"Sit behind the counter," the father directed Antosha. Then crossing himself several times before the ikon, he departed.
Still sniffling, Antosha pulled up a case of Kazan soap for a seat and opened his Latin grammar to continue writing out his exercises. He stuck his pen in the inkwell and the point scraped on ice. There was little difference between the temperature in the unheated store and outdoors. In disgust Antosha gave up all thought of homework. He knew that his father would not return for about three hours. Sticking his hands in the sleeves of his coat, and hunching from the cold, like the two apprentices, he worried over the low mark he would receive in Latin the next day and the reprimand this would provoke from his teacher and father.
"Thus Antosha served his time in the store which he hated," remarks Chekhov's oldest brother Alexander, from whose reminiscences this account is taken.1 "There he learned his school lessons with difficulty or failed to leam them; and there he endured the winter cold and grew numb like a prisoner shut up in four walls, when he ought to have been spending his golden school days at play."
The wares in father Chekhov's lowly place of business in provincial Taganrog resembled those in an old-fashioned general store in rural New England. Along with groceries, one could buy kerosene, lamps, wicks, sandals, herring, cheap penknives, tobacco, yarn, nails, pomade, and various nostrums for common ills. And if one wished, one could get drunk on vodka there, for spirits were sold in a separate but connected part of the store. Filthy debris on the floor, torn soiled oilcloth on the counters, and in summer swarms of flies settled everywhere. An unpleasant melange of odors emanated from the exposed goods: the sugar smelled of kerosene, the coffee of herring. Brazen rats prowled about the stock. One drowned in a vat of mineral oil, and the humorless but religious-minded father Chekhov paid a priest to reconsecrate the oil, which somehow failed to convince amused customers that prayer had cleansed the defiled commodity.
Old-timers and hangers-on, attracted more by the liquor than by the groceries, made a kind of club of the store. Wanned by vodka in the cold winter nights, they kept the wearied shopkeeper up till one in the morning while they swapped dirty stories, always leeringly admonishing: "But you, Antosha — Don't listen. You're still too young."
Tending store, which was ordinarily open from five in the morning to eleven at night, was a regular assignment for the three older Chekhov boys. Sometime their mother would gently remonstrate with her husband when she thought that little Antosha was being put upon.
1 Chekhov's sister and brother, Mariya and Mikhail, question the truthfulness in part of Alexander's reminiscences, which are quite critical of their father's behavior, but the evidence of Chekhov himself tends to support their veracity.
"He's got to get used to it," Pavel Yegorovich would answer. "I work. Let him work. Children must help their father."
"But he's been sitting in the store all week. At least let him take Sunday off to rest."
"Instead of resting, he fools around with street urchins. If one of the children isn't in the store, the apprentices will snitch candy, and the next thing will be money. You yourself know that without one of us there the business will go to pieces."
This line of argument usually silenced the mother. Like her husband, she was convinced that the apprentices were little thieves. Certainly provocation was there in abundance. The apprentices, brothers ten and twelve years old, led a miserable existence. They had to work five years without pay and received only the barest essentials in food and clothing. And among the tricks of the trade they learned from their master was how to cheat customers through short weight and measurement. This acceptable form of thievery, so contrary to the precepts of honesty and uprightness which God-fearing father Chekhov lavished on his children, puzzled and hurt the sensitive Antosha. He brought the problem to his mother, but she assured him of his father's probity. As for Pavel Yegorovich, he had no doubt about his honesty. Religion and conscience were one thing, trade was another, and he never mixed them. This familiar kind of compromise with integrity began to bother Antosha and it intensified his dislike of working in the grocery store.
The father's brand of integrity also included a form of tyranny not uncommon in the patriarchal circles of Russian lower-class families in those days. The cufEngs and whippings which he dealt out to the apprentices induced a nervous trembling in Antosha, who could barely restrain his tears at the spectacle of any human suffering. Nor did Pavel Yegorovich spare the rod with his own children. To his wife's protests he would answer with complete sincerity: "I was brought up in this manner and, as you can see, I'm none the worse for it." The memory of these whippings haunted Chekhov even as a grown man and he could never forgive his father the humiliation and indignity he endured.
When Antosha had finished his third year at school, fear of his father's anger kept him and his brother Alexander tied down to tending a grocery stand near the railway station. They worked day and night throughout the whole summer vacation at this subsidiary venture, onlv one of several that failed. In this familv, which had to watch
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every kopeck, the children were schooled to the necessity of being helpful. But the excessive demands of their father, which were rooted in lack of imaginative comprehension of a child's normal needs and urges, often made their existence a peculiarly joyless one. "You can't run about because you'll wear out your shoes," he would counter An- tosha's complaint at the long hours in the store. "It is bad to fool around with playmates. God knows what they'll teach you. In the shop, at least, you'll be a help to .your father." Or when Antosha insisted that he could not get any homework done in the store because of the cold, the customers, and the requirement of entering every sale in the huge ledger, or because of the noisy interruptions of vodka-drinking hangcrs-on, Pavel Yegorovich attributed all this to his laziness and daydreaming: "Why, I find time to read over two sections from the Psalter every day and you are unable to learn a single lesson!"
The moment Antosha lived for, during his store-minding, was when his father entered to relieve him. The youngster would respectfully ask if he might go because he had lessons to do. "Have you read the Catechism?" "I've read a little of it." "Then go. But watch out, learn your lessons, and don't play around, or ... " Antosha would slowly exit, walk contemplatively out of sight of the store windows, and then suddenly fly off in high spirits like a bird just released from a cage.
Memories of these endless hours of servitude in his father's grocery store always remained with Chekhov. They not only imaginatively informed the unhappy lives of the children of his tales, but they also helped to inspire his pathctic judgment of those years: "There was no childhood in my childhood."
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In his determination to rise above the bondage into which he had been bom, Chekhov's father never rid himself of his serf heritage of harshness and acquisitiveness. Very few of Russia's foremost writers emerged from this kind of environment. The familiar pattern was the secure, cultured, and often idyllic gentry background that produced Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Genius, of course, could be distilled from the lowly beginnings and adversities of the Chekhov family, but the struggle left its scars on the developing personality and creative imagination. Squeezing the slave out drop by drop, as Chekhov expressed it, was the endless battle of his life.
Grandfather Yegor Mikhailovich Chekhov, coming from a long line of serfs in the Voronezh Province, began this process of self-emancipation. Shrewd, driving, and thrifty, he was transferred from work in the fields to his master's sugar-beet factory, where he soon became foreman. He learned to read and write and saw to it that his three sons acquired this mueh education. In 1841, at the age of forty-two, after years of saving, he realized the dream of his life — he bought his freedom and that of his wife and sons for thirty-five hundred roubles, a veritable fortune in the eyes of a peasant in those days, yet this sum was not large enough to include his only daughter in the deal. However, his owner, Count A. D. Chertkov — father of the future disciple and literary excc- utor of Leo Tolstoy — "generously" threw in the girl.