Merchants had traditionally represented the more Asiatic face of Russian society due to the fact that their trade links had initially developed with the Orient. Dur ng the two and a half centuries of the Tatar yoke, the Tatar-Mongols had exacted humiliating tr outes from Russian principalities, but they also stimulated trade via the great caravan routes spanning the length of thei»- enormous empire. Russian merchants profited from the trading opportune :s that opened up with Persia, Central Asia and China, acquiring a Tatar-based commercial vocabulary along the way. Tovar, the Russian word for merchandise, for example, is derived from the Tatar term for possessions or cattle, as is tovarishch ('comrade'), which meant business partner long before it was commandeered by the Bolsheviks. The pro-Asiatic orientation of Russian trade continued long after the Mongols were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century. Of all the social classes in Russia, the merchant class was the most passive, and most supportive of the autocratic regime, and it was really only in the nineteenth century that it began to change its patriarchal ways and succumb to the processes of modernization. Due to the restriv:tive practices of the imperial government, which did its best to inhibit any activity that might threaten [ts authority (it took several years merely to decide which government department should pay for the replacement of kerosene with electricity at one police stat' >n m St Petersburg, for example), capitalism reached Russia late, but the Westernization of the merchant class finally began to accelerate in the 1860s, the era of the Great Reforms.
A new law passed in 1863 reduced the number of guilds from three to two. To compensate for the fact that the guilds were now open to all sections of the population following the Emancipation of the Serfs, merchants of the First Guild now acquired privileges that enabled them to be presented at court and wear the official green and red uniform of the regional government with sword and spurs (although they were not allowed to wear different colour cuffs and collars, like members of the nobility). If they had served for twelve years in the First Guild and were Orthodox Christians, merchants were also allowed to enrol their children as boarders in various educational establishments. Merchants had always been identifiable by their long beards and oriental style of dress, but the traditional uniform of kaftans and high boots with pointed toes had finally given way to Western-style frock-coats and top hats by the time Chekhov's father began trading.26 Pavel Chekhov took pride in his appearance even when business was very poor, and the starched linen shirts dutifully ironed by his daughter were always spotless; his son Anton was to inhent his father's neatness, if notFng else.
Like every other social group in Russia, merchants had a distinct culture of their own, which the Chekhov family typified to a certain degree. Direct contact with foreign traders and their Western-style capitalist business practices meant that Taganrog was inevitably more cosmopolitan than most provincial towns ; n Russia, but its merchants still inhabited a relatively closed world, symbolized by the eternally closed shutters of their houses. It was something Chekhov noticed for the first time when he came back to his home town in 1887, and was in large measure due to the .nsecu-ity merchants felt with regard to their tenuous social status, segregated from the rest of society. With their lives ruled largely by financial concerns and the simple problem of survival, it was not surprising that merchants wanted to protect their businesses by keeping them within the family. Sons were expected to work long hours for their fathers from an early age, and merchants like Pavel Cheknov, who kept shops, would trade long hours every day, even on Sundays, closing only for the major religious holidays at Christmas and Easter. Pavel Chekhov opened his doors at five in the morning and would not shut them until at least eleven m the evening - later, if he liked the conversation of customers who had lingered. In the patriarchal fam ily life of the Russian merchant, the father's word was law. This was certainly the case in the Chekhov family, and Evgenia always deferred to ner husband, even if she disapproved of his harsh disciplinarian methods.
Chekhov's family was also typical in its religious devotion. The church was central to the life of Russian merchants, some of whom were so conservative that they clung to the Old Belief, dating from the church schism of the seventeenth century. The financial year for merchants began, significantly, in Easter week, and other dates in the commercial calendar were also timed to coincde with major religious holidays. Merchants regarded the fanrly icons as their most treasured possessions and often invited priests to hold religious services in their homes; when entering the premises of other merchants they crossed themselves and kissed each other three times.27 But Pavel Chekhov was extraordinarily pious even by the standards of Russian merchants, who were known for their part'cular devotion to the rituals of the Orthodox church, obsessive attendance at services, and their observance of all ^asts. Orthodox services tend to be long, but Pavel Chekhov would have been happy for them to be still longer: even the priests complained when he was a choirmaster, because he liked to proceed at such a slow pace, drawing everything out. Chekhov's brother Alexander recalled that their father never missed a service, and ensured that his children d d not either. One of the reasons why Pavel was such a poor businessman was probably the «ccessive amount of time he dedicated to the church. As a major port with several churches, Taganrog had its own Cathedral Church of the Assumption, a spacious building with a single large dome, bu'lt n 1829 in the middle of the town's main square. It was here that Pavel Chekhov led the choir for several years, and it was here that his th xd sonI Anton, was baptized, with both godparents from local merchant families.28
Where Pavel Egorovich was unusual was in h's interest in education and culture, neither of which were traditionally respected in merchant households. His writer son used to apologize to his correspondents for seeming continually to be thinking about money, and blamed it on the circumstances of his upbringing. Every aspect of life in Taganrog revolved around money, and he lamented the fact that he had Deen forced to grow up in an environment in which it had played such a large role. His father would lament that he only ever made losses in his trade, a complaint Chekhov may have had in the back of his mind when he later wrote the darkly humorous 'Rothschild's Violin'. In this story a curmudgeonly coffin maker, so mortified by his losses, concludes that he will only ever make a profit when he dies, and no longer needs to feed himself or pay taxes:
Uspensky Cathedral, Taganrog, where Chekhov was christened.
As he walked home, he realized that bung dead would bring only profit: he would not need to eat or drink, pay tax, or offend people, and since people get to lie in their graves for not ust one, but for hundreds and thousands of years, then you would make a huge profit if you added it all up. From life you just made a loss, but from death you made a profit. Thn was, of course, a reasonable way of looking at things, but t was annoy "ng and painful to come to terms with: why was the world set up in such a strange way so that life, which a human being only gets once, brings no profit?29
Chekhov's father was not a successful merchant, but all the same he was considerably more enlightened than the majority of his class. It is true that he nitially sent Anton and Nikolai to the Greek school in Taganrog, believing he would be setting them up for lucrative careers if they could speak the language: the most piosperous businessmen n Taganrog were all Greek, after all, and success was measured by the numbers of clerks one was able to employ. Pavel Chekhov was held in great respect for sending all five of lis sons to the Taganrog gymnasium. He, of course, had received only a rudimentary education growing up as a serf, learning to read and write at the age of eight at the village school. Although he did not write much or have all that much to say, he attached great importance to the ability to write beautifully (even his shopping lists were penned in an ornate calligraphic style), which again seems to betray an excessive attachment to form. As a boy, Pavel had also been taught by the village priest to read music and to play the violin (which he held on his chest rather than under his chin, in the folk music style). He took an active interest in politics and local affairs and liked reading French boulevard novels, but it was newspapers he enjoyed the most. Each issue would be read from beg aning to end, before being carefully tied up with string and then stored at the end of the year. Pavel Egorovich subscribed to the first Taganrog newspaper when it appeared in the 1860s, and made his sons read it out aload. Although it mostly contained news of interest to merchants, the paper also carried a few stories from the national and foreign press, as well as local news.