" 'I don't give a tinker's damn! Nothing can happen to your heart if you drink.'
"The vouth with the bad heart drinks."
j
Places of entertainment, art, and culture in Moscow were the reporter's beat, and Chekhov took full advantage of them in his spare time in search for copy. A horsecar, in the spring, took him to Sokolniki Park on the outskirts of the town. There he drove around the gardens, listened to the military band whose musicians munched salted cucumbers between their numbers. Or he watched the fine carriages trot by with their society ladies and dandies indifferently staring at the strollers and hawkers. Most of all he liked the smell of burning charcoal and the sight of smoke curling up from the samovars of picnickers in the pine groves.
In 1881 he frequented the All-Russian Exhibition which opened in Moscow. There he and Nikolai heard P. A. Shostakovsky, founder and director of the Philharmonic Orchestra, play a rhapsody of Liszt by way of advertising the virtues of a piano of one of the exhibiting manufacturers, and so taken were they by the performance that for weeks afterwards the rhapsody, played by Nikolai, resounded in the family circle. Chekhov became acquainted with Shostakovsky and used him as the model for the director in his tale Two Scandals. One day at the Exhibition the newspapers announced a terrible train wreck in which many lives were lost. After reading the account Chekhov grew agitated and said loudly to a friend: "Such catastrophes can happen only in our swinish Russia." A passing general overheard the remark and turned fiercely on Chekhov. "What did you say, young man? Repeat it exactly — 'in our swinish Russia'? What's your name? Who are you?" Chekhov was quite bewildered and tried to explain, but the general interrupted: "Good enough, sir. You will answer for this," and swept on. Fear of arrest — quite possible on the strength of a denunciation by a general — worried Chekhov, for it would mean the end of his university studies. But nothing happened.
Chekhov also regularly visited the Fantastic Theater of the daring and imaginative manager, M. V. Lentovsky, situated in a simulated ancient ruin in the Hermitage Park. This was good for an article, in which Chekhov mingled faint praise with reproof over the incongruity of staging cheap modern vaudeville in an atmosphere of pseudo- medievalism.
The visit of the great Sarah Bernhardt at the end of 1881 captivated the city and kept Chekhov on the run attending her afternoon and evening plays at the Grand Theater. The two articles that he devoted to the event are cast in the light, humorous vein demanded by Spectator. "More than anything else in the world she loves reclame," he writes in his half-joking account of her career. On her trip to America she visited "a professor of black magic, the enchanter Edison, who showed her all his telephones and phone-phones. According to the testimony of a French artist . . . , the Americans drank up the whole of Lake Ontario in which Sarah bathed." Yet he could not resist the temptation to intersperse among his quips serious criticism of Bernhardt and the playing of the French actors in her company. His Taganrog schoolboy interest in the theater had been intensified by access to the much richer theatrical world of Moscow, which had already become a favorite subject for his pen. Critical insights into nearly everything about the theater show — even this early — a surprising degree of perception, and in matters of staging and acting he clearly anticipated the advanced ideas of the famous director Stanislavsky. "Every sigh of Sarah Bernhardt," he writes — "her tears, her death agonies, all her acting — is nothing other than a lesson cleverly and faultlessly learned by heart. . . . She turns every one of her heroines into women as unusual as herself. . . . In all her acting there glows not talent, but an enormous amount of hard work." And he concludes: "There were moments in her acting which touched us almost to tears. But the tears did not flow because all the charm was effaced by artificiality."
Chekhov could be just as severe on Russian acting. In a serious criticism of a performance of Hamlet at the Pushkin Theater at this time, he keenly analyzed several aspects of the production and damned the lead role of the popular actor Ivanov-Kozelsky: "It is not enough to feel and be ablb to transmit this feeling correctly on the stage; it is not enough to be an artist. An actor must also have a great fund of knowledge. To play Hamlet one must take pains to be educated."
In his hunt for subjects to write about, Chekhov also turned his critical eye on literature. In particular, he found the craze for the popular foreign romances a fit subject for amusing satire. To the editor of Alarm Clock, A. D. Kurepin, he spoke disparagingly of the melodramatic romances of the Hungarian writer Moricz Jokai, which were widely read in translation in Russia. Kurepin responded with the usual retort —it is one thing to criticize, but could he do as well? To the editor's horror, Chekhov at once offered to wager that, though he knew nothing about Hungary save what he had read in Jokai's novels, he would produce a romance which the readers would think was a translation of Jokai. The result was the short novel, The Unnecessary Victory, which appeared serially in Alarm Clock in 1882, signed A. Chekhonte. Soon Kurepin was receiving enthusiastic letters from readers, one of which declared: "Ah, how interesting! Can't we have something else by the same author? And why not give the author's real name? Truly, is it not Moricz Jokai?"
chapter iv
Aesculapius versus Apollo
During the summer of 1882, after he had finished his third year of medical study, Chekhov spent some time in the little town of Vosk- resensk, a few miles from Moscow. There, two years before, the stolid, uncommunicative Ivan, the forgotten brother of the family, had been appointed to teach in a small parochial school. Its patron, a wealthy cloth merchant, placed a sizable house at the disposal of bachelor Ivan. The family seized upon this happy circumstance to escape the heat and dust of Moscow and settle in Ivan's house over the summer months.
Many of the townsfolk of Voskresensk soon got to know Ivan's brother Anton, a tall, thin, graceful young man with longish hair and broad-brimmed black hat. They were attracted by his friendly smile and the tender look on his Christlike face that now bore the faint outlines of a mustache and beard. Chekhov popped up everywhere, at the post office, at the tavern with the gold samovar on its blue sign, and at the office of the local justice of the peace. With quiet curiosity he talked with everyone, and before long not a few of these people appeared in disguised form in a Voskresensk cycle of tales. Ivan also introduced him to some of the officers of a battery stationed in the town, and Chekhov, as a medical student, was particularly happy to make the acquaintance of the distinguished physician P. A. Arkhangelsky, who directed the ruial hospital at Chikino about two miles from Voskresensk.
Back in Moscow in the fall Chekhov resumed his studies. Though he now spent a good deal of time, as an advanced student, in the clinic for children's diseases, he evinced no particular interest in medieal specialization. If he had any specialty, it seemed to be trying to earn money, and the effort it entailed made application to medicine increasingly difficult. His classmate Korobov remarked at this time: "Chekhov wrote an unusual amount and with his earnings served as the chief support of his impecunious family." On the whole, however, his teachers and fellow students were quite unaware of his literary endeavors. They did not connect the tales appearing under the pseudonym A. Ciiekhonte with the medical student whom they knew as Chekhov.
He sought subjects everywhere, in his own daily experiences, in the newspapers, among reporters, and even in the letters he received. Chekhov announced at home that he would pay ten kopecks for an idea for a story and twenty for a complete outline, awards which young Misha occasionally won. More serious drawbacks were the hit-and- miss nature of writing for the cheap Moscow press, its niggardly rate of remuneration, and its vacillation in paying authors. He desired more stable publishing connections and a higher return for his efforts. In 1882 an accidental meeting took place that removed these anxieties and proved to be highly significant for Chekhov's future literary development.