Young Chekhov's character was formed and his self-reliance developed in these three years of shifting for himself at Taganrog. The maturing process accelerated; physically and mentally Anton grew with surprising rapidity. His attitude toward school and intellectual self-improvement became more serious and his marks improved. He plunged into a variety of reading. Among the many books charged out to him in the town library, Russian classics in fiction and literary criticism of the nineteenth century predominate. But youthful curiosity also led him into tackling the tougher intellectual matter of Buckle, Schopenhauer, and Humboldt. Get into the habit of reading, he rather pompously wrote his younger brother Misha, who had made the mistake of informing Anton of his devotion to Uncle Tom's Cabin. "So Madame Beecher Stowe wrung tears from your eyes? I read her once and six months ago reread her with a scientific purpose in mind and was left with the unpleasant sensation we mortals experience after eating too many raisins or currants." Try Don Quixote, he advised, a work "almost on a level with those of Shakespeare." (April 6-8, 1879). Nor did Anton neglect at this time the "thick" journals, the essential monthly fare of all cultured Russians, and he even scraped together enough money to subscribe to one of the most important, Annals of the Fatherland. Besides, with his love for the comic, he eagerly followed every issue of such humorous magazines as Alarm Clock and Dragonfly, publications that he would be contributing to in a few years. Sundays and holidays were set aside for these amusing periodicals at the town library. They would sit all day right through dinner, recalls one of Anton's school companions, laughing so loudly that they disturbed the other readers.
Part of the swiftly maturing process was the livelier interest Anton took in people, a new capacity to form friendships, and a growing awareness of the charms of schoolgirls. Part of the attraction of the Drossi household was the young daughter Manya. They took walks together in the town park, he submitted to her demands for candy in order to be admitted to her room, and on one occasion anxiously waited for her in a blizzard to walk her home from school.
Late in life Chekhov replied to a friend's request for a biographical note with a brief sketch in which, among other things, he declared: "I was initiated into the secrets of love at the age of thirteen." So ironie and spoofing is the whole account that this singular bit of information perhaps should not be taken too seriously. As an example of love at first sight, however, he once told his friend A. S. Suvorin of an incident that could have occurred only when he was a boy and perhaps on a visit to his grandfather. While he was looking in a well one day a girl of fifteen stepped up to draw water. So captivated was he by her beauty that he immediately began to embrace and kiss her. The girl offered no protest, forgot entirely about her pail of water, and for a long time they remained silent, pressing close together and staring at their reflections in the well. More positive, perhaps, was the confidence to Misha of the many "happy and gay" love affairs he enjoyed during the last two years at school, and the pose of the surfeited swain which he adopted in a lost letter to Alexander, in which he had apparently avowed his intentions of giving up this frivolous business. For the older brother, now deep in the frivolity of Moscow, sagely replied that there was both sense and nonsense in his decision, and he advised: "You don't have to be a worshiper of the wenches, but neither is it neccssary to run after them."
Now, as an amusing and lively young man without a family, Anton received invitations from kind friends during the summer vacation periods. His landlord's well-to-do-brother, I. P. Selivanov, had him out to his country house as a guest and took him on business trips in the steppe region. The family of jovial fat "Makar," his schoolmate Vasily Zembulatov, invited him to their summer place. But he particularly enjoyed his stay at the Don steppe farmhouse of his pupil Peter Kravt- sov, who was not much younger than his teacher. Here a semiprimitive life prevailed. Everything seemed half-wild — nature, the savage, unfed dogs, and even the barnyard fowls which were shot down by the trigger- happy Kravtsovs when required for food. Anton entered into this frontier existence with zest and learned to shoot, to hunt, and to ride restive horses. He loved the immensity of these plains stretching to the horizon, their profusion of varicolored wildflowers, and the mysterious loneliness of the steppe at night, under the stars, when quiet moments of self-communion seemed filled with an eternity of time and space.
Letters between Anton and members of his family were frequent, although very few of his survived the enforced moves of the family in Moscow during these three years of separation. His parents' letters never failed to contain recitals of poverty, sickness, and discouragement; Alexander drew a grim picture of continual domestic bickering which included a carping defense of his insistence on living apart from the family. In his own letters Anton tried to comfort and amuse them with tidbits about the doings of their old friends at Taganrog, and often he accompanied them with little gifts from his small earnings. At times he would draw a moral from the youthful wisdom he was acquiring and it would glow with the precocity of talent and a dawning sense of his own worth. "Why do you refer to yourself as an 'insignificant and inconspicuous little brother'?" he asks in a reply, already quoted from, to one of Mikhail's letters. "So you consider yourself insignificant? . . . Do you know before whom you ought to be conscious of your insignificance? Before God, perhaps, the human intellect, beauty, and nature, but not before men. Before men you must be aware of your own worth. You're an honest person, aren't you, not a rogue? Well, then, respect yourself as an honest fellow and remember that no honest fellow ean be insignificant. Do not confuse 'humbling yourself' with a 'consciousness of your own insignificance.' "
With money for a one-way ticket from Alexander and his rash assurance that somehow the return fare would be forthcoming, Anton undertook the trip of eight hundred miles to Moscow to visit the family during the Easter vacation of 1877. Though amply prepared for it, he must have been shocked by their poverty-stricken existence, so different from their way of life at Taganrog —the sleazy neighborhood, the crowded single-room apartment with its drab, hand-me-down furnishings and lack of the most commonplace necessities. All slept on the floor, for there were no beds. On occasions Nikolai and an artist friend stole wood from carts to heat the stove. The mother earned a bit by sewing, and the father had just obtained a laboring job on a construction.
Failure in life seemed to increase both Pavel Yegorovich's sternness and humorlessness in his relations with the children. Was it misplaced facetiousness or merciless intent that dictated the family regimen which he tacked on the wall under the solemn title: "Work Schedule and Domestic Duties To Be Observed in the Household of Pavel Chekhov in Moscow"? To each of the children — Nikolai, Ivan, Misha, and Masha — was assigned a time to get up in the morning and a time to go to bed at night; they were told when to eat and to go to church, and what they should do in their free time. At the end of the listing he wrote: "Failure to fulfill these duties will result first in a stern reprimand, then in punishment during which it is forbidden to cry. Father of the family, Pavel Chekhov." Eleven-year-old Misha complained that he had been punished for oversleeping eight minutes, because the time on the schedule had been changed after he went to bed, to which Pavel Yegorovich illogically replied: "Get up and look at the regulation, and if it is too early for you to rise, then go back to sleep." Sixteen-year-old Ivan yelled so loudly during a savage beating for an infraction of the rules that the neighbors protested.