you have mercilessly poisoned the rest of the holidays for me – there is no doubt about that. All December I’ve been poorly, I’d begun to recover in the holidays. Your reproach upset, offended, insulted and alarmed me … Today I am confirmed in Petersburg as Head of the Imports Desk and Customs Translator. My sufferings are over … What a pity your reproach came just when for the first time I breathed freely.
In mid February 1883 Anna gave birth to a daughter. Pavel would not acknowledge his first grandchild or speak to her mother. None of her uncles, even Anton, expressed any joy at the birth of Mosia, as her parents called her. Aleksandr complained that Mitrofan and Liudmila would not be godparents to the baby. Mitrofan could not face neighbours’ questions if a priest came to the house. Liudmila told Father Pokrovsky that Aleksandr and Anna had married in St Petersburg. Aleksandr accepted Mitrofan’s conditions: the child must go to church daily and observe all fasts. Liudmila then declared that Pavel would not let them condone sin. Aleksandr wept.
Anton sent his brother at the end of February 1883 a harsh ten-page tirade:
What do you expect of father? He is against tobacco smoking and illicit cohabitation – and you want to be friends with him? You might manage it with mother or aunt [Fenichka], but not with father. He’s the same flint as the dissenters, no worse, and you won’t budge him … You carry your cohabitation like a stolen watermelon … You want to know what I think, what Kolia, or our father thinks?! What business is it of yours?
Anton detected and disliked in both Aleksandr and in Kolia a disparity between high-minded pretensions and sordid actions. Kolia was taking on prestigious commissions – to paint the sets at Lentovsky’s theatre in the Ermitage, to illustrate Dostoevsky – and doing nothing except to complain that he was misunderstood. Within a year, Anton predicted, Kolia would be finished. Both brothers, in his view, were destroyed by self-pity. He alone felt in the ascendant and triumphantly told Aleksandr on 3 February 1883:
I’m becoming popular and have now read a critique of myself. My medicine is going crescendo. I know how to treat and I can’t believe it. You won’t find, old boy, a single disease I wouldn’t undertake to treat. Exams are soon. If I get into the 5th class, then finita la commedia.
The family appeared to be dissolving. Aleksandr was stuck in Taganrog. Kolia moved out to live in a sordid tenement, Eastern Furnished Rooms. Vania stayed all year in Voskresensk. Masha spent all the time she could at her courses or at girlfriends’ houses. Only Misha stayed home, studying for matriculation. Anton felt untrammelled, apart from the times when Pavel spent the night on Golovin lane. Then Anton sheltered at night with the artists, Levitan and Kolia, or with Natasha Golden, to study or write, where Pavel did not moan about the cost of candles. The insolvent bankrupt lectured his sons on finance. A pencilled folio runs:
Kolia and Antosha, You have left things to the last day and I told you several times that 10 roubles had to be ready to pay the rent, you know that it can’t be put off and I like Punctuality. You have put me in an awkward position. To blush when the landlord comes is not right for a man of my age, I am a Person with a positive Character.7
Notes
1 ‘Slough’ from Continual Dew (1937).
2 The first page of Chekhov’s case notes is given in I. Geizer, Chekhov i meditsina, 1960, 12.
3 Pelageia’s entry each afternoon with the question, ‘Isn’t it time you had your beer?’ was used much later by Chekhov for Dr Ragin’s servant in ‘Ward No. 6.’
4 See OR, 331 50 1 a–m, for Leikin’s 205 letters to Anton, 1882–1900.
5 See RGALI, 2540 1 149: Aleksandr’s letters to Ivan Chekhov 1882–97.
6 Cut from Pis’ma, 1939: see OR, 331 32 8: Aleksandr’s letters to Anton 1882.
7 See OR, 331 81 16: Pavel’s letter to Anton and Nikolai, 2 Jan. 1883.
THIRTEEN
The Death of Mosia
1883–4
ALEKSANDR AND KOLIA sank into maudlin drunkenness while Anton worked frenetically. In March 1883 he was writing a weekly story for Fragments and for The Spectator. At the same time Anton had a series of examinations to sit: he had a ‘4’ (good) from Sklifosovsky for operative surgery; his gynæcology was outstanding (‘5’).1 As Tsar Alexander III was to be crowned in Moscow, a few examinations were postponed until September.
Anton could relax and turn his attention to the arts and to his family. His impatience with the feckless had not abated: he saw in actors the same weakness and lack of professionalism that he deplored in his brothers. The contemporary theatre seemed just Aleksandr and Kolia writ large, and had to be fought with, he told the dramatist Kanaev: ‘our actors have everything except good breeding, culture or, if I may say so, gentility … I expressed my fears for the future of the modern theatre. The theatre is not a beer garden and not a Tatar restaurant.’
Anton forced a little gentility on his father, and, not altogether disinterestedly, Pavel acknowledged Aleksandr’s family:
Dear son Aleksandr! You must give Masha a briefcase for Easter, she cannot do without. I have no means to order one. Kindly send in good time what you promised. We are well, Mama has toothache. We have no letters from you. Regards to Anna, a kiss for Mosia, a blessing for you. Your loving father, P. Chekhov.2
Masha never got her briefcase, but Aleksandr received a little paternal affection. Pavel, after a few drinks, even boasted of Aleksandr’s uniform in the Customs service. Home life prospered on 60 roubles a month from Fragments: the Chekhovs kept a piano and a servant. Kolia was paid by Utkina, owner of The Alarm Clock, in kind: of Kolia’s earnings the Chekhovs kept a desk, a candelabra and a wall clock all their lives.
Anton also helped Aleksandr at Easter 1883. He persuaded Leikin to print Aleksandr’s stories; at first Leikin did not know that the author whom Anton was recommending was Aleksandr: ‘Who is Agathopod Edinitsyn (“Unit”)?’ 1300 miles from St Petersburg, Aleksandr needed his brother’s help to be a writer again. It was rumoured that civil servants were to be banned from the popular press and, as some of Aleksandr’s stories were set in the Customs Service, he needed cover. Anton pointed out the miseries of journalism, mixing with rogues, earning a pittance to be devoured by dependants. Aleksandr ignored the warnings, and felt happier. He had his wife and daughter; he sent for his dog and for Nadia, Anna’s daughter by her first husband, Sokolnikov; he even contemplated bringing out Aunt Fenichka to run his household. He wrote to Vania (23 April 1883): ‘My little daughter is growing … and giving me much joy … I strongly resemble my Vater, Anna is becoming so attached to me that she has become inseparable and I am quite content with my fate.’
Now Anton became friendlier and broached his preoccupations with women and with sex in a long letter to Aleksandr in April 1883: Anton invited his brother to participate in a doctoral thesis he would write after qualifying – a History of Sexual Authority, modelled on Darwin’s Origin of Species. Surveying the world from insects to human beings, Anton reckoned that the higher the social development in mammals the more nearly equal the sexes become, but he was convinced of the inferiority of even the educated female human being:
She is not a thinker … We must help nature as man helps nature when he creates heads like Newton’s, heads that approach organic perfection. If you’ve grasped my idea, then 1) the problem, as you see, is very real, not like the fucking-about of our female emancipationist publicists and skull-measurers … The history of universities for women. Curious: in all the 30 years they have existed, women medics (excellent medics!) haven’t produced a single serious dissertation, which proves that they are schwach in the creative line.
Anton had been reading the potentially feminist arguments of Herbert Spencer and Sacher-Masoch, but his thinking is shot through with the misogyny of Schopenhauer’s ‘Essay on Women’. On a personal level Anton’s difficulties with women were beginning to torment him. Not that his sexual drive was monstrous: his promiscuity stemmed from a rapid loss of interest in any one woman. Zoologists might compare Anton�
��s sexuality with that of the cheetah, which can only mate with a stranger. Once intimacy is established, cheetahs cohabit impotently. Anton’s impotence had something to do – perhaps as cause, perhaps as consequence – with his transactions with prostitutes. Not aroused by women he liked (and, worse, not liking women who aroused him), Chekhov was troubled, until he was too ill to be aroused at all. He told Aleksandr and Anna:
There’s no way I can tie myself to our woman, though there are a lot of opportunities … You screw her once, but the next time you can’t get it in. I have all the equipment, but I don’t function – my talent is buried in the ground … I fancy a Greek girl now … forgive me, jealous Anna, for writing to your patient [the sick Aleksandr] about Greek girls.3
Student pranks gave Chekhov some joy, but they too tended to have sinister outcomes. Anton, Kolia and Levitan, with another art student, bought a stallholder’s oranges and sold them so outrageously cheaply to the public that the stallholder had them arrested. After the exams were over, in Voskresensk, Anton, Kolia, Vania and Misha and three young doctors from the hospital at Chikino set out on a sixteen-mile pilgrimage to the monastery of St Sawa and walked on to see a colleague, Dr Persidsky, at the hospital in Zvenigorod. At tea in Persidsky’s garden they sang the popular, but banned, ‘Show me the home, Where the Russian peasant does not suffer’. The local policeman charged them with subversion. Although a newspaper, the Russian Gazette, and powerful friends intervened, the Governor of Moscow forced Persidsky out of Zvenigorod. After Anton’s first experience of injustice indignation seeps into his prose.
Summer 1883 in Voskresensk gave Anton his first footing in genteel society. If Aleksandr and Kolia dragged him down, Vania raised him up, by introducing him to the officers of the battalion stationed at Voskresensk – Lieutenants Egorov, Rudolf and Eduard Tyshko, and Colonel Maevsky and his three children. Known as Tyshko in the Headgear, Eduard Tyshko, irresistible to women, had been wounded in the Turkish war and was never seen in public without black silk headgear to disguise his wounds, became a close friend of the Chekhovs. Anton’s friendship with the officers was tested when Lieutenant Egorov asked for Masha’s hand in marriage. She referred the proposal to Anton, who warned Egorov off. The lieutenant, not surprisingly, then behaved badly when Evgenia rented a cottage from him for the summer of 1884. She complained to Masha: ‘We want to move out of this lousy flat, since Egorov has left us nothing, we’ll have to move all the crockery from Moscow … He’s left all the furniture locked and sealed.’ Only in 1890 would Lieutenant Egorov make his peace with Anton.
Other Voskresensk friendships extended to Vania’s brothers. Once, stranded at a Christmas ball by a blizzard, Vania was offered a lift home in a guest’s sledge. The stranger was Aleksei Kiseliov, who owned an estate at Babkino two miles up the river Istra from Voskresensk. Aleksei Kiseliov was a very well-connected, if impoverished, aristocrat, with a nostalgia for his rakish past. His wife Maria was an amateur writer and a prude. The Kiseliovs were charmed by Masha and Anton. These Voskresensk friendships were lifelong. Anton had glimpses of new worlds – the officers’ life he was to portray so expertly in Three Sisters, and the rundown Arcadia of the landowner. Babkino taught Masha how to be a lady. Anton got to know intellectuals, for instance Pavel Golokhvastov, a magistrate who was a Slavophile activist and his wife, a playwright. The Kiseliovs and Chekhovs fished and played croquet together. Anton flirted with their servants and dairymaids. He joined the Russian intellectual establishment. Nevertheless, unlike Misha and Masha, Anton also had business in Voskresensk. He was useful to Dr Arkhangelsky at the Chikino clinic. The stories of summer 1884, with Vania and the Kiseliovs in Voskresensk, show newly acquired surgical, as well as social, skills.
In Anton’s absence Pavel grumbled: ‘Nice children you are, you’ve left Mother ailing, and are having fun. It’s lucky that God has saved her, but you have no pity. Pavel the Long-Suffering.’
Evgenia too was soon to leave the Moscow household. Anton persuaded Aleksandr that she would be more use to him in Taganrog than Aunt Fenichka: ‘Mother badly wants to visit you. Take her on, if you can. Mother still has spirit and is not as heavy going as Aunt.’ Evgenia duly went to Taganrog. It was a mistake. Aleksandr’s household was sunk in irremediable filth and chaos. The servants did as they liked, Aleksandr spent each month’s salary within a few days, Anna could not do housework. Evgenia, never good at crises, did not even have her refuge of coffee and a clean bed. Mitrofan and his wife Liudmila were no support: a few days after her arrival on 26 June 1883, they went, with two of their children, to Moscow to see Pavel and then to Voskresensk. Before the week was out Evgenia was desperate:
Antosha for God’s sake send me just a rouble and quickly I’m afraid to ask your father I need to buy bread for my tea, not to speak of supper … When Mitrofan returns, send me money for the fare back. In any case, I can’t leave while they’re away. I’ve lent them my wicker trunk, such anguish, I’m afraid I shall fall ill … Aleksandr is as unhappy as can be, if only at least Kolia came. E. Chekhova. Please, answer and don’t mention to anyone that I am complaining.4
Nobody could rely on Evgenia: she herself thirsted for protection. After a fortnight she begged her fare back to Moscow from her children.
Anton left Voskresensk for Moscow, from where it was easier to send Leikin a constant steam of prose. Aleksandr, Anna and baby Mosia had, however, followed Evgenia from Taganrog, so that to find peace Anton stayed in ‘Natashevu’ Golden’s house or with Palmin at Bogorodskoe in the suburbs. Here he wrote. Leikin restricted Anton from experimenting with new forms, and was petulant if Chekhov made a début in a Moscow weekly, tolerating only The Spectator as a Chekhov family concern. Leikin turned down the only long work Chekhov wrote that year, ‘He Understood’, a charming piece set in Voskresensk. A peasant shoots a starling, is detained for poaching and wins his release by persuading the angry landowner that his yearning to shoot is as incurable as the latter’s alcoholism. At the end of 1883 Chekhov placed the story in Nature and Field Sports, under his real name for the first time.5
Two pieces written in summer 1883 stand out: one is a melancholy story for The Alarm Clock, ‘The Dowry’: the heroine loses her dowry to a drunken uncle and her fiancé cannot help her. The story’s effect lies in the narrator’s ineffectual sympathy; the ending ‘Where are you, Manechka?’ introduces the helpless pathos of the typical Chekhovian ‘hero’. The other piece, ‘The Daughter of Albion’, about an ugly English governess enduring the barbarity of her employer, was the first piece Chekhov wrote for Fragments to win renown. Russians joked about frigid Englishwomen – Chekhov himself had written that ‘if the Russian evolved from a magpie and the German from a fox, the English evolved from frozen fish’ – but ‘The Daughter of Albion’ has the nature poetry of a ‘fishing’ story based on Anton’s summer angling at Babkino. Not for the last time, Anton’s mockery of his hero and heroine is tempered by a lyrical celebration of the countryside.
Leikin wanted even more from his most popular author: ‘Fragments of Moscow Life’ came out every week: under two pseudonyms Anton might supply half the material for an issue. Kolia, less reliable, was Leikin’s best illustrator; Leikin sent him special torchon paper from St Petersburg. As August ended and Anton’s final year of medicine approached, he complained to Leikin:
in the next room a baby is crying (it belongs to my brother who has come to stay), in another room father is reading mother [Leskov’s] ‘Sealed Angel’. Someone has wound up a musical box and I can hear ‘La Belle Hélène’. I’d like to run off to the country, but it’s 1 in the morning … For a writer it would be hard to invent anything fouler than these surroundings. My bed is occupied by my brother who keeps on coming up to me and raising the topic of medicine. ‘My daughter must have colic in the belly, that’s why she’s crying.’ I have the great misfortune to be a medic and everyone thinks they have to ‘discuss’ medicine with me … I solemnly promise never to have any children.
The gods took n
ote of that promise.
Peace seemed to be restored when Evgenia came back from the country and Aleksandr and his family returned to Taganrog. In autumn 1883, once university life began, Anton and Kolia mixed with Masha’s kursistki. Ekaterina Iunosheva received a joking ‘Last Farewell’ by Kolia. (Anton had a hand in this poem – all three eldest Chekhov brothers had the stuffed owl for a muse):
As from a cigar a dreamer smokes,
You float about in all my dreams,
Bringing with you love’s cruel strokes,
And on your lips a hot smile gleams …6
Kolia did not stay in the family home for long. He hid behind the ample skirts of Anna Ipatieva-Golden from his creditors and the authorities, and Anton no longer collaborated with him.
In late November Kolia left Moscow and went to stay with Aleksandr and Anna Sokolnikova in Taganrog. Meanwhile Pavel, horrified to discover that Aleksandr and his consort had stolen something precious from him, asked Kolia to intervene:
My regards to Aleksandr. I am sorry for the ruined creature and those that live with him. He has stolen my wedding certificate and is living on it and this grieves me. Bring it, be sure to take it off him. Those that live without the law shall perish without the law!7
Pavel’s phrase ‘shall perish without the law’ became a family saying.
Anton kept out of these quarrels: he was drawn to wider horizons. Leikin had been leaking hints to those in Petersburg who asked about the identity of his contributor, Antosha Chekhonte. On 8 October 1883 Nikolai Leskov, revered for his novel The Cathedral Folk and for his powerful stories, such as ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, arrived with Leikin for five days in Moscow. Leikin could not resist introducing Leskov to Chekhov. Leskov (with Ostrovsky, the only living writer whom Pavel Chekhov respected) had surly suspicions of young writers, but took to Chekhov. Anton took Leskov on a tour of the brothels in Sobolev lane. They ended up in the Salon des Variétés. Then, as Anton told Aleksandr, Leskov and he took a cab:
Anton Chekhov Page 13