section of humanity- an embittered Jew, a Polish countess, peasants rebellious and submissive. Nature - ponds, insects, a storm - overwhelms the boy's mind: he succumbs to a fever. The work has a musical structure: it is a symphony, with a storm and a pastorale as haunting as those in Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Spellbound by memories of his own childhood in the steppes, Chekhov also had Gogol's 'Sorochintsy Fair' and Turgenev's prose poetry in mind as bench marks. 'Steppe', unmatched until Katherine Mansfield's 'Prelude', is the first work by Chekhov that we can call a classic.
Pleshcheev read the manuscript in ecstasy. In February 1889 it was published. It left musicians, painters and writers awe-struck: Vsevolod Garshin, the most original of younger prose-writers, had met his peer. Critics, notably Ostrovsky (the playwright's brother) risked their necks in praise. Suvorin, Aleksandr reported, 'left his tea undrunk. Anna Suvorina brought him three fresh cups when I was there'. Suvorin's cronies, however, distanced themselves. Aleksandr passed on the
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MY ÍÏÎ I II I 1(s' Kill'I It comments of Burenin, the New Times journalist who was most trusted by Suvorin: Such descriptions of the steppe as yours he has read only in Gogol and Tolstoy. The storm that gathers and does not burst is the height of perfection. The characters, except for the yids, are alive. But you don't know how to write long stories… 'Steppe' is the beginning, or rather the prologue, of a big piece you will write. Leikin tried to dispirit Chekhov: 'Hanging is too good for those who advised you to write long pieces. A long piece is good when it's a novel or tale with a plot, a beginning and an end… Anyway, I stopped reading about 25 pages before the end.'
Unlike his experience with Ivanov, Anton was sociable and cheerful all the time he was writing 'Steppe', although he wondered at his story, almost unique in his work for its lack of love interest. 'I can't do without women!' he exclaimed in a letter to Shcheglov.