He wrote most of the purely farcical pieces with a restraint and focus that had to skedaddle down an expected route or fit a genre’s tone: they were apparently impersonal or, as he had described them to Alexander, objective. He certainly seems to have sympathized, however, with the cornered Shchupkin, and he himself was about to tumble into a real-life engagement.
*
He published the suspenseful but comic “A Night in the Cemetery” (“Noch na Kladbishche”) on January 8. A first-person narrator tells of a scary night that concluded with his waking up in a monuments storeroom. He announces: “My story begins, as begin in general all the best Russian stories: I was, I confess, drunk…” He eventually becomes philosophicaclass="underline" “It can’t be forgotten that with the new year the closer it is to death, to wider baldness, more twisted wrinkles, the wife older, more kids, less money…”25
For January 11 he wrote up a contest announcement for Fragments titled “The Contest” (“Konkurs”) that isn’t quite a joke. But Chekhov’s idea, which Leykin allowed him to try out to inspire more reader participation, doesn’t seem to have paid off; it received few responses. Another piece, “Tips for Husbands” (“K Svedeniyu Muzhei”), was blocked by censors. One possible reason for the censorship is that the “tips” aren’t really for husbands but for the Don Juans attempting to seduce those husbands’ wives.26 One of Leykin’s headaches as the editor of a humor magazine was dealing with censors, who were idiosyncratic and inconsistent. The magazine’s illustrations, which are surprisingly racy, were as much of a game for Leykin to sneak past censors as the written pieces.27 By January 12, Chekhov had selected most of the seventy-seven short stories that Leykin would publish that spring in the book Motley Stories.
The marriage theme was percolating in Chekhov’s life and fiction. He needed to borrow a jacket and vest to serve as the best man at the wedding of an acquaintance, the doctor Pavel Rozanov, on January 12. Rozanov was not from Moscow and didn’t have friends or family close by, but Chekhov and his sister Maria (often addressed or referred to as Masha), studying to become a teacher, agreed to represent Rozanov’s side.
Chekhov scheduled a “Tatyana Day” dinner with other friends the night of the midday wedding, and he got home only early the next morning. (That his brother Mikhail noted this detail means, I think, that such carousing was unusual.) Tatyana Day was an annual celebration by Moscow University students.28 Though his older brothers had drinking problems, Chekhov was a moderate drinker and none of his friends ever recounted his acting drunkenly. Two days after the wedding, Chekhov wrote and teased Rozanov that it was now Rozanov’s wife’s duty to find him a spouse: “If Varvara Ivanovna doesn’t find me a bride, I’ll definitely shoot myself.” When Chekhov expressed despair in letters to friends, he often declared this most self-dramatic act; he was continually threatening to shoot himself. In his fiction, the characters, equally self-dramatic, actually sometimes do it. He further teased Rozanov: “It’s time I was ruled with a rod of iron, as you now are…”29 He was in such sorry shape from the Tatyana Day all-nighter, as he told Rozanov, that he realized he needed to get married. “In the choice of bride, let you guide her taste, as ever since January 12 I began believing in your taste.”30
In “First Debut”31 (“Pervyi Debyut”), published on January 13, Chekhov describes a young lawyer’s awful, humiliating first day on the circuit. He leaves the district court with his driver; the winter weather is so bad, however, that they have to stop for the night at a house that the driver finds. The two lawyers who opposed him in court are already there, and he gets huffy and silent. When the water for tea has been made, they all realize he has sugar, and they have tea, but he, feeling petty and unforgiving, won’t share. He lies down by the oven; they think he’s asleep and they talk about him in ways that show their understanding of his rookie selfconsciousness. He is awake, though, and cries out his hurt to them, and they talk him around—explaining that debuts are always challenging. They help cover him from the cold with their heavy coats and they go to sleep.
Among the many observations we could make about this fine little story, one is to note how well Chekhov understands shame. It had been only a year and half since he himself had debuted as a doctor out in the countryside. Mikhail Chekhov recounts how his debuting brother lost his nerve in the midst of operating on a boy’s foreskin. Dr. Rozanov himself took over and to everyone’s relief completed the work.32
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On January 16, Chekhov turned twenty-six.33 (He and other Christian Russians celebrated name days rather than birthdays; his name day was January 17.) He had eighteen and a half more years to live. Knowing but not admitting to others that he had tuberculosis, he might not have been surprised by that literal deadline. And though money was tight, there just had to be a big party. In his invitation to his friend Mikhail Dyukovskiy, he kidded that “I’m a poor man: my wife’s a widow, my children orphans,” and thus had a request for Dyukovskiy: to bring a dozen and a half knives and forks, teaspoons, glasses, small plates, and a cast-iron stove.34
Chekhov’s sister Maria was in a women’s higher education program, and one of her classmates and invitees to the party was the twenty-four or twenty-five-year-old Evdokiya (known to the family as “Dunya”) Isaakovna Efros. Chekhov had known Efros since at least the spring of 1885.
The longest letter of the month, besides the New Year’s letter to Alexander, was on January 18 to Viktor Bilibin, Leykin’s sub-editor, and it was long partly because it had to make up for a January 2 letter that Bilibin never received. That letter, Chekhov said, “was so big that there wasn’t a driver who would agree to take me with it to the mailbox.”35
He caught Bilibin up with what he remembered was in it, including a scolding for not having let him pay for their meal together when he was visiting Petersburg in December. He remembered having written Bilibin about the New Year’s costume party and the photo album he had been given and “how the fish in my aquarium died from a cigar thrown in their water.” He said the party had cost a bundle and that he had poisoned himself with alcohol.
À propos Christmas has cost me 300 rubles. Don’t you think I’m just crazy? Yes, it certainly is a great misfortune to have a family…. Thank goodness Christmas is over. If it had gone on for another week I should have had to go begging in the streets. At the moment I haven’t a farthing in my pocket.36
Note that if he actually spent 300 rubles, that was nearly half a year’s rent. But the big moment, shared only with his new friend Bilibin and the details of which were otherwise known only to Dunya Efros herself, was that “Last night, bringing a young lady home, I made her a proposal. I went out of the frying pan and into the fire… Bless my marriage.”
If Efros took the proposal seriously and told anybody about it, no one accounted for her ever having done so. Maria Chekhova, who outlived her brother by more than fifty years, claimed (probably disingenuously) that she had never heard of the engagement until decades later. As Chekhov devoted three most casual sentences to his engagement in the middle of a long letter to a man actually getting married, the biographer Ronald Hingley suggests that there never was an engagement. I, on the other hand, think that there was an engagement, but that it started out as a joke. That is, at the conclusion of his wild name day party, Chekhov proposed and Efros accepted… as a joke. And they played along at this together until they didn’t know themselves whether it was a joke or not.
There was marriage all around: for friends and for characters in his fiction. Why not try it himself? Even upstairs from his family’s apartment there were weddings. He wrote to Leykin the very next day about the wedding party that he was overhearing: “Somebody banging their feet like a horse has just run over my head… Must be the best man. The band is thundering… For the groom who is going to screw his bride this music may be pleasant, but it will stop me […] getting any sleep.”37