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.’8
Pavel and Evgenia had left Anton and Vania to fend for themselves.
Notes
1 Vrondy in his old age remembered Anton as an adept and favourite pupil with whom he would often play loto, a demure form of bingo, after class.
2 See OR, 331 81 11: Pavel’s letters to his wife and children, 1876–90.
3 See OR, 331 33 125: Evgenia’s letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1876–90.
4 See OR, 331 81 12: Pavel’s letters to Evgenia, 1876, 1884 and 1891.
5 See OR, 331 81 38: Pavel Chekhov to G. P. Selivanov.
6 Mitrofan deferred to his ‘spiritual adviser’, the elderly Father Vasili Bandakov, whose volumes of ‘Short Teachings for the Simple Folk’ were used by the lazier priests of southern Russia. One of Bandakov’s sermons is subtitled ‘composed in the house of the Chekhovs’. In 1890, at Mitrofan’s request, Anton wrote an obituary: ‘He preached at every opportunity, never bothered about time or place … Bad harvests, epidemics, conscription … he was passionate, bold and often cutting.’
7 See RGALI, 860 1 576: M. I. Il’kov, typescript memoir.
8 See OR, 331 58 29: G. P. Selivanov’s letters to Anton.
SEVEN
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,1 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.2 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 admitted3 that he lost his virginity at the age of thirteen – probably at this establishment.)
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 1 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, Onufri 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 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-business man 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 listens to us and only occasionally does the Artist [Kolia] slap his model’s head and shout, ‘Good Lord, Misha, when are you going to pose properly? Turn three-quarte
rs-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.’4
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. Evgenia 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.5
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 Evgenia 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 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. When 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.
Money trickled in both directions. Aleksandr sent Anton 15 roubles for the journey to Moscow in the Easter 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] constantly 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 decently, my linen is shining clean, gloves, top hat, and they’re sure I’m a millionaire.
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 o
ur 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 … My mother has a character on which an outsider’s moral support acts strongly and beneficially …’.
Moscow stimulated Anton. On his return his 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.
Anton Chekhov Page 8