For many years, Chekhov was a prolific contributor to the monarchist, ultrachauvinist Petersburg newspaper Novoye vremya, which Nicholas II read thoroughly every day (they say he had a special copy on vellum made just for him). Chekhov gave them some of his best stories. The publisher of Novoye vremya, the spiritual heir of the Petersburg journalist and publisher Faddei Bulgarin, the owner of the infamous Severnaya pchela, was Alexei Suvorin, who was just as clever and unprincipled as Bulgarin. Suvorin was one of the first to recognize Chekhov’s talent and paid him well. According to Chekhov, when he started working for Novoye vremya, “I felt I was in California.”
Suvorin’s group published several newspapers and magazines, the annual reference book All Petersburg, calendars, and the so-called Cheap Library, which flooded the country with some three hundred titles of Russian and foreign classics. He put out a special series for reading in trains. They and his other publications were sold in Suvorin’s own book stores and hundreds of kiosks in railroad stations. Suvorin was often accused of greed and shameless commercialism, to which he replied with total sincerity, “I worked for Russian education and Russian youth…. I can go to any judgment and die peacefully.”17
A contemporary spoke of Suvorin as a gifted editor who avidly sought new authors: “Like a fisherman, he cast a line with a lure and felt true pleasure when a large fish ended up on his hook.”18 One contributor to Novoye vremya described it as “an obliging chapel where you could pray any way you wanted, as long as it sounded vivid and talented.”19 That at any rate was fair with regard to the newspaper’s theater section, which was considered one of the best in the capital. As for the arts, Novoye vremya hated the decadents and so it readily published articles by the temperamental foe of modernism, Vladimir Stasov, who occupied the ideological pole opposite Suvorin. Once Stasov explained his work in the “reactionary” newspaper this way: “When I need multitudes of the Russian public, who know only Novoye vremya, to read about this or that, I boldly go to Suvorin.”20
Another colorful figure in the world of the press was Solomon Propper, an Austrian citizen who, according to popular legend, appeared in Petersburg with no money and bought the rights for thirteen rubles at auction to publish Birzhevye novosti (Stock Exchange News). It was said that Propper never did learn to speak Russian tolerably, but he certainly mastered the rules of the newspaper game. In a relatively short time he increased the paper’s circulation to ninety thousand. According to one of his workers, “Propper used blackmail: firms that refused to advertise in his newspaper were soon denounced as not creditworthy. He did it cleverly, between the lines. The banks called him a revolver.”21
Soon Propper was buying up estates and houses, received the rank of councillor of commerce, and even became a member of the city duma of Petersburg. But most important, he expanded his publishing business, sending out often as free supplements numerous magazines, including Accessible Fashions, Family Health, Knowledge and Art, and Ogonyok (Little Flame). Ogonyok, founded in 1908, was particularly popular. By 1910 its circulation had reached 150,000, and by 1914 it peaked at 700,000, surpassing all other existing Russian periodicals of the time.
All of Propper’s publications covered culture extensively. There was a popular joke in Petersburg: “What’s the most theatrical newspaper?” “Stock Exchange News.” “And the most stock-oriented newspaper?” “Theater Review.” The latter was published by the financier I. O. Abelson, patron of the young violinist Nathan Milstein.22 Propper took into account that the Russian public devoured news about new books, plays, art, music, and movies, and reports from auctions. To woo and keep readers, the Petersburg mass media tried to inform them about every interesting event in those fields. That’s how the Russian modernists came to their attention.
A pioneer here was the illustrated weekly Niva (Cornfield), founded in 1869 in Petersburg by Adolf Marx, from Prussia. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Niva’s circulation had reached 275,000. Its success came in great part thanks to the magazine’s steady publication of contemporary Russian prose and generous presentations of lithographs of paintings by realist Russian artists. According to a contemporary, Marx “understood a bit of art, and even less of literature.”23 But his enterprising instinct led him to select authors like Leo Tolstoy, whose novel Resurrection premiered in the pages of Niva, and Chekhov.
