take his writing more seriously. He had spent months trying to persuade Suvorin to overcome his prejudices and read the stories Chekhov was publishing in The Petersburg Newspaper, and he had finally been vindicated.
Meanwhile, the pages of Motley Tales, Chekhov's second short story collection, were being prepared for printing at the typographers in Petersburg. It was time for him to make his second visit to the capital. He was again beset with financial difficulties, and was again coughing blood – now a regular occurrence, particularly in spring when the snows began to melt. On 25 April 1886, however, he returned to spend another two weeks in St Petersburg. On this occasion, he travelled at his own expense, and took a room in a boarding house near the railway station on Pushkin Street, just off Nevsky Prospekt. After arriving off the overnight train and having a wash – he told his brother Misha in a letter written at the end of his first day – he put on his new trousers, his new coat and his pointed shoes, and set off on a triumphant tour of the city's editorial offices. It was a fifteen-kopeck cab drive, down Nevsky
to Troitsky Lane, where the Fragments editorial team had relocated and which was still Chekhov's first port of call. The pianist Anton Rubinstein, whom, according to some of his friends, Chekhov resembled, would move into an apartment further down the street the following year, and the street now bears his name – Chekhov had been very amused when his brother Alexander named his new-born son Anton in February 1886, quipping in a letter: 'What boldness! You might just as well have called him Shakespeare! After all, there are only two Antons in the world: me and Rubinstein.'25
Suvorin's bookshop, Nevsky Prospekt, St Petersburg
Chekhov received an enthusiastic welcome at the Fragments office, which he used as his mailing address during his stay. The journal's proprietor was not at his desk when he went round to the press next door, so he set off to visit his new friend Ivan Bilibin, who took him for a boat trip on the river and then for lunch at Dominique, a popular restaurant with a billiard room, on Nevsky Prospekt opposite the Kazan Cathedral. But that was not all, he wrote jubilantly to Misha. Next came a visit to The Petersburg Newspaper, and finally an audience with Suvorin himself.26 It made all the difference that Chekhov was no longer being paraded as Leikin's 'discovery'. He and Suvorin immediately saw eye to eye on this occasion, and the relationship they struck up during his visit two years later would, over the years, develop
into what would be for both of them the most important and the closest friendship of their entire lives. Motley Tales was the first and last collection Chekhov published with Fragments. In 1887, New Times became Chekhov's main publisher, issuing nine separate editions of collections and individual stories at a thousand copies each. The first collection, In The Twilight, was reprinted twelve times; when it was reissued in 1891, there were a further eleven reprintings.27
The obvious question of why Chekhov, a man who loathed despotism in all its forms, and whose whole life may be regarded as an implicit – indeed, sometimes explicit – criticism of the Russian government's venal and unjust policies, should have entered into such a longstanding and fruitful relationship with Suvorin and his newspaper is a difficult one to answer. Both were complex individuals, from different generations, with completely different personalities and widely differing incomes. What they had in common was a passion for writing, a high degree of intelligence, a peasant background, Voronezh province (where Suvorin and Chekhov's father grew up) and a large helping of the Orthodox Church. At the beginning, Chekhov needed the money that Suvorin was offering – it was far more than he was getting anywhere else. He later confessed that when he first started writing for New Times, he felt as if he was in California.28 And despite his self-effacing manner, Chekhov was ambitious: whatever its politics, New Times was considerably more prestigious as a place to publish than The Petersburg Newspaper. And it provided him with a greater creative freedom than he had enjoyed elsewhere: the stories he published in The Petersburg Newspaper and the comic journals were noticeably more straightforward. Suvorin's high expectations and keen interest also stimulated Chekhov to produce the best work he could for him, and from New Times it was a much smaller step to the prestigious literary journals than from The Petersburg Newspaper. But he also felt uneasy about contributing to a publication that was held in derision by the liberal intelligentsia, and immediately began to worry that he would be barred from publishing in literary journals as a result.29
Eventually Chekhov found it impossible to reconcile the newspaper's reactionary orientation with his friendship with its proprietor, and the virulently anti-semitic stance it adopted over the Dreyfus case in 1897 caused a rift in their (already cooling) relations that never really healed. But for a good ten years the two men enjoyed
each other's company. They travelled twice to Western Europe together, and met regularly in Petersburg, Moscow, and at Suvorin's luxurious seaside dacha in Feodosia in the Crimea (such a landmark you could buy a postcard with a picture of it). In between their meetings, they corresponded: Chekhov wrote Suvorin 337 letters between 1886 and 1903. He probably received as many in exchange, although none have survived to tell the other side of the story: Suvorin destroyed them all soon after Chekhov's death. (He went specially to Yalta to collect them, giving up his letters from Chekhov in exchange.) Suvorin was the recipient of Chekhov's best letters, the sounding board for his most serious ideas about literature, the theatre, human psychology, Russia. Initially Chekhov may have been rather naive about the implications of publishing with New Times, but he and Suvorin found each other such stimulating company that he could soon no more dispense with the publisher than he could turn his back on the man. There was no one he found as thought-provoking, no one who seemed so well read. As for Suvorin, whose incisive personality can be gauged from the letters to writers who did not predecease him, it was Chekhov's personality which most enchanted him. There was perhaps no other person he loved more outside his own family.
Although he occasionally took a room in a hotel such as the fashionable Angleterre on St Isaac's Square, after 1888 Chekhov usually stayed with Suvorin and his family in their vast apartment on Ertelev Lane, a street renamed Chekhov Street in his honour in 1923. In a fashionable area, right in the heart of the city not far from the Fontanka River, the Suvorin family residence was conveniently close to the printing press, a few minutes' walk down the same street, and the main Suvorin bookshop on Nevsky Prospekt itself. Around the corner were the editorial offices of New Times, on Malaya Italianskaya – a street so called because of the Italian garden whose perimeter it bordered (it was renamed Zhukovsky Street in 1902). For Chekhov there were pluses and minuses to being a house guest. On the plus side were two luxuriously appointed rooms which came with a grand piano, a fireplace, a handsome desk, and Vasily the valet (who was better dressed than Chekhov, and bemused him by going about on tiptoe trying to anticipate his desires). There was also Suvorin's magnificent library of literary and religious works, and portraits on the walls of his favourite writers: Shakespeare, Pushkin, Turgenev and Tolstoy.30 Having to
sustain long conversations with Suvorin's wife and dine en famille, despite the presence of their three dogs, was definitely on the side of the minuses. The Suvorin children thought Chekhov was a genius because he had written a story about a dog who goes off to perform in a circus (Kashtanka), and stared at him continuously throughout dinner, expecting him to say something very clever. What most cramped Chekhov's style, though, was that he had to behave himself: he could hardly roll up drunk at the Suvorins', let alone in female company.31
When he managed to escape after his first long day spent at Ertelev Lane in March 1888 (his hosts did not retire until three in the morning), and could step out into the snowy streets, he headed round the corner to the editorial offices of The Northern Messenger, which had become Petersburg's leading literary journal. The previous month it had published 'The Steppe', his longest story to date, and his first major work, thereby reassuring him that his association with New Times had not barred his route to literary respectability. The Northern Messenger had arisen in 1885 to take the place of National Annals, which had been shut down by the government the previous year, and Chekhov developed a very warm relationship with Alexei Pleshcheyev, his editor there. Publishing a story in one of the so-called 'thick' (literally 'fat') monthly journals was still of huge symbolic significance to any aspiring Russian writer who wished to be taken seriously. There were four main titles in the 1880s, three of them based in
