To N. A. Leikin, 3 August 1883. Moscow.
H. A. Лейкину, Между 31 июля и 3 августа 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written between 31 July and 3 August 1883 from Moscow, this letter goes again to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor and publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki (“Splinters”). At twenty-three, Chekhov was still turning out captions, filler pieces, and comic advertisements at speed under the pen name Antosha Chekhonte, and this letter opens on a small production mishap: he discovers, to his mock horror, that a set of joke advertisements he had submitted for the paper have appeared garbled – and, worse, appear to be simply lost, since what ran in the current issue isn’t what he sent. He shrugs it off as minor and sends replacements, with instructions to hold them for several months.
The middle of the letter turns social and anecdotal: an account of a visit to the poet Liodor Palmin at his dacha in Bogorodskoye, comic in its inventory of vodka, pickled cucumbers, and whitefish, and in the detail that Palmin’s hospitality (extended even to the ladies present) does nothing to slow his prodigious output across multiple publications. Chekhov then reports a small literary-political tangle: a review he wrote of Leikin’s book Karasi i shchuki (“Carp and Pike”) turns out to be superfluous, since the book has already been widely noticed, and a separate request for space in the magazine Mirskoy tolk has backfired – the editor there, Pushkaryov, took offense at an earlier, anonymous notice Chekhov had written and is venting that irritation on Leikin instead, not knowing who the actual author was.
The letter closes on a note characteristic of these apprentice years: a glance back at “The Tragedian” (an earlier story of his) with the regret, delivered lightly but seriously enough to register, that the format constraints of the comic press had forced him to compress material that could have supported a much longer treatment. It is an early instance of a tension that would recur throughout his career between the demands of quick paying work and the fuller scope his material sometimes wanted.