“The Playwright” (“Dramaturge,” November 27) is a comic skit in which a doctor asks his patient, a playwright who drinks day and night, how and when he “writes.” His work, the playwright says, is very difficult; that is, he has others translate foreign plays for him, and he adds a few Russian touches.
Though Chekhov was tired of writing comic pieces, he was still very funny. One of his funniest stories is “The Orator” (“Orator,” November 29), about a young man named Zapoikin who is hired by acquaintances to speak at funerals: “He can speak […] in his sleep, on an empty stomach, dead drunk or in a high fever. His words flow smoothly and evenly, like water out of a pipe, and in abundance; there are far more moving words in his oratorical dictionary than there are beetles [cockroaches] in any restaurant.”10 He is brought to the funeral of a collegiate assessor and delivers fulsome words about another man, who, Zapoikin discovers, is at the funeral.
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Chekhov and his sister arrived in Petersburg on November 26th, and they stayed with Leykin through the first two days of December. “Leykin always listed the price of things to try to show his guests how much he liked them,” remembered Mikhail Chekhov, “and how generously they were being treated. ‘Please eat this smoked fish; it cost two rubles and seventy-five kopecks a pound.’ ”11 They also dined at Maria Kiseleva’s sister’s home and visited the Hermitage. Chekhov wrote Kiseleva when he had returned to Moscow, “I was relaxing in Peter, that is, I roamed around the city all day, paying visits and listening to compliments, which my soul doesn’t tolerate.”12
December 1886
“Why don’t you write? One day, you will have blisters on your fingers, and you will become a writer. I will help you, if you wish. You should not wait for inspiration, but instead write every day. In about six years, you would be a good writer.”
—In conversation with a young writer1
Chekhov would have finished writing and sent off “The Trouble” (“Beda,” December 1) to Khudekov at the Petersburg Gazette before he and his sister Maria left for the capital on the 26th of November. Chekhov had personal reasons to work out his feelings about and remedies for alcoholism. In “The Trouble,” an office worker, Putokhin, has been on a five-day binge, and as he comes out of it, he is fired by his boss. He then fears the hurt and disappointment his loving wife will express when he gets home. He is so ashamed he wonders if he should blow his brains out. To his amazement and delight, his wife forgives him: “God willing, we’ll get through this trouble.”2 Her forgiveness reforms him, and now when he is out and sees drunks, he doesn’t laugh at them or judge them. Putokhin concludes: “The vice isn’t that we drink but that we don’t raise drunkards up.” And Chekhov, or his attentive narrator, adds: “Maybe he’s right.” As Chekhov believed at this time, to understand is to forgive.
Leykin wrote Chekhov on December 5 to ask him to send stories for the important year-end issue not later than December 21 and the New Year’s pieces not later than December 28.3 Chekhov probably didn’t need reminding. On December 8, in the Petersburg Gazette, he published “The Order,” which is about a writer working on deadline. (That same day he replied to Leykin and told him he had begun working on his Christmas-issue story for New Times, which story, after an unusual two-week struggle, became “On the Road.”)
Chekhov complained about deadlines and, thank goodness, wrote to deadline. What would he have written if he hadn’t had to? How many great works by Mozart and Chekhov would we be deprived of if they hadn’t needed to earn money? They were young and able, full of energy and genius, and if outside pressures nudged them to the table to compose, let us express our gratitude and appreciation for these deadline-inspired gems.
But Chekhov, though proud and self-critical of his work, didn’t see or didn’t like thinking of his stories as art. Writing at deadline does not inspire belief in one’s work as art or genius. It’s just got to be done. Chekhov was a pro.
In the middle of November he wrote a mocking story about a pretentious, overly precious writer who demands from his family awe and quiet, “Hush!” (“Tssst!” in Russian).
“Shattered, soul-weary, a sick load of misery on the heart… and then to sit down and write. And this is called life! How is it nobody has described the agonizing discord in the soul of a writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears at the word of command when his heart is light? I must be playful, coldly unconcerned, witty, but what if I am weighed down with misery, what if I am ill, or my child is dying or my wife in anguish!”
He says this, brandishing his fists and rolling his eyes….4
We are all unappreciated actors in the dramas of our lives. Chekhov is mocking Ivan, the writer, and also echoing his own complaints—minus the wife and child. At various times Leykin had heard all the rest from Chekhov, and Chekhov had heard absolutely all of it from Alexander. The protagonist is a prima donna:
[…] he goes into the bedroom and wakes his wife.
“Nadya,” he says, “I am sitting down to write…. Please don’t let anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying or cooks snoring…. See, too, that there’s tea and… steak or something…. You know that I can’t write without tea…. Tea is the one thing that gives me the energy for my work.”
Thinking of himself, he thinks of nobody else.
Ivan Yegorich throws himself back in his chair, and closing his eyes concentrates himself on his subject. He hears his wife shuffling about in her slippers and splitting shavings to heat the samovar.
She is hardly awake, that is apparent from the way the knife and the lid of the samovar keep dropping from her hands. Soon the hissing of the samovar and the spluttering of the frying meat reaches him.
His wife is still splitting shavings and rattling with the doors and blowers of the stove.
In his mockery, Chekhov is not twitting Alexander or his other writer-friends so much as himself:
Like a girl who has been presented with a costly fan, he spends a long time coquetting, grimacing, and posing to himself before he writes the title…. He presses his temples, he wriggles, and draws his legs up under his chair as though he were in pain, or half closes his eyes languidly like a cat on the sofa. At last, not without hesitation, he stretches out his hand toward the inkstand, and with an expression as though he were signing a death-warrant, writes the title….
Chekhov’s titles changed occasionally from their first appearance in magazines and journals to their second in books or in the Collected Works. But his primary advice about titles was simplicity: “Put as plain a title as possible—any that occurs to your mind—and nothing else.”5
He writes till four o’clock and would readily have written till six if his subject had not been exhausted. Coquetting and posing to himself and the inanimate objects about him, far from any indiscreet, critical eye, tyrannizing and domineering over the little anthill that fate has put in his power are the honey and the salt of his existence. And how different is this despot here at home from the humble, meek, dull-witted little man we are accustomed to see in the editor’s offices!
“I am so exhausted that I am afraid I shan’t sleep…” he says as he gets into bed. “Our work, this cursed, ungrateful hard labor, exhausts the soul even more than the body…. I had better take some bromide…. God knows, if it were not for my family I’d throw up the work…. To write to order! It is awful.”
It is awful. It is. And yet Chekhov knew just as well the harsher demands of a full-time doctor’s life. If he had had to earn his bread by medical work, he would have died even younger.