To N. A. Leikin, 27 June 1883. Voskresensk.
H. A. Лейкину, 27 июня 1883 г. Воскресенск.
Headnote
Written on 27 June 1883 from Voskresensk, this letter continues Chekhov’s ongoing negotiation with Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor and publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki (“Splinters”), over who will take charge of the paper’s regular “Moscow notes” column. Chekhov, twenty-three and still a medical student, had agreed in principle to try his hand at it, but the letter shows him hedging hard: he has sent sample notes on trial and is visibly anxious about whether they’ve landed, inviting Leikin to cut anything that doesn’t work and proposing a fallback candidate, the writer Pazukhin, whom he only half-recommends. The trade language – “my goods, the reader’s money,” Leikin as “the expert” who bears the risk – is characteristic of how frankly Chekhov, still early in his career, talked about journalism as a wage-earning trade rather than literature with a capital L.
The letter also carries the miscellany typical of his correspondence with Leikin in these years: a complaint about the sloppy proofreading at a rival humor paper, Strekoza (“The Dragonfly”), news of an unplaced story (“Until the 29th of June”) whose length he can’t quite estimate, and a wary account of an invitation from a new periodical, Novosti Dnya (“News of the Day”), edited by Pyotr Kicheev, formerly of Budilnik (“The Alarm Clock”); the line about a “censored thing” and hiding from readers “behind a red cross” reflects the routine friction of the era’s censorship on the comic press. Chekhov closes, as often, worrying aloud that his letters run too long – a joke that becomes its own small demonstration, since the letter that makes it is one of the longer notes in this stretch of the correspondence.
The postscript’s request for “two words” on the fate of his notes is not idle: at this point Leikin’s verdict determined not just whether a sketch ran, but whether the fee that supported Chekhov’s family that month existed at all.