He was as versatile as he was productive. He wrote captions to cartoons; literary parodies; comic calendars, diari-es, questionnaires, aphorisms and advertisements; innumerable sketches; and even a detective novel. In his endless search for story material, he made use of his own experiences and raided the lives of friends and relatives. He could be frivolous or serious, now topical, now seasonable, hilarious as a parodist, and ingenious with comic twists. Thus A Dreadful Night (1884) is probably autobiographical in inspiration, it is seasonable (a Christmas tale published on December 27th), has a twist ending, and must be the send-up to end all send-ups of the
traditional Christmas horror story!
The largest single group among Chekhov's early work, though, consiMs of stories of knockabout romance. Here we meet a small army of foolish young men, silly young girls, matchmakers, mothers, and mothers-in-law. The heroes and heroines of this world are either strivingdesperately to find a wife or husband, or striving desperately to be unfaithful to one. Such well-worn themes could be relied upon to raise an easy laugh when all other inspiration failed. A brilliant l;rst flowering of the genre was Nofes from the Journal of a Quick- Tempered Man (1887), with its huge cast of 'variegated young ladies' and .Machiavellian mothers, all in hot pursuit ofthe only two, not very eligible, bachelors in the summer datcha colony. By that time, however, Chekhov had already written the first of his distinc- tive serious love stories; although non-love story might be a better description of Verochka (1887).
Another very large group, panicularly prominent in 1883 and 1884, produced several of the best known of Chekhov's earliest works. The gigantic Tsarist bureaucracy had long been a target for satire. Chekhov extracts his own brand of absurdist humour from its rituals and conventions, its red tape, bribery and corruption ('You seem to have left something behind in my hand,' says the official in one sketch to a petitioner when his chief appears at an awkward moment), and the arrogance or servility displayed by people towards those below or above them in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Not that Chekhov is sentimentally disposed towards the servile underdog. Few tears, it seems from his laconic account, need be shed for the hero of The Death of a CivilServant (1883), little sympathy felt for the thin man in Fat and Thin (1883). These tales are inspired with a youthful exasperation and disgust at the absence of the most basic notions of self-respect; or, as in the case of the landowner's behaviour in The Daughter of Albion (1883), of respect for others.
Chekhov was successful as a young writer-journalist because he catered for the rnarket. His stories appealed to young men of roughly his own age and social status who could easily identify themselves with heroes on the look-out for a good match or forced to lick the boots of their departmental chief. From the cheerfully low-brow Moscow Alarm Clock and The Dragonfly (which had published his first contribution in March 1880, when he was just twenty), he graduated to the St Petersburg Splinters, widely regarded as Russia's leading comicsheet. 'l have always maintained a serious tone even in matters of humour,' wrote its editor, Leykin. Chekhov was intro- duced to him in October 1882, and it was Leykin who, by imposing strict limits on the length of contributions, taught the prolix young Chekhov a lesson that he never forgot: how to be succinct. Whilst still workingforSp/infers, he also began to write for the respectable Petersb^rg Gazefte and in February 1886 made his debut in the major newspaper New Times. Its editor, Suvorin, had been told about this promising new writer by the veteran author Grigorovich, who himself had first become aware of Chekhov from reading The Httntsman in the Petersbttrg Gazetfe of July 18th, 1885.
In The Httntsman several qualities that will mark Chekhov out as a short story writerachievetheir first successful artisticexpression. A place, an atmosphere, are evoked powerfully, but by the slenderest, poetic means; and this natural setting interacts subtly with the characters themselves. Whilst ostensibly doing no more than describe the meeting and conversation of two people on a hot sum- mer's day (the story was first subtitled 'A Scene'), Chekhov succeeds both in throwing into relief how each sees the world, and in making palpable the whole texture of their lives - past, present, and even future. As a result, the unresolved ending, the unsentimental way in which he shows the impossibility of any rapprochement between them, satisfies by its emotional and psychological authority.
In March 1886 Grigorovich wrote directly to Chekhov. He was generous in praise of his talent, 'which places you far beyond the modern generation of writers', but urged him strongly to respect that talent by writing with more care and at greater leisure. He also suggested he should attempt a major longer work. In his reply, Chekhov sought to excuse himself. No one had ever taken his writing seriously, he wrote, he was immersed in medicine, and he had never spent more than twenty-four hours on a single story. Nevertheless, he adds that while writing stories in this 'mechanical' way he had been very careful not to waste on them 'images and scenes which are precious to me and which for some reason I carefully saved up and put aside'.
Grigorovich's advice was heeded, but did not take etfea all at once. Chekhov could still notafford tostop writingto a deadline for several publications simultaneously, he still had comic writing in his blood, and he still had much to contribute to the life of the very short story (reading which, as Chekhov put it, 'feels rather like swallowing a glass of vodka'). In 1887 he wrote almost as prolifically as in 1886.
In fact, some of his best comic stories belong to this period, and even in 1887 he was still writing occasionally for The A/arm C/ock.
That he had been 'saving up' his best material, however, seems to have been true. From the very start, even in his most prolific and hasty work, Chekhov saw himself u a professional writer. He was constantly experimenting with genres, forms and narrator's masks. On several occasions he tried to persuade Leykin to accept non- humorous work from him for Sp/inters. He read the masters of Russian prose exhaustively and critically. Even in these early years he is known to have kept notebooks in which he collected scraps of living speech and potential literary material. Whenever a previous work of his was to be repubhshed, he laboured meticulously over revising and retouching it to his current standards. Thus when given the opportunity to write longer and more serious stories for Suvorin, he was able to raise the quality of his writing, and widen the range of his themes, apparently without effort.
The quieter psychological note already heard m The Httntsman now comes to the fore. People matter more than situations. From the start he had shown a keen eye for the quirkiness of human behaviour, whether its harmless foibles, as in Raptttre (1883)or The Comp/aints Book (1884), or its more harmful and ominous perversions (Sergeant Prisfc»'beyev, 1885); but in such stories behaviour is inevit- ably seen from the outside only. What the young Chekhov now shows, however, is a marvellous ability to enter into the lives of characters, completely to 'inform', as Keats said of the poet, the lives of men, women, children, animals, and even plants and landscapes, and make the reader experience the world from their point of view. Fascinatingly, the eye may still be momentarily that of a humorist, but more and more it is that of an observer in whom imaginative empathy with his subjects is coupled with a strong scientific sense of what is physically and psychologically plausible. In Oysters (1884) and TyphKs (1886) he makes direct useof his medical knowledge to describe abnormal physical states, but these are not mere 'clinical studies': they are transformed by Chekhov's vital, imaginative involvement. With the same blend of imagination and authenticity he enters into the lives of children, whether growing up normally, as in Kids and Grisha (both 1886), or in the intolerable conditions depicted in Vanka (1886) or Let Me S/eep (1888). And because he inhabits his characters so fully, moral judgment of them is sus- pended.