PpJkin was something of an institution in St Petersburg, renowned for its traditional Russian cuisine, and popular with Dostoevsky (who lived nearby) and other local luminaries. Several branches had opened since Anisim Palkin founded his first inn in 1785, but the one on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Vladimirsky Avenue was the most famous. When к opened in 1875, its vast premises, in one of the busiest parts of the city, featured a marble staircase leading to the first floor complete with fountain, a winter garden of tropical plants, a pool stuffed with sterlet (small sturgeon), a concert hall, and numerous private dining rooms, all r'chly furnished. On Sundays in the 1890s, you could even dine to the accompaniment of music from the Preobrazhensky Life Guards band. On Sundays n the 1990s, you could come and play roulette. It is perhaps typical of the unpredictability of Russian business pract ;es that when entrepreneurs decided to open 'an elite casino club' on the site of the former restaurant (which had functioned as a cinema in Soviet times), they decided to resurrect Palkin too. Its cuisine may have made it a fixture for the Russian beau monde,17 but it is unlikely many budding young writers can afford its prices these days.
Chekhov was given a royal reception by Leikin in 1885, but their professional relationship was actually becoming quite fraught. Leikin was a journalist first and foremost, and he wanted material that fitted the template of his journaclass="underline" stories had to be short and funny, and cranked out without too much deliberation. Chekhov was never going to be a writer in Leikin's mould. He was an elegist as much as a comic, with a poetic temperament, and he found it increasingly difficult to write to order. He found the Moscow reportage particularly irksome. And . was hard having to be funny all the time. And who knows how much impact suddenly starting to cough blood had on Chekhov's frame of mind in 1884? With his limited horizons,
Leikin, meanwhile, was simply unable to appreciate Chekhov's more ambitious, serious stories, winch he found inferior. He wanted stories which provided entertainment. To be fair, Fragments was a comic journal. Leikin became increasingly proprietorial when Chekhov began to branch out (winch publishing in The Petersburg Newspaper allowed him to do). He then naturally felt somewhat threatened by Chekhov's resulting success in literary circles. But Chekhov never ceased to be grateful to Leikin for helping him at such a seminal point in his career. Despite the cloak-and-dagger operations, winch he suspected were going on behind his back in order to keep him in the Fragments stable, he was highly appreciative of Leikin's generous hospitality. Like Chekhov, Leikin had been born into a merchant family, with a father who had gone bankrupt. He had done very well for himself through journalism, and in addition to buying a palatial estate out of town that had belonged to Count Stroganov,18 he had a comfortable apartment on the Petrograd side of St Petersburg, near the Peter and Paul Fortress. Chekhov got on best with Leikin when it came to talking about dogs and fishing, which they were both keen on: Leikin had two vociferous dogs, and he later presented Chekhov with two pairs of puppies.
One of Chekhov's tasks during his visit to Petersburg was to discuss with Leikin the arrangements for his new short story collection: the publisher of Fragments had agreed to publish seventy of Chekhonte's most successful stories, under the title Motley Tales. Another task was to call on the editorial offices of New Times and The Petersburg Newspaper (where he was rece-ved like the 'Shah of Persia'), and meet other people in the St Petersburg literary world. The warmth of his reception made him embarrassed that he had not taken his writing more seriously, he wrote afterwards to his brother Alexander; it was difficult getting used to the fact that people were reading his work.19 But the knowledge that he was being read by the literary community in St Petersburg had an immediate effect on his writing. 'Heartache', published in The Petersburg Newspaper a month after his return, is a prime example of a finely crafted early story on a serious theme which would never have passed muster with Leikin. Rarely, for a work by Chekhov, it is actually set in St Petersburg (but more probably inspired by Moscow), and its mixture of sadness and humour was to become his trademark. A grief-stricken cab driver attempts, on a snowy winter night, to talk about the death of his son to his fares, but no one wants to listen and he ends up talking to his horse. Chekhov's ability to set a scene was already masterly. Writing to order for Leikin had honed an inbuilt talent for concision to which he now began to add emotional depth:
Evening twilight. Large flakes of wet snow are circling lazily around the streetlamps, only ust I t, and settling in a soft, th:n layer on roofs, the backs of horses, shoulders and hats. Iona Potapov the cabbie is all white, like a ghost. He is as hunched up as a iving person can be, and is sitting on the box without moving. Even if an entire snowdrift fell on him, he probably would not consider it worth shal ng the snow off himself... His old mare s also white and motionless. Standing there stock still, with her angular frame and legs straight as sticks, she looks like one of those one-kopeck gingerbread horses close up. She is probably deep in thought. Having been torn away from the plough, from familiar grey scenes, and thrown into this maelstrom of monstrous lights, with its relentless dm and people rushing about, it would be impossible not to think .. .20
It was precisely stories like 'Heartache' which had the readers of The Petersburg Newspaper turning eagerly to page three whenever they appeared.
II
Messengers from the North
Who could have ever imagined that such a genius would emerge from the latrine?
Letter to Mikhail Chekhov, 25 April 1886
I've just been walking down Nevsky. Everything is full of amazing joie de vivre, and when you look at the pink faces, the uniforms, the carriages and the ladies' bonnets, it feels like there's no sorrow in the world.
Letter to Mitrofan Chekhov, 13 March 1891
Wheels were set in motion after Chekhov returned home from St Petersburg at che end of his first visit ill December 1885. Within a matter of weeks, Alexei Suvorin, the proprietor of Russia's biggtst newspaper, had sent an envoy to talk to Chekhov about writ:ng for New Times. It was tricky, the envoy explained, because Chekhov had now been to St Petersburg, and, according to his intelligence, had now promised to write for The Petersburg Newspaper twice a week (previously it had only been once a week - on Mondays, the only day of the week that Leikin did not file). Leikin had apparently also offered Chekhov a 600-rouble annual retainer as long as he stopped writing for The Alarm Clock, which was the main Moscow rival to Fragments. The envoy reckoned that negotiation would have been much easier a few weeks earlier, before he had got on that train.21 But he ended up walking in through an open door. Chekhov was thrilled to be asked to write for New Vmes.
Like Leikin, Suvorin was much older than Chekhov, thirty-six years older to be precise (and with a son two years older than Chekhov). Suvorin was also a writer, whose voluminous legacy, like Leikin's, has similarly been consigned to oblivion. But he was considerably more interesting. As with so many of the people who came to prominence in Russian life in the last decades of the n neteenth century, Suvorin was a self-made man. His father had been a peasant conscript, promoted to captain for his valour in 1812, and his mother was the daughter of a priest. After spending several years as a school teacher in the provinces, during which time he started contributing to comic journals and the national press, he was invited to begin a full-time journalistic career in Moscow, working for a daily newspaper and also writing for all the most prestigious journals. A few years later he moved to St Petersburg, and while Chekhov was growing up in Taganrog, Suvorin slowly built up his empire. Finally, in 1876, he became the owner of the bankrupt New Times, a daily which had been founded in 1862. Suvorin turned it around, and for the next few decades it was the most .^nportant newspaper in Russia, with a circulation of up to 70,000 in its heyday. Back in the 1860s Suvorin had been a liberaclass="underline" a novel he published was considered so inflammatory it was pulped by state order, and he was arrested for publishing an article on the radical critic Chernyshevsky. A decade later his politics had changed, and New Times under his ownership developed an increasingly unsavoury reputation for its support of the regime: it is indicative that when Suvorin died in 1912, Nicholas II sent a wreath to his funeral.22 As well as owning the press which printed the newspaper, Suvorin also eventually acquired his own publishing house (whi :h pioneered cheap pocket editions), bookshops across the country in all the major cities and at railway stations, a histoi .cal ournal and a theatre.