IVANOV: […] We love each other, but we shall never be married. It makes no difference how I rave and grow bitter by myself, but I have no right to drag another down with me. My melancholy robbed my wife of the last year of her life. […] Wherever I go, whether hunting or visiting, it makes no difference, I carry depression, dullness, and discontent along with me. […] When I murmur at my fate everyone who hears me is seized with the same disgust of life and begins to grumble, too. […]
Chekhov, I suspect again, was analyzing the play as he wrote it. I grumble to myself that it’s not my fault I agree with the characters’ self-assessments!
I turn over the last page and I smile.
“That bad, huh?” says Chekhov.
“No!…” Because, who am I to say? I love this guy! He is one of the greatest writers in the history of the world. In the English-speaking world, no one’s plays except Shakespeare’s are as admired and as often performed as his. Looking at my watch, I say, “Oh, my God! My wife’s expecting me—the kids… they’re supposed to call and… The play’s great, Anton Pavlovich! Thanks for letting me read it.”
Chekhov laughs. He sees me to the door and claps me on the back as I, ashamed of my cowardice, depart.
*
When Ivanov with slight revisions went into rehearsal at the end of 1888 in Petersburg, Chekhov wrote in exasperation to Suvorin: “The director sees Ivanov as a superfluous man in the Turgenev manner. Savina asks why Ivanov is such a blackguard. You write that ‘Ivanov must be given something that makes it clear why two women throw themselves at him […]’ If all three of you have understood me this way, it means my Ivanov is a failure. I must have lost my mind and written something entirely different from what I had intended.”6
All right, why shouldn’t Chekhov have erred once in a long while? In the midst of the play’s new production in Petersburg in January 1889, Chekhov reflected about the play: “I would very much have enjoyed delivering a paper to the Literary Society on where I found the idea for writing Ivanov. I would have publicly admitted my guilt. I cherished the audacious dream of summing up everything written thus far about whining, despondent people and of having my Ivanov put a stop to this sort of writing.”7
But now in October 1887, Anton wrote to Alexander to ask him if New Times could put in a notice about Ivanov in the theater chronicle.8 He told Alexander about chatting with Korolenko for three hours.
Writing to Leykin on October 7, he didn’t tell him about having written Ivanov. That was his accomplishment of the last couple of weeks, and he wanted it advertised soon, but he didn’t want Leykin to know. Instead, he pretended he hadn’t been writing anything: “You’re probably mad I’m not sending you stories. Alas, I sent them nowhere! I’m sick, then depressed, time wastes away, there’s no money.” He complimented Leykin’s recent story and did mention he had sold old stories for a book to be published by the Verner Brothers, Innocent Speeches.
Why didn’t he want Leykin to know about Ivanov? He didn’t want Leykin’s advice or he didn’t want his envy? He hadn’t told him in early 1886 about his new relationship with New Times, either. To inform Leykin about his other publishing opportunities was to tell him there would not be time to produce stories for Fragments—but that was a message he was continually trying to get across anyway. So why not fess up?
He wrote again on October 10 or 12 to Alexander, to whom he would continue to write frequently in the next two months: “Your letter is received; so as not to lie in bed and spit at the ceiling, I sit myself down at the table to answer.”9
Chekhov’s energy was often, understandably, depleted:
I am ailing and depressed, like the son of a hen. The pen falls from my hand, and I do not write at all. I am expecting bankruptcy in the immediate future. If the play doesn’t save me, then I am lost in the bloom of my years. The play may bring me 600 or 700 rubles, but not before the middle of November, and what will happen until that middle I know not. I cannot work, and everything I write turns out rubbish. My energy—fuit! […]
I am scratching a Saturday feuilleton, but merely so-so, and on an unattractive theme to me. [“The Cattle-Dealers”] will turn out bad, but still I will send it. […]
I wrote the play Ivanov unexpectedly, after a talk with Korsh. I went to bed, thought out a theme, and wrote it. I spent a fortnight on it, or, rather, ten days, for there were days in the fortnight when I did not work or wrote something else. […] It is a pity I cannot read the play to you. You are a lightminded man and have not seen much, but you are much fresher and keener-eared than all my Moscow praisers and accusers [the false-praising Ezhov and I would have to agree]. Your absence is no small loss to me.
Not only had weary, depressed Chekhov written Ivanov, he had composed, he told Alexander, a very long story:
Ask Suvorin or Burenin whether they will publish a thing of 1,500 lines. If so, I will send it, although personally I am against dailies publishing long dossiers and bringing over the train in the next number. I have a love story of 1,500 lines, not a tedious one, but no good for a serious monthly, for there figure in it a president and members of a military high court—that is, they are not Liberals. Ask them, and answer soon. On hearing from you I will make a clean copy and send it off.
Alexander replied on October 18 that “Suvorin was even amazed that you would ask about this.”10 Of course New Times would publish it. The editors of the Collected Works note that Chekhov’s long story, a novel, was never found.
Sometime after October 10, Chekhov asked his friend Vladimir Gilyarovskiy if he wanted to go to the circus with him and his brother Ivan. Chekhov enjoyed the circus a lot, more than the fictional dog Kashtanka would in his upcoming Christmas story.
Chekhov wrote Korolenko on October 17: “it seems to me that if you and I live another ten or twenty years in this world, we shall not fail to find points of contact in the future. Among the Russians who are happily writing at the present day I am the most lightminded and least serious. I am under warning; poetically speaking, I have loved my pure muse but I have not respected her. I have been unfaithful to her more than once and taken her places unfit for her. But you are serious and sound and true.”11 He also told Korolenko about Thoreau’s Walden, which was coming out in translation in an edition by New Times.12 Chekhov had interesting and intelligent reservations about Walden: “The first chapter promises a great deal; he has ideas, freshness and originality, but he is hard to read. The architecture and composition are impossible. Ideas, beautiful and ugly, light and cumbrous, are piled on top of each other, crowded together, squeezing the juice out of each other, and at any moment the pressure may make them squeal.”
On the same day, Chekhov wrote his cousin Georgy to apologize about the delay in communicating. He was busy writing “all day long” and his hand got tired. “I don’t go to the theater or on visits, so Mama and Auntie call me homebound ‘Grandpa.’ ”13 (But he had gone quite a lot to Korsh’s theater and he had just been to the circus!) Unusually, he mentioned his father: “With each year he becomes softer and kinder.” Pavel was still working as a shop employee on the other side of Moscow and usually slept at Chekhov’s brother Ivan’s. Pavel’s softening would have been information Georgy shared with his father, Anton’s Uncle Mitrofan. Anton asked about everyone’s health and set to rights all the family communications.