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Despite the many claims on his time during these first two Melikhovo years, Chekhov managed to keep writing at the center of his daily existence. It is surprising how much he published and how much more he planned over this busy period. The new sights, sounds, landscapes, people, and activities of Melikhovo and its surroundings spurred his imagination and filled his mind with subjects for his pen. The notebooks which he began to keep at this time contain, in addition to non- literary material, observations, character sketches, bits of dialogue, and descriptive passages that have a bearing not only on tales he was writing, but also on pieces designed for the future.
Though crcation had long since become a positive need, Chekhov now had to write to meet his debts — in buying Melikhovo he had not anticipated heavy expenditures for improving the place. There were no rich authors in this world, he told Yezhov, and if he were in debt, that was the order of things. True, among Chekhov's literary contemporaries, veiy few achieved substantial earnings. Printings were small, for books rarely sold in large numbers, and contracts disproportionately favored publishers. After 1905, with the removal of censorship, the publishing business improved greatly and successful authors then earned much money. Comparatively speaking, however, Chekhov's income by this time was better by far than most of his writing contemporaries. By 1893 In the Twilight had had seven printings, Motley Tales, five, Tales, eight, Gloomy People, four, The Duel, four, and special editions of single stories and of his other collections had gone into more than one printing. So chaotically did he keep accounts that at one point he thought he owed Suvorin's publishing firm for advances when they actually owed him money. In addition, he had begun to receive small sums regularly for the reprint rights of a number of his stories published by Intermediary, and at the end of 1893 he was paid twenty-three hundred roubles by the publisher I. D. Sytin for the reprint rights of a series of his early tales. In fact, by 1893 had reimbursed Suvorin for most of his loan toward the purchase price of Melikhovo, and had liquidated the mortgage held on the property by the former owner, who willingly reduced the sum upon Chekhov's offer to pay in full. He now owed only the bank mortgage. Though his output, talents, and the position he held in the literary world undoubtedly justified a much larger income, with judicious management of his affairs his earnings were adequate to support him and his family comfortably.
Chekhov's literary position was now generally recognized as the foremost one among contemporary writers of prose fiction. Critics praised him not only as an artist, but as a thinker; Brother Alexander wrote him that his Petersburg readers were interested in his social ideas. His stories had already begun to appear in English, French, German, and Czech; and various magazines were not only pressing him for contributions but also offering him attractive positions as editor. Modestly he scolded one publisher who advertised his name in huge letters as the author of a forthcoming story; he had been treated, he said, as though he were a dentist or a masseur. More than ever distinguished writers sought him out. It was conveyed to him at this time that Leo Tolstoy wished to meet him and had actually called at his old Moscow address. Although A. I. Ertel, author of the brilliant novel The Garden- ins, received a refusal when he asked Chekhov to do a public reading, this initial meeting began a firm friendship between them. On Chekhov's initiative, eighteen of the leading writers and artists of Petersburg gathered for a convivial dinner, on January 12, 1893, at the MaloYaroslavets restaurant, a gesture of rare comradeship in Russian letters which he urged should be repeated at regular intervals.
Chekhov now usually wrote more slowly and with much care. He no longer turned out tales at the behest of editors and he told one who pushed him hard to regard him as a contributor who would send in pieces only when lie could, even if that meant oncc in three years. And he tried to avoid taking any advancc except for a tale he already had under way. In the light of the extraordinary rapidity with which he had written his early stories, it is interesting to find him now marveling at the speed with which Potapenko produced. "He can write about sixteen printed pages in a day and without a single correction," Chekhov informed Suvorin. "Oncc, in five days, he wrote eleven hundred roubles' worth. In my opinion this express-train writing is not at all a drawback, as Grigorovich thinks, but a peculiarity of talent. One village wench will thrash around like a sturgeon for two days before she gives birth; for another, to give birth is just like running into a lavatory." (November 28, i8gj.) At times Chekhov sought relief from intense concentration on his writing in more or less mechanical work, such as copy- editing talcs for New Times, which he still occasionally did, or even abbreviating Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo, a procedure he suggested to Suvorin when he spoke of his intention of publishing a translation of this novel. Chekhov bled it so drastically, he told Suvorin, that the novel looked like a person who had suffered from typhoid. Svobodin, observing this task at Melikhovo, drew an amusing caricature, in which he portrayed Dumas weeping copious tears as he stood behind Chekhov's chair and watched him slashing away at The Count of Monte Cristo.
In general, Suvorin's passion for French fiction was not shared by Chekhov. For example, lie admitted that Zola's novel Le Docteur Pascal had some merit, but he disagreed with Suvorin that Pascal was the best character. He was invented and had something bad inside him, said Chekhov, whereas Clotildc was a human being, a personality, and had a waist and breasts that he could feel. And he strenuously objected to Zola's conception of the relations between the ancicnt Dr. Pascal and the young and attractive Clotildc. When he had diarrhea at night, Chekhov explained to Suvorin, he usually placed a cat on his stomach and it kept him warm like a hot compress. But one has to be a Frenchman, he continued, to make of Clotildc "a hot-water bottle for a gray- haired cupid with the spindly legs of a cock. It is offensive to me that someone younger and more vigorous did not make use of Clotilde; an old King David, worn out in the embraces of a young girl, is like a melon which, touched by the frost of an autumn morning, still hopes to ripen, for every vegetable has its day. . . . I'm not preaching moral- "for the lonely man, the desert is everywhere" / 299
ity, and no doubt my own old age will not be free from attempts 'to draw my bow,' as Apuleius says in the Golden Ass. Judged from a human point of view, there is nothing wrong in Pascal's sleeping with a young girl — that is his own personal affair; what is wrong is that Zola should praise Clotilde for sleeping with Pascal, and it is wrong that he should have called this perversion love." (November 11, 1893.)
Including The Wife and The Grasshopper, which have already been mentioned, Chekhov published twenty-one long and short stories, articles, and notes over 1892-1893, which appeared in no less than seven newspapers and magazines. He also did most of the writing on two other tales and completed his book, The Island of Sakhalin. An urge to return to the miniature tales of his early years, persistently nurtured by Leikin and perhaps furthered by his gift of the dachshunds, Quinine and Bromine, led Chekhov to submit four "trifles" in 1892, signed by pseudonyms, the last he ever published in Fragments. The short story, In Exile (World Illustration, 1892), drawn from Chekhov's experience in Siberia, is a poignant account of psychological erosion among those condemned by the law to live in this inhospitable land. Simeon, the ferryman, takes refuge in vodka and the illusory conviction that he wants absolutely nothing from life, a belief opposed by the unhappy Tartar exile who yearns for a sight of his mother and wife, because God made man for happiness, sorrow, and grief.