The Moscow circle of young writers also welcomed Chekhov to their literary and social gatherings. Less distinguished than the Petersburg group, they were passionate liberals — which may account for their slowness in recognizing Chekhov's great talent. Their ideological hero was Mikhailovsky, and they also worshiped the writings of Saltykov- Shchedrin with his emphasis upon social satire. Nemirovich-Danchenko recalls Chekhov at one of these gatherings — tall, handsome, modest, and restrained in his gestures. In such groups he preferred to listen and observe rather than talk. When he did speak, pushing his long hair back in a characteristic gesture and his face illuminated by a charming smile, he spoke always to the point, with quiet independence and no trace of artificiality. Like most present, he knew by heart the speeches of V. A. Goltsev, who often addressed the group. He was the editor of the well-known Moscow progressive magazine Russian Thought, and his forensic efforts in the liberal cause were as boring as they were well-intentioned. Chekhov, as previously indicated, disliked this magazine and cared less for its editor, and not till a few years later did he learn to appreciate the virtues and political courage of Goltsev. Once a cab in which Chekhov and Nemirovich-Danchenko were riding collided with a horsecar. Nemirovich-Danchenko remarked that they could easily have been killed. "Dying would be bad enough," replied Chekhov, "but Goltsev's funeral speech would be worse."
Chekhov's prestige among the Moscow writers helped to bring about his election, in 1889, to the select Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. Membership this same year in the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers probably pleased him more, for one of its functions was to protect the royalty rights of members no matter where their plays might be performed throughout Russia. He even agreed to serve on an executive committee of this society, which must have been something of a chore — he notes that one of the meetings lasted from seven in the evening till three in the morning. His willingness to serve, despite his instinctive dislike for organizations, was no doubt connected with the practical purpose of the society. Yet his comic sense prevailed at the meetings. It was impossible to describe them, he wrote Suvorin: they ought to be performed. In fact, he published in New Times, anonymously, an amusing dramatic spoof of the
meetings: Obligatory Declaration.
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After putting Ivanov behind him, Chekhov turned once again to that frustrating challenge of his creative life —his attempts to write a novel. Many hours during 1889 were dedicated to this agonizing effort. By way of preparation he plunged into the reading of fiction. "If I could live another forty years," he wrote Suvorin, "and read, read, read, and learn to write with talent, that is, concisely, at the end of that time I would fire at you with so great a cannon that the heavens would shake. But now, like the rest, I'm only a Lilliputian." (April 8, 1889.) And Chekhov sincerely believed this as he contemplated the great Russian writers of the past. When at this time his friend Tikhonov wrote that the eminent zoologist N. P. Wagner regarded him as the greatest Russian author, "an elephant among all of us" (Turgenev's phrase about Tolstoy), Chekhov promptly replied he had been so little caressed as a child that endearments still struck him as something unfamiliar, a new experience. Though he would now like to be kind to others, he refused to believe that either he or any of his generation of writers would be esteemed by posterity as an elephant. At best, he said, they would be known collectively as "the Eighties" — that is, a "sort of team." (March 7, 1889.)
However, he did not always spare the reputation of the older writers. He declared to Suvorin that Dostoevsky, whom he was then reading, was ". . . pretty good but too long-winded and too indelicate. There is much that is pretentious." (March 5, 1889.) And like Tolstoy, Chekhov now wondered why he had ever considered Goncharov a first-class writer. "His Oblomov is in no sense an important thing," he wrote Suvorin at the beginning of May. "The hero himself is a far-fetched character, not nearly big enough to make it worth while writing a whole book about him. He is a flabby sluggard like so man)', a commonplace nature, average, petty; to rank him as a social type is to make too much of such a person. I ask myself: If Oblomov were not such a sluggard, what would he be? And I answer: Nothing." Nor do the rest of the leading characters in this celebrated novel come off much better. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov admired; but with reservations. Shortly after that famous satirist's death, in 1889, he wrote Pleshcheev: "I'm sorry about Saltykov. His was a firm, strong mind, the mean spirit that inhabits the petty, average, spiritually distorted Russian intellectual has lost in him its most implacable and troublesome enemy . . . only Saltykov could condemn openly. Two thirds of his readers did not like him, but all believed him. No one doubted the sincerity of his contempt." (May 14, 1889.)
Curiously enough, Chekhov did not undertake to re-read any of Tolstoy this year, but the gray seer of Yasnaya Polyana had for the first time begun to read Chekhov, and cryptic entries in his diary record both praise and criticism. On the whole, it was Gogol, an artist so close to him in certain respects, who aroused Chekhov's positive enthusiasm. He had been reading his tales again and seeing his plays. "But how direct and how powerful is Gogol," he wrote to Suvorin, "and what a great artist he is! . . . He is the greatest Russian writer."
Certainly Gogol's Dead Souls and its hero Chichikov appear to have been very much in his mind when he resumed work on his novel, according to a comment in an article by Suvorin after Chekhov's death. "On several occasions," Suvorin wrote, "he described to me the broad theme of the novel with its half-fantastic hero who lives on forever and takes part in all the events of the nineteenth century."
Chekhov continued to think of the novel in terms of the title he had mentioned to Grigorovich the previous year: Tales from the Life of My Friends. Whenever he sat down to it, he felt as he did after eating a good meal. To Pleshcheev he wrote that he would dedicate the novel to him, and he lightly mentioned to Suvorin that he would soon be coming up to Petersburg to auction off the manuscript to the highest bidder. He had just finished one of the tales, he wrote Anna Yevreinova, editor of the Northern Herald (he had planned the novel as a series of separate but thematically connected short stories). For the first time, he explained, circumstances were ideal for his concentrating on a lengthy major work —he had enough money ahead and had given promises to no one for any other writing. Now he didn't leave the house, he informed her; he wrote and wrote. "Ah, what a novel! If it were not for the thrice-accursed conditions of censorship, then I would promise it to you in November. There is nothing in the novel inciting to revolution, yet the censor will spoil it. Half of the active characters say: 'I do not believe in God,' there is a father whose son has been condemned to prison for armed resistance, a district police officer who is ashamed of his uniform, a marshal of the nobility whom all hate, etc. It is rich material for a censor's blue pencil." (March 10, 1889.)