work
The Escape (Побег)
"The Escape"
also: Побег, Pobeg
A story by Alexander Lazarev (Gruzinsky), submitted for publication in Suvorin's "Novoye Vremya" and here the occasion for both Chekhov's explanation of the newspaper's flat per-line fee for young contributors and a stretch of pointed line-edit craft criticism -- a continuity slip where one character is called both Anika and Prokhor, and the advice to make the prose 'juicier, fattier' via the image of a stick run through a smoked whitefish.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Lazarev, 13 March 1890. Moscow. §4 стройте фразу, делайте ее жирнее, сочнее… напоминает ту палку, которою проткнут копченый сижок
One of Chekhov's most vivid pieces of craft advice in this stretch of correspondence: a thin, plain sentence is compared to the stick or skewer run lengthwise through a smoked whitefish (сижок, a small freshwater whitefish sold split and smoked) to hold it stiff for display or transport -- a homely image for prose that has structure but no flesh on it. "Juicier, fattier" (жирнее, сочнее) calls for sentences with more sensory substance and specificity, not more ornament.
- To A. S. Lazarev, 13 March 1890. Moscow. §4 Каждая фраза… должна полежать в мозгу денька два и пожириться в собственном соку
Chekhov extends the same cooking/fattening image into a compositional method: a sentence should "lie in the brain for a couple of days and get basted in its own fat" before being committed to paper, echoing the smoked-whitefish figure just above. He frames the advice as tested on himself, though he admits he does not follow it out of laziness -- consistent with his habitual self-deprecation about his own working methods elsewhere in the letters -- and generalizes it into an observation about the visibly reworked, patched-over manuscripts of "all genuine masters."