Nor did Chekhov participate in the organized social and political activities of his fellow students. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 1, 1881, brought to an end hopes of further reform which the emancipation of the serfs had encouraged at the beginning of his reign. A period of dark reaction set in under his successor Alexander III. The universities fulfilled their traditional role as centers of opposition to all forms of legal coercion and the suppression of public opinion. In vigorous demonstrations students protested the government's repressive actions. If Chekhov attended any of the various student assemblies during these stormy times, and there is some evidence that he did, it was only as a passive spectator, for he appears to have remained indifferent to the revolutionary ferment seething in Moscov/ University after the Tsar's assassination.
The reasons for this apparent unconcern were complex. That Chekhov preferred to seek friendships outside the university and was too absorbed in other matters to take part in student activities are inadequate explanations. His old Taganrog schoolboy trait of avoiding participation in the rough-and-tumble of his classmates seems to have carried over into his university years. Nor had the bankruptcy of his family and their subsequent lowly position driven him into sympathy with the radical-minded boys who secretly read illegal revolutionary literature in the upper classes of his Taganrog school. However, if he now failed to make common cause with his university comrades, who were deeply agitated over oppressive Tsarist acts, it does not argue a critical unawareness of economic, social, and political abuses. His singular attitude was rooted in an inherent dislike for intellectual herd-mindedness. And even this early in his development, the representatives of progressive ideas left him quite unimpressed. He saw something false and rhetorical in the student movement and guessed that these youths were infected by the very ills which they wished to eradicate and would lose their radicalism as soon as they left the university and started to build careers as doctors. In his own hard school of experience Chekhov had already learned that the views a man has on the important issues of society should have some relation to the life he lives. When he found the two incompatible, he suspected deceit. Organized efforts to improve man's material condition, as well as the state of the soul, he had already begun to distrust. He avoided submitting the freedom of his own personality to the authority of any group, just as he refused to abandon his spiritual independence by accepting the faiths of others. So now he regarded the university as a place where he was studying to become a physician, not a revolutionist.
«3,
On the way home from university classes that first winter, Chekhov would stop once a week at a newstand to buy the latest issues of the humorous magazine, Alarm Clock and Dragonfly. He could ill afford the few kopecks, for most of his scholarship money went to his mother for household expenses. With cold, trembling fingers he turned the pages to the fine print of their "Letter Box" sections and ran his eye expectantly over comments to would-be authors. At last, in the November 12 Alarm Clock, his eye caught a familiar title; with vexation he read that his sketch, Boring Philanthropists, would not be published.
In what was a highly competitive business, most of the humorous magazines led a hand-to-mouth existence, paid their contributors starvation wages, and often treated them like poor petitioners. Since length was ordinarily associated with serious reading, all manuscripts had to be brief. Editors required writers to shape their contributions to the seasons of the year and to holiday periods such as Easter or Christmas. The multitude of genres included parody, anecdotes, jokes, aphorisms, satiric sketches, short stories, and dramatic scenes. Pieces on all forms of popular entertainment were favored, and stock situations and types that would appeal to many levels of the population were pushed hard, such as the cuckolded husband, overeager damsels, young fops getting married, bribe-taking officials, temperamental artists and actors, bungling doctors, peculating shopkeepers, prankish students, and frustrated old maids.
Shortly after his arrival in Moscow, writing for those humorous magazines over which he used to pore with delight in the Taganrog library had occurred to Chekhov as the most promising way of adding to his slender resources. Alexander, who two years ago had attempted to place Anton's schoolboy efforts in Alarm Clock, had now achieved some succcss as a writer for these magazines; he continued to encourage his brother to try.
Then, on January 13, 1880, Chekhov read in "Letter Box" section of the St. Petersburg weekly Dragonfly laconic but exeiting news, addressed to him: "Not at all bad. Will print what was sent. Our blessings on your further efforts." Shortly thereafter, a letter arrived from the editor to inform him that he would receive an honorarium of five kopecks a line (about a quarter of a cent a word). Impatiently, Chekhov ran through every succeeding weekly copy of Dragonfly, but not until
March 9, in issue Number 10, did he find his tale: A Letter from the Don Landowner Stepan Vladimorovich N., to His Learned Neighbor Dr. Friederick. It was signed simply ". . . v." His family rejoiced over this first printed work. The twenty-year-old Chekhov's literary career had begun.
A Letter is a slight thing of several pages, an amusing parody on popular scientific knowledge as reflected in the "profound observations" of a limited Don landowner on such questions as man's descent from monkeys and the possibility of living on the moon. Perhaps some of the learned nonsense which the schoolboy Chekhov had spewed forth in his lecture as the old professor in the Taganrog domestic skits entered into the substance of A Letter, and the laughably archaic turns of speech of the Don landowner may well have been suggested by Grandfather Chekhov's old-fashioned letters to his son. In the same issue of Dragonfly appeared another still briefer composition in which Chekhov merely listed, by way of ridicule, the stereotyped devices and characters of writers of fashionable romances.
Chekhov lost no time in following up the advantage he had won with the editor of Dragonfly. Since tales and sketches had to be brief, the payment on each was necessarily small, but if he could publish many of them he had visions of a substantial income to add to the family purse. Now every moment he could steal from his medical studies he spent on writing. He plied Dragonfly with manuscripts, and in the course of the remaining months of 1880 nine more of them were printed. They vary from a few pages of parody on Victor Hugo's novels to sharply satirical and ironic miniature short stories or ancedotes on how a father tries to bribe a schoolteacher to raise his son's mark (Daddy); how a loathsome landowner forces a betrothed peasant couple, whom he has caught stealing his apples, to beat each other as a penalty (For Apples); and the picture of a bride-to-be thoughtlessly subjected to the cynical views on marriage of her mother, father, and finally her future husband (Before the Wedding). Most of these contributions were signed by the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte, or some variant of it — the nickname which that waggish and much admired Taganrog teacher of religion, Father F. P. Pokrovsky, had used when ealling upon Chekhov to recite in his classroom.