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The Petersburg Ivanov January-February 1889 IN THE NEW YEAR OF 1889 Suvorin and Chekhov were like twins: they produced each other's plays; they planned to write together The Wood Demon, a country comedy, dividing between themselves the characters and the acts. Suvorin would come to Moscow for Tatiana Repina; then Anton would see Ivanov performed in Petersburg. All Petersburg was gossiping about their relationship. 'Suvorin the Father, Suvorin the Son and Chekhov the Holy Ghost,' they quipped when the two friends appeared with the Dauphin.32 Rumour had it that Suvorin paid Anton 6000 roubles a year; that either the eleven-year-old Nastia Suvorina or Pleshcheev's daughter Elena was to be Anton's bride. No Chekhov brother was yet married, unlike all Anton's doctor friends, and nearly all his acolytes, Bilibin, Shcheglov, Gruzinsky, Ezhov. Anton pleaded poverty. Evreinova's joke at The Northern Herald became a rumour: Chekhov was betrothed to Sibiriakova, a millionaire widow.
Anton prepared for Suvorin's arrival, searching the Moscow hotels for a suite with central heating. He could not shake off his horror at Aleksandr's treatment of Natalia. On 2 January 1889, as he had done with Kolia two years before, he spared his eldest brother nothing: I was driven from you by your horrible, completely unjustified treatment of Natalia and the cook… Constant foul language of the lowest sort, raising your voice, reproaches, rows at lunch and dinner, constant complaints at your hard labour and cursed life - isn't that an expression of coarse tyranny? However pathetic and guilty the woman, however intimate she is with you, you have no right to sit in her presence wim no trousers on, to be drunk in her presence, to use language that not even factory workers use when they see women around… No decent husband or lover would let himself talk coarsely to a woman about pissing, about lavatory paper, to
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make an ironic joke of their relations in bed, to poke about verbally in her sexual organs. This debauches a woman and distances her from God in whom she believes. A man who respects a woman, who is well-bred and loving, will not appear in front of the chambermaid without his trousers, shouting at the top of his voice, 'Katka, bring the piss-pot!'… Between the woman who sleeps on clean sheets and the woman who dosses down on dirty sheets and roars with laughter when her lover farts is the same distance as between a drawing room and a pub… You can't get away with obscenities in front of the children, insulting the servants or spitefully telling Natalia 'Clear off and go to hell! I'm not keeping you.'33 After this salvo, Natalia got the upper hand in her marriage: Aleksandr drank, the flat was sordid and the children unhappy, but he never abused her again. Anton was, in Natalia's eyes, her rescuer.
In a letter that January, Anton told Suvorin he was glad he had not written a novel - perhaps the novel which has been lost - when he still lacked 'a feeling of personal freedom', although, looking back at his life so far, he saw it as a victory: What writers of the gentry had free from birth, we the underclass have to pay for with our youth. Why don't you write the story of a young man, the son of a serf, a former shop boy, chorister, schoolboy and student, brought up on deferring to rank, on kissing priests' hands, submitting to others' ideas, thankful for every crust, thrashed many times, who tormented animals, who loved having dinner with rich relatives, who was quite needlessly hypocritical before God and people, just because he knew he was a nonentity - write about this young man squeezing drop by drop the slave out of himself and waking one fine morning feeling that real human blood, not a slave's, is flowing in his veins. Slave's blood still ran in his brothers' veins. Aleksandr was bonded to Suvorin's New Times, Vania to the inspector of primary schools, Misha, shortly to graduate, to the Tax Inspectorate, Kolia to drink and drugs. Anton alone seemed free.
Anton extended his charity to other derelicts. Despite Palmin's drunken slanders - he had spread rumours to Leikin that Anton was mad and suicidal - Anton rode out to treat him for a cut, and was touched by Palmin's gift of a bottle of Ylang-Ylang perfume. Anton visited the dying Putiata, and discreetly placed an envelope of JANUARY- FEBRUARY l88o banknotes under Putiata's pillow. Putiata was more embarrassed than relieved: 'as a poor man with a family you ought not to have done this.'
On 10 January 1889 Suvorin came to Moscow to watch rehearsals of Tatiana Repina. It had mixed success, but one critic, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was in the next decade to be cofounder of the Moscow Arts Theatre and a close associate of Chekhov, did protest at Suvorin's provocative prejudices: 'Why did the author have to put two Jews as the most antipathetic figures on stage?… Why did the author have to deal so inappropriately with the women's question?' For the time being Suvorin's anti-Semitism and sexual chauvinism did not impair his friendship with Anton. They celebrated Tatiana's day so thoroughly that Anton's hand still shook when, the next day, he wrote to Lily Markova, now Sakharova.34 The following week Suvorin and Chekhov set off together for Petersburg. Chekhov had a contract with the Aleksandrinsky theatre for 10 per cent of the gross from Ivanov, and sold them the rights to The Bear. Ivanov had been passed, after further revision, by the censor for the Imperial Theatres, but the play's defenders were faint-hearted. One Petersburg theatregoer, the playwright Sazonova, records: 'Davydov and Sazonov are both unwilling to act in the play, all its absurdities and inconsistencies are even more striking.'35 Anton spent evenings arguing with Davydov that the new version, where the doctor taunts Ivanov into suicide, was plausible. Despite the difficulties with Ivanov, made worse by the author attending the rehearsals, Anton thought about future plays. He contemplated joint authorship of a farce with Shcheglov: they improvised a plot.36 Suvorin and Anton did the literary rounds: a surreptitious sketch by Repin shows Chekhov bored to tears and Suvorin smouldering with anger at a meeting of the Society of Russian Writers.
Anton went to see Khudekov, the editor of The Petersburg Gazette: Khudekov's wife attracted Anton, but it was Khudekov's sister-in-law who responded. Lidia Avilova, mother of two and writer of children's stories, was infatuated. She had little encouragement - Anton avoided affairs with married women with children - but saw herself as the love of Chekhov's life, encrypted into Chekhov's fiction. Other female company was uncomplicated. Pleshcheev and Shcheglov left Anton free tickets to go out with George Lintvariov to the Prikazchik club:
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MY It E (» I 11 I E '• ' E A. E 1» E E 'If you're going there for 'erotic' purposes, we are superfluous.' With Nastia Suvorina Anton established a joking avuncular relationship.37 Only Grigorovich still hoped to see them married. Anna Suvorina recalled: 'My daughter was interested in anything but famous writers. Anton often told her that he wouldn't mind doing what Grigorovich wanted but on condition 'Nastia, your daddy has to give us a dowry: his publishing firm as my property and his monthly magazine…'' On 31 January 1889 the Petersburg premiere of Ivanov took place. It had, even its enemies admitted, great success. Davydov's obesity expressed Ivanov's moral paralysis. Russia's unhappiest actress, Strepe-tova, put her suffering into Sarra. They brought the house down at the end of Act 3. Strepetova could not stop crying. Anton momentarily felt the cast were 'kith and kin'. Modest Tchaikovsky, Bilibin, and Barantsevich were moved. Many proclaimed the play the equal of Griboedov's or Gogol's dramas. Some had doubts: Shcheglov's diary noted 'drafts blowing across the stage, the author's inexperience and the absence of finish.' Suvorin felt that Ivanov's character never develops, that the women characters were sketchy - allegations which Anton repudiated. Lidia Avilova, however, was watching him intently at the party backstage: Anton kept his word and sent me a ticket to Ivanov… How he stood, strained and awkward, as if he was tied down. And in that glimmer of a smile I sensed a morbid tension, such tiredness and anguish that my arms drooped with helplessness. I had no doubt, despite the noisy success, that Anton was dissatisfied and unhappy. Anton fled to Moscow before the second performance on 3 February. The play had only five performances that season, although every house enthused. More sober evaluations came by post. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, then a playwright, but not yet a director, spoke for posterity on Ivanov: You are die most talented… and I subscribe to this without the slightest feeling of envy, but I shan't consider Ivanov to be among your best work… but to be among the original drafts of beautiful pieces.38 Ivanov brought Anton two new friends. Nemirovich-Danchenko was in ten years to be the interpreter of Chekhov's drama and then a close friend of Anton's wife. The other was Pavel Svobodin, who played
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Ivanov's uncle Shabelsky. Svobodin was bewitched by Anton for the rest of his short life. Svobodin and Anton were two over-worked consumptives, with contradictory streaks of idealism and cynicism. Svobodin believed in Chekhov's genius and, with Suvorin, pushed Anton into finishing his next play, The Wood Demon.
In Moscow Anton tried to help his less fortunate friends Gruzinsky, Ezhov and Barantsevich: he offered to revise their work, he persuaded Suvorin to take them on, but the acolytes felt insecure when they visited the Chekhovs in the winter of 1888-9. Gruzinsky, normally a good-natured man, resented the claims that Kolia, Vania,
