collection, In the Twilight, which Suvorin had just published in book form: Questions without answers, answers without questions, stories with no beginning or end, plots with no denouement… Mr Chekhov should turn on his work lamp in his study to light up these half-lit characters and dispel the gloom that conceals their silhouettes and contours. A man whom there were few to praise, worried by debt and by his brothers, Anton fell into gloom.
156
x57
TWKNTYTWO O
Ivanov in Moscow September 1887-Jarmaiy 1888 IN SEPTEMBER 1887 Anton wrote a letter apparently so suicidal that Aleksandr destroyed it, responding: You write that you're alone, have nobody to talk or to write to… I deeply sympathize with all my heart and soul, for I am no happier than you… One thing in your letter I can't understand: lamenting that you hear and read only lies and more lies, petty, but endless. What I can't understand is why you're hurt by it and driven to moral vomiting by an overdose of vileness. Undoubtedly you're a clever decent person, don't you realize that in our age everything lies?… I don't deserve the order of St Anna [his sick and unloved wife, Anna, and a civil service award], but it's hung round my neck and I wear it workdays and holidays. The answer, Aleksandr told his brother, was to move to Petersburg, but Anton now found Petersburg repellent. Suvorin was still in the country, mourning, while the 'Zulus' as Anton dubbed the journalists of New Times, were lambasting Darwin or Nadson. He salved his conscience by fancying that he and his brother counterbalanced the reactionaries. Suvorin saw no conflict, saying: 'Chekhov did not condemn New Times' political programme, but angrily argued with me about Jews… It New Times helped Chekhov to get on his feet, then it is good that New Times existed…''9 Suvorin never doubted that his affection for Anton was reciprocated: 'If Chekhov loved me, he did so for something serious, far more serious than money,' he was to say to Doroshevich. Nevertheless, Suvorin did not always shield Anton from his underlings' attacks, even if he sometimes defended Anton against them: 'Chekhov is a very independent writer and a very independent man… I have facts from his literary life to prove what a straight, good and independent man he is.'20 ()ther Petersburgers irritated Anton. He wrote less for Fragments:
158
SEPTEMBER 1887-JANUARY l888 Leikin and Bilibin bored him, whining about each other - hen-pecked Bilibin's anaemia and anorexia; Leikin's deviousness, obesity and hysterical fits. Babkino, not least Aleksei Kiseliov's sexual frustration, was also becoming tedious.
Anton was short of money too. For 150 roubles he sold the Verner brothers, typographically Moscow's most innovative printers, the rights to fourteen of his comic stories; he was waiting for Suvorin to market a more substantial book. In Russia in the 1880s it was more profitable to write full-length plays: a playwright received two per cent of the gross takings for each act of a play. To be performed in the State theatres, a play had to pass many hurdles. In Moscow there was one reputable private theatre: Korsh's. Lily Markova had acted there, as had Daria Musina-Pushkina, Masha's friend. Chekhov made fun of a 'preposterous' drama at Korsh's theatre. Korsh challenged him: 'Why don't you write a play yourself?' Korsh's actors told Chekhov he would write well: 'You know how to get on people's nerves.'21 Chekhov agreed to write a play, and then join the Russian Society of Dramatists and Operatic Composers.
Chekhov's title, Ivanov, was a clever ploy. Ivanov is a surname as common in Russia as Smith in England, and the play could bring one per cent of the population to see their namesake. Ivanov, a bright intellectual (we are told), spends all four acts of the play in manic depression. The Jewish girl he has married and cut off from family and religion is dying of OA; he falls for the daughter of his creditors. Self-hate overcomes him. For the Korsh theatre Ivanov at least had melodramatic curtain falls: Act 2 ends with the sick wife catching her husband embracing his new love; Act 3 ends with his telling her the doctor's prognosis, and the play ends with the hero's death - by heart attack and later, Chekhov decided, by bullet. Modern audiences are more enthralled by Ivanov's conflicts with the priggish doctor who denounces him and the evil steward who eggs him on - three central male figures suggesting one multiple personality. Chekhov himself saw the play as charting a mental disease, but he was to baffle actors who wanted to know only whether Ivanov is villain or victim? Chekhov bemused them by subtitling the play 'Comedy'.
Ivanov, his 'dramatic miscarriage', was written in ten days. Chekhov shut his study door and upset Nikolai Ezhov by his 'pensive, taciturn, somehow disgruntled' mien. Ezhov was the first outsider to read the
159
MY B KOI IE Its' KEEPER play out: Chekhov listened with detachment. Ezhov praised it to Chekhov's face, but privately reacted 'with amazement, since instead of the expected cheerful comedy in the Chekhov genre I found a gloomy drama crammed with depressing episodes… Ivanov seemed unconvincing.'22 Chekhov was happy: the play was: 'light as a feather, without a single longueur. An unprecedented plot'. Korsh liked it too, and Davydov, who was to play the lead part, kept Chekhov up until three in the morning, enthusing. Twenty years on, he wrote: 'I don't recall any other work captivating me like this. It was as clear as anything that I was seeing a major playwright laying new paths.'23
The first performance on 19 November 1887 launched Chekhov as a dramatist. He had produced something 'big', 'serious', though - as he saw himself - unpolished. Leikin was a mean-spirited and uncalled-for mentor: he slandered Davydov, and told Chekhov to stay away from rehearsals. The first night went awry: Chekhov was aghast. Only Davydov and Glama, who played Sarra, knew their parts, and the minor actors were drunk. Nevertheless the audience applauded and the author took three curtain calls, though the finale with Ivanov's coincidental heart attack at his second wedding bewildered them. For the second performance four days later, Chekhov tinkered with this act. Piotr Kicheev, the literally murderous editor who had never forgiven Anton for deserting The Dragonfly, went for the jugular: 'deeply immoral, cynical rubbish… the author is a pathetic slanderer of the ideals of his time. [Ivanov is] not a hero of the times we live in, but just an outright blackguard, trampling on all laws, God's and man's.' Surrounded by beer bottles and duck dung, Palmin wrote to Leikin: 'In all the scenes there is nothing comic and nothing dramatic, just horrible, disgusting cynical filth, which creates a revolting impression.'
Ivanov had one more performance in Korsh's theatre. Critics praised it only enough to ensure that the play toured the provinces. For 400 roubles Chekhov endured embarrassment which coloured his attitude to the theatre. Disapproval incited in him a love-hate relationship with drama; he would respond with plays that were time bombs for stage conventions and poison for actors. The more he was lectured on conventions, the more he would flout them. In the failure of Ivanov lie the seeds of the success of Uncle Vania.
Chekhov was to flee the city after almost every new production of his plays. Four days after the third performance of Ivanov, he went
SEPTEMBER 1887-JANUARY 1888
to Petersburg. He brought Ivanov for Suvorin to read. This time, however, he slummed with Aleksandr and his family, all recuperating from typhoid. Aleksandr's life outdid Ivanov's: Anna, facing death, missing her eldest son and her daughter, was jealous of Aleksandr, who thought only of sexual frustration. Aleksandr's household, despite two servants and the salary that Suvorin paid him, was sunk in filth and poverty; the two infant boys were retarded, locked in a world of their own. Anton wrote home, as his own high-minded character in Ivanov, Dr Lvov, might have written: 'Anna is ill (tuberculosis). Filth, stench, weeping, lying; stay a week with Aleksandr and you'll go crazy and get as filthy as a floor-rag.'
After three days he left for the Leikins, to wash, sleep and relax. From Leikin he moved to the Hotel Moskva. Living in luxury among strangers, he could make women friends, but he was also freer to make new men friends. In St Petersburg he acquired two more lifelong acolytes, as he had previously acquired Ezhov and Gruzinsky. One was Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov, the grandson of an army general, who wrote as Shcheglov ('Goldfinch'), following the fable by Krylov: 'Better to sing well as a little goldfinch, Than badly as a nightingale.' The other was Kazimir Barantsevich, a ticket inspector on Petersburg's trams, who had six children and spent his nights writing. Pathologically modest, Barantsevich had no mirrors in his house. He wrote about heroes with lives even grimmer than his own: but for Chekhov, he would never have left Petersburg.
Bilibin, Shcheglov and Barantsevich in Petersburg, Gruzinsky and Ezhov in Moscow, were not just friends and admirers; they were horrible warnings of the price of failure for a Russian intellectual. Trapped by bad luck, poverty or mediocrity into being part-time writers, they seemed to Anton like animals in a menagerie. As Vagner, a zoologist, would tell Anton, they saw Chekhov as the elephant in the zoo. Their admiration became envy only when the elephant broke out of the zoo. The other animals stayed caged, dispirited, cannibalistic. It was Suvorin, the kindly keeper who fed and doctored the menagerie, who singled out Anton for release, raising his payments from 12
