On rare occasions, their sister Masha recalls, the brothers would endeavor to derive a modicum of fun from these onerous religious duties. Once Father had already left for early mass, expecting the others to follow immediately. Antosha, however, refused to get out of bed, despite his mother's pleas and the threat of his father's anger. Fearful that they would be late, she finally hustled off with the rest of the family. On the way to church they met Antosha coming from the opposite direction. He had been in bed fully dressed all the time, and had dashed off the moment she was out of sight, contriving by short cuts to seem to be coming from church. On this same occasion Nikolai, who had been assigned to the tower to ring the church bells, greeted his mother's approach with that deafening crescendo which was properly reserved solely for the priest's approach. For this prank he caught it from his father.
Homework, play, and sleep were all sacrificed to choir rehearsals, performances, and incessant church attendance. Recollecting these trials in later years, Chekhov wrote with some bitterness: "I was brought up in religion and received a religious education; I sang in the choir, read from the Apostles and the Psalms in church, attended regularly at matins, and was compelled to assist at the altar and ring the bells. And what is the result? I remember my childhood as a pretty gloomy affair, and I'm not a bit religious now. When my two brothers and I, standing in the middle of the church, sang the trio 'May My Prayer Be Exalted,' or 'The Archangel's Voice,' everyone looked at us with emotion and envied our parents — but at that moment we felt like little convicts." (March 9, 1892.)
chapter ii
"Before Men You Must Be Aware of Your Own Worth"
Time tends to soften the hardships of the past, especially when they are recollected in the warm glow of success in life. Wben Chekhov recalled his early years, however, it was usually with a sense of pain and regret over his lost childhood. Here time seems to have distorted the image somewhat. Although the record is often gloomy, existence in the family circle at Taganrog was by no means an entirely bleak one. Oddly enough, the two main sources of detailed information about this period — the reminiscences of Chekhov's oldest brother Alexander and of his youngest, Mikhail — present strikingly contrasting pictures, which may well have been influenced by the unstable temperament and wayward life of the first and by the pleasanter personality and successful career of the second. Ordinary discretion would suggest that the truth probably lies somewhere in between these two accounts.
Certainly, in a family only one generation removed from serfdom, it was little short of a miracle that all six children should have received a higher education. Through the chain reaction of social progress begun by Grandfather Chekhov's liberating roubles, his son's children were able to exploit freely the natural abilities that sprouted within them: Alexander became a journalist and successful writer; Nikolai a talented artist and illustrator; Anton one of Russia's greatest authors; Ivan an able pedagogue; Mikhail a well-known jurist and writer; and Mariya a capable teacher and artist. And within his limited means the stern, quixotic father strove to foster these abilities in his children by providing them with some elements of culture which would have puzzled and perhaps disgusted their serf grandfather. He taught them to read music, to sing, and to play the violin, and for a time he employed a piano teacher and an instructor in French. His readiness with the rod, outbursts of temper, and narrow religious piety did not prevent the development of a warm, affectionate feeling in the family circle. In some measure his despotic behavior helped to inspire the unusual devotion to each other that existed among the children. But the care and gentleness of the mother was the cement that bound them all together. When they were little she held them enthralled by her accounts of traveling about Russia with her father, tales of peasant hardships under the old days of serfdom, and stories of the bombardment of Taganrog in the Crimean War. Often their old nurse would spell her with more fantastic yarns drawn from the rich treasury of Russian folklore. Pleasant evenings of song were organized at home when singing was not a chore, or the father and Nikolai would play duets on the violin or be accompanied on the piano by Masha.
The reserve Antosha often displayed to outsiders vanished in the family circle. He was the liveliest and most original of the children, always ready for a joke or a humorous enterprise, characteristics that remained with him throughout his life. Misha recalls going to the bazaar with him one summer day on an errand for his mother, to buy a duck. All the way home Antosha kept plaguing the fowl so it would quack: "Let everyone know that we're going to dine on duck," he declared. Antosha, an enthusiastic pigeon fancier with his own dovecote at home, liked to roam around the bazaar inspecting the caged songbirds; he himself sometimes trapped and sold songbirds for a few kopecks.
During the long summer vacations from school, there were occasions, despite the household tasks, when the children were allowed to escape into the joyous realm of youthful play and sports. Summers in Taganrog were extremely hot. The boys went around barefoot and at night slept in the small garden in shelters of their own making — Antosha's was under an arbor of wild grapes. There he scribbled verses and for some whimsical reason imagined himself as "Job under the banyan tree." A little girl, the daughter of a widow who lived in a tiny cottage in the Chekhov yard, shyly courted him through touching verses written in chalk on the garden wall. In the uncavalier fashion of a thirteen- year-old boy, he countered her tenderness with mocking couplets in which he advised: "It is better for girls to play with dolls / Than to be writing verses on garden walls." And when she poutingly called him "peasant" one day as he was stoking the samovar in the garden, he conclusively ended the romance by banging her over the head with the dusty charcoal bag.
Fishing, swimming at the seashore, and walks in the public garden occupied the free summertime of the Chekhov children. In diving one day Antosha received a severe cut on his forehead which left a permanent scar. Unlike many townsfolk, however, the family could not afford a summer place away from the heat of Taganrog, but they took trips into the countryside, especially to Grandfather's village about sixty miles away on the Donets steppe. Years later Chekhov vividly recalled a vacation at Grandfather's, as a boy of twelve, and how he was ordered to keep tally on the output of a steam threshing machine. The hissing, whistling machine, with "its cunning, playful expression," seemed alive, and it was the perspiring men who appeared to be machines. And Misha describes a trip which the children took the next summer (1873) to Grandfather's, spending two days at a charming village on the way. Accompanied only by their mother — apparently the father had to remain behind to take care of the grocery store — the children considered the journey a prolonged lark. They drove out into the steppe in a hired peasant cart. Alexander wore a broad-brimmed paper hat which he had made for the outing, and the barefoot Nikolai an old collapsible opera hat which he had procured somewhere. There were stops on the road, picnics, romps in the meadows and orchard raiding. Antosha played a leading role in the endless practical jokes, most of which were concentrated on separating Nikolai from his battered stovepipe. Success came when they were in swimming; Antosha knocked it off from behind and the hat, sadly enough, filled with water and sank in the pond.