Aleksandr saw familiar faces: 'In Tula, Antosha, I saw at the station your bride, she who is on the Grachiovka, and her mama. They say of this mama that when she got in the saddle, she broke a horse's back.' Aleksandr did not like his wife's home town, and sent Anton an anti-ode to Tula. It is similar in tone to Betjeman's poem 'Slough':15 I entered Tula with distress, My greying girlfriend would insist On dragging me, she could not see. Alas, I could not overrule her, I suffered and I went to Tula… In Taganrog, at first, all went well: Aleksandr had returned to his native town in glory - a graduate, a civil servant, and apparently married to a gentlewoman. Stopping at the Hotel Europa, Aleksandr entered Mitrofan's shop as customer, to be swamped by avuncular embraces and hospitality. Mitrofan and Liudmila (who now had four children) removed Aleksandr and his partner from the hotel, in exchange for teaching their twelve-year-old son Georgi grammar. Then they stayed with old friends, the Agalis, as paying guests. Very soon, however, Taganrog had read Anton and Kolia's skit of the Loboda wedding, and only the Chekhovs' nanny Agafia was still pleased to see Aleksandr.»
Taganrog was not on Anton's mind. All July 1882 he had to earn money in Moscow, while his mother and the younger Chekhovs were
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DOC Mill (II I E IK) V in Voskresensk with Vania. Pavel stayed overnight at the Moscow apartment every other day, so Kolia and Anton moved to a dacha with Pushkariov and his consort Anastasia. Deserted, Pavel called his wife and younger children back from Voskresensk and then threatened to join his sons at Pushkariov's. While the friendship with Pushkariov lasted, Chekhov contributed to his journals. Talk of the World aimed high: Anton printed a story, 'Livestock', that recalls the perpetual triangle in Dostoevsky's Eternal Husband. In 'Livestock' too the lover is saddled forever with the husband of the woman he has seduced.
After the holidays, Pushkariov printed Chekhov's longest piece in a Moscow weekly: four issues of Talk of the World carried 'Belated Flowers'. (This story was dedicated to Anton's former lodger, the medical student Nikolai Korobov.) The 'belated flowers' are a patrician family fallen on hard times. The story line, though crude, is strong. The central hero shows the author's wishful thinking: a doctor of humble origins flourishes as the 'belated flowers' wilt. Chekhov re-used the story line less crassly in 'Ionych' of 1899, where a plebeian doctor likewise turns the tables on the town's patrician family.
'Livestock' and 'Belated Flowers' like 'The Lady', were impressive: they brought respect, demand and money. That year, 1882-3, was strenuous for Anton. Fourth-year medics were taught by the luminaries of Russian surgery and internal medicine. Chekhov's practicals were in paediatrics. Here he wrote up the case of Ekaterina Kurnukova, a doomed infant, paralysed and pustulent with neonatal syphilis, whom he tended for twelve weeks.16 To mix harrowing study with a social life and some hundred literary pieces needed superhuman determination and energy.
To make a name, however, a writer had to be printed in Petersburg, where periodicals printed what was considered to be serious literature. Chekhov owed his breakthrough to the poet Liodor Palmin, who wrote for both Moscow's and St Petersburg's press. When Chekhov first saw him at The Alarm Clock Palmin, at forty-one, looked like a tramp: hunched, pockmarked and dirty. A few lyrics of noble civic sentiment, some elegant translations of the classics and a talent for improvisation made him popular. He was an unusually compassionate soul in the literary world. Flitting from one tenement to another, in dingy parts of Moscow where visitors risked their lives at night, with
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his servant Pelageia, who became consort and eventually wife, Palmin took in stray dogs, cats, ducks and hens, the crippled, the blind and the mangy. He and Pelageia drank heavily.17 Chekhov was as fascinated by Palmin as by Uncle Giliai; the fascination was mutual.
In October 1882 Nikolai Leikin, editor of the St Petersburg weekly journal Fragments, came to see Palmin. They dined at Moscow's best restaurant, Testov's. As they drove away, Palmin spotted Kolia and Anton Chekhov on the pavement. He recommended them to Leikin, always in search of talent, as contributors. By 14 November Leikin had accepted three of Anton's pieces (and rejected two). He paid 8 kopecks a line, he wanted weekly contributions and he allotted Anton up to a quarter of each issue of 1000 lines. (In Russia even writers as famous as Tolstoy were paid by the line for short works and by the printer's sheet of 24 pages for longer works.) Kolia provided centrefold and cover pictures. Leikin was Russia's most prolific writer of comic sketches: every Taganrog schoolboy knew his work. As an editor he was ruthless (he rewrote without consulting his authors), but he won respect for his tenacity against the censors and drew major writers, notably the novelist Nikolai Leskov, to Fragments.
Despite a weekly correspondence, which became frank,18 Anton found Leikin's boasting and pedantry tiresome. A nouveau riche eccentric, Leikin nevertheless commanded admiration for his love of animals and children. In 1882 he adopted a baby left on his doorstep. For his two hounds, Apel and Rogulka, he hung his Christmas tree with raw meat. Anton's physical distaste for Leikin, 'the lame devil', a squat, hirsute man with tiny eyes, and his irritation with Leikin's manipulative ploys were tempered by gratitude for spotting his talent. Leikin wanted exclusivity, and Anton had to write less for the Moscow journals. This jealousy became paranoiac at the end of the year, when subscribers were deciding which magazines to take for the new year. Leikin needed to show that anyone who wanted to read Antosha Chekhonte had to buy Fragments. Leikin's motives were economic, and agreed with Anton's artistic principles on one point only: the need for precision, speed and brevity. Yet, under Leikin's and the censor's stringent tutelage, Chekhov began to show a telling, ironic turn of phrase, a gift for dialogue, for an impressionistic image.
A new rhythm started: Fragments came out every Saturday and various Chekhovs put Anton's contributions on Tuesday's midnight
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I. () i I i» ii N 11 E E 11 I V mail train to Petersburg so that Lcikin could set them up, submit them to the censor and get them out in time. The discipline was stricter still when Leikin asked Chekhov to provide a weekly column called 'Fragments of Moscow Life'. This was to parade the corruption and provinciality of Moscow for the amusement of Petersburg's readers, who needed to believe that they were in Europe and Moscow was in Asia. To be exposed as the author would have made life difficult: Chekhov had a new pseudonym for these articles, 'Ruver', and, when his hand was suspected after a few months by others in Moscow's 'Grub Street', switched to 'Ulysses'. Writing less for Moscow and mocking Moscow's writers and editors lost Anton friends in the offices of The Alarm Clock, where he even used editorial conferences as material for his Fragments articles. Eight kopecks a line justified betrayal. In Moscow Anton published in The Spectator where friendly relations with the Golden sisters helped, and where Davydov also paid 8 kopecks a line. Any Moscow publication, especially at the end of the year, was to Leikin a dagger in the back. Often Leikin accused Palmin and Chekhov of losing him subscribers by their promiscuity.
Socially, Anton was moving in more refined circles. His sister Masha, whom her elder brothers had spurned as the family crybaby, had grown up to be a friend and confidante. In May 1882 she matriculated from the episcopal gimnazia and started university courses (in Russia, as in Britain, female students were taught extramurally). Enrolled on the prestigious Guerrier courses, where eminent historians such as Kliuchevsky lectured, Masha had become a kursistka (a female external student). The friends Masha brought home in autumn 1882 to her brothers were more salubrious than the editorial secretaries of the weekly magazines, let alone the landladies with whom her brothers roomed, but only the more daring girls on the Guerrier courses could breathe the Bohemian atmosphere around Kolia and Anton. Masha's fellow students rivalled Anna and Natalia Golden for Kolia's and Anton's affections. To one, Ekaterina Iunosh-eva, an entomologist, Anton sent a beetle 'which has died of desperate love', but she favoured Kolia.
Olga Kundasova, known as 'the astronomer', was a kursistka who found work at the Moscow observatory. In 1883 she and Anton became lovers, a relationship that limped on for two decades. Olga Kundasova was gawky, strong-boned, highly strung, but even in her most unhappy
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and infatuated moments too penetrating and frank for Anton to be comfortable with. More seductive was a temperamental, mordant Jewish student, Dunia Efros. Both Olga Kundasova and Dunia Efros experienced much distress before finding their places on the periphery of Anton's life. Far more complex and less Bohemian than earlier women in the three brothers' lives, they also behaved as equals. They changed Anton's perception of women. If the best stories Chekhov wrote for Fragments have psychological depth, we must thank the women
