As well as going to the theatre, Chekhov also enjoyed hearing music.
He went to see Glinka's Л Life for the Tsar at the Bolshoi with his sister in his first winter in Moscow, and in November 1881 got to know the Spanish virtuoso violinist and composer Pablo Sarasate during his Russian tour (having perhaps already met him when he had played in ^aganrog). A few weeks later Sarasate sent Chekhov his photograph from Rome, writing to him in Italian: 'To my dear friend Doctor Antonio Chekhonte, Pablo Sarasate. Rome, Piazza Borghese . .. With love.'19 Maybe it was Sarasate who inspired the parodic story 'The Sinner from Toledo', which Chekhov published in The Spectator that December under the heading 'translated from the Spanish'. Chekhov was good at cod-Latin, but he did not know a word of Spanish, and he never went anywhere near Spain.
Much of the music Chekhov heard was at home. In June 1882 he and Nikolai went to the national exhibition of art and industry that was held in Moscow and were particularly struck by a demonstration given in the piano section. The performer was Pyotr Shostakovsky, a Moscow musician who founded the Russian Philharmonic Society and conducted his own orchestra. Shostakovsky dazzled the Chekhov brothers with his performance of a rhapsody by his teacher Liszt, and Nikola' was so taken with it that he started to play it several times a day. Some times he played to Shostakovsky himself, who became a family frend. N'coJai had nher i.ed his father's musical gifts and taught himself the violin as well the piano. To judge from his repertoire (apart from Liszt, he was very fond of the Chopin nocturnes), he was extremely competent.
Chekhov was part.:ularly close at this time to his brother Nikolai. Before his sad descent into alcoholism and his subsequent fatal illness, Nikolai had everything to look forward to. His prodigious artistic talents promised success as a serious painter, and were also recognized by regular commist. ons from journals like The Alarm Clock. His friends were to become some of the most important figures in the Russian art scene. Two of them also became friends of Anton. First of all there was the painter Lev^ :an, with whom Chekhov shared an almost identical approach to landscape, the prime source of lyrical inspiration to both of them. The painting of the P wer Istra in summer time which Levitan gave Chekhov in 1885 was to follow him wherever he moved, the canvas finally settling along With its owner in Yalta. The course of Chekhov's friendship with Levitan was not always smooth, but there
Chekhov and his brother; Nikolai, February 1882
were few people to whom he was closer. The loss of his letters to Levitan leaves a huge hole in his correspondence. In 1891, in a letter to his sister, Chekhov was thrilled to report Levitan's first major success after seeing his canvas 'Quiet Monastery' exhibited in St Petersburg. It is this same painting (with a few details changed) which Yulia Lapteva is moved by in 'Three Years', Chekhov's masterly 1896 story of Moscow merchant life:
Yulia stopped in front of a small landscape and looked at it dispassionately. In the foreground there was a little river, a timber bridge over it, a path on the other side disappearing into dark grass, then some woods on the right hand side and a bonfire near it: no doubt people were watching over the horses pasturing for the night. In the distance an evening sunset burned.
Yulia imagined going over the bridge herself, then along the path, further and further, with everything quiet all around, corncrakes calling sleepily and the fire flickering in the distance. And for some reason it suddenly seemed to her that she had seen those clouds which stretched out over the red part of the sky, the forest and the field long ago and many times over; she felt completely alone, and it made her want to go walking down that path further and further and further; and the reflection of something eternal and unearthly hovered around the place where the evening sun was setting.20
Another of Nikolai s friends was the architect Franz (Fyodor) Shekhtel, who would go on to create Moscow's most fabulous Art Nouveau buildings in the early 1900s. Among these was the extraordinary house he designed for the merchant millionaire Stepan Ryabushinsky, where Chekhov's friend Maxim Gorky was later virtually imprisoned by Stalin in the 1930s. Shekhtel remained more Nikolai's friend, but his connection with Chekhov was long-lasting. In 1895 Shekhtel designed the little house 'ti the garden at Melikhovo where Chekhov wrote The Seagull, and in 1902 he received a commission to convert the old theatre on Kamergersky Lane as a permanent home for the Moscow Art Theatre. After Chekhov's death he designed the new library building in Taganrog, which was named after the donor of a large part of its collection.
Nikolai never lived to fulfil his artistic promise, but before he went into terminal decline, he illustrated many of his younger brother's early ston and some evocative photographs of them taken in the early 1880s commemorate their collaboration. The brothers are captured posing n a well-appointed room with heavy Victorian furniture, long drapes and lighted candles, both neatly turned out in jackets and ties. The bespectacled Ni^o'ai is seated at a small table looking at the large sheet of paper he is holding in one hand, with a paintbrush in the other. His box of pa its sits open on the table, while a portfolio imprinted with his initials stands propped up against the table legs in the foreground. A slightly dreamy looking Chekhov is standing with his legs crossed, leaning up against a bureau, looking down at his brother's picture. One of Nikolai's sketchbooks contains drawings of the famous statue of Pushkin that was unveiled in Moscow with much fanfare in June 1880. The drawings on the sketchbook's yellow, white and blue leaves were studies for [lustrations that were to appear in journals like The Alarm Clock and The Spectator, and commemorated an event which was regarded as one of national importance. This was, after all, the first statue of Pushkin to be erected iti Russia, and it had been paid for by public subscription. Turgenev came all the way from Paris, and Dostoevsky from St Petersburg in order to give speeches to mark the occasion, and Chekhov was no doubt with his brother at least some of the time while he was capturing the proceedings on paper. He was as much a devotee of Pushkin as any other educated Russian, and Uncle Mitrofan in Taganrog started crying because he was so moved by what his nephew Anton wrote about the great poet in a letter at that time.21
In addition to their creative collaboration, Anton and Nikolai spent much of their free, time together, and sometimes their respective worlds of medicine and art collided. In January 1882, Nikolai drew a cartoon for The Alarm Clock depicting drunken professors and students celebrating St Tatiana's Day (the figure standing in the foreground, glass in hand, is perhaps his brother). It was on 12 January 1755 that the Empress Elizabeth had signed the edict consenting to the foundation of Moscow University, and St Tatiana's Day had marked the beginning of the student vacation ever since. The debauched scenes which took place annually at the Hermitage restaurant (shown in Nikolai's picture) were legendarv. As soon as he became a student himself, Chekhov joined in with gusto, and later instituted an annual St Tatiana's Day dinner for his writer friends in St Petersburg. In anticipation of unruly behaviour on St Tatiana's Day, the proprietors of the Hermitage would replace the restaurant's 5 lk furnisnmgs with wooden tables and stools, take up the carpets and throw sawdust on the floor. 'Tatiana' happens to rhyme with the Russian word for drunk (piana) and policemen would be enjoined to remember dien Tatiany, studienty ршпу and not rush to arrest the inebriated students as they staggered home in the small hours.