Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  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 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, after the older Chekhovs had returned at 4 a.m. from the Polevaevs, Evgenia 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.’7 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 Gavrilov’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 TB. 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 him from visiting the Salon des Variétés, doing the cancan there and taking ladies off for all-night vigils.’ This 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 1 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 and literature. His behaviour was ‘excellent’, his attendance and effort ‘very good’.

  In August Taganrog’s administration for the meshchane (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.

  Notes

  1 In Russia this title has been reassigned to the Chekhov play once known as Platonov, but Platonov has nothing to do with ‘fatherlessness’ and has references that point to the 1880s.

  2 Chekhov’s books were plundered by family and ‘friends’, lost in peregrinations, or given away to school, prison and city libraries. See Balukhaty and Khanilo in bibliography.

  3 See OR, 331 81 19: Pavel’s letters to Anton, 1878.

  4 See RGALI, 331 81 25: Pavel’s letters to Mitrofan and Liudmila Chekhov, 1876–93: 2 Feb. 1878.

  5 See OR, 331 82 15: Nikolai’s letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1879–84.

  6 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel’s letters to Ivan Chekhov, 1879–98.

  7 See OR, 331 81 20: Pavel’s letters to Anton, 1879.

  II

  Doctor Chekhov

  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

  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, Seveliev 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, not to mention theology. He 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, TB 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 unadventurous. 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.

  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 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 clichés 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 that Kolia … has abandoned art and is busy with things that bring him neither money nor a profession. It is very disagreeable t
o 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 … Aleksandr has shortened my life by half and has ruined my health. Antosha, my friend, note what I have written and treasure these words and pass them on to your brothers. P. Chekhov.

  In the April examinations, Anton had a mere ‘3’ for anatomy. (Aleksandr, who as a natural scientist also took anatomy, had a ‘5’.) He consoled himself with Aleksandr and other students in the bars of Sokolniki park, drinking punch and Russian ‘cognac’. Anton and Aleksandr composed a drunken letter to the ‘cross-eyed’ Kolia, after rounding off the night with the whores of the Salon des Variétés: ‘I salted the dives and hammered the lamp into the crème 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 the worst sense, has turned everything inside out. To Hell with him! I excuse him, but I’m embarrassed with regard to Maria Egorovna [Polevaeva] and Karolina Egorovna [Schwarzkopf].4