Konstairitin Pobedonostsev welded great power over Russian cultural life at the end of the nineteenth century. No one fitted the description of the 'Tsar's Eye' (the nickname given to those holding the post of Procurator) better than he did. A staunch defender of autocracy and an implacable opponent of reform, the bespectacled and sour- looking Pobedonostsev determined the course of Russia's domestic policy under Alexander III, and was thus largely responsible for the atmosphere of gloom and paranoia which Chekhov evokes to such chilling and satirical effect in his mature stories. (One literary critic later claimed that Pobedonostsev was the first Russian bureaucrat to develop a complete theory of stagnat'on.) The repressive measures he advocated after the assassination of Alexander II were so unpopular in educated circles that they won him the additional nickname of 'The Grand Inquisitor'. (Dostoevsky, who had consulted him on the writing of ne Brothers Karamazov, was one of this dour man's few close friends.) As the lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church - a civil appointment made by the Tsar - Pobedonostsev had licence to intervene in questions of censorship as well as in matters of national education and religious freedom, and his edicts cast a pall over Russian literary life. The stagnant short-story years of the 1880s and 1890s provide a striking contrast to the preceding decades under Alexander II, a dynamic era of enormous, soul-searching novels and public debate. Morale was undermined when Dostoevsky and Turgenev died in quick succession in the early 1880s, and Tolstoy placed his fiction writing second to the preaching of moral ideas. It was further eroded when Russia's most distinguished literary journal, Notes of the Fatherland (or National Annals), was closed down because of its allegiance to 'dangerous' (i.e. Populist) political ideas. The journal had been a mouthpiece of liberal thought for forty-five years.
It was not the best time to be a writer. But this was precisely when Chekhov appeared on the scene. Pobedonostsev's tenure as Procurator of the Holy Synod, in fact, spanned the entire length of Chekhov's writing career, beginning in 1880 (the year the young medical student made his literary debut), and ending with his resignation in 1905, the year after Chekhov's death. Pobedonostsev came to see Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899,5 but was not known to have been one of the playwright's adn rers. LiKe all Russian wrters, Chekhov had to endure the humiliation of submitting every work he wrote to the censor, and then complying with whatever demands it made for excisions and alterations. This had as deleterious effect on his sense of self-worth as an artist as on all his other colleagues in the Russian literary fraternity. The assassination attempt on Pobedonostsev in 1901 took place just weeks after the Procurator had finally succeeded in engineering the excommunication of Tolstoy from the Russian Orthodox Church, after years of try;ng to silence his voice of moral protest. It was an event greeted With widespread derision by the intelligentsia, since it only served to increase the authority of the 73-year-old writer, who had anyway not changed his hostile stance towards the Church for over two decades. The standing of the fatally compromised Church, by contrast, sank even lower.
St Petersburg may have been the seat of government in Russia, a city teeming with soldiers and uniformed officials, but it was also the country's literary capital, and no provincial writer with aspirations could afford to gnore t for long. Chekhov's entire literary career in fact was entwined with St Petersburg, beginning w. h the very first two pieces he published in 1880 in the comic journal The Dragonfly. With the second of these, 'What Do You Come Across Most Often in Novels, Short Stories Etc.?', Chekhov showed that he was a sophisticated reader, and had got the measure of the techniques of successful literary construction. Although he later borrowed from the canon when it suited him, his iror ic compend urn of typical characters and devices also indicates his intention not to follow the cliched path himself. What you most often came across n novels, short stories etc., then, according to Chekhov was:
A count, a countess bearing traces of her former beauty, a neighbour who is a baron, a liberal-minded writer, an impoverished nobleman, a foreign
musician, obtuse servants, nannies, governesses, a German manager, a squire, an heir from America. People who are ugly, but likeable and attractive. A hero who saves the heroine from a horse which has bolted, strong-spirited, and capable of showing the power of his fists at any given opportunity.
Unscalable heights, impenetrable, unembraceable, incomprehensible distant spots on the hoiizon, in other words - nature!!!
Fair-haired friends and red-haired enemies.
A rich uncle, libe ral or conservative, depending on the circumstances.
An auntie in'Tambov.
A doctor with a concerned expression, g'ving hope in a crisis; will often have a stick with a knob on the end and a bala head. And where there is a doctor, there will be rheumatism caused from righteous labour, migraine, inflammation of the brain, care of wounded duellers and the inevitable advice to take the waters.
An aged servant who worked for the old masters, ready to go anywhere for them, even throw himself into the fire. A great wit.
A dog who can do everything but talk, a parrot and a nightingale.
A dacha outside Moscow and a mortgaged property in the south.
Electricity, mostly unconnected to either village or town.
A briefcase of Russian leather, Chinese porcelain, an English saddle, a revolver which does not misfire, a medal in a buttonhole, pineapples, champagne, truffles and oysters.
Chance eavesdropping as tne cause of great revelations.
An innumerable number of interjections and attempts to use appropriate technical vocabulary.
Subtle hints at rather sticky circumstances.
The frequent absence of an ending.
Seven mortal sins in the beginning and a wedding at the end.
An ending.6
No, the weekly Dragonfly was not quite in the same league as the monthly literary journals, those bastions of high seriousness ana good taste read by the high-m aided ntelligentsia, but it was very popular. When the editor inexplicably stopped accepting his submissions a few months later, Chekhov was forced to find an outlet with the two main comic journals in Moscow, The Spectator and The Alarm Clock.
His big break had come in October 1882, when Nikolai Leikin, the chief contributor and newly appointed editor of the new 'weekly illustrated journal' Fragments (the word 'oskolki' could also be translated as 'splinters'), took the train down from St Petersburg to come on a talent-scouting mission in Moscow.
Leikin was best known as the leading feuilletonist for The Petersburg Newspaper, one of the new independent dailies that had sprung up as a result of the Great Reforms in the late 1860s. It had an impressive circulation of about 20,000 readers, and Leikin entertained them with light-hearted stories about diverse aspects of merchant life in the capital unt'l his death in 1906.7 He was an extraordinarily prolific writer: in add;t:on to the thousands of articles he churned out over the course of his career, he produced some seventy books of stories and sketches, which - unlike those of his protege - now all sit gathering dust on library shelves. He liked what Chekhov was writing, and published his first piece in Fragments a month later. A couple of the stories Chekhov though1- up for Leikin are short enough to be quoted in toto, ana convey well the spirit of his typical submissions in the early days. In January 1883, for example, Fragments publYhed 'Thoughts of a Reader of Newspapers and Journals', signed by 'The man without a spleen', which was full of corny puns derived from the names of Russian publications: