Misfortunes pursued him back in Moscow. He frankly wrote Suvorin that certain people were gossiping that his trips to Petersburg and his aid in the production of Suvorin's play Tatyana Repina4 at the Maly Theater were to be explained by the fact that he was courting his daughter. To make matters worse, Pleshchccv wrote him on Dcecmber 31 of a rumor that he intended to move to Petersburg and take a position on New Times. The editor of the liberal Northern Herald made it clear that any closc connection with the "shameless trash and fellows" who wrote for this newspaper would associate him with their reactionary views, and besides such work would have a destructive influence on his talent. In reply Chekhov explained that Suvorin had jokingly offered him a position on New Times at six thousand roubles a year, and that he himself, becausc he considered the matter as of no conscquence, had probably been responsible for its circulation. But now that Pleshchccv had made an issue of it in sueh terms, Chekhov, with his obstinate independence challenged, asserted that he saw no harm in accepting a position on New Times. If they paid him a thousand roubles a year he would agree to read manuscripts for the paper, and if they were willing to offer him a thousand roubles a month, he would give his whole attention to the work and — he pointedly informed Pleshchccv — "I would eonduct an unrelenting struggle for my own independence and for those views which I hold in journalism." (January 2, 1889.)
In fact, as 1888 drew to a elosc an accumulation of disagreeable happenings soured Chekhov's endless good-nature and undermined his spirit. He informed Suvorin that he contemplated moving to Petersburg
4 Chekhov gave Suvorin a good deal of advice about the structure of this play and its production. And in March 1889 he sent Suvorin a manuscript, entitled Tatyana Repina. A Drama in One Act. It was a half-serious effort, written in one sitting, Chekhov said, to provide a kind of epilogue to Suvorin's serious play, in which the further fate of some of the characters is worked out. Suvorin liked it so much that he had two copies printed, one for himself and one for Chekhov.
with his mother so that he could engage in serious work, for his writing was suffering in Moscow. After being called away late one night from work on a stubborn story in order to heal the lacerated head of his drunken friend, the poet Palmin, he wrote Suvorin: "In general, I lead a tedious life and from time to time I begin to feel hatred, something that has never happened to me before. Long, stupid conversations, guests, petitioners, the two-or-three-rouble payments from patients which arc spent on cabs, leaving me nothing — in fact, everything is in such a muddle that I feel like running away from home. People obtain loans from me and don't repay them, they take away my books, and have no regard for my time. All I lack is an unhappy love-affair." (December 2 3, 1888.)
And three days later he continued in the same vein to Suvorin: "All week I've been as mean as a son of a bitch. . . . On the first evening of the holiday I hovered over a sick man who died before my eyes. On the whole, there have been many unhappy motifs. Spitcfulness is a kind of pusillanimity. I acknowledge it and scold myself."
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Over 1888 one may observe an intellectual as well as an artistic flowering in Chekhov. Perhaps the success of The Steppe, his first deliberate effort to claim a place among Russia's leading writers, helped to jar him loose from an inherent timidity and encouraged him to assert himself in sharp and often memorable language on social and artistic questions. Ideas flowed easily and his frame of reference expanded. Although at times he evinced a daring reaching out to identify himself with contemporary issues, especially in the area of literature and criticism, his self-assertiveness was conditioned by the doubts and anxieties of a young man.
In conversations and letters Chekhov now began to lay about him with surprising directness in contemporary literature and criticism. With few exceptions he disapproved of most of the young writers and tended to attribute their failings to the defeatism and social sickness of the times. They were uninterested in the lives of simple people; they were too timid, too subjective, and too narrow in their outlook. When Pleshcheev informed him of the envy of certain young writers over his winning the Pushkin Prize, Chekhov lashed out: "These sons of bitches ought to rejoice and not envy. They have neither patriotism nor love for literature but only their own ambition." (October 25, 1888.) What particularly distressed him was the clannishness of these young writers, their eagerness to form groups to protect their own material interests or to support literary platforms. When one of them invited him to join a Petersburg group that proposed to carry announcements of one another's works in their books, Chekhov wrote to one of them, Leontiev- Shcheglov, that he could understand "solidarity and such stuff" on the stock exchange, in politics, and in religious affairs, but not among literary men. "To lend a helping hand to one's colleague, to esteem his personality and work, not to gossip about him or envy him, not to lie or play the hypocrite with him — for this you've got to be not so much the young literary figure as just a plain human being. Let us be ordinary people, let us adopt the same attitude toward all, then an artificially-wrought solidarity will not be needed." (May 3, 1888.)
It may have been Chekhov's apprenticeship to the humorous journals and cheap press that made him so hostile to the thick periodicals that catered to the literary elite. Although he had been happy enough to be taken up by the Northern Herald, he suspected that some of these publications looked down their noses at him. Snobbish well-wishers were glad that he had deserted New Times, he informed Suvorin, so now he would hasten to publish a tale in his newspaper before their joy evaporated. His suspicion that several of the thick periodicals secretly took their orders from government officials had some basis in fact. Writing to Pleshcheev about the liberal Russian Thought, a magazine in which Chekhov later played a prominent part, he declared: "Under the banner of science, art, and oppressed free-thinking among us in Russia, such toads and crocodiles will rule in ways not known even at the time of the Inquisition in Spain. You will see! Narrowness, great pretensions, extreme ambition, and the complete absence of any literary and social conscience will do their work." (August 27, 1888.) The fact that most literary critics in this and other thick periodicals had acclaimed his best contributions up to this point did not prevent him from dubbing them all as "flatterers and cowards," afraid either to praise or blame and, in particular, not believing in themselves. When the important critic, A. I. Vvedensky, who had attacked him, expressed surprise that Chekhov had failed to visit him, he scornfully retorted: "I could not call upon him because I don't know him. In the second place, "I'm not accustomed to associate with people to whom I'm indifferent, just as I don't dine at the jubilees of writers I don't read. In the third place, the time has not yet come for me to go to Mecca on a duty call." (April 9, 1888.)