The prize and the play overshadowed new trends in Chekhov's prose. 'The Attack' was not his only puritanical Tolstoyan indictment of society. In another story, 'The Princess', an ascetic doctor accuses a princess of masking her hypocrisy as charity. A very substantial story 'The Name-Day Party', like Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party', gets at the private falsity which underlies a public celebration; 'The Name-Day Party' ends dramatically, with a thunderstorm to wash away the party and a miscarriage to shock the heroine out of her pretences. All three stories are studies of lies and the way in which physiology reveals the lie. The techniques are Tolstoy's: the author monitors the character's body language and makes the simpleton soothsayer to the sophisticate. Nobody foresaw that Chekhov, after weighing Tolstoyanism, would reject it. The liberal and hedonistic elements in Chekhov's make-up rebelled against Tolstoy's puritanism, just as Chekhov's expressive understatement was ill suited to Tolstoy's lapidary edifying style.
One short article said more than anything else about Chekhov's intentions and aspirations. In October 1888 the explorer of China and Tibet, Nikolai Przhevalsky, now known as the discoverer of Przewalski's horse, died by a remote lake on the border of Kirgizia and China. He died as Tchaikovsky would, sick with homosexual love, after drinking infected water. Chekhov wrote an unsigned obituary for Przhevalsky in New Times, praising his heroism, saying that one Przhevalsky was worth a dozen educational institutions and a hundred good books. Chekhov had not read Przhevalsky's last book in which the explorer recommends exterminating the inhabitants of Mongolia
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M Y 11 It Î I 11 I Ê S Ê I'. 1.1» Ê It and Tibet, replacing them with Cossacks, and starting a war with China. What aroused Chekhov's enthusiasm was the image of the lone traveller deserting family and friends, trekking to the ends of the earth to die.
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The Petersburg Ivanov January-February 1889 IN THE NEW YEAR OF 1889 Suvorin and Chekhov were like twins: they produced each other's plays; they planned to write together The Wood Demon, a country comedy, dividing between themselves the characters and the acts. Suvorin would come to Moscow for Tatiana Repina; then Anton would see Ivanov performed in Petersburg. All Petersburg was gossiping about their relationship. 'Suvorin the Father, Suvorin the Son and Chekhov the Holy Ghost,' they quipped when the two friends appeared with the Dauphin.32 Rumour had it that Suvorin paid Anton 6000 roubles a year; that either the eleven-year-old Nastia Suvorina or Pleshcheev's daughter Elena was to be Anton's bride. No Chekhov brother was yet married, unlike all Anton's doctor friends, and nearly all his acolytes, Bilibin, Shcheglov, Gruzinsky, Ezhov. Anton pleaded poverty. Evreinova's joke at The Northern Herald became a rumour: Chekhov was betrothed to Sibiriakova, a millionaire widow.
Anton prepared for Suvorin's arrival, searching the Moscow hotels for a suite with central heating. He could not shake off his horror at Aleksandr's treatment of Natalia. On 2 January 1889, as he had done with Kolia two years before, he spared his eldest brother nothing: I was driven from you by your horrible, completely unjustified treatment of Natalia and the cook… Constant foul language of the lowest sort, raising your voice, reproaches, rows at lunch and dinner, constant complaints at your hard labour and cursed life - isn't that an expression of coarse tyranny? However pathetic and guilty the woman, however intimate she is with you, you have no right to sit in her presence wim no trousers on, to be drunk in her presence, to use language that not even factory workers use when they see women around… No decent husband or lover would let himself talk coarsely to a woman about pissing, about lavatory paper, to
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make an ironic joke of their relations in bed, to poke about verbally in her sexual organs. This debauches a woman and distances her from God in whom she believes. A man who respects a woman, who is well-bred and loving, will not appear in front of the chambermaid without his trousers, shouting at the top of his voice, 'Katka, bring the piss-pot!'… Between the woman who sleeps on clean sheets and the woman who dosses down on dirty sheets and roars with laughter when her lover farts is the same distance as between a drawing room and a pub… You can't get away with obscenities in front of the children, insulting the servants or spitefully telling Natalia 'Clear off and go to hell! I'm not keeping you.'33 After this salvo, Natalia got the upper hand in her marriage: Aleksandr drank, the flat was sordid and the children unhappy, but he never abused her again. Anton was, in Natalia's eyes, her rescuer.
In a letter that January, Anton told Suvorin he was glad he had not written a novel - perhaps the novel which has been lost - when he still lacked 'a feeling of personal freedom', although, looking back at his life so far, he saw it as a victory: What writers of the gentry had free from birth, we the underclass have to pay for with our youth. Why don't you write the story of a young man, the son of a serf, a former shop boy, chorister, schoolboy and student, brought up on deferring to rank, on kissing priests' hands, submitting to others' ideas, thankful for every crust, thrashed many times, who tormented animals, who loved having dinner with rich relatives, who was quite needlessly hypocritical before God and people, just because he knew he was a nonentity - write about this young man squeezing drop by drop the slave out of himself and waking one fine morning feeling that real human blood, not a slave's, is flowing in his veins. Slave's blood still ran in his brothers' veins. Aleksandr was bonded to Suvorin's New Times, Vania to the inspector of primary schools, Misha, shortly to graduate, to the Tax Inspectorate, Kolia to drink and drugs. Anton alone seemed free.
Anton extended his charity to other derelicts. Despite Palmin's drunken slanders - he had spread rumours to Leikin that Anton was mad and suicidal - Anton rode out to treat him for a cut, and was touched by Palmin's gift of a bottle of Ylang-Ylang perfume. Anton visited the dying Putiata, and discreetly placed an envelope of JANUARY-FEBRUARY l88o banknotes under Putiata's pillow. Putiata was more embarrassed than relieved: 'as a poor man with a family you ought not to have done this.'
On 10 January 1889 Suvorin came to Moscow to watch rehearsals of Tatiana Repina. It had mixed success, but one critic, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was in the next decade to be cofounder of the Moscow Arts Theatre and a close associate of Chekhov, did protest at Suvorin's provocative prejudices: 'Why did the author have to put two Jews as the most antipathetic figures on stage?… Why did the author have to deal so inappropriately with the women's question?' For the time being Suvorin's anti-Semitism and sexual chauvinism did not impair his friendship with Anton. They celebrated Tatiana's day so thoroughly that Anton's hand still shook when, the next day, he wrote to Lily Markova, now Sakharova.34 The following week Suvorin and Chekhov set off together for Petersburg. Chekhov had a contract with the Aleksandrinsky theatre for 10 per cent of the gross from Ivanov, and sold them the rights to The Bear. Ivanov had been passed, after further revision, by the censor for the Imperial Theatres, but the play's defenders were faint-hearted. One Petersburg theatregoer, the playwright Sazonova, records: 'Davydov and Sazonov are both unwilling to act in the play, all its absurdities and inconsistencies are even more striking.'35 Anton spent evenings arguing with Davydov that the new version, where the doctor taunts Ivanov into suicide, was plausible. Despite the difficulties with Ivanov, made worse by the author attending the rehearsals, Anton thought about future plays. He contemplated joint authorship of a farce with Shcheglov: they improvised a plot.36 Suvorin and Anton did the literary rounds: a surreptitious sketch by Repin shows Chekhov bored to tears and Suvorin smouldering with anger at a meeting of the Society of Russian Writers.