Anton Chekhov. A life

Anton Chekhov

A life

By Donald Rayfield

Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois

Copyright 1997

Press paperback edition 2000

For Alia, Galia, Maia and Tolia

PREFACE

Anton once told me, 'In time all my things must see the light of day and I have no reason to be ashamed of them.' Bykov to Maria Chekhova, 7 April 1910 (LN87, 356)

We recognize Anton Chekhov today as a founding father of the modern theatre, where the author, not the actor, is king. We acknowledge him as the author who gave Europe's narrative fiction a new ambiguity, density and subtle poetry. Of all the Russian 'classics' he is, to non-Russians especially, the most approachable and the least alien, whether on the stage or the printed page. He lets his reader and spectator react as they wish, draw their own conclusions. He imposes no philosophy. Chekhov's approachability is inseparable from his elusiveness. It is very hard to say what he 'meant', when he so rarely judges or expounds. From Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's fiction we can reconstruct a philosophy and a life. From Chekhov's work, and from his many letters, we get only fleeting and contradictory glimpses of his inner world and experience. His many biographers have tried to build out of the evidence a consensual life of a saint - a man who in a life shortened by chronic illness pulled himself from poverty to gentility, became a doctor and tended to the oppressed, won fame as the leading prose-writer and dramatist of his time in Europe, was supported all his life by an adoring sister and, though too late, found happiness in marriage with the actress who interpreted him best.

All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts. This life of Chekhov tries to encompass rather more than has been documented before. The picture of Chekhov is now more complex. If, however, the man that emerges is less of a saint, less in command of his fate than we have hitherto seen him, he is as much a genius and no less admirable. His life should not be seen as an adjunct to his writing: it was a source of experience that fed his fiction. It is, above all, a life enthralling for its own sake. Anton Chekhov suffered the irreconcilable demands of an artist with responsibilities

XV

ANTON Cll IK MOV to his art as well as to his family and friends. His life has many meanings: we read into it the story of a disease, a modern version of the Biblical 'JosePn an«^ his Brothers', or even the tragedy of Don Juan. Chekhov's life could be a novel by Thomas Mann about the unbridgeable gap between being an artist and a citizen. It also exemplifies the predicaments of a sensitive and talented Russian intellectual at the end of the nineteenth century - one of the richest and most contradictory periods in Russia's political and cultural history.

Few writers guarded their privacy from the public eye as assiduously as Chekhov. Yet no writer so carefully preserved and filed every scrap of paper - letters, bills, certificates - connected with him and his family. Nor did his proclaimed 'autobiographophobia' prevent him from sorting out the year's letters into cartons every Christmas.

There are many biographies available - some comprehensive, such as E. J. Simmons's or Ronald Hingley's, some flamboyant, such as Henri Troyat's, some finely judged, such as Mikhail Gromov's or V. S. Pritchett's. Russian or not, they all use the same range of printed sources. Nearly five thousand letters written by Anton Chekhov have been published, but several have been severely bowdlerized. (The import of another fifteen hundred letters, now lost, can be inferred from the replies.) These sources, notably the complete works and letters in thirty-one volumes published in Moscow between 1973 and 1983, have a remarkably full and intelligent scholarly apparatus, all of which provides biographers with an enormous range and quantity of material.

The untapped sources are just as vast. In the archives, principally the Manuscript Department of the Russian State Library (once the Rumiantsev Museum, then the Lenin Library), there are some seven thousand letters addressed to Anton Chekhov. Perhaps half of the letters in the archive have never been referred to in print, primarily letters that reflect Chekhov's private life. Moreover, in various archives (notably the Russian (formerly Central) State Archives for Literature and Art, the theatrical museum archives in Petersburg and Moscow, the Chekhov museums in Taganrog, Melikhovo and Sumy) there is a mass of documentary and pictorial material, letters of contemporaries which shed light on Chekhov's life as a writer and a man. Archival records show that a small circle of Russian scholars have over the last thirty years combed these sources thoroughly, yet their published

PREFACE

work, detailed in the bibliography of this book, uses only a fraction of these sources. A Russian and Soviet tradition of not 'discrediting or vulgarizing' (the phrase comes from a 1968 Central Committee resolution forbidding publication of certain passages) has even today made Russian scholars hesitant about bringing the full range and depth of the Chekhov archives into the public domain. Three years' work systematically searching, transcribing and mulling over the documentation has convinced me that nothing in these archives either discredits or vulgarizes Chekhov. Quite the opposite: the complexity, selflessness and depth of the man become even clearer when we fully account for his human strengths and failings.

Chekhov's life was short, but neither sweet nor simple. He had an extraordinary number of acquaintances and liaisons (though few true friends and lovers). He moved in many orbits - he had dealings with teachers, doctors, tycoons, merchants, peasants, bohemians, hacks, intellectuals, artists, academics, landowners, officials, actresses and actors, priests, monks, with officers, convicts, whores, foreigners and landowners. He got on well with people of every class and condition, except the nobility and court. He lived for virtually all his life with his parents and sister, and much of the time with one or more of his brothers as well, not to mention a network of aunts and cousins. He was restless: he had countless addresses and travelled widely from Hong Kong to Biarritz, from Sakhalin to Odessa. To write a full biography would take a lifetime longer than Chekhov's own. I have concentrated on his relationships with family and friends, but there is a sense in which his life is also a historia morbi. Tuberculosis shapes it and ends it: his efforts to ignore and to cope with disease form the weft of any biography. There are many works in English offering a critical study of his work. If we read about Chekhov, it is primarily because he is a writer of very great importance. Any good bookshop or library offers a number of critical studies to enrich the reader's understanding of Chekhov's work. In this biography, however, his stories and plays are discussed inasmuch as they emerge from his life and as they affect it, but less as material for critical analysis. Biography is not criticism.

Not all the mysteries in Chekhov's life can be solved, and much evidence is missing: Chekhov's letters to his fiancee Dunia Efros, to Elena Pleshcheeva, to Emilie Bijon almost certainly exist in private

XVI

xvii

ANTON ÑÏ I' Ê ÏÎ V

hands in the West. It is equally possible (bat the hundreds of letters that Suvorin wrote to Chekhov are mouldering in an archive in Belgrade: their discovery would force Chekhov's life, and (because of what Suvorin knew and confided to Anton) Russian history, to be rewritten. A few archival items have also proved difficult to trace, for example most of Chekhov's student exercises in medicine. Nevertheless, the material that is now available enables a much fuller portrait of Chekhov and his times than ever before. D. R. Queen Mary Westfield College, London February 1997 .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My warmest thanks go to Alevtina Kuzicheva. Without her assistance my work in the Otdel rukopisei (The Manuscript Department) of the Russian State Library and RGALI (Russian State Archives for Literature and Art) would have been more trammelled, and through her I had introductions to every major Chekhovian scholar and museum in Russia and the Ukraine. I want to thank the staff at the Russian State Library and the Manuscript Department who, despite the demoralizing conditions, a dilapidated building and grim prospects, managed to deliver most of what I sought; the same applies to the staff at RGALI. I am grateful to Galina Shchiobeleva of the Moscow Chekhov Museum, and to Igor Skvortsov of the Sumy Chekhov Museum for allowing me so much access. To Liza Shapochka and her husband Vladimir Protasov of Taganrog I owe a special debt for their hospitality and consultations. Olga Makarova of Voronezh University Press has been very helpful in providing local material. Among my Western colleagues, Professor Rolf-Dieter Kluge, the energetic organizer of the Badenweiler conferences of 1985 and 1995, has been a great stimulus. I want to thank Dmitri Konovalov of Ufa for lending me his manuscript notes on the Andreev sanatorium, as well as for his hospitality. (None of these experts, or anybody else I have consulted, bears any responsibility for my judgments or approach.)

I also thank the doctor in charge of the hospital that was once Bogimovo and the staff at the Andreev sanatorium at Aksionovo. Apart from Siberia, Sakhalin and Hong Kong, I feel I have stood and sat, and have been a minor or major nuisance, in almost every place that bears Chekhov's imprint. Descendants of Chekhov's friends, for instance M. Patrice Bijon, have been most tolerant of my search for material. Countless people will be grateful that the work is finished. Thanks and acknowledgements for illustrations to the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum (Moscow), to the Chekhov Museums in Melikhovo, Moscow, Sumy, Taganrog and Yalta, to the Pushkinski Dom (St Petersburg), and to the Russian State Library.

This book owes much to British Academy support: notably a three-month humanities research fellowship, which extended my sabbatical leave long enough to make headway. To my colleagues at Queen Mary and Westfield College, who had to put up with frequent dereliction of duty, I proffer my apologies. xviii m

ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES

This book is meant for the general reader, but for specialists I have given sources for quotations and new information. References are given to archive sources and less accessible publications: Chekhov's letters and the best-known memoirs (see Select Bibliography) are well indexed, and the reader can check these sources without additional reference. All translations into English are my own. In footnotes I have used a few abbreviations (the place of publication is Moscow, unless otherwise indicated): MXaT OR

RGALI PSSP

Gitovich Letopis Pis ma 1939 Pis ma 1954 Perepiska 1934, 1936 Knipper-Chekhova 1972 Levitan Pis ma 1956 Moscow Arts Theatre Museum Archive Manuscript Department of Russian State Library (otdel rukopiset) Russian State Archives for Literature and Art A. P. Chekhov Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: 1 -18, works (referred to as I-XVUI); 1-12 (+ indices), letters (referred to as 1I2\ I973"83N. I. Gitovich Letopis' zhizni i tvorcbestva A. P. Chekhov a, 1955 I. S. Ezhov Pis'ma A. P. Chekhovu ego brata Aleksandra Pavlovicha, 1939 M. P. Chekhova Pis'ma k bratu A. P. Chekhovu, 1954 A. P. Derman, Perepiska A. P. Chekhova i 0. L. Knipper, 1934, 1936 V. la. Vilenkin, Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova, 1972 A. Fiodorov-Davydov, A. Shapiro /. /. Levitan: Pis'ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia, 1956

XXI

ANION (II I h IK IV Perepiska I, II, 1984 Letopisets Î semie 1970 Vokrug Chekbova V vospominaniiakh LN68

LN87

M. P. Gmniovsi el;il. I'rrrpiska A. P. Chekbova, 10H4, 1 vols. (F.xpanded 1996, 3 vols.) A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova Melikhovskii letopisets: Dnevnik P. E. Chekbova, 1995 Sergei Mikhailovich Chekhov, Î semie Iaroslavl, 1970 Vokrug Chekbova (ñîòð. Å. M. Sakharova),

1990

Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (ñîòð. N. I. Gitovich), 1986 Literaturnoe nasledstvo 68: Chekhov (ed. V. V. Vinogradov), i960 Literaturnoe nasledstvo 87: Iz istorii russkoi literatury… (ed V. R. Shcherbina), 1977

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

Transliteration from Russian is standard British, except that I use / for both è and É. I also transcribe Russian e as e, although initially and after a vowel it is pronounced ye. Russian surnames of transparently French or German origin are given in more familiar forms, thus Áîíüå, Øåõòåïü are rendered Beaunier, Schechtel, not Bonie, ShekbteP. Tchaikovsky is spelt traditionally; so is Chaliapin. Russian female names are given feminine form: Chekhova, Ternovskaia. Crimean Tatar names are given Turkish spellings. I have taken liberties with Russian first names. Patronymics (the middle names ending in -ovich, -ovna, etc.) have been omitted except where needed; I have reduced the varied forms of Christian names, whose choice depends on degree of acquaintance, intimacy, mood, to the minimum: for example, it may not be clear to an English reader that Maria, Mariushka, Marusia, Mania, Mosia and Masha are all the same person. In the case of Chekhov's siblings, I hope I may be forgiven for referring to Maria Pavlovna Chekhova as Masha, Nikolai Pavlovich as Kolia, Ivan Pavlovich as Vania, Mikhail Pavlovich as Misha; as there are other Sashas in Chekhov's life, Aleksandr Pavlovich Chekhov remains Aleksandr. In the interests of clarity, I use the better known pseudonyms of some persons (Gruzinsky for Lazarev, Andreeva for Andreeva-Zheliabuzhskaia, etc.). The index should resolve any ambiguities. Dates are given by the Russian (Julian) calendar, twelve days behind Europe until 12 March 1900, then thirteen days behind. All dates are Russian, except when the action takes place abroad when both dates are given. Russian temperatures in Reaumur have been converted to centigrade.

XXII

I

Father to the Man We could hear screams coming from the dining room… and knew that poor Ernest was being beaten. 'I have sent him up to bed,' said Theobald, as he returned to the drawing room, 'and now, Christina, I think we will have the servants in to prayers." Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

ONE

Ô

Forefathers

1762-1860

È^î would have thought that such genius could come from an earth closet! ANTON CHEKHOV and his eldest brother Aleksandr were bewildered: in two generations the Chekhovs had risen from peasantry to metropolitan intelligentsia. Little in Anton Chekhov's forebears hints at his gifts for language, or foretells the artistic talents of his brother Nikolai or the polymath versatility of his eldest brother Aleksandr. The key to Chekhov's character, his gentleness and his toughness, his eloquence and his laconicism, his stoical resolution, is hidden in the genes he inherited as well as in his upbringing.

Chekhov's great-grandfather, Mikhail Chekhov (1762-1849), was a serf all his life. He ruled five sons sternly: even as adults, they called him Panochi, Lord Father. The first Chekhov of whom we know more is Mikhail's second son and Anton Chekhov's paternal grandfather, Kgor Mikhailovich Chekhov. As a child Chekhov met him on a few summer holidays. There was no affection between them.1 Grandfather Kgor fought his way out of bondage. He was born in 1798, a serf of Count Chertkov at Olkhovatka in Voronezh province, the heart of Russia, where forests meet steppes, half way between Moscow and the Black Sea. (Chekhovs are traceable in this region to the sixteenth century.) Egor, alone of his kin, could read and write.

Kgor made sugar from beet and fattened cattle on the pulp. Driving Count Chertkov's cattle to market, he shared the profits. Through luck, ruthlessness and thirty years' hard work, Egor accumulated 875 roubles.2 In 1841 he offered his money to Chertkov to buy himself, his wife and his three sons out of serfdom into the next class of Russian citizens, the petit-bourgeoisie (meshchane). Chertkov was generous; he deed Kgor's daughter Aleksandra too. Egor's parents and brothers remained serfs.

3

FATHKK I «» I III* MAN

Egor took his family 300 miles south to ilir nrw steppe lands, tamed after centuries of occupation by nomadic Turkic tribes. Land was being sold to veterans of the Napoleonic wars and to German immigrants. Here Egor became estate manager to Count Platov at Krepkaia (Strong-point), forty miles north of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. He pushed his three sons onto the next rung in Russia's social ladder, the merchant class, by apprenticing them. The eldest, Mikhail (born 1821) went to Kaluga, 150 miles southwest of Moscow, to be a bookbinder. The second, Anton Chekhov's father, Pavel, born 1825 and now sixteen, worked in a sugar-beet factory, then for a cattle drover, and finally as a merchant's shop boy in Taganrog. The youngest son, Mitrofan, became a shop boy to another merchant in Rostov on the Don. Egor's daughter Aleksandra, her father's favourite child, married a Vasili Kozhevnikov at Tverdokhliobovo near the steppe town of Boguchar.3

Egor remained on the Platov estates until he died, aged eighty-one. He was ruthless and eccentric. Like many managers of peasant stock, he was cruel to the peasantry: they called him the 'viper'. He also earned the dislike of his employers: Countess Platov banished him six miles away to a ranch. Egor could have lived there in a manorial house, but preferred a peasant's wooden cottage.

Chekhov's paternal grandmother Efrosinia Emelianovna, whom her grandchildren saw even less, for she rarely left the farm, was Ukrainian.4 All the loud laughter and singing, the fury and joy that Chekhov associated with Ukrainians, had been beaten out of her. She was as surly as her husband, with whom she lived fifty-eight years before her death in 1878.

Egor emerged once or twice a year to escort a consignment of the Countess's wheat to Taganrog, the nearest port, and to buy supplies or spare parts in the town. His eccentricity was notorious: he devised dungarees as formal dress and moved 'like a bronze statue'. He flogged his sons for any misdemeanour - picking apples, or falling off a roof they were mending. Pavel Chekhov developed a hernia after one punishment, and had to wear a truss for it throughout his adult life. Late in life Chekhov admitted: I am short-tempered etc., etc., hut I have become accustomed to

1762-1860

holding back, for it ill behoves a decent person to let himself go… After all, my grandfather was an unrepentant slave-driver.5 Egor wrote well. He is reported as saying: 'I deeply envied the gentry not just their freedom, but that they could read.' He apparently left Olkhovatka with two trunks of books, unusual for a Russian peasant in 1841. (Not a book was seen, however, when his grandsons visited him at the Platov estate thirty-five years later.)

His efforts for his children were not matched by much affection. Ë bully in life, on paper he could be rhetorical, obfuscating, or sentimental. A letter of Egor's to his son and daughter-in-law runs: Dear, quiet Pavel Egorych, I have no time, my dearest children, to continue my conversation on this dead paper because of my lack of leisure. I am busy gathering in the grain which because of the sun's heat is all dried up and baked. Old man Chekhov is pouring sweat, enduring the blessed boiling sultry sun, though he does sleep soundly at night. I go to bed at 1 in the morning, but up you get, Egorushka, before sunrise, and whether things need doing or not, I want to sleep. Your well-wishing parents Georgi and Efrosinia Chekhov.6 Like all the Chekhovs, Egor observed name days and the great Church feasts, but he was laconic. Pavel on his name day (25 June) in 1859 received a missive which read: 'Dear Quiet Pavel Egorych, Long live you and your dear Family for ever, goodbye dear sons, daughters and line grandchildren.'

Anton's maternal line was similar, and Tambov province, where the family came from, was as archetypically Russian as neighbouring Voronezh. Again, a peasant family of thrust and talent had bought its way into the merchant classes. Anton's mother, Evgenia Iakovlevna Morozova, had a grandfather, Gerasim Morozov, who sent barges laden with corn and timber up the Volga and Oka to market. In 1817, aged fifty-three, he bought for himself and his son, Iakov, freedom from the annual tax which serfs paid their owners. On 4 July 1820 Iakov married Aleksandra Ivanovna Kokhmakova. The Kokhmakovs were wealthy craftsmen: their fine woodwork and iconography were in civil and ecclesiastic demand. The Morozov blood had, however, I sinister side. Some of Gerasim Morozov's grandchildren - a maternal mule and an aunt of Anton and his brothers - died of ÒÂ. Iakov Morozov lacked the stamina of Egor Chekhov: in 1833 he

I

1

ÃË'ÃÍ I-'. Í II) I II I MAN

went bankrupt, then found protection (like Kgor Chekhov), from a General Papkov in Taganrog, while Aleksandra lived with her two daughters in Shuia. (Their son Ivan was placed with a merchant in Rostov-on-the-Don.) On n August 1847 a fire burned down eighty-eight houses in Shuia: the family property was lost. Then, in Novocherkassk, Iakov died of cholera. Aleksandra loaded her belongings and her two daughters, Feodosia (Fenichka) and Evgenia, into a cart and, camping on the steppes, trekked 300 miles to Novocherkassk. She found neither her husband's grave nor his stock in trade. She travelled 100 miles west to Taganrog and threw herself on General Papkov's mercy. He took her in to his house and provided Evgenia and Fenichka with a rudimentary education.

Anton's maternal uncle Ivan Morozov, forty-five miles away in Rostov-on-the-Don, served under a senior shop boy: Mitrofan Chekhov.7 Either Mitrofan or Ivan introduced Pavel Chekhov to Evgenia Morozova. In his twenties Pavel had a signet ring made. He inscribed on it three Russian words meaning 'Everywhere is a desert to the lonely man'. (Egor read the inscription and declared, 'We must get Pavel a wife.') The autobiographical record that Pavel compiled for his family in his old age has a laconic melancholy that surfaces at the rare moments of frankness in Anton's letters and frequently in the heroes of his mature prose: 1830 [be was then 5 years old] I remember my mother came from Kiev and I saw her 1831 I remember the powerful cholera, they made me drink tar 1832 I learnt to read and write in the priest's school, they taught the lay ABC 1833 I remember the grain harvest failing, famine, we ate grass and oak bark.8 A church cantor taught Pavel to read music and to play the violin, folk-style. Apart from this, and the ABC, he had no formal education. His passion for church music was the salve for his unh^ppiness, and he also had artistic ability, but his creativity drained away in compilations of ecclesiastical facts and what casual visitors called his 'superfluous words'. In 1854 Pavel and Evgenia were married. Evgenia had beauty but no dowry; while Pavel's appeal as a future merchant compensated for his equine looks.

6

1762-1860

Ivan Morozov, sensitive and generous, refused to sell suspect caviar, and was dismissed from Rostov-on-the-Don. He returned to Taganrog where Marfa Ivanovna Loboda, the daughter of a rich city merchant, fell for him. The youngest of the three Morozov children, Fenichka, married a Taganrog official, Aleksei Dolzhenko. She had a son, Aleksei, and was soon widowed.

Anton's mother, Evgenia, survived seven live births, financial disaster, the deaths of three of her children and her husband Pavel's tyranny. She had a shell of self-pity to retreat into, but she had few resources beyond the love of her offspring: she read and wrote with reluctance. Of the three Morozov children only Ivan had talent: he spoke several languages, played the violin, trumpet, flute and drum, drew and painted, repaired watches, made halva, baked pies from which live birds flew out, constructed model ships and tableaux, and invented a fishing rod which automatically landed fish. His tour de force was a screen painted with a mythological battle scene: it divided his shop from his living quarters, where he gave his visitors tea.

Anton loved and pitied his mother. He deferred to and detested his father, but from the son's birth to the father's death father and son never permanently separated. Pavel, like his own father Egor, could behave like a heartless monster or callous humbug, and portray himself as an affectionate self-sacrificing patriarch. He inspired loathing in his eldest son Aleksandr and saccharine affection in his youngest, Misha. Few outside the family could regard him without amusement or irritation. Apart from the Lord God, with whom he constantly communed, his closest friend was his brother Mitrofan.

Mitrofan was a modestly successful merchant, liked in Taganrog. Constantly gathering and disseminating family news, he was the chief link in the family, a willing host and an effusive, if calculating correspondent. Mitrofan Chekhov and his brothers, Mikhail in Kaluga and Pavel a few hundred yards away, shared a fanatical piety and, sometimes, humbug. They were all founder members of a Brotherhood attached to the Cathedral in Taganrog. It collected money to support the Russian monastery on Mount Athos and to provide charity to Taganrog's poor. Pavel writes to Mitrofan in summer 1859 (the brothers addressed each other with the formal Vy, never the intimate Òó), giving the first hint of ÒÂ in the family:

7

1

FA I II IH I Î III I MAN

go to the trouble in Moscow of iiskinj; the /Vic-dual men regarding the illness of Evgenia Iakovlevna, the sort of illness is very well known, she spits every moment, this dries her out extremely, she is very fussy, the slightest thing becomes unpleasant to her, she loses her appetite and there is no way now of putting her right, would there be a means or a medicine to give her peace of mind and settle it?9 Family reunions were melancholy, quarrelsome occasions: from Kharkov in May i860 Mitrofan writes to his brother: this was a heavy day for me, from morning until dinner, I could in no way distract my heart, just the recollection that I am alone depressed me to the point of exhaustion… I was taken to dine at Nikolai Antonovich's… where I was received with affection and well, which rarely happens with us. All three of Egor Chekhov's sons were life-affirmers in one respect: as patriarchs. Mikhail had four daughters and two sons, Mitrofan three sons and two daughters. Pavel and Evgenia had seven children. They married on 29 November 1854; two more years elapsed before Pavel scraped together 2500 roubles to join the Third Guild of Merchants. Their first child, Aleksandr, was born on 10 August 1855, as the Crimean War ended. Two English ships bombarded Taganrog, demolishing the dome of the cathedral, the port and many houses. Evgenia and her sister-in-law Liudmila abandoned their homes, leaving a chicken still cooking, and fled to the steppes, to stay with Egor Chekhov. Here Evgenia gave birth in the priest's house. She returned to a tiny house belonging to Efrosinia, Pavel's mother, which Egor had divided between Pavel and Mitrofan. When Mitrofan married Pavel moved a few streets away to a rented two-room mud-brick house on Politseiskaia Street. In 1857 he began trading; on 9 May 1858 a second son, Nikolai [Kolia], was born. In 1859 the Third Guild was abolished; raising more capital, Pavel became a Second Guild merchant. Evgenia was pregnant again. Pavel was a conformist: he became alderman on the Taganrog Police Authority. In January 1860 he wrote to brother Mitrofan: 'last Saturday the Church of St Michael was struck by lightning and caught fire right in the dome.' This seemed to him a portent before Anton's birth on 16 January i860.10

TWO

1860-8

TAGANROG HAD imperial status and a cosmopolitan population that made it more of a colonial capital than a provincial city. Visually, it was striking: a decrepit military harbour and a thriving civil port at the foot of a promontory jutting into the shallow Sea of Azov; half a dozen avenues, lined with Greek merchants' houses, punctuated with Russian government buildings, radiating northeast from the tip of land towards the steppes. You might have thought you were in a dusty city of Thrace, until you reached the wooden shanty town of the Russian suburbs.

Founded by Peter the Great to establish a foothold on the Sea of Azov and challenge Ottoman suzerainty, Taganrog was, like Petersburg, built without consideration for its inhabitants. Its sandy soil made poor foundations; fresh water was hard to find; it was hot in summer and cold in winter; the sea was so shallow that steam boats had to be unloaded a mile offshore. In 1720 Turks forced the Russians to demolish and abandon Taganrog. It was refounded by Catherine the Great in the 1770s and populated by Greek colonists who, like the Greeks of classical times, took refuge from poverty or tyranny in townships around the northern Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Some Greeks had been Mediterranean pirates and were now tycoons; many lived by cheating Russian farmers and bribing Russian customs officials. They spread wealth, not only by conspicuous consumption, but by generous civic arts, founding orchestras, clubs, schools and churches, bringing in French chefs to cook Lucullian dinners and importing Italian sculptors to carve their tombs in the cemetery. In Chekhov's boyhood, they were followed by Italian and Russian merchants, and by dealers of all nations, exploiting the wealth of Taganrog's awakening hinterland. The city developed feverishly. Tsar Alexander I also left his mark on the city. He came to Taganrog

8

9 FATHER TO III V. MAN

for spiritual solace at the end of his reign, and settled in a modest single-storeyed 'palace' where he died three months later; Taganrog was briefly a shadow capital of the empire. Anton was born when Taganrog's future still looked bright. The building of railways to the south of Russia still awaited imperial consent. Cartloads of wheat and meat from the steppes - the nearest large town, Kharkov, was three hundred miles north over trackless steppes - descended on Taganrog to be shipped.

At Anton's christening in the Russian cathedral the godparents were Greek customers of Pavel and Mitrofan. A Russian nurse was hired, a serf who had been sold by her owners for helping the daughter of the family to elope. The Chekhov family expanded, moving house, sometimes living with members of Mitrofan's family. They were in the house of Pavel Evtushevsky, Mitrofan's father-in-law, when, on 18 April 1861, a fourth son, Ivan [Vania], was born. A daughter Maria [Masha] was born on 31 July 1863. The family moved in 1864 to a larger house on a more prestigious street. There a sixth child, Mikhail [Misha], was born on 6 October 1865.

Memories of Anton in infancy come from his elder brothers. As Kolia, barely thirty years old, lay dying in 1889 he set down childhood memories." He recalled the house when Anton was still a baby, and the weeds and the fence which recur in Anton's late stories: I lived in a litde one-storey house with a red wooden roof, a cottage ornamented with burdock, netdes, buttercups and such a mass of pleasant flowers as honoured the grey palisade mat surrounded these dear creatures on all sides… In this cottage there are five rooms and then three steps lead through the kitchen to the shrine where the great men [the three eldest Chekhov sons] lie, although the eldest of them is only just three feet high. Kolia's memory then leapt to a time when Anton was eight. Uncle Ivan Morozov had carved a toy horseman, 'Vaska', out of cane for the four-year old Vania: the four boys slept in one bed and a sunbeam moved across their faces: at first Aleksandr waved the sunbeam off as if it were flies, then uttered something like 'Thrash me? What for?', stretched out and sat up… Anton dragged from under a pillow ë wooden toy… first of all Vaska leapt over his knees and I lien lie and Anton crawled

1860-8

over the marbled wall. Aleksandr and I watched all Vaska's adventures with great enjoyment until Anton looked round and hid it very quickly under the pillow again. Vania had woken up. 'Where's my stick-toy, give me my stick-toy,' he squealed. Kolia also recorded his last sight of Uncle Ivan, who could not bear the rough merchant world: We rarely saw uncle Vania's red beard, he didn't like to visit us, as he disliked my father who ascribed Uncle's lack of trade to his incompetence. 'If Ivan Iakovlevich were given a good thrashing,' my father used to say, 'then he'd know how to set up in business.' Uncle Vania had married for love, but was unhappy. He lived with his wife's family and heard the accursed 'a good thrashing' there as well. Instead of supporting the man, everyone thought up threats, more and more absurd, and finally deranged him and ruined his health. The family hearth he had dreamed of no longer existed for him. Sometimes, to avoid undeserved reproaches, he would shut up shop, not go to his room and spend the night under the fence of his house in the dew, trying to forget the insistent 'a good thrashing', 'a good thrashing'.

I remember him once running in to see my aunt asking for some vinegar to rub himself with and when she asked questions, he flapped his arms at her, tears in his eyes and quickly ran aw… Kolia died of ÒÂ before he could write any more. Uncle Vania died of ÒÂ shortly after the vinegar incident.

Aleksandr also recalled the toy Vaska and the shared bed. Aleksandr had often been left in charge of Anton: he remembered the infant Anton straining on his pot, shouting to Aleksandr to 'get a stick, get a stick' to help him: But sensing my inability to help you, I got nastier and nastier and finally pinched you as painfully and viciously as I could. You 'let rip' and I reported to mama when she came to your yelling, as if butter wouldn't melt in my mouth, that it was all your fault, not mine.12 When Anton was aged about ten, the scales of dominance swung the other way. For a decade he and his eldest brother jostled for power until Anton became the effective head of the family. Aleksandr recalls his first defeat when they were left minding the stall by the railway station: li 1

1 1

I Ë I 11 I Ê I (» lilt MAN You were chanting 'Bang your head, \ãìù your head, drop dead!'… I banged you on the head with a piece ol corrugated iron. You left the shop and went to see father. I expected a severe thrashing, but a few hours later you majestically walked past the door of my stall, accompanied by the shop-boy Gavriusha, on some mission for father and purposely did not look at me. I watched you walking off for a long time and, I don't know why, burst into tears. Anton's earliest years were spent more with the clan than the family. When he was six, the family moved in with Mitrofan and Liudmila, while Aleksandr spent two or three years living with Fenichka. The Chekhov and Morozov marriages tied Pavel and Evgenia to several Taganrog families, both rich and poor. A number of Russified Greek families were related to the Chekhov clan: godparents, and the Kam-burovs, close neighbours on Politseiskaia street, rich merchants whose Russian bourgeois veneer was skin-deep, for old man Kamburov would curse the children, 'Fuck your mother', in a thick Greek accent. They combined Mediterranean temperament with liberal Russian mores: their daughters Liubov and Liudmila Kamburova were much in demand. In such milieus Aleksandr's and Kolia's schoolboy romances began - hence the command of demotic Greek that Aleksandr retained, and the Taganrog urban jargon which he used in his letters. Taganrog's Greeks called Aleksandr 'lucky Sasa' for his fluency.13

The first eight years of Anton's life were punctuated by family name days and Church feasts, particularly Easter, which Pavel observed with zeal. Everyday life was freer: in school holidays he and Kolia could follow Aleksandr around Taganrog, catching fish in the smuggler's bay of Bogudonie, trapping finches in wasteland to sell for kopecks, watching convict gangs catching stray dogs with hooks and clubbing them to death, coming home in the evenings covered with lime and dust or mud. i?•

THREE Ô

Shop, Church and School

1868-9

PAVEL CHEKHOV was a bad merchant, taking too much pleasure in calligraphy, copying out price lists, inventories and lists of creditors. He turned his shop into a forum for endless moralizing with customers, a club where they could gossip over a glass of wine or tea. Church music was his opening into Taganrog society. Pavel had an unbounded passion for sung services. Despite limited training and ability, he became the regent (kapellmeister) of the cathedral choir in 1864, after years as an amateur. He refused to omit a bar of music or a word of the liturgy; cathedral services became interminable. Parishioners and clergy asked Evgenia to persuade him to shorten them, but Pavel never compromised over his favourite quality 'splendour'. In 1867 he was dismissed.

Pavel moved to the Greek monastery, which, to broaden its congregation, now held services in Russian. The Greek clergy had little Russian and needed a Russian cantor. Pavel formed a choir of blacksmiths, whose powerful bellows-lungs made them strong, rough, basses and baritones. Pavel's choir lacked altos and sopranos. He rehearsed with two young Taganrog ladies, but their nerves led to a calamity, and the blacksmiths had to take over. Pavel renounced female singers and recruited his three eldest sons. Aleksandtf recalled 'the doctor who treated our family protested at this premature violence to my infant chest and vocal cords'.14 For years church singing became torture, especially at Easter, when the boys were hauled out of bed on a freezing morning for early matins. They would sing at two more long services in the day, before rehearsing all evening in the shop, under a choirmaster who thrashed them. During his adult life, right up until his death, Anton would rarely spend an Easter night in bed; instead he would wander the streets, listening to the church bells. The congregation's wonderment at the sight of Aleksandr, Kolia and

J3

1 Ë I III II I î I II I MAN Anton, on their knees on the freezing stones, singing the three-part Motet of the Robber on the Cross, was not shared by the singers. Anton Chekhov recalled that they 'felt like little convicts', kneeling, worrying that the holes in their shoes were visible. Joys were few: watching merlins nesting in the bell-tower, an uncalled-for crescendo or peel of bells as their mother entered. The music, but not the doctrines of the Christian church, entered Anton's blood: 'The Church bells of Easter Sunday are all that I have left of religion,' he was to tell his schoolfriend, later the actor, Aleksandr Vishnevsky. To another writer, Shcheglov, he confessed in 1892: 'In my childhood I had a religious education and a religious upbringing… And the result? When I recall my childhood I now find it rather gloomy; I now have no religion.'

In 1872 the Greek monastery church had a new priest who had no command of Russian, and Pavel's Russian choir was dismissed. The church that stood in the new Taganrog market, where Pavel, his blacksmiths and his fellow merchants worshipped and sang, had a paid professional choir. Only in the chapel of Tsar Alexander's 'palace' could Pavel display his family 'trio'.

The doctor may well have been right to blame the ill health of the three eldest Chekhov boys on those early services and late rehearsals. The positive side was that Anton's mind was saturated with the Church Slavonic language of the psalms, of the Orthodox free-verse psalmodic variations known as akafisty. His love of Russian church music long outlasted his faith in God, though he could only sing, or pick out a tune on a piano with one finger. Kolia, on the other hand, played the violin and piano, the latter with what a professional witness called virtuosity. In his brief prosperity in the late 1860s and early 1870s Pavel hired both a music teacher and a French teacher for his children. Both Aleksandr and Kolia acquired fluent French, whereas Anton's foreign languages, like his musical talents, remained undeveloped.

Aleksandr was a star pupil at Taganrog gimnazia [grammar school]. Pavel wavered about Kolia and Anton. Greek customers persuaded him that prosperity lay with a job as a broker in a Greek trading firm. This future 1500 roubles a year salary required a command of demotic Greek. When a debt of 100 roubles was unexpectedly paid, Pavel invested in Kolia's and Anton's education. For modern Greek, a child had to attend the parish school attached to the Greek Church of

1868-9

St Constantine and St Helen. (Aleksandr had two or three years earlier picked up Greek at this school.) The school, where 'Nikolaos and Antonos Tsechoph' were enrolled in September 1867, was a Dothe-boys Hall. In one large room with five long wooden benches one teacher, Nikolaos Voutzinas, took five classes simultaneously, starting with the alphabet and ending with syntax and history. In each corner of the schoolroom was an iron semicircle where an older pupil would test and punish pupils of a lower form, who were each sold a tatty primer. Aleksandr and Anton never forgot Voutzinas' catch phrase: 'Their parents will pay for everything.' Voutzinas would periodically disappear to his private quarters, where a Ukrainian housekeeper met his needs. (It is said he also raped a Greek boy there.) His red beard, loud voice and metal ruler restored order when he reappeared. Voutzinas devised a number of tortures, including strapping a boy to a stepladder to be spat at by the class. The fees, however, were modest, and the boys needed no uniform.

The school year ended: Pavel decided to demonstrate his sons' command of Greek to his customers. Despite stickers for 'diligence' and 'exquisite work' which Voutzinas awarded his pupils, neither Kolia nor Anton had more than the alphabet. In the row that ensued, the boys, not Voutzinas, were punished. In August 1868 they were enrolled into the gimnazia, Anton entering the preparatory class.

Taganrog school has been portrayed both as the prototype demesne of Chekhov's degraded fictional schoolteachers and as the Eton of the Pontus Euxine. It was hell and heaven - like a good English 'public' school, minus sport, sodomy and the cane. During Anton's eleven years there it flourished. A survey of its teachers and its pupils shows it evolving into a hotbed of talent. School formed Anton Chekhov as strongly as home, and liberated him from home.

In September 1809 the city's leading citizens had founded a gimnazia for their city. In 1843 the school was moved to a light and airy two-storey classical building, situated at Taganrog's highest point. It began to produce famous alumni - for instance, the poet Shcherbina, translator of Homer into Russian. When the era of reforms began in 1856, the school entered two decades of turbulence. The expansion of cities in southern Russia led to a turnover of staff; the heady atmosphere of Alexander II's reign brought in radicals who conflicted with authority.

4

15

1ËÒ1Ï Ê 1(1 I II I MAN

In iH6$, the headmaster was sacked and wandered Taganrog as a mad tramp. The new head, Parunov, gave him a burial in 1865. In 1867 the Minister for Education, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, visited the school, to make it an example of a new conservative, classical gimnazia: dubious subjects were replaced with double and compulsory Greek and Latin; Russian literature, as a ferment of rebellion, was severely restricted. Subversive teachers were squeezed out. Country pupils who boarded with Taganrog families found their quarters under surveillance. Dmitri Tolstoy felt that the education system and the church should shadow the gendarmerie which he had established. His reforms made many teachers into policemen and much teaching into parrot-learning, but created a framework within which canny teachers and able pupils flourished. The school was an avenue for Jews, merchants, petit-bourgeoisie, sons of priests into the new professional classes, the intelligentsia. They became doctors, lawyers, actors, writers - which worried a government, rightly afraid of under-employed intelligentsia as a force for revolution.

In a Russian gimnazia all pupils were treated as members of the gentry. The only discipline was detention in a whitewashed cell under the school's vaulted staircase. Physical punishment was forbidden: a teacher who struck a pupil would be dismissed. After the Voutzinas regime of thrashed palms and crucifixion, not to speak of the floggings in Pavel Chekhov's household, the preparatory class was paradise to Anton. He discovered that few fellow-pupils were beaten even at home. That quiet resistance to all authority, the core of Anton's adult personality, was fomented in the classroom. The gimnazia was a great leveller - upwards, rather than downwards. It gave pupils from poor, clerical, Jewish or merchant households the rights and aspirations of the ruling class. Some parents, however, could no longer afford the fees and uniform, and transferred their sons to technical school, to become tailors or carpenters. Efim Efimiev, who left school at 12 in 1872, eventually to become a watchmaker and fine joiner, recalls: We were considered people of plebeian origin… by the cheap cloth uniform… I took a lunch of a small piece of bread and dripping which I often shared with Anton, because he had no nourishment apart from bread, a baked potato and a gherkin.'1

1868-9

Pavel's fondness for the rod, exceptional even for the unenlightened merchant class, was an aspect of his personal cruelty. The younger children, especially Misha, were brought up in Moscow, where Pavel was restrained by the urbane prejudices of his landlords from exercising full paternal rights. Masha, the only surviving girl, was treated as a doll: she was remembered as the 'blushing Murochka' in her starched pink dress. The elder sons were thrashed mercilessly. While the Chekhovs' rich in-laws, the Loboda family, were notorious for flogging servants and children, Pavel's children envied Mitrofan's family, where the children were preached at, not flogged. Aleksandr was traumatized by floggings - both he and Kolia wetted their beds well into their teens. Efim Efimiev, Anton's schoolmate from 1869 to 1872, recalls: 'in the Chekhov household… as soon as his father appeared we went quiet and ran home. He had a heavy hand. He punished children for the most innocent naughtiness. Thrashings.' In the mature work 'Three Years', Chekhov gives a graphic account of a young intellectual alienated from his merchant background, with many details that tally with what we glean from Anton's correspondence about his own childhood anguish. My father began to 'teach' me, or, to put it simply, to beat me, when I was less than five years old. He mrashed me with a cane, he boxed my ears, he punched my head and every morning, as I woke up, I wondered, first of all, would I be beaten today? In his late twenties Anton recalled to Aleksandr: Tyranny and lies crippled our childhood so much that it makes me sick and afraid to remember. Remember the horror and revulsion we felt in those days when father would flare up because the soup was over-salted, or would curse mother for a fool. At the end of the century Aleksandr told his sister: It was a sheer Tatar Yoke, without a glimmer of light… I look back on my childhood with crushing anguish.16 The journalist Nikolai Ezhov's memoir of 1909 confirms the horror: After thrashing his children, Pavel Egorovich went to church and told the victims to sit and read so many pages of the psalter. Chekhov… told a fellow-writer: 'You know, my father thrashed me so much

[6 ?7

ÃÀ I III Ê III I II I MAN

when I was a child that 1 still cannot lor^ei it.' And the writer's voice quivered. The teacher of Religious Knowledge at the school was Father Fiodor Pokrovsky, then in his early thirties. He preferred to visit Mitrofan Chekhov's house rather than Pavel's: in Mitrofan's family the hospitality was not punctuated by children being beaten or by Pavel's ranting. Pokrovsky misjudged the Chekhov boys, telling Evgenia: 'Something may come of your eldest [Aleksandr], but absolutely nothing can come of the two younger ones.' Pavel Filevsky, an ex-pupil and a fellow-teacher, described Pokrovsky as follows: 'Appearance, stance, musical voice, inventiveness, the gift of the gab - everything was attractive. But he was insincere… he had little erudition, his theology was "from the gut"."7 The children, however, saw Pokrovsky as their defender. He often overrode the headmaster Parunov at meetings. He argued with the deputy-head, the inspektor, a key figure in a Russian gimnazia, on behalf of pupils whose parents could not pay the fees (from ten to twenty roubles a year). He lobbied for the Chekhov brothers, too. In class he would forget the catechism and talk of his war exploits or of Goethe, Shakespeare and Pushkin. Chekhov kept in touch with the priest until he died in 1898, and Pokrovsky eagerly read what his ex-pupil wrote. Years later Mitrofan was to report to Pavel: 'Antosha told me in his letter that he owes the Priest not just his knowledge of scripture but literature, the ability to understand the living word and to clothe it in elegant form.'

The preparatory class of 1868-9 was taken by kindly men: the elderly but lively Swiss Montagnerouge, who had been the boarding housemaster, was affectionately known as Stakan (wineglass) Ivanych.

The Latin teacher, Vladimir Starov, left the deepest impression: a gentle, much liked man, he fell in love with the stepdaughter of his colleague Andrei Maltsev, Ariadna Cherets, a wanton beauty known as Rurochka. She married and ruined him. In the late 1880s, when the school's self-appointed secret policeman, a Czech called Urban, denounced him, Starov was removed to a remote school in the steppe: Ariadna abandoned him and eloped with an actor well-known all over Russia, Solovtsov, and began to act herself. Starov died of alcoholism in hospital. Not just Chekhov's stories ('Ariadna', 'My Life') but also the story 'My Marriage' by his geography teacher Fiodor Stulli, were

1868-9

based on Starov and his Ariadna. Another of Chekhov's teachers, Belovin, a radical historian, died of alcoholism. Ippolit Ostrovsky, a mathematics and physics teacher, died in service of ÒÂ.

The teacher who determined the fate of most pupils was the inspektor: in Taganrog gimnazia this was the 'Centipede' A. F. Diakonov, whose sayings were a compendium of moral cliches that pupils memorized and derided: 'If a law exists, it is not for the amusement of the lawmakers and must be observed.' Diakonov is one source for (Ihekhov's automaton of a Greek teacher, The Man in a Case, but in lire his unbending principles, his lack of animosity, even his loneliness and taciturnity, won him grudging respect.

Greek caused the school and Anton Chekhov most problems. Aleksandr and Kolia were good Greek scholars, but Anton did not always manage to achieve the '3' mark necessary to pass into the next form. There were too few classical Greek teachers; finally the authorities recruited Zikos from Athens. A fine teacher, Zikos was, nevertheless, as Filevsky puts it, 'not too fastidious about seeking enrichment'. He took bribes, muttering to pupils with '2' marks 'chremata [money]!' Corruption was endemic in Russian schools. Teachers took laggards as boarders and then charged 350 roubles a year, feeding the boys, as Anton later put it 'like dogs, on the gravy from the roast'. Zikos was so blatantly exploitative that he 'compromised' the school and in the early 1880s was repatriated.

Another recruit was a Czech called Jan Urban. The school bogey, he had worked in Kiev (where somebody broke his leg), and in Simferopol (where his windows were smashed).18 Each town he left after denouncing pupils and staff to the authorities. Taganrog was his last chance, but his denunciations continued. One of the pupils he harassed killed himself. In Anton's last years at the gimnazia boys packed a sardine can with explosives and hurled it at Urban's house. The bang was heard ten blocks away. Urban demanded that the police arrest the anarchists responsible, but the headmaster and police did nothing. Urban had difficulty finding a new landlord. Such was his standing that even the city gendarme forbad his daughter to marry Urban's son. In the 1905 disturbances schoolboys stoned Urban: he picked up the stones and carried them in his pocket until his death.

Some teachers were never recalled by Anton. Yet one wonders how he could forget Edmund-Rufin Dzerzhinsky, 'a pathologically irritable iH I Ë I 111 It I Î I II I MAN man' says Filevsky. Until 1875 Edmund kulin taught mathematics and later fathered the murderous head of Lenin's secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Anton remembered best the teachers who stayed throughout his years there, and those who met grotesque ends.19 In later life he dismissed them as chinodraly (careerists) and used their eccentricities and tragedies for fiction.

In his first years Anton was academically mediocre and not very docile. Only Pavel Vukov, responsible for discipline, when asked after Chekhov's death, spoke out: 'He got on our nerves for nine years.' (Later Vukov put it more tactfully: 'His ideas and witty phrases were taken up by his schoolmates and this became a source of merriment and laughter.') As for Anton's fellow-pupils, friendships were not formed until later. The Chekhov family was still too clannish.

From 1868 Pavel's income grew and provided an education for all of his children. The death of their grandmother, Aleksandra Kokh-makova in 1868, was barely noticed: paralysed, she had been unaware of the world for four years.

Anton's life of a schoolboy and a chorister was made tougher when, early in 1869, the Chekhovs moved into a rented two-storey brick house on a corner site, at the edge of town, on the route taken by the carters and drovers on their way to and from the port and the steppes. On the upper storey they had a drawing room, with a piano; the lower storey was a shop, its side rooms crammed with tenants and stores. Outside, where one of the shop boys or Chekhov children would stand to solicit customers, hung a sign: TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, AND OTHER COLONIAL GOODS. In addition to the family (although Aleksandr often lived elsewhere), two shop boys, the young Khar-chenko brothers, Andriusha and Gavriusha, about 11 and 12 years old, were taken in, receiving no salary for their first five years, not even allowed pockets in their clothes, lest they be tempted to steal, and thrashed even more often than the children of the house. They were trained to give short change and short weight and to pass off rotten goods as sound.20

Here, on 12 October 1869, Evgenia, the last of the Chekhov children, was born. Somehow the Chekhovs found room for tenants -Jewish traders, monks, schoolteachers. One tenant played a key role in the family's last Taganrog years. The Chekhovs never forgot Gavriil Parfentievich Selivanov, who worked in the civil courts by day and at

1868-9

night went to the club where he earned another living as a gambler. An elegant bachelor, he fought to keep his straw hat clear of the sunflower seed husks and other debris that blew in the wind around the Chekhov shop. Selivanov soon became a member of the family, even calling Evgenia 'mama'. Another tenant was a pupil in the senior classes of the gimnazia, Ivan Pavlovsky, later to be a journalist-colleague of Chekhov's. Pavlovsky left an indelible mark on the memory of his schoolmates. In 1873 he left to study in Petersburg, but was arrested as a revolutionary and sent to Siberia.

From the upper storey of the Moiseev house the family could see Taganrog's new market square. To this square convicted criminals, their hands tied behind their back, a placard naming their crime round their necks, would be brought on a black tumbril to a scaffold. The drums rolled, the convict was lashed to a pillar, and the sentence was read out, before they were led off to prison or exile. Evgenia and uncle Mitrofan, like many citizens in provincial Russian cities, visited the prison on name days or on feast days.

Pavel's charity was limited: he merely allowed two monk-priests, ostensibly collecting alms for Mount Athos, to shelter in his yard and turned a blind eye to their drinking. Pavel was not so indulgent to his sons. Regardless of school, they were given the duties and punishments that he had endured. Latin homework could be done while keeping an eye on the shop, which was open from before dawn until well into the night. The paternal phrases which Aleksandr remembered ran: 'I had no childhood in my own childhood. Only street urchins play in the street. One beaten boy is worth two unbeaten.'

With a properly equipped shop, scales, a table and chairs for customers, shelves and cupboards everywhere, sheds and attics, Pavel tried to deal in everything. He was, surprisingly, a1* gourmet, who would dine with the devil if the food was good, and he made his own mustard. In his shop he kept the finest coffee and olive oil. Aleksandr tried to reconstruct the inventory forty years later: tea by the pound or ounce, face-cream, pen-knives, phials of castor oil, waistcoat buckles, lamp-wicks, medicinal rhubarb, vodka or San-turini wine by the glass, olive oil, 'S' Bouquet perfume, olives, grapes, marbled backing paper for books, paraffin, macaroni, laxatives, rice, Mocha coffee, tallow candles, used tea-leaves, dried and re-coloured

,M»

2 1

FA I'll I. Ê I Î I II I MAN {bought from hotels, for servants], honey sweets and fruit-gums - next to floor polish, sardines, sandalwood, hen inj-s, canisters for paraffin or cannabis oil, flour, soap, buckwheat, home-grown tobacco, ammonia, wire mouse-traps, camphor, bay leaves, 'Leo Wissor' Riga cigars, birch brooms, sulphur matches, raisins, strychnine… cardamom, cloves, Crimean sea salt in the same niche as lemons, smoked fish and leather belts. Pavel also sold a number of medicines. One of them, called 'bird's nest', contained among other ingredients mineral oil, mercury, nitric acid, 'seven brothers blood', strychnine, and corrosive sublimate. Bought by customers for their wives, it was an abortifacient. 'That "birds nest" probably despatched many people to the next world,' Anton remarked after finishing medical training. Serving customers vodka and sweet red Santurini wine,21 Pavel still traded unprofitably. The intense labour involved in drying out and repackaging used tea leaves was unrewarding. To important customers Pavel was servile, but when anyone complained that the tea stank of fish or the coffee of candle wax, he would publicly punch and kick the shop boys, Andriusha and Gavriusha Kharchenko. (Pavel was summoned to the Taganrog magistrate for excessive beating.) Pavel's ideas of hygiene and safety did not meet even the lax standards of the time: he assured his youngest son that flies cleared the air. When Pavel found a rat in a barrel of his olive oil, he was too honest to say nothing, too mean to pour the oil away, too lazy to boil and re-filter it. He chose consecration: Father Pokrovsky conducted a service in the shop. The incident of the drowned rat was enough to drive away the least fastidious customer, and heralded the collapse of Pavel Chekhov's Colonial Store.

FOUR

The Theatres of Life and Art

1870-3

A WELL-FITTED SHOP and a bourgeois drawing room overlooking two tree-lined avenues, soon to be lit by gas, formed the European facade of the Moiseev house. The crowded bedrooms, the sheds in the yard, the kitchen without running water, the absence of a bath, represented the Asiatic reality behind the facade. The image of a provincial home with stinking, cockroach-infested back rooms and a magnificent facade would haunt Anton's prose to his last story. The prosperous European facade was fragile, for Pavel lacked financial acumen. Within a year he had competition just across the road; he bought unsaleable wine on credit. Debts mounted, and the family fortunes turned. In September 1871 Anton's baby sister Evgenia died. Kvgenia was far more deeply affected by this than by the later deaths of three adult sons. Even sixteen years later Aleksandr remarked that his mother remembered that death 'as if it were today'.

Pavel extended his opening hours and rented a stall on the square by the new railway station. When the stall failed to cover even the costs of its paraffin lamp, he rented a stall in the new market. Worst of all, in the summer holidays he forced his sons - including the twelve-year-old Anton - to run these outposts, opening a stall at 5 a.m. and staying until midnight to return with pitiful takings.

The summer holidays gave relief in Anton's childhood: fishing the rivers and roaming the countryside were to be prerequisites of happiness in his adult life and his fiction. On Anton the sea left a mark even stronger than the countryside. Taganrog boys fished from the piles driven into the shallow bed of the unfinished port, or went west, to the stony beach of Bogudonie, known as Smuggler's Bay. Diving into the water one day, Anton cut open his head, acquiring the scar listed on his identity papers. Here he sat with his eldest brother, often next to the school inspektor Diakonov, like prey and predator visiting i:

23

I Ë ÏÈ Ê ÃÎ I III MAN

the same watering hole. They angled lor tlit- liny, edible Gobius fish. A thread was passed through the gills of each one; the chain of transfixed fish was left writhing in the water, to keep them fresh until they were taken to market. There were diversions on the way back: schoolboys would slash the sacks of Clementines or walnuts in the carts that climbed slowly from the port to the town. If the driver caught the thieves, he would lash out with his knout.22 Fishing gave Anton the stillness he desperately missed at home. More exciting sport was found on wasteland, with a school friend, Aleksandr Drossi, catching finches. (Some of the Chekhov brothers were to keep finches and songbirds, flying around their living rooms, in adult life.) The other sport was in the cemetery, whose mixture of Orthodox austerity, flamboyant Italian statuary and permanent decrepitude haunts much of Chekhov's prose. Here Anton caught tarantula spiders with a ball of wax.23

Even in boyhood the sea and the river Mius had a primarily melancholic effect on Anton, becoming memento mori in his mature stories. Writing to his patron, the novelist Grigorovich, in 1886, Chekhov would recall: When my blanket falls off me at night, I begin to dream of enormous slippery rocks, the cold autumn water, the bare shores - all this is vague, in a mist, with not a fragment of blue sky… When I run away from the river, I pass the tumbledown cemetery gates, the funerals of my schoolteachers. Anton's life broadened in the early 1870s. He explored the surroundings of the town and visited school friends and their parents. Aunt Fenichka's laissez-faire household allowed pillow fights, while the families of Taganrog's officials and merchants gave still greater relief from a grim home life. Anton now had intimations of future torments: migraine, and abdominal illness, then called 'catarrh of the stomach' or 'peritonitis', and attributed to bathing in cold water. Summer brought malarial fevers. Anton thought of diarrhoea and a constant cough as normal. Although Evgenia had shown symptoms -spitting blood, fever - Uncle Vania Morozov had already died of ÒÂ, and Aunt Fenichka suffered fits of coughing and debilitation, nobody suggested that tuberculosis might have struck Anton. For the time being, Anton's vitality fought off recurrent infection. The

1870-3

boy looked very different from the man. We know a face honed by suffering, a chest hollowed by coughing: the broad-shouldered, wide-cheeked peasant boy before the mid 1880s is a shocking contrast to the later stereotype. He was known as 'bomba' at school for his large head.

In July 1871, when Anton was eleven, an ox cart stopped at the shop: it was the engineer from Krepkaia, where grandfather Egor was employed. He had come to Taganrog to buy a piece of farm machinery. Aleksandr and Anton begged their parents to allow them to ride the ox cart and stay with their grandparents. They left in such haste that they had no protection from the rainstorms that struck the cart as it trundled over the steppe: it took two days to cover forty-five miles. Being soaked in the storm, getting lost in the reeds of a steppe lake, being berated by the drunken carter, meeting a Jewish innkeeper (whom the carter and engineer cheated) - all these incidents were transmuted sixteen years later into Chekhov's masterpiece 'Steppe'. And just as 'Steppe' climaxes in a great disillusionment when the mysterious old man who is the object of the first part of the journey turns out to be of little interest, so Aleksandr and Anton finally reached their grandfather's estate to find that he had long been posted to an outlying village, Kniazhaia, where he was hated as 'the viper'. Egor himself expressed no animation when he finally saw his grandchildren. Worse, as soon as the peasants realized that these boys were the grandchildren of the manager, they turned away and cursed them as the 'viper's' offspring. Egor and Efrosinia lived like peasants. The boys camped among the dustsheets in the house of the absentee young countess. After nearly a week, Aleksandr and Anton struck up a relationship with the blacksmith and purloined a sheet to trawl the millpond for fish. Old Egor did not back up his reputation as a self-taught man of books: he dismissed his grandsons' grammar-school education as a hotbed for 'learned fools'. Anton was shocked by his grandmother's revelations: privation and thrashings from Egor, in an outpost surrounded by resentful peasants, had broken her. For the first time the boys understood how their father had been formed, and that his childhood had been even worse than theirs.

A week with their grandparents was enough for Aleksandr ind Anton. Aleksandr insisted on walking six miles back to the main village, Krepkaia, and asked Countess Platova to arrange for them to be taken •'I

2 5

I A I II Ik I Î I II I MAN home. A few days later the two hoys wcw loaded onto a cart returning to Taganrog.

In May 1872, Anton (like a quarter of the pupils) failed to pass the third-year examinations - he did not reach the minimum '3' mark required in all subjects, Greek being his Achilles heel. He faced exile in 'Kamchatka', the back row in the third year, for 1872/3. That summer, for a while, Anton could forget this humiliation: the Chekhov children were, to their joy, left behind by their parents. Pavel and Evgenia set off on a pilgrimage around Russia, to visit the great monasteries and Holy Relics, Mikhail Chekhov (fatally ill with ÒÂ) in Kaluga, the Polytechnical Exhibition in Moscow, and then, on the way home, Evgenia's rich cousins and in-laws in Shuia. It was this summer which gave Masha, then nine, her first memories: she would try not to harbour grudges, and see the best of the Chekhovs' childhood. She remembered only peaceful pursuits - Aleksandr making electric batteries, Kolia painting, Vania binding books.

In 1873 the sons' horizons broadened, while Pavel's contracted. Anton had a social life: both older brothers, Aleksandr and Kolia had romances, perhaps love-affairs, with girls from the gimnazia that often collaborated with the boy's school and was only a few blocks away. Aleksandr was in love and virtually engaged to Maria, the daughter of Franz Faist, the Taganrog watchmaker. Kolia, who was highly attractive, despite his Mongoloid looks and his short stature, was much pursued, particularly by Liubov ('Love') Kamburova, a cousin of the Chekhov family. To judge by the letters from the girls of Taganrog to Moscow, when the brothers left town, these were only a few of the daughters of Greek and Russian merchants who found the Chekhov brothers attractive. Aleksandr was clever and articulate; Kolia could clown, act and play music; Anton had wit and exquisite manners. Taganrog families long remembered his considerateness to everyone - a concern that seemed at odds with his mocking mimicry of hosts and guests. Even those to whom his literary fame was irrelevant, such as Irinushka, the nanny in Mitrofan's household, remained bewitched by Anton. The secret of his appeal not just to women and girls, but to hotel servants and council officials, publishers and tycoons, lay in the tact and restraint which he cultivated even on his deathbed. Charm led Anton into the houses of the rich: he valued not so much their governesses, amateur dramatics, concerts, fluency in French, tea

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1870-3

served in china cups, as the respect they seemed to have for others' dignity and privacy.

Anton's tastes and mind were also stimulated by the Taganrog theatre. For decades (it was founded in 1827) it had been regarded by the school as a threat to the morals of the pupils. Pupils were only allowed to visit the theatre after the inspektor had approved the play and was satisfied that the boy would not be distracted from his homework. Teachers patrolled the theatre to spot any unauthorized schoolboys they might cover the heads with scarves, abandon school uniform, or bribe the doorman to let them in when the auditorium was plunged in darkness. The semiforbidden nature of the theatre allured them. A rich cosmopolitan clientele allowed Taganrog to maintain a theatre and a repertoire out of all proportion to the city's size or appeal, with singers from Italy and actors from Moscow to challenge local performers.

Pavel regarded the theatre as the gateway to hell (he is not known to have seen even his son's plays), though his brother Mitrofan was a keen member of the audience. In 1873 the school's hostility to the theatre was temporarily neutralized by the appointment of a young inspektor, the appropriately named Aleksandr Voskresensky-Bi illiantov, who liked to clown in the classroom, constantly took out a pocket mirror to check on his magnificent red beard and was conspicuous in the theatre, where he would crush nuts with his boot and chew loudly at the most pathetic points. This Narcissus was dismissed within the year, but by then Anton was hooked on the theatre. The first performance he saw from a 15 kopeck seat in the gallery, Vania testifies, was Offenbach's La Belle Helene. Offenbach's Helen of Troy, torn between an ineffectual Menelaus and a trouble-making Paris, was to become the model for Chekhov's own dramaticheroines.

In the 1870s, Taganrog's repertoire had 324 different productions.24 Much was French farce and vaudeville, adapted or merely translated, and operetta. Shakespeare too was performed: Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice. Anton's fascination with, and variations on, Hamlet were spawned by the Taganrog theatre. Its range of mainstream Russian drama, particularly of Ostrovsky's beautifully constructed 'realjst' studies of the horrors of merchant life - Poverty Is No Vice, The Thunderstorm, Wolves and Ewes, The Forest - left Anton an admirer of Ostrovsky. Romantic drama, however - Victor Hugo and Friedrich

27

I Ë I È I It I O I II I MAN Schiller - aroused his mockery. The great Kuropean operas - Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, especially Rigoletto, II trovatore, Un ballo in mas-chera were also performed - evoked in Anton an ambivalent response.

The Taganrog public was demanding and rowdy. Bad singers were whistled off the stage. The provincial reviewers were well-informed. Schoolboys wore special ties to mark their support for one soprano or another. Close underground bonds linked the school and the theatre: one technician spread information on the programmes to come, another sneaked boys in out of sight of the school's police. One of the actors, Iakovlev, had a son studying in the gimnazia. Anton and his friends, including the future actor-manager (and rake) Solovtsov, met him and other actors offstage.

Apart from symphonic concerts in the theatre, there was music elsewhere in Taganrog: the town's park had a symphony orchestra and for many years entry was free. The repertoire was checked by Diakonov and the headmaster before boys were allowed to attend. Music was the only force that could bring Anton to the verge of tears, while Kolia could replay by ear pieces he had heard just once. What she saw as the pernicious influence of the theatre and the concert hall dismayed Evgenia.

Amateur dramatics were inspired by the Taganrog professionals. Until illness weakened his voice, Anton took on several parts, notably the mayor in Gogol's Government Inspector, with Vania playing the antihero Khlestakov, Kolia the servant Osip, and Maria, embarrassed at being publicly kissed, the eligible daughter.

In 1873 Parunov was replaced as headmaster by the statuesque and stentorian Edmund Rudolfovich Reutlinger. He was related by marriage to the new inspektor Diakonov and, although they avoided each other outside school, they made a triumvirate with Father Pok-rovsky. Reutlinger could reassure the ministry of his solid conservatism, while running a school that was innovative and tolerant. Under Reutlinger joint concerts and performances were held with the girls' gimnazia. The two schools had teachers in common, although male teachers were mercilessly teased in the girls' school. The French teacher Boussard was entrusted with joint social events: a fine cellist, a well-known Taganrog host, he was loved by both schools. His death in service and his tomb in Taganrog cemetery haunted Chekhov's adult nightmares.

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Like many successful headmasters, Reutlinger had more style than substance. He may not have been particularly intelligent, but he was fond of his pupils. To the Chekhovs he was a godsend. Like Parunov, he recognized the brilliance of Aleksandr, and made him a proposition. In return for board and lodging, Aleksandr went to live with Reutlinger, where he could study peacefully and repay his host by tutoring one of the headmaster's boarders. (This gave Aleksandr, like Pavel as alderman on the Police Authority, the reputation of being an informer.) Aleksandr's pupil was Aleksandr Vishnevetsky, later (as Vishnevsky) to be the handsomest, and stupidest, star in the Moscow Arts Theatre firmament. It was not Reutlinger, however, but an outsider in the school, a law specialist called Ivan Stefanovsky, who drew the attention of the school's examining council to the exceptional literary qualities of Chekhov's otherwise 'mediocre' compositions.

When Anton passed into the fourth class, he was threatened with losing his new foothold in educated society. Pavel decided to insure against failure. (Anton had already failed one end-of-year exam, while Kolia had failed two.) Kolia, Anton and Vania were made to write to the headmaster: Desiring to learn in the trade class of the Taganrog District College the following crafts: Ivan, bookbinding; and Nikolai and Anton, cobbling and tailoring, we have the honour of most humbly asking your excellence to permit us to study the above-mentioned trades. 20 October 1873 Kolia and Vania were probably expelled from Technical College, although Vania became a competent bookbinder. Anton persisted for nearly two academic years. Records show Anton making a pair of fashionable stovepipe trousers, which Kolia wore, and early in 1874 a tricot waistcoat and trousers for himself. But never again was Chekhov seen to pick up a needle and thread - except for medical purposes.

Before his first year of double schooling, Chekhov had a holiday with his mother and all his siblings. Leaving Pavel in charge of the shop, they set off slowly by lumbering ox cart, past the Jewish cern-etery, up the Mius river valley and northwards to the springe of Krinichka; they camped under the stars in the settlement of Sambek, where the marmots whistled from their burrows in the steppe. Another

29

day took them twenty-five miles to Kniazhaia, where Egor and Efrosi-nia received - welcomed is too strong a word their family and housed them in the deserted manor house. Watching Ukrainians threshing corn fifteen years later, Anton recalled how, at harvest time, Egor put him to work: For whole days from dawn to dusk I had to sit by the steam-engine and write down the bushels and pounds of grain that had been threshed; the whisdes, the hissing and the bass wolf-cub sound which the steam-engine utters when working at full tilt, the screech of wheels, the slow gait of the oxen, the clouds of dust, tiie black sweaty faces of fifty or so men are all etched into my memory like 'Our Father'.

FIVE Ô

Disintegration

1874-6

I N 1H74 Pavel Chekhov borrowed to buy stock. As security he used the little brick fortress of a house he had built in 1873 (also on credit) on a plot of land half a mile away. The house had been built to let, but trade in Taganrog was in the doldrums, and the house was empty. The contractor, Mironov, had cheated Pavel by building the walls far too thick: the extra debt to Mironov for the unnecessary materials he had used was to prove ruinous. Others who lent Pavel 200 or 1000 roubles were themselves pressed; they offered his bills of exchange to the banks as security for their own debts, but times were abnormal. Ruin loomed. Taganrog's commercial life was turned upside down by the railway. While the engineers were not sufficiently well bribed to place the station in the centre of town, they did bring the rails down to the port. The rich now became very rich, for wagons of coal from the newly mined steppes and the wheat and wool that was now coming from the mechanized ranches of the Black Earth earned the Greek and Russian commodity dealers millions. (Pavel's in-laws, the Lobodas, flourished, importing cheap haberdashery by rail from Moscow.) But the small traders who lived by supplying steppe farmers and carters were now going bankrupt. The railway that brought the wheat to Taganrog also delivered to the steppes cheap goods from Moscow. Taganrog was no longer a source of haberdashery, "ironmongery or colonial goods. Few carters now passed Pavel's shop.

In summer 1ß74 Pavel surrendered the tenancy of his 'Colonial' shop and moved his family and his tenants, including the canny Gavriil Selivanov, into his new, but mortgaged, house. The shop boys Andri-usha and Gavriusha Kharchenko lost their jobs; poor Andriusha was conscripted into the army and died in training the following year. Ravel continued trading from market stalls, but the writing on the wall was clear to all but himself. He had more dependants. Aleksandr

I A I II h |(II) I M I MAN

1874-6

had moved out to live with the headmaster, but Aunt Fenichka, widowed and destitute, with her nine-year-old son Aleksei, had moved in with the Chekhovs. The new house was crowded, but it had a view of the sea from the upper window.

In 1874 Anton began to write: a satirical quatrain, apparently about the inspektor Diakonov, for a class magazine. His youngest brother Misha remembered another quatrain written by Anton on the garden fence. A schoolgirl who lived next door to the Chekhovs chalked up a sentimental poem on the fence. Anton's response ran: Why don't you wipe the milk off your lips, Fence-writing poetess in skirts? You should be playing with your dolls Rather than trying rhyme and verse. When the heat was unbearable Anton slept outside with the two black yard dogs under a vine, calling himself 'Job beneath the fig-tree'. Once Anton insisted on bringing home from market a live duck and tormenting the bird so that it would let the neighbours know that the Chekhovs could still afford meat. Anton's other activities were those of the town's urchins: he went to the old Quarantine graveyard, where victims of the 1830 cholera epidemic were buried, to search for human skulls; he looked after pigeons in a dovecote; he trapped goldfinches or shot at starlings, steeling himself to the screeches of wounded birds in their cages at night. He never forgot those tormented starlings.

By now the eldest Chekhov fledgling was also ready to fly. In July 1874 Aleksandr, with a few roubles in his pocket, set off by boat to Sevastopol. Dressing up and being taken for a member of the gentry were addictive pleasures. At the first port in the Crimea, Feodosia, he visited the one-kopeck baths: They gave me a sheet and pitcherful of water for my feet. When I came out of the water, it was like being a Lord. Naturally I didn't miss the opportunity to put on airs and strut for a kopeck. Then the ladies took hold of me, put me in a phaeton… and drove me around town.25 On his return, Aleksandr continued to live in gentility with ReutHnger and contrived to keep his petit-bourgeois family at a distance. At Easter 1875 Pavel reproached him: 'Aleksandr, I can see that you don't need us, that we have given you a freedom to live and to manage SO young… you cannot see yourself and a spirit of arrogance lives in you.'

Kolia and Anton also stretched their wings. Anton had passed his examinations in May 1874 and in August joined the fifth year. He became a frequent visitor to the household of a schoolmate Andrei Drossi and his sister Maria.26 Maria was particularly fond of Anton (both were taught by Father Pokrovsky) and allowed him into her bedroom on payment of 20 kopecks' worth of sweets. The Drossis were rich corn merchants, and liberal parents. Visitors took part in charades and amateur dramatics, and the Drossi family governess arranged tea parties. Anton composed and acted in vaudevilles, but destroyed the scripts afterwards. Here Anton befriended a Jewish schoolmate; here too he expanded his acting to parts from Ostrovsky as well as Gogol. Uncle Mitrofan occasionally called to express benign approval, but Pavel never appeared. The dislike between Pavel (Chekhov and the Drossis was mutual. Maria Drossi to her dying day remembered her one purchase at Pavel's shop: she had handed over 3 kopecks for an exercise book and walked out, by mistake, with a 5-kopeck book: Pavel rushed out after her and in silent fury snatched the book out of her hands. It was Maria Drossi who first noticed that Anton referred to Pavel as 'my father', never 'Papa' or 'Dad'.

Pavel had cause to be irritable. In spring 1875 he could not pay his dues for the Second Guild of Merchants and was expelled from the guild and demoted to a simple meshchanin. This entailed loss of privileges for himself and, worse, for his male offspring (if they failed to become university graduates) - as meshchane they became liable to corporal punishment and six years' military service. That spring Anton failed his Greek examinations and had to repeat the fifth year.

The summer holidays of 1875 were the last that the Chekhov brothers were to spend all together, fishing with a special moving cork float that Anton had devised. The boys took with them a frying pan and, if Pavel was out of the way, a bottle of Santurini wine, and cooked their catch on the shore.

In the summer of 1875 Anton was first invited by the family tenant, Gavriil Selivanov, to stay with one of his brothers, Ivan Selivanov (a notorious gambler) and the latter's new wife, a rich widow. It was the first of four or five unforgettable occasions on which Anton went to live on a semisavage Cossack ranch, where the livestock and the }2

J3

FATHER TO THE MAN

Ukrainian peasants were terrorized by the incessant carousing and gun shots from the house. In 1875, on his first visit, after bathing in a cold river, Anton became for the first time so ill that Ivan Selivanov panicked in fear for the boy's life, and drove him to Moisei Moiseich, a Jewish innkeeper. The innkeeper sat up all night applying mustard poultices and compresses to the sick boy, and over the next few days the innkeeper's wife nursed Anton to a state fit for the cart-ride back to Taganrog. (Moisei Moiseich and his wife inspired the Jewish innkeepers in the story 'Steppe' written twelve years later.) In Taganrog Anton's 'peritonitis' was treated by the school doctor, Doctor Schrempf from Dorpat in Estonia, who inspired Anton to take up medicine as a career. After this illness, Anton took an interest in (ierman, the language of instruction at Dorpat, and showed unsuspected motivation.

That summer of 1875 Aleksandr had matriculated with a silver medal. Despite their poverty, the family decided to send both Aleksandr and Kolia to Moscow, Aleksandr to study mathematics and science in Moscow University, and Kolia to enrol at the Moscow College of Art and Architecture, which willingly accepted students, even if they had only completed half their secondary education, on a portfolio of work. As Tsar Alexander II and his ministers planned more wars, military conscription (for six years) was in 1874 extended: not just the peasantry, but also sons of any class who failed to secure exemption, were liable. If they enrolled in university, the spectre of military service receded; if they graduated it melted away for ever. On 7 August 1875, their luggage packed by uncle Mitrofan, Pavel's two eldest sons took the train to Moscow. They were not friendless there. They would soon be joined by a fellow student from Taganrog, Gauzenbaum; the wealthy Ivan Loboda, a frequent traveller, would check up on them. Apart from fellow students from Taganrog they would find in Moscow their twenty-four-year old cousin from Kaluga, Mikhail [Misha] Chekhov (or Chokhov as many pronounced his surname). Misha was a clerk in Gavrilov's wholesale haberdashery firm of Gavrilov, agent for Coats Paisley's threads. Gavrilov supplied many Taganrog merchants, notably the Lobodas, and had even dealt with Pavel Chekhov. Mikhail, however different in his shop boy's background from his educated provincial cousins, was a sharp 'likely lad' who could find them cheap lodgings.

1874-6

The shock of the big city was considerable, particularly for Kolia who was less resourceful and who had to prove himself to the College of Art. Aleksandr, however, wrote a blase letter on his twentieth birthday:27 We arrived safely. We met Misha. When we talk to him we use the polite Vy just like papa and uncle. I think we are going to get on with him… The hotel is real rubbish. The table somehow dances and limps on one leg. The samovar is like a drunk… My respects to his Excellence Anton as the oldest child in the house… If Vania knew how plump the women are in Moscow. But don't tell him or he'll be seduced… Kolia is spitting in all the corners and under the table. He kept crossing himself on die journey. We are quarrelling over mat… Misha is very kind. We haven't found a flat yet. When someone is coming to Moscow, send the violin, a balaclava, my galoshes and my pen… That same day Kolia explained why he spat and crossed himself against the evil eye:

… the rail journey was shaky to Kursk and at one place our train nearly crashed into a goods train, if it hadn't been for a circle blocking the track. All the passengers were very scared… after tea we went in search of cousin Misha. We asked for him [at the warehouse] and he appeared. A real dandy, quite unrecognizable from his photograph… we answer, 'don't you recognize us?' 'Yes, judging by what Ivan Loboda tells me, if I'm not mistaken.' 'We're your cousins', says Aleksandr.28 Two days later, the brothers were installed in the first of many lodgings, 'Furnished Rooms over the Smyrna Dining Rooms', two minutes from the Art College and twenty from the university. Moscow landladies disliked students, but the brothers' charm worked. Their land-lady told them, said Kolia: 'No rows: play, sing, dance, the only thing that frightens me is rows. Of course you're young men and I have no right to forbid you anything.'

Aleksandr was enrolled, but Kolia was embroiled in misunderstandings that sapped his will power. On 13 August Aleksandr (who had his father's obsession with accounts) broached the subject of money: Enrolling in the University cost me 1 rouble. If [Kolia] passes his examination he won't be able to pay the whole fee: he has to pay

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30 silver roubles by 10 August… The flat costs us [each] per month 5.33, board 6.50, bread and tea 1.50, laundry 1, lighting 1.50, total 15 roubles. We can't live on less… Kolia doesn't know about this letter. He has gone completely dozy, just crosses himself all the time and touches the icon with his forehead. Four days later Aleksandr was still complaining: 'Damn Kolia's pomade. He's been carefully greasing his hair and combing it in with both combs, so that I have got my hair terribly greasy.' Pavel was not interested in his sons' hair. He planned to get Aleksandr to buy goods wholesale on credit and send them to Taganrog. Aleksandr was set against this and, using cousin Misha as a commercial authority, told his father why: Firstly, when Loboda finds out, he'll undercut you in Taganrog… secondly, you can only buy for cash in Moscow…, thirdly, buying on credit costs three times more…, fourthly, Moscow will ask Loboda what sort of person you are, and Loboda will naturally say as suits him: fifthly, Loboda is an expert… sixthly, Loboda is in place and has customers; seventhly, Loboda will squash us with his prices; eighthly, you will inevitably quarrel with him. And now consider Misha's position… he will lose his reputation and his boss will look askance… Keep struggling with the grocery. For the first time, the tables had turned. Pavel had lost his authority and his sons were finding independence. Aleksandr could as a silver medallist always find private pupils in Moscow. Acrimony between him and his father poisoned their relations, though Aleksandr sympathized with Pavel as Taganrog's merchants squeezed him: 'because of some bastard who is only concerned about his ugly mug you and I have to suffer, the thought makes me spit blood.'

Kolia was paralysed by the financial obstacles: he wanted to move on to Petersburg, where entry to art college was free, but had no money for the fare. Pavel, after repeated pleas, petitioned Liubov Alferaki, the wife of Taganrog's richest merchant, asking her to pay for Kolia's transfer to the Petersburg Academy of the Arts: Give him an education in the arts, which bounty you have bestowed on many… for twelve years my son and I have read and sung in the Palace church when you pronounced your prayers to the Almighty God with great ardour.

1874-6

The Alferakis did not help. Kolia felt abandoned, and sank in despair at the prospect of joining Misha Chokhov in Gavrilov's warehouse. Aleksandr was hurt by his parents' apathy. They offered reproaches, not support. Evgenia suspected him of hating his brother; Pavel ordered him to church. Aleksandr begged them: 'And for God's sake I ask you to write more warmly to us, from the heart: daddy, you just give lectures which we have learnt by heart since we were children

Evgenia was distressed by Aleksandr's closing remark: 'I've been to the catholic church. Wonderful music' 'Aleksandr, pray properly, you've no business going round catholic churches,' she replied. She sent Aleksandr two roubles and a torrent of complaints for his name day, and begged Aleksandr to apply to the railway millionaire Poliakov for a free ticket, so that she could come and settle Kolia in. She was desperate enough finding money and space in Taganrog, and persuading the two gimnazia to keep Maria, Anton and Vania on, when the fees could not be paid. As soon as her two eldest sons had left, she took on Selivanov's niece Sasha as a paying guest. Anton w;is in the country, too ill to write. Evgenia poured her heart out to Aleksandr: Kolia must be ill, my heart can sense it. We've let the annexe to tenants and we are living like sardines in a can, I'm worn out with running from living room to kitchen and I expect the people in the rooms are finding it very tight… The younger brothers in Taganrog were still full of the joys of their summer holidays: on 16 August 1875 Vania wrote to Aleksandr and Kolia: It was good, I rode a horse yesterday was Mama's birthday and I spent the whole day in the shop and the day before was a dinner at uncle Mitrofan's where our cousins had dinner and there were a lot of priests… I had the first letter from you and took it especially it interested the Kamburovs when I read out that Kolia was crossing himself at every step. I'm well Anton is not very well… By September 1875 the two brothers were living in conditions that Aleksandr recalled as 'a cloaca with fish floating up from beneath the floorboards'. Aleksandr wanted to send Kolia home for Christmas alone. 'I've no reason to go to Taganrog, I find it repulsive now.' Evgenia's sons had done what she had asked them not to: they had

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1Ë I 111 l-C Ml Mil MAN asked a Jew for help. Kolia described his visit to Rubinstein, a member of the distinguished composer's family, well known for philanthropy to provincial students: 'I already know half Moscow. I've been to see Rubinstein. He is a tiny little yid, about the height of our Misha, he received us rather coolly, he hardly speaks any Russian and so I talked through a Jewish interpreter…' Kolia wanted private pupils. Rubinstein promised to help. Kolia explained to his mother, at great length, that as a stranger in Moscow he had only expenses and no prospects of earnings. Anton still had Kolia's paints in Taganrog. 'I sit alone at home, I'm fed up with sloping around Moscow.' Finally on 4 September he passed a mathematics exam, was enrolled at the Art College and began to draw. Even though he could now only afford half a roll for breakfast and his shoes let in the rain, Kolia's mood swung violently from depression to euphoria. Ivan Loboda brought him a violin from ' I aganrog. Kolia reassured his mother in a tone that must have aroused Anton's envy: a life outside the parental home, independent! And in an independent life you have to keep your ears sharp and your eyes open, because you're dealing not with boys but with mature people… Today I had for dinner: borshch and fried eggs, yesterday I had borshch and chops… Kolia's high spirits lasted all autumn. He found pupils among his fellow students for calligraphy and drawing, but he still had to complete his secondary education while studying Art and Architecture: Anton sent him his Ovid and a crib. By now Kolia was known to a circle of students as 'The Artist', trawling Moscow's drinking dens. The trickle of money from Taganrog dried up. While attending university only on Tuesdays, in return for board and lodging for himself and Kolia, Aleksandr worked in a crammer run by two Scandinavians, Brukker and Groening. Kolia's eccentricities made life intolerable: he worked spasmodically, rarely washed and often wet his bed. In October 1875 Aleksandr complained to Anton: I'm writing on my bed, half-asleep, for it is past one in the morning. Kolia has been snoring for some time after his constant 'I can't spare the time'. The poor boy is wiped out. He's stunk the whole room out. He has an odd way of sleeping. He covers himself so that his head and back are covered up, but a yard of his legs are uncovered.

1874-6

He's trouble, he slops about bare-foot in the evening, wears no socks, there's mud in his boots… his feet are filthy. He went to the baths on Saturday and by Sunday his feet are like an Ethiopian's… We have floods almost every night and all his rotten stuff is drying in my room. I swear to you by God that I'll lose my job because of his arsehole… Mama is afraid I'm treating him badly, but she's the one, because she doesn't bother to do anything about acquiring an overcoat for him, while Papa tries for miracles and writes to tell us to borrow money… Although his pupils were charged 700 roubles a year, Brukker had stopped feeding, let alone paying, his student-teacher. In a freezing November the school was no longer heated, the boys fell ill and their parents retrieved them. Groening and Aleksandr fled. Despite a libellous letter from Brukker's wife, a Prince Vorontsov paid Aleksandr board and lodging to teach his sons for a few months. Kolia plunged into destitution, and complained to his parents: Aleksandr has left and I wandered all day around town looking for somewhere to live and came back hungry at night, I hadn't eaten since breakfast and when I got back I asked for food and they told me there wasn't any. Aleksandr's at Vorontsov's, I'm sitting in a little room and there's revolution in the building, they're saying Aleksandr has poached all the pupils that the parents have removed because of the bad state of things. In the next room Brukker is raging and I'm sitting and waiting for him to say, 'Clear out.' Ten roubles from Loboda got Kolia lodgings in December, but he was desperate: 'I shall be spending the night in 30 degrees of frost by Sukharevka tower and I shall die of starvation if nobody lends me anything…' The noose tightened in Taganrog. Evgenia told Aleksandr that she could not cope, let alone find the fare to come and comfort her sons:. Antosha and Vania have spent all week at home, the school is demanding payment and we have no money. Yesterday, 9 October, Pavel went and asked the headmaster to let Vania off, but Antosha is still at home, in all 42 roubles have to be paid for him and Masha. Now tell me not to moan. I'm so weak with worry that I can hardly walk, if I had my health I might earn some money, but I can't, yesterday I spent all day in bed… I asked Selivanov for 30 roubles to pay back at 10 roubles a year. He wouldn't… what are we to do with Kolia, he mustn't drink tea before bedtime. Please see to

J8

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FATHER TO III I MAN

his underwear, don't let him drop it about and let it rot. I'm even crying because we haven't sent you any money… Daddy isn't sending you money, but not because he's mean, God sees that he has nothing. This month we have to pay 50 roubles interest on the house to the bank… Vania's been sent back from school. Diakonov just threw him out. Pokrovsky spoke up for us, but Diakonov wouldn't hear of it… December 1875 in Taganrog was severe: Evgenia had frostbite on both hands. She had thanked Ivan Loboda for keeping an eye on her sons and Loboda lent her enough money for Kolia to come home for Christmas and the New Year. So severe were the snows, however, that the railway from Taganrog was blocked. Kolia had to leave the train south at a halt by a Scythian barrow, Matveev Kurgan: on 23 December Anton was sent by sledge with fur coats to carry him back, hungry and ill, over the last forty miles. Kolia stayed with his family until February, when the lines were kept clear, and he could beg his fare back to Moscow from a family friend.

Kolia was busy in Taganrog contacting old flames. He wrote in dog-French, German and Russian reassuring Aleksandr that Maria Faist, his fiancee, loved him: Quand je disais que tu are putting on weight elle disait toujours: Good boy!… I don't know how I shall leave here; Vater refuses to send any money. I told him if I'm not sent off by the 15th I'll steal it and go. Vater envoye pour moi de tabac, deja 2 fois Vania is such a little bastard that nobody gets any peace.29 Anton too reported to Aleksandr on Maria Faist - in dog-German. On 3 March 1876 he wrote his first surviving letter: Ich war gestern im Hause Alferakis auf einen Konzert, und sah dort deine Marie Faist und ihre Schwester Luise. Ich habe eine discovery gemacht: Luise is jealous of dich and Marie und the other way round. Sie fragten mich von dir separately, secretly. But was ist das? Du bist ein lady's man… Evgenia and Pavel were busy salvaging every penny owed to them. Selivanov's niece Sasha owed rent, but Selivanov had left for warmer premises and taken her with him. Evgenia could not afford a rouble a day to heat the house for her remaining tenants: they piled into the kitchen for warmth. Somehow in these conditions Anton gained '5's

1874-6

for Religious Knowledge and German. When Kolia left, his younger brothers and sister cried 'Take us too!', but it was not the children who were off to Moscow. At Easter, early in April 1876, a family council was held: Egor came from Krepkaia, leaving the blind Efro-sinia. He read his grandsons' letters from Moscow and agreed that Pavel had to seek his fortune there. Loboda saw no way out: bills of exchange were falling due. In Russia debtors' prisons existed until 1879 and, despite Pavel's status as police alderman, he risked confinement in the 'pit'. Evgenia told her father-in-law that there wasn't even money for the fare to Moscow. To her amazement, she told Aleksandr, 'he pitied us and gave money… I don't know how to thank him for all his benefactions, he's old and works hard for all his children, for God's sake write to him and thank him, he's already given Kolia 10 roubles.' Egor was dismayed by his sons. In Kaluga Mikhail had died; in Taganrog Mitrofan was just keeping his head above water; Pavel was about to flee in disgrace.

Plans were made to abandon ship. Loboda would not buy the stock. The family hid their unsold wares in the stable. Evgenia hovered between despair and wild hope. She wrote to Aleksandr and Kolia on 8 April: 'Anyone who meets me will be amazed, I've aged all at once, could you give Papa any more, or might we find a little shop in Moscow to rent…'30

Evgenia scraped together 11 roubles for Kolia's fees at College and handed the money, with Easter eggs and cake, to a Taganrog merchant leaving for Moscow. She packed Pavel's bags. The market stall was locked up and the keys entrusted to Ivan Loboda's younger brother, Onufri. The deadline for Pavel's payment of 500 roubles to the Mutual Credit Society passed. The guarantor, a merchant called Kostenko, paid the 500 roubles and counter-sued Pavel. The builder, Mironov, was suing for the 1000 roubles owed to him.

On 23 April 1876, before dawn, Pavel left Taganrog by cart, so as to evade his creditors' spies at the railway station. He went to the first country halt in the open steppe where the Moscow-bound train would stop. At 2.00 p.m. on 25 April he was in Moscow. In Taganrog Anton took over his father's battle for survival.

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SIX

ô Destitution

1876

THE YEARS FROM 1876 òî 1879 were traumatic in Anton Chekhov's life. His letters to his father and brothers in Moscow have mostly been lost, but their letters to him, as well as his mother's and his Uncle Mitrofan's letters, show unremitting hardship and fear of worse.

At sixteen Anton became the head of the household, dealing with creditors, debtors, relatives and friends of the family whose sympathy was limited, coping with his mother's misery and his younger siblings' dismay. Gavriil Selivanov showed himself a hard-headed businessman as well as a family friend: the grim comedy of The Cherry Orchard with the auction, the transformation of Lopakhin from friend into predator and the dispersal of the household to the four winds originated in Chekhov's adolescent years in Taganrog. Gavriil Selivanov played Lopakhin to the improvident Chekhovs. Anton, distress forging both his willpower and his reserve, grew strong.

In this debtor's hell, surprisingly, Anton's marks at school improved. The theatre and private concerts continued to occupy him, and he also went to classes with Taganrog's dancing teacher, Vrondy.31

Anton had already started a handwritten class-magazine, The Hiccup. Aleksandr, when sent an issue in September 1875 and two issues early in 1876, was encouraging, and he showed them to cousin Misha Chokhov. Everyone in the Gavrilov warehouse, including its owner, Ivan Gavrilov, found them amusing. In 1876 a wider window on the world, in the form of the Taganrog Public Library, opened for Anton. The school authorities were reluctant for pupils to use it: the school library had a restricted range of books, cutting pupils off from radical works, or anything seditious, such as the new satirical weeklies and monthly journals - the staple diet of the Russian intellectual. (In school only Father Pokrovsky subscribed to such 'subversive' journals

1876

as Notes of the Fatherland.) Anton joined the library in January 1877, sometimes retrieving his two-rouble deposit to buy food.

The Moscow and Petersburg satirical weeklies influenced all of Taganrog's youth. Destined for the newly literate of the metropolis, for uninhibited students and new professionals, these journals showed irreverence to received ideas and prominent personalities. They encouraged their readers to submit their own pieces - comic sketches, caricatures, polemical articles - for publication and payment. Anton began to submit his own anecdotes for Aleksandr to edit and market through his university contacts. Pavel's first letters from Moscow are full of pathos. Penniless, dependent on his student sons, he was apparently blind to the irony of the situation. From the day after his arrival he continued to dictate: Dear beloved Evochka, Antosha, Vania, Masha and Misha, I arrived safely yesterday in Moscow at 2 in the afternoon. Kolia met me at the station and we got a cab and went to the Flat, where Aleksandr was waiting for us. They were very pleased mat I had come. After a talk, we went round Moscow and then to the Dining Rooms for a good dinner. Three dinners cost 60 kopecks and one bottle of kvas 7 kopecks. I saw the college where Kolia is studying, the university, the Post Office, the Telegraph, the 'Saviour in the Pine Grove'. When we went up there to pray, we were shown the most Sacred relics of St Stefan of Perm… The flat is suitable for three, the. landlady is kind, I was only astonished tliat they never lock their room when they leave, they say there's no need, but a hired servant does the cleaning and might take something, God grant tiiat it is safe… Moscow is not like our Taganrog, there's endless noise, people bustling, the people live the lives they should, mere is order in everything, everyone knows their business… I ask you children to listen to Mama, do not upset her, don't argue with each other, do your homework properly. Vania, see you make an effort. The exams are soon. Farewell, my dear ones. I am always with you. P. Chekhov.32 Pavel and his two elder sons now lodged in one room in a house belonging to a Karolina Schwarzkopf and her family, the Polevaevs. The house was on the sleazy Grachiovka ('Rookery', also known as the Drachiovka, 'Rip-off, or Brawl Alley', but now Trubnaia street);

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KA'I II IK I Î I III MAN

the Polevaevs were considered 'last' and Masha Chekhova later accused them of corrupting both Aleksandr and Kolia.

Pavel did not yet detect Bohemian influence. Me was obsessed with religious pilgrimage: he spent a day and a night at the St Sergei monastery thirty miles north of Moscow and wrote sermons to his wife. He did not hurry to find work: Kolia, he told Evgenia, was copying paintings in the Museum and a shop had offered 25 roubles for one painting. Pavel told Anton to hide furniture from creditors and stave off bailiffs; he was to sell furniture to pay fares to Moscow for other family members. Pavel had signed his goods over to Aunt Fenichka to deflect his creditors. Complacent Father Chekhov told his younger children on 6 May 1876: Dear Children… If you go on living a good life, I shall bring you to Moscow. Here there are many Institutions for study, Gimnazias… stay quiet, don't spread it to anybody, try to take your exams as well as you can and get matriculation, don't talk to anybody about this.

Thank you Antosha that you are running the household and collecting what is owed to us… Vania, the rains have started, I'm very glad you have put the barrel under the drainpipe. Misha is a good boy, he will try to write and tell me how he is progressing. And Masha probably hasn't forgotten what I ordered her to do, when I left for Moscow, to study well in the gimnazia and to play the piano three times a day, according to my method, not hurrying, looking at the music and not leaving a single note out. If she plays well, then I shall bring you to Moscow and buy a good piano and music then she will be a complete Artist and perform in Public. To his wife, a week later, Pavel was less sanguine about salvaging anything: he trusted neither his creditors, nor his 'well-wishers'.

Pavel still believed that, if need be, he could sell his house for more than he owed. In Taganrog that same day, appropriately the Assumption of the Cross, Evgenia tried to shake Pavel into a sense of reality: My darling Pavel Egorych, We received the letter where you write that we must sell the house. I wanted to sell it a long time ago only to get rid of the debts but there are no buyers… I said, Antosha go to Tochilovsky, he lends money against security, so Antosha went yesterday… Tochilovsky just shouted, 'That's a bog, God forbid,

1876

no question, I want nothing to do with Taganrog,' so Antosha came home and now I don't know who to turn to… yesterday, the 13th, we were sitting having tea, we hear the bell, we opened the door, there was Grokholsky with papers, the first question was, is Pavel Egorych at home. We say no… I asked Grokholsky whether he would bother Pavel in Moscow and he says, 'You just warn your husband.' This is what I advise you to do, my dear, you write an open letter to all of us saying you are leaving for Tambov, write in it 'I am leaving for Tambov now' or wherever you like, but write it… Anxiety and worry have finished me and now our old nanny came last Wednesday started crying… I pulled myself together and told her, 'Nanny I can't keep you, I haven't got even a kitchen-maid, I'm alone.'… fetch us quickly or I could soon go mad. Aleksandr is already listed for military service, I don't know why, it's posted on all the fences… I hoped we'd mortgage the house and just be in debt to Kostenko, and now I can't think what to do. Answer quickly. E Chekhova." Ë tenant in Moscow had to register with the police. Fortunately, the Polevaevs were not law-observing: Pavel escaped arrest, but could offer no counsel to his stranded family. Anton, a mere boy, could not dun debtors or fight off creditors, even if some, like Grokholsky, were the fathers of school friends. Mironov and Kostenko, who held the house as security, would not waive the 1000 roubles they were owed. Pavel's illusions about the Cathedral Brotherhood that he and Mitro-fan belonged to were shattered. On 9 June 1876 he complained: I've lost any desire to even discuss our foul affairs. In my letter I asked you to give 300 roubles' worth of receipts as payment to Kostenko. Mironov has damaged everything, he called in the loan in a very unChristian way, even a wicked Tatar wouldn't do that… Evochka, about mortgaging the silver setting of the icon, how can you?..,34 For once, Pavel felt abashed by the distress he had caused and praised his wife and son for coping so well. But he also felt betrayed. Gavriil Selivanov had promised Evgenia: 'For you, Mama, I'll do anything.' I le had brought his niece Sasha, as a paying guest, back to the Chekhov house to share Masha's room. Selivanov knew everything that happened in the civil courts and chose his moment. Before the Chekhov home could be auctioned, he made a deal with Mironov, Kostenko and the court. He paid a mere 500 roubles, and promised Kostenko

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45

! ËÒÏ Ã.Ê ÃÎ III Ê MAN that the furniture could be sold to meet the interest payments that Pavel had defaulted on. In July, Selivanov, Masha claimed years later, announced to Evgenia: 'I've paid off the bill of exchange and forgive me, Mama, but now this is my house.' Evgenia's letter to Anton of 12 March 1877 confirms that rather than an act of betrayal, Selivanov's purchase was a favour which Anton had asked of him, to protect the family from more predatory creditors.

For the next eighteen months Selivanov offered to sell back the house to the family at the price he had paid - thus saving them, not robbing them of, 500 roubles. His attitude hardened only after losing patience with his improvident former landlords. He repaired the property and contemplated marrying and living in it. The Chekhovs hoped against hope that he was genuinely their nominee purchaser in a stratagem to save their home. On 1 October 1876, when only Anton and Vania were left in Taganrog, Pavel still showed trust, writing to Selivanov and giving him powers of attorney to rent the house on his behalf.

Pavel and his family were not cheated: they never did offer Selivanov the price for which he had redeemed their house. Kolia and Antosha sought out Selivanov's advice and trusted him as much as they did Uncle Mitrofan. Good relations persisted between the Chekhovs and Selivanovs. The friendly correspondence between the Chekhovs and Selivanov's niece Sasha and brother-in-law and nephews, the Kravtsovs, suggests that Selivanov, though hard-nosed, was no rogue.

Mitrofan's lukewarm sympathy hurt Pavel and Evgenia more. Mitrofan wrote effusive sermons (Aleksandr called him and his wife 'the Holy Fathers'), assuring Pavel that their trials were from God.35 When Pavel asked for money, Mitrofan pleaded poverty (although he had no debts) and limited his support to feeding Anton, hiding Evgenia's treasures and sending two or three roubles to Pavel in Moscow. Pavel's fraternal love faltered: in September 1876 Aleksandr reported to Anton: He used not to let anyone say anything bad about his brother and his spouse, but now he never misses a chance to besmirch them, which by the way they thoroughly deserve. Once he even went so far as to say about them: 'Pharisees, sons of bitches.'… Selivanov in my view is a thousand times right when he warns mother against the Holy Fathers.

1876

On 3 June 1876, after a grim family conference with Fgor and his blind wife, Mitrofan wrote to his brother: We can see Evgenia is very unhappy; she has lost weight, and so has Anton, only we do not know how you are living in Moscow, what you are doing, how you are feeding yourself. A great Divine Visitation is upon you… Evgenia was with us today to see Papa off and drank a glass of fine wine. She said, 'For grief.' We said, For future joy.' Mironov hopes you can be saved, but you must pray for him. Pavel did not remonstrate with Mitrofan, but with Anton for showing his anxiety. Antosha! I'm told that you and Mama have supposedly lost weight. How can this be? You write to me, 'Daddy, be brave and strong, be cheerful and pray.'… So you are as big a coward and as poor in spirit as your elder Brother… Antosha, take care of Mama, if anything happens, you will have to answer. She could come and join us, perhaps you can gather say 100 roubles for her fare. Life is no bowl of cherries here either… Pavel saw his whole life as a great sacrifice; he lectured Anton: 'we have not had a single peaceful day in our lives, have cared, have laboured, have endured everything, suffered, pleaded, so as to educate you as best we could, to make you cleverer, to make your life easier.' The other children were told to clean the barrels in the cellar, asked about the latest trials of corrupt merchants in Taganrog, reproached for poor marks at school. Pavel, Aleksandr and Kolia had moved, in the same house, from a 13-rouble room to a 7-rouble room. In the holidays Aleksandr and Kolia went to the country with Mrs Pol-evaeva, leaving Pavel alone in Moscow. He vented his discontent to Anton: Here we don't know the taste of beef or potatoes or fish or vinegar… Tell Mama not to let anyone into the House and not to let the Creditors see her, say that she's not at Home… Sell the furniture, the Mirrors and the beds, get the money together and send Mama to Moscow… Anton was unhappy at being left behind in Taganrog to fend for himself and his indigent parents. Pavel brushed aside his protests:

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I'À I ÏÊ Ê TO III Ê MAN

Antosha… I'm amazed that you and Masha want so much to come to Moscow and not to live in Taganrog. The bedbugs in Moscow would eat you in one night, I've never seen such enormous insects in my life. Worse than Taganrog creditors, I literally scrape them by hand off my pillow at night. You write that whether I find a job or not, you still have to come, but you don't consider mat it's impossible to live in Moscow without money… I am definitely going mad with nothing to do, I am weak with idleness, never in my life have I experienced such an agonising situation… Mama writes that she won't be allowed to leave Taganrog, and that she has debts. I am astounded by such an opinion… Kolia desperately wanted his mother to come, together with the youngest children, Masha and Misha. But he agreed with Pavel that Anton and Vania should stay. He took his father's side and said that it was not worth Pavel working for less than 50 roubles a month. Nobody in Moscow would employ a bankrupt merchant in his fifties for even half that wage. Gavrilov, cousin Misha's employer, turned Pavel away: 'Why did you come here?' Pavel, a debtor on the run, had no permit to settle in Moscow; any creditors who were not staved off by Selivanov or the Taganrog Brotherhood could extradite him to Taganrog. Aleksandr and Kolia had seen fugitive debtors escorted by soldiers to the station; they urged Pavel to face the music, declare himself bankrupt and only then to return to Moscow openly, with a valid passport. A Taganrog police official, Anisim Petrov, much feared as an informer, but a friend of the Chekhovs, assuaged Pavel's fears. Kolia asked Anton to find out from Selivanov whether the Taganrog authorities were trying to have Pavel extradited. To Kolia's anxious letter of 9 June, Pavel added an angry note: 'What's the point of looking for me when there's nothing to be got out of me? I escaped empty-handed and Glory to God for that!'

Glimmers of hope soon eclipsed. In mid June Gavrilov lent Pavel 115 roubles to buy 90 pounds of tea to pack into one-pound bags for 9 roubles profit. Gavrilov even let Pavel take home the tea samples. The Micawber in Pavel came to life. By late June he was painting a rosy future to Evgenia: Come to Moscow, bring Masha. Just get 50 roubles together and come. We'll find a flat or a country cottage. The Moscow air is good, my health is restored. I don't miss Taganrog any more and

1876

don't want to go there. Who'll be in the house - just Antosha. Leave him to Fenichka… bring the valuables, the silver frames. Here you can pawn them and get good money, the interest is small, i'/2% a month. When we earn some money, we'll redeem them again. If you can't let Mitrofan have my fox-fur coat for 50 roubles, bring it with you, we'll pawn it here and get whatever money we need. Where you are you're likely to starve to death, but here we have credit. [Ivan] Loboda is here and is nice and respectful to me. He says he's seen you at his family's house. I suppose the children's clothes must be worn out, but here we have everything, we live like Lords… Mitrofan now claimed that he was rallying support for his brother: All the others sympathize and commiserate and nobody thinks that you did anything on purpose. Grigori Bokos… said, 'Write and tell your brother that I have mortgaged my last property and redeemed the bill, which I shall not call in, but I would like Pavel to renew it…' On 29 June 1876 the blind Efrosinia, Pavel and Mitrofan's mother, broke her leg. She never rose from her bed again. (The bearer of these tidings took Vania and Misha to stay with Egor for a month.) On 11 July Mitrofan's infant son Ivan died.

Using Anton's earnings from selling the household goods and tutoring fellow pupils, Evgenia paid for three fares to Moscow. Vania and Misha returned from their grandparents' house. On 23 July 1876 Evgenia, taking Masha and Misha with her, caught the train to Moscow. The Chekhov house stood empty.

Vania moved in with his widowed aunt Marfa Morozova, who, in spite of her Loboda resources, did not pay his school fees. Anton spent a month with Selivanov's relatives in the country: there he lay ill for a fortnight, apparently with a hernia. In Taganrog he was taken in by Gavriil Selivanov, agreeing, for board, lodging and fees, to coach Selivanov's Cossack nephew Petia Kravtsov for cadet college, and his lively niece, Sasha Selivanova, for grammar school. Sasha Selivanova wore a red dress with black spots: Anton called her 'ladybird' and developed a flirtation with her that endured for decades. On one occasion they were spotted 'cooing like doves' on a bench overlooking Taganrog's great flight of steps to the seashore; when disturbed they slipped away to the nearest courtyard.37

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FATHER TO THE MAN

Judging by the letters the young Kravtsov wrote and by Sasha's later career as a schoolteacher, this first love did not stop Anton from being an effective tutor. He and Selivanov established a modus Vivendi. Four years later Selivanov would write to Anton: 'When I invited you to my quarters, we understood each other the moment we spoke and we recognized in our hearts that I needed you just as much as you needed me.'38 Pavel and Evgenia had left Anton and Vania to fend for themselves.

SEVEN Ô

Brothers Abandoned

1876-7

ONCE HIS MOTHER had left for Moscow Anton was pressed even harder to raise money by selling furniture, finding tenants and collecting debts, but the worst had happened: Pavel's creditors did not hope to recover their money from two schoolboys. Living with Selivanov, dining with aunts and uncles, Pavel's sons did not fear the bailiff's knock. Four heady summer holidays, from 1876 to 1879, were spent on ranches belonging to Gavriil Selivanov's brother Ivan or his sister Natalia Kravtsova. As guests of the Kravtsovs (another Gavriil, Natalia, and their four children), on a ranch where even chickens and pigs ran wild, Anton and Petia went out with a shotgun to get the dinner. Here Anton rode stallions bareback and, as he confessed years later,39 spied on peasant girls bathing naked. He kissed one of them, without a word, by a well.

On 16 August 1876 school started again and Anton reigned himself in. Public Library chits show that he was reading classics - from Cervantes to Turgenev. He was now in the 6th class, where the brightest boys were looking forward to freedom and wealth as doctors or lawyers. Anton's best marks were for Religious Knowledge; his father and uncle, after all, were members of the Cathedral Brotherhood. It was assumed that Anton would join the clergy, and Anton was teased as 'Pious Antosha'. Few pupils from Taganrog became priests, but the matriculating classes of its gimnazia in the late 1870s produced a great number of professionals: there were to be at least eleven doctors.40 Outside school the schoolboys led a wild social life. They would meet in a den, play cards, drink, smoke and indulge in amateur dramatics. The landlord tolerated this youth club. Precocious gimnazia boys also frequented Taganrog's notorious brothel. (Chekhov later admitted41 that he lost his virginity at the age of thirteen - probably at this establishment.)

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ãë i III:H i î ill i MAN

Vania, eighteen months younger, left the childless house of Marfa Morozova - where the sounds of thrashings still resounded - and moved in with his gentle Aunt Fenichka and her son Aleksei, calling in on the Loboda household for meals. On i November 1876 Mitrofan reported to Pavel: 'Vania… is living with Fenichka, he's only been going to school for the last week; he has some money from bookbinding; he asks you not to miss him or worry about him.' A fortnight later, Mitrofan clarified: 'Vania hasn't been going to school, but in late October there was a concert in the school hall for the benefit of poor pupils and it was a success. The next day Vania started attending and is getting good marks.'

Anton, on the other hand, Mitrofan saw only when the boy came to beg for a postage stamp or a glass of tea. All winter 1876-7 Pavel nagged his son: 'I told you to give the wall clock to Mitrofan and you sold it… Mama was expecting 20 roubles from you. When she heard that only 12 had been sent, she burst into floods of bitter tears.' The three roubles a week Antosha earned coaching barely paid his own costs, and he was sharing his income with a Jewish friend, Srulev. Although Selivanov owned the house, he was willing to let Pavel have the income from any tenants. This was Pavel's only hope. Anton persuaded the widow Savich, who lived next door with her daughter Iraida, to take a room in the Chekhov house. A rabbi was willing to take the house for 225 roubles a year; Pavel and Selivanov both held out for 300. Pavel was being unrealistic; Selivanov was perhaps now prevaricating, for he had no interest in Pavel earning enough to redeem his house. In mid December Selivanov made a surprise visit to Moscow, on his way to see his brother in Petersburg, and visited Pavel for just half an hour. They talked mainly about Pavel's debts; Pavel still trusted his former tenant. He wrote to Anton: 'We were very glad to see him.'

Pavel felt the house was morally his. On 21 December 1876 he sent a new power of attorney to Evgenia's bachelor brother-in-law, ()nufri Loboda: 'To rent out as living accommodation the brick house with iron roof and all outbuildings, a brick annexe and a carriage-house that is mine personally, at a price that you consider right for not less than one year…'

Pavel even three months later had no doubt that a tenant would be found. Evgenia, however, was alarmed by Selivanov's vagueness

1876-7

about the ownership of their house. In Spring 1877 she wrote anguished notes to Selivanov and to Anton: she was searching for another saviour. Her rich relatives, the Zakoriukins from Shuia, visited Moscow on their way back from a pilgrimage: they gave Masha 10 roubles for a new dress and offered Evgenia and her younger children hospitality in Shuia: I shall ask them to buy back the house and then we shall sell it to Gavriil Selivanov for 3400 roubles… ask him personally for Christ's sake to keep his promise to me, to let us buy it back and not to charge too much for the rebuilding, while we have a chance of asking the Zakoriukins. For God's sake, Antosha, talk to Mr Selivanov… our only hope is that God the King of Heaven will inspire Selivanov to do the good deed he promised [giving back the house D.R.]. Our life is very short and if he does a good deed for us, then he will live long, and if he does not, he will die before the year is out, I have entrusted this to St John the Divine… If Selivanov agrees and doesn't charge much for the house, then I shall come at the end of June and you and I will go to Moscow together. Anton read the letter to Selivanov, who snorted, 'I thought Evgenia was cleverer than that.' Evgenia intended, as soon as the weather was warm, to walk the thirty miles to the St Sergei monastery to pray for Selivanov's soul. Pavel merely asked Selivanov to get the family a 300-rouble grant from the Brotherhood.

The Shuia relations understood Evgenia's plight, but would not buy out Selivanov. Day-to-day living in Moscow was fraught and Pavel still had no work. In February 1877 he found a job as a builder's clerk on a church site. He was dismissed in two days. All that autumn and winter he had sat, idly pontificating. Infuriated, Aleksandr (who was then living with Kolia in a school) described to Anton Pavel's life in Moscow: We've borrowed 10 roubles from Misha Chokhov and they've been squandered and we sit weeping. Worst of all, we've lost all hope of finding a job. Every, every day we go to church and invariably, like an ex-businessman at the Exchange, we listen to talk about the Serbian war and usually come home empty-handed, for which we are met with tears of joy and the phrase: 'My bitter judgement', after which we disrobe, take a printed sermon out of our pocket, bought from the church elder, and begin to read aloud. Everyone

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listens to us and only occasionally docs the Artist [Kolia] slap his model's head and shout, 'Good Lord, Misha, when are you going to pose properly? Turn three-quarters-face.' Then after the injunction, 'Quieter you Antichrists,' order is restored. When the reading is over, the sermon is hung on a nail, with its number and the words 'Price one silver kopeck. Glory to Thee, Lord,' written on it.'42 Misha Chokhov could cheer up his destitute uncle and aunt, and even lend them 10 roubles, but he was busy at Gavrilov's and in his social life, and in no position to offer charity. A bleak winter followed. Rvgenia felt bereft not only of food, clothes and hope, but also of Anton's concern: We've had two letters from you full of jokes while we had only 4 kopecks for bread and dripping and waited for you to send money, it was very bitter, obviously you don't believe us, and Masha has no fur coat. I have no warm shoes, we stay at home, I have no sewing machine to earn money with… For God's sake send money quickly… please don't let me die of misery, you have plenty to eat and the sated can't understand the hungry. Tear this letter up. E. Chekhova. We sleep on the floor in a cold room… and tomorrow… we have to find 13 roubles for the flat.43 Anton showed little compassion. In a letter to Aleksandr he enclosed an iron hinge, a bread roll, a crochet hook and a picture of Filaret the Merciful. He teased his mother's lack of punctuation: when she instructed him 'Antosha in the pantry on the shelf he replied that there was no 'Antosha on the shelf in the pantry'.

When Mitrofan sent money, it was for Pavel to buy and send him a Church elder's uniform. He expected other services from Pavel, such as distributing his spiritual adviser's sermons in Moscow. Mitrofan would have sent with Ivan Loboda the coffee and halva that Rvgenia loved, but 'Loboda refuses to take anything crumbly'. Neither did Mitrofan send the sewing machine, because the railways were refusing freight that winter: the trains were requisitioned for the Russo-Turkish war, soon to rage in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Kolia's paintings, which he offered to his Taganrog relatives, were stranded at the station in Moscow for the same reason. Mitrofan wrote to Pavel and Evgenia: 'Without your sewing machine you have time to pick up a pen and tell Taganrogians about your life… have you

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got into debt there, or not? You write, my unforgettable brother, that you have no money… God will never abandon you.'

As November ended, Pavel's father Egor came to the rescue. Mitrofan announced: '… the old man, our kind parent, grieving and commiserating, cordially deigns from his own small earnings to send you, his beloved offspring, to feed your family, one hundred roubles. Let us give thanks to the Lord.' That Christmas saw another family conference in Taganrog. Old Egor summoned Selivanov to Mitrofan's house. Selivanov offered to sell Pavel's house to Mitrofan or Egor for the 500 roubles he had paid the bank. Neither Egor nor Mitrofan took up the offer. Selivanov felt his obligations to the older Chekhovs were now over. Within a year, after he had made repairs, he moved in, taking with him his nephew Petia Kravtsov, niece Sasha and Anton. Anton seemed happy as Selivanov's lodger. He was treated well by everyone except the cook Iavdokha, the only servant in Chekhov's life to mistreat him. She saw Anton as a hanger-on to be bullied, not a master to be obeyed. Anton and Petia greeted the New Year of 1877 raucously, firing a shotgun at the fence. He wrote to cousin Misha in Moscow: 'The room stinks of gunpowder and gun smoke covers the bed like fog; a terrible stench, for my pupil is firing rockets off in the room and at the same time is letting off his natural Cossack, rye-bread, home-grown explosive from a certain part of the body that is not called artillery.'

New Year in Moscow was grim, although the Taganrog authorities now allowed Mitrofan to buy Pavel and Evgenia a year's passport, so that they could live openly in Moscow. The eleven-year-old Misha showed enterprise. Wben threatened with joining the Gavrilov warehouse as a shop boy, he roamed all over Moscow, until he persuaded one headmaster to take him until a benefactor was found to pay the fees. In the severe cold of the winter of 1876-7 the eleven-year-old Misha ran to school without a coat. Egor's 100 roubles had soon gone. Anton was told to sell the family piano. Anton's earnings from his three pupils also went to Moscow. Kolia sold a painting, Aleksandr an anecdote, but both dressed fashionably and drank, and for much of the time lived apart from their parents or from each other. When Anton stopped sending cheap tobacco from Taganrog, Aleksandr spent his money on sweet, oval Saatchi and Mangoubi cigarettes.

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Money trickled in both direct s. Aleksandr sent Anton 15 roubles for the journey to Moscow in the Kastcr holidays. On 17 March 1877 Anton took the train for his first visit to Moscow, though nobody knew how they would pay his return fare. Aleksandr urged him to stay with him in the sordid Grachiovka, rather than in the crowded family flat-Firstly, because I live alone and therefore you won't be in my way, but will be a welcome guest; secondly, because our parents have just two rooms with a population of five human beings (the cur that lives there doesn't count); thirdly, my place is far more convenient than theirs and there are no Paul de Koks [Pavel], no Ma [Mama], nor 2 Ma [Masha] constandy weeping for any conceivable reason. Fourthly, I don't have the hideous drunken Gavrilov crowd; and fifthly, living with me you'll be free to do and go as you like. Rows were shaking the main family home. Kolia swore five times a day that he was leaving. Pavel and Evgenia were, half way through the academic year, despondently looking for a school for Masha and loudly complaining. Aleksandr was summoned to mediate by Masha. He found Evgenia shivering in a soot-covered overcoat in the kitchen, while Pavel sat in the living room mending his fur-coat, oblivious to the tears he had caused by swearing at his wife. Kolia would try to paint members of his family - his habit of screwing up one eye as he studied his model had earned him the nickname 'Cross-eye' - but Pavel would drive him and his 'stinking paints' into the kitchen. Pavel would then declare that he would no longer support his ungrateful family, muttering 'Blessed is the man that goes not to the council of the ungodly'. Evgenia felt insulted that Aleksandr lived apart. Aleksandr told Anton: I have a nice comfortable room, decent healthy board and clean linen, and above all peace and quiet, where you don't hear the voices of the beaten and the voice of the beater, where nobody fumes, bothers or gets in the way… None has ever asked me if I have any money, where I get it, how I earn it and if I have enough. They don't care. They only know that every month they get at the same date 5 roubles from me and about eight times a month, outside the due time, they send for a loan from me (repaid in the next world in burning coals). They can see I'm dressed decendy, my linen is shining clean, gloves, top hat, and they're sure I'm a millionaire.

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Aleksandr still dreamed of Marie Faist, even though there was now a Moscow woman whom Aleksandr called his wife. Aleksandr's sexual drive was strong. 'Fuck while the iron's hot,' was his motto. The 'wife' was, perhaps, Maria Polevaeva, his landlady. In summer 1878 Masha spent a week in the country with Maria Polevaeva. She and her sister Karolina Schwarzkopf (known as Kshi-Pshi) were the only women in her brothers' lives about whom Masha publicly said a bad word. Ten years later Aleksandr declared not marrying Marie Faist had wrecked his life. After two years apart, in early 1877, he still wanted her to be his bride: Could I stop loving her or forget her? Daddy and Mummy can set their minds at rest! No devil will make me get married. Let it be known to them that only she will be the wife in my home. But this will not happen before I am completely secure and have stuffed our parents' throats. Anton stayed with Aleksandr in Maria Polevaeva's house for two weeks among the thieves' dens and brothels of the Grachiovka. The most memorable aspects of his stay were visits to the theatre and the cementing of his friendship with his worldly twenty-five-year-old cousin, Misha Chokhov. Misha made the first move; in December 1876 Anton clasped the hand of friendship in tones that recall his father or uncle: Why should I hang back and not take up the blessed chance of getting to know a person like you and moreover I consider, and always have considered, it my obligation to respect the oldest of my cousins and respect a man whom our family regards so warmly. Misha Chokhov and his fellow shop-workers would visit the Chekhov household, down innumerable bottles and sing both church and folk songs at the top of their voices, Pavel rising to conduct the singers as he used to in the Palace chapel at Taganrog. The womenfolk -Evgenia, Masha and Misha Chokhov's sister Liza - would cover up the men when they fell asleep.

After the Easter holidays of 1877 the family scraped the money together to send Anton back to Taganrog and fabricated a medical certificate to explain the delay to the school inspecktor. Anton begged Misha to look after Evgenia: 'she is shattered, physically and morally

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… My mother has a character on which an outsider's moral support acts strongly and beneficially…'.

Moscow stimulated Anton. On his return he contributed to a new school magazine, Leisure, a sketch based on Taganrog scenes. That May examinations distracted him - 'I nearly went mad', he told Misha Chokhov. In the summer Anton resumed his effusive letters, begging his cousin once again to keep an eye on his mother. He expressed an affection that seemed to have survived beatings and tribulations: My father and mother are the only people in the whole wide world for whom I shall never ever grudge anything. If I ever stand high, it is their doing, they are glorious people, and their unbounded love of their children puts them above all praise, compensates for any faults of theirs. Anton missed Pavel and Evgenia badly. On 18 June 1877 Vania left Taganrog to join them in Moscow. Anton was invited to the wedding of Misha Chokhov's sister to a linen pedlar in Kaluga on 13 July, a merchant's extravaganza which Aleksandr, Kolia and Masha all attended (though Aleksandr thought the bride and groom the 'stupidest asses I ever met'). Nobody offered to pay Anton's fare from Taganrog, so he could not go.

EIGHT Ô

Alone

1877-9

ANTON STARTED the seventh and penultimate class in August 1877, after a month with the Kravtsovs in the steppes at Ragozina Gully and some weeks with Ivan Selivanov, riding to outlying farms. Back in Taganrog, Anton lived in the old family house with Gavriil Selivanov and the Selivanov-Kravtsov offspring, Petia and Sasha. He wrote. I Ie sent sketches and verses via Aleksandr to journals such as The.?Harm Clock, signing himself 'Nettles'. Some were rejected, all were lost.

In late 1877 and early 1878 Anton tried his hand at drama. (Even è fourteen he is reported dramatizing Gogol's historical tale Taras liulba.) At eighteen, he composed a farce The Scythe Strikes the Stone and a full-length drama, Fatherlessness. Fatherlessness is an appropriate title for his last years in Taganrog, but what the play was about we do not know.44 In October 1878 Aleksandr delivered his judgement on his brother's work: Two scenes in Fatherlessness are handled with genius, even, but on the whole it's an unforgivable, if innocent lie… The Scythe Strikes the Stone is written in excellent language which is very typical for each character developed, but your plot is very shallow. The latter I said (for convenience) was mine and read it to friends… the answer was: 'The writing is fine, it has skill, but little observation and no experience of life.'

What Anton read and saw in the 1870s we know from Taganrog's library and theatre. Presumably, Pavel took to Moscow in 1876 his substantial collection of religious books. Anton's own books give us few hints. Perhaps his books from the 1860s and 1870s were bought later; as a schoolboy he could afford little. Translations of Hamlet and Macbeth (1861 -2) may be the first books Anton acquired. Hamlet looks

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like a schoolboy's possession: the owner's name is written five times, and it has pencil marks in the margins. Ë few books are numbered: a prayer book of 1855 is No. 63, Hamlet is No. 82; Macbeth No. 8 -No. 85, however, is a medical textbook published in 1881. Anton may as a boy have owned from youth Goethe's Faust in a Russian version of 1871 and an 1803 Russian translation of Beccaria's pioneering On Crimes and Punishments^

Medicine, not literature, was the career he contemplated, and he wanted to go straight from Taganrog to Zurich university - the Mecca for Russian medical students. Aleksandr argued against this plan and gave Anton a guide to the universities of Russia, from the distinguished German university of Dorpat to the Armenian academy in Nakhichevan where they taught 'hairdressing, shaving and cutting corns'. Aleksandr himself was happy in the science and mathematics faculty of Moscow university. He focused Anton's ambitions on Moscow.

Anton was set on university; he announced to Aleksandr in June 1877 that he 'sent all young ladies packing'. Aleksandr responded: 'You shouldn't be a skirt-chaser, but there's no need to avoid women.' The Taganrog theatre too lost its appeal, after the excitement of Moscow. Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of its most successful stagings, seemed just a 'tear-jerker'. Although the authorities removed some 300 'seditious' books and journals in 1878, the Public Library was Anton's lifeline, and his reading was now serious. He even advised his elder brothers to read Turgenev's essay Don Quixote and Hamlet, a study of the Russian antihero which has a bearing on Chekhov's own fictional heroes who would be, like Turgenev's, either Quixotic men of action who do not think, or cerebral Hamlets who cannot act.

The pressure to send money to his family - and tobacco and cigarette paper to Aleksandr - did not relent. In return Anton asked for drawing instruments, but Aleksandr claimed that they were too expensive to send. He asked for Aleksandr's chemistry notes, but Aleksandr said that they were beyond his understanding. He asked for logarithm tables, but Pavel could not afford a set.

Hope dawned in Moscow. Konstantin Makarov, a drawing teacher who had taken a liking to Anton in Easter 1877, invited Masha to a ball at the Moscow cadet school where he taught. There she met a pupil of the episcopal Filaret girls' gimnazia. Masha followed her young brother Misha's example. She went to ask the Bishop of

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Moscow for a free place, but the Bishop told her, 'I'm not a millionaire' and refused. A Taganrog colleague of Pavel's, the merchant Sabinin, then took pity and offered to pay. She was quickly tutored for entry into the second year, and in August 1877 was accepted into the Filaret school. Misha, too, had found a benefactor: old Gavrilov paid his fees. Kvgenia pawned her gold bracelets to pay the rent, but Pavel now had hopes of returning south. Another bankrupt merchant had returned to Taganrog, Mitrofan reported, and would start afresh; perhaps Pavel might do the same. Alms arrived: Pavel's sister Aleksandra sent three roubles through Mitrofan; Father Filaret, treasurer of the Brotherhood, sent a rouble; an old colleague sent two. Finally, a member of the Taganrog administration hinted that if Pavel returned, he might have a clerical job at 600 roubles a year. In June 1877 Mitrofan was encouraging: 'have faith that the Lord will not abandon you. Many people are suffering, but not Ivan Loboda and Gavriil Selivanov: those two will probably never be touched by poverty.'

Pavel was offered a clerical job by a church charity. Although he Could compose a lament or a sermon, he could not write a memorandum and was dismissed. In their Moscow flat, at the end of September, he posted up a family roster: Timetable of jobs and household obligations to be carried out in the family house of Pavel Chekhov, resident of Moscow. Where it is stated who is to get up, go to bed, dine, go to church and when, and what jobs to do in their free time, namely… Mikhail Chekhov, aged 11; Maria Chekhova, aged 14: Going to church without delay for all night Vigil at 7 p.m. and early Matins at 6.30 and late Matins at 9.30 on Sundays. Misha had to 'clean boots with a rag', Masha 'to comb her hair carefully'. Those who do not obey this roster are liable first to a severe reprimand and then to punishment, during which crying out is forbidden. Father of the Family Pavel Chekhov. Misha was beaten for oversleeping by eight minutes and not looking at the timetable. He was then instructed: 'Get up and look at the timetable to see if it is time to get up and if it is too early, then go back to bed.' A row blew up between Vania and Pavel over a pair of trousers: Aleksandr described it to Anton (1 November 1877):

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FATHER li) I 111 MAN The father of the family followed him and, m the Taganrog custom, started hitting him round the face. «Xlendcil by such cruel treatment, Member of the Family Ivan Chekhov, aged 17, opened his throat wide and called out as loud as he could. The landlord and landlady and the family members who ran towards the row shamed the Father of the Family and made him release the Member. Then the landlord and landlady made things very clear, pointing to the gate, while the Father of the Family smiled in the most innocent way… Salvation came from old Gavrilov: on 10 November 1877, after seventeen months' idleness, Pavel Chekhov was hired as a clerk. For 30 roubles a month, with free board and lodging, this ex-merchant, aged fifty-two, had to live like the shop boys, working from before dawn well into the night, with the 'right' to board and lodging on the premises (of which he usually availed himself). He could bring home sugar, which the family fed to Misha's puppy, now Korbo the family dog. The roster was taken off the wall. Work in the warehouse stopped the quarrels at home; now the shop boys bore the brunt of Pavel's lectures on how to trade and live. These earned him the name of 'Teacher of Morals'. Pavel was no longer head of the household but a visiting relative, though he never accepted demotion. Evgenia wept less. Kolia worked at home for his gold medal; his best friend, a mortally consumptive artist Khelius (known as Nautilus), came to live with them. Kolia's fame grew: he was now painting theatre sets for a wealthy patron.

In August Anton had written to Misha Chokhov asking him to lobby Gavrilov for Aleksei Dolzhenko. Old Gavrilov not only took on Pavel, but also subsidized Mikhail Chekhov's schooling and promised Pavel's nephew, Aleksei Dolzhenko, a place from February 1878. What had driven Gavrilov to relent towards the Chekhovs? Undoubtedly Misha Chokhov had pleaded Pavel's case. For all the Chokhov hedonism - 'If you drink, you die, if you don't drink, you die, so better drink' - Misha and his siblings were amiable.

Pavel made decisions and paid off minor creditors, such as the old family nurse. He fantasized about becoming rich. At the end of 1877 he had decided: 'Antosha! When you finish studying at the Taganrog gimnazia, you must join the Medical faculty, for which you have our blessing. Aleksandr's choice was frivolous against our wishes and so quite unsuccessful.' In fact Aleksandr excelled in everything from

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Scripture to Physics, but no longer propitiated a father on whom he did not depend. Now that Pavel spent all day and most nights at «..ivrilov's, Aleksandr rejoined his mother, his siblings and the dog. Anion, unlike Aleksandr, went through the motions of consultation. Kven Kolia's art won Pavel's approval. In January 1878 he told Anton: 'We desire you to have the character of your brother Kolia!… by his behaviour he has won good comrades… Nothing in the world cheers us now, we have just one consolation, our children, if they are good.'4'

Pavel fought any wilfulness in his offspring. Anton had written about his 'convictions' and at the end of January Pavel responded with ïîïó: 'Our own convictions feed us no bread, which is why I work for Mr Gavrilov according to his convictions.' Pavel embarrassed Anton by asking Father Pokrovsky to protect the boy. He devised ploys for buying back the family house. He conceded that Selivanov might never let the house revert, but perhaps he could retrieve his lost capital. To Mitrofan and Liudmila Pavel wrote: So, my dear Brother, if I can buy back our house perhaps with the money collected for Mt Athos monastery and the income from the house can be the interest for the loan, when business in Taganrog improves and a starting price can be named, then ask permission to sell it.47 Mitrofan quashed the idea almost by return of post: the Athos fathers' money kept in the Taganrog branch of the State bank is held solely by Father Filaret to be sent to Odessa… But Father Filaret, for all his kindness, finds joy in the miseries of those who do not live as he does… I shall tell him frankly that I am trading badly, not covering my expenses, so that he does not reproach me for not helping you… Fgor's 1878 New Year letter to Pavel is gruesome: Your mother, Pavel, has been suffering for nearly two years with an untreatable illness, neither her arms nor her legs work, not only was her body withered, but her bones are like splinters, she lies in bed not moving, moreover recently she has a disease of the head, the tumour on her face is like a pillow and there are water blisters and now she cannot see the light of heaven. She is suffering and I am struck down by exhaustion of spirit and strength, she repeatedly asks o;

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I Ë I II I ii H» I It I MAN God Tor death, but the hour («»t her soul to depart lias not come, she is fed and watered by strangers, when there is no kin, in this grief she often calls on the Lord, she rails, groans day and night, like a fish against the ice, she recalls past happiness, and the present is not happy, she says 'I gave birth to children and saw them, but they are no more, they have scattered over the face of the earth, now they would help me and pity me in my great need.' On 26 February 1878, nearly eighty years old, Efrosinia died - of smallpox, it is reported. Efrosinia's death broke Egor. That summer, at the age of eighty, he left Countess Platova and visited each of his surviving children and grandchildren in turn: first in Taganrog, then in Kaluga, and in Moscow. In December Egor wrote to Pavel and Evgenia and their children, whose names he confused: I speak to you perhaps for the last time… as the first cause of your existence on the earth… I have eaten our daily bread from the table of kind, giving gentlemen, my kind children… forget not the sinful Egor in your prayers… console me with your letters while I am here on earth and when I am in the next world and if by God's mercy I shall be free from deepest hell, I shall write to you from there how sinners live and how the righteous rejoice with the holy angels… now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. In early 1879 the 'mobile bronze statue' went to stay with his daughter in Tverdokhliobovo and died there of a heart attack on 12 March 1879. At nineteen Anton had lost all his grandparents and three of his uncles. Little wonder that cemeteries haunted his dreams and his waking hours.

Others close to him in Taganrog were disappearing. In early May 1878 his cousin Aleksei Dolzhenko left for Moscow to begin, at the age of thirteen, a life of drudgery at Gavrilov's. After two weeks Aleksei took to Moscow life, while his mother, Fenichka, grieved, for two months alone and chronically ill, in Taganrog. On 31 July, her bags packed by Anton, with presents from Mitrofan and old Egor, Fenichka arrived in Moscow to live with Evgenia. Her sister hesitated, for Fenichka was a 'grumbler' and a drain on the house, but when the widow arrived Evgenia was ecstatic: 'I talk and I cry when I have to tell her about past grief.' For the next thirteen years the two sisters were almost inseparable, nursing each other, visiting holy relics, cooking and sewing. Pavel was far cooler. He wrote to Anton: 'Mrs Dol1877-9 zhenko arrived… let her not yearn and may she live better than with Aleksei in Taganrog, she has already seen him and upset herself…'

Selivanov and the Kravtsovs had by this time become more of a family to Anton than his own. He was now eighteen. He even contemplated taking Sasha Selivanova with him when he went to Moscow and enquired about the curriculum in the girls' school which Masha was attending. (The Filaret school had compulsory German, strict Religious Knowledge, and no dancing - to the dismay of a vivacious (lossack girl like Sasha Selivanova.) Despite all his extra-curricular work, Anton's marks in May 1878 were excellent. He rejected his mother's pleas to join the family that summer. He roamed the steppes around Ragozina Gully with Petia Kravtsov and gun dogs.

Life in Moscow was less harrowing now that Pavel had found work. Aleksandr and Kolia socialized with the demi-monde of Moscow. By March 1878 Aleksandr had left his 'ungodly' wife. Pavel was overjoyed and called him Sashenka again, but Aleksandr's 'room' was occupied by a tenant. Despite Pavel's long absences, the family found a new subject for quarrelling. On 17 March 1878 Aleksandr told Anton: Vania simply rages. Yesterday he virtually thrashed mother and when father is there he turned out to be such an angel that I still can't get over my astonishment. He really is a nasty piece of work, brother!… He answered that he doesn't have to work, that his affairs are none of his mother's business and that he has to be fed, cared for and nurtured because he was summoned from Taganrog to Moscow!!!… Vania, now seventeen, gravitated away from school to his elder brothers' bohemian life. He went carriage-riding; he serenaded girls. In April 1879 he failed his examinations. Masha also had to retake a year, Misha only just scraped through, and even Kolia failed History of the Christian Church. Kolia was on the road to fame; Aleksandr had returned to the fold, but Vania, Kolia complained to Anton, is trouble. He can't walk past without punching Masha or Misha in the neck… You can't get through to Vania with preaching, he just does nothing, despite the unbearable family quarrels which he is the only reason for… we have rows, violence… I get myself a room which I obviously pay for, and now Vania has moved in with me…

6.,

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I' Ë III I It I II I || I MAN lie was in real danger of servitude, lor Pavel now proposed to put him in a factory. Mimicking the parental tone, Kolia copied out an interminable letter to their father: What's the point of him working two years at a factory and then being recruited for six years as a soldier?… if he is a workman, this reflects badly on you… what will he do with his limited pay?… No, Papa!48 Vania was too big to thrash. In May Pavel reprimanded his errant son: Recently you have become useless, idle and disobedient… How many times have I asked you… your conscience is asleep… you come home at midnight, you sleep the sleep of the dead until noon… Widi God's help and blessing try to find yourself a job in Moscow in a Factory or in a Shop… the Iron foundry or a Technical Institute.49 Vania was saved in 1879 by being examined and passed, thanks to Mikhail Diukovsky, a teacher and close friend of Aleksandr and Kolia. Vania was transformed from lout into student-teacher. Pavel was delighted.

Kolia was to be in more serious trouble. He was only interested in finding a studio where his models could pose for him. He never bothered to register with the military for exemption. He asked Anton to send the necessary papers from Taganrog to Rostov-on-the-Don, but Anton replied only with jokes about him being conscripted. The worse the rows, the more the family longed for Anton, the one member of the family never to shout, hit out or weep. Kolia promised his father: 'You and Mama will be considerate to each other, our submissive brother Anton will come and we shall live, thank God, a glorious life.'

The women of the household had respite from Kolia and Vania in September 1878: their rich relatives, the Zakoriukins and Liadovs, invited them to Shuia, where Evgenia had spent her childhood. Showered with presents and friendship, they returned in early October, and the Chekhov family moved to a more spacious apartment. Still on the notorious Grachiovka attached to the church of St Nicolas, it was a dank basement: all that the inmates could see ,877-9 from the window were the ankles of passers-by. Here the Chekhovs took a lodger: an art student who paid 20 roubles to be fed by Evgenia and taught by Kolia.

Evgenia longed to reunite her family. On New Year's day 1879,.liter the older Chekhovs had returned at 4 a.m. from the Polevaevs, Fvgenia wrote to Anton: I want you to finish your course in Taganrog safely and come to us as quickly as you can. I have never been at peace it's soon two years since we saw each other… I have a lot to tell you, but I can't see well and I don't even want to write… Aleksandr took us to the Artistic Circle Christmas party. Masha danced a lot, tell everybody. On Anton's nineteenth birthday the message was reinforced by Pavel: 'Use every means to lighten Mama's burdensome fate, she is your Only One. Nobody loves you like your Mother.'50 Feeding and clothing her children and a tenant left Evgenia exhausted. By the standards of her class she was living in disgraceful poverty, for she had no servant and stoked the stoves and swept the rooms herself.

Fenichka was bedridden - terrified of fire, she would lie down clothed in all her garments, including her galoshes. She added to the burdens by adopting a stray bitch. When Pavel came home, he offered to help, but complained of giddiness and exhaustion from his labours at (lavrilov's. 'At least come quickly, Fenichka says you're hard-working,' Evgenia begged Anton on 1 March: Every hour I ask God to bring you quickly, but Papa says when Antosha comes he will just go visiting and won't do anything, but Fenichka argues that you are a homebody and a hard worker. I don't know whom to believe… I have no time to sleep. Antosha, on Easter Sunday go to Matins at the St Michael church and then be shriven… Evgenia's eldest sons led unshriven lives. Aleksandr caroused at weddings. Kolia wallowed in misery: his beloved had left him to marry the manager of a hospital; Khelius, his closest friend, died of ÒÂ. Rather than come home, Kolia would spend the night at the school where Diukovsky taught. Easily led, he began a dissolute life. He and Aleksandr frequented the notorious pleasure gardens of Strelna that winter. Aleksandr warned Anton in February: 'Kolia is starting new pictures and not finishing them. He's in love again, not that this stops

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him from visiting the Salon des Vari6t6s, doing the cancan there and taking ladies off for all-night vigils.' Tins Bohemianism eclipsed in Evgenia's eyes the prestige of paintings that were used as cover pictures for a satirical weekly. She wanted Anton's support: 'Quickly finish your studies in Taganrog and come as fast as you can, please… I need you to start on the medical faculty… We don't like Aleksandr's occupation, send us our icons a few at a time…'

Kolia too put store on Anton's arrival, promising that with Misha they would walk to St Sergei monastery as soon as he reached Moscow. Perhaps he felt penitent. Now Aleksandr frequented the editorial offices of the weekly magazine Chiaroscuro, where he also published sketches and stories. A new family entered the Chekhovs' lives: the wife of the publisher Nikolai Pushkariov was Anastasia Putiata-Golden. Her two sisters were to play a fateful part in the lives of Aleksandr, Kolia and Anton. The second sister, the Valkyrian Anna Ipatieva-Golden, was already Kolia's mistress.

Anton sent a description of his grandfather's funeral, then faced the examinations on which everything hung. He knew what awaited those who did not qualify for tertiary education: on i March he had registered at a Taganrog recruiting centre. Every examination had to be passed. On 15 May he took the Russian essay: set by the Chief Education Officer in Odessa, the topic reflected the convictions of the Tsar's government: 'There is no greater evil than anarchy'. The examination started at 10.20 a.m. and Anton was the last to finish, at 4.55 p.m. The longest philosophical discourse that Chekhov ever wrote, his essay earned a commendation for its literary finish. The next day Anton took Scripture and gained a '5'; successive days brought History Oral ('4'), Latin ('3') and Latin Oral ('4'). After a fortnight came Greek ('4'), Greek Oral ('4') and Mathematics ('3'). On 11 June disaster nearly struck: in Mathematics Oral Anton failed to multiply fractions correctly, and only after a vote was he conceded the vital '3'. On 15 June 1879, he received a matriculation certificate, signed by Actual State Councillor and Chevalier Edmund Reutlinger, Diakonov, Father Pokrovsky and seven other teachers. Chekhov had been awarded '5's in Religious Knowledge (both examination and course work), Geography, French and German (course work). In Latin, mathematics, physics and natural sciences - the relevant subjects for medicine - he had scored only '3's. He had a '4' for Russian language

1877-9

and literature. His behaviour was 'excellent', his attendance and effort 'very good'.

In August Taganrog's administration for the meshebane (petit bourgeoisie) issued Anton with a 'ticket of leave' for study in Moscow. This includes a physical description: height 6' 1" (2 arshins, 9 vershki, i.e. 1.84 m.), dark auburn hair and eyebrows, black eyes, moderate nose, mouth and chin, long unmarked face, special marks: scar on forehead under hairline.

He left for Moscow at the last possible moment. Pavel and Evgenia begged him to sell the kitchen table and the shop scales. Anton was to bring with him Pavel's iconostasis, ledger books and shop drawers, Misha's bedstead, and buckets and baskets filled with Fenichka's belongings. Evgenia asked him to shame Selivanov into returning the house. Pavel issued him with a sermon: Fight your bad tendencies… I give you good advice and so does Mama: never do anything according to your own will, always act as we desire; live as God commanded, Your friends, your true friends are Papa and Mama. Anton lingered in Taganrog - he planned to stay the summer at Ragozina Gully and at Kotlomino, twenty miles from the city, with a school friend, Vasili Zembulatov. Pavel wrote to him that 'we shall just be looking forward to you and withering'.

In late July Anton prepared to leave for Moscow. On 2 August Taganrog gave Anton his 'ticket of absence'; on the 4th he had his permit to study at Moscow university signed by the city elder for the meshchane. He was also awarded what he had lobbied for all summer: one of ten new bursaries of 25 silver roubles a month that Taganrog city council awarded its best school-leavers. Anton recruited two tenants: his school friends Dmitri Saveliev and Vasili Zembulatov, two years older than Anton, who were also starting medicine at Moscow University. They each offered 20 roubles a month to the household on the Grachiovka. On 6 August, laden with baggage, Anton boarded the train to a new life.

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Doctor Chekhov ô I was frequently more proud of a skilful amputation, of the successful cure of a rash, of progress in riding, or of conquering a woman, than of the praise I heard for my first ventures in literature. Konstantin Leontiev, My Literary Fate

NINE

Ô

Initiation

1879-80

ON 10 AUGUST 1879, in the basement flat on the Grachiovka, after two years away from them, Anton Chekhov was reunited with his family.1 Misha, now eleven, sunning himself at the yard gates, took time to recognize his brother; Pavel was sent a telegram at Gavrilov's across the river. Misha took Anton and his two friends on a walk around Moscow, before the family's first celebratory supper in five years. The next day brought a gentleman from the northern city of Viatka. He asked the Chekhovs to take in his son, Nikolai Korobov, another medical student. Korobov was a virginal, gentle person, unlike the extrovert southerners, Anton's companions from Taganrog, Sevel-iev and Zembulatov, but gruelling studies and the Grachiovka made the four medical students friends for life. The Chekhovs' poverty had been alleviated. Never again would Evgenia take in washing, or Masha cook in neighbours' houses. Evgenia fed her household to satiety, and almost made ends meet. Aleksandr and Kolia rarely came to stay; soon Vania, too, would cut loose. Evgenia and Fenichka had a servant girl. After a month in the basement, the family moved down the Grachiovka to more salubrious quarters. Here they slept two to a room, with a room for dining and entertaining.

Anton and his friends went to register at the University. Medical students had their classes in spacious clinics on the Rozhdestvenka (near the Grachiovka). Moscow University's medical school was in its prime, with professors of world renown, and 200 students graduating annually from a demanding five-year course. The first generation of purely Russian specialists was ousting the Germans who had dominated Russian medicine until now. First-year students, however, did not attend the lectures of the great professors Zakharin, Sklifosovsky and Ostroumov. They were taught by junior assistants. Anton had to study inorganic chemistry, physics, mineralogy, botany and zoology,

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DOC I Î It (II I KIIOV not to mention theology. I le studied the 'anatomy of the healthy human being'. The modern student gets a pickled limb, dissected by dozens before him; in nineteenth century Moscow, as in London and Paris, each student had a corpse from Moscow's poor who had been hanged or drowned, died of alcohol poisoning, cold, typhoid, ÒÂ or starvation, been murdered or crushed by machinery. Anatomy was a testing ground for new students; even those taking philosophy and literature came to the anatomy theatre to steel their nerves. Chekhov was not the first Russian writer whose powers of observation and analysis were trained by the dissection of corpses.

There were mundane reasons for choosing medicine: it was a secure and prestigious profession. Anton was a student who never failed an exam, but not an academic high flyer. In therapeutic medicine he was imadventurous. His bent - for diagnosis and forensics - was apt for a writer too. All his life his eye for a fatal disease and a victim's life expectancy was feared, and his autopsies admired. In psychiatry, then in its infancy, Anton also showed prowess. He lacked, however, a surgeon's callousness and dexterity. Some had reservations about his choice of career. Selivanov wrote: I read the letter of a doctor-to-be who in the not too distant future will in the course of his profession be despatching several dozen people into eternity… I would not like to see you become a bad or mediocre doctor, but to meet you as a sensational Professor of Medicine.2 Anton did not cut the cord tying him to Taganrog. He wrote to Petia Kravtsov, who, after Chekhov's tutoring, was in cadet college (much to Selivanov's gratitude) and also to Uncle Mitrofan. Anton needed friends in Taganrog, and had to grovel to the city fathers, who disliked disbursing their ten scholarships.

Anton now took up with friends he had made in Easter 1877, who were part of Kolia's social circle. Their friend the drawing-teacher Konstantin Makarov died of typhoid in 1879, but another teacher, Mikhail Diukovsky, fanatically admired Kolia, Anton and Masha. Through Diukovsky and Kolia, Anton was befriended by art students who were to shape his future - Franz Schechtel, the future architect who would design the cover for his first collection of stories, and Isaak Levitan, soon to become Russia's leading landscape painter.

1879-80

Aleksandr was for Anton a link to literature, through the Moscow weeklies, where Aleksandr was both a contributor and an editorial hanger-on. Aleksandr, still studying chemistry and mathematics, was at first little help: he was drifting to the gentry with his friends, the rich, sick and dissipated orphans, Leonid and Ivan Tretiakov. Their guardian, Malyshev, was chief inspector of Village Schools for Moscow province and helped to find work for Vania. He sent the lad forty miles west of Moscow to Voskresensk, where there was a school attached to a cloth mill owned by a magnate named Tsurikov. Tsurikov allotted Vania an adequate salary, and a house substantial enough to accommodate all the Chekhovs when, from May to August, Anton, Masha and Misha were free from study. Vania, at eighteen, was transformed from an undesirable lodger into a giver of sanctuary. Pavel was exultant: Voskresensk stood by the famous monastery of New Jerusalem. Mitrofan congratulated the Moscow Chekhovs: 'How pleasant that you have an occasion to visit New Jerusalem often… I live badly, I sin much, pray for me.'

Anton tried to break into the weekly journals, but destroyed the manuscript of Fatherlessness, the play he had sent for Aleksandr's verdict. In October, as 'Chekhonte', a nickname that Father Pokrovsky had given him, he despatched a story, 'Bored Philanthropists', to The Alarm Clock, where Aleksandr was a familiar. He waited for one of The Alarm Clock's acerbic responses, but the rejection, when it came, was polite. On Evgenia's name-day, 24 December 1879, there was no money for a cake. Anton sat down and wrote a parody of his father's and grandfather's ignorant and menacing pomposity, 'A Don Landowner's Letter to a Learned Neighbour' for The Dragonfly. On 13 January he received his first acceptance.

The Dragonfly was a breakthrough, but only for a year. Its editor, Ippolit Vasilevsky, had a poor eye for new talent.3 Two years passed before The Alarm Clock and then The Spectator published Anton, though these journals were a second home for Aleksandr and Kolia. The 5 kopecks a line that Vasilevsky paid his contributors was a pittance: six stories published in the second half of 1880 brought Anton a total of 32 roubles 25 kopecks. Such journals sold to 2000 subscribers and twice as many casual buyers at 10 to 20 kopecks a copy; no editor could offer even regular contributors a living wage. The trap into which Chekhov was falling forced writers to compose

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weekly stories, each under a different pseudonym, for several journals, to earn no more than Pavel Chekhov's wages in a warehouse.

The Dragonfly rejected as many as it accepted of Anton's first sketches. His contributions were as good as any, but he restricted himself to parody. Another piece, 'What do we find most often in novels, stories etc.', printed in March 1880, mocked the cliches of Russian authors and predicted what the mature Chekhov would shun: A count, a countess with traces of long lost beauty, a neighbour (a baron), a liberal writer, an impoverished gentleman, a foreign musician, dim footmen, nurses, a governess, a German estate manager, an esquire and an heir from America… Seven deadly sins and a marriage in the end. That year Anton made no impact on his readers, nor on the family finances. Kolia earned far more and, when he painted stage sets or portraits of the Tsar, could subsidize the family as well as pay for his own dissipation. The Chekhovs still looked on their rich relatives in Shuia with envy, and Mitrofan, impressed when he saw his nephews in print, still saw the Moscow Chekhovs as pitiably poor relations. The Moscow Chekhovs did not put down roots: they had nearly a dozen addresses in Moscow in Anton's student years. Spring 1880 found them in another house on the Grachiovka belonging to a priest, Father Ivan Priklonsky. Even with the lodgers' income and Vania's new career, the Chekhov household sank back into debt. In April 1880, Pavel reproached Anton for our house [in Taganrog] which still has no tenant after two years, and the goods taken on tick from the Grocer's Shop. I am shaken by any unjust action and my health is harmed. I am pleased and content when modesty, moderation and punctuality in life are observed by my children… I'm sorry tbat Kolia… has abandoned art and is busy with things that bring him neither money nor a profession. It is very disagreeable to me that I and your Mother have made efforts to set him straight, but he has gone by his own will and desire, has lost his path and become stuck in a bog… AJeksandr has shortened my life by half and has ruined my healtli. Antosha, my friend, note what I have written and treasure these words and pass them on to your brothers. P. Chekhov.

1879-80

In the April examinations, Anton had a mere '3' for anatomy. (Alek-sandr, who as a natural scientist also took anatomy, had a '5'.) He consoled himself with AJeksandr and other students in the bars of Sokolniki park, drinking punch and Russian 'cognac'. Anton and AJeksandr composed a drunken letter to the 'cross-eyed' Kolia, after rounding off the night with the whores of the Salon des Varietes: 'I salted the dives and hammered the lamp into the creme tartare of chastity,' Anton ended cryptically.

Uncle Mitrofan knew nothing of this. He dined out on Anton's selective accounts of Moscow life, and read them out to neighbours, priests and relatives. He invited Anton to Taganrog for the summer holidays. Anton was only too pleased to accept. By early June Korobov had returned to the Urals, and Zembulatov to Kotlomino; Taganrog town hall hinted that Anton had to fetch his bursary in person. Pavel's behaviour drove his sons south. One evening, fuelled by vodka, he raged at their guests. His apologies to his sons did not undo the damage: [Saveliev] is worse than any old woman. He had 3 glasses while I was there, and he got carried away, well, nobody suited him, I very much regret that I had a conversation with him, thanks to a sip of vodka he has twisted my words in me worst sense, has turned every-diing inside out. To Hell with him! I excuse him, but I'm embarrassed with regard to Maria Egorovna [Polevaeva] and Karolina Egorovna [Schwarzkopf].* In July Anton and Kolia took the train south. Anton stayed a month with Vasili Zembulatov. They dissected rats and frogs. He lingered in the steppes with the Zembulatovs, before visiting Taganrog, where he collected 75 roubles from the town hall and sent his father 15. Nevertheless, leaving for Moscow on 26 August, Anton had to beg Zembulatov to advance him the rent. August in Taganrog was expensive. Evgenia and the younger children were with Vania in Voskre-sensk. Pavel, alone in Moscow, told Anton and Kolia to visit Father Bandakov, to get news of their old nanny, to visit their grandfather's grave at Tverdokhliobovo 400 miles away, and to list outstanding debts in Taganrog. Most precise was his order for 'a gallon of Santurini wine from Titov or Iani at the Old Market at 4 roubles the two gallons.'5

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The girls of Taganrog in the iKKos were in a predicament that preoccupied Anton Chekhov's mature prose. Every enterprising, intelligent male school-leaver left for university in Moscow, Petersburg or Kharkov; the girls were left with their impatient parents, playing the piano, embroidering pillow cases, their only potential grooms the sons of merchants and officials, too complacent to leave. Work as schoolteacher or midwife meant poverty and exploitation. Their third choice was to elope with an actor or musician, and blot the family escutcheon. Their predicament was to be lamented in many of Chekhov's stories of provincial incarceration. In Moscow, among more calculating beauties, Anton had missed the impetuosity of Taganrog's Greek girls. Now he and Kolia had romantic hopes. Kolia addressed Liubochka Kamburova as 'Empress of my Soul, Diphtheria of my Thoughts, Carbuncle of my Heart', though he had been pursuing her friend Kotik ('Kitten'). Of the Taganrog girls, the boldest on paper was, however, the half Greek Lipochka Agali. In October she wrote: 'None of your young ladies dares write to you, for fear you will criticize their spelling. But I'm not afraid since I'm sure that you won't laugh at me, you're my defender, aren't you…'6 Selivanov cynically congratulated Kolia on his luck: 'You've had payment in kind which you enjoy, if I'm not mistaken, right left and centre, I mean on canvas and between the sheets - and she's not bad-looking - I've seen her portrait; your adolescent fancy "Kitten…'"

Anton brought back a human skull from Taganrog: it had pride of place in his room, this time in yet another house on the Grachiovka.

TEN Ô

The Wedding Season

1880-1

THE CHEKHOV FAMILY moved again in November 1880, a quarter of a mile uphill from the Grachiovka, to more reputable, long-term quarters; the landlady, Mrs Golub, had a weakness for Anton. Their lodgers did not follow: Korobov, Saveliev and Zembulatov sought a less turbulent host than Pavel.

Anton's second year of medicine was demanding: students dissected corpses by day, and studied pharmacology by night. Medicine absorbed Anton more than literature in early 1881. The weekly journals were lukewarm to Anton. The Dragonfly's rejections became ruder: in December, Vasilevsky printed an opinion, 'You are fading before you blossom. Great pity.' It took six months to find an outlet for his work. Politics was stifling the popular press. Censorship in 1881 became so harsh as to endanger the journals in which Anton made his debut. The Talk of the World had an issue confiscated for its cover picture - pens and inkwell in the shape of a gallows with the caption: 'Our instrument for deciding vital questions.'

The public mood was no longer inclined towards humour. That spring the atmosphere had become oppressive. On 1 March terrorists blew up Tsar Alexander II in Petersburg. Petersburg was shaken by the wave of arrests, and the barbarous spectacle of a multiple hanging by a drunken hangman, before the world's ambassadors. In Moscow, professors who called on Alexander III to reprieve his father's murderers were dismissed. The Tsar's family believed that God had killed Alexander II for adultery and for undermining autocracy, but would not spare his killers. Alexander III, a bluff military man with a love of the bottle, left ideology to his tutor, the Procuror of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. The Procuror was an intellectual - he had presumed to advise Dostoevsky on the composition of The Brothers Karamazov. His views were that the State should only prepare

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1880-I

souls for the afterlife. 'The existence of unbridled newspapers,' he said, had no part in the salvation of the populace. Police spies were everywhere: Anisim Petrov came from Taganrog to stay with the Chekhovs for a month, almost certainly on official instructions.7 The student body was in turmoil. In student meetings held at the university during March, as far as Nikolai Korobov recalled, Anton was present but silent, 'neither indifferent nor active'. On anti-Semitism, however, Anton spoke his mind. When his school friend, Solomon Kramariov, bemoaned his hardships as a Jew studying law in Kharkov: 'The Jews are being beaten everywhere and all over, which won't gladden the heart of Christians like you, for example.'8 Anton offered vigorous support: 'Come and study and teach in Moscow: things look good for Taganrog men in Moscow… Disraelis, Rothschilds and Kramariovs don't and won't get beaten up… If you are beaten in Kharkov, write and tell me: I'll come. I like beating up those exploiters…'

In this unhappy spring 1881 Anton asserted his authority in the family: he quarrelled with Aleksandr for turning up drunk and sparking off a family row: 'I don't let my mother, sister or any woman say a word out of place to me… "being drunk" doesn't give you a right to shit on anyone's head…'

Anton published nothing in spring 1881: perhaps he was writing his first surviving play, a monstrous melodrama usually known by the name of its main protagonist, Platonov. Misha recalled copying out the whole text twice, and handing it to the actress Ermolova. She rejected it, and Anton never took up the manuscript again. (It was published nearly twenty years after his death.) To perform it would take five hours; it is full of cliches and provincialisms. Yet Platonov is a blueprint for Chekhovian drama: a decaying estate is to be auctioned, and nobody can save it. Even the mine shafts making ominous noises under the steppe anticipate The Cherry Orchard. The hero, like Uncle Vania, believes he could have been Hamlet or Christopher Columbus and spends his energy on pointless love affairs. The doctor fails to forestall a suicide. The play lacks stagecraft, brevity and wit, but its absurdities and its mood of doom, its allusions to other writers from Shakespeare to Sacher-Masoch make it recognizable as Chekhov's work. It also proved that Chekhov could write seriously and at length.

In June 1881 The Alarm Clock printed one sketch by Anton. Months passed before Chekhov was a regular, but their office gave him an

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insight into Moscow's 'Grub Street'. The Alarm Clock's owner was a crooked nonentity. One editor, Piotr Kicheev, was notorious for having murdered a student.

Summer offered relief from oppression. Only Vania had to stay at his post, in his school house at Voskresensk all summer, so that Pavel ordered him: 'Don't be absent… prepare to receive your family with the appropriate honours: Mama, your brother [Misha] and your sister.'

While Aleksandr went to the country to stay with his rich friend Leonid Tretiakov, Kolia and Anton decided to represent the Moscow Chekhovs with Gavriil Selivanov and Uncle Mitrofan at Taganrog's most resplendent social occasion that summer - the wedding of their cousin Onufri Loboda. Anton arrived in a magnificent chapeau-claque, a folding top hat, which kept blowing away on the journey to the church. Kolia drew a caricature, and Anton wrote facetious captions. Taganrog never forgot that wedding, nor the caricature, when it was published in autumn.

Wisely, neither Anton nor Kolia stayed long after the wedding. Anton was not to see his native city again for nearly six years. By late July he had joined his mother and younger siblings in Voskresensk. Here, to judge by a letter to his rich cousin in Shuia, the 'peritonitis' that had nearly killed him as a boy recurred. When he recovered he-got to know the hospital at Chikino, a mile north of Voskresensk. The Chikino doctors, particularly Piotr Arkhangelsky, reinforced Anton's vocation. Throughout August 1881 Anton nervously helped Arkhangelsky treat the ill-nourished and diseased peasantry who flocked to the hospital for free relief. Doctor Chekhov found himself dealing with rickets, worms, dysentery, tuberculosis and syphilis, all of them endemic among the Russian peasantry.

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1881-2

ELEVEN

The Spectator

1881-2

IN SEPTEMBER 1881 the third-year medical students were introduced to new subjects: diagnostics, obstetrics and gynaecology. They became familiar with live bodies. Venereal diseases, then under the aegis of 'skin diseases', were central to the course, as a primary source of income for many practitioners. In Russian cities, as in France, prostitution was regulated with compulsory inspections and treatment. In Moscow hordes of prostitutes were inspected at police stations, twice weekly if in brothels, once a week if free-lance. A junior doctor could earn a good living. To stop syphilis becoming as endemic in cities as it was in the countryside, this demeaning procedure continued, despite the protests of enlightened doctors. A doctor became, as Anton later put it, 'a specialist in that department'. If Anton had 'difficulties with women', in the sense that his sexual encounters had to be light-hearted, even anonymous, and certainly without emotional involvement, these difficulties may stem from, or have encouraged, his familiarity with the whores of Sobolev lane, the Malaia Bronnaia and the Salon des Varietes, whom he met not only professionally. He never disowned them: even when his women friends were more reputable, he nostalgically recalled the 'smell of horse sweat' of the 'ballerina' he knew when a second-year student. For his first three years in Moscow, his girlfriends were nameless denizens of the red-light districts.

Literature also took Chekhov into new worlds. He was invited to become a contributor to a new Moscow magazine that came out sometimes weekly, sometimes more often, The Spectator. This journal became the workplace of four Chekhov brothers. On the Strastnoi boulevard, little over a mile from the Chekhov apartment, The Spectator became the brothers' club: Aleksandr worked on it as an editorial secretary, Kolia as an artist, Anton as a regular humorist, and Misha, who called after school, as an occasional translator and tea boy. The founder editor, Vsevolod Davydov, was saner than Kichcev on The Alarm Clock and kinder than Vasilevsky of The Dragonfly.

Kolia's best artwork was done for The Spectator, where he felt loved - not just by his colleagues, but also by The Spectator's secretary, Anna Aleksandrovna Ipatieva-Golden, a divorcee who became his common-law wife for seven years. The 'three sisters' motif entered Anton's life: over the next ten years Anton and his brothers were to be involved with at least five trios of sisters. The first of these trios - Anna, Anastasia and Natalia Golden - left a deep mark on the Chekhovs. Anastasia Putiata-Golden was, like her sister Anna, an editorial secretary, and lived with the genius Nikolai Pushkariov, editor of Chiaroscuro and Talk of the World.9 Only the youngest, Natalia Golden, was unmarried: she fell in love with Anton for life, a love that he reciprocated for two years. Anna and Anastasia were magnificent blond Valkyries - dubbed by their disparagers as kuvalda ('sledgehammer' or 'big slag') No. 1 and kuvalda No. 2. Natalia Golden looked utterly different, a thin, obviously Jewish girl with wavy black hair and an aquiline nose. Of the Golden sisters' origins almost nothing is known except that they were Jews who had converted to orthodoxy, but in the early 1880s, with their notorious appetites for eating and making love, they were at the centre of the lives of Anton and Kolia.10

Aleksandr's affections were focused elsewhere. His story 'Karl and Emilia' made an impact at The Alarm Clock and he won the heart of the editorial secretary there, Anna Ivanovna Khrushchiova-Sokolnikova." Anna Sokolnikova ousted the Polevaeva sisters from Aleksandr's heart: she was to be his common-law wife until her death, and bear him three children. Born in 1847, greying and stout, Anna was eight years older than Aleksandr, and she had tuberculosis. Worse, she already had three children and, as the guilty party in a divorce, she was forbidden by a Russian ecclesiastical court to remarry.12 Pavel - with the assent not just of Evgenia but also of Anton -refused to treat Anna or her eventual offspring, his first grandchildren, as family.

Pavel respected Jews: in his diaries he marked off the Jewish Passover as assiduously as the Christian Easter. Natalia Golden, unmarried, was acceptable to Pavel, who raised no objections when Anton stayed the night at her more spacious house. Anton's pretext was studying for exams; in any case he wanted greater privacy than a room

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1)«ê: l OK «è i Ê NOV shared with Misha. Soon Anton and Natalia were calling each other Natash-chez-vous and Antosh-chez-vous (i.e. Natasha at your place), Russified as Natashevu and Antoshevu.

Love and literature brought Kolia and Anton to The Spectator and tied Aleksandr to The Alarm Clock. Through Anna Sokolnikova, Anton, too, within the year, became a contributor to The Alarm Clock, and through Anastasia Putiata-Golden, Anton met the editor and owner of Chiaroscuro and Talk of the World, and became a contributor to both.

The sleazy world of the Moscow weeklies and the nightclubs, such as the Salon des Varietes where the contributors congregated, gave Anton material both for personal enjoyment and literary indignation. On one occasion, he exploited a visit he made to the Salon des Varietes at the end of September 1881 with two rich cousins from Shuia, Ivan Ivanovich Liadov and his brother-in-law Gundobin, whom Chekhov nicknamed Mukhtar after the Turkish general who fought the Russians in the Caucasus. Had Anton signed his article with his real name, the doors of the Salon would have closed to all Chekhovs. In it he describes the 'hostesses' - the Blanches, Mimis, Fannis, Emmas -whose fortune-seeking in Russia ended in this sordid nightclub - while the customers, named as Kolia, Ivan Ivanovich and Mukhtar, drink and disappear into private rooms. The thrust of the article is in the end: 'Antosha Ñ advises the management that they would make more money by charging to leave, not to enter. Chekhov wrote many sallies against the Salon: perhaps he was responsible for it closing and reopening as the Theatre Bouffe in 1883. The distaste in Anton's article is at odds with Kolia's illustration, a centrefold, crowded with flirtatious hostesses, daring cancan dancers and happy punters.

In September 1881, euphoric after the family wedding, Aunt Marfa Loboda wrote to congratulate Anton on his achievements. Aunt Marfa could not have been more cruelly deceived. Taganrog did not admire Anton long. The issue of The Spectator (No. 9, 4 October 1881) that printed the Salon des Varietes, carried a double-page spread of Kolia's wicked caricatures and Anton's disrespectful text, 'The Wedding Season'. The Lobodas, the Chekhovs and Gavriil Selivanov could see their faces drawn as the various wedding guests: a noisy drunken Mitrofan; the bridegroom, Onufri Loboda, captioned 'As stupid as a cork… marrying for the dowry'; Gavriil Selivanov as 'a lady-killer…'

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The scandal broke when Aleksandr moved to Taganrog. He advised Kolia and Anton: If you two value your backs, I advise you not to go to Taganrog. The Lobodas, Selivanov, their kith and kin are all seriously furious with you for 'The Wedding' in The Spectator. Here that cartoon is seen as an expression of the blackest ingratitude for hospitality. Yesterday Selivanov came… with the following speech: 'I'll tell you that Anton and Nikolai's behaviour was caddish and in bad faith, taking material for their cartoons from houses where they were received as family… I don't know what I did to deserve this insult.' Anton was unperturbed: he replied that he disliked all issues of the Lobodas as much as they disliked issue No. 18 of The Spectator. Chekhov had a lifelong blind spot: despite his powers of empathy, he never understood the hurt of people whose private lives he had turned into comedy. Mitrofan had probably never been drunk in his life; he read The Spectator and felt betrayed: how did this barb tally with Anton's protestations of love four months before? Years passed before Aunt Marfa wrote again. Gavriil Selivanov left Anton's letters unanswered. The affectionate Lipochka Agali, probably the Hellenic beauty portrayed as 'the Queen of the Ball', also fell silent. Not for the last time were those most sure of Anton's affection embarrassed and humiliated in his fiction, and never would Anton admit, let alone repent, his exploitation.

Anton was now attacking more formidable targets. On 26 November 1881 France's most renowned actress, Sarah Bernhardt, came to Moscow, fresh from America and Vienna, and began twelve nights at the Bolshoi theatre in Dumas-fils' La Dame aux camelias. Sarah Bernhardt had a poor press from Moscow's reviewers, but nobody panned her like Anton Chekhonte in The Spectator in November and December 1881.13 Despite Bernhardt's histrionic skills, he declared her so soulless, so tedious that 'if the editor paid me 50 kopecks a line I would not write about her again'. The crux of Chekhov's reaction was: 'She has no spark, the only thing to make us cry hot tears and swoon. Every sigh of Sarah Bernhardt, her tears, her dying convulsions, all her acting is nothing but a faultlessly and cleverly learnt lesson…' The actress in Chekhov's drama - Arkadina in The Seagull - is

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likewise an egocentric exhibitionist who has to be curbed. This review of Bernhardt is the first shot in a war that Chekhov as dramatist and later Stanislavsky as director were to wage against the stars of the stage and their pretensions. Like the Salon des Varietes, actresses were frequented by Anton in private and denounced in public.

Chekhov was becoming a journalist. Frequenting The Alarm Clock he got to know Moscow's most fearless reporter, Giliarovsky ('Uncle Giliai'), the linchpin of Moscow's best newspaper, the Moscow Gazette. Kolia and Anton had been invited to become founder members of Moscow's gymnastic society (in 1882 Anton was muscular and broad-shouldered). Their first sight in the gym was Russia's champion boxer, Seletsky sparring with the bear-like Uncle Giliai. Giliai represented for a while Anton's ideal of versatility. True, Anton did not frequent thieves in the slums around the Khitrovo market, drink spirits by the gallon, uproot large trees without a spade, stop a speeding cab by grabbing hold of the rear of the carriage, break the test-your-strength machine at the Ermitage, tame a horse so vicious that it had been expelled from the cavalry, lift friends bodily off the platform onto a departing train, nor perform any other of Giliarovsky's legendary feats, but in his later determination to be a journalist, an explorer and a farmer, as well as a doctor and writer, Anton was to emulate Uncle Giliai.

As much as a nervous censorship allowed, Chekhov wrote of crime. In 1881-2 three scandals rocked Russia: a railway crash at Kukuevka on 30 June 1882, on the line to Moscow from Kursk (and Taganrog), where an embankment collapsed and entombed hundreds of passengers; the Rykov affair (which lasted until 1884), the embezzlement by a bank's directors of millions of roubles; and the arrests of Taganrog merchants and customs officials, for smuggling. In all cases the accused were punished so leniently, that the stench of corruption hung in the air. After the Kukuevka affair everyone feared for their lives on Russia's jerry-built railways: the government forbad further discussion of accidents. Kukuevka injected into Chekhov's stories the same morbid distrust of railways that we find in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Dosto-evsky's The Idiot.

The Taganrog customs scandal affected the Chekhovs most. In June 1882 Aleksandr graduated from Moscow university. He wanted to set up house with Anna Sokolnikova and escape Pavel's strictures, so he applied for one of the posts vacated by Taganrog's imprisoned officials.