The news distressed Masha. He was popular, she wrote him, even famous, and she considered the sum of a hundred thousand roubles for his works cheap. She readily offered to publish his writings herself, as Tolstoy's wife was now doing in the case of her husband's works, in the conviction that her brother would make much more money. Chekhov tried to assuage her worries by representing himself as a sharp bargainer. Marx was stingy, he admitted, but he gave him a hard time. He had countered Marx's initial offer of fifty thousand roubles with a demand for seventy-five thousand, and he had insisted that the publisher have no control over the income from performances of his plays.
In reality, the astute publisher found Chekhov a rather easy mark, as the contract, which was signed on January 26, plainly indicated. For seventy-five thousand roubles, Chekhov sold Marx the rights to everything he had published or would publish in the future. Twenty thousand was payable upon Chekhov's formal agreement to all the terms, and the remainder, in varying sums, at four set dates over the course of the next two years. However, Chekhov retained first publishing rights to anything he wrote after signing the contract, but thereafter it became the property of Marx, who would reimburse him at the rate of two hundred and fifty roubles for a printer's signature (sixteen printed pages) during the first five years, this rate to increase by two hundred roubles for each of the next three five-year periods. Though Chekhov had the privilege of deciding on which of his writings would go into the proposed edition, Marx reserved the right to veto anything he regarded as unsuitable. Finally, Chekhov was required to turn over to Marx, within six months of signing the contract, a complete bibliography of all that he had published, as well as copies of these works. And if he held back an item or made arrangements with anyone else to publish his writings, for such breach of contract he was obligated to pay Marx at the rate of five thousand roubles for each printer's signature.
Marx had drawn up a shrewd contract. As the possessor of the total corpus of Chekhov's works, he had the sole right to print them in any number of editions without further remuneration to the author, except the initial payments for new stories. His shrewdness is attested by the large profits he reaped from the deal.
Chekhov, however, was not unaware of some of the drawbacks of the contract — he would be feeding Marx's heirs and widow, he told Serge- enko, while his own widow would get nothing. From a long-range point of view he realized that he risked losing much, despite the steeply rising rate of remuneration over the years for new works. In his telegram of acceptance, he jokingly promised Marx not to live more than eighty —a remark, said Sergeenko, which almost ruined the deal, for the publisher took it literally. Chekhov's agreement was clearly influenced by his own cool assumption that his years were numbered. He told Suvorin that the contract would be profitable if he lived less than five or ten years, and unprofitable if he lived longer. When his former student Yakovlev, who shared Masha's conviction that her brother ought to publish the works himself, protested about his excuse, that he had not long to live, Chekhov replied: "My friend, you forget that I'm a doctor, however bad a one I may be. The medical experts do not at all deceive me; my case is a poor one, and the end is not far off."
To Masha, he wrote reassuringly that, whatever might be the disadvantages, there would at last be order in his publishing affairs; and so, glory be to God! The initial payment, he pointed out, would take care of all his debts and cover the expenses of building the Yalta house, and of a new piano and furniture; the remainder he would put in the bank at 4 per cent interest. And he optimistically estimated his future annual income from bank interest, the sale of new stories to magazines and then to Marx, and royalties from the performances of his plays as nine and a half thousand roubles. "1 am now a 'Marxist,'" he cheerfully told his friends.
In all these negotiations Suvorin was very much on Chekhov's conscience. He wired him as soon as he received Marx's offer and also asked Sergeenko to inform him of the details, for Suvorin must cease publication of Chekhov's works after January 26. Although the contract was not explicit on the matter, it appears that the remaining copies of Suvorin's various editions could be sold or Marx had the option of buying them up. Suvorin sent Chekhov a long telegram in which he pointed out some of the obvious financial pitfalls in the proposal, urged him to delay his decision, and, if what he needed was ready money, offered to send him twenty thousand roubles at once. Brother Alexander, however, reported from Petersburg that Sergeenko represented the deal as already consummated when he called on Suvorin, although Sergeenko denied this to Chekhov. However, Suvorin accused Chekhov of unwarranted secrecy in the matter and of not wanting to sell to him. Alexander described a quarrel between Suvorin and his two older sons, who now played an important role in their father's business, over his desire to make a counter-offer to Chekhov; the sum involved, the sons protested, was too large an investment. In a letter to Misha months later, Chekhov confirmed some of these details. When he had put the question to Suvorin whether he wished to buy all his writings, Suvorin had replied that he did not have the money, that his sons would not agree to it, and that anyway no one could pay more than Marx. The advance of twenty thousand roubles which Suvorin offered, Chekhov pointed out, would have meant purchasing all his works for that sum and he would never be able to wrest himself free from debts. And he added that when the deal with Marx had been concluded, Suvorin had written that he was glad of it, because his conscience had always troubled him on account of the poor job he had done of publishing his writings.
Chekhov, who obviously felt badly about this severance of his publishing relations with Suvorin, tried whimsically to minimize its significance. His fiction was of no consequence, he declared; the important thing was the royalty from his plays, and this was out of Marx's hands. Only the need of securing a large sum at once had compelled him to take this step, he wrote Suvorin, and now he experienced the nasty feeling of having married a woman for her money. Repeatedly he suggested that they get together to celebrate, in some fitting manner, the termination of their close relations as author and publisher over the last thirteen years. "We part peacefully," he said, "but we also got along very peacefully together, and I seem to recall that we never had a single misunderstanding during all the time you printed my books." (January 27,1899.)
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Chekhov immediately undertook the formidable task of gathering together all his stories, listing the newspapers and magazines in which they had appeared, and preparing edited copy for the first two volumes of his collected works. He had been condemned to hard labor, he soon protested, and if he had foreseen the magnitude of the effort he would have insisted upon a hundred and seventy-five thousand roubles. Many early tales in the humorous newspapers and magazines had vanished entirely from his memory, to say nothing of the issues and dates when they had been published. To list all this material, he asserted, was like being asked to enumerate precisely every fish he had caught over the last twenty years. As the copy piled up he was overwhelmed by its bulk, and found himself wondering how all this could possibly have come from his pen. Much of it he was ashamed of, and excluded from the collected works; and every story he acccptcd he subjected to rigorous editing, sometimes amounting to rewriting it. In going over the old magazines he came across forgotten illustrations by Nikolai, and he was so impressed by their brilliance that he decided to collect them in a bound volume and send them to the Taganrog library as a memento to his dead brother.