Twenty-five years later Chekhov remembered this outing in a letter to a Taganrog friend, and regretted that writers did not take advantage of the wild beauty and rich historical material associated with the Donets steppe.
On Sundays the family would sometimes have dinner with Uncle Mitrofan, who was more successful in the grocery business than his brother. Also deeply religious, he became an elder of the parish church and was given to interlarding his speech with Biblical language. But Antosha liked this uncle, who really practiced the Christian virtues he preached; he forbade corporal punishment, always behaved kindly to his wife and children, and treated his niece and nephews with gentle consideration. Antosha also visited the homes of a few of his classmates, especially that of Andrei Drossi, whose father was a well-to-do wheat broker. In this pleasant household, which provided some cultural entertainment, conversation, and musicales, the youngster was a general favorite with the grownups as well as with the children and servants.
A favorite pastime of the Chekhov children was to escape into the make-believe world of domestic play-acting, in which they often dramatized and ridiculed the cant and vulgarity of Taganrog life. Here, too, Antosha's superior qualities of imagination and inventiveness and his droll sense of the comic won him unquestioned leadership. After his first visit to the theater at the age of thirteen he became fascinated by it. He went as often as he could, seeing such plays as Hamlet, Gogol's The Inspector-General, Griboedov's Woe from Wit, and a dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin. To attend the theater a schoolboy had to have permission from the school head and be accompanied by a parent. Antosha and some of his young friends found a way around these obstacles by making themselves up in dark glasses and their father's coats and sitting in the gallery. The power and mystery of disguise intrigued Antosha and he acquired considerable skill in it and in mimicry. He liked nothing better than to imitate at home the characters he saw on the stage. Once, disguised as a beggar, he completely took in his kind and gentle Uncle Mitrofan, who, moved to compassion by his plea, readily gave him alms.
Such skill showed off to good advantage in the domestic theatricals which the Chekhov children contrived. Antosha would be the dentist in Dental Surgery, and after a scene of many torments he would extract, with the coal tongs, a bottle-cork of a tooth from the "patient" Alexander and proudly display it to a roaring audience. Or — when his father was not present — he would transform himself into a decrepit ecclesiastic who was being examined for the post of village deacon by Alexander as the bishop. Antosha's face changed, his voice grew tremulous, and all the faltering of a panic-stricken old man was perfectly simulated. He concocted other scenes drawn from the school and social life of Taganrog — such as an old professor delivering a lecture, or his favorite, which he acted many times and always with new and amusing variations — the town mayor at a ceremonial function in church. In his school uniform, with an antique sword over his shoulder, he strutted through the pompous paces of the mayor and concluded the scene with a ludicrous inspection of the Cossack guard.
Real plays inevitably entered into the repertory of these domestic performances. Parents, relatives, and neighbors particularly enjoyed the children's staging of Gogol's The Inspector-General and laughed heartily when Masha, as the mayor's daughter, ran off the improvised stage in confusion when Nikolai as Khlestakov attempted to embrace her before the spectators. But Antosha, as the mayor, grotesquely made up, padded with pillows, and adorned with medals he had cut out, captivated all by his acting.
Antosha's adolescent abilities as an actor and writer of dramatic scenes spread beyond the family circle. At the age of fifteen he was invited to participate, during the vacation period, in more formal amateur theatricals which were organized, in the interests of charity, by the Drossis. He performed a number of comic parts, but his outstanding hit was in the role of an old crone in Grigoriev's piece, The Coachmen, or the Prank of a Hussar, which on popular demand was repeated again and again. "It is impossible to imagine," Andrei Drossi recalled, "the Homeric laughter of the audience upon the appearance on the stage of Anton Pavlovich; and, to do him justice, he acted the role in a masterly fashion." Here too were staged scenes on Taganrog life, which Antosha wrote and in which the spectators were sometimes able to identify themselves.
The sap of literary talent had already started to run. Though none of these early dramatic efforts has survived, they were clearly concentrated on the foibles, oddities, and incongruities of people. Themes and details of several of his later works can be traced to these lost boyish skits, if we may judge from contemporary accounts of them. And the schoolboy verse that he scribbled at this time also dealt with humorous subjects. If Chekhov's passion for the theater and dramatic writing began in his boyhood, so did his special literary tendency to discover the comic in the banality and absurdity of life.
Unhappily theatricals at the Chekhov household came to an end in 1875 when Antosha had to part with his two older brothers, indispensable co-workers in this domestic fun. The despotism of their father probably played a major part in the rebellion and subsequent instability of Alexander and Nikolai. Whereas Antosha quietly struggled within the family circle against parental severity, it tended to turn his older brothers into lonely, alienated youths. As early as his last year in school, the brilliant nineteen-year-old Alexander broke away from the family. He accepted a position as tutor to the children of the school's director and lived in his house. The degree of estrangement of father and son is reflected in a letter of Pavel Yegorovich to Alexander at this time: "Sasha, I gather that you don't need us, that the freedom we've given you guides your youthful years. . . . I'm only sorry that you've begun so early to forget your father and mother, who are devoted to you with all their hearts and have not spared means or health in bringing you up. From now on I ask you only one thing: Alter your character and be good to us and to yourself. . . ."
Having graduated in the spring of 1875, Alexander, who had won the school's silver medal for outstanding ability in his studies, decided to enter Moscow University. And Nikolai left with him, although he had not yet finished his schooling. For he, too, was in revolt against his father. Besides, he had already revealed exceptional artistic talent and wished to study at the Moscow School of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture. To Antosha it seemed as though they had gone out into a world of light leaving him to struggle, alone, with the tyranny of their father and the tedium of Taganrog. He keenly missed his two older brothers, for they were closest to him in the family in spirit and intellect. All three had rcached a common understanding of what was false and dishonest in the life around them, and they shared each other's pleasure in making fun of it. Partly to keep in touch in a sphere which he knew would amuse them, Antosha began the Stammerer, a humorous manuscript magazine, in which he wrote up funny sccnes of Taganrog life. Sincc he valued Alexander's literary judgment highly, the youthful author eventually abandoned the project after his parents received a letter from their son in Moscow, in which he commented: "Tell the editor of the Stammerer that his sheet is not as interesting as formerly. There's not enough salt in it."