Once free, Grandfather Chekhov lost no time in thrusting his sons out into the world to make good the liberty he had bought for them. Though a stern father to his children, he was determined to get them established in life on a social level higher than that from which they sprang. And he set them an example by his own energy in business affairs, which finally won for him the responsible position of steward of the large estate, near Taganrog, belonging to the son of the famous hero of the 1812 war, Ataman M. I. Platov.
To this southern Russian town of Taganrog on the Azov Sea Grandfather Chekhov, in 1844, sent his nineteen-year-old son Pavel Yegoro- vich, after he had served an apprenticeship for three years in Rostov, to work in the countinghouse of the merchant I. E. Kobylin. The oldest son, Mikhail Yegorovich, was sent as an apprentice to a bookbinder in Kaluga; and the youngest, Mitrofan Yegorovich, to a merchant in Rostov.
Taganrog first won general notice in 1825 as the place where the colorful Emperor Alexander I mysteriously died; it is now much more celebrated among Russians as the birthplace of Chekhov. When that writer's father went there to live, this thriving port of some thirty thousand inhabitants represented a strange mixture of Russian and European cultures. A large part of the population was foreign — mostly Greeks, some Italians and Germans, and a few English. And they controlled the economic life of Taganrog through their export-import firms, such as Valyano, Skarmang, Kondyanaki, Missuri, and Sfaello. Here too the Greeks predominated, as wealthy grain merchants and shipowners whose shady business operations not infrequently fell afoul of the law. To a considerable extent these foreign millionaires also legislated the cultural life of the town and under their auspices it took on an incongruous European glitter. They were the patrons of the local theater; they supported a fine symphony orchestra to play in the public garden; and they lavished flowers and money on the prima donnas they imported to sing Italian opera. Even their marble tombs were commissioned from the best sculptors of Italy. Thoroughbred horses harnessed to carriages of foreign manufacture carried their wives, dressed in the latest European fashion, to elaborate dinner parties, and in the clubs their husbands gambled for stakes running into thousands of roubles.
This veneer of foreign culture and social finery contrasted sharply with the external appearance of Taganrog and the old-fashioned patriarchal way of life of the bulk of the Russian population, who lived a hand-to-mouth existence as workers, stevedores, petty shopkeepers, and clerks. In spring, mud, almost ankle-deep in places, covered all but the main streets, and in the summer they were a tangled mass of weeds, burdock, and uncut grass. At night people went about with lanterns, for only the two principal thoroughfares were illuminated and these inadequately. Town authorities regarded with insufferable complacency the kidnaping of pretty young girls, who were whisked off the streets into carriages, destined for Turkish harems. Any day one might see stray dogs barbarously clubbed to death at the bazaar, convicts punished on a scaffold in a public square or harnessed like horses to carts, dragging sacks of flour and grits from the warehouse to their prison. Every Saturday an attendant, with a large twig broom on his shoulders, roamed the streets shouting: "To the bath! To the bath! To the public bath-house!"
Among the Russians in Taganrog the initial social status of young Pavel Yegorovich working away in Kobylin's countinghouse was a lowly one. Long hours, fawning servility to anyone a rung higher on the ladder, and occasional blows were his lot in return for a pittance of pay. In the formation of the narrow, unattractive side of his nature, this grim experience completed anything his stem father had left undone. However, if the struggle for security hardened him, an impractical and artistic side, never fully realized, endowed Pavel Yegorovich with softer, more human traits that found expression in a love for art. As a boy he had learned from the village deacon to read music and to sing; another village deacon taught him to play the violin; and he himself cultivated a small talent as a painter. In some respects, his aggravating religiosity was simply a manifestation of his devotion to the beauty of the ritual and of his passion for sacred music —which he later participated in professionally.
Not until Pavel Yegorovich had worked for ten years did he feel that he was sufficiently established to risk matrimony. Through his brother Mitrofan, who had recently come from Rostov to open a small grocery store in Taganrog, he met his friend Ivan Morozov. This led to an introduction to Ivan's family — his widowed mother, and her two daughters, Evgeniya and Fedosiya. The Morozovs, of serf origin, had come from Vladimir Province. The family had prospered until the father, a textile salesman, suddenly died from cholera on one of his business trips. The widow, with her son and two daughters, settled in Taganrog. Pavel Yegorovich courted the nineteen-year-old Evgeniya Yakovlevna Moro- zova, and married her on October 29, 1854.
Their life together began inauspiciously, for to save money they lived with the Morozovs. Soon the Crimean War stifled the trade of the seaport, and Taganrog itself was bombarded by the Anglo-French fleet. The pregnant Evgeniya Yakovlevna fled the town to a suburb, where she gave birth to her first child, Alexander (Sasha), only ten months after her marriage. After they returned to the town, the young couple moved to a little house which Pavel Yegorovich's father had acquired. As time passed, however, the cherished hope of Pavel Yegorovich — to rid himself of the slavery of Kobylin's and start a business of his own — grew closer to realization. He had been scraping and saving for years; by 1857 he felt that he could wait no longer —he opened his first grocery store.
A new dignity came with the new business. Pavel Yegorovich was at last a proprietor, his own master. A touch of the Micawber in his nature inspired illusions of grandeur and he began to refer to himself as a "merchant" and to his little shop of cheap groceries as a "commercial enterprise." But the meager profits were paced by his rapidly growing family. A second son, Nikolai, appeared a year after Pavel Yegorovich went into business. The couple had to move in 1859, for Pavel's brother Mitrofan had also married and now exercised his claim on their father's little house. On January 17, i860,2 a third son, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Antosha), was bom. A larger house had to be taken the next
2 Though this is the date entered on Chekhov's birth certificate, he once told I. A. Bunin that the deacon officiating at his baptism had mistakenly dated his birth a day late, and in at least two of his letters he refers to January 16 as his birthday. However this may be, January 17 was accepted by Chekhov, his family, and friends as the day of his birth.
year when the mother gave birth to Ivan. Then the family moved again, for a fifth child, a daughter Mariya (Masha), was born in 1863 and another son, Mikhail (Misha), less than two years later.
If six children in ten years kept father Chekhov in a continual state of worry as the provider, they sorely tried the stamina and fortitude of his young wife (a seventh child, born in 1869, died two years later). But she was a devoted mother and a careful and thrifty housekeeper. Her love for her husband remained despite his overbearing behavior, the traditional serf attitude in marriage that somehow clung to Pavel Yegorovich and which is perhaps best summed up in the peasant proverb: Beat your wife as you beat your old sheepskin coat. It was oppressive and horrible to remember, Chekhov wrote his brother Alexander years later, how their father's despotism and lies ruined their mother's youth and spoiled their own childhood. The children never forgot the terrible scenes at the dinner table provoked by some trifle such as ovcrsalted soup, when he would furiously berate their mother and call her a fool. Only too often was she forced by his tyranny or unwise judgments into the position of protector of the children. Then she would softly and tearfully plead with him in their defense. Chekhov recalled with pain how his father would smilingly bow and scrape before customers while selling them cheese the smell of which nauseated him, or the fawning petitions for favors that he would write to wealthy citizens of the town.