Meanwhile, “Anyuta” (the same, “Anyuta”) was published February 22. Leykin had had to deal with the censor’s objections to the undisguised sexual exploitation of the good, trusting, vulnerable title character, a young, impoverished medical student’s lover and human anatomy dummy:
“These ribs are like the keys of a piano,” he said. “One must familiarize oneself with them somehow, if one is not to get muddled over them. One must study them in the skeleton and the living body…. I say, Anyuta, let me pick them out.”
Anyuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened herself up. Klochkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began counting her ribs.20
Anyuta does not know she is special. We observe her exploitation by the medical student and his friends; an artist comes by to get her to pose for him. She is a type, a body, someone intended, they feel, for their use. Chekhov feels for her, brings to light her distinctiveness, her pride, her helplessness: “In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to another, she had known five students like Klochkov. Now they had all finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of course, like respectable people, had long ago forgotten her.”21 As a former medical student himself, as the brother of and friend of artists, Chekhov was familiar with and ashamed of such behavior and of all such “respectable people.”
To not be left in the dust, Leykin wrote Chekhov with a plan: he advised him to certainly keep writing for New Times, but to submit rarely to the Petersburg Gazette, “because you say you’re not in the position to write more than you’re writing.”22 He goaded Chekhov to ask the Gazette’s editor Sergey Khudekov for more money—he would give it, Leykin assured him—but, in the meantime, he reminded Chekhov, write the story that you started for Fragments and were supposed to send by Saturday. Leykin, perhaps to make up for the lack of satisfactory pieces, said he himself would start writing two stories. Chekhov’s friend, the architect Schechtel, who had designed the frontispiece for Chekhov’s book of stories, wrote a note warning Chekhov that, after his (Schechtel’s) conversation with the book’s printer, Roman Golike, Chekhov was right not to trust Leykin. What Leykin was trying to do, Schechtel did not make clear.
On February 25, Chekhov received a gift from Leykin: a small sculpture of a dog. Was this the Trojan Horse through which Leykin would overcome Chekhov? Leykin and Chekhov loved dogs, and eventually Leykin would send Chekhov the offspring of his own adored dogs. Chekhov was moving on to a bigger literary world and Leykin was jealous and hurt.
March 1886
Doctors have disgusting days and hours; God forbid anyone experiencing them. It is true that ignoramuses and sneaks are not a rarity among doctors any more than among writers, engineers, people generally, but those disgusting hours and days of which I am speaking fall only to doctors, and because of that, in fairness, much should be forgiven them.
—Letter to Suvorin1
Though Chekhov’s first letter of March is dated February 28, he wrote it to Bilibin the night of the 28th after midnight; he wandered through various topics:
Leykin, when he writes me a letter, has the need to put on the heading not only the year and date, but even the hour of the night that he, sacrificing sleep, writes to his lazy employee. I will imitate him: it’s now 2 in the morning… Appreciate that! […] I’m busy up to my neck! […]
I write and I doctor. In Moscow typhus spreads rampantly. I’m especially afraid of this typhus. It seems to me that once I got sick from this awfulness, I wouldn’t get well, and there are occasions for infection at each step… Why aren’t I a lawyer instead of a healer? Tonight I went to a girl sick with croup, and every day I go to a Jewish schoolgirl who I am treating for the disease of Nana—small pox. […]
For the themes, merci… Oh, how I need themes! I have written about everything […] Going on 5–6 years, I won’t be in the position to write a story a year. […]2
It does sometimes seem that he wrote about “everything,” and yet from the contents of his letters we’ll see that he let a few of his own experiences go untold, among them suffering from hemorrhoids, performing surgery, conducting gynecological exams, having sexual intercourse, and using certain kinds of rough words. Of course, the mores of his times would not have allowed stories presenting those subjects to be published. Finally, he landed on the subject he only confided to Bilibin:
However, all that’s boring…. Let’s talk about marriage.
I’m still not married. With my fiancée, I broke off completely. That is, she broke off with me. But I still didn’t even buy a revolver and I don’t write journals. Everything in the world is perverse, circular, rough and relative.
This paragraph seems significant, and yet after that glum conclusion, he changed the subject to his book and again to Leykin, and finally to Bilibin’s own health. This was an especially diary-like, rambling letter by Chekhov—written after a long day of medical work before going to bed. Was he actually broken up by the breakup? He assured Bilibin he wasn’t. Was he putting a fiction to rest? That is, we pretended we were engaged, and now we’re not pretending anymore, and we’re certainly not marrying. We were kind of making it all up anyway.
I’m inclined to think that Chekhov guiltily backed away from Efros, forcing her to do the breaking up.
Why did Chekhov only talk about his engagement to Bilibin? There are no surviving letters from Chekhov to Efros. There are only two surviving letters from her to him, which we will encounter when he does.
*
The first two of fifteen stories that Chekhov published in March were about disingenuous young men. “The Big Wig” (“Persona,” March 1) describes the daydreams of an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old answering, like hundreds of others, a want ad for a big-wig scribe:
“I don’t know how to compose, Mama,” Misha sighed. “I confess I’ve already sat behind the writing desk five times, and not a line of mine has come. I want to write smartly, but it comes out simple, like you’re writing to Auntie in Kremenchug.”3
Chekhov himself would have preferred reading such “simple” writing to whatever writing Misha might think of as “smart.”
Misha sat behind the table, laid out before him a sheet of paper and set to thinking. After a long while staring at the ceiling, he took the pen and swinging his arm, as all do who venerate their own writing, began, “Your highness! I was born in 1867 in the town of K. to my father Kyrill Nikanorovich Naballashnikov and my mother Natalia Ivanovna. My father worked in a sugar factory of the merchant Podgoyskov in the office and received 600 rubles a year. Then he quit and for a long time lived without a place. Then…”
Misha, who shares his nickname and perhaps his swinging writing arm with Chekhov’s youngest brother (who was born in 1865), did not want to mention his drunken father’s death, but he does because for the sake of his poor mother he is more or less begging for a job.
Misha wrote up a whole page. He wrote sincerely, but pointlessly, without any plan or chronological order, repeating and entangling himself.
He’s sincere and any reader would want to give the innocent, earnest, and devoted boy a job. After two weeks of painful anticipation of a reply, he ventures to the Big Wig himself, who scolds him for bothering him, as he already has his scribe.