What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests’ hands, worshiping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before god and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance—write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.32
That fearsome “young man” who squeezed “the slave out of himself drop by drop” was of course Chekhov. This declaration, written to his closest friend and confidant of the time (1889), is the most personal revelation he ever made, but unfortunately he himself never wrote that story, though his memoirist siblings and his conscientious biographers have ever since his death tried to do so. My modest suggestion is that his own stories do tell, in pieces and flashes, that story of himself, the “real human being.”
No one has tracked his daily routines beyond what the editors of the invaluable Letopis’33 (“Chronicle”) of his life have compiled. We have a few contemporary facts about some particular days, but there isn’t an appointments calendar or a record of the patients he saw. He was on the other hand very good at keeping track of publications, sending follow-up letters and commissioning various brothers to round up the late payments from forgetful or tight-fisted editors. During my mostly happy days of research, I had the big, great obvious idea of compressing this biography of two years of his life—writer, doctor, financial provider, joker, lover, friend—into a short story, written as if by himself. It would be brilliant, amusing, and concise. We would know Chekhov from the outside through carefully selected observations and from the inside through his buzzing thoughts….
I didn’t manage to write that story.
For this biography, Chekhov would have advised me, had he been unable to dissuade me from writing it at all, to Keep it simple. Sketch the mundane everyday life and activities, but vividly. Admit what you don’t know. Be modest. Be brief! That sounds simple, but as his friend Viktor Bilibin eventually protested when Chekhov cajoled him toward greater artistry in his writing: I’m not you, Anton Pavlovich!
*
Some notes on the text: I use the present tense in describing and discussing Chekhov’s creative works; I use the past tense when describing and presenting letters and memoirs. The variations from that rule are either intentional or accidental. I use the transcription from Cyrillic method of, for example, x to kh (as in Чехов/Chekhov) and the й and ы to y (sorry, but the scholarly transcription of the й to j makes me cringe), the ю to yu, the я to ya. I ignore the ё (“yo”) in names (Kiseleva) and use the simple e. I ignore the ye pronunciation that some Russian e’s have and stick to the e (for example, not Dostoyevsky but Dostoevsky). I accept the soft sign and render it as what looks like an apostrophe (Леонтьев/Leont’ev), except in familiar names like Tatyana or Gogol. I refer to Chekhov as Anton only in discussing or presenting exchanges between him and his siblings: that is, when he was not Chekhov but Anton or Antosha. I refer to his brother Aleksandr as Alexander. I have silently corrected British-translated spellings (e.g., colour, mould, theatre) for American spellings. I have silently replaced Garnett’s and others’ tch spelling of the Russian ch (ч) as ch. That particular spelling is why we still see Tchaikovsky spelled that way, and why some translations of Chekhov before the 1920s render his name as Tchekhov. Because the translations of individual story titles vary so much into English, I indicate the Russian title in transliteration for each. In the appendix, I list in English and Russian all of the titles of the stories and skits in chronological order.
PART ONE
Chekhonte & Chekhov
January 1886
It is not up to me to permit or prohibit you to write. I referred to the need for learning to punctuate properly because in a work of art punctuation often plays the part of musical notation and can’t be learned from a textbook; it requires instinct and experience. Enjoying writing doesn’t mean playing or having a good time. Experiencing enjoyment from an activity means loving that activity.
—To a young writer1
There was a costume party at the Chekhovs’ on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1885. They lived in Moscow on the north side of the Moscow River, in a merchants’ quarter known as Yakimanka. They had moved into this apartment at the beginning of December. The apartment was damp, but for the first time Dr. Chekhov “had a room of his own: a study with an open fireplace where he worked and received his patients. The flat was on the ground floor, and that turned out to be a serious disadvantage, for the [second] floor of the house was occupied by a restaurant that was regularly let out for wakes and wedding parties.”2 This New Year’s Eve, the Chekhovs would contribute to the building’s happy noise.
Among the guests was Maria Yanova.3 She presented a photo album to Chekhov. Opening the photo album, Chekhov would have read Yanova’s inscription: “My humble gift to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in memory of saving me from typhus.” He had tended to her and to her mother and sisters when they had typhus in early December. Her mother and one sister had died, the sister with Chekhov at her bedside. Maria Yanov’s brother Alexander was a painter and had been a classmate of Chekhov’s brother Nikolay at a Moscow art institute. Yanov could not afford a doctor for his mother and sisters and Chekhov had volunteered for the dangerous and tragic job.4
He was twenty-five. He was tall, handsome, with dark brown hair; he had a trim beard and moustache, dark eyes, and in photos sometimes had a smart-alecky expression he directed at the camera.5
In 1894, Chekhov with two of his friends, Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik and Lidiya Yavorskaya. He must have made them laugh, but he had trained himself not to laugh at his own jokes. He named this photograph The Temptation of St. Anthony.
“All were captivated by his appearance and manner,” writes one biographer. “With his capacity to make friends, many, upon meeting him for the first time, felt that they had known him for years. As he talked his face grew animated, and he occasionally brushed back his shock of thick hair or toyed lightly with his youthful beard.”6 He had a baritone voice. If he had a Southern Russian accent, or a special rhythm to his phrasing, no one ever remarked on it. “Simplicity dominated his movements and gestures. All were struck by his expressive eyes set in a long, open face with well-defined nose and mouth.”
The six-foot-one doctor was also amusing. He wrote funny stories and skits for Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers and magazines, for which work he used pen names, the most common and popular being Antosha Chekhonte.
*
It had only been a few weeks before, during his first ever visit to St. Petersburg, that Chekhov discovered that Antosha Chekhonte was a very popular writer. For five years already Chekhov had been writing comic stories and cultural journalism under various pen names and anonymously for Moscow and Petersburg publications. In his most frequent venue, Fragments (a title sometimes translated into English as Splinters or Shards), Antosha Chekhonte was the star attraction. His St. Petersburg Gazette short stories, some of which were serious, were attracting the literati. Famous authors in the capital wanted to meet him and when they did, they encouraged him to write more and longer pieces. His host in Petersburg, the Fragments editor and publisher Nikolay Leykin, himself a popular humorist whom Chekhov and his brothers read growing up, had wanted to show him off but was anxious not to lose him.