BRUCE KING
ADELE KING
1
A Life
Nature and life conform to the very same outdated stereotypes that even editors turn down. Chekhov to Suvorin (30 May 1888)
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the town of Taganrog on the sea of Azov in southern Russia on 17 January I8601, the third of six children, five boys and a girl. He might have been born a serf, as his father Pavel Yegorovich had, for the Emancipation came only in 1861; but his grandfather, a capable and energetic estate overseer named Yegor Chekh, had prospered so well that in 1841 he had purchased his freedom along with his family's. The boy's mother Yevgeniya was the orphaned daughter of a cloth merchant and a subservient spouse to her despotic husband. To their children, she imparted a sensibility he lacked: Chekhov would later say, somewhat unfairly, that they inherited their talent from their father and their soul from their mother.2
The talent was displayed in church. Beyond running a small grocery store where his sons served long hours, - 'In my childhood, there was no childhood,' Anton was to report3 - Pavel Chekhov had a taste for the outward trappings of religion. This was satisfied by unfailing observance of the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church, daily family worship, and, especially, religious music. He enrolled his sons in a choir which he founded and conducted; and aspired to be a pillar of the Taganrog community.
Taganrog, its once-prosperous port, now silted up and neglected, had a population that exceeded fifty thousand during Chekhov's boyhood. Its residents included wealthy Greek families and other Europeans, the ship-building interests. The town benefited from such public amenities of the Tsarist civic system as a pretentious-looking gymnasium, which the Chekhov boys attended, for one of Pavel's aims was to procure his children the level of education needed for entry into the professions. The upward mobility in the Chekhov generations is reflected in the character of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, a self-made millionaire whose grandfather and father were serfs on the estate he manages to buy. Chekhov's father, born a serf, had risen from meshchanin or petty bourgeois4 to be a member of a merchant guild; and Chekhov himself, as a professional physician and writer, became influential on the national scene. He was a model of the raznochinets or person of no settled rank who had begun to dominate Russian society in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
To bar mass advancement, the tsarist curriculum laid great stress on Latin and Greek; one recalls the schoolmaster Kulygin in Three Sisters chuckling over the fate of a friend who missed promotion because he could not master the ut consecutivum construction. Schoolmasters are usually portrayed by Chekhov as narrow, obsequious and deadly to the imagination, no doubt the result of his own experience as he studied the classics, German, Russian and, for a brief time, French. His best subject was Scripture. School days were lightened by the fairy tales of his nanny, the picaresque reminiscences of his mother, vacations spent on the estate his grandfather managed, fishing, swimming, and, later, visits to the theatre.
As a boy, Chekhov was stage-struck. Although it was against school regulations, he and his .classmates frequented the gallery, often in false whiskers and dark glasses. Besides attending the active and not inelegant Taganrog Playhouse, Chekhov was the star performer in domestic theatricals, playing comic roles like the Mayor in Gogol's Inspector General and the scribe Chuprun in the Ukrainian folk opera The Military Magician. While still at school, he wrote a drama, called Without Patrimony, and a vaudeville, The Hen Has Good Reason for Clucking. Later, while a medical student, he tried to revise them, even as he completed another farce, The Cleanshaven Secretary and the Pistol, which his younger brother Mikhail recalled as being very funny. It concerned the editing of a sleasy newspaper and featured a double-bed as the major set- piece. Never submitted to the censorship, it is now lost.
By 1876 Pavel Chekhov had so mismanaged his business that, fearing imprisonment for debt, he stole off to the next town, to take the train to Moscow. There his two elder sons were pursuing their studies. He had already stopped paying his dues to the merchant guild and had reverted to the status of meshchanin. Whether Anton suffered a psychic trauma at this loss of caste, as had the young Ibsen when/iw father went bankrupt, is matter for speculation; certainly the repercussions felt at the sale of the home left their trace on many of his plays. Dispossessed of house and furniture, his mother and the three youngest children also departed for Moscow, abandoning him in a home now owned by a friend of his father. He had to support himself by tutoring for the three years needed to complete his course. He did not rejoin his family until Easter 1877, his fare paid by his university student brother Aleksandr; and this first visit to Moscow and its theatres set standards by which he henceforth judged the quality of life in the provinces. Suddenly, Taganrog began to look narrow and philistine.
Just before Anton Chekhov left Taganrog for good, a public library opened. This enabled him to read classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet, a work he was to cite indefatigably, and, like any Victorian schoolboy, Uncle Tom's Cabin and the adventure stories of Thomas Mayne Reid. Heavier reading included philosophic works that enjoyed a high reputation at the time, such as Buckle's positivist and sceptical survey of European culture, The History of Civilisation in England. Later in life, Chekhov took a wry view of this omnivorous autodidacticism, and had the clumsy bookkeeper Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard read Buckle for self-improvement.
It was at this time that Chekhov began writing, sending comic pieces to Aleksandr in Moscow in the hope they would be accepted by the numerous humour magazines that had sprung up in the capitals. He made friends with actors, hung around backstage, and learned how to make up. One of his school-fellows, Aleksandr Vishnevsky, did enter the profession, and eventually became a charter member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Nikolay Solovtsov, to whom Chekhov dedicated his farce The Bear and who created the title role, was another friend from these Taganrog days.
In 1879 Chekhov came to Moscow to study medicine at the University, aided by a scholarship from the Taganrog municipal authorities. He arrived to discover himself the head of the family, which was still in dire straits and living in a cramped basement flat in a disreputable slum. His father, now a humble clerk, boarded at his office; his elder brothers, Aleksandr, a writer, and Nikolay, a painter, led alcoholic bohemian lives; his three younger siblings, Ivan, Mariya, and Mikhail, had still to complete their educations. Lodging at home, Chekhov was compelled to launch a career as journalist, at the same time he carried out the rigorous five-year medical course.
At first, he wrote primarily for humour magazines, contributing anecdotes and extended jokes, sometimes as captions to Nikolay's drawings; these brought in ten to twelve kopeks a line. Gradually, he diversified into parodies, short stories and serials, including a murder mystery and a romance that proved so popular it was filmed four times in the early days of cinema. He was a reporter at a famous trial. He became close friends with Nikolay Leykin, editor of the periodical Splinters (Oskolki). He conducted a theatrical gossip column, which won him entry to all the greenrooms and side-scenes in Moscow. And he shared in his brothers' bohemianism; he wrote to an old schoolchum, in a letter the Soviets publish only in expurgated form: 'I was on the trot all last night and, 'cept for a 5-ruble drunk didn't... or catch .... I'm just about to go on the trot again'.5 His writing at this time was published under a variety of pseudonyms, the best known Antosha Chekhonte, from a schoolboy nickname. He also found time to revise Without Patrimony which he seriously hoped would be staged; turned down by the leading actress to whom he submitted it, it was burnt by its author. But a copy survived, minus the title-page, and was first published in 1923; it has since become known as Platonov, after the central character.