That it was to Alexei Suvorin that this letter was addressed is surely no accident. If Chekhov loved Tolstoy better than any man, it was Suvorin with whom he felt most comfortable. Suvorin was another self-made man, and also the grandson of a serf. He was twenty-six years older than Chekhov, and the millionaire publisher of New Times, a right-wing daily with the largest circulation of any newspaper in Russia, as well as the owner of a large publishing house, five bookshops, and the majority of the bookstalls in Russian railway stations. In addition, he was a writer (of plays and stories) of some accomplishment. Suvorin’s invitation to Chekhov in 1886 to write stories for New Times at the high rate of twelve kopecks a line is regarded as the fulcrum of Chekhov’s artistic emergence. He had already begun to liberate himself from the humor genre; he was writing longer, nonhumorous stories for the daily Petersburg Gazette. But the Gazette paid poorly, and it was only Suvorin’s offer that permitted him to cut his ties with the humor magazines and devote himself to serious fiction. Grigorovich wrote Chekhov an electrifyingly flattering letter, but it was Suvorin who created the conditions under which he could produce art.
The friendship that developed between the middle-aged magnate and the young writer aroused the sort of envy and derision such relationships do. Chekhov, of course, did not share the reactionary and anti-Semitic views of New Times—which only made his motives seem more suspect. (In actuality, the differences between Chekhov’s and Suvorin’s politics were not as great as they appeared; in private, Suvorin could evidently permit himself less objectionable views than those of his paper. In time, however, the paper’s shrill anti-Dreyfusism was to put a serious strain on the friendship.) The theater critic Alexander Kugel wrote (Donald Rayfield tells us), “The way [Suvorin] entertained Chekhov, looked at him, enveloped him with his eyes, reminded one somehow of a rich man showing off his new ‘kept woman.’ ” Along the same lines (according to Simmons), Shcheglov quoted a Petersburg literary rival of Chekhov as saying: “Chekhov is a Suvorin kept woman!” This was not so: Chekhov took no money from Suvorin beyond his earnings and an occasional loan (which he always punctually repaid). Suvorin’s hospitality to him at his mansion in St. Petersburg (Nelly pointed it out to me during a tour of the city—a large red stone building of a sturdy Victorian cast) and at his estate in the Crimean resort town of Feodosia was reciprocated by Chekhov in the country houses he rented before buying Melikhovo, and then at Melikhovo (which, much to his sorrow, Suvorin didn’t like). Everything was extremely correct in this regard. (How far Chekhov was from sponging off Suvorin can be inferred from a letter he wrote to his sister while traveling in Europe with Suvorin: he wistfully noted how cheap the trip would have been had he not had to stay in the fancy hotels and eat in the expensive restaurants that Suvorin favored.)
When the two men weren’t together, they faithfully—you could almost say obsessively—corresponded. We have only Chekhov’s side of the correspondence. Simmons reports that when Chekhov died Suvorin turned over Chekhov’s letters to Maria in exchange for his own. The latter were never seen again, so we don’t know what tone Suvorin adopted toward his protégé. But from Chekhov’s letters we may gather that he and Suvorin were more like a father and son who adored each other than like a kept woman and her wealthy protector. Suvorin was the generous, appreciative, worldly, bookish father Chekhov should have had, rather than the narrow, cruel tyrant he got. The relationship, as Rayfield has characterized it, was “one of the most fertile in Russian literature.” Olga, who was perpetually reproaching Chekhov for the brevity and levity of his letters to her (“Write me a beautiful, sincere letter and don’t take refuge in jokes, as you so often do. Write what you feel”), would have killed for one of Chekhov’s beautiful, sincere letters to Suvorin. “You complain of the shortness of my letters,” Chekhov wrote to Olga in 1901, and lamely explained, “My dear, my handwriting is small.” To Suvorin he wrote letters that ended only when his fingers began to ache. “In case of trouble or boredom where am I to go? Whom am I to turn to?” he wrote in the summer of 1893 when Suvorin was about to go abroad. “There are devilish moods when one wants to talk and write, yet I don’t correspond with anybody but you, and there is nobody whom I talk with for any length of time.”
But even to Suvorin Chekhov refused the ultimate epistolary satisfaction, the unconditional declaration of love. “This doesn’t mean that you are better than all those whom I know,” he felt constrained to add, “but it does mean that I have grown used to you and that you are the only one with whom I feel free.” A number of memoirists have written of Chekhov’s inability to get close to anyone. One must always be skeptical of such an observation, since it can simply describe the relationship of the subject and the memoirist, and not necessarily apply to the subject’s other relationships. In Chekhov’s case, though, the observation comes from a variety of sources, and it seems to fit. The consensus is that Chekhov was extremely charming to everyone and close to no one—not even to Suvorin, to whom he came closer to being close than to anyone else. In his last years, weakened by illness, he married a woman with whom—had he been healthy—he probably would have broken, as he had broken with all the other women in his life. It was not in his character to give his heart away.
It was also not his habit to give himself away in his work; he was not a confessional writer. But in one story at least he may have practiced a veiled form of autobiography. That story is “Kashtanka” (1887), narrated from the point of view of a female dog, and presented as a story for children. In fact, it is a dark, strange, rather horrible (as well as wonderful) fable that I, for one, would never read to a child. The story reverses the usual formula of the well-treated animal who is wrested from a comfortable home and made to endure cruel hardship until it is finally reunited with its humane original master or mistress. Kashtanka is a hungry and ill-treated animal who gets lost, is adopted by a kindly man, and then is reunited (by her own choice) with her abusive original owner. The kindly man finds Kashtanka shivering in the doorway of a bar during a snowstorm, and takes her home and feeds her. He is an animal trainer who has a circus act performed by a cat, a gander, and a pig. He adopts Kashtanka, starts teaching her tricks, for which she proves to have great aptitude, and one day brings her to the circus to perform in the act with the others. The original owner, an alcoholic carpenter, happens to be in the audience with his son, and when the two of them call to her, Kashtanka leaps out of the ring to go to them, and unhesitatingly, and even joyfully, resumes her life of privation.
Chekhov prepares for the ending by depicting the household of the kindly master as a faintly sinister place. Kashtanka and the cat and the gander are kept in a room always identified as the little room with dirty wallpaper. An uneasiness is always present, a kind of uncanniness that reaches a climax one night when the gander utters a horrible shriek and then pathetically dies, as the dog howls and the standoffish cat huddles against her. When read as a parable of alienation—a case study of homesickness—the dog’s return to the original master takes on a sort of tragic inevitability. We know that the sleek, well-groomed animal Kashtanka has become under the care of the kindly circus master will soon again be a bag of bones, beaten by the carpenter and tortured by the son. But she will be cured of her unease; she will be where she belongs, leading her own proper life, rather than a life that is not really hers.