He goes on:
“[…] I must tell you, sir, that when I was younger I strove after celebrity with every fiber of my being. To be popular was my craze, so to speak. For the sake of it I studied, worked, sat up at night, neglected my meals. And I fancy, as far as I can judge without partiality, I had all the natural gifts for attaining it. To begin with, I am an engineer by profession. In the course of my life I have built in Russia some two dozen magnificent bridges, I have laid aqueducts for three towns; I have worked in Russia, in England, in Belgium…. Secondly, I am the author of several special treatises in my own line. […] I will not fatigue your attention by enumerating my works and my merits, I will only say that I have done far more than some celebrities. And yet here I am in my old age, I am getting ready for my coffin, so to say, and I am as celebrated as that black dog yonder running on the embankment.”
The engineer recounts that he thought he had been about to achieve fame many years before when he had finished a bridge in a provincial town, but at the opening day ceremonies, he was outshone by his untalented actress girlfriend. The story ends with the listener asking the engineer if he has heard of him—just as famous in his way—and the engineer hasn’t. They laugh.
Chekhov thought his own recent fame was undeserved. To his amazement, it would only get bigger and bigger.
PART THREE
At Home with Family and Fame
Leaving Babkino in early September and returning to Moscow was like returning to school after a summer vacation. Their previous apartment had been too noisy1 and so Chekhov’s sister Maria had found the family a house to rent on the then quiet Kudrinskaya-Sadovaya Street. Chekhov’s father Pavel, contributing to the family welfare, had tried to deliver the first two months’ rent (some of the money arriving as a loan from Leykin), but there was an obstacle set up by the landlord that delayed the family’s entry until the furniture arrived.
Drawing by Mikhail Chekhov of the house at the time.
Chekhov probably saw the new lodgings for the first time on September 7. He would note that the neatly stacked red house “looks like a chest of drawers.”2 Fortunately, this Sadovaya “Garden Ring” house remains standing on a busy, noisy boulevard across the street from the Moscow Zoo. We visitors can enter the present-day house-museum on the ground floor and walk through Chekhov’s study and bedroom. Bookcases line the study’s walls. He saw patients there and wrote. When and where Chekhov did his reading is hard to tell, because nobody describes him reading and Chekhov’s recorded remarks on his prodigious reading are scarce.3 We know he pored over his medical books and kept up with and would help support medical journals. He seems to have read every literary author of consequence and read enough to be familiar with those who weren’t of consequence, and he only occasionally made fun of young men, usually men like Nikolay and his younger brothers, who hadn’t read the classics. We also know he had stamina and in later years could read, for example, Resurrection, an 1899 novel by Tolstoy, in one sitting. “On the foundation of the volumes he had inherited from his dead friend Popudoglo,” writes the biographer Ernest Simmons, “he had begun to build a substantial library. He haunted the secondhand bookshops and his purchases were extremely varied—mostly Russian belles-lettres, but also some foreign works, sets of magazines, and quantities of travel books, memoirs, collections of letters, and reference works. For the most part it was a working library, and the well-thumbed appearance of some of the volumes testified to their frequent use by Chekhov in his writing.”4
The ground floor also had the kitchen and bedrooms for the cook and a maid (these aren’t part of the museum tour). The Chekhovs were scraping by, regularly out of money, but they were middle-class now and had servants.
The spiral staircase leading to the second floor, where his sister and parents had bedrooms, is still visible in the museum, but I seem to remember climbing enclosed stairs to the second-floor exhibits. In Chekhov’s time, a wolf-skin, a gift to the family from someone, as the Chekhovs do not seem to have been wolf-hunters, hung halfway up the spiral stairs. There was a “dining room, the drawing room and a spare room with a lantern. The drawing room had a piano, an aquarium and a large unfinished painting by Nikolay of a sempstress asleep over her work at daybreak.”5
His younger brother Mikhail remembered: “Anton coughed particularly violently during the period that we lived on Kudrinskaya-Sadovaya from the fall of 1886 to the spring of 1890. […] My responsibility before bed was to light the lamp in Anton’s bedroom because he often woke up and did not like to be in the dark. Only a thin partition separated our rooms, and we used to talk through it whenever we were unable to sleep in the middle of the night. It was through that wall that I was able to hear how bad his cough was.”6
I appreciate Mikhail reminding us about his brother’s health. Chekhov was so active and efficient and had an extraordinary capacity for work, but this was despite the tuberculosis that continually weakened him. I wonder, though, if Mikhail did not overestimate his brother’s pleasure in the constant social activities:
Anton could not be alone during that period, and as I mentioned before, our house was always filled with young people playing the piano, joking, and laughing upstairs. He would write at his desk downstairs, energized by the noise. He always shared our fun and thrived on the excitement.7
There is some evidence in Chekhov’s letters this coming year that a little more peace and quiet would have been appreciated.
September 1886
…though they hadn’t met, OF COURSE Chekhov wrote under his influence, was responding to Tolstoy in everything he wrote. I mean, to be a writer in the late 1880s meant, no exaggeration: “This is a response to Tolstoy.”
—Michael A. Denner, editor, Tolstoy Studies Journal1
The eight short stories Chekhov published this September are not, for the most part, among his best, except for one terribly grim tale published September 8, “The Dependents.” I puzzled over its Russian title: Nakhlebniki. There in the middle of it, apparently its root, is khleb, bread. “Dependents” seems a neutral word, but the agitated and painful story feels not at all neutral. The best definition for nakhlebniki I found that reflects the story is “Freeloaders.”
Chekhov adored animals and agonized when he witnessed cruelty. He understood harsh words as originating in frustration and despair. Some of Chekhov’s friends and relatives deemed some of his stories from these years as verging on Tolstoyan, which none of them ever suggested was a compliment. I would deem this story Tolstoyan, but only descriptively, not negatively, and as a way to distinguish the master from his literary pupil.
An impoverished old man of seventy awakens and says his prayers and sweeps up and sets the samovar to boil. It becomes ready:
“Oh, you’ve started humming!” grumbled Zotov. “Hum away then, and bad luck to you!”
At that point the old man appropriately recalled that, in the preceding night, he had dreamed of a stove, and to dream of a stove is a sign of sorrow.
Dreams and omens were the only things left that could rouse him to reflection; and on this occasion he plunged with a special zest into the considerations of the questions: What the samovar was humming for? and what sorrow was foretold by the stove? The dream seemed to come true from the first. Zotov rinsed out his teapot and was about to make his tea, when he found there was not one teaspoonful left in the box.2
Zotov is a homeowner, an artisan, not (he grumbles to himself) a peasant for whom such an impoverished existence might be more acceptable.
He curses his affectionate, scrawny dog Lyska, and surveys his other (indeed) dependent, the bony unnamed horse as she emerges from her decrepit shed. Zotov is a master of sarcasm:
“Plague take you,” Zotov went on. “Shall I ever see the last of you, you jail-bird Pharaohs!… I wager you want your breakfast!” he jeered, twisting his angry face into a contemptuous smile. “By all means, this minute! A priceless steed like you must have your fill of the best oats! Pray begin! This minute! And I have something to give to the magnificent, valuable dog! If a precious dog like you does not care for bread, you can have meat.”