Chekhov was protective of his mother, and brother Mikhail recounts instances of her doting on him: “After a few hours of writing, Anton would come to the dining room around eleven and look at the clock meaningfully. Catching this, Mother would immediately stand up from her sewing machine and begin fussing. ‘Ah, my-my, Antosha is hungry!’… After lunch Anton would usually go to his bedroom, lock himself in, and mull over his plots—if Morpheus did not interrupt him, that is. We would all go back to work from three in the afternoon until seven in the evening.”21
My favorite of Chekhov’s biographers, Ernest Simmons, writes: “The years 1885 to 1889 were among the happiest in Chekhov’s relatively short life. By the end of this brief period he had emerged from obscurity to become one of the most appreciated and discussed writers of the day…. He had brought his family from indigence to a position of material security and social acceptance…. Many publishers were bidding for the products of his pen.”22
*
To have as few failures as possible in fiction writing, or in order not to be so sensitive to failures, you must write more, around one hundred or two hundred stories a year. That is the secret.
—Letter to his brother Alexander23
In the midst of those “happy years,” March of 1886 was the most productive month of his writing life; he published fifteen short stories, a few of them among his most excellent. As soon as he finished a story, off it went in the overnight mail to St. Petersburg, and within the week it was in print. He was not writing without thinking, he was writing without blocking. There was nothing in the way between his imagination and the paper he was writing upon. For example, “Poison” (“Otrava,”24 published March 8) is not an especially good or memorable story, and yet it is interesting in the context of what I’m regarding as his creative diary: A father-in-law, instead of paying the groom a dowry, gives him a note for an overdue loan. The anxious groom discovers that the doctor-debtor, one Klyabov, won’t pay it, because the interest has fraudulently ballooned.
The palming-off of the bad debt on the son-in-law doesn’t seem to reflect very much on Chekhov’s immediate circumstances, except that Chekhov was as usual in debt and was himself at the moment a fiancé. The story’s most personal vibrations are activated when it comes to poor Dr. Klyabov, who after working all night has been roused from his sleep. These are the aggravations that Dr. Chekhov suffered:
“God knows what!” Klyabov waved his arm, getting up and making a tearful face. “I thought that you were sick, but you’re here with some nonsense… This is shameless on your side! I went to lie down at seven today, but you for some Devil knows reason wake me! Decent people respect others’ peace… I’m even ashamed for you!”25
Chekhov wrote to his editor Nikolay Leykin about “Poison”:
Having written and reread the story I sent you yesterday, I scratched my ears, raised my brows and grunted—activities every author does after having written something long and boring… I began the story in the morning; the idea wasn’t bad and the beginning came out quite okay, but the misfortune was that I came to write with interruptions. After the first page, A. M. Dmitriev’s wife came to ask for a medical certificate; after the second I received a telegram from Schechteclass="underline" Sick! I had to go treat him… After the third page—lunch and so on. But writing with interruptions is like an irregular pulse.26
And even in the midst of this letter to editor Leykin, he was interrupted: “Someone’s pulled at the bell…”; after that ellipsis, Dr. Chekhov announced, with relief, “Not for me!”27 In “Poison,” Chekhov re-experienced Dr. Klyabov’s frustrations and distractions. Who would interrupt him next?
On this day he was writing or about to write “A Story without an End.” In these two years, Chekhov seemingly had stories “without end.” This new one, about a would-be suicide, is told by an unnamed first-person narrator, whom Chekhov, putting some space between himself and the storyteller, didn’t allow to be a doctor, even though he is remarkably knowledgeable about physiology; the narrator, it turns out, is only a humor writer.
*
On my middle-aged way to learning Russian so I could read Anna Karenina in the original, I read dozens and dozens of Chekhov’s stories, some in heavily annotated editions for us Russian learners. In English I had read all of Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov, and I either didn’t notice or didn’t care that she didn’t arrange the stories chronologically. She gathered the stories the way a florist might arrange bouquets: loosely, occasionally thematically, occasionally by time-range, size, or quality. When I was reading Russian collections, however, I kept noticing that so many of my favorite stories had been published in 1886 and 1887. I loved Chekhov’s later stories too, but there weren’t so many of them. Had anyone else noticed all those 1886 and 1887 publication dates?… Of course others had! In the best book about Chekhov, read by me at least a few times since the early 1980s and “forgotten,” there is this emphatic and dead-on declaration: “Eighteen eighty-six and early 1887 brought a whole stream of stories, unprecedented in Russian literature for the originality of their form and subject matter and for their compression and concision.”28 I second that evaluation.
I chose to study the two years where Chekhov took center stage in Russian literature so that I could give myself and you, my reader, the illusion of comprehensiveness. There is no comprehensive biography of Chekhov, though there are many good biographies. Like Garnett’s story collections, they too seem to focus on a theme or aspect of his life. Rosamund Bartlett, who seems to me to have the most thoroughly knowledgeable appreciation of Chekhov’s life and work, focused her biography, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (2005), on the places where he lived and visited. Donald Rayfield’s Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997, updated and revised in 2021) is large and long but not focused on his writing. It is informative about the Chekhov family’s dynamics and is full of unexpurgated material from Chekhov’s and his correspondents’ letters that had never even been published in Russian.29 Michael C. Finke’s Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings (2021) is a good but brief biography that fairly balances the life and work. I have read all of Chekhov’s 1886–1887 letters in Russian, and there are several collections of his letters in English, which I draw on and quote from.
It’s possible to catch Chekhov in the looking-glass in the miracle years of 1886 and 1887 because he had almost no time to look away.
*
“My work is like a diary. It’s even dated like a diary.”
—Pablo Picasso30
I wish we really knew how he wrote his stories or even any single tale. In that hour or three wherein Chekhov’s hand and imagination inscribed a story, even if we watched his quick right-handed penmanship slide and scritch across his narrow notebook pages, with sometimes not even a cross out, what would we know beyond the appreciation of his speed and focus? Perhaps it would be like viewing the replayed iPad paintings of David Hockney, where in about sixty seconds the screen displays a flurry of the artist’s eyes’ and finger’s decisions: lines, shapes, colors, tones, resizings… and voilà, a beautiful tree-lined road. Chekhov’s mother Evgenia said, “When he was still an undergraduate, Antosha would sit at the table in the morning, having his tea and suddenly fall to thinking; he would sometimes look straight into one’s eyes, but I knew that he saw nothing. Then he would get his notebook out of his pocket and write quickly, quickly. And again he would fall to thinking.”31
From some such perspective we can at least imagine him at work, and certainly we can see the proof in the pudding. Chekhov’s stories are as personal as any great artist’s landscapes and portraits. David Hockney is not the trees and he is not the friends he paints. But from Hockney’s many works we know a lot more about how he sees and understands the world than we probably know about our own ways of seeing. He and Chekhov help us appreciate what can be appreciated, if only we were focused geniuses. We know from Chekhov’s thousands of pages of writing that the challenge of his life was to free himself to feel the entirety of his humanity, which meant in his case a combination of intelligence and wit and a deep well of sympathy for the weak and the vulnerable: