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Pavel Yegorovich had himself to blame for the financial misfortune that overtook his family toward the end of 1875. The year before he had built a house on a plot of land in Taganrog given to him by his father. The construction, in which he was badly cheated, consumed all his available capital and he had to borrow five hundred roubles from a local mutual credit association. A friend and worker in the association, a certain Kostenko, agreed to endorse the note.
In the ensuing year trade in the grocery store went from bad to worse. Alexander received a sad letter from his father: "Day by day my business falls off terribly. I'm in the dumps, am losing heart, and I don't know what Mama and I will do. Ah, money, money! How difficult it is to obtain it without patronage and in an honest way." Actually the laying of a railway to Vladikavkaz had for some time diminished the significance of Taganrog as a port and trading center, and Pavel Yegorovich had neither the foresight nor business acumen to anticipate changing conditions or to meet ordinary competition. At best, he was a petty trader dealing in goods that yielded an absurdly low profit. As Chekhov once explained to his brother Alexander, their father's whole fault was a narrow outlook and a determination to pursue every kopeck while he let the roubles get past him. And as his yearning for social status increased with the years, he tended to neglect his business. One reason his children had to spend so many hours in the grocery store was because their father was so frequently off on civic duties, religious ceremonies, and choir directing.
The family soon began to feel the pinch of sharply falling income. Things got so bad that little Misha and Ivan were sent to their grandfather's home for periods of time in order to save on food. The mother wrote her two elder sons in Moscow in her quaint ungrammatical and unpunctuated style which is not duplicated here: "Antosha and Vanka [Ivan] have now sat home [from school] for a whole week. They demand payment and we have no money. Yesterday, October 9, Pavel Yegorovich went to plead with the director. They have excused Vanka from payment, but Antosha is still at home and for him and Masha we must pay forty-two roubles. What grief!"
The letter was a cry for help, but the two older sons needed help themselves. Hoping to obtain a doctorate in mathematical sciences at the university, Alexander supported himself and his brother by copying out lecture notes for others. The artist Nikolai did nothing beyond his painting. God would provide, he believed, and, often half-starved, he went about dirty and unkempt. When Alexander could afford the price of a stamp, he sent pleading letters to his hard-pressed family, asking for assistance, especially for Nikolai, whose clothes were in rags, but he received only religious counsel from his father. "When you're sick at heart," Alexander angrily wrote him, "and are filled with gloomy thoughts, you hope for at least friendly comfort and a sympathetic word, but instead you get advice to go to church."
In the course of 1876 catastrophe overwhelmed the Chekhov family. By the middle of April the father, unable to pay the five hundred roubles which he had borrowed to help build his house, or even the interest on this sum, was forced to declare himself bankrupt. Kostenko, who had to make good his surety to the mutual credit association, promptly sued Pavel Yegorovich for the money. Facing the certainty of a debtor's prison, he stealthily slipped into a railroad car on a little siding near Taganrog and, with a ticket apparently paid for by his father, escaped to Moscow. After more than thirty years of striving, this humiliating exit from the scene of his small triumphs brought an end to youthful dreams of material and social success. Worse still, this fifty- year-old father had become a failure in the eyes of his six children.
The distracted mother, in an effort to save something from the debacle, ordered Antosha to query a moneylender about the possibility of his buying the house, but he showed no interest. Nor did any of the family's relatives come to the rescue — kindly disposed Mitrofan protested his own poor financial situation at that time. At this juncture, G. P. Selivanov, a clever gambler and a professed friend of the family, offered to help. In their need for money, the Chekhovs had taken in him and his niece, Alexandra, as lodgers, and Antosha tutored the niece to prepare her to enter the Taganrog School for Girls. Since Selivanov was an official in the civil court where the suit against Pavel Yegorovich was pending, the mother's hopes were raised. Through legal trickery, however, Selivanov managed to have the house deeded over to him by paying a mere five hundred roubles, the sum of the original loan; then by decision of the court the movable furnishings of the house were ordered auctioned, the proceeds going to Kostenko to reimburse him for the interest he had paid on the loan.
Left without a home or furniture after twenty-two years of married life, the weeping mother set out for Moscow, in July 1876, to join her husband and sons, taking with her Misha and Masha. Young Ivan was placed in the home of her sister Fedosiya in Taganrog, but after several months he was also sent on to Moscow. Antosha remained alone in the old house to guard — and to sell if he could — the few personal belongings left to the family. The new owner, Selivanov, offered Antosha room and board in exchange for tutoring his nephew, young Peter Kravtsov, who had also come to live with his uncle while preparing to enter a military school. "I am necessary to you," Selivanov cynically explained later, "and you are necessary to me." With his strong sense of pride, however, it could not have been easy for Antosha to accept this apparent compensation of conscience from the man who had mulcted his family. But he agreed, for he was determined to finish his own schooling and he had three more years to graduation.
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In beginning a new phase of his life in such radically altered circumstances, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, now sixteen years old, must have been assailed by conflicting feelings. He was free at last, free of the drudgery of tending shop, of choir rehearsals, of endless churchgoing, and free also of the well-intentioned tyranny of his father.
At times, however, Anton's new freedom, which he prized, must have been tinged with bitterness, for it had come to him through the un- happiness of the family he loved. The mute evidence of their misfortune confronted him daily as a mere lodger in a comer of the house that had belonged to his parents. More tangible evidence in the form of pleading letters from his mother informed him of this dire poverty in Moscow. He sent her the tiny sums he received from the sale of pots and saucepans, along with notes containing perhaps misdirected efforts to cheer her up. "We have received two letters from you full of jokes," she wrote in some anguish, "while at this very time we have only four kopecks for bread and candles. We've been waiting for the money that does not come from you; it would be very grievous if you should not believe us. Masha has no winter coat and I have no warm boots, so we have to sit at home. I have no sewing machine to help me earn money. . . . For God's sake, write soon and send me money! What about the sale of the commode and other things? Please hurry. Don't let me die from grief."
These were large and depressing responsibilities to thrust upon a youth of sixteen, but time increased them until they absorbed much of Chekhov's vital forces in an incredible degree of self-dedication to a concept of family duty. He secured odd jobs, mostly tutoring, and from his meager earnings he sent part to his mother; for a time his father remained unemployed in Moscow, and Alexander could give very little help and Nikolai none. The humiliation of the lowly paid was Antosha's lot. Unable to afford galoshes in winter, he hid his wet, worn-down boots under his pupil's table; he waited patiently for the overdue three roubles a month for his lessons; and he speculated longingly on whether his employer would offer him a glass of tea with sugar. Yet, characteristically, he shared one of his precious tutoring assignments and its remuneration with a school friend whose need was no less than his own.