Chekhov: A Biography

Chapter Two

Anton’s situation as a cynically abandoned child is in some respects similar to the fate of Dickens when he was put to work in the blacking factory. There was the difference that Anton was still at school and free of his father’s rule and his dread of being beaten. He hated the separation from his brothers and his sister and feared for them: above all he felt responsibility for his helpless mother. This seems to be the moment when he first felt that he was the one with the duty and the wit to replace the father as the practical savior of the family and was no longer the neutral watcher of it. If the strict father had indeed broken the will of his two elder brothers, Anton had conserved his. The lonely but self-reliant boy takes responsibility for the dishes, the pots and pans and the sewing machine his mother has left behind and sends them piecemeal to Moscow when he can afford to do so. Soon, pitiably, and in not very literate letters, his mother is begging him to send money. In addition to tutoring the son of the new shopkeeper, he takes on tutoring other boys at school. He sends the money secretly through a rich Moscow cousin, to whom he writes:

If I send letters to my mother, care of you, give them to her when you are alone with her, there are things in life which one can confide in one person only, whom one trusts.

And again:

Please go on comforting my mother, who is both physically and morally broken.

And to his young brother Mikhail he writes a charmingly priggish letter:

I got your letter when I was fearfully bored and was sitting at the gate yawning, so you can judge how welcome that immense letter was. Your writing is good, and in the whole letter I have not found one mistake in spelling. But one thing I don’t like.

He lectures Mikhail for calling himself “your worthless and insignificant brother.”

You recognize your insignificance? … Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intelligence, nature, but not before men.

And then he gives him a precious literary lecture. Harriet Beecher Stowe had been widely read in Russia at the time of the campaign for the liberation of the serfs. Mikhail had said that the story had “wrung tears from my eyes.” Anton replies:

I read her once, and six months ago read her again with the object of studying her—and … I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants.

He tells his brother to read Don Quixote “by Cervantes, who is said to be almost on a level with Shakespeare,” and advises Mikhail to tell his elder brothers to read Turgenev’s essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” “You won’t understand it, my dear.” He also recommends—and this is a sign of Anton’s resdessness and longing for the adventures of travel—Gon-charov’s The Frigate Pallada. The children of the fierce Pavel had all turned out to be readers.

If there is a puritan in Anton, he is enjoying his freedom. He likes his pupil, the creditor’s son—a “wild young Cossack of the southern steppe.” The boy had an uncle who managed a rich estate, and the two went off and stayed with a primitive family whose incurably talkative father had refused to send the sons to school. They ran wild, shooting every bird in sight, including their own chickens and turkeys and even a pig when the family needed one. Anton called it “wholesale murder” and, years later, he wrote about the family in his famous comic story The Pecheneg. The scene was to appear rather differently in The Steppe. There were other trips to the steppe. On one he heard for the first time that strange sound of a bucket falling down a mine shaft which haunts other stories and which he was to use again with effect in The Cherry Orchard. On another summer trip there was an alarming experience. He loved swimming, and one day he had to be pulled out of the water in agony. He was rushed to a country tavern kept by a Jewish family, who looked after him for the night and then sent him to the grammar school doctor in Taganrog, Dr. Strempf, who diagnosed peritonitis. The recovery was slow, and later in his life Chekhov thought this illness was the cause of the piles and intestinal troubles from which he was to suffer all his life.

The illness was one of those events that become decisive in a youth’s life. The doctor told Anton about his profession, and of how he had been trained abroad at Dorpat and in Switzerland. To get abroad! To be trained in Dorpat, even Zurich, as a doctor! The dream grew in his head. Better-off boys at the grammar school became doctors, and his mother wanted her sons to rise above the risks of a tradesman’s life.

Anton longed to see his family in Moscow, and at last his eldest brother, Alexander, who was at the university, sent him the fare for the slow seven-hundred-mile journey. When he got there the conditions under which the family lived shocked him. They were packed into a single basement room, where the only sight of the outside world was of the feet of people passing over the grating above the window. The neighborhood was poor and close to the brothel quarter. Pavel had been given a modest job in a warehouse on the other side of Moscow and came home only at weekends. Anton’s two older brothers had had to find rooms of their own. In the basement the broken mother earned a few rubles by sewing. It was her conviction that Anton was their only hope. Alexander soon convinced his brother that to think of training to be a doctor in Dorpat or Zurich was out of the question: he would have to be content with Moscow. And indeed, when he had seen the glorious sights of the city and its crowds, Anton was convinced.

He returned to Taganrog. In the two years that followed he worked hard and read enormously. He graduated well enough to get a grant from the town towards his fees at the medical school of Moscow University. He was nineteen.

The photographs of Anton at this time show him to be a tall, energetic young man with the broad face of the Russian peasant. His brown hair is thick and wavy. The fine long eyes have a steady thinking gaze. He is eager for responsibility and to get his family out of that Moscow slum and into decent quarters, especially for the sake of his mother. Money? He will bring with him two rich students who have graduated with him and are going to the university. He will rent rooms to them. His own family must be rescued from debt, from dependence on his father’s relations, from the habit of running up bills at the grocer’s and butcher’s: they must pay cash. There is also the question of educating his sister and his young brothers. He has inherited his father’s one virtue: the passion for education. All the Chekhovs are gifted: even his eldest brother, Alexander, who has taken to drink, is an excellent linguist, and Nikolay, who has also drifted into drink and Bohemian life, is a clever painter and is doing caricatures for the Moscow papers. They know Moscow better than he does. In short, Anton has appointed himself head of the family although he has five years at the medical school ahead of him. Although he is sure of himself and soon moves the family into a larger flat, he sees that his grant will vanish into the family pool. He will have to find a spare-time job, and here Alexander is useful. He was trying to write sketches for the comic papers, not with much success, for Alexander is as long-winded as his father. Anton, who, after all, has been the comic entertainer and actor of the family, decides to try his hand. He had started a facetious paper called The Stammerer at school.

The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 had been followed by a reaction against his reforms under his successor Alexander III. The censorship was stiffened, and the resourceful Muscovites fell back on their traditional taste for joking, lying and the vulgar. Crude comic magazines were popular. The most popular were The Alarm Clock and The Dragon Fly, both published in St. Petersburg. You had to be topical and seasonal. You compiled comic calendars, absurd letters of advice; you made sly fun of clerks and officials and newlyweds. Anton makes a drunken bridegroom slash the quilt of the marriage bed so that a cloud of flock pours down on the heads of the crowd outside. There is the tale of people going home to find a coffin in their rooms—an undertaker who is in debt is trying to convince his creditors that there is a boom in his sales; a clerk sneezes over the head of a general in the theater and he pesters the general with apologies—the general has not noticed the sneeze. There are ludicrous scenes in the courts. The thing was to capture the absurd in everyday life, and absurd names were essential. Here Anton was a master. There is a Dyadechkin, a Blinchikov, a Fintifleyev, a top civil servant called Vele-leptov whose clerks are Vesisiev and Chernosvinsky. And later on we shall find him inventing the constable Prishi-beyev, a pompous policeman so obsessed with unlawful assembly that he will arrest two or three men arguing about the ownership of a dog who has bitten someone in the street; the constable cannot believe it when the judge dismisses the case. Chekhov turned out these things fast and with glee in the middle of his medical studies. Doctors and patients were also victims, of course. The work was very badly paid and some of the magazines evaded payment. If the censor refused to pass a piece, one altered the title and submitted it to another censor known to be idle. The pieces appeared under a pseudonym, Antosha Chekhonte, a comic name given to him by a schoolmaster in Taganrog.

Chekhov was ashamed of this stuff: “The word ‘newspaper-writer’ means, at very least, a scoundrel. I’m one of them; I work with them; I shake hands with them; I’m even told that I’ve begun to look like one….” And indeed the shabby young man in the broad-brimmed hat did. “But,” he added, “I shan’t die as one.”

Some of his better things were eventually noticed by Nik-olay Leykin, the owner of another Petersburg magazine. Though a secretive, difficult and jealous man, as Chekhov eventually thought, Leykin offered a higher rate than the Moscow journals—eight rubles a line. He wanted Chekhov to write “little stories” and a gossip column on theatrical and social life. The pay was good, but Leykin wanted a monopoly of his work. Chekhov was grateful but he refused to be tied to the new editor, and indeed all his life Chekhov refused to bind himself. For the moment he was grateful for Leykin’s interest and concern for the conditions under which he was forced to work. He wrote to Leykin:

I write under the most atrocious conditions. My non-literary work lies before me flaying my conscience unmercifully. The offspring of a visiting kinsman is screaming in the next room, in another Father is reading aloud [Leskov’s] The Sealed Angel to mother…. Someone has just wound up the musical box and it’s playing “La Belle Hélène.” … Can you conceive of more atrocious surroundings for a literary man? My bed’s taken up by the visiting relation, who keeps coming over to me and engaging me in medical conversation. “My daughter must have colic, that’s why she’s screaming.” … And when they’ve had enough of talking medicine, they start on literature.

Many years later Leykin claimed to be the discoverer of Chekhov’s talents, and indeed many of the promising “little stories” were written for him. But, like all talented writers, Chekhov was a reading man. He was an admiring if critical reader of Tolstoy and Turgenev: Tolstoy for his almost animal eye for the telling detail and for the portrait of Anna Karenina, Turgenev for his prose style. Dostoyevsky he despised for his “shrillness” and his prolonged irrational storms, but there are instances of Dostoyevsky’s influence. The more immediate influence at this time was the popular satirical realism of Saltykov-Shchedrin and his one masterpiece, the richest and “gloomiest” of Russian novels, The Golovlyov Family, with its classic portrait of the traditional Russian hypocrite, Iudushka. Goncharov’s famous Oblomov, the portrait of the idle Russian landowner, seemed to Chekhov a perverse hymn to idleness, the Russian curse. In his popular older contemporary Leskov, the author of the famous Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Chekhov was to have his nearest rival as a copious writer of short stories, but Leskov was religious, indeed he called himself a mystic. Chekhov was an atheist to whom the images and ceremonies of the Orthodox Church were interesting as deeply rooted manifestations of traditional art rather than of acceptable faith.

The young Chekhov was also drawn to the translations of popular French and other European novelists who were fashionable in Russia. He read them in order to parody them. There was a Romantic Hungarian novelist, Mor Jókai, who had written an extravagant novel about the erotic adventures of the daughter of a gypsy violinist in high society in Paris; there were parodies of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne and the famous French writer of detective fiction, Émile Gaboriau, whose ingenuity appealed to Chekhov, as we can see in The Swedish Match. In this story he makes rough fun of the mistakes of the inductive method of detection (it turns out that a murder has not occurred: the victim is found to be grossly asleep).

This story was followed by The Shooting Party, a combination of melodrama and full-length detective novel, which was run as a newspaper serial in 1884—the anxious year of Chekhov’s graduation as a doctor. It was translated into English by A. E. Chamot in 1926 and has recently been reissued with an admiring introduction by Julian Symons, himself a distinguished writer of detective stories. Chekhov took great pains to baffle the reader. The characters are wickedly sensational old-style villainous landowners. The tone is high-flown and lush in its eroticism, a parody of Gaboriau’s famous Monsieur Lecoq and of the Dostoyevsky of Crime and Punishment—Chekhov disliked his “spiritual” melodrama. If the style is one of romantic excess, it must be said that the particularity of landscape and lake and forest has all of Chekhov’s feeling for nature. There are glints of the Chekhov to come.