Mr Martin and Count Tolstoy seem to think Her Majesty's naval commanders are lost to all humane feelings. At any rate, the Russian inhabitants of the seaboard seem to think otherwise, for our greatest difficulty is to prevent ourselves being burdened with voluntary prisoners.36
It was understandably with an eye to avoiding conscription that Evgenia Chekhova pressed her husband to raise the money necessary to join the merchant class when the couple returned to Taganrog at the close of the Crimean War together with their baby son: one of the privileges was exemption from military service.37
Chapter 2 TAGANROG AND THE STEPPE
I
A Southern Childhood
There is in reality nothing to see at laganrog beyond the house in which
Alexander I died. The town is neat and tidy but the dust is terrific.
Murray's Handbook for Travellers to Russia, 1875
The south is your homeland; the south will always attract you.
Letter from Georgi Chekhov, 1889
Chekhov's last brief visit to his home town of Taganrog took place in the hot summer days of July 1899, and he arrived unannounced. He met with relatives and acquaintances whom he told about the circumstances of his father's death, he discussed plans for the statue of Peter the Great that had been commissioned for Taganrog's bicentenary, he gave advice on how best to cultivate conifers (a rarity in that part of the world), and then he headed back to Yalta. If Taganrog had been in Chekhov's mind a lot at that time, it was not only because his father had died the previous autumn. He had received the news just after he had reluctantly set off to spend his first winter in Yalta. Chekhov's move south to the Crimea had taken him back to his childhood: the memories of the years he spent growing up now came flooding back, and were intensified during his first Yalta spring by the sweet scent of blossoming acacia trees, which were foreign to Moscow but grew in profusion in Taganrog's warm climate. Chekhov's love of trees is well known, and it began early. Large numbers of poplars and lilac trees lined the streets of Taganrog along with the acacias, often planted in two rows to provide shade during the summer months.1 When they were in full leaf, the rows of tiny cottages tended to disappear completely in the foliage, their diminutive size accentuated by the broadness of the streets they stood on. It was in one of those tiny single-storey houses with a low roof and shuttered windows that Chekhov was born in 1860. Located in one of the less well-appointed neighbourhoods of Taganrog, the squat whitewashed building was rented from a local merchant, and was one of hundreds of such buildings which still line the dusty back streets of the town. L'ke its neighbours, it was constructed with mud bricks and set a long way back from an unpaved road in a yard full of wild steppe grass, and trees with nesting boxes fixed to them. Before it was renamed in honour of its famous former resident, the
Chekhov's birthplace, Taganrog
street was imaginatively named Politseiskaya - Police Street, because there was a police station located there. -
The twenty-three square metres of the Chekhovs' house certainly did not provide much living space for a fami'y of five. Apart from a minuscule kitchen with an earthen floor, there were just three low- ceilinged rooms. Chekhov's parents slept m one bedroom, and baby Anton о ned his elder brothers, four-year-old Alexander and two-year- old Nikolai in the other. His aunt later recalled that he rarely cried as a baby, and learned to walk and talk early.3 The third room, with four large windows, served as dining room, sitting room, and study for Chekhov's father. But the most important function of this room was as a place to pray. Pavel Egorovich took praying very seriously. The icon corner was as traditional a feature of Russian households as the brass samovar, but many families paid scant regard to the holy image that was chere to help them pray. Many a family icon became obscured over the years with soot from the oil lamp supposed to burn continually beneath it as a symbol of God's constant grace. This was never the case in the God-fearing Chekhov family home: the main corner of their front room was covered with icons. Beneath the icons and the icon lamp stood a cabinet on which lay a prayer book, the family Biole and a tall brass candlestick. Pavel Egorovich would lead prayers without fail every evening, and before certain feast days would burn incense before the icons. On the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration, celebrated in early August when the first fruits of the harvest were traditionally blessed, the Chekhovs would place honeycomb, apples and poppy seed underneath the icons. The next day they would take them to be blessed in church, and only then could the family break their fast and eat the fruit. Of all the members of his own family, Pavel Egorovich was particularly close to his brother Mitrofan, who was equally devout and served as an elder in one of Taganrog's churches. Whenever Mitrofan Egorovich came to visit, so his relatives liked to recount, he would go straight to the icon corner and start praying, crossing himself and bowing down to the floor. Pavel Egorovich would stand waiting to greet his brother with outstretched arms, but the praying would go on and on. And typically, by the time Mitrofan Egorovich had finished saying a prayer to each of the many icons, and was finally ready to meet h.a brother's embrace, Pavel Egorovich would have begun praying himself.4
Pavel and Murofan Chekhov and then families, 1874
Impecunious Russians did not tend to lead settled lives, and like the nomadic tribes who had once populated the southern steppe regions, the Chekhovs moved frequently from one rented property to another. They lived in six different places in Taganrog during Anton's childhood. Just before a fourth son, Ivan, was born to Pavel and Evgenia Chekhov in April 1861, they moved further out of the centre of Taganrog, but moved to back Politseiskaya Street to live in a house belonging to a local priest two years later (this was where their first daughter, Maria, was born). In 1864 they moved to the main street of Taganrog, Petrovskaya (or Piterskaya, named after the city's founder, Peter the Great), the year before the birth of their last son, Mikhail. This was another small one- storey house, with a red wooden roof, according to the memories of Nikolai Chekhov, surrounded by burdock, nettles and buttercups. Alexander, Nikolai Anton and Ivan all shared a featherbed in the musty bedroom next to the kitchen with its acrid smell of burnt sunflower oil. The family lived here for five years before finally moving, in 1869, to much grander premises. Chekhov was nine years old in 1869, the year he became a pupil at the Taganrog gymnasium.