merchants. The first flat proved to be so damp that after a few weeks it was exchanged for a much larger flat on the same street, Yakimanka (whose strange-sounding name came from the Church of Saints Joachim and Anna which stood in the area). The Chekhovs' flat was on the ground floor of an old house with columns that stood opposite the baroque Church of St John the Warrior. It was the largest property they had rented in Moscow and Chekhov was able to have his own study with a fireplace. Various musician friends started coming to take part in the Tuesday night soirees that were revived here, some of them paying court to Chekhov's sister Masha at the same time. Chekhov, meanwhile, had begun to acquire literary admirers. One friend who came round one evening when Chekhov had severe stomach ache later recounted an ingenious method that a local chemist had devised for acquiring his autograph. Ivan Babakin, the young village boy Chekhov had taken under his wing at their summer dacha, was dispatched to procure some castor oil capsules from the chemist. When Chekhov opened the box to find two enormous pills, he had laughed. After writing 'I am not a horse' on the box in large letters, he sent Ivan back to the chemist.24 Thus had the chemist acquired his autograph.
After a while, the flat on Yakimanka proved to have its problems too. The upstairs tenant hired his premises out for wedding receptions, funeral wakes and dinners, and it proved to be very noisy. Another move loomed. Rather than pay rent all summer, the family decided to give up the flat when they moved out of town to their dacha the following spring. Earlier that year, Chekhov had started contributing stories to the Petersburg-based Hew Times, Russia's most popular and influential daily newspaper, and the fee he earned gave him unprecedented buying power. After seven years of moving from flat to flat, in the autumn of 1886, he was able to rent a whole house for the first time. It would be the family's first proper home in Moscow and they would stay there for the next four years. Just before they moved,
Chekhov published his first short story under his own name and shortly afterwards received an unsolicited fan letter from Dmitry Grigorovich, a well-known Petersburg figure. Grigorovich thought it was time Chekhov started taking his writing seriously:
I'm convinced that you are destined to write several superb, truly artistic works. You will be committing a grave sin if you do not justify these expectations. But for that what is necessary is respect for talent, which is such a rare gift after all. Give up writing for deadlines. I do not know what your income is, but if it is small, it would be better if you starved, like we starved in our day, and stored up your thoughts for work that is well conceived and thought through, written in happy hours of inner concentration rather than in one sitting. . ,25
Grigorovich's words fell on fertile ground. Deep down Chekhov knew that the stories he was now writing were of artistic worth, but he needed validation from someone in the literary establishment in Petersburg, because no one in his milieu took him seriously. Chekhov immediately wrote Grigorovich a long, effusive letter in reply:
Your letter, my dear, beloved bearer of good tidings, struck me like a bolt of lightning. I almost burst into tears and felt very moved, and now feel as if it has left a deep mark in my soul.. . People close to me have always been scornful of my writing, and do not cease to give me friendly advice not to give up a proper profession for the pen-pushing. I have hundreds of acquaintances in Moscow, including a few dozen who write, and I cannot remember a single one of them who has read me or saw me as an artist.. .2?
The writers at the weekly literary club he attended in Moscow, he explained, would simply laugh in his face if he went and read Grigorovich's letter out to them. No, he had never spent more than a day writing a story, but with his medical practice (which Grigorovich had, of course, no idea about), he never had more than a couple of hours of leisure time late at night to devote to writing. And then, of course, he did not have the energy to work seriously on anything. All hope, he concluded, was therefore on the future. Chekhov's conservative Uncle Mitrofan did not really approve of earning one's living as a writer, so it
was not without some pride that his nephew sent a letter to him in Taganrog to tell him what had happened, employing some forgivable epistolary licence by slightly conflating Grigorovich's first two letters:
There is a major writer in Russia, Dmitry Grigorovich, whose portrait you will find in your copy of Modern Figures. Not long ago, quite out of the blue, and not being acquainted with him, I received a sizeable letter from him. Grigorovich is such a respected and popular personality that you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was! Here are some passages from his letter: 'You have real talent, a talent which places you far above the writers of the new generation … I am over sixty-five, but I have preserved so much love for literature, I follow its progress with such keen interest, and am always so glad to encounter something lively and gifted that, as you can see, I could not restrain myself from extending both my arms to you . .. When you are next in Petersburg, I hope to see you and embrace you, as I now embrace you in absentia.27
Emboldened by Grigorovich's letter, Chekhov now began giving similar avuncular advice to his older brother Alexander, who also had pretensions to a literary career, noting with a bit of a swagger that he was now the writer to watch.28 Motley Tales, his second short story collection, published in May 1886, certainly attracted a lot of attention. Another brother who now received avuncular advice that March was the wayward Nikolai, whose dissolute lifestyle prompted Chekhov to write him an extraordinary letter – extraordinary both because it was very long (the two brothers saw each other on a regular basis, after all), and because of what it said. Chekhov's exhortations to Nikolai actually tell us a great deal about his own sense of moral purpose: civilized people respect human beings as individuals, he admonished Nikolai, enumerating a further seven precepts which clearly followed a plan he had worked out for himself. They have compassion for other people, the list continued, they respect other people's property, they do not tell lies even in the most trivial matters, they do not denigrate themselves in order to provoke the sympathy of others, they are not vain, they value their talent, if they have it, and work at developing their aesthetic sensibility, and they are fastidious in their habits. Bearing in mind the singleness of purpose which was to characterize Chekhov's attitude towards his writing (the nonchalance he affected was a highly effective
smokescreen), it is particularly interesting to note the way he embellished his comments to Nikolai about dedication to one's craft. Civilized people take pride in their talent, he thundered on, sacrificing for it peace of mind, women, wine, and all the bustle and vanity of the world. Chekhov took his own lessons to heart. And in concluding his letter to Nikolai by telling him to 'work unceasingly, day and night, read constantly, study, exercise will-power', stressing that every hour was precious, there was probably more than Grigorovich's wake-up call at work.
Nikolai had tuberculosis. His reaction to having been given this death sentence was to give up. For the last eighteen months, Chekhov had known that he too had contracted this fatal disease, and now fell victim to ominous coughing fits each spring and autumn as the seasons changed. In November 1884 he had completed his first commission for The Petersburg Newspaper: fifteen pieces of daily reportage from a high-profile Moscow fraud trial. Although Chekhov himself had suggested the assignment, he had not anticipated how gruelling it would be to sit in court day after day and then rush home and write 'like one possessed' in order to meet his deadlines. The exhaustion took its toll on his fragile health. Chekhov's main Petersburg editor had for some time been trying to persuade his young protege to make the journey to the capital, where his work was being published to increasing acclaim. After the trial finished, Chekhov was forced to confide in him that he had been spitting blood. It was not tubercular, he emphasized to another correspondent,29 but of course it was. He was unable even to get on with his writing properly, let alone board a train.30 As a doctor, he knew exactly what he was dealing with.
Chekhov's reaction to contracting tuberculosis was the opposite of that of his brother. An early awareness of living on borrowed time spurred him on to industry, not sloth. The letter from Grigorovich helped him to start valuing his artistic gift: if he did not completely sacrifice for it peace of mind, women, wine, and all the bustle and vanity of the world, he nevertheless came close. And this new dedication to his art was not accompanied by the ruthlessness and egocentricity often associated with creative genius, but again by their opposites. Looking ahead to the next eighteen years of his life, Chekhov's activities outside his writing – his work as a doctor, the
