was drawing the cover of Motley Stories, reported: 'There is a supposition that Leikin is undermining your interests'.
For Easter Anton sent Suvorin his finest and most lyrical piece of prose so far, 'On Easter Night': a pilgrim listens to the ferryman monk mourning the death of his friend. Easter joy is tempted with lament. Chekhov's prose is imbued with intense love of the archaic language of the liturgy which only he and Leskov could fuse into literary Russian. 'On Easter Night' transcends the author's own unbelief.
Four things, however, stood between Chekhov and a triumphal visit to Petersburg: Easter, his health, poverty and Kolia's behaviour. Only twice, in 1878 and 1879, had Anton spent an Easter away from his parents. He stayed in Moscow until 14 April, Easter Monday. At Easter Anton's health took on an ominous annual pattern: with spring and the rising of the sap, his lungs spurted blood. On 6 April Anton confessed to Leikin that he was spitting blood, too weak to write, but 'afraid to submit to the soundings of my colleagues'. Family and friends gave him no respite. Giliarovsky wrote a hoax letter, saying he had a broken leg, extensive burns and wounds after a fire: Anton rushed to his bedside to find a case of St Anthony's fire. Vania's diarrhoea and Aunt Fenichka's chronic cough demanded nursing and kept Anton in Moscow. He even lacked money for the fare to Petersburg, although Suvorin, unlike Khudekov, paid his authors on time. On 5 March Anton was ordered by the magistrate to pay 50 roubles of Kolia's debts; apparently Kolia owed another 3000.
Anton's elder brothers were inexcusably irresponsible: they stood in his way. He lectured them both, writing to Aleksandr on 6 April: You write that you're 'being burnt, slashed, ground and blood-sucked'. You mean, you're being dunned? My dear brother, you've got to pay your debts! You must at any cost, even to Armenians, even at the price of going hungry… If people with a university education and writers think debts are just forms of suffering, what will everybody else think?… Look at me, I have a family round my neck far larger than yours and groceries in Moscow cost 10 times more than where you are. Your rent is what I pay for a piano, I don't dress any better than you. At the same time Anton gave Kolia an ultimatum: You are kind to die point of being wet, magnanimous, unselfish, you will share your last penny, you're sincere; you don't know envy or hate, you're simple, you pity people and animals, you're not spiteful or vindictive, you're trusting… You are gifted from above with what others don't have… on earth there is only one artist for every 2,000,000 people… You have just one fault. This is your false excuse, your grief and your catarrh of the gut. It is your extreme lack of good breeding… The lower-class flesh brought up on thrashings, wine cellars and handouts shows. It's hard, awfully hard to overcome it.
Well bred people in my opinion must satisfy the following conditions: 1) They respect human personality and are always considerate, gentle, polite and yielding… 2)… They go without sleep… to pay for their student brothers, to buy clothes for meir mother… 3) They respect others' property and therefore pay their debts… The tirade ended: 8) They develop an aesthetic sense. They can't go to bed in their clothes, look at cracks full of bedbugs in the wall, breathe foul air,
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DOC I I II (E I E II l)V walk on lloors covered with spittle, nil out of an old paraffin can. They try as far as they can to tame and ennoble the sexual instinct… They need from a woman not bed, not equine sweat, not the sounds of urination, not a mind expressing itself in the art of deceiving you with fake pregnancy and lying non-stop. They, especially artists, need freshness, elegance, humanity, a capacity to be a mother, not a hole… They don't knock back vodka, don't sniff cupboards, for they know they are not pigs. They drink only when free to, on the right occasion… Come home to us, smash the vodka decanter and lie down and read… if only Turgenev, whom you haven't read… You must drop your fucking conceit, because you're not a little boy… You'll be 30 soon! It's high time! I'm waiting… We're all waiting. Kolia's delinquency affected many. Franz Schechtel had shown trust: he found Kolia work restoring icons for a new church, where, as architect, he was penalized for delays. Kolia took the money and materials. Schechtel appealed to Anton: 'I'm tearing my hair and pulling my teeth with despair: Kolia has vanished and left not a trace: there's no way I can get to him.'55
Eventually, on Easter Sunday Kolia was traced, but no materials were recovered.
Anton had done all he could. He was leaving for his second fortnight in Petersburg. Motley Stories was launched on 27 April; there were cogent financial reasons for going. If Suvorin paid 87 roubles for one story, why should not Khudekov raise his rates? Leikin encouraged Anton: 'It wouldn't be a bad idea for you to come to Petersburg the week after Easter, and meet Suvorin and Grigorovich [again]. I would do that for the sake of literary connections which are essential for a writer.' On 25 April 1886, Anton stepped out of the train in Petersburg: he was to be enthusiastically received by the Great and the Good.
III
My Brothers'1 Keeper And Joseph nourished his father, and his brethren, and all his father's household with bread, according to their families. Genesis XLVII, 12
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NINETEEN
The Suvorins April-August 1886 IN APRIL 1886 Anton Chekhov met Suvorin again. A powerful bond, built on misconceptions that would weaken it, was formed. Suvorin saw in Chekhov genius and delicacy; Chekhov saw in Suvorin sensitive authority. Twelve years would pass before Suvorin found the 'flint' in Chekhov's make-up and Chekhov detected the 'lack of character' in the publishing baron. They needed each other: New Times had no genius among its talented writers; Chekhov had no other access to Petersburg literary circles. For a decade Chekhov was frank with Suvorin as with nobody else. Suvorin responded to Chekhov with candour; they were soon equals.
A soldier's son, born in the heartland of Russia, Voronezh province, Suvorin had much in common with Chekhov: he had fought his way up as teacher, journalist, critic, playwright. He had made his name as a radical in the 1860s, as a friend of Dostoevsky at the end of 1870s and had burst into politics, making New Times a paper that was read, admired and detested - for its closeness to ruling circles, its nationalism and cynicism, its advertisements where unemployed French women 'sought a position'. Suvorin kept independent: he had a nominal editor, Fiodorov, who kept a suitcase packed, ready to spend a few months in prison for any offence Suvorin might commit. He was now becoming a major publisher and the proprietor of most of Russia's railway-station bookstalls.
Suvorin was a complex figure - a man of much wit, but little humour, a supporter of autocracy in his leader articles, an anarchist in his diary. His faults were offset by virtues: the anti-Semitic ravings of New Times were countered by his private fondness for an elderly Jewish lady, his children's music teacher, who lived in the household. The worst Suvorin's enemies said of him was that he feared 'only death and a rival newspaper'. The theatre critic Kugel wrote of him:
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in his fur hat, his fur coat hanging open, carrying a big stick, I almost always saw the figure of Ivan the Terrible… Something foxy in the lower jaw, in the gape, something sharp in the line of his forehead. A Mephistopheles… The secret of his influence and his sharp vision was that, like the greatest political and philosophical geniuses, he deeply understood the bad side of human nature… The way he entertained Chekhov, looked at him, enveloped him with his eyes reminded one somehow of a rich man showing off his new 'kept woman'. Suvorin's first wife, Anna Ivanovna, died in circumstances that won even his enemies' pity. One summer evening in 1873 Suvorin, entirely unsuspecting, was summoned to a hotel room, where he found her dying of a revolver wound inflicted in a suicide pact with her lover. Three years later, Suvorin married another Anna Ivanovna, twenty-two years younger than he: she, though flirtatious, defended her husband like a tigress; he loved her, he declared, third after his newspaper and his theatre. Suvorin suffered one bereavement after another: in 1880 his daughter Aleksandra died and then his infant son Grisha, of diptheria. Two of his sons and a favourite son-in-law would also die before him. He became a lonely insomniac. Suvorin rarely went to bed before his paper came out, and spent hours alone in his office with just a cup of coffee and a chicken breast for sustenance. He strode the streets and cemeteries of Petersburg. After his bereavements began, he retreated to the country, allowing his son Aleksei, 'the Dauphin', to wrest power from him and, eventually, to undo his empire.
Like Anton Chekhov's, Suvorin's love for his many dependants could give way to irritation. Like Anton, Suvorin would long for company when alone, and for solitude when in company. Suvorin had, however, the warmth of the nepotist. Anton Chekhov was not the first alumnus of the Taganrog gimnazia he was to adopt: his legal manager, Aleksei Kolomnin, left Taganrog ten years before Chekhov, and married Suvorin's daughter. Suvorin had taken the entire Kolomnin family under his wing. Now the Chekhovs came under his aegis; Suvorin was to offer employment to
