home, she wrote to Anton, Vania and Misha: 'My heart is torn to pieces, I miss you so much. But I can't say it's torn into three even pieces. One is bigger. (iuess which one of you three is the reason? So you all played the part of the holiday husband excellently.'10 Anton wired back: 'Angel, darling, miss you terribly, come soon… Your lover.'
I he climax of January was Anton's twenty-seventh name-day party 'with Jewgirls, Turkeys and Ianova girls'. His cousin Aleksei Dol-z.henko brought violin and zither. Over the holidays Anton produced only one story with any literary impact or personal input, 'Enemies': a bereaved doctor is tricked into an unnecessary visit and conceives a violent hatred of mankind. Chekhov placed a story in the Moscow weekly The Alarm Clock. Once again Leikin was furious with Chekhov for giving Fragments nothing in December, when new subscribers had to be lured. Before turning up at Anton's name-day party, he wrote: 'You really have stabbed Fragments in the back. Of course, you're not a journalist, you can't fully understand what you have done to me.'1
Chekhov no longer felt dependent on Leikin: he told Uncle Mitro-fan, 'I am now the most fashionable writer.' Leikin tried to rein (Ihckhov in: 'Your last piece in New Times is weak, in general your little pieces [for Leikin] are more successful'. He tried to bind Anton closer, suggesting a tour of the northern lakes or the southern provinces together - a proposal that Chekhov evaded for a decade - promising him a puppy, pestering him with his hypochondria. Leikin was worried about his obesity. Frivolously, Chekhov prescribed two weeks' fasting. Eventually, in May 1888, fed up with Leikin's and Bilibin's hypochondriac missives, he would order: 'Take a French maid, 25-26, and, when you're bored, screw her as hard as you can. That's
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good for the health. And when Bilibin comes, let him screw the maid too.' Leikin, Russia's most prolific humorist, did not understand such quips, but he forgave Anton and raised his fee to 11 kopecks a line.
At the same time Anton's illusions about Suvorin were dented. In New Times Burenin attacked a dying man, the poet Nadson, the darling of radical students, for 'pretending to be bedridden, so as to live at his friends' expense'. Nadson had a fatal haemorrhage: Burenin was called a murderer. At the same time Suvorin staged a coup by selling out 40,000 copies of a ten-volume set of Pushkin's work a few days after the copyright expired. Kicking a dying man and exploiting an expired copyright earned Suvorin both obloquy for opportunism and admiration for acumen. Anton was dismayed. He thought Nadson 'greater than all other living poets together'; he found that Suvorin had not reserved for him a single set of the Pushkin edition Anton had promised to friends and relatives.
Chekhov began to wonder, too, what his new admirers in Petersburg might want from him. On 29 January 1887 Aleksandr told Anton: 'You are expected - they don't know what - but they expect. Some demand big and thick, others serious, yet others real polish, while Grig-orovich is afraid your talent might be changed into petty cash.' Maria Kiseliova was wrestling with New Times for Anton's soul. In early January, revolted by Anton's sensational story 'The Slough' and its heroine, a nymphomaniac Jewish swindler, she wrote: 'I'm personally upset that a writer of your sort, i.e. gifted by God, shows me just 'a dunghill'… I had an unendurable urge to swear at you and your foul editors who don't care that they are ruining your talent.'2 Anton defended at length his right to poke about in dunghills: 'A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must renounce subjectivity in life and know that dunghills play an important part in the landscape and evil passions are as much part of life as good ones.' But Maria Kiseliova had hit her mark. The lubricious, Zolaesque sequence of New Times stories came to an end. In February 1887 Chekhov published little, then began a new direction. One story, 'Verochka', in New Times, met both Kiseliova's and Suvorin's tastes: the hero has come to a country district and is about to leave; Verochka, the girl whose family has looked after him, is quietly but desperately in love with him, but he lacks the emotional energy to respond to her. Their parting and the hero's failure to propose at the traditional encounter in the garden
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M Y II E i I 11 I H S E 1.1'. I» E R are scenes that will recur through Chekhov's work, up to The Cherry Orchard. The sense of futile waste makes 'Verochka' a story we can call archetypically Chekhovian.
Despite all the poetry in 'Verochka', Anton felt his well running dry. He longed to revisit the south, the scenes of his childhood: he had not seen Taganrog since the Loboda wedding in June 1881. Overlooking Anton's misbehaviour then, Uncle Mitrofan and cousin George in Taganrog, and the Kravtsovs, Gavriil and Petia, in their steppes, pressed him to come. A break from his immediate family and his editors would be a search for new material.
To travel Anton needed an advance from Suvorin, and for that he needed to visit Petersburg. His elder brother's cry for help provided a less transparent pretext for the journey. Aleksandr felt a pariah: Suvorin had forbidden him to sign his work for fear of readers confusing two A. Chekhovs. Although he was offering Kolia a refuge from creditors, vice and police in Petersburg, Aleksandr was himself so penniless that he purloined Vania's coat. He then telegraphed to Moscow that he was fatally ill. On 8 March Anton took the night train. From a hotel room on the Nevsky Avenue Anton wrote to the family: Naturally I travelled as tense as could be. I dreamt of coffins, torch-bearers, I fancied typhus, typhoid, doctors etc… Generally, a vile night… My only consolation was my darling precious Anna (I mean Karenina) who kept me busy all the way… Aleksandr is perfectly well. He was depressed, frightened and, imagining he was ill, sent that telegram. Anton's journey achieved its real aim. He and Suvorin talked from nine in the evening to one in the morning: Anton left with an advance of 300 roubles, and then wrote to Franz Schechtel, who would get him a free railway ticket to Taganrog and back. 'Whatever happens, even earthquakes, I'm going, because my nerves can't stand it any more.' He collected fees, but told Masha: 'I'd ask you to spend as little as possible. I don't know when I'm coming. Aleksandr with his depression and tendency to hit the bottle can't be left until his lady recovers…' After cementing his friendship with Suvorin, Anton went to see Grigorovich, diagnosed arterial sclerosis, kissed him and divulged a prognosis of imminent death only to Suvorin. Apart from Alcksandr's household, other things in Petersburg upset Anton. SomeSEPTEMBER 1886-MARCH 1887 one stole his overcoat, so that he froze on the streets. Typhoid was raging: it killed Leikin's porter. By 17 March Anton was back from 'the city of death' in Moscow, determined to leave for the south within the fortnight.
Anton's brothers begged for his attention. Schechtel wrote on 26 March: 'Kolia writes that he's very ill, spitting blood… Shouldn't we get together at his place tonight?' On 29 March Aleksandr appealed again from Petersburg: Anna is in hospital, ward three, Annushka [the servant] in ward 8, typhoid, Kolia [the elder son] is in Oldenburg's clinic, Antosha [the younger son] is being visited daily by a woman doctor. I and my Tanka [the other servant] are the only ones on their feet. Anton had had enough and would not be dragged back to Anna's or Kolia's bedside. On 2 April 1887, swearing his Taganrog cousin Georgi to secrecy, he took the train south. a.5°
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TWKNTY-ONE o Taganrog Revisited April-September 1887 As FRANZ SCHECHTEL became a successful architect, he became more careful with his reputation and his money. He got Anton a third-class single to Taganrog - mean payment for the medical attention he had enjoyed. Anton slept, like his cat, 'boots under nose'. At 5.00 a.m. on the first morning he woke in Oriol, and posted a letter telling the family to obey Vania, as the 'positive man of character'. On the third morning, Easter Saturday, the train reached the sea. Anton, Mitrofan and his clan went to all-night Easter service. Taganrog disillusioned Chekhov; he wrote to Leikin: 60,000 inhabitants do nothing but eat, drink, reproduce and have no other interests. Wherever you go, Easter cakes, eggs, Santurini wine, suckling babies, but no newspapers or books anywhere… The town's location is beautiful in all respects, a splendid climate, masses of fruits of the earth, but the inhabitants are hellishly inert. Everyone is musical, gifted with imagination, highly strung, sensitive, but it's all wasted. There are no patriots, no businessmen, no poets, not even any decent bakers. After six years' increasing gentility in Moscow, Anton found Mitro-fan's house foul. 'The lavatory is in the back and beyond, under the fence,' he told the family. '… There are no spittoons, no decent washstand… the napkins are grey, Irinushka [the servant] is grubby and gross… so you could shoot yourself it's so bad!' He went to see the house where he had spent the last five Taganrog years and reported: 'Selivanov's house is empty and neglected. It's a dreary sight and I wouldn't have it at any price. I'm amazed: how could we live in it?!'
For eight years Anton had not been parted for so long from his mother and sister. He wrote a diary of this sentimental journey and
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posted it in instalments. He saw old teachers - Diakonov, the deputy-head, still 'as thin as a viper', Father Pokrovsky now 'the thunder and lightning' of the church. He asked after girlfriends - a jealous husband kept one away; other girls had eloped with actors. He visited the wives of his Moscow colleagues, Saveliev and Zembulatov; he drank wine with local doctors, now trying to turn the town into a seaside spa. He hid from the police informer Anisim Petrov, who was now a member of Mitrofan's Brotherhood.
