Once a year, Seryozhka is a prima donna:
Seryozhka displays himself before the ignorant Matvey in all the greatness of his talent. There is no end to his babble, his fault-finding, his whims and fancies. If Matvey nails two big pieces of wood to make a cross, he is dissatisfied and tells him to do it again. If Matvey stands still, Seryozhka asks him angrily why he does not go; if he moves, Seryozhka shouts to him not to go away but to do his work. He is not satisfied with his tools, with the weather, or with his own talent; nothing pleases him.
Every stage of making art is a challenge—but a true artist is respected and honored:
He swears, shoves, threatens, and not a soul murmurs! They all smile at him, they sympathize with him, call him Sergey Nikitich; they all feel that his art is not his personal affair but something that concerns them all, the whole people. One creates, the others help him. Seryozhka in himself is a nonentity, a sluggard, a drunkard, and a wastrel, but when he has his red lead or compasses in his hand he is at once something higher, a servant of God.
One point: Chekhov was an atheist. A second point: he was very knowledgeable about Russian Orthodox ritual. Third: he respected religion’s moral and artistic bases. Fourth and final point: while teasing his lazy, drunken, talented older brothers with this depiction of reckless, wayward Seryozhka, he was also describing his own and their own struggles and sense of fulfillment as artists.
When Chekhov faulted himself in his letters, it was often for laziness and lack of discipline. What this tells us, I think, is not that he was deluded (he wrote and did so much!) but that he was constantly having to overcome those traits. Though he usually immediately found the entrance and rhythm he needed for writing, it always took an effort. A couple of weeks after he had completed medical school back in 1884, he began working that summer at a district hospital. He wrote in his usual lively way to his then-and future-editor Leykin:
I am in fine fettle, for I have my medical diploma in my pocket. The countryside all around is magnificent. Plenty of room and no holiday-makers. Mushrooms, fishing, and the district hospital. The monastery is very romantic. Standing in the dim light of the aisle beneath the vaulted roof during an evening service, I am thinking of subjects for my stories. I have plenty of subjects, but I am absolutely incapable of writing anything. I’m too lazy…. I am writing this letter—lying down. With a book propped up on my stomach, I can just manage to write it. I’m too lazy to sit up. […] My family lives with me, cooking, baking, and roasting whatever I can afford to buy for the money I earn by my writing. Life isn’t too bad. One thing, though, is not so good: I am lazy and not earning enough… 14
In “Art,” meanwhile, Chekhov admiringly concludes the story of a slothful artist’s dazzling display on the icy river:
Seryozhka listens to this uproar, sees thousands of eyes fixed upon him, and the lazy fellow’s soul is filled with a sense of glory and triumph.
I like to think that Chekhov’s New Year’s wish was to inspire Alexander and Nikolay to experience Seryozhka’s “sense of glory and triumph.”
*
Alexander, Anton’s oldest brother and his most frequent correspondent for the next couple of years, had plenty of difficulties. For one, he was working in a customs office in the provinces and had missed the Moscow family’s New Year’s party. Alexander had a common-law wife, and they had two children; a baby who was about to arrive would be named after Anton. Though Alexander had led the Chekhov brothers into freelance work at humor periodicals, he did not have Anton’s tact, steadiness, or self-discipline. He drank too much. He could be oafish, rude, and pathetic. However, Alexander “was the only Chekhov who could match, or even outdo, Anton in wit, intelligence, and mordant irony.”15
Alexander was a touchstone for Anton about what not to do or become. When scolding another young author who simply wasn’t putting in the hours, Chekhov used Alexander as an example of premature “impotence” through lack of use:
If you go on writing so little, you will write yourself out without having written anything. As a warning you can take my brother Alexander, who was very miserly as a writer and who already feels that he has written himself out.16
In these two years of breakout success for Anton, there are forty-five letters from Chekhov to Alexander. Most are full of news, teasing, and advice; a few are only a handful of sentences, almost invariably about fees Chekhov needed Alexander to pick up from Petersburg periodicals and send—but he always included a joking brotherly insult. Alexander’s replies are lively and equally full of teasing and name-calling.
The first surviving 1886 letter of Chekhov’s was written on January 4 to Alexander. Anton wished him a happy New Year and scolded him, in the usual comically outraged tone he used only with his brothers and closest friends, for not having written: “You wretch! Raggedypants! Congenital pen-pusher! Why haven’t you written? Have you lost all joy and strength in letter-writing? Do you no longer regard me as a brother? Have you not therefore become a total swine? Write, I tell you, a thousand times write! It doesn’t matter what, just write… Everything is fine here, except for the fact that Father has been buying more lamps. He is obsessed by lamps.”17
This is one of the rare mentions between them of their father. He and Alexander preferred not to write about him, and there are only five known letters in his life from Anton to Pavel.18 On the other hand, Anton regularly emphasized keeping connections open among the siblings and with their mother.
He briefly recounted for Alexander his two-week mid-December trip to Petersburg and his stay there with Leykin: “He did me proud with the meals he fed me but, wretch that he is, almost suffocated me with his lies… I got to know the editorial staff of the Petersburg Gazette,19 and they welcomed me like the Shah of Persia. You will probably get some work on that paper, but not before the summer. Leykin is not to be relied upon. He’s trying all sorts of ways to stab me in the back at the Petersburg Gazette, and he’ll do the same with you. Khudekov, the editor of the Petersburg Gazette, will be coming to see me in January and I’ll have a talk with him then.”
Chekhov vented more about Leykin than about any other person, partly because Anton’s brothers knew him and could join him in taking their own lazy shots at him. Anton didn’t mention in this letter to Alexander, however, that he had just received a letter from Leykin complaining about Alexander’s recent work, how only one of the two stories that Alexander had sent was publishable, and even that one consisted, said Leykin, simply of various tellings-off.20
Chekhov’s letter to Alexander became a critique of his brother’s writing:
For the love of Allah! Do me a favor, boot out your depressed civil servants! Surely you’ve picked up by now that this subject is long out of date and has become a big yawn? And where in Asia have you been rooting around to unearth the torments the poor little pen-pushers in your stories suffer? For verily I say unto thee: they are actively unpleasant to read!
How many of us writers are lucky enough to have absolutely candid readers who can express their impatience while simultaneously guiding us? Anton complimented, with reservations, one particular piece: “ ‘Spick and Span’ is an excellently conceived story, but oh! those wretched officials! If only you had had some benevolent bourgeois instead of your bureaucrat, if you hadn’t gone on about his pompous rank-pulling fixation with red tape, your ‘Spick and Span’ could have been as delicious as those lobsters Yerakita was so fond of guzzling. Also, don’t let anyone get their hands on your stories to abridge or rewrite them… it’s horrible when you can see Leykin’s hand in every line…”