got a good look at Mishka’s face, he could tell that this was impossible. Something of significance had clearly occurred. So, instead of sending him on his way, the Count led him back up to his study where, having taken a seat, Mishka turned his hat in his hands.
“Weren’t you scheduled to arrive in Moscow tomorrow?” the Count ventured after a brief silence.
“Yes,” said Mishka with a careless wave of his hat. “But I came a day early at Shalamov’s request. . . .”
An acquaintance from their university days, Viktor Shalamov was now the senior editor at Goslitizdat. It was his idea to have Mishka edit their forthcoming volumes of Anton Chekhov’s collected letters—a project that Mishka had been slaving over since 1934.
“Ah,” said the Count brightly. “You must be nearly done.”
“Nearly done,” Mishka repeated with a laugh. “You’re quite right, Sasha. I am nearly done. In fact, all that remains is to remove a word.”
Here is what had unfolded:
Early that morning, Mikhail Mindich had arrived in Moscow on the overnight train from Leningrad. With the galleys on their way to the printer, Shalamov had said he wanted to take Mishka to the Central House of Writers for a celebratory lunch. But when Mishka arrived in the publisher’s reception room shortly before one o’clock, Shalamov asked him to come back to his office.
Once they were settled, Shalamov congratulated Mishka on a job well done. Then he patted the galleys that, as it turned out, were not on their way to the printer, but were lying right there on the editor’s desk.
Yes, it was a job of nuance and erudition, Shalamov said. A paragon of scholarship. But there was one small matter that needed to be addressed before printing. It was an elision in the letter of the sixth of June 1904.
Mishka knew the letter well. It was the bittersweet missive written by Chekhov to his sister, Maria, in which he predicts his full recovery just a few weeks before his death. During typesetting, a word must have been dropped—which just shows that no matter how many times you review a galley, you will never catch every flaw.
“Let’s see to it,” said Mishka.
“Here,” said Shalamov, rotating the galley so that Mishka could review the letter for himself.
Berlin,
June 6, 1904
Dear Masha,
I am writing you from Berlin. I’ve been here a whole day now. It turned very cold in Moscow and even snowed after you left; the bad weather must have given me a cold, I began having rheumatic pains in my arms and legs, I couldn’t sleep at night, lost a great deal of weight, had morphine injections, took thousands of different kinds of medicine, and recall with gratitude only the heroin Altschuller once prescribed for me. Nonetheless, toward departure time I began to recover my strength. My appetite returned, I began giving myself arsenic injections, and so on and so forth, and finally on Thursday I left the country very thin, with very thin, emaciated legs. I had a fine, pleasant trip. Here in Berlin, we’ve taken a comfortable room in the best hotel. I am very much enjoying the life here and haven’t eaten so well and with such an appetite in a long time. The bread here is amazing, I’ve been stuffing myself with it, the coffee is excellent, and the dinners are beyond words. People who have never been abroad don’t know how good bread can be. There’s no decent tea (we have our own kind) and none of our hors d’oeuvres, but everything else is superb, even though it’s cheaper here than in Russia. I’ve already put on weight, and today, despite the chill in the air, I even took the long ride to the Tiergarten. And so you can tell Mother and anyone else who’s interested that I’m on my way to recovery or even that I’ve already recovered . . . Etc., etc.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
Mishka read the passage once, then read it again while calling up in his mind’s eye an image of the original letter. After four years, he knew most of them by heart. But as hard as he tried, he could not identify the discrepancy.
“What is missing?” he asked, at last.
“Oh,” said Shalamov, in the tone of one who suddenly understands a simple misapprehension between friends. “It is not that something is missing. It is that something must be taken out. Here.”
Shalamov reached across the desk in order to point to the lines in which Chekhov had shared his first impressions of Berlin,