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.
And now, all of a sudden, your letter arrived. You must forgive the comparison, but it had the same effect on me as a government order 'to get out of the city in twenty-four hours.' That is, I suddenly felt the need for haste, to get out of this rut, where I am stuck, as quickly as possible.
In his letter about 'Karelin's Dream,' Chekhov gives a remarkable account of the way being cold at night gets into one's dreams: When at night the quilt falls off I begin to dream of huge slippery stones, of cold autumnal water, naked banks-and all this dim, misty, without a patch of blue sky; sad and dejected like one who has lost his way, I look at the stones and feel that for some reason I cannot avoid crossing a deep river; I see then small tugs that drag huge barges, floating beams. All this is infinitely grey, damp, and dismal. When I run from the river I come across the fallen cemetery gates, funerals, my school teachers… And all the time I am cold through and through with that oppressive nightmare-like cold which is impossible in walking life, and which is only felt by those who are asleep When I feel cold I always dream of my teacher of scripture, a learned priest of imposing appearance, who insulted my mother when I was a little boy; I dream of vindictive, implacable, intriguing people, smiling with spiteful glee-such as one can never see in waking life. The laughter at the carriage window is a characteristic symptom of Karelin's nightmare. When in dreams one feels the presence of some evil will, the inevitable ruin brought about by some outside force, one always hears something like such laughter…
These dreams, in their atmosphere of dread and uncanni-ness, put one in mind of the novels of Dostoevsky and the paintings of Edvard Munch, and hint at anxieties of which Chekhov preferred never to speak. Chekhov's biographers regularly note his reserve, even as they attempt to break it down. With the opening of the Soviet archives, hitherto unknown details of Chekhov's love life and sex life have emerged. But the value of this new information-much of it derived from passages or phrases cut out of Chekhov's published letters by the puritanical Soviet censorship, and absurdly said to make him 'more human'-is questionable. That Chekhov was not prudish about or uninterested in sex is hardly revealed by his use of a coarse word in a letter; it is implicit in the stories and plays. Chekhov would be unperturbed, and probably even amused, by the stir the restored cuts have created-as if the documentary proof of sexual escapades or of incidents of impotence disclosed anything essential about him, anything that crosses the boundary between his inner and outer life. Chekhov's privacy is safe from the biographer's attempts upon it-as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.
The attentive reader of Chekhov will notice a piece of plagiarism I have just committed. The image of the kernel and the husk comes from another famous passage in 'The Lady with the Dog,' in the story's last section. Gurov, after parting with Anna at the end of the summer and returning to his loveless marriage in Moscow, finds that he can't get her out of his mind, travels to the provincial town where she lives with the husband she doesn't love, and is now clandestinely meeting with her in a hotel in Moscow, to which she comes every month or so, telling her husband she is seeing a specialist. One snowy morning, on his way to the hotel, Gurov reflects on his situation (all the while conversing with Ins daughter, whom he will drop off at school before proceeding to his tryst): He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth-such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club… his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities-all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
'The Lady with the Dog' is said to be Chekhov's riposte to Anna Karenina, his defense of illicit love against Tolstoy's harsh (if ambivalent) condemnation of it. But Chekhov's Anna (if this is what it is) bears no real resemblance to Tolstoy's; comparing the two only draws attention to the differences between Chekhov's realism and Tolstoy's. Gurov is no Vronsky, and Anna von Diderits is no Anna Karenina. Neither of the Chekhov characters has the particularity, the vivid lifelikeness of the Tolstoy lovers. They are indistinct, more like figures in an allegory than like characters in a novel. Nor is Chekhov concerned, as Tolstoy is, with adultery as a social phenomenon. In Anna Karenina, the lovers occupy only a section of a crowded canvas; in 'The Lady with the Dog,' the lovers fill the canvas. Other people appear in the story-the crowd at the Yalta harbor, a Moscow official with whom Gurov plays cards, the daughter he walks to school, a couple of servants-but they are shadowy figures, without names. (Even the dog is unnamed-when Gurov arrives at Anna's house, and sees a servant walking it, Chekhov makes a point of noting that 'in his excitement he could not remember the dog's name.') The story has a close, hermetic atmosphere. No one knows of the affair, or suspects its existence. It is as if it were taking place in a sealed box made of dark glass that the lovers can see out of, but no one can see into. The story enacts what the passage about Gurov's double life states. It can be read as an allegory of interiority. The beauty of Gurov and Anna's secret
