He saw this year and next as an opportunity to write full speed ahead, trusting himself to “avoid subjectivity” and tell simple stories of complex people. When he was suffering from tubercular symptoms, his pace slowed, but he labored on. One immediate result this spring was the most extraordinary evocation in literature of the art of writing, more particularly of composing “hymns of praise,” in the short story “Easter Eve.”
April 1886
Don’t invent sufferings you have not experienced, and don’t paint pictures you have not seen…
—Letter to his brother Alexander1
On April 2, Grigorovich answered Chekhov’s letter, the “sincerity” of which had gratified the old man. “You’re doing excellently that you flee from and don’t waste images and pictures that are especially dear to you…. think up a good plan (an architectural structure of the story is the important thing)—and in summer start with God to work. If your personal talent is not in line with a novella or novel, write short stories, but work them over into refinement. With only ‘A Sportsman’s Sketches’ Turgenev would have made himself a great name!”2
On April 4, Chekhov wrote Bilibin: “You write that my last two stories in the Pete Gaz are weak…” These would have been “On the River” and “Spring.” He took Bilibin’s critiques, as he took everyone’s, in stride, even outdoing them in their criticism. Chekhov said the next ones would be even weaker. He explained, “I wore myself out.” But then he turned to anti-Semitism, using it and reproaching its use. “As for the good women about whom you asked, I hasten to maintain that there are so many of them in Moscow. Just now my sister had a whole bouquet, and I melted like a Jew before gold… By the way: in the last ‘Fragments of Petersburg Life’ [a gossipy culture section, the Moscow installments of which Chekhov usually wrote] there were three swipes you took at Jews. Why’s that?”3
Considering that Chekhov occasionally used loaded words and stereotypes about Jews and in fact had just done so in this letter, this scolding is surprising, and Bilibin could have asked in return: What about you? Chekhov then returned to one of his special topics with Bilibin and asked about the date of Bilibin’s wedding and told him that “During St. Thomas week [the week beginning the Sunday after Easter] I will be a best man for two: a doctor and an artist.”
But Chekhov was not well. With springtime he was coughing up blood. “Chekhov suffered from ill health most of his adult life,” writes Dr. Richard Carter, “and the year he graduated from medical school [1884] he experienced the first of many episodes of hemoptysis, a harbinger of an early death. For several years he suffered recurrent bouts of fever, productive cough, and chest pain that kept him awake many nights. In retrospect, this was most likely from tuberculous bronchiectasis…. However, Chekhov often complained about less serious ailments such as hemorrhoids, diarrhea, constipation, heart palpitations, muscular twitching, migraine headaches, and phlebitis. He was nonchalant and minimized the nature of his more serious lung disease…”4
He usually had symptoms twice a year. When friends queried him, he soberly or jokingly fended them off: “I am not going to have any treatment. I shall drink mineral waters and quinine, but I shall not allow myself to be examined,” he wrote to a concerned Suvorin in 1891.5 Lest we non-medical people feel too bewildered by Chekhov’s long denial of his own tuberculosis, Dr. John Coope explains:
Only someone with little experience of sick doctors would be surprised to find such an attitude in someone whose chosen pursuit is the treatment of illness. There is a great, almost impassable gulf between being in professional charge of illness and being a patient. In part this is due to knowing the limits as well as the advantages of treatment, but perhaps even more to an unwillingness to relinquish control over the management of one’s everyday life to others.6
He only admitted to having tuberculosis in 1897. Suvorin visited him in the hospital that spring:
“To calm patients,” [Chekhov] said, “we say when they have a cough it is gastric and when they have a hemorrhage it is a burst vein. But gastric coughs do not exist and coughed up blood definitely comes from the lungs. Blood is coming from my right lung as it did in the case of my brother, and another of my tuberculosis relatives. The doctors try and tell me, as a doctor, that it is a gastric hemorrhage. I listen to them but don’t take any notice. I know I have tuberculosis.”7
*
April was much slower for Chekhov as far as literary production went; he published only six stories, one of them the soon-to-be very popular story called “Grisha” (“Grisha,” April 5), about a two-year-eight-month-old toddler who goes out for a walk with his nursemaid. Grisha takes in a lot of sights, and fortunately for the nursemaid can’t communicate them all to his mother: “When he reached home, Grisha explained to mamma, the walls, and his crib where he had been and what he had seen. He told it less with his tongue than with his hands and his face; he showed how the sun had shone, how the horses had trotted, how the terrible oven had gaped at him, and how the cook had drunk.”8 Chekhov credited Bilibin with the idea for this story.
By April 6, it was time to scold Alexander about the debts that Nikolay and he had rung up. Anton had apparently heard from Alexander about it, but he had a multi-pointed argument ready. By Point 3, Anton was mocking Alexander’s trying to weasel out of payments:
You say: “They burn, cut, trample and suck.” That is, they demand payment of debts? My dear fellow, but one must pay debts! One must at whatever cost, even to little Armenians, even at the price of starving. If university men and writers see suffering in paying debts, what about the rest? I wonder. But the whole point is in the principle…. Anyhow, why contract debts? Forgive me this silly question, but I vow this is not a sermon. One could, surely, do without debts. I judge by myself; I have on my shoulders a family which is much bigger than yours, and provisions in Moscow are ten times dearer than in your place. For your house you pay as much as I do for the piano. I dress no better than you…. The whole trouble is in expenses and purchases you have no right to make and with which you should long since have dispensed: Nestle’s flour, a superfluous servant, and so on. When husband and wife have no money they do not keep a servant—that is a practical rule. […] The magistrate has sentenced me to pay 105 rubles, the debt which you and Nikolay made at Semenov’s shop. […] During the summer holidays I’ll squeeze myself somehow. I and the family will spend fifty rubles a month, and there will be no debts. […]
(5) Why do you write so little? How disgusting! […] All the stories you sent me for Leykin smell strongly of idleness. […] Respect yourself, for the love of Christ; don’t give your hands liberty when your brain is lazy! Write no more than two stories a week, shorten them, polish them. Work should be work. Don’t invent sufferings you have not experienced, and don’t paint pictures you have not seen—for a lie in a story is much more boring than a lie in conversation….
Remember every minute that your pen and your talent you will need in the future more than you do now, so don’t profane them…9
He echoed Grigorovich’s warning to him, translated into brotherly scolding:
[…] Literature has been no labor to you, but most surely it is labor. Were you a decent man, were you to sit at a story (of 150 or 200 lines) for five or seven days, what a result there would be! You would not recognize yourself in your lines, just as you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror…. Consider, you are not piled up with pressing work, and therefore you can work on one little thing for several evenings. Is it profitable? Count. With great minuteness you could write five or seven stories a month, which would make about a hundred rubles; and now, though you write a great deal, you don’t make fifty. […]