To N. A. Leikin, 12 January 1883. Moscow.
Н. А. Лейкину, 12 января 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow on 12 January 1883 to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor and publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters" or "Fragments"), for which Chekhov had begun writing the year before under the byline "Antosha Chekhonte." Chekhov was twenty-two, still a medical student, and Oskolki was fast becoming his most important outlet and his most exacting editor’s domain: Leikin ran a tight shop, with firm rules about length, tone, and turnaround, and this letter is Chekhov formally petitioning against one of them.
The letter is a young contributor’s negotiation with his editor, conducted in the polite, faintly formal register Chekhov reserved for professional correspondence rather than the mock-abusive intimacy of his letters to his brother Alexander. Its real business is the 100-line ceiling Leikin imposed on submissions: Chekhov describes, with the wry, self-observing precision that would become his signature, the actual mechanics of writing under that constraint – the compression, the anxious recount of lines, the pieces abandoned rather than sent because they ran long. The request that follows, to raise the limit to 120 lines, is modest and hedged (he promises rarely to use the extra room), but the paragraph that earns it is already the record of a writer discovering that brevity imposed from outside is a different discipline from brevity chosen – a tension that runs through his whole apprenticeship at Oskolki.
"The Only Remedy," offered as an example of a piece cut to the bone and still, in Chekhov’s own judgment, too long, is one of the many Chekhonte-era humoresques whose fate depended on exactly this kind of editorial arithmetic. The postscript turns to a different, sharper grievance: the tsarist censorship then bearing down on Budilnik ("The Alarm Clock"), another Moscow humor magazine Chekhov wrote for, where hundreds of lines were being struck from every issue – a reminder, tucked almost as an aside after the shoptalk about word counts, that the tighter and more dangerous constraint on the Moscow comic press in these years was not an editor’s ruler but the censor’s pen.