2 54
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ANNfI S I) I I' EI. Ê RINAGE upbeat ending is not very cogent; tire story is shackled to fashionable ideas of the time - Tolstoy's asceticism and Darwin's 'struggle for existence'. Laevsky's hysterical, good-natured delinquency recalls Aleksandr Chekhov; von Koren has the megalomania of Przhevalsky, the logic of Dr Vagner and even Anton's own toughness. Yet we can sense the protagonists, von Koren and Laevsky, activist and quietist, as two sides of Chekhov, against a background of indifferent nature. From now on he would write works which argue ideas, not until the authorial mouthpiece is victorious, but until the reader senses that all ideas are futile.
Suvorin liked 'The Duel' so much that he allowed it to fill the literary supplement of New Times for most of October and November, and although Chekhov made enemies in Petersburg - there was after all no room for other contributors - his reputation as Russia's greatest living storyteller was now established. His second publication that autumn, the anonymous polemic 'The Tricksters', appeared in New Times on 9 October 1891. It created a scandal which persuaded the Imperial Society for Acclimatizing Plants and Animals to rebuild Moscow zoo along the lines of Hagenbeck's Hamburg zoo, and buy new, healthy animals.
When Anton had described Fenichka dying, he had mentioned, with mounting irritation, the mongoose leaping. 'I'm auctioning the mongoose,' he wrote to Natasha Lintvariova. Anton now showed two faces. In 'The Tricksters' he raged: The Moscow public calls the Zoo 'the animals' graveyard'. It stinks, the animals die of hunger, the management hands its wolves over for wolf-baiting, it's cold in winter… there are drunken rowdies and animals which are not yet dead of hunger can't sleep. Anton's letter to the Zoo director on 14 January 1892, however, ingratiates: Last year I brought from Ceylon a male mongoose {mungo in Brehm). The animal is utterly healthy and in good spirits. As I am leaving Moscow for some time and cannot take it with me, I humbly ask the Management to accept this animal from me and to fetch it today or tomorrow. The best way of carrying it is a small basket with a lid and a blanket. The animal is tame. I have been feeding it on meat, fish and eggs.
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Thanks to Suvorin's indiscretion, it was widely known that Chekhov was the author of 'The Tricksters', but Dr Volter of the zoo did not question why the zoo's most articulate enemy should offer them a free mongoose. He sent for it, and reported: 'The mongoose has arrived safely and does not seem to have frozen. I hasten to carry out my promise about a free ticket to the zoo.'53 Poor Sod was visited by Masha, using the free ticket. Sod put his paws through the bars and removed her hair-combs. He survived two years in this 'animals' graveyard'. No mongoose is listed among the fallen and sick for 1892, but there is no mongoose in the zoo's inventory for 1895. Sod, like Lika, could reflect on the fate of those who loved Anton, but whose demands for a response were too insistent.
Living in a crowded flat with a mongoose meant to Chekhov remoteness from reality and 'the people'. The revealing remark, to Suvorin in October, is: 'There is nothing I love so much as personal freedom.' Freedom from being crowded by others made the dream of a country estate an obsession. Anton had a substantial income, not just from 'The Duel' but from editions of collected stories and from farces, and Suvorin was eager to advance or underwrite money. Anton could spend 5000 roubles and mortgage a property for much more. Aleksandra Lintvariova and the Smagin brothers were put on alert, Anton relying on Aleksandr Smagin's love for Masha as an incentive to drive him around the farms of Mirgorod. All through December 1891 Smagin bargained with Ukrainian landowners. Just before Christmas, Anton sent Masha down to inspect a short list, make decisions and exchange contracts. Masha was flustered by the responsibility, yet seized the reins of power. Ukrainian farmers, however, did not like dealing with a woman. By New Year's Eve Masha was exhausted and begged Anton to come in person. She went back to Moscow empty-handed.
When she returned Anton was gone. He was seeing in the New Year with Suvorin in Petersburg. While Masha faced blizzards in the Ukraine, Anton relaxed for a fortnight. He and Suvorin were up until 4.00 a.m. drinking champagne with the actress Zankovetskaia; in the afternoons they tobogganed down ice mountains. They wanted diversion: they had both spent much of October and November too ill with flu to leave their bedrooms.
Now Anton's closest actor-friend, Pavel Svobodin, announced his imminent death:
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Are you sleeping peacefully opposite my windows, across the road, in Suvorin's house?… What sort of actor am I, when I have, on stage, such attacks of convulsions and spasms in the chest, throat and left elbow that I can't even call for help? Well sir, and what do I do with three children?54 Svobodin was not deceived when Anton told him that 'his disease was trivial.' Two and a half years had passed since Kolia's death, and Anton still sought oblivion in selfless work on behalf of the suffering prisoners of Sakhalin. Sakhalin remained a life's cause: he was despatching books and school programmes there, and contributing a chapter, 'On Escapees and Tramps', for charitable publication. Now Anton found a new cause. In central Russia the harvest of 1891 had failed; the government discouraged any intervention. The conservative New Times was one of the first newspapers to call for famine relief. By November peasants were eating grass; terrible hunger was imminent. Anton raised the alarm. Masha's pupils raised funds. Lika contributed 34 kopecks. Dunia Efros gave a rouble and demanded a receipt. Suvo-rin, moved by the hunger in Voronezh, his native province, did not blame the peasants for improvidence and even cooperated with rival newspapers. His children contributed their pocket money. Anton, helped by Pavel Svobodin in Petersburg, exacted contributions from friends. (His notebooks show that doctor-friends offered roubles, writers kopecks, while the Writers' Charitable Fund, with 200,000 roubles' capital, refused to give the 500 he asked them for.) Petersburg knew of Chekhov's campaign and marvelled at Suvorin's involvement in a cause so radical.
Anton discovered that Lieutenant Evgraf Egorov, Masha's old admirer, with whom the Chekhov family had quarrelled eight years ago, was now (like Aleksei Kiseliov in Voskresensk and Aleksandr Smagin in Mirgorod) a 'rural captain' (a post that gave men enormous power over the peasantry) fighting the famine in Nizhni Novgorod province. Egorov opened soup kitchens for children and devised a practical charity. He used funds to buy horses from the peasants, so that they could buy food and seed-corn. The horses were then kept until spring and sold back on credit, thus saving the animals on which the peasants depended. Egorov welcomed Anton: 'You shouldn't even have mentioned our old misunderstanding; such a petty incident cannot break a relationship.'55
AUGUST 189I-FEBRUARY 1892
In November, while Anton was too ill to move, he had begun a story 'The Wife' (originally entitled 'In the Country'), in which a doctor, despite the enmity of his estranged wife, devotes his energies to famine relief. He now offered it to The Northern Herald, instead of 'My Patient's Story', which had no hope of passing the censor.56 To the amazement of editor and author, the censor did not alter a word of 'The Wife', despite the politically tabu subject of famine. The only shocks were registered by telegraphists as Chekhov and his Petersburg editor decided on the title: 'Let me leave the wife.' - 'All right, leave the wife. Agreed.' 'The Wife' is weak - like other Chekhov stories where a saintly doctor wars with an unprincipled woman, for personal martyrdom sours the altruism, but it achieved more publicity for famine relief than any manifesto.57