A young man dreams of dedicating himself to literature, writes constantly to his father about it, finally gives up his job, goes to Petersburg and dedicates himself to literature – he becomes a censor.
Notebook No. 1
Thank you for the invitation to Petersburg. I would love to come and visit you, but. . . all I have in my pocket are conductors' and policemen's whistles . . . !
Letter to N. Leikin, 11 August 1884
Chekhov spent three days visiting St Petersburg during the last six years of his life, when he was based in Yalta. He had always been more closely tied to Moscow, and if the association was made indelible by repeated expressions of nostalgia in letters sent from his Crimean exile, it was set in stone with the plaintive refrain of 'To Moscow!' in his play Three Sisters, whose main characters gave voice to his own yearnings. Olga Knipper, who played the first-ever Masha, a role specially created for her, simply assumed that Chekhov did not care for St Petersburg. Immediately after the premiere of Three Sisters in January 1901, the Moscow Art Theatre went on tour to St Petersburg for the first time, taking their Chekhov productions with them. When Olga was not on stage or attending parties, she enjoyed going for walks along the embankment of the frozen Neva River, wrapped up in furs. She liked the physical appearance of St Petersburg, she wrote to Chekhov in Yalta, particularly its wide pavements and the European lustre that everything in the city seemed to possess, but she did not think that he shared her
Nikolaevsky Station, Moscow, where Chekhov boarded trains for St Petersburg
enthusiasms.1 'You write that I don't like Petersburg. Who told you that?' Chekhov wrote back. 'I do love Petersburg, I have a distinct weakness for the place. And I have so many memories bound up with the city!'2 Those memories stretched back fifteen years, to the start of his literary career, and telling Olga in that same letter that he had just been reading about the assassination attempt on Pobedonostsev probably triggered the earliest of them.
There were distinct reasons why the assassination attempt on the Procurator of the Holy Synod and chief adviser to Alexander III might have made Chekhov think back to the first visit he made to St Petersburg in 1885, shortly before his twenty-sixth birthday. He had arrived back in Moscow just before Christmas that year, full of excitement and bursting to tell his family about the new acquaintances he had made during his two-week stay in the capital. And he was still reeling from the unexpectedly warm reception he had received there as a talented new writer. Chekhov's pious father, however, who had never been to St Petersburg, was more interested in hearing about the Senate and the Holy Synod. These government departments were located in two mammoth buildings and were connected by an arch. They looked out over the most famous
monument in the city, the statue of the Bronze Horseman, down by the Neva. Chekhov's father was angry that his son had not paid a visit.3 But Pobedonostsev (his name in Russian comes from the word for 'victor') was the last person Chekhov would have wanted to call on, not least because he had just experienced the first real shock of having his work censored, following a 'pogrom' on the journal to which he contributed.4 Far less impressed by authority figures than his conservative father, Chekhov studiously avoided the world of Russian officialdom throughout his life.
Konstantin Pobedonostsev wielded great power over Russian cultural life at the end of the nineteenth century. No one fitted the description of the 'Tsar's Eye' (the nickname given to those holding the post of Procurator) better than he did. A staunch defender of autocracy and an implacable opponent of reform, the bespectacled and sour-looking Pobedonostsev determined the course of Russia's domestic policy under Alexander III, and was thus largely responsible for the atmosphere of gloom and paranoia which Chekhov evokes to such chilling and satirical effect in his mature stories. (One literary critic later claimed that Pobedonostsev was the first Russian bureaucrat to develop a complete theory of stagnation.) The repressive measures he advocated after the assassination of Alexander II were so unpopular in educated circles that they won him the additional nickname of 'The Grand Inquisitor'. (Dostoevsky, who had consulted him on the writing of The Brothers Karamazov, was one of this dour man's few close friends.) As the lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church – a civil appointment made by the Tsar – Pobedonostsev had licence to intervene in questions of censorship as well as in matters of national education and religious freedom, and his edicts cast a pall over Russian literary life. The stagnant short-story years of the 1880s and 1890s provide a striking contrast to the preceding decades under Alexander II, a dynamic era of enormous, soul-searching novels and public debate. Morale was undermined when Dostoevsky and Turgenev died in quick succession in the early 1880s, and Tolstoy placed his fiction writing second to the preaching of moral ideas. It was further eroded when Russia's most distinguished literary journal, Notes of the Fatherland (or National Annals), was closed down because of its allegiance to 'dangerous' (i.e. Populist) political ideas. The journal had been a mouthpiece of liberal thought for forty-five years.
It was not the best time to be a writer. But this was precisely when Chekhov appeared on the scene. Pobedonostsev's tenure as Procurator of the Holy Synod, in fact, spanned the entire length of Chekhov's writing career, beginning in 1880 (the year the young medical student made his literary debut), and ending with his resignation in 1905, the year after Chekhov's death. Pobedonostsev came to see Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899,5 but was not known to have been one of the playwright's admirers. Like all Russian writers, Chekhov had to endure the humiliation of submitting every work he wrote to the censor, and then complying with whatever demands it made for excisions and alterations. This had as deleterious effect on his sense of self-worth as an artist as on all his other colleagues in the Russian literary fraternity. The assassination attempt on Pobedonostsev in 1901 took place just weeks after the Procurator had finally succeeded in engineering the excommunication of Tolstoy from the Russian Orthodox Church, after years of trying to silence his voice of moral protest. It was an event greeted with widespread derision by the intelligentsia, since it only served to increase the authority of the 73-year-old writer, who had anyway not changed his hostile stance towards the Church for over two decades. The standing of the fatally compromised Church, by contrast, sank even lower.
St Petersburg may have been the seat of government in Russia, a city teeming with soldiers and uniformed officials, but it was also the country's literary capital, and no provincial writer with aspirations could afford to ignore it for long. Chekhov's entire literary career in fact was entwined with St Petersburg, beginning with the very first two pieces he published in 1880 in the comic journal The Dragonfly. With the second of these, 'What Do You Come Across Most Often in Novels, Short Stories Etc.?', Chekhov showed that he was a sophisticated reader, and had got the measure of the techniques of successful literary construction. Although he later borrowed from the canon when it suited him, his ironic compendium of typical characters and devices also indicates his intention not to follow the cliched path himself. What you most often came across in novels, short stories etc., then, according to Chekhov was:
A count, a countess bearing traces of her former beauty, a neighbour who is a baron, a liberal-minded writer, an impoverished nobleman, a foreign
musician, obtuse servants, nannies, governesses, a German manager, a squire, an heir from America. People who are ugly, but likeable and attractive. A hero who saves the heroine from a horse which has bolted, strong- spirited, and capable of showing the power of his fists at any given opportunity.
Unscalable heights, impenetrable, unembraceable, incomprehensible distant spots on the horizon, in other words – nature!!!
