high quality for inclusion. Then came revision of some works, and endless proof-reading.
Chekhov did not form a friendship with his new publisher, as he had with Suvorin, and their correspondence was restricted to business. On 11 June 1899, he met Marx for the first time when he travelled to St Petersburg to discuss how his plays should be published. The weather was vile, and he returned to Moscow the same day after having had his photograph taken. In May 1903, he made his final visit to the capital in order to try to remonstrate with his German jail-keeper. Although he was very sick, he proudly refused the offer of 5,000 roubles to pay for treatment abroad; all he came away with was 66 kilograms of beautifully bound books.83
Born into the family of a German clock maker, the fifth of nine children, Adolf Marx had developed a passion for books from a young age. He had moved from Berlin to St Petersburg when he was twenty-one (the year before Chekhov was born), thinking he would stay for a
couple of years. However, he ended up settling into the 100,000-strong German community in St Petersburg, and remained in the Russian capital for the rest of his life. From lowly beginnings, his achievement was to build up a publishing empire that would transform the reading habits of most of the Russian population, founding both the publishing house of A. F. Marx and a spectacularly popular journal. When he died in Russia in October 1904 at the age of sixty-six, just a few months after Chekhov died in Germany, one obituary proclaimed that his name should be written in gold letters in the history of Russia's enlightenment. Since nearly everyone had at least one of his publications on their shelves at home, the obituarist declared that all Russian people should be sincerely grateful to him.84 At the time of his death, by which time he had been elevated into the hereditary Russian nobility,85 there were about a thousand people employed at his headquarters in Malaya Morskaya Street in downtown Petersburg and at his press a little further out on Izmailovsky Prospekt. Among the many novels published by A. F. Marx was Tolstoy's Resurrection.
Marx obtained permission to publish a journal in 1869, and it became the jewel in his crown. Although the Russian word niva simply implies a field that has been ploughed (with the stress on the first syllable – the opposite of the river Neva which flows through St Petersburg), the journal's name is usually translated as The Cornfield or The Meadow. It was nothing like a traditional Russian 'fat' journal. Modelled on a popular German journal called The Summerhouse {Die Gartenlaube), it had pictures, it came out weekly, and besides literature it included photo journalism, articles on scientific and medical subjects and features on world geography and historical events. The Meadow was also intended as family reading for Russia's burgeoning middle class and the provincial intelligentsia.86 One cannot help but wonder, therefore, what readers made of the novella Chekhov published in its pages in the autumn of 1896, while he was undergoing his ordeal with the The Seagull. It was hardly reassuring reading: an educated young man living in a provincial town falls out with his domineering father over his disdain for middle-class values and goes to live as a labourer, experiencing a failed marriage and the collapse of his Utopian ideals along the way. True to form, Chekhov challenged conventions with 'My Life', a story in which he enters into dialogue with Tolstoy's radical ideas about how people should live. Much to his chagrin, this tale of
dysfunction and social apostasy was subjected to quite severe censorship. By the middle of the 1890s, publishing in a Petersburg journal had become a comparatively rare event for Chekhov, whose main allegiance was now with Moscow journals and newspapers. He did, however, publish one other story in The Meadow - another classic study in provincial unhappiness, written in 1898, entitled 'Ionych'.
Adolf Marx proved expert at marketing The Meadow; its circulation rose from under 10,000 in its first year of publication to over 200,000 by the time Chekhov's story appeared – a figure that was completely unheard of in Russia. The average circulation of most of the monthly literary journals, after all, was under 5,000. What made The Meadow so successful, apart from its low price (only religious journals were cheaper), was the free give-aways which Marx pioneered with special permission from the Ministry of the Interior in 1879. These included pictures, maps, photographs, calendars and, from 1894, the collected works of great Russian writers. To make this last venture economically viable, he merely raised the cost of the journal's annual subscription a little. In return, Russian readers got an incredible bargain, especially when Marx started issuing the collected works of Chekhov in 1903. The publishing house of A. F. Marx had already published a ten-volume edition of Chekhov's writings between 1899 and 1902, with a print-run of 20,000. At a cost of one and a half roubles per volume (or two roubles if you wanted the handsome calico binding), plus postage and packing, you could have books sent to wherever you lived in the empire. But it proved far cheaper simply to subscribe to The Meadow and pay the optional extra rouble for the literary supplement. Because of postal restrictions, the contents of this second edition of Chekhov's collected works were spread over sixteen volumes, beginning with the 20 January 1903 issue of The Meadow. It even included some stories omitted from the first edition for various reasons, so subscribers got an even better deal. No other publisher could have disseminated Chekhov's writings to such a wide audience. Chekhov's collected works were sent to 235,000 subscribers across the country.87
Chapter 10 A DREAM OF MOSCOW
I Part-Time Resident
Chekhov never really settled back into Moscow life after he returned from Siberia in December 1890. Unable to afford the rent, his family had left the house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya soon after he departed for Sakhalin that spring, and he returned to live in the smaller flat they had rented on Malaya Dmitrovka Street instead. Malaya Dmitrovka was located more centrally than the house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya; and Chekhov joked that he had now become an aristocrat and so was obliged to live on an aristocratic street. After the endless open space of Siberia, living conditions seemed very cramped, and he was soon itching to leave again. Misha was now working in the town of Aleksin and had moved out, but Pavel Egorovich had moved in, having retired from his job, and the population of the Malaya Dmitrovka flat was further swelled by the animals Chekhov brought back with him from his travels: mongooses, one of which turned out to be a ferocious palm civet. The animals had predictably caused mayhem in the small flat, jumping up on tables and breaking china; the one that survived was donated a year later to the Moscow Zoo. Chekhov avoided having to spend too much time in the flat by first going on a long trip abroad with Suvorin, and then immediately departing for the family dacha. At the end of the summer, he began a serious search for a house in the countryside outside Moscow and the family moved to Melikhovo the following spring. However, he would later return to stay in the Malaya Dmitrovka area of Moscow when he was based in Yalta.
As soon as Chekhov was no longer living in Moscow, freed from
Chekhov photographed in St Petersburg after meeting Adolf Marx in 1899
worry about rent and the constant need to buy firewood during the cold winter months, he began to enjoy the time he spent there. During the Melikhovo years he only ever made visits to Moscow and preferred to stay at the Grand Moscow Hotel, which was located at the foot of Tverskaya, the city's central thoroughfare, a stone's throw from Red Square. He particularly enjoyed waking up in his favourite room, number five, when the bells were ringing in the churches on feast days. On 6 December 1895 – St Nicholas's Day – he wrote to Suvorin that he had woken up early, lit candles and started working, enjoying what he called the 'raspberry' sound of the bells outside.1 In some respects the visits that Chekhov made during the six years that he was based at Melikhovo were his happiest times in the city: he had no ties or responsibilities now that his home and his main place of work were elsewhere, and so he was free to enjoy the bachelor lifestyle that had been denied him during the earlier years of penury when he had his parents to look after. There were numerous adoring women ready to throw themselves at his feet.
Although Chekhov's literary career had first taken off in St Petersburg, the pendulum swung back to Moscow in the 1890s. Starting with 'Ward No. 6', he began publishing many of his most important stories in the Moscow- based Russian Thought, while shorter stories were siphoned off to the main Moscow newspaper the Russian Gazette. Both had reputations for having a pronounced liberal bias. Chekhov's ability to form an alliance with these
