Pavel’s tyranny extended, of course, to the religious life of his family, and here, if not quite a sign of grace, a more affecting aspect of his character appears. The enemy of idleness, he would settle to the common peasant hobby or craft of painting ikons, and this was to have an influence on Nikolay, his second son, who became a talented painter, and on his daughter, Mariya, who when she grew up became a teacher at a Moscow school. More important was Pavel’s fanatical addiction to choir singing. He acted as choirmaster in the local church, and he would march his children to choir practice and rehearse them for hours, often until two in the morning. Chekhov was to write of this ordeal with indignation. The Chekhov children appeared like a band of frightened little saints before the congregation. What he detested in this was what he called “the monstrous lie” of this show of enforced saintliness on their part and their father’s. To these displays he attributed the early and lasting loss of his religious faith. Yet the artist in Chekhov retained for life his feeling for the rituals of the Orthodox Church and above all for the singing of the ingenious canticles. A few of his finest stories, like Easter Eve, The Artist and above all the superb The Bishop, reflect the profound influence of religious music on his own work. If his prose is plain and neutral, it is nevertheless musical in its architecture and its curious response to sounds.
As a self-appointed choirmaster, Pavel was not disinterested. It was a step to public importance in Taganrog. He rose to the official rank of “merchant of the second Guild,” which dated from Peter the Great’s creation of an official Russian class system in the grand reforms of the eighteenth century. Through his rank Pavel could claim an important honorary connection with the police. He became a proud figure in official processions, wearing a top hat with the other ruling dignitaries, who lived very much in one another’s pockets. If the seaport lived by trade, its habits were oiled by bribery. As a rising tradesman with an eye for financial advantage he saw the importance of education for his children. Here his shrewdness at first misled him.
We must look more closely at Taganrog, as Chekhov evoked it again and again in his stories and letters. With the Crimea on its western shore, the Sea of Azov is linked by a channel to the Black Sea, which gave traders a valuable contact with Turkey and the Mediterranean. The wealth of the port was in the hands of international companies run by Greeks, Italians, Turks, French and British. These foreigners lived grandly apart, in fine streets and in fine houses, whereas the majority of the Russian population were the stevedores and dockworkers who lived in low-built shacks like Pavel’s, where the streets were no more than muddy or grass-grown lanes. The Russian houses stank—as Chekhov wrote—of boiled cabbage, of sturgeon baked in sunflower oil and of vodka. One of the popular sports of the rough youths of the town was to catch dogs, give them vodka, tie cans to their tails and chase the maddened animals through the streets.
The foreigners brought some Western graces to the little seaport. The Italians had built a theater and well-known foreign actors and singers appeared there. There was a small park with a bandstand. After the reforms under Alexander II the town had a grammar school. The Greeks too had a school. With an eye to getting his sons into the grain trade, Pavel decided that the Greek school was the place for them. What was the use of the Russian school with its useless classical education? His wife opposed him. She knew little about education, but she did know that boys who graduated at the grammar school might, if they were clever enough, get a grant from the town council which would get them to the university and free them from the nightmare of military service. They might enter the safety of the Civil Service or attain the respectability of doctors or, above all, money-making lawyers. Pavel never listened to his fretful wife. But he had overlooked the obstacle of the Greek language, in which instruction took place. The boys, who were as diligent as their father, were stumped by its difficulties and the quick Greek lads jeered at them. They learned nothing, their marks were poor, and Pavel was appalled. It must be said that for all his money-grubbing he understood the importance of education. Indeed his children were all very able and agreed in later life that they owed their talents to their tedious and stormy father, and their power to feel to their mother. Pavel gave up his dreams of a fortune in foreign trade and moved the boys to the Russian grammar school, and one by one they all went eventually to the university. When Anton’s turn came, Pavel had doubts. As an insurance against failure he saw to it that the boy also took lessons in tailoring at the common trade school, and in fact Anton did succeed in making a pair of trousers, fashionably narrow in the leg, for his second brother. That at any rate saved money.
There is a family photograph in which we see the small Anton—he would grow to be as tall as his brothers and father—standing in the neat school uniform, with pride in his stare. He is following his brothers in their journey through classic Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic, Russian, German, religion, geography, mathematics and history. Alexander, the oldest, was heading for mathematics at Moscow University. Nikolay was to follow him, into art. Anton showed no particular bent beyond a gift for hitting off the mannerisms of the masters. One of them may have helped to inspire the schoolmaster in Chekhov’s story The Man in a Case, a man so afraid of the freedom of private impulse that he puts a stop to everything “unusual” or outside of official control. He represents something that had been a chronic evil in Russian life. Alexander II had introduced reforms in Russia. He had reformed the judiciary, he had created rural district councils—the zemstva—and town councils, he had liberated the serfs, but already there was a feeling that liberal reforms had gone too far. Reaction had begun, and one or two of the masters had the reputation of being government spies on the watch for “dangerous ideas” in the boys. Belikov, in The Man in a Case, is a farcical portrait of the type.
One of the natural results of Pavel’s sermonizing and his often violent strictness with his wife and his children was to unite them with one another and with their gende mother. As a girl she had led a wandering life with her father, the traveler in textiles, in many parts of Russia. Her simple mind was full of folklore. She liked to tell the tale of the Crimean War and of how, when Alexander was born in 1855, she had to escape from Taganrog when the Anglo-French fleet bombarded the town. It is commonly the role of the middle child of a large family to be the listener, the watcher, the peacemaker and humorist. Anton loved dressing up, disguises and practical jokes. He was silent at school, but he let himself go with his brothers and sister at home and led the way in making fun of the townspeople of Taganrog. There is a story that he dressed up as a beggar and got money out of his uncle; and another lark—which Pavel would have forbidden if he had seen it—when the boy pretended to be a comic priest being examined by his bishop. Boys were not allowed to go to the town theater without a permit from the school, or without their parents; when he was thirteen, Anton joined a group who dressed up in their fathers’ jackets, wore dark glasses, got into the gallery and saw Hamlet and Gogol’s The Government Inspector. He even acted in Gogol’s play to entertain the family. Soon he, with his brothers and sister, was sneaking off to private theatricals in the town, and Anton, the born mimic and connoisseur of slapstick, took the lead. And then there was the relief of trips to the country and the sea, and especially to that genial Uncle Mitrofan, when the grocer’s shop was forgotten. And, in fact, Chekhov’s dark memories of his childhood are less concerned with himself than with the bad effects their severe upbringing had upon his older brothers. They had taken the brunt of their father’s temper and been lastingly broken in will by it. Anton took pride in his ability to stare his father in the face when he was likely to be beaten. His will was not broken. The chin is raised in defiance when he stands in his school uniform in the family photographs.