Just over a month after reaching an agreement to write for New Times, Chekhov submitted his cirst story, signing it, as usual, with hi« Antosha Chekhonte pseudonym. When the readers of New Times opened their copies of the Saturday supplement edition on 15 February 1886, however, it was Chekhov's real name that they saw printed on the page. Although Chekhov had nurtured hopes of keeping his real name for all the medical articles he was planning to publish (and never did because he became too famous as a writer), he had acquiesced to Suvorin, who was adamant that the pseudonym now be dropped. There was all the difference in the world in having Suvorin as an editor, as the first letter Chekhov wrote to him makes clear:
Dear Alexei Sergeevicb,
I received your letter. Thank you for the flattering remarks about my work and for publishing my story so quickly. You can j ldge for yourself how refreshing and even inspiring for my writing it has been to have the kind of attention from such an experienced and talented person as yourself...
I share your opinion about the ending of my story and thank you for your useful suggestions. I've been writing for six years, but you are the first person who has bothered to provide suggestions and the reasons for them.
The A. Chekhonte pseudonym probably is strange and a bit recherche. But it was thought up in the misty dawn of my youth, I have grown used to it, and so I don't notice its strangeness .. ,23
'The Requiem', Chekhov's first story for New Times was a pearclass="underline" Andrey Andreyich, a simple-minded but devout rural shopkeeper has stayed behind in church in order to ask the priest to serve a requiem in memory of his beloved daughter Maria, recently deceased. During the service, he had sent up a petition to the altar, and now cannot understand why Father Grigory should berate him for appealing 'for eternal rest for God's servant, the whore Mam'. It turns out that Maria had, in fact, become a famous actress, who was even wiitten about in the newspapers, but Father Grigory in vain t: :es to persuade her father that there s notb'ig inherently sinful n working in the theatre, that it is not his place to condemn, and quite inappropriate to use such indecent words. As Father Grigory intones the words of the serv ce in the deserted church, Andrey Andreyich cannot quite bring himself to forgive his daughter for prostituting herself to the stage, and the story ends w: h her troubled soul finding release elsewhere:
A stream of bluish smoke rises from the censer and hangs in! the broad, slanting ray of sunlight which crosses the dark and lifeless empt; ness of the church. It seems that the soul of the deceased g /1 is floating alongside the smoke in that ray of sunlight. Twisting like a chi d's curls, the thin streams of smoke ise up towards the window as if d;speliing all the despair and sadness that poor soul contained.24
Leikin would have never let Chekhov get away with this sort of prose. But it was precisely this sort of prose, and the powerful evocation of the night-time storm ir| 'The Witch', his second story for New Times, which made Dmitry Grigorovich finally dip his pen in ink ;n St Petersburg a month later and exhort the 26-year-old Chekhov to take his writing more seriously. He had spent months try;ng to persuade Suvorin to overcome his prejudices and read the stories Chekhov was publishing in The Petersburg Newspaper, and he had fir ally been vindicated.
Meanwhile, the pages of Motley Tales, Chekhov's second short story collection, were being for prepared for printing at the typographers in Petersburg. It was time for him to make kia second visit to the capital. He was again beset with financial difficulties, and was again coughing blood - now a regular occurrence, particularly n spring when the snows began to melt. On 25 April 1886, however, he returned to spend another two weeks in St Petersburg. On this occasion, he travelled at his own expense, and took a room in a boarding house near the railway station on Pushkin Street, just off Nevsky Prospekt. After arriving off the overnight train and having a wash - he told his brother Misha in a letter written at the end of his first day - he put on his new trousers, his new coat and his pointed shoes, and set off on a triumphant tour of the city's editorial offices. It was a fi<teen-kopeck cab drive, down Nevsky to Troitsky Lane, where the Frugmenzs editorial team had relocated and which was still Chekhov's first port of call. The pianist Ancon Rubinstein, whom, according to some of his friends, Chekhov resembled, would move into an apartment further down the street the following year, and the street now bears his name - Chekhov had been very amused when his brother Alexander named his new-born son Anton in February 1886, quipping in a letter: 'What boldness! You might just as well have called him Shakespeare! After all, there are only two Antons in the world: me and Rubinstein.'25
Chekhov received an enthusiastic welcome at the Fragments office, which he used as his mailing address during his stay. The journal's proprietor was not at his desk when he went round to the press next door, so he set off to visit hic new friend Ivan Bilibin, who took him for a boat trip on the river and then for lunch at Dominique, a popular restaurant with a billiard room, on Nevsky Prospekt opposite the Kazan Cathedral. But that was not all, he wrote jubilantly to Misha. Next came а ч ,sit to The Petersburg Newspaper, and finally an audience with Suvorin himself.26 It made all the difference that Chekhov was no longer being paraded as Leikin's 'discovery'. He and Suvorin immediately saw eye to eye on this occasion, and the relationship they struck up during his visic two years later would, over the years, develop
Suvorin's bookshopя Nevsky Prospekt, St Petersburg
into what would be for both ot them the most important and the closest friendship of their entire lives. Motley Tales was the first and last collection Chekhov published with Fragments. In 1887, New l\mes became Chekhov's main publisher, issuing nine separate editions of collections and individual stories at a thousand copies each. The first collection, In The Twilight, was reprinted twelve times; when it was reissued >n 1891, there were a further eleven reprintings.27