marry, Anton, for longer than three months, and if you do, leave your wife before she is thirty, for after thirty a woman, even the most selfless, sees her husband primarily as a convenience.'
Suvorin senior, who had over the past year done little more than tinker with his villa and organize the publication of two books of Chekhov's stories, shook off his torpor at the end of September. He spent a day with Anton in Moscow before going to Petersburg to take control. Suvorin confirmed what Anton already knew: the Russian Academy's 1888 prize for literature was half his. Even before 'Steppe' was published, the committee - run by Grigorovich - had ensured the outcome in Anton's favour. The 500 roubles, added to the income from increased sales of Anton's books, In the Twilight of 1887, and, now, Stories, pulled the Chekhovs out of debt. Suvorin came to congratulate him, followed by Anna Suvorina. Visits from the Suvorins were prestigious, but made Anton a target for Moscow's radicals who fell upon any intimate of New Times.
Suvorin found a distraction after his two sons' deaths: he started a theatre. For the next two decades he surrounded himself with pretty actresses and more or less talented playwrights, while New Times slid into the hands of the Dauphin. Now Suvorin had a play of his own to produce in Moscow, Tatiana Repina. Suvorin and Chekhov agreed to produce each other's plays in their respective cities. Chekhov was to see Tatiana Repina through rehearsal at Korsh's theatre, while Suvorin would have Ivanov performed in Petersburg, a crucial debut for Chekhov. Anton overhauled his play again.
Anton's letters to Suvorin became longer, and more frequent; the relationship was closer than ever. On 14 October 1888 he revealed his secret, but pretended that he was not seriously ill: Every winter, autumn, spring and every wet summer's day I cough. But all this frightens me only when I see blood: in blood that flows from your mouth there is something ominous like a red sunset… consumption or any serious lung illness is recognized only by a syndrome and I happen not to have that syndrome; blood sometimes pours from a lung all day, it gushes, the household and patient are horrified and it ends with the patient not dying - more often than not. Only four days before Anton had had another haemorrhage.
Rather than OA Chekhov preferred to discuss sex with Suvorin. He had written a story, 'An Attack', after some pressure, to commemorate Garshin. Chekhov chose a controversial topic: the brothels of Sobolev Lane. The story has a simple 'three friends' plot: three students trawl the brothels; one is so convinced that prostitution is evil that he preaches on the streets. His friends take him to a psychiatrist who tells him it is he, not society, which is sick. The two 'healthy' students resemble Schechtel and Levitan; the rebel resembles Kolia. The narrator sides with the rebel, who is very much in 'the Garshin spirit', pure, ardent and on the verge of insanity. It is the first Chekhov story where we ask if the sane are the real madmen. Anton found his own experience of prostitution as a medical student a cause for ambiguous feelings. To Suvorin he wrote, on n November 1888: 'I talk a lot about prostitution, but decide nothing. Why isn't anything written about prostitution in your paper? It's the most terrible evil.' To Plesh-cheev (whose views were as broad-minded as Kiseliov's) Chekhov wrote the next day in a different tone: 'As a medic I think that I described the mental pain correctly, following all the rules of psychiatry. As for the girls, I used to be a great specialist in that department in days of yore.' To Shcheglov in late December Chekhov showed complete tolerance: 'Why do you so dislike talking about Sobolev Lane? I love people who go there, although I go as rarely as you do. One mustn't disdain life.'
That autumn the disparity between sex in real life and sex in literature irritated Anton. When Suvorin praised Zola's expertise, Chekhov responded angrily: I have seen quite a few wayward women and have sinned many times personally, but I don't believe Zola or that lady who told you, 'Wham-bam, and it's done.' Dissipated people and writers like to make out they are gourmets and fine connoisseurs of fornication; they are daring, decisive, inventive, they have sex 33 different ways, on virtually everything but a knife edge, but all that is just talk, in fact they have sex with their cooks and go to one-rouble brothels… I have never seen a single decent apartment where circumstances
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would allow you to topple a woman dressed in a corset, skirts and a proper dress onto a chest or a divan or the floor and have sex with her without the servants noticing. All these terms for doing it 'standing up', 'sitting down' and so on are nonsense. The easiest way is on a bed, and die other 33 are difficult and feasible only in a hotel room or a shed… If Zola himself had sex on tables, under tables, on fences, in dog kennels, in mail coaches or saw with his own eyes others doing so, then trust his novels, but if he wrote on the basis of rumours and friends' stories, then he was hasty and careless.31 Rather than discuss such matters on paper, the Suvorins invited Anton and Masha to Petersburg. The Dauphin expected Chekhov to come home drunk: 'Let your sister have your rooms, you take the library… the one near the hall. I recommend the divan there. A separate entrance. When you come in at night, try to fall to the left and you'll hit the door.' By early December Anton and Masha were installed at the Suvorins'. Anton talked all night with Pleshcheev, Modest Tchaikovsky, Davydov and George Lintvariov. On 11 December Anton went with Suvorin to the first night of Tatiana Repina. The next day he read his story 'An Attack' to the Literary Society. He avoided public readings, not just out of shyness but because he would lose his voice after only a few minutes: an ominous symptom of OA. Fortunately Davydov took over. Anton tried to explain Ivanov to uncomprehending professionals. In that fortnight in Petersburg the crucial meeting was with the composer Piotr Tchaikovsky: like Levitan and, in the future Rachmaninov and the painter Repin, Tchaikovsky proved that musicians and painters best understood Anton's art.
Anton spent time interceding for others: introducing George Lintvariov to Tchaikovsky ('nice, not at all like a demigod', Anton asserted), persuading editors to pay Maria Kiseliova more for her children's stories. He found no time for Grigorovich, and hurt his feelings. His most traumatic experience was a visit, without Masha, to see Aleksandr. He was not jealous: over the years Natalia Golden's serpentine figure had filled out and now her black tresses were hidden under a headscarf. Nevertheless, although Anton had never protested at his brother's abuse of Anna Sokolnikova, Aleksandr's drunken, obscene bullying of his old love Natashevu outraged him. He left the house after a row and got drunk. Suvorin had to guide him to bed.
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Back in Moscow, Anton, on Aleksei Suvorin's behalf, cast Tatiana Repina at the Maly theatre. He decided that 'actresses are cows who fancy they are goddesses… Machiavellis in skirts'. Suvorin was producing Ivanov at the Aleksandrinsky theatre in Petersburg. Anton became as ruthless as any producer. 'The women are devious. Don't reply to their telegrams and letters, if you get any, without my say-so,' he ordered Suvorin. The stress of fighting theatrical egos made his haemorrhoids painful. He was fighting for Suvorin, and, through Suvorin, fighting Petersburg actors' incomprehension of even the revised version of Ivanov. Anton sent Suvorin medical graphs of Ivanov's depression. He felt he would never win unstinted praise: Petersburg loathed psychological drama.
The prize and the play overshadowed new trends in Chekhov's prose. 'The Attack' was not his only puritanical Tolstoyan indictment of society. In another story, 'The Princess', an ascetic doctor accuses a princess of masking her hypocrisy as charity. A very substantial story 'The Name-Day Party', like Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party', gets at the private falsity which underlies a public celebration; 'The Name-Day Party' ends dramatically, with a thunderstorm to wash away the party and a miscarriage to shock the heroine out of her pretences. All three stories are studies of lies and the way in which physiology reveals the lie. The techniques are Tolstoy's: the author monitors the character's body language and makes the simpleton soothsayer to the sophisticate. Nobody foresaw that Chekhov, after weighing Tolstoyanism, would reject it. The liberal and hedonistic elements in Chekhov's make-up rebelled against Tolstoy's puritanism, just as Chekhov's expressive understatement was ill suited to Tolstoy's lapidary edifying style.
One short article said more than anything else about Chekhov's intentions and aspirations. In October 1888 the explorer of China and Tibet, Nikolai Przhevalsky, now known as the discoverer of Przewalski's horse, died by a remote lake on the border of Kirgizia and China. He died as Tchaikovsky would, sick with homosexual love, after drinking infected water. Chekhov wrote an unsigned obituary for Przhevalsky in New Times, praising his heroism, saying that one Przhevalsky was worth a dozen educational institutions and a hundred good books. Chekhov had not read Przhevalsky's last book in which the explorer recommends exterminating the inhabitants of Mongolia
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M Y 11 It I I 11 I E S E I'. 1.1» E It and Tibet, replacing them with Cossacks, and starting a war with China. What aroused Chekhov's enthusiasm was the image of the lone traveller deserting family and friends, trekking to the ends of the earth to die.
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