To N. A. Leikin, 25 June 1883. Moscow.
Н. А. Лейкину, 25 июня 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
In June 1883 Chekhov was twenty-three, still a medical student in Moscow, and already one of the more reliable hands writing short humor for Nikolai Leikin’s Petersburg weekly Oskolki ("Splinters" or "Fragments"), the magazine that would carry the bulk of his early comic work and, not incidentally, pay the bills for a large and financially precarious family. Leikin was not merely an editor to the young Chekhov but a patron and gatekeeper – famously exacting about length, tone, and turnaround – and this letter shows Chekhov managing that relationship with the mixture of deference and self-deprecating candor that marks his early correspondence with older literary men.
The occasion is a new assignment: Leikin has asked Chekhov to take over the "Moscow notes," a column of local miscellany and gossip that Chekhov admits, with characteristic bluntness, had previously been badly done and would barely be missed if it vanished. He is candid about his own unsuitability for the form – he doubts he has the eye for it, calls himself "poor in observation of the present moment" – while at the same time performing exactly the kind of quick, self-mocking comic voice Leikin was paying for: the mock ultimatum ("pfft!"), the invented verb routines, the running joke about becoming "a Podkhalimov" (a fawning toady, from the stock comic type of Russian satire) after failing, not for the first time, to deliver promised stories on schedule.
Two small pieces of literary business surface in passing. The story he mentions finishing and shelving, "Petrov den’" ("St. Peter’s Day"), came out too long for Leikin’s format and was set aside rather than cut to fit – an early instance of Chekhov’s practical, market-driven relationship to his own length and form. And the letter’s closing joke, about turning into a "Podkhalimov," points to the comic persona – deferential, put-upon, endlessly promising and endlessly late – that the young "Antosha Chekhonte" cultivated for his editors even as he was, in fact, delivering with real regularity. The tone throughout is light, but the letter is also a working document: a young professional writer negotiating an assignment, a deadline, and a debt of trust with the man who was making his early career possible.