In 1874, the Chekhovs finally moved into their own house on Elizavetinskaya Street, not far from where Anton was born. Pavel Egorovich was swindled by the contractor who built t, and ended up sinking all his capital nto the house's construction. The modest one- storey dwelling was neither well built nor particularly attractive. Matters worsened when the new shop he had opened near the railway station failed to orosper: his business had started to go downhill when the railway network was extended to Rostov and not Taganrog. The grain traders who had brought their deliveries by horse and cart now switched to using trai. is. The bay had by this time become so shallow that maritime trade was also no longer viable, and by the time the railway line was extended to Taganrog, it was too late to save Pavel Egorovich's business. Less than two years later, he had to abscond in order to avoid be.ng thrown into the debtors' prison. Alexander and Nikolai were students in Moscow by this time, and Pavel's nephew Mikhail was also in Moscow, work ig for a haberdashery company run by a wealthy merchant called Gavrilov. So Moscow was the obvious destination for Pavel Egorovich to run to. He made a careful list of the clothes and linen he was to take with him to Moscow:
1 pair of black trousers
1 pair to wear
1 knitted coat
1 top hat 1 straw hat 1 warm coat 1 pair of boots 1 pair of galoshes
pillow with a case 10 pairs of socks
5 shirts 4 shirt-fronts 4 handkerchiefs
toweis
sheets3
He was joined soon after by his wife and their two youngest children, but it was agreed that Anton and Ivan should complete their education in Taganrog. They were therefore left behind, boarding initially with the house's new owner Gavii. Selivanov. Chekhov tutored Selivanov's nephew Pyotr Kravtsov, and was later invited to spend time out in the steppe with hir family. When Chekhov returned to Taganrog as an adult, it was essentially a dead town, its qt iet, deserted streets exuding an atmosphere of sadness and neg'ect. To one of his contemporaries, visiting Taganrog felt like walking through a quiet cemetery.31
Although Chekhov's merchant background receded in importance as he entered the ranks of Russia's burgeoning professional class, first by acquiring a degree in medicine, then literary celebrity, it remained an essential part of his make-up. It is telling that when he became a student at Moscow University in 1879, he registered with the police as a meshchanin. At the beginning of his second year, however, he registered himself as being of merchant background.32 The plays of Alexander Ostrovsky had reinforced a set of negative stereotypes which had characterized merchants as d shonest, uneducated and narrow-minded people prone to gluttony and cruelty. Chekhov was to play a major role in helping to change their public percept'on. The young merchant hero of his story 'Three Years' is in many ways a transitional figure - educated but not yet completely liberated. By the time Chekhov came to write The Cherry Orchard a decade later, the suffocatmgly closed world which we see in plays like The Storm (best known via Janacek's opera Katya Kabanova) had finally opened up, Chief beneficiaries of Russia's industrialization, merchants became the new elite - cosmopolitan, educated, and extremely wealthy. Konstantin Stanislavsky, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, the company which championed Chekhov's innovative plays, was an example of the new breed of cultured merchant industrialists from Moscow who had a serious interest in art and a lot of money to invest. Chekhov thought Stanislavsky would be the ideal person to play the hard-working merchant Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, who is portrayed at least as sympathetically as the hapless gentry whose cherry orchard he purchases. But it was precisely because of his own merchant origins that Stanislavsky did not want the part, but that of the o'd nobleman Gaev. Since commercial enterprise had never enjoyed a good reputation in Russia, Stanislavsky wished to play down how he had come by his money. Like many nouveau riche merchants at the turn of the century, he hoped to do that by buying a country estate and adopting the old- world lifestyle of the nobility, a class by then in its death throes. Even Chekhov fulfilled a dream of becoming a landowner when he bought his m'niature estate at Melikhovo, but was characteristically ironic when referring to the pleasures of being lord of the manor.
Ill
The Don Steppe
but if the traveller in spring or autumn steps off the platfom of any small station and listens in the morning or evening to the calls of birds and the hum of insects, filling the whole steppe with life, he will perhaps understand why to the dweller on the steppe there is no dreariness in its apparent monotony.
Murray's handbook for Travellers to Russia, 1875
in April 1887, just before he wrote his first story for a serious literary journal, Chekhov rook the train back to Taganrog in order to spend several weeks travelling round the steppe. He had not been home in six years, and needed to see southern Russia again, he said, in order not to 'dry ou t'; he wanted to resurrect in his memory things that had already grown dim so that his writing might be more vivid.33 So he started taking detailed travel notes to store up as a creative reserve for future stories, and sent them as letters to his family. On the last leg of his two- day train journey from Moscow, a few hours before reaching his destination, his mood suddenly soared: 'The weather is glorious, there is a smell of the steppe and the sound of birds singing. I can see old friends - kites flying over the steppe ... The kurgans, the water towers, the buildings - it's all familiar and unforgettable . . ,'34
A^ter staying for a while in Taganrog, where he caught up with relatives and old friends, he set off travelling once more ana was again intoxicated by 'bare steppe, kurgans, kites, larks, blue horizon . . Л35 He had to spend one night during his travels at a remote station, waiting for his connection, and managed to find a second-class carriage to sleep in that was parked n a siding. Stepping out in the small hours to relieve himself, he was awestruck by the beauty of the nocturnal steppe landscape and described it in a letter to his family: '.. . outside it was utter magic: the moon, the vast steppe with its kurgans and wilderness, deathly silence, the railway carnages and rails standing out snarply in the shadows - it seemed like the world had become extinct... It was a scene I won't forget in a million years.'36
The old Russian word steppe> meaning lowland', has no equivalent in other languages, but the word combination used by the Japanese, 'ocean of land', conveys well the fundamental features of the vast treeless plain that extends all the way from the Danube in the west, chrough Central Asia to MongoHa ana China.37 A halfway house between forest and desert, the steppe, with its temperate climate, was the perfect natural environment for the pastoral way of lite of the Scythian horsemen. They were among the first inhabitants of the land of southern Russia and the Ukraine to benefit from its fertile 'black earth' soil which, when uncultivated, produces a profusion of wild flowers, herbs and grasses, some of them more than six feet tall. The Scythians lived in the saddle (inspiring the Greeks to create the mythical half-man, half-horse beast they called a centaur), and when their kings died, their horses were bured aiong wth them, laid out °n concentric rings. Kurgans, the vast burial mounds raised over their tattooed bodies, have for centuries been ar ntrmsic and indeed fundamental part of the steppe landscape of southern Russia, and a key ingredient of one of Chekhov's most important sources of lyrical inspiration. Henry