Trubnaya Square, Moscow
Chekhov's family had moved twelve times since migrating to Moscow. He joined them in a dank basement flat owned by the Church of St Nicholas-on-Grachevka, in an nsalubrious part of the city near the red light district. Grachevka Street was notorious for its hardened criminals. Bolshoi Golovin Lane, where the family moved to next, was full of brothels. Nearby was Trubnaya Square, or Truba as it was commonly known, named after the pipe (the truoa) in the white city wall through which the little Neglinnaya River trickled. Trubnaya Square was famous for its Sundav pet market, and every spring on the Feast of the Annunciation, hundreds of goldfinches, chaffinches and siskins would be set free. This was in keeping with a tradition whereby all respectable Russians considered it their duty to let at least one bird free on Annunciation Day. Chekhov was to live in this area for the next six years, and one of his most memorable early works was a vignette about the Trubnaya Square market. Nikolai Leikin, the editor to whom he submitted it for publication in the new Petersburg journal Fragments, thought it had too much of a Moscow flavour and promptly rejected it. 'In Moscow on Truba' appeared in November 1883 in the Moscow- based The Alarm Clock instead.10 After Fragments, The Alarm Clock was the most popular comic journal in Russia, and was certainly more established, having been founded in 1866. Some of Chekhov's earliest Moscow memories found their way into this brief but vivid piece, which clearly made him homesick for the steppe and his bird-catching days in warm Taganrog. Even at this early stage, Chekhov was beginning to develop a distinctive style:
Hundreds of sheepskins, winter coats, fur caps and top hats swarm like lobsters in a pot. You can hear the many-voiced singing of birds, which reminds you of spring. If the sun shines or if there are no clouds in the sky, the singing and the smell of hay makes you day-dream and carries your thoughts far, far away. A row of carts extends at one end of the square. On the carts you will not find hay, cabbages or beans, but goldfinches, siskins, demoiselle cranes, larks, black and grey thrushes, blue-tits and bullfinches. They are all jumping about in clumsy homemade cages, looking with envy at the free sparrows and warbling. The goldfinches will go for five kopecks, the siskins cost more, and the other birds have a completely unfixed price.
'How much is the lark?'
Even the man selling them does not know how much his lark is. He scratches the back of his head and says whatever figure comes into his head - < ther a rouble or three kopecks, depending on who is buying. There are expensive biras too. On a soiled little pole sits a faded old chrush with a scrawny tail. He is respectable, pompous and motionless, like a re tired general. He gave n to h;s captivity ages ago and has been looking at the deep blue sky with indifference for a long time now. He is probably cons'dered a sensible bira because of his indifference. You cannot sell him for less than forty kopecks. Thronging round the birds are schoolboys, workmen, young people in fashionable coats, enthusiasts in unbelievably threadbare hats and trousers so shabby they look as if they have been eaten by mice.11
As well as birds, there were hares, rabbits, hedgehogs, guinea-pigs and
ferrets on sale, and then there were fish:
The fish section is the most interesting. There are about ten muzhiks sitting in a row. In front of each of them there is a bucket and in these buckets is a small inferno. In the green, murky water teem little carps, burbots, minnows, snails, frogs and molluscs. Large water beetles with broken legs dart about on the surface, clambering over the carps and hopping over the frogs. The frogs climb over the beetles, the molluscs climb over the frogs. As a more expensive fish, the dark green tench have an advantage: they are kept in a special jar where they cannot exactly swim about, but they have a bit more room to breathe . . .
'The carp is a great fish! A carp, your excellency, will never die! You
can keep him for a year in a bucket, and he'll still be alive! I caught these fish a week ago now. I caught them in Perervo, sir, and walked back with them all the way. The carp are two kopecks each, the burbots three, and the minnows are ten for ten, all alive and kicking! You can have them for five. And how about some worms?'
The vendor reaches into the bucket and pulls out with his dirty, stubby fingers a soft little minnow or a baby carp no longer than your nail. Near the buckets are spread out lengths of fishing line, hooks and traps, and pond worms reflect a fiery crimson in the sunshine.12
Chekhov was a passionate fisherman, and Trubnaya Square was where he would sometimes direct his brother Ivan to buy tackle for summer fishing at the dacha. It was also where he came to buy fish to put in his pond when his family moved out of Moscow to Melikhovo in 1892. As a scruffy student standing in the market and logging impressions into his memory for his story, he can hardly have imagined that one day he would have his own pond to fish in. Trubnaya Square was also, of course, where his brother Misha bought the fish for the family aquarium. Many years later, Chekhov sat down to write his story In the Cart'. As she is travelling home by cart to the village where she is a teacher, his character Marya suddenly has a flash of recollection: And with amazing clarity, for the first time in all these thirteen years, she was able vividly to remember her mother and father, her brother, the apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with the little fish and everything else down to the smallest detail; suddenly she heard the sound of the piano and her father's voice.' Chekhov was clearly remembering the hard early years in Moscow, and also thinking nostalgically of his Moscow youth when he wrote this story in 1897, having been sent to Nice in the vain hope of curing his tuberculosis.
Living conditions were spartan and very cramped in the flat on Grachevka: there were n; ле people living in four rooms, three of whom were lodgers taken in by the Chekhovs in order to make ends meet. The situation had eased a little, as Pavel Egorovich was at least earning a regular salary. After long months of unemployment, he had been forced to swallow his Pi.de and take a job as an accounts clerk for a merchant on the other side of town who had a haberdashery firm, and he was to live chiefly on his employer's premises for the next few years. Two of his nephews already had jobs at Gavrilov's warehouse: Mikhail, the son of his eldest brother, and Aunt Fenichka's only son, Alexei, who had started work at the age of thirteen.13 Pavel Egorovich's meagre income did not go far, and Alexander and Nikolai were reneging on their duty to help. As soon as Chekhov received the first instalment of his student grant, therefore, it was pounced on. A few weeks later the family moved again, the grant from the Taganrog City Council (one of twenty awarded that year) enabling them to take up residence in a super1 >r first-floor flat.