The obvious question of why Chekhov, a man who loathed despotism in all its forms, and whose whole life may be regarded as an implicit - indeed, sometimes explicit - criticism of the Russian government's vena) and um'ust poli< :es, should have entered into such a longstanding and fruitful relationship with Suvorin and bis newspaper is a difficult one to answer. Both were complex indhiduals, from different generat ons, with completely different personalities and widely differ ng ncoines. What they had in common was a passion for writing,, a high degree of ntelligence, a peasant background, Voronezh province (where Suvorin and Chekhov's father grew up) and a large helping of the Orthodox Church. At the beginning, Chekhov needed the money that Suvorin was offering - it was far more than he was gett5ng anywhere else. He later confessed that when he first started writing for New Times, he felt as if he was in California.28 And despite his self- effacing manner, Chekhov was ambitious: whatever its politics, New Times was considerably more prestigious as a place to publish than The Petersburg Newspaper. And it provided him with a greater creative freedom than he had enjoyed elsewhere: the stories he published in The Petersburg Newspaper and the comic journals were noticeably more straightforward. Suvorin's high expectations and keen interest also stimulated Chekhov to produce the best work he could for him, and from New Times it was a much smaller step to the prestigious literary lournals than from The Petersburg Newspaper. But he also felt uneasy about contributing to a publication that was held in derision by the liberal intelligentsia, and immediately began to worry that he would be barred from publishing in literary journals as a result.29
Eventually Chekhov found it impossible to reconcile the newspaper's reactionary orientation with his friendship with its proprietor, and the virulently anti-semitic stance it adopted over the Dreyfus case in 189 / caused a rift in their (already cooling) relations chat never really healed. But for a good ten years the two men enjoyed each other's company. They travelled twice to Western Europe together, and met regularly in Petersburg, Moscow, and at Suvorin's luxurious seaside dacha in Feodosia in the Crimea (such a landmark you could buy a postcard with a picture ol it). In between their meetings, chey corresponded: Chekhov wrote Suvorin 337 letters between 1886 and 1903. He probably received as many in exchange, although none have survived to tell the other side of the story: Suvorin destroyed them all soon after Chekhov's death. (He went specially to Yalta to collect them, giving up his letters from Chekhov in exchange.) Suvorin was the recipient of Chekhov's best letters, the sounding board for his most serious ideas about literature, the theatre, human psychology, Russia. Initially Chekhov may have oeen rather naive about the implications of publishing w'th New Times, but he and Suvorin found each other such stimulating company that he could soon no more dispense with the publisher than he could turn his back on the man. There was no one he found as thought-provoking, no one who seemed so well read. As for Suvorin, whose incisive personality can be gauged from the letters to writers who did not predecease him, it was Chekhov's personality which most enchanted him. There was perhaps no other person he loved more outside his own family.
Although he occasionally took a room in a hotel such as the fashionable Angleterre on St Isaac's Square, after 1888 Chekhov usually stayed with Suvorin and his family in their vast apartment on Ertelev Lane, a street renamed Chekhov Street in his honour in 1923. In a fashionable area, right in the heart of the city not far from the Fontanka River, the Suvorin fam.ly residence was conveniently close to tne printing press, a few minutes' walk down the same street, and the main Suvorin bookshop on Nevskv Prospekt itself. Around the corner were the editorial offices of New Times, on Malaya Italianskaya - a street so called because of the Italian garden whose perimeter t bordered (it was renamed Zhukovsky Street in 1902). For Chekhov there were pluses and minuses to being a house guest. On the plus side were two luxuriously appointed rooms which came with a grand piano, a fireplace, a handsome desk, and Vasily the valet (who was better dressed than Chekhov, and bemused him by going about on tiptoe trying to anticipate his desires). There was also Suvorin's magnificent library of literary and religious works, and portraits on the walls of his favourite writers: Shakespeare, Pushkin, Turgenev and olstoy.30 Having to sustain long conversations with Suvorin's wife and dine en famille, despite the presence of their three dogs, was definitely on the side of the minuses. The Suvorin children thought Chekhov was a genius because he had written a story about a dog who goes off to perform in a lircus (Kashtanku), and stared at km continuously throughout dinner, expecting him to say something very clever. What most cramped Chekhov's style, though, was that he had to behave himself: he could hardly roll up drunk at the Suvorins', let alone ;n female company.31
When he managed to escape after his fKSt long day spent at Ertelev Lane in March 1888 (his hosts did not retire until three in the morn Jig), and could step out into the snowy streets, he headed round the corner to the editorial offices of The Northern Messenger, which had become Petersburg's leading literary journal. The previous month it had published 'The Steppe', his longest story to date, and his first ma or work, thereby reassuring him that his association with New Times had not barred his route to literary respectability. The Northern Messenger had arisen in 1885 to take the place of National Annals, which had been shut down by the government the previous year, ana Chekhov developed a very warm relationship with Alexei Pleshcheyev, his editor there. Publishing a story in one of the so-called 'thick' (literally 'fat') monthly journals was still of huge symbolic significance to any aspiring Russian writer who wished to be taken seriously. There were four main titles in the 1880s, three of them based in St Petersburg, but the prestige was no longer what it was (or later would be in the Soviet period). As a member of the parvenu younger generation who had only recently joined the ranks of the ntelligentsi i, Chekhov attached far less importance to literary journals than did his crustier older contemporaries. As he wrote to the poet Po^nsky ust before 'The Steppe' was published:
Isn't it the same whether a nightingale sings in a big tree or a bush? The requirement that talented people should only publish in thick journals is small-minded, smacks of servility and is harmtul like all prejudices. This prejudice is stupid and ridiculous. There was a point to it when the publications were headed by people with clearly defined outlooks, such as Belinsky, Herzen and so on, who not only paid a fee, but drew people to them, taught and educated them, but now when we have some very grey kind of people with dog collars running these publications, allegiance to thick journals won't stand up to criticism, and the difference between a thick journal and a cheap newspaper is only quantitive, that is to say, from the point of view of an artist, it is not worthy of respect or attention. There is one convenient aspect to writing for a thick journal, though: a long piece won't get chopped up and is printed whole. When I wr• te a long story, I will send it to a thick journal, and the small ones I will publish wherever the wind and my will want to take them.32