Though Alexander was an artist himself, well-educated and clever, Chekhov pointed out that he tended to concentrate on unimportant feelings, subjectively experienced, instead of on sincere human emotions. In reality, he declared, this had been the main trouble in his comments to Nikolai. "In your writings you underscore trifles. Yet you are not a subjective writer by nature. It is not an innate but an acquired trait. To get rid of this acquired subjectivity is as easy as to take a drink. You need only to be more honest, to throw yourself overboard, not make yourself into the hero of your own novel, to renounce yourself if only for half an hour. You have a story in which a young wedded couple kiss all through dinner, slobber, weep oceans of tears. There is not a single sensible word in it, one thing only — complacency! But you did not write for the reader. You wrote because you like that kind of chatter. However, suppose you were to describe the dinner, how and what they eat, what the cook is like, how insipid your hero is, how content with his lazy happiness, how stupid your heroine is and how ridiculous is her love for this napkin-bound, sated, overfed goose. We all like to see happy, contented people, that is true; but to describe them, what they said and how many times they kissed, is not enough. You need something else — to free yourself from the personal impression that a calm, honeymoon happiness produces on anyone who is not embittered. Subjectivity is a terrible thing. It is bad in that it exposes the poor author completely. I'll wager that all wives of priests and clerks who read your works are in love with you, and if you were a German you would get free drinks in all the beer halls where German barmaids serve. If it were not for this subjectivity, you would be the best of artists. You well know how to laugh, to sting, to ridicule, and you have such a rounded style, have experienced much, have seen too much. Alas! the material is all wasted."
Further, Chekhov sharply criticized Alexander's attitude toward his parents, especially his father, who deplored his son's affair with a married woman. It was Alexander's defensive posture in the whole matter that irritated Chekhov, and the notion that he could persuade his obdurate father to change his own set of morals to suit his son's. "Everyone has the right to live with whom he wishes and how he wishes — it is the right of a mature man; yet you, it seems, do not believe in this right if you find it necessary to send advocates. . . . What is your cohabitation, then, from this point of view? It is your nest, your warmth, your grief and joy, your poetry — yet you bear yourself toward this poetry as though it were a stolen watermelon; you regard everyone with suspicion (what a person says or thinks about this), you fuss
with everybody, you whimper, you groan." (February 20, 1SS3.)
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The demands of Chekhov's medical training intensified just at the time when the market for his journalistic and literary efforts expanded considerably. "I'm becoming popular and have already been reading critics on myself," he wrote Alexander at the beginning of February, 1883. Nearly every letter of Leikin now had a word of praise for his stories and sketches and four or five other magazines were happy to print his pieces. But Chekhov had no illusions about either the nature of his success or the artistic quality of these "amusing trifles" which he would dash off at a sitting. With excessive humility, he dubbed them "literary excrement." And he told Alexander, "I'm a newspaperman because I write much, but this is temporary. I'll not die as one." (May 13, 1883.) His real career, he believed, was that of medicine, and about this he was deeply serious. "I'm steeped in medicine," he wrote Alexander in the same letter, "although I still do not have faith in myself as a physician. . .
Chekhov's letters reveal the difficulties and anxieties he experienced during this fourth year of medical study. Frequent attendance at operations, long histories of patients to write up for his professors — who admired the clarity and literary skill with which he performed this task — and often calls for medical assistance from indigent writing friends, such as Palmin and Popudoglo, kept him frantically busy. He was proud of the fact that of the various physicians who had at one time or another treated Popudoglo, he, still a student, was the only one to diagnose correctly the disease which finally carried him off. In tribute to their friendship, Popudoglo left him his extensive collection of books, which became the basis for Chekhov's substantial library. Though Chekhov discarded many of them as worthless, he insisted on reimbursing his friend's widow from his own scanty means for this gift from her husband.
Throughout his schooling Chekhov always dreaded examinations, and now the bizarre conditions under which he had to prepare for them increased his fears. Alexander, in a short story that is actually a realistic account of the home conditions his brother had to contend with in studying, describes Chekhov deep in his lecture notes, when Auntie Fedosiya wanders in:
"Korbunka, Korbunka, Korbo, come and eat. You poor thing, Kor- bunka, you have not eaten today."
Chekhov, silent, looks under the table and chairs and quietly says:
"Auntie, the dog isn't here. Hunt for it somewhere else, and don't disturb me, I'm busy."
Before she withdraws Aunt Fedosiya must expatiate on Korbo's virtues. Chekhov returns to his studies. Soon there is a knock on the door and young Misha enters looking for a pencil. Chekhov orders him out and Auntie is quickly back again scolding him for having made Misha cry. After a long argument on this subject, he finally gets rid of her and settles down once again. But soon Masha comes in and wants to know "what is the meaning of 'psychic substance?'"
"Darling, I'm busy, and anyway I don't know what it means!"
"What, and you in the Medical School!"
"But what's that got to do with it?"
"How, 'what'? You should know everything."
"Mother of God, be off!"
"To hear this from you! You're a boor. I'm going, I'm going. You're a boor."
For a short time the hard-pressed student enjoys some peace. But he has hardly resumed his lecture notes when from the next room conies the incessant noise of his mother's rickety sewing machine. She is running it slowly so it will not disturb him, but the very delibcrateness of the motion makes the sound much more nervc-racking. Then Auntie appears to ask him if the noise of the sewing machine bothers him. Next the front door-bell rings, and in comes Alexander very much in his cups. With desperate eagerness Chekhov accepts his invitation to go over to his place and have a drink. He knows that Alexander will soon be sound asleep and that in the quiet of his Single room he can sit up all night, undisturbed, preparing for his examinations.
Even as early as his student days Chekhov manifested more interest in the scientific theory of medicine than in the practice of it. He contemplated at this time a scientific work, "A History of Sexual Authority," and in a letter to Alexander he drew up an extensive outline of the project. Applying the evolutionary method of Darwin, he wished to analyze the question of the mutual relations of the sexes among various samples of the animal world, beginning with the simplest organisms and ending with man. But nothing came of this proposal, in which he hoped to prove that the male superiority over the female was related to the length of her period of childbearing, and that the degree of superiority would be lessened if the term of pregnancy could be reduced.
In the summer before he graduated from Medical School, however, Chekhov received some experience in the practice of medicine when Dr. Arkangelsky invited him to assist in the reception of patients and in going the rounds in his rural hospital at Chikino. Chekhov spent many hours in the hospital, and though he displayed an expected uncertainty in his activities at this stage, Dr. Arkhangelsky observed that he labored with concentrated attention and obvious love for the work and for the sick who passed through his hands. However long-winded and irrelevant they might be in telling of their illnesses, he listened patiently and never raised his voice.