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The impulse to marry Dunia Kfros was not her dowry: her family were not rich. Nor did Anton have a desire for progeny (except for a puppy from Leikin's Apel and Rogulka). Aleksandr described with pride how he witnessed the birth of his second son, whom he named Anton, and then declared that after this spectacle he could never make love to Anna again. Aleksandr's picture of philoprogenitive domesticity in Novorossiisk in January 1886 was a deterrent. Aleksandr advised Anton in his next letter: 'You still aren't married. Don't… I've forgotten when I last slept.'
Anton's engagement to Dunia Efros was short and secret. His letters to Bilibin trace stormy ups and downs. On 1 February, Anton, with Kolia and Franz Schechtel, went to a ball at the barracks where Lieutenant Tyshko was now stationed. His fervour for Dunia cooled, and he told Bilibin: Thank your fiancee for the mention and the consideration and tell her that my marriage is probably alas and alack! The censor won't pass it… My she is a Jewess. Does a rich Jewgirl have the bravery to take Orthodoxy and the consequences - all right, she doesn't -and there's no need to… And anyway, we've already quarrelled… Tomorrow we'll make it up, but in a week we'll quarrel again… She's so annoyed that religion gets in the way that she breaks pencils and smashes photographs on my desk - that's typical… She's a terrible shrew… I shall divorce her 1-2 years after the wedding, that's certain. Dunia's violent spirit attracted and repelled Anton, and would infiltrate the highly sexed and assertive heroines of his stories that year. On 16 February 1886 Anton told Bilibin: 'Nothing is certain about my marriage yet', and on 11 March: I have split up to nee [sic] plus ultra with my fiancee. Yesterday we met… I complained to her of having no money and she told me that her Jewboy brother drew a 3-rouble note so perfectly that the illusion was complete: the chambermaid picked it up and put it in her pocket. That's all. I shan't write about her to you again. By early April Bilibin stopped asking about Chekhov's fiancee. Troubled by Anton's licentiousness, Bilibin questioned him on love and sex in literature and reality. As for his own love life, Chekhov would only say that 'he thawed like a Jewboy before a gold rouble' at the 'flowerbed' of beautiful women surrounding Masha. Dunia Efros remained a family friend, although she quarrelled with Masha two years later. In her letter from a North Caucasian spa that summer, four months after breaking with Anton, her conciliatory tone set the pattern for Anton's discarded lovers: I was thinking of a rich bride for you, Anton, even before I had your letter. There's a very loving merchant's daughter here, not bad-looking, rather plump (your taste) and fairly daft (also a virtue). She is desperate to get away from mummy's supervision which oppresses her terribly. Once she even drank 4 gallons of vinegar to be pale and scare mummy. She told us that herself. I think you'll like her. There's lots of money.32 Dunia's Jewishness was certainly instrumental in bringing her and Anton together and in sundering them. Like many southern Russians, Anton admired and liked Jews. Always a defender of Jews, he asked Bilibin why he used the word 'yid' three times in one letter? Yet he himself used the word 'yid' both neutrally and pejoratively and, like many southern Russians, Anton felt Jews to be a race apart with irredeemably unacceptable attitudes. 'Jew' and 'non-Jew' were categories in which he classified every new acquaintance, even though his utterances and his behaviour make him, by the standards of the times, a judophile.
We can infer Anton's cynicism about love and marriage from two items he offered to Fragments in January 1886. One was a readers' competition: The writer of the best love letter will win: a photograph of a pretty woman, a certificate signed by the editor and the judges that he has won and a free subscription for this or next year, as he wishes… Terms: 1) Only males may take part; 2) The letter must be sent to the office of Fragments no later than 1 March and bear the author's address and surname; 3) The author's letter is to be a declaration of love, showing that he really is in love and suffering, with parallels between infatuation and real love… 4) Conditio sine qua iii: the author must be literate, decent, gentle, playful and poetic… Ladies are appointed as judges. Chekhov's other piece, 'For the Information of Husbands', gave six methods to seduce wives. It was banned: 'Despite its jocularity, how
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ever, the topic's immorality, the indecently voluptuous scenes and cynical hints lead the censor to forbid it.' Bilibin, engaged to marry, told Chekhov that the skit was an affront (22 January): 'So the censor wouldn't pass 'The Attack on Wives'! Eh?… You deserved it. And to think that you're about to be married.'53
In any case Anton wanted a career more than he wanted Dunia Efros. In 1885 he had written some hundred pieces, as much in bulk as he would write in his ten last and finest years. By 1886, a regular contributor to Khudekov's Petersburg Newspaper, he was attracting attention among serious readers and writers. Leikin's Fragments was unrewarding, for Leikin had no time for polished work. He wrote his fair copy straight out and thought others should do the same. Fragments was so strictly censored in 1885 that its existence, and Anton's income, were threatened. There were practical as well as creative reasons for Anton to move to Khudekov's paper, although Chekhov conceded to Bilibin (who had no illusions) that Leikin had merits: 'Where else would you find such a pedant, such a manic letter-writer, such a runner to the censorship committee?' As a literary mentor, however, Leikin was redundant, although he could charm as well as irritate with his egocentric trivia, writing to Chekhov on 26 February 1886: I am still bothered with my stomach. It must be a serious catarrh. And bismuth hasn't helped. I've added a grain of codeine to 10 powders (1/10)… Yesterday I bought a cow for 125 roubles. Avery fine cow. I meant to send it to my country estate, but I couldn't bear to and placed it until Easter in my town house, all the more since I have a spare stable. Now we are drinking genuine milk. For the stomach Chekhov advised arsenic. (He prescribed Bilibin arsenic, too; Anton and Leikin mocked Bilibin for being too cowardly to take it.)
A reminder of his schooldays inspired Chekhov to aim higher. Viktor Bilibin drew Anton's attention to a talented short novel, My Marriage, in the October and November 1885 issues of the monthly The Russian Herald. Using material from Taganrog gimnazia, it told of a schoolteacher who loses his idle wife, and then his beloved sister-in-law, to an actor, a fiery radical. Anton recognized the author, Fiodor Stulli, as his old geography teacher. My Marriage left an imprint on JANUARY l886 Chekhov: he was to use its title and some of its motifs years later. To be overtaken as a writer by one of his teachers spurred his ambition. A new eye for nature, rich experience in Moscow and Babkino, from fishing to autopsies, the training of the anatomy theatre and the historia morbi, made Chekhov stand out in Khudekov's Petersburg Newspaper. Stories like 'The Dead Body', where peasants guard a corpse until the authorities come, or 'Sergeant Prishibeev' [Basher], about a maniac who takes the law into his own hands, have a radical outlook, and a subtlety quite uncharacteristic of the Antosha Chek-honte of old. Chekhov could risk pure pathos. 'Grief (of November 1885), based on an incident at the Chikino hospital, has an old turner, himself crippled by frostbite, delivering his dying wife to hospital. It won Palmin's admiration. 'Anguish' of January 1886 (a cabby, whose son has died, turns to his horse for sympathy) convinced Aleksandr of his brother's genius. Chekhov could now be serious, not yet in his letters, but in his art, where he could be sure of hiding behind a neutral, ironical authorial persona. The most telling of the stories on the eve of his breakthrough is 'Artistry': a drunken peasant erects a cross on the frozen river. Typical of all Chekhov's fiction, it is a seasonally appropriate work, timed to appear on the relevant day -the Feast of the Consecration of the Waters - but this is the first of several stories Anton was to write that show a religious mystery and work of art created by a flawed human being. This depth and range also owes much to Maupassant, widely admired in Russia; Bilibin and Chekhov discussed Bel-Ami and Une Vie in their letters. The impact of a dozen major stories published across thirty or so Monday issues of The Petersburg Newspaper softened the hostility of critics to a writer of lowly provincial origins who had, as yet, no influential patron.
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Acclaim February-April 1886 IN THE NEW YEAR Kurepin of The Alarm Clock returned from Petersburg. He told Chekhov that the press baron Aleksei Suvorin wanted Chekhov's stories for the Saturday supplement to New Times. Chekhov accepted with alacrity and Kurepin told the magnate. On 1 5 February Fragments published 'In Alien Lands', one of Chekhov's best light pieces: outrageously funny and touchingly sad, it paints the predicament of a Frenchman whose Russian host has confiscated his passport, so as to turn his guest into a slave. Anton's debut with 'Requiem' in New Times the same day overshadowed even the impact of 'In Alien Lands'. 'Requiem' outgrows the humorous genre to which at first sight it appears to belong: a grieving father insists on having his daughter commemorated as a fornicatrix. Apart from initiating Chekhov's theme of the actress as social outcast, this story builds tragedy out of the comedy of misunderstanding. Suvorin sent Anton a telegram and insisted that he allow his
