Chekhov

Chapter One

Anton Chekhov was born on January 17, 1860, in the small seaport of Taganrog, a town just outside what are now the boundaries of the Ukraine, on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia. In the following year Emperor Alexander II had decreed the abolition of serfdom, and it was a matter of pride in the Chekhov family that their peasant grandfather, who had been the manager of the sugar-beet mill and eventually the steward of a large estate in the province of Voronezh, had saved enough money to buy the freedom of his family twenty years before. He had shrewdly educated his sons and put them into trade. Pavel, Chekhov’s father, became a bookkeeper in a merchant’s office in the larger port of Rostov-on-Don. There, by hard work, he was able at last to marry and to open a general store in Taganrog. His young wife was the daughter of a merchant in the textile trade. Anton was their third son. A daughter and two more sons followed.

With the great difference that Russia was scarcely yet an industrial country and indeed had hardly moved out of its medieval condition, Pavel had much in common with the classic self-made Victorian puritan. He was a fierce believer in Self-Help and the work ethic, a despot in the family, shouting his wife down, ruling his sons by beating them, saying—when his wife protested—that the same had been done to him and that it had made a man of him. Pavel, the slave turned master, was a tall, almost handsome figure with a grizzled beard and a glare in his eyes, a man not to be argued with. All heads were lowered at mealtimes as he hectored the family on their duties. On the wall of the living room was a timetable of the children’s tasks, hour by hour, during the day. There were to be no idle minutes, there was to be no playing in the streets. At an early age the children had their duties in the shop. It was open from five in the morning until midnight.

Like the majority of the houses in the poorer parts of the town, the Chekhovs’ house had a single story and a tin roof; the store was attached to the house. There was no sanitation: the family had to go to common bogs in a field at the back. For washing there was the communal bathhouse in the town. Where did the family sleep? Behind screens in the living room. Chekhov often slept in a shed where his father kept his lifetime store of newspapers. When the boys started school they had to sit at the counter of the shop, doing their homework, and keeping an eye on the wretched, ill-paid apprentices, who had been trained in the art of short weight and were inclined to steal. In later life when Chekhov was famous he paid for the education of the daughter of one of these lads.

The store sold everything—tallow candles, kerosene lamps, general provisions, tools and sandals. It stank of cheese, herrings and, of course, vodka—sold in a separate room. In the summer the flies swarmed on the greasy counters; rats ran about, and there is a tale that one day a rat drowned in a tub of oil and Pavel, with cunning piety, got a priest in to reconsecrate the oil. Later in his life Anton told the writer Ivan Bunin, whose origins were comparatively genteel, that what he remembered chiefly was the cold nights when he worked in the store, but, with shy pride in his hard times, added: “I sold tallow candles and took the greatest pleasure in wrapping up the icy candles in a scrap of paper.”

Pavel’s tyranny extended, of course, to the religious life of his family, and here, if not quite a sign of grace, a more affecting aspect of his character appears. The enemy of idleness, he would settle to the common peasant hobby or craft of painting ikons, and this was to have an influence on Nikolay, his second son, who became a talented painter, and on his daughter, Mariya, who when she grew up became a teacher at a Moscow school. More important was Pavel’s fanatical addiction to choir singing. He acted as choirmaster in the local church, and he would march his children to choir practice and rehearse them for hours, often until two in the morning. Chekhov was to write of this ordeal with indignation. The Chekhov children appeared like a band of frightened little saints before the congregation. What he detested in this was what he called “the monstrous lie” of this show of enforced saintliness on their part and their father’s. To these displays he attributed the early and lasting loss of his religious faith. Yet the artist in Chekhov retained for life his feeling for the rituals of the Orthodox Church and above all for the singing of the ingenious canticles. A few of his finest stories, like Easter Eve, The Artist and above all the superb The Bishop, reflect the profound influence of religious music on his own work. If his prose is plain and neutral, it is nevertheless musical in its architecture and its curious response to sounds.

As a self-appointed choirmaster, Pavel was not disinterested. It was a step to public importance in Taganrog. He rose to the official rank of “merchant of the second Guild,” which dated from Peter the Great’s creation of an official Russian class system in the grand reforms of the eighteenth century. Through his rank Pavel could claim an important honorary connection with the police. He became a proud figure in official processions, wearing a top hat with the other ruling dignitaries, who lived very much in one another’s pockets. If the seaport lived by trade, its habits were oiled by bribery. As a rising tradesman with an eye for financial advantage he saw the importance of education for his children. Here his shrewdness at first misled him.

We must look more closely at Taganrog, as Chekhov evoked it again and again in his stories and letters. With the Crimea on its western shore, the Sea of Azov is linked by a channel to the Black Sea, which gave traders a valuable contact with Turkey and the Mediterranean. The wealth of the port was in the hands of international companies run by Greeks, Italians, Turks, French and British. These foreigners lived grandly apart, in fine streets and in fine houses, whereas the majority of the Russian population were the stevedores and dockworkers who lived in low-built shacks like Pavel’s, where the streets were no more than muddy or grass-grown lanes. The Russian houses stank—as Chekhov wrote—of boiled cabbage, of sturgeon baked in sunflower oil and of vodka. One of the popular sports of the rough youths of the town was to catch dogs, give them vodka, tie cans to their tails and chase the maddened animals through the streets.

The foreigners brought some Western graces to the little seaport. The Italians had built a theater and well-known foreign actors and singers appeared there. There was a small park with a bandstand. After the reforms under Alexander II the town had a grammar school. The Greeks too had a school. With an eye to getting his sons into the grain trade, Pavel decided that the Greek school was the place for them. What was the use of the Russian school with its useless classical education? His wife opposed him. She knew little about education, but she did know that boys who graduated at the grammar school might, if they were clever enough, get a grant from the town council which would get them to the university and free them from the nightmare of military service. They might enter the safety of the Civil Service or attain the respectability of doctors or, above all, money-making lawyers. Pavel never listened to his fretful wife. But he had overlooked the obstacle of the Greek language, in which instruction took place. The boys, who were as diligent as their father, were stumped by its difficulties and the quick Greek lads jeered at them. They learned nothing, their marks were poor, and Pavel was appalled. It must be said that for all his money-grubbing he understood the importance of education. Indeed his children were all very able and agreed in later life that they owed their talents to their tedious and stormy father, and their power to feel to their mother. Pavel gave up his dreams of a fortune in foreign trade and moved the boys to the Russian grammar school, and one by one they all went eventually to the university. When Anton’s turn came, Pavel had doubts. As an insurance against failure he saw to it that the boy also took lessons in tailoring at the common trade school, and in fact Anton did succeed in making a pair of trousers, fashionably narrow in the leg, for his second brother. That at any rate saved money.

There is a family photograph in which we see the small Anton—he would grow to be as tall as his brothers and father—standing in the neat school uniform, with pride in his stare. He is following his brothers in their journey through classic Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic, Russian, German, religion, geography, mathematics and history. Alexander, the oldest, was heading for mathematics at Moscow University. Nikolay was to follow him, into art. Anton showed no particular bent beyond a gift for hitting off the mannerisms of the masters. One of them may have helped to inspire the schoolmaster in Chekhov’s story The Man in a Case, a man so afraid of the freedom of private impulse that he puts a stop to everything “unusual” or outside of official control. He represents something that had been a chronic evil in Russian life. Alexander II had introduced reforms in Russia. He had reformed the judiciary, he had created rural district councils—the zemstva—and town councils, he had liberated the serfs, but already there was a feeling that liberal reforms had gone too far. Reaction had begun, and one or two of the masters had the reputation of being government spies on the watch for “dangerous ideas” in the boys. Belikov, in The Man in a Case, is a farcical portrait of the type.

One of the natural results of Pavel’s sermonizing and his often violent strictness with his wife and his children was to unite them with one another and with their gende mother. As a girl she had led a wandering life with her father, the traveler in textiles, in many parts of Russia. Her simple mind was full of folklore. She liked to tell the tale of the Crimean War and of how, when Alexander was born in 1855, she had to escape from Taganrog when the Anglo-French fleet bombarded the town. It is commonly the role of the middle child of a large family to be the listener, the watcher, the peacemaker and humorist. Anton loved dressing up, disguises and practical jokes. He was silent at school, but he let himself go with his brothers and sister at home and led the way in making fun of the townspeople of Taganrog. There is a story that he dressed up as a beggar and got money out of his uncle; and another lark—which Pavel would have forbidden if he had seen it—when the boy pretended to be a comic priest being examined by his bishop. Boys were not allowed to go to the town theater without a permit from the school, or without their parents; when he was thirteen, Anton joined a group who dressed up in their fathers’ jackets, wore dark glasses, got into the gallery and saw Hamlet and Gogol’s The Government Inspector. He even acted in Gogol’s play to entertain the family. Soon he, with his brothers and sister, was sneaking off to private theatricals in the town, and Anton, the born mimic and connoisseur of slapstick, took the lead. And then there was the relief of trips to the country and the sea, and especially to that genial Uncle Mitrofan, when the grocer’s shop was forgotten. And, in fact, Chekhov’s dark memories of his childhood are less concerned with himself than with the bad effects their severe upbringing had upon his older brothers. They had taken the brunt of their father’s temper and been lastingly broken in will by it. Anton took pride in his ability to stare his father in the face when he was likely to be beaten. His will was not broken. The chin is raised in defiance when he stands in his school uniform in the family photographs.

A story called Difficult People, written many years later when Chekhov was twenty-six, evokes the family scene in his childhood. One of the boys is leaving home the next day to go on the seven-hundred-mile journey to Moscow University and is asking for money to pay for his fare and keep. The family is at table. The father boils up in a rage of self-pity.

“Take everything!” he shouted in an unnatural voice; “plunder me! Take it all! Strangle me!” He jumped up from the table, clutched at his head and ran staggering about the room. “Strip me to the last thread. Squeeze out the last drop! Rob me! Wring my neck!”

We notice the word “unnatural,” which conveys Chekhov’s ear for the false in his people.

The boy defies the father. We see him leave the house in the autumn drizzle, his defiance changing to fear, from fear to self-pity and eventually to despair. And then, as so often in Chekhov’s stories, an irrelevant sight gives a turning point to the boy’s feelings. A rich old lady, a landowner, drives by in an elegant carriage and he bows, smiling.

And at once he caught himself … in that smile…. Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do.

For the boy knows the gossip that even in the life of that rich old lady there had been terrible troubles. Her father had been exiled by the Tsar, her husband, a gambler, had been ruined, her four sons had turned to the bad. What terrible family scenes there had been! And yet she smiled!

The student thought of his comrades, who did not like talking about their families; he thought of his mother, who almost always lied when she had to speak of her husband and children.

The boy turns back to his house and decides to have it out with his father. And so the row starts up again: the timid mother listens speechlessly. The boy shouts:

“Not a dinner or tea passes without your making an uproar. Your bread sticks in our throat…. You have worn my mother out and made a slave of her, my sister is hopelessly crushed, while I …”

The father shouts back. The boy goes to bed and cannot sleep. Twice his mother comes from behind the screen and makes the sign of the cross over him. He can hear his father pacing the floor all night. At five in the morning the boy gets up once more, calls out good-bye to them all: he is going. As he passes his father’s room the father calls out quiedy, “The money is on the round table,” without turning, as he too says good-bye.

A cold, hateful rain was falling as the labourer drove him to the station. The sunflowers were drooping their heads still lower, and the grass seemed darker than ever.

Chekhov’s own drama, when he was sixteen, was more desperate. It was not he who left home in panic and temper. This time the father, indeed the whole family, left suddenly to escape from Taganrog, leaving him behind.

If Pavel was a narrow man, laying down the moral law, he had a Micawber in his nature. The top-hatted figure on the town council and in the processions of Taganrog had had to buy a larger house as the family grew, but he had chosen a bad moment. The railway age had come to Russia late. The larger and more important trading city of Rostov-on-Don at the estuary of the great navigable river Don had become an important railway terminal. There had been a proposal for a branch line to Taganrog but the citizens there had havered about paying the large and necessary bribe for this valuable connection. In the end the town fathers settled for an absurd compromise: a branch line fourteen miles inland from their town. They reckoned that to build a road to the station would be cheaper. In fact building a road cost more. Big ships were turning away from Taganrog, the harbor was neglected and silted up and commerce declined, and the trade of common shopkeepers like Pavel was hit. Soon the aging Pavel went bankrupt. He had borrowed money on note of hand, the lender foreclosed and Pavel could not pay. He was ruined and liable to the law. He fled the town. There was a rumor that he fled secredy to relations in Moscow, hidden in a goods wagon, leaving his wife and children to follow with what family possessions they could carry. The creditor was “merciful” to some extent: he took over house and shop and let the family go, on condition that they left Anton behind as a hostage. Anton was still at school, and the man shrewdly arranged for him to stay on for three years until he graduated, provided that he tutored his son at a cheap rate.