snowy winter
night, to talk about the death of his son to his fares, but no one wants to listen and he ends up talking to his horse. Chekhov's ability to set a scene was already masterly. Writing to order for Leikin had honed an inbuilt talent for concision to which he now began to add emotional depth:
Evening twilight. Large flakes of wet snow are circling lazily around the streetlamps, only just lit, and settling in a soft, thin layer on roofs, the backs of horses, shoulders and hats. Iona Potapov the cabbie is all white, like a ghost. He is as hunched up as a living person can be, and is sitting on the box without moving. Even if an entire snowdrift fell on him, he probably would not consider it worth shaking the snow off himself. .. His old mare is also white and motionless. Standing there stock still, with her angular frame and legs straight as sticks, she looks like one of those one-kopeck gingerbread horses close up. She is probably deep in thought. Having been torn away from the plough, from familiar grey scenes, and thrown into this maelstrom of monstrous lights, with its relentless din and people rushing about, it would be impossible not to think . . .20
It was precisely stories like 'Heartache' which had the readers of The Petersburg Newspaper turning eagerly to page three whenever they appeared.
II Messengers from the North
Who could have ever imagined that such a genius would emerge from the latrine?
Letter to Mikhail Chekhov, 25 April 1886
I've just been walking down Nevsky. Everything is full of amazing joie de vivre, and when you look at the pink faces, the uniforms, the carriages and the ladies' bonnets, it feels like there is no sorrow in the world.
Letter to Mitrofan Chekhov, 13 March 1891
Wheels were set in motion after Chekhov returned home from St Petersburg at the end of his first visit in December 1885. Within a matter of weeks, Alexei Suvorin, the proprietor of Russia's biggest newspaper, had sent an envoy to talk to Chekhov about writing for New Times. It was tricky, the envoy explained, because Chekhov had now been to St Petersburg, and, according to his intelligence, had now promised to write for The Petersburg Newspaper twice a week (previously it had only been once a week – on Mondays, the only day of the week that Leikin did not file). Leikin had apparently also offered Chekhov a 600-rouble annual retainer as long as he stopped writing for The Alarm Clock, which was the main Moscow rival to Fragments. The envoy reckoned that negotiation would have been much easier a few weeks earlier, before he had got on that train.21 But he ended up walking in through an open door. Chekhov was thrilled to be asked to write for New Times.
Like Leikin, Suvorin was much older than Chekhov, twenty-six years older to be precise (and with a son two years older than Chekhov). Suvorin was also a writer, whose voluminous legacy, like Leikin's, has similarly been consigned to oblivion. But he was considerably more interesting. As with so many of the people who came to prominence in Russian life in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Suvorin was a self-made man. His father had been a peasant conscript, promoted to captain for his valour in 1812, and his mother was the daughter of a priest. After spending several years as a school teacher in the provinces, during which time he started contributing to comic journals and the national press, he was invited to begin a full-time journalistic career in Moscow, working for a daily newspaper and also writing for all the most prestigious journals. A few years later he moved to St Petersburg, and while Chekhov was growing up in Taganrog, Suvorin slowly built up his empire. Finally, in 1876, he became the owner of the bankrupt New Times, a daily which had been founded in 1862. Suvorin turned it around, and for the next few decades it was the most important newspaper in Russia, with a circulation of up to 70,000 in its heyday. Back in the 1860s Suvorin had been a liberal: a novel he published was considered so inflammatory it was pulped by state order, and he was arrested for publishing an article on the radical critic Chernyshevsky. A decade later his politics had changed, and New Times under his ownership developed an increasingly unsavoury reputation for its
support of the regime: it is indicative that when Suvorin died in 1912, Nicholas II sent a wreath to his funeral.22 As well as owning the press which printed the newspaper, Suvorin also eventually acquired his own publishing house (which pioneered cheap pocket editions), bookshops across the country in all the major cities and at railway stations, a historical journal and a theatre.
Just over a month after reaching an agreement to write for New Times, Chekhov submitted his first story, signing it, as usual, with his Antosha Chekhonte pseudonym. When the readers of New Times opened their copies of the Saturday supplement edition on 15 February 1886, however, it was Chekhov's real name that they saw printed on the page. Although Chekhov had nurtured hopes of keeping his real name for all the medical articles he was planning to publish (and never did because he became too famous as a writer), he had acquiesced to Suvorin, who was adamant that the pseudonym now be dropped. There was all the difference in the world in having Suvorin as an editor, as the first letter Chekhov wrote to him makes clear:
Dear Alexei Sergeevich,
I received your letter. Thank you for the flattering remarks about my work and for publishing my story so quickly. You can judge for yourself how refreshing and even inspiring for my writing it has been to have the kind of attention from such an experienced and talented person as yourself. ..
I share your opinion about the ending of my story and thank you for your useful suggestions. I've been writing for six years, but you are the first person who has bothered to provide suggestions and the reasons for them.
The A. Chekhonte pseudonym probably is strange and a bit recherche. But it was thought up in the misty dawn of my youth, I have grown used to it, and so I don't notice its strangeness . . .23
'The Requiem', Chekhov's first story for New Times was a pearl: Andrey Andreyich, a simple-minded but devout rural shopkeeper has stayed behind in church in order to ask the priest to serve a requiem in memory of his beloved daughter Maria, recently deceased. During the service, he had sent up a petition to the altar, and now cannot understand why Father Grigory should berate him for appealing 'for
eternal rest for God's servant, the whore Maria'. It turns out that Maria had, in fact, become a famous actress, who was even written about in the newspapers, but Father Grigory in vain tries to persuade her father that there is nothing inherently sinful in working in the theatre, that it is not his place to condemn, and quite inappropriate to use such indecent words. As Father Grigory intones the words of the service in the deserted church, Andrey Andreyich cannot quite bring himself to forgive his daughter for prostituting herself to the stage, and the story ends with her troubled soul finding release elsewhere:
A stream of bluish smoke rises from the censer and hangs in the broad, slanting ray of sunlight which crosses the dark and lifeless emptiness of the church. It seems that the soul of the deceased girl is floating alongside the smoke in that ray of sunlight. Twisting like a child's curls, the thin streams of smoke rise up towards the window as if dispelling all the despair and sadness that poor soul contained.24
Leikin would have never let Chekhov get away with this sort of prose. But it was precisely this sort of prose, and the powerful evocation of the night-time storm in 'The Witch', his second story for New Times, which made Dmitry Grigorovich finally dip his pen in ink in St Petersburg a month later and exhort the 26-year-old Chekhov to
