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Chekhov's southern ramblings, however, failed to dispel his dissatisfaction with himself and his writings. The day after his return to Moscow he left for Babkino, though this summer retreat had now begun to pall on him. He contemplated renting a dacha on the Sea of Azov, and then decided that the railroad would have to provide free tickets if he were to transport all his family that distance. Neither the familiar pleasures of Babkino nor the appearance, in August, of his third book, In the Twilight, could mitigate the boredom and spiritual unease which he complained of frequently to friends in the course of the summer. By the beginning of September he seemed anxious to return to Moscow.
A mysterious hint that something of a serious nature troubled Chekhov is suggested by his correspondence at this time with his trusted friend Shekhtel. On May 17, he had cheerfully congratulated the architect on his intention to marry and had added: "I encourage it and would willingly imitate you if only a suitable bride could be found." A few weeks later he wrote him again. The letter contains a baffling passage, made more cryptic by several erasures: "Our last frank conversation produced a refreshing impression on me, for in the first place, it increased my fellow feeling for you, and in the second place, I've learned from this a most precious bit of information, namely, that I'm not the only martyr nor, as it seemed to me, a person without backbone in certain cases; these occasions always caused me excessive agitation and fears and I became a martyr to the core, although I had not assessed my own spiritual condition; [a line and a half erased] each time my spiritual sensitivity reached a point where every trifle agitated it, I became more spineless, and I could not look on things simply. . . ." (June 4-5, 1887.)
In letters to another dear friend at this time, Mariya Kiseleva, Chekhov complains of the grayness and boredom of life, that he has no new thoughts and the old ones are all mixed up in his head like worms in a green fishing box, that his existence is empty, and that he "writes little, drinks vodka in the evenings, and suffers from nervous spasms." And he adds that Mile. Syrout, whose beauty he describes but about whom nothing else is known, "I have not seen again, but her image never leaves me for a moment. . . . Permit me to remain silent about the remainder of my breakable dolls. . . . Depressing boredom. Get married, but why?" (September 13, 1887.) At the same time he informed Leikin: "Though it is long since I've written, this does not mean that the fountain has dried up. Alas, the fountain does not want to flow! Over the last three weeks I've abandoned myself in cowardly fashion to melancholy. I've avoided the bright lights, I cannot hold a pen; in short, 'nerves' — which you do not recognize. I was in such a psychic state that I absolutely could not work." (September 11, 1887.)
Chekhov rarely mentioned any reasons for his disturbed state of mind, and when he did he usually ascribed it to family difficulties, lack of money, or even bad weather. With his unfailing secretiveness about intimate matters, he was unable to make the real reasons clear even to his brother Alexander, with whom he was ordinarily quite confidential. Early in September he started a letter to him with the statement: "I'm beginning to get back to normal." This remark referred to his letter to Alexander on September 5, but one, unfortunately, which has not survived. From Alexander's reply to this lost letter, we get some indication of the seriousness of Chekhov's condition, if not any clearer notion of the actual causes. "You say," declares Alexander, "that you are all alone, that you do not speak or write to anyone. ... I don't understand one thing in your letter: your weeping over the fact that you hear and read lie after lie, petty but incessant. Nor do I understand precisely what it is that offends you and causes moral vomiting from an exccss of vulgarity. . . . But that you are not in condition to work, this I believe. . . . I would regard myself as the most villainous of pessimists if I agreed with your phrase: 'My youth has vanished.' "
Chekhov's spiritual illness over 1886 and 1887 is not traceable to any single cause. Fundamentally it was a consequence of a struggle to identify his artistic mission which in one form or another troubled him for the rest of his life. The simplicity of existence had suddenly become complicated by compelling responsibilities, real or imaginary, to society, which he felt he must assume if he were to justify himself as a serious artist. Writing was not just a means to a material end, it was an end in itself and one that involved a debt of duty and conscience to humanity. The adjustment was a painful one.
Over this period, however, other factors no doubt aggravated Chekhov's spiritual turmoil. Brother Nikolai's swift descent on the downward path deeply worried him. During one of Nikolai's sieges of illness following a prolonged drinking bout, Chekhov wrote in morbid tones to Mariya Kiseleva: "Life is a nasty business for everyone. When I'm serious it seems to me that people who nourish an aversion to death are illogical. So far as I understand the order of things, life consists of nothing but horrors, squabbles, and trivialities that mingle and alternate one with the other." (September 29, 1886.) And the comment to Alexander about his vanishing youth, viewed in conjunction with other evidence, suggests that once again Chekhov had grown concerned about his unmarried state and the inexorable passing of time. Perhaps he was thinking of himself when he has Ognev, in the fine story Verochka (1887), wonder why he cannot respond to the heroine's love. Was the cause too much mental preoccupation, Ognev sadly asks, or "merely that irresistible devotion to objectivity which so often prevents people from actually living" and hence leads them to regard ecstasy and passion "as affected and unreal"? Had his "grim struggle for bread, his friendless, bachelor life" brought him to this? And the lies which caused Chekhov moral vomiting may well have been cheap gossip that connected his name with some young lady, or they could refer to harsh things said about him in the reviews of his book where, as he put it, he was recognized as either a genius or a psychopath.
In his dawning sense of artistic responsibility, what probably worried
Chekhov much more was the gossip and criticism about his connections with Suvorin and the reactionary New Times. His initial hope that he could separate friendship for Suvorin from the newspaper he published soon ran into severe testing. At this time Chekhov regarded the prose writers Korolenko and Garshin, and the extremely popular civic poet, S. Ya. Nadson, whose verse concentrated on the evils of despotism and on social injustice, as the foremost Russian authors of his generation, although his opinion about Nadson's poetry soon changed. As the young Nadson lay dying at the end of 1886, one of the principal writers of New Times, the vitriolic V. P. Burenin, published a series of articles on him in that newspaper, in which he jeered at the poet as a parasite who deliberately played at being ill in order to live off private charity. Chekhov shared the popular reaction of outrage and the conviction that the article hastened Nadson's death. At about the same time popular indignation was directed against Suvorin when he was sued and compelled to make restitution for "lifting" some hitherto unprinted poems from an edition of Pushkin in order to piece out the imperfections of his own edition.
Various remarks in Chekhov's letters indicate that these events jolted his complacency about Suvorin's publishing ventures. "I can hardly avoid having contempt poured upon me for my collaboration with New Times," he declared to Alexander. And his tone of awe toward the "great man" changed markedly. He was not afraid of the generals, he told his brother in another letter, and he now boldly advised Alexander, who was timid about expressing his views on the staff of the newspaper: "New Times needs you. You will be even more essential if you refuse to conceal from Suvorin that there is much about New Times that you don't like. An opposition party is necessary, a young party, fresh and independent. . . ." (September 7 or 8, 1887.)