averred in a letter to Leikin in May 1884, but since he had to pay 200 roubles to finance the book's publication, on top of supporting his family, paying the rent on the summer dacha, and covering his sister's university fees and so on, he simply did not have the extra hundred roubles he would need to make the trip.10 He was, after all, only making a few kopecks a line for
his stories – rather less than the 9,000-rouble retainer paid to Leikin as the star journalist on the The Petersburg Newspaper.11 In the event, Chekhov need not have worried about being left with remainders: Tales of Melpomene sold out within a year and made a profit, but it received only two small mentions in the St Petersburg press. Leikin issued another invitation to Petersburg later that summer, which Chekhov was again forced to decline, once more lamenting the fact that he had neither enough money, nor a nice aunt who could hand out long-term loans.12 Plans for a trip that winter also came to naught after Chekhov fell ill and began spitting blood.
In the summer of 1885 the need for Chekhov to start making his presence felt in literary circles in the capital became more pressing. People in the writing world wanted to meet Antosha Chekhonte in the flesh! By now, his work was appearing almost exclusively in Petersburg publications, and his continuing failure to visit the capital the following autumn started to become a joke. Petersburg really was not China, Leikin reasoned; it really was time he made the acquaintance of Sergei Khudekov, the editor of The Petersburg Newspaper. T myself know it's not China,' Chekhov replied in October 1885; 'and as you know, I've been feeling the need to make this trip for a long time now, but what am I to do? Thanks to the fact that I live in a large family, I never have a spare ten roubles in my hands, and the trip will cost a minimum of 50 roubles even if I do it as cheaply as possible. Where am I going to get the money from? I wouldn't know how to extract it from my family, and don't even consider that as a possibility anyway.'13
In the end, it was the wealthy Leikin who made the journey possible by taking Chekhov back with him after his next trip to Moscow, paying for his first-class rail fare and putting him up for two weeks at his own expense. Even allowing for his understandable wish to embellish a few details, it is clear from the letter Chekhov wrote to his Uncle Mitrofan back in Taganrog the following spring quite how important his first trip to 'Piter' had been:
After you left us, just before Christmas, a St Petersburg editor came to Moscow and took me back to St Petersburg with him. He took me first class on the express, which must have cost him a fair bit. I was given such a warm reception there that for the next two months my head was still spinning from all the praise. I had a magnificent apartment to stay in, a
pair of horses, fabulous food, free tickets to all the theatres. I have never in my life lived in such luxury as I did in Piter. As well as lavishing praise on me and offering me the utmost degree of hospitality, I was presented with 300 roubles and sent home again first class … It turns out I am much better known in St Petersburg than I am in Moscow.14
Arriving in St Petersburg for the first time in 1885 was certainly a thrilling experience for Chekhov. As one British aristocrat put it earlier in the century, such was the monumental scale of the streets and buildings that carriages were reduced to nutshells and people to insects.15 The dignity and grandeur of granite-clad St Petersburg was everywhere apparent. Having heard people in Moscow constantly complaining about St Petersburg, Chekhov could not help but be awed as he stepped off the overnight train and encountered wide avenues filled with speeding troikas gliding noiselessly over the snow, spacious squares, enormous classical buildings painted in bright colours, imperial ministries, opulent mansions, embassies, and foreign-looking domed cathedrals. Just off Nevsky Prospekt, right in the middle of town, was Nikolaevskaya Street, where the editorial office of Fragments was
originally located, and it was one of Chekhov's first ports of call. A few doors down was the unusual Old Believer Church of St Nicholas the Miracle Worker, which Leikin showed him.16 He was also taken to the Hay Market, the setting for much of Crime and Punishment, and to the Field of Mars to see Leifert's famous puppet show. And on Nevsky Prospekt itself, near the Fontanka River, was Palkin, one of the city's top restaurants. Chekhov was taken to dine among the aspidistras of its ornate high-ceilinged dining room by his new Petersburg acquaintances; he had never been anywhere so smart.
Palkin was something of an institution in St Petersburg, renowned for its traditional Russian cuisine, and popular with Dostoevsky (who lived nearby) and other local luminaries. Several branches had opened since Anisim Palkin founded his first inn in 1785, but the one on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Vladimirsky Avenue was the most famous. When it opened in 1875, its vast premises, in one of the busiest parts of the city, featured a marble staircase leading to the first floor complete with fountain, a winter garden of tropical plants, a pool stuffed with sterlet (small sturgeon), a concert hall, and numerous private dining rooms, all richly furnished. On Sundays in the 1890s, you could even dine to the accompaniment of music from the Preobrazhensky Life Guards band. On Sundays in the 1990s, you could come and play roulette. It is perhaps typical of the unpredictability of Russian business practices that when entrepreneurs decided to open 'an elite casino club' on the site of the former restaurant (which had functioned as a cinema in Soviet times), they decided to resurrect Palkin too. Its cuisine may have made it a fixture for the Russian beau monde,17 but it is unlikely many budding young writers can afford its prices these days.
Chekhov was given a royal reception by Leikin in 1885, but their professional relationship was actually becoming quite fraught. Leikin was a journalist first and foremost, and he wanted material that fitted the template of his journal: stories had to be short and funny, and cranked out without too much deliberation. Chekhov was never going to be a writer in Leikin's mould. He was an elegist as much as a comic, with a poetic temperament, and he found it increasingly difficult to write to order. He found the Moscow reportage particularly irksome. And it was hard having to be funny all the time. And who knows how much impact suddenly starting to cough blood had on Chekhov's frame of mind in 1884? With his limited horizons,
Leikin, meanwhile, was simply unable to appreciate Chekhov's more ambitious, serious stories, which he found inferior. He wanted stories which provided entertainment. To be fair, Fragments was a comic journal. Leikin became increasingly proprietorial when Chekhov began to branch out (which publishing in The Petersburg Newspaper allowed him to do). He then naturally felt somewhat threatened by Chekhov's resulting success in literary circles. But Chekhov never ceased to be grateful to Leikin for helping him at such a seminal point in his career. Despite the cloak-and-dagger operations, which he suspected were going on behind his back in order to keep him in the Fragments stable, he was highly appreciative of Leikin's generous hospitality. Like Chekhov, Leikin had been born into a merchant family, with a father who had gone bankrupt. He had done very well for himself through journalism, and in addition to buying a palatial estate out of town that had belonged to Count Stroganov,18 he had a comfortable apartment on the Petrograd side of St Petersburg, near the Peter and Paul Fortress. Chekhov got on best with Leikin when it came to talking about dogs and fishing, which they were both keen on: Leikin had two vociferous dogs, and he later presented Chekhov with two pairs of puppies.
One of Chekhov's tasks during his visit to Petersburg was to discuss with Leikin the arrangements for his new short story collection: the publisher of Fragments had agreed to publish seventy of Chekhonte's most successful stories, under the title Motley Tales. Another task was to call on the editorial offices of New Times and The Petersburg Newspaper (where he was received like the 'Shah of Persia'), and meet other people in the St Petersburg literary world. The warmth of his reception made him embarrassed that he had not taken his writing more seriously, he wrote afterwards to his brother Alexander; it was difficult getting used to the fact that people were reading his work.19 But the knowledge that he was being read by the literary community in St Petersburg had an immediate effect on his writing. 'Heartache', published in The Petersburg Newspaper a month after his return, is a prime example of a finely crafted early story on a serious theme which would never have passed muster with Leikin. Rarely, for a work by Chekhov, it is actually set in St Petersburg (but more probably inspired by Moscow), and its mixture of sadness and humour was to become his trademark. A grief-stricken cab driver attempts, on a
