Reading Chekhov

I debated with myself whether to challenge Sonia, and decided I would. I said, "Look, if we're going to talk about Chekhov, we need to say that Anton Pavlovich cared about truth above all else. He did not look away from reality. People not being paid for work is something he would have talked about-not brushed away with 'Let's talk about Chekhov.' " I sounded a little ridiculous to myself-like someone doing an imitation of a character in a socialist realist novel-but I enjoyed Sonia's discomposure, and when she started to answer I cut her off with "Tell Ludmilla what I just said." Sonia obeyed, and Ludmilla, smiling her sweet smile, said, "This is why I find it hard to read Chekhov. There is too much sadness in it. It is his spirituality that attracts me-the spirituality I receive from learning about his life." On the drive back to Moscow, Sonia praised the "good taste" of Melikhovo, before relapsing into conversation with Vladimir. He was a large, swarthy man of around fifty, wearing a black leather coat and exuding a New York taxi driver's gruff savoir faire. The contrast between him and Sergei, my St. Petersburg driver, a slender young man who dressed in jeans and carried a book, was like the contrast between Moscow and St. Petersburg themselves. St. Petersburg was small and faded and elegant and a little unreal; Moscow was big and unlovely and the real thing in a city. St. Petersburg came at you sideways; Moscow immediately delivered the message of its scale and power. Chekhov loved Moscow and had reserved feelings about St. Petersburg, even though his literary career got properly under way only when, in 1882, the St. Petersburg editor and publisher A. N. Leikin invited him to write for his humorous weekly, Fragments, and moved into full gear when he began writing for Suvorin's St. Petersburg daily New Times. He would visit St. Petersburg, first to see Leiken and then Suvorin, but he never really warmed to the city. In his fiction, people from St. Petersburg tend to be suspect (In "An Anonymous Story" an unsympathetic character named Orlov is described as a St. Petersburg dandy) or apologetic ("I was born in cold, idle Petersburg," the sympathetic Tuzenbach says in Three Sisters). In St. Petersburg, Chekhov suffered the worst literary failure of his life, with The Seagull-comparable to Henry James's failure with Guy Domville. At its premiere, at the Alexandrinsky Theater in 1896, it was booed and jeered, and the reviews were savage. (According to Simmons, "The News dismissed the play as 'entirely absurd' from every point of view," and a reviewer for the Bourse News said the play was "not The Seagull but simply a wild fowl.") The failure is generally attributed to a special circumstance of the premiere: it was a benefit for a beloved comic actress named E. I. Levkeeva, and so the audience was largely made up of Levkeeva fans, who expected hilarity and, to their disbelief and growing outrage, got Symbolism. At its next performance, which was attended by a normal Petersburg audience, The Seagull was calmly and appreciatively received, and positive criticism began to appear in the newspapers. But by that time Chekhov had I crawled back to Melikhovo, and believed that he was finished as a playwright. "Never again will I write plays or have them staged," he wrote to Suvorin. Because of Chekhov's slender and ambivalent ties to St. Petersburg, the city has no Chekhov museum, but a few of his letters and manuscripts have strayed into its Pushkin Museum, and on the morning of my first day in Nelly's charge she took me to inspect them. We sat at a table covered with dark green cloth, opposite a young, round-faced archivist named Tatyana, who displayed each document like a jeweler displaying a costly necklace or brooch. (Once, when Nelly reached out her hand toward a document, Tatyana playfully slapped it.) Chekhov's small, spidery handwriting, very delicate and light, brought to mind Tolstoy's description of him as reported by Maxim Gorky: "What a dear, beautiful man; he is modest and quiet like a girl. And he walks like a girl." One of Tatyana's exhibits was a letter of 1887 to the writer Dmitri Grigorovich, commenting on a story of Grigorovich's called "Karelin's Dream." Today, Grigorovich's work is no longer read; his name figures in literary history largely because of a fan letter he wrote to Chekhov in March 1886. At the time, Grigorovich was sixty-four and one of the major literary celebrities of the day. He wrote to tell the twenty-six-year-old Chekhov that "you have real talent-a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." Grigorovich went on to counsel Chekhov to slow down, to stop writing so much, to save himself for large, serious literary effort. "Cease to write hurriedly. I do not know what your financial situation is. If it is poor, it would be better for you to go hungry, as we did in our day, and save your impressions for a mature, finished work, written not in one sitting, but during the happy hours of inspiration." Chekhov wrote back: Your letter, my kind, warmly beloved herald of glad tidings, struck me like a thunderbolt. I nearly wept, I was profoundly moved, and even now I feel that it has left a deep imprint on my soul… I, indeed, can find neither words nor actions to show my gratitude. You know with what eyes ordinary people look upon such outstanding people like yourself, hence you may realize what your letter means for my self-esteem… I am as in a daze. I lack the ability to judge whether or not I merit this great reward. Chekhov went on to acknowledge the haste and carelessness with which he wrote: I don't recall a single tale of mine over which I have worked more than a day, and "The Hunter," which pleased you, I wrote in the bathhouse! I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires-mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself. And: What first drove me to take a critical view of my writing was… a letter from Suvorin. I began to think of writing some purposeful piece, but nevertheless I did not have faith in my own literary direction.