the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor, and the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections. He lives in New York City.
Blaisdell applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Chekhov Becomes Chekhov at the Pegasus Books website.In most Chekhov biographies, Leykin comes off as the crooked editor and publisher that all of us writers have in mind as blocking or exploiting our genius. But however much Chekhov defamed and mocked him, however much we naturally side with our hero and hold in contempt anyone or anything hampering his literary development, Leykin is my favorite supporting character.To my surprise, page 99 is a good page! Not necessarily typical, but good. I have written two narrowly focused biographies, but I can’t say I know how to introduce real people as characters. I don’t know how to bring out their qualities and I have little confidence in my judgments of them. I don’t even know how to fairly judge my heroes, Chekhov and Tolstoy. How can I show their essence? I can’t. I can only give my very limited impressions of people I have never met. Nikolay Leykin is someone I only ever knew the existence of through biographies of Chekhov and Chekhov’s letters. I did read excerpts of Leikin’s letters that are quoted in the notes of the excellent Soviet edition of Chekhov’s Collected Works.
Nineteen years older than Chekhov, Leykin was of peasant stock. As a provincial boy he was apprenticed to a shop owner in St. Petersburg, where he was also enrolled in a school. “He had written, by his own account, more than 20,000 short stories and sketches, and called himself ‘a man of letters’ with great pride,” writes Mikhail Chekhov. According to Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, Leykin’s humorous writings, which the Chekhov brothers had grown up reading, were primarily about Russian merchants and their domestic lives, but the fiction’s “wide popularity with less-literate readers rapidly dwindled at the beginning of the 20th century.”
Leykin had been a literary father to the three eldest Chekhov boys. Mikhail Chekhov, who did not work for him, described him: “He was short, broad-shouldered, lame in one leg, and eccentric.” Because he was unattractive and had a bad leg, Chekhov and Alexander would refer to him as “Quasimodo.”PHOTO {Nikolay Leykin.}
Earlier in their relationship, Chekhov could and did explain the difficulties he had crafting comic stories to size. Though a proud professional, Chekhov always had an artist’s sense of proportion, and he sought space and the allowance for his own discretion about topics. Even at the age of twenty-three, Chekhov had stood up for himself to Leykin....
When I found a collection of Leikin’s comic stories in Russian and tried to read one, I saw that it would not be easy; the language is quick, allusive, and idiomatic. There are no stories by Leykin translated into English, as far as I was able to find. He is known today only because he was Chekhov’s humor-story editor from the time Chekhov was 21 to age 27. Chekhov once teasingly threatened to depict Leykin in a story, and Leykin said he would be flattered by the attempt, but there is no story identified by Chekhov or his acquaintances that points to Leikin. (If there had been, I would have grounded my impressions of Leykin on Chekhov’s fictional depiction.) My presentation of Leykin should be and is, I hope, acknowledged as limited. He was shrewd enough and vulnerable enough to call out Chekhov’s social and literary excuses in 1887, in particular about not writing for Fragments as much as he promised he would (the success of Leikin’s humor magazine had depended through 1886 on Chekhov’s work as “Antosha Chekhonte”). As I regularly point out in the book, Chekhov, financially supporting his parents and younger siblings, could always rely, no matter his immediate squabbles with Leikin, on emergency loans from “Quasimodo.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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