for your botched journey abroad and the only reason I forgave your bad manners. I how furious I was with you!'4 Anna, unlike Suvorin, was amused to see her family in the play.
In November 1889 The Northern Herald saved itself from extinction by printing Chekhov's 'A Dreary Story'. The work made a tremendous impact. Chekhov had found a voice and a viewpoint in his disillusioned professor of medicine: the existentialism of a man dying in a world from which he is totally alienated seemed a generation ahead of Tolstoy. The Petersburg Professor of Medicine, Botkin, died of liver cancer that winter, and Chekhov's work seemed prophetic. Even Leikin conceded: 'Charming. It is your best piece.' Anton proudly inscribed a copy to the playwright Prince Sumbatov: From a successful author who's Managed to combine and fuse A soul at peace, a mind on fire, The enema tube and poet's lyre. The Wood Demon was, however, to be widely deplored. All autumn Pavel Svobodin pestered Anton to complete it by the end of October for his benefit performance in Petersburg. His letters to Anton that autumn are frantic: I'm superstitious and afraid of November every year, that's the month for disasters in my life (I was married on 12 November 1873) and therefore… in November - it's better to have no play at all…
I hope you were lying when you said you'd thrown two acts of The Wood Demon into the Psiol… God forbid!!!
We really have to spend two weeks living together, or at least see each other every day - and the Wood Demon would sprout. You would go fully armed after him into the forest and I would part the thorny branches in your path, clear the trail and the two of us would
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ANNf I '. Ill I'i II KINASE find him and drag him out.., lor the.sake of God who created the Psiol, write, Antoine! Svobodin set his benefit night for 31 October. In mid October Svo-bodin took a train to Moscow, grabbed the script and went back; his family copied out the play to submit to the Theatrical-Literary Committee of the Aleksandrinsky Theatre.
On 9 October Svobodin read the play to the committee, which included one man disillusioned with Anton, Grigorovich. The committee rejected The Wood Demon, not simply because Grigorovich was hostile. They were unhappy on many counts: a university professor was vilified, in a country where professors had the rank of general (within living memory a student had been flogged to death for assaulting a Moscow professor). They also wanted a 'safe' play, for the heir to the throne was to attend Svobodin's benefit performance, and The Wood Demon was unorthodox, undramatic, and obscure.
Svobodin cancelled his benefit night, telling the editor Vukol Lav-rov that The Wood Demon might be 'boring, drawn-out, strange', but was worth double the hackneyed vulgarities the Aleksandrinsky audiences preferred.5 He begged Anton: Dear friend, go to your 2 2-rouble wash-stand, have a wash and a think, couldn't something be done with The Wood Demon so that it appeals not just to me and Suvorin… but to those who advised you to burn it? Svobodin dared to be frank. Suvorin's comments are not on record. The actor Lensky was brutal: I'll say one thing: write stories. Your attitude to the stage and to dramatic form is too contemptuous, you respect them too little to write drama… Pleshcheev, the following spring, delivered judgement: This is the first piece by you that has left no impression on me… As for Voinitsky, strike me dead, I can't understand why he shot himself. Anton felt he might as well take 500 roubles advance from the Abramova troupe in Moscow. They hurriedly rehearsed. The male actors did not know their parts, the women couldn't act. At the premi210
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ere on 27 November 1889 the audience booed. A claque from Korsh's theatre wolf-whistled to punish the breakaway author and actors. The reviewers were scathing: 'boring', 'pointless', 'clumsily constructed'. Chekhov withdrew his play and refused to print it, though no lithographed copies were circulating in the provinces. Seven years would pass before, by a mixture of alchemy and surgery, he transmuted The Wood Demon into Uncle Vania.
Anton had expected to live for three to four months off The Wood Demon, and was now in financial straits. He had only one other publication of any significance that autumn: 'Ordinary People', later the first half of'The Literature Teacher'. A schoolteacher in a dead provincial town, seduced by the prospects of wealth, decides to marry one of his ex-pupils. Allusions to real figures link the story to Chekhov's stay with the Suvorins and their children in the Crimea in summer 1888, and to the offer of little Nastia as a bride: the story is a coded 'no, thanks' to Suvorin6 (who without comment printed it in New Times). The Northern Herald took time to pay for 'A Dreary Story'. The sales of three books of stories, constantly reissued by Suvorin, and the 'pension' from lvanov and the farces Anton had written, kept the Chekhovs solvent.
Family life seemed to settle: Aleksandr in Petersburg was married and sober; Vania lived in his schoolhouse with Pavel; Misha was with the Suvorins in Petersburg and soon to leave home. Aunt Fenichka was meekly dying. Of Kolia only debts remained: his paintings vanished into his creditors' hands. Anton and his brothers agreed to pay off the monetary debts. There were other liabilities: Anna Ipatieva-Golden, as Kolia's common-law widow, wrote on 30 November 1889: There's not a soul in Moscow I could turn to, I can't ask my family, they're all (except for Natasha) virtually dying of hunger. The fact is I am stuck even now in the country at Razumovskoe with no firewood, no fur coat and so I appeal to you, for Christ's sake, send me 15 roubles.7 Anton gave her money, and asked Suvorin to give her work. The Suvorins, however, demanded a hefty deposit from those employed in their bookshops: Anna was unemployable. After another hand-out she resumed her old job as companion to unmarried mothers and
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ANNEES OK I'l I I KINAGE landlady to students. Anna's gratitude was effusive: 'I wept with gratitude, that is from feeling your kindness to the point of tears. And I'd never thought you were like that.'
Anton began an affair with Kleopatra Karatygina. He took her, at her request, to see Les Huguenots, and prescribed her laxatives. Never did he bring her home or mention her. He also saw Glafira Panova, sometimes at the same address and time as Karatygina. She was clearly in his mind when he wrote to his editor, Evreinova, at The Northern Herald and mused about settling down 'with a nice little actress', or to Suvorin, for whom he drew Glafira's foot: 'I have known actresses who used to be ballerinas. Yesterday, before a stag night, I visited one such actress. She now despises ballet and looks down on it, but she can't get rid of her ballet body movements.'
Writing to Elena Lintvariova, Anton laughed at commitment: he signed himself 'A. Panov', to make fun of the rumours that he was to marry Glafira Panova. Kleopatra had agreed to humiliating conditions from her 'hellishly elegant writer': she was not to talk about the relationship in case Anton's mother and sister found out. Glafira had more pride, Kleopatra wrote: Glafira is with me… She asks me to tell you that if you grudge 20 kopecks, she takes on the travel costs… everything she would like to throw at our bosses will be thrown at you. Although, as she says, you will get what you deserve. In a word, you are going to be bawled out, she doesn't care that you're a fashionable writer and hellishly elegant. So if you wish to make up for your negligence towards her come and fetch me (if you're not embarrassed to drive down the street with an actress nobody wants)… You are ordered to come on Monday from 12 to 2. You are to have your hair curled and to put on a pink tie. Glafira left for Petersburg. Karatygina followed, clutching letters of recommendation and a copy of 'A Dreary Story' (a work she loathed for its portrayal of acting as moral perdition) inscribed 'For the famous actress K. K.'s bloody nerves, from her doctor'. About this time Anton confided in Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he had seduced a married woman and found her to be a virgin. (He also told the playwright that none of his affairs had lasted more than a year.)8 Anton hated being a 'fashionable writer': when an admirer in a
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restaurant started to recite a page by heart, he hissed at his companion, 'Take her away, I have a knuckle- duster in my pocket.' He felt ill all autumn: he told Dr Obolonsky that he had 'flu, Mesopotamian plague, sap, hydrophobia, impotence and all sorts of typhoids'. At his desk Anton was as paralysed as his professor of medicine. Instead of picking up the discarded novel, he encouraged Suvorin to send him unsolicited manuscripts to sift. Some of the beneficiaries were the young men and women who had accosted him in the Crimea. Ilia Gurliand had his story of a civil servant 'Gorshkov' polished and published. Anton took Elena Shavrova's next story, 'The Chorus Girl', about a girl seduced and abandoned by an actor who has another mistress. Anton recognized the protagonists. He told Suvorin: I've made the middle of'The Chorus Girl' the beginning, the beginning the middle, and I've put on a totally new ending. When the girl reads it she'll be horrified. And mummy will give her a thrashing for an immoral ending… The girl is trying to portray an operetta troupe that was singing this summer in Yalta… I used to know chorus girls. I remember a 19-year-old whom I treated and who flirted splendidly with her legs. For the first time I
