From his two weeks of being recognized and admired in Petersburg, Chekhov understood that there would be new, more prestigious, and better-paying venues where he could publish his writing.
He was tied into a couple of particular formats at Fragments: paragraph-long anecdotes and jokes, or one hundred–line stories of about a thousand words. Leykin also had a heavy editing hand and didn’t hold himself back from crabbing about Chekhonte’s less inspired pieces. Chekhov provided Fragments with two or three pieces a week, among them an occasional gossipy Moscow culture column, all the while also conducting his medical practice and, ever since the spring of 1885, writing a story a week for the Petersburg Gazette.
Chekhov would joke this year and for the next few years that medicine was his wife and writing was his mistress—and that he had no trouble hopping beds. But really, it was that his mistress and wife had their own close and invigorating relationship. “There is no doubt in my mind that my study of medicine has had a serious impact on my literary activities. It significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate,”7 he told a former medical school colleague.
As New Year’s was an important publishing week, there being an uptick of readers during the holidays, Chekhov wrote six timely pieces for various publications.
The skit “The Maskers” (“Ryazhenye”) appeared in the St. Petersburg Gazette newspaper on New Year’s Day 1886. Many of the pieces Chekhov wrote from 1880 to 1886 I would call by the not necessarily demeaning word “skits,” corresponding to the wide range of humor we can find today in New Yorker magazine Shouts & Murmurs pieces or in McSweeney’s. He had probably written “The Maskers” five or six days before. Mail service was dependable and fast between Russia’s two biggest cities, about 400 miles apart.
Masking, or mumming—dressing up and acting out a pantomime—is a New Year’s tradition in some communities around the world. In “The Maskers,” Chekhov describes a parade: one person after another, one dressed as a pig, another a pepper-pot, a female fox, an entrepreneur, a chained dog. A character sketch follows of a dissipated fellow, “a talent,” who will soon have mourners and an obituary, and then an account of this “pet goose” of a drunken writer who needs quiet, quiet, quiet! “At home, when he sits alone in his room and creates ‘a new piece,’ everyone goes on tiptoe. Good lord, if it’s not 15 degrees in his room, if beyond the door a dish clinks or a child squeaks, he seizes himself by the hair and with a chesty voice, ‘Dammmmmit!… There’s nothing good to say about a writer’s life!’ When he writes, he’s performing a holy act: he wrinkles his brow, bites his pen, puffs, sniffs, and continually crosses out.”8 Chekhov was probably teasing his oldest brother Alexander, an editor, family-man, and part-time writer, whom Chekhov regularly addressed in letters as “You Goose.”
On January 2, Chekhov met with an emissary of the powerful publisher and editor Aleksei Suvorin. The journalist Alexander Kurepin asked Chekhov if he would be willing to write for New Times. Kurepin knew that Chekhov had already promised to write two pieces a week for the Petersburg Gazette and was on a one-year salary of 600 rubles with Fragments. (To give some sense of monetary value, the yearly rent on the four-bedroom, two-story house in Moscow that the Chekhovs would move into in September was 650 rubles.) Kurepin was able to report to Suvorin that Chekhov “eagerly agreed”9 to write for New Times. Most of the twenty-eight stories for New Times that he would write over the next two years paid more than 100 rubles each.
Chekhov had sent four pieces on December 28 to Leykin for Fragments for the New Year’s issue (January 4), the most important of the year for the magazine, as it inspired new subscriptions. Chekhov was dismayed about the first piece, “New Year’s Great Martyrs” (“Novogodnie Velikomucheeniki”). He told Leykin: “I wanted to write it shorter and spoiled it.”10 One such martyr, Sinkletev, recounts his drunken New Year’s Day wanderings: From Ivan Ivanich’s “to the merchant Khrymov’s to offer him my hand… I went to greet… my family… They asked me to drink for the holiday… And how not drink? You offend if you don’t drink… Well, I drank about three glasses… ate sausage… From there, to the Petersburg side to Likhodev… A good man…”11
Ellipses are a distinctive form of Chekhov’s punctuation. Usually the ellipsis is not a pause for dramatic effect. The dots usually function as a tick-tick-tick, a moment of hesitation preceding Chekhov’s next stroke of the pen. The ellipses are notable because they indicate that he wrote fast and directly, so fast that these ellipses are like pit stops for an Indianapolis 500 race car driver. His stories of the time and his letters are full of ellipses and in the scholarly edition often consist of two periods rather than three. English-language translators, if they acknowledge them, adjust them to the standard English three periods, as will I. For us, in this book, my deletions of material will be an ellipsis in brackets […]. The other ellipses are Chekhov’s own.
His other January 4 pieces are “Champagne (Thoughts from a New Year’s Hangover)” (“Shampanskoe (Mysli s Novogodnego pokhmel’ya)”), a monologue cursing the apparent beauties and joys of champagne; “Visiting Cards” (“Vizitnye Kartochki”), a list of visitors, among them “Court Counselor Hemorrhoid Dioskorovich Boat-y”12; and finally “Letters” (“Pis’ma”), wherein a reader, hounded by the magazine’s advertising promotions, writes: “You asked me to recommend your journal to my acquaintances; I did. Pay me my expenses.” That is, he took the journal’s command literally and went and recommended it to his acquaintances who happened to live far away. The second fictional letter-writer complains about receiving unwanted mail—essentially spam. The third complains that when Russia’s Julian calendar catches up to Western Europe’s, women will age twelve to thirteen days. (Here is an opportunity to mention that all the dates in this book correspond to the laggard Julian calendar, indeed in 1886–1887 twelve days behind our own. Chekhov’s January 1 was January 13 in England and the United States.) The fourth letter is an invitation to a home-performed drama night.
The first real short story of the year—one Chekhov would have considered and did consider an actual short story for length and semi-seriousness—was published in the Monday issue of the Petersburg Gazette on January 6, “Art” (“Xhudozhestvo”). (Russians then and now usually leave off the Saint from Petersburg; they also often, as Chekhov sometimes did, leave off the burg. I will use simply Petersburg.) Chekhov describes a villager known as Seryozhka who knows he is a wretch but that also, once a year, through carving and coloring ice on the river, that is, through making art, he has value—the art elevates him: “He obviously enjoys the peculiar position in which he has been placed by the fate that has bestowed on him the rare talent of surprising the whole parish once a year by his art. Poor mild Matvey [his assistant] has to listen to many venomous and contemptuous words from him. Seryozhka sets to work with vexation, with anger. He is lazy. He has hardly described the circle when he is already itching to go up to the village to drink tea, lounge about, and babble.”13