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In 1885 Chekhov's literary career took a conscientious turn upwards. On a visit to St. Petersburg, he had been embarrassed by the acclaim that greeted him, because he recognised that he had been writing sloppily: 'If I had known that that was how they were reading me,' he told his brother Aleksandr (4 January 1886), 'I would not have written like a hack'. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from D. V. Grigorovich, doyen of Russian critics, singling him out as the most promising writer of his time and urging him to take his talent more seriously. Although Antosha Chekhonte continued to appear in print for a few more years, Anton Chekhov made his first bow in the prestigious Petersburg newspaper New Times (Novoe Vremya). Its editor Aleksey Suvorin had risen from peasant origins to become a tycoon and leading influence-monger in the conservative political camp; he and Chekhov were to be closely allied, although their friendship would later founder when Suvorin promoted the anti-Semitic line during the Dreyfus affair.

During the years when he was winning recognition as a short-story writer, Chekov made two further attempts to write for the theatre. With the first, On the High Way (Na bolshoy doroge, 1885), he came up against the obstacle of the censorship, which banned it on the grounds that it was a 'gloomy, squalid play'. The other piece, the monologue On the Harmfulness of Tobacco (O brede tabake) was, like many of his early 'dramatic etudes', written with a specific actor in mind. It appeared in 1886 in a St. Petersburg newspaper, and Chekhov kept revising it, publishing the final version, almost a new work, in his collected writings of 1903. Two farces, Hamlet Prince of Denmark and The Power of Hypnotism (both 1887), never got beyond the planning stage.

Profiting from an advance from Suvorin, Chekhov returned to southern Russia in 1887, a refreshment of the memory that was productive of remarkable work. The stories that followed signalled his emergence as a leading writer of serious fiction. The publication of The Steppe {Step, 1888) took place in The Northern Herald (Severny vestnik), one of those so-called 'fat' journals that had housed the works of Turgenev and Tolstoy, and were instruments of public opinion. That same year, Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize for Literature by the Imperial Academy of Science for his collection In the Gloaming (V sumerkakh). One of the most enthusiastic instigators of this honour had been the writer Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who would later play an impor­tant role in establishing Chekhov's reputation as a drama­tist.

The Northern Herald was liberal in its politics, its editor Aleksey Pleshcheyev having been a prisoner in Siberia with Dostoevsky. Typically, Chekhov was able to be friends with Pleshcheyev and Suvorin simultaneously, and he con­tinued to write for New Times. But this reluctance to identify himself with a party exposed him to much acrimonious criticism from members of both camps, and especially from the progressive left. Katherine Mansfield has pointed out that the 'problem' in literature is an invention of the nineteenth century; one of the legacies of Russian 'civic criticism' of the 1840s was the notion that a writer had both an obligation to depict social problems and to pose a solution, making his works an uplifting tool of enlightenment. This usually meant espousing a doctrinaire political platform. Chekhov, perhaps fortified by his medi­cal training, treasured his objectivity and steadfastly refrained from taking sides, even when his sympathies were easy to ascertain. 'God keep us from generalisations,' he wrote. 'There are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of them are professed by people who have never had any problems'.

Between 1886 and 1890, his letters chew the cud over objectivity and his 'monthly change' of opinions, which readers preferred to see as the views of his leading characters. To his brother Aleksandr (10 May 1886), he insisted that no undue emphasis be placed on political, social or economic questions in writing. The author must be an observer, posing questions, but not supplying the answers, he insisted to Suvorin (27 October 1888); it is the reader who brings subjectivity to bear. Not that an author should be cold, but his own involvement in a problem should be unglimpsed by the reader.