For the first time, Chekhov glimpsed a literary career that might go beyond the limitations and banalities of the humorous magazines. To Bilibin he confided a fresh hope: "I will write a big thing, but on the condition that you'll find a place for it among the offerings of the thick journals [the great quality periodicals that printed the belles lettres of famous authors]. After my debut in New Times, is it possible to suppose that they will now aecept me in some one of the thick periodicals? What do you think? Or am I mistaken?" (February 28, 1886.)
Chekhov's hopes were perhaps stimulated by what he felt was greater freedom in the selection and treatment of themes. Though he continued to spceialize in humor, he was handling serious subjects more and more over 1885 and the early months of 1886, and with an independence that bore the hallmark of the emancipated artist. Boldly he informed Leikin, about the manuscript of Anyuta sent to Fragments: "There is nothing illiberal in it. Indeed, it is time to get rid of hedging." (February 3, 1886.) Sure enough, the censor objected; not so much because Anyuta was the mistress of the student in the story as beeause she had served several other men in this eapacity.
The frequency with whieh this dread dragon either banned outright or demanded ehanges in Chekhov's stories eloquently testifies to the author's persistence in writing as he pleased. "How oppressive and shocking," he wrote Leikin when the latter fulminated against the severity of the censorship. "How unreliable is the bit of bread literature gives us . . ." (October 12, 1885.) Chekhov could ill afford to lose his fee for each banned story, and at times he would agree to deletions if they seemed of little consequence. So arbitrarily did the censorship function that it was often possible to outwit it by the simple deviee of changing the title of a tale and sending it to another magazine. This was the procedure used in the ease of Chekhov's famous story Sergeant
Prishibeyev. He had submitted it first to Leikin under the title A Superfluous Guardian. With his usual obtuseness to artistic merit, Leikin found it too long and dull in parts, and cut it in order to "lessen the dullness." But the story failed to get through the Censorship Committee, which declared: "This piece belongs to those in which ugly social faults are described, revealing the consequences of increased police surveillance. Because of the exaggeration of the harm of such surveillance, the piece cannot be accepted." Chekhov changed the title to Sergeant Prishibeyev and sent it to Petersburg Gazette, where it was published, with the approval of the censor, pretty much in the form in which he had originally written it.
The range of observation, emotion, and satire had noticeably broadened and deepened in the best tales of 1885-1886, and Chekhov's accuracy in the language of description and dialogue was rapidly approaching the perfection of his later masterpieces. His experiences at Babkino increased his interest in and knowledge of the peasant type appearing in the rambling old woman of A Tedious Business. She so confused the village deacon in listing her relatives for prayers for the dead that both the living and the dead become inextricably mingled in his head in a cynical catalogue of sameness that does blasphemous violence to a holy rite. And the peasant hero of The Hunter, an exquisite fusion of nature's sultry moods and the emotional frustration of unrequited love, is brilliantly characterized through the effective use of dialogue that poses the hopeless opposition of a peasant girl's longing and the hunter's love of open fields and cool forests with gun on shoulder. The same device of skillful dialogue reveals perfectly the peasant mentality of Denis Grigoriev in The Malefactor, who stubbornly argues with the magistrate his right to unscrew nuts from the bolts of the railroad tracks — after all, there are so many of them, and they make ideal sinkers for fishing lines!
In other tales of this period, biting and realistic satire is employed to expose the vulgarity of the spoiled rich — for example, that of the wife in An Upheaval. When a brooch disappears (her weak-willed husband, whose fortune she has appropriated, had stolen it) she has the room of the shy young governess Mashenka searched — "I for one don't trust these learned paupers too far." And Mashenka, for the first time in her life, experiences the feeling "that is so familiar to persons in dependent positions who eat the bread of the rich and powerful and cannot speak their minds." In A Calamity, however, the youth Chekhov displays surprisingly mature psychological insight in probing the complex emotional struggle that goes on in the mind of a notary public's pretty wife who is passionately pursued by her husband's lawyer friend. When the lover compels her to admit insincerity in denying him, he then cynically reassures her by declaring that "only savages and animals are sincere. Once civilization has ushered in the need for such comforts as, for example, feminine virtue, sincerity is out of place." When she finally recognizes the danger of succumbing to her lover's pleas, and begs her obtuse husband to take her away on a trip, he offers instead a silly, sententious homily on husbandly prerogatives, on which Chekhov comments: "There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble."
This rich fare Chekhov could vary with the simple and beautifully written story, Grief, of the old Petersburg cabby who had no one to talk to about the death of his son. Attempts to confide his sorrow to passengers on this snowy night, the description of which is so perfectly attuned to his sad, gently litany, are unfeelingly blocked by a wall of human indifference. Yet he must tell someone of the sorrow that burdens his soul. So after he has stabled his little mare, he begins: "Supposing, now, you had a foal, and you were own mother to that foal. . . . And supposing suddenly that little foal were to die. . . . You'd be sorry, wouldn't you?" The horse chews as its master feeds it, breathes on his hand, and listens.
Such enduring tales, however, amount to only a small fraction of the more than a hundred stories Chekhov produced in 1885 and the first few months of the following year. In the welter of average pieces, not infrequently cluttered with low comedy and tasteless witticisms, these few perfectly chiseled works of art, such as The Hunter, Grief, and Sergeant Prishibeyev, seem almost like accidental fruits of his genius. The continued haste with which he wrote and the uncomplaining way in which he at times accepted the inept editorializing of Leikin on some of his masterpieces suggest that he did not really understand or value his gifts. To be sure, with his inborn modesty about everything connected with his creative art, no writer ever undervalued his artistic powers more grossly than Chekhov, and especially in the early years of his career. He constantly referred to his tales as "rubbish," "junk," "a chewed rag," and if he nurtured any artistic ambitions, he never wore them on his sleeve. When he agreed to Suvorin's request to sign his own name to his stories, he admitted that he had always thought of restricting his signature to learned medical articles that he wished to write. "My family name and crest I've given to medicine, which I shall not desert for the rest of my life," he declared to Bilibin. "Sooner or later I shall part with literature."4 Nor were the Moscow authors with whom he associated likely to encourage in him a sense of the importance of his art and the necessity of valuing his readers. For to these literary hacks and journalists of the humorous magazines, whose sole concern with writing was a commercial one, with few exceptions he was, at best, a talented entertainer. Artistically he had become a lonely figure among them. Up to this point Chekhov lacked the advice and encouragement of older authors of distinction, who might have taught him to adopt a serious attitude toward his art and to develop a sense of self-criticism.