No woman yet affected Anton as much as another visitor, Piotr Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky had loved Chekhov's prose (and Chekhov his music) for two years. He called on 14 October 1889: they agreed to collaborate on an opera, Bela, about the abduction of a Circassian princess by a Russian officer, based on part of Lermontov's A Hero of our Time. Anton gave Tchaikovsky his books, inscribing his latest collection, entitled simply Stories, 'from your future librettist'. Tchaikovsky responded with a photograph 'from your ardent admirer.' When the composer left, he forgot his cigarette case: Semashko the cellist, Ivanenko the flautist and Vania the schoolteacher each took a cigarette and solemnly smoked it before letting Anton post the case back. Tchaikovsky responded by sending a season ticket to the Russian Musical Society's symphonic concerts in Moscow, a ticket which Masha used. Anton dedicated his new collection of stories Sullen People to Tchaikovsky. Literary friends were bemused. Gruzinsky grumbled to Ezhov: 'Why should Chekhov dedicate a book to Tchaikovsky? He ought to dedicate it to Suvorin, oughtn't he?'3
Suvorin had forgiven Anton his failure to meet in Vienna. Others had not. Grigorovich was telling the Suvorins that there were now better writers, and that Anton had libelled the Suvorins in The Wood Demon. Anton blustered: You're not in the play and can't be, although Grigorovich with his usual insight sees the opposite. The play is about a bore, egotistical, wooden, lecturing on art for 25 years… For God's sake don't OCTOBER-DECEMBER l88y believe these gendemen who… ascribe to others their personal foxy and badgery features. Oh how glad that Grigorovich is! And how pleased they'd be if I'd put arsenic in your tea or turned out to be a secret police spy. Grigorovich never quite forgave Anton for all the trains he had met in vain. Anna Suvorina, however, on 12 November 1889 accepted Anton's apology: 'I know, and they say, you're in love again. Is it true or not? That was the only explanation I had for your botched journey abroad and the only reason I forgave your bad manners. Î how furious I was with you!'4 Anna, unlike Suvorin, was amused to see her family in the play.
In November 1889 The Northern Herald saved itself from extinction by printing Chekhov's 'A Dreary Story'. The work made a tremendous impact. Chekhov had found a voice and a viewpoint in his disillusioned professor of medicine: the existentialism of a man dying in a world from which he is totally alienated seemed a generation ahead of Tolstoy. The Petersburg Professor of Medicine, Botkin, died of liver cancer that winter, and Chekhov's work seemed prophetic. Even Leikin conceded: 'Charming. It is your best piece.' Anton proudly inscribed a copy to the playwright Prince Sumbatov: From a successful author who's Managed to combine and fuse A soul at peace, a mind on fire, The enema tube and poet's lyre. The Wood Demon was, however, to be widely deplored. All autumn Pavel Svobodin pestered Anton to complete it by the end of October for his benefit performance in Petersburg. His letters to Anton that autumn are frantic: I'm superstitious and afraid of November every year, that's the month for disasters in my life (I was married on 12 November 1873) and therefore… in November - it's better to have no play at all…
I hope you were lying when you said you'd thrown two acts of The Wood Demon into the Psiol… God forbid!!!
We really have to spend two weeks living together, or at least see each other every day - and the Wood Demon would sprout. You would go fully armed after him into the forest and I would part the thorny branches in your path, clear the trail and the two of us would
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ANNf I '. Ill I'i II KINASE find him and drag him out.., lor the.sake of God who created the Psiol, write, Antoine! Svobodin set his benefit night for 31 October. In mid October Svo-bodin took a train to Moscow, grabbed the script and went back; his family copied out the play to submit to the Theatrical-Literary Committee of the Aleksandrinsky Theatre.
On 9 October Svobodin read the play to the committee, which included one man disillusioned with Anton, Grigorovich. The committee rejected The Wood Demon, not simply because Grigorovich was hostile. They were unhappy on many counts: a university professor was vilified, in a country where professors had the rank of general (within living memory a student had been flogged to death for assaulting a Moscow professor). They also wanted a 'safe' play, for the heir to the throne was to attend Svobodin's benefit performance, and The Wood Demon was unorthodox, undramatic, and obscure.
Svobodin cancelled his benefit night, telling the editor Vukol Lav-rov that The Wood Demon might be 'boring, drawn-out, strange', but was worth double the hackneyed vulgarities the Aleksandrinsky audiences preferred.5 He begged Anton: Dear friend, go to your 2 2-rouble wash-stand, have a wash and a think, couldn't something be done with The Wood Demon so that it appeals not just to me and Suvorin… but to those who advised you to burn it? Svobodin dared to be frank. Suvorin's comments are not on record. The actor Lensky was brutaclass="underline" I'll say one thing: write stories. Your attitude to the stage and to dramatic form is too contemptuous, you respect them too little to write drama… Pleshcheev, the following spring, delivered judgement: This is the first piece by you that has left no impression on me… As for Voinitsky, strike me dead, I can't understand why he shot himself. Anton felt he might as well take 500 roubles advance from the Abramova troupe in Moscow. They hurriedly rehearsed. The male actors did not know their parts, the women couldn't act. At the premi210
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ere on 27 November 1889 the audience booed. A claque from Korsh's theatre wolf-whistled to punish the breakaway author and actors. The reviewers were scathing: 'boring', 'pointless', 'clumsily constructed'. Chekhov withdrew his play and refused to print it, though no lithographed copies were circulating in the provinces. Seven years would pass before, by a mixture of alchemy and surgery, he transmuted The Wood Demon into Uncle Vania.
Anton had expected to live for three to four months off The Wood Demon, and was now in financial straits. He had only one other publication of any significance that autumn: 'Ordinary People', later the first half of'The Literature Teacher'. A schoolteacher in a dead provincial town, seduced by the prospects of wealth, decides to marry one of his ex-pupils. Allusions to real figures link the story to Chekhov's stay with the Suvorins and their children in the Crimea in summer 1888, and to the offer of little Nastia as a bride: the story is a coded 'no, thanks' to Suvorin6 (who without comment printed it in New Times). The Northern Herald took time to pay for 'A Dreary Story'. The sales of three books of stories, constantly reissued by Suvorin, and the 'pension' from lvanov and the farces Anton had written, kept the Chekhovs solvent.
Family life seemed to settle: Aleksandr in Petersburg was married and sober; Vania lived in his schoolhouse with Pavel; Misha was with the Suvorins in Petersburg and soon to leave home. Aunt Fenichka was meekly dying. Of Kolia only debts remained: his paintings vanished into his creditors' hands. Anton and his brothers agreed to pay off the monetary debts. There were other liabilities: Anna Ipatieva-Golden, as Kolia's common-law widow, wrote on 30 November 1889: There's not a soul in Moscow I could turn to, I can't ask my family, they're all (except for Natasha) virtually dying of hunger. The fact is I am stuck even now in the country at Razumovskoe with no firewood, no fur coat and so I appeal to you, for Christ's sake, send me 15 roubles.7 Anton gave her money, and asked Suvorin to give her work. The Suvorins, however, demanded a hefty deposit from those employed in their bookshops: Anna was unemployable. After another hand-out she resumed her old job as companion to unmarried mothers and
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ANNEES OK I'l I I KINAGE landlady to students. Anna's gratitude was effusive: 'I wept with gratitude, that is from feeling your kindness to the point of tears. And I'd never thought you were like that.'