The year 1884 was critical in Chekhov’s life. At the age of twenty-four, he set up as a general practitioner and, influenced by reading the English social critic Herbert Spencer, began research on a history of medicine in Russia. That December he had bouts of spitting blood, which his medical expertise might have led him to diagnose as a symptom of pulmonary tuberculosis. No outside observer would have suspected this active, well-built, handsome young man was suffering from a mortal illness. Only in his last years did he become a semi-invalid, and, until that time, he kept up the pretence that his symptoms were not fatal. This subterfuge was not carried on simply to allay his family’s anxieties. He wilfully strove to ignore the forecast of his own mortality and regularly discounted the gravity of his condition.
Eighteen eighty-four also saw the publication of his first collection of stories, pointedly entitled Fairy Tales of Melpomene: the muse of tragedy compressed into pithy anecdotes of the life of actors. Chekhov had found more prestigious and better-paying periodicals to take his stories and was now an expert on Moscow life.
He had an opportunity to amplify his subject matter when he and his family began to spend summers in the country, first with his brother Ivan, master of a village school, and then in a cottage on the estate of the Kiselyov family. It was during those summers that Chekhov gained first-hand knowledge of the manor house setting he employed in many of his plays, and made the acquaintance of the officers of a battery, who turn up as characters in Three Sisters. Chekhov’s artistic horizons also expanded, for the Kiselyovs, intimates of the composer Chaikovsky, were devoted to classical music. Another summer visitor to become a lifelong friend was the painter Isaak Levitan, whose impressionistic landscapes are graphic counterparts of Chekhov’s descriptions.
The following year Chekhov’s literary career took a conspicuous upward turn. On a visit to St. Petersburg, Chekhov had been embarrassed by the acclaim that greeted him, because he recognized that much of his output had been hasty and unrevised. “If I had known that that was how they were reading me,” he wrote his brother Aleksandr, on January 4, 1886, “I would not have written like a hack.” Such stories as “Grief” and “The Huntsman,” both from 1885, had already displayed a new care in technique and seriousness in subject matter. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from Dmitry Grigoro-vich, the doyen of Russian critics, singling him out as the most promising writer of his time and urging him to take his talent more seriously. Although Antosha Chekhonte continued to appear in print for a few more years, Anton Chekhov made his first bow in the powerful Petersburg newspaper New Times. Its editor, Aleksey Suvorin, had risen from peasant origins to become a tycoon and a leading influence-monger in the conservative political camp. He and Chekhov were to be closely allied, although their friendship would later founder when Suvorin promoted the anti-Semitic line during the Dreyfus affair.
During the years when he was winning recognition as a writer of short stories, Chekhov made two further attempts to write for the theater. With the first, Along the Highway (1885), he came up against the obstacle of the censor, who banned it on the grounds that it was a “gloomy, squalid play.” The other piece, the monologue The Evils of Tobacco, was, like many of his early “dramatic études,” written with a specific actor in mind. It first appeared in 1886 in a St. Petersburg newspaper, and Chekhov kept revising it, publishing the final version, virtually a new work, in his collected writings of 1903. Farces he sketched out with collaborators never got beyond the planning stage.
Between 1886 and 1887, Chekhov published one hundred and sixty-six titles while practicing medicine. Such fecundity boosted his fame but wore him out. His health and his temper both began to fray. Profiting from an advance from Suvorin, Chekhov returned to southern Russia in 1887, a trip that produced remarkable work. The stories that ensued signaled his emergence as a leading writer of serious fiction. The novella “The Steppe” (1888) was published in The Northern Herald, one of the so-called fat, or weighty, journals that had introduced the writing of Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy and served as organs of public opinion. That same year, Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize for Literature by the Imperial Academy of Science for his collection In the Gloaming. One of the most enthusiastic instigators of this honor had been the writer Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who would later play an important role in establishing Chekhov’s reputation as a dramatist.
The Northern Herald was liberal in its politics, its editor, Aleksey Pleshcheev, a former prisoner in Siberia with Dostoevsky. Typically, Chekhov was able to be friendly with Pleshcheev and Suvorin at the same time, and he continued to contribute to New Times. His reluctance to be identified with any one faction exposed him to much acrimonious criticism from members of both camps, and especially from the progressive left. The writer Katherine Mansfield pointed out that the “problem” in literature is an invention of the nineteenth century. One of the legacies of Russian “civic criticism” of the 1840s was the notion that a writer had an obligation to engage with social problems and offer solutions, making his works an uplifting instrument of enlightenment. This usually meant espousing a doctrinaire political platform. Chekhov, perhaps fortified by his medical training, treasured his objectivity and steadfastly refrained from taking sides, even when his sympathies were easy to ascertain. “God keep us from generalizations,” he wrote. “There are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of them are professed by people who have never had any problems.”
Between 1886 and 1890, his letters discuss his objectivity and his “monthly change” of opinions, which readers preferred to see as the views of his leading characters. To his brother Aleksandr he insisted on May 10, 1886, that in writing no undue emphasis be placed on political, social, or economic questions. In another letter to Suvorin, on October 27, 1888, Chekhov wrote that the author must be an observer, posing questions but not supplying the answers. It is the reader who brings subjectivity to bear. Not that an author should be aloof, but his own involvement in a problem should be invisible to the reader, he explained to Suvorin, on April 1, 1890:
You reproach me for my objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, absence of ideals and ideas, etc. You want me to say, when I depict horse thieves: horse-stealing is a bad thing. But that’s been known for a long time now, without my help, hasn’t it? Let juries pass verdicts on horse thieves; as for me, my work is only to show them as they are.
The year before “The Steppe” appeared, Chekhov had at last had a play produced; the manager Fyodor Korsh had commissioned Ivanov and staged it at his Moscow theater on November 19, 1887. It was a decided if controversial success. As Chekhov wrote to Aleksandr, “Theater buffs say they’ve never seen so much ferment, so much unanimous applause cum hissing, and never ever heard so many arguments as they saw and heard at my play” (November 20, 1887). It was taken up by the Alexandra Theatre, the Imperial dramatic playhouse in St. Petersburg, and produced there on January 31, 1889, after much hectic rewriting in an attempt to make the playwright’s intentions clearer and to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of the new cast.
The theme of a protagonist fettered by a sick wife and want of money was a distorted reflection of Chekhov’s own situation. His family obligations kept his nose to the grindstone, and he felt guilty whenever he traveled away. Yet the success of Ivanov and the curtain-raisers The Bear and The Proposal (1888–1889) had put Chekhov at a premium as a dramatist. Urged on by Korsh and others, and unable to make headway on a full-length novel, Chekhov hoped to collaborate with Suvorin on a new comedy; when the publisher begged off, Chekhov completed it himself as The Wood Goblin (1889). It was promptly turned down by the state-subsidized theaters of Petersburg and Moscow, which regarded it as more a dramatized story than an actable play. They recommended that Chekhov give up writing for the stage. A production at a private theater in Moscow was received with apathy bordering on contempt, and may have helped provide the impetus for a decision Chekhov would soon make to go to Sakhalin, ten thousand miles away. Throughout 1888 and 1889, Chekhov also tended to his brother Nikolay, who was dying of tuberculosis; after Nikolay’s death, Chekhov experienced both guilt and a foreboding of his own mortality, which brought on the mood conveyed in “A Dismal Story” (1889), in which a professor of medicine contemplates his frustrated ideals and imminent demise. The author’s mood was at its lowest ebb.