Hie Hermitage was located on Trubnaya Square, where the pet market was held, and was one of Moscow's famous restaurants. It had been founded by a Russian merchant and a French chef in the 1860s and was renowned foi its superb cuisine, Япе wines (some of which were reputed to have come from the cellars of Louis XVI) and smartly dressed waiters, who wore shirts of Dutch linen tied with silk beits. It was a favourite haunt for the Moscow intelligentsia, some of whom had breakfast, lunch and dinner there, doing business from their regular tables. Tchaikovsky celebrated hb disastrous wedding here in 1877, and it was at the Hermitage that Dostoevsky and Turgenev were both feted with celebratory dinners. This was where Chekhov liked to come with his friends, and it was on one of tnese occasions in 1897 that he suffered the severe lung haemorrhage which led to the official diagnosis of tuberculosis. Chekhov could never have imagined such a scenario in the early 1880s when he was oining .n rowdy choruses of 'Gaudeamus lgitur'.
Chekhov liked to drink like any other student, but rarely to excess, he reputation for industry and self-control which was such a distinct feature of his adult personality was forged early on. In 1882 he began writing for Fragments, which represented a step up the ladder from the low-grade Moscow journals he bad been writing for un.il then. By 1883, he was earning from his writing not just the 150 roubles a year he had earlier boasted about, but about 100 roubles a month. This was about three times as much as his student stipend and three times as much as his father's salary. But that did not mean writing was always easy, as a letter sent to his editor N.kolai Leikin in August 1883 makes clear. Most Muscovites escaped the c.ty heat and headed for their dacha in the summer months, but Chekhov was still working:
I am writing in the most awful conditions. In front of me is a pile of non- literary work batte/mg mercilessly at my conscience, a visiting relative's baby is howling in the next room and in the room the other side my father is reading aloud to my mother from [Leskov's story] The Sealed Angel.. . Someone has started up the music box, so I have to listen to [Offenbach's] La Belle Helene ... I'd like to do a bunk to the dacha, but it's one o'clock in the morning... It's hard to imagine a more awful situation for someone who wants to be a writer. My bed is being slept in by the relation who has come to stay; he keeps on coming up to me and engaging me in conversation about medical subjects. 'My daughter's probably got colic; that must be why she's crying all the time.' I have the great misfortune to be a doctor, and there seems to be no single individual who does not think it incumbent on him or her to talk to me about medicine. And if they get tired of discussing medicine, they start off on literature . . .22
It says something about how Chekhov's attitude to writing was beginning to change at this time that he excluded everything he wrote before 1883 from the edition of his collected works that he put together at the end of his life. In these early years he was still producing hundreds of stories, but he later disowned most of them. Such was thefate meted out to 'Drama at a Shooting Party', which was published serially in a Moscow newspaper over the course of many months, beginning in November 1884. Chekhov was later so embarrasbed by the steamy love scenes and melodramatic plot twists of this murder mystery that he pretended he had never written it. It certainly comes as a surprise to discover that this master of elegant, chiselled prose ever wrote a novel, let alone a gripping page-turner. It is an immature work stylistically, wn tten in the hard-up early years for money which proved difficult to extract: the newspaper owner tried to fob Chekhov off with offers of .theatre-tickets and new pairs of trousers.23 As many Chekhov critics agree, though, it is under-rated. In 1884, Chekhov also brought out his first book at his own expense, in a print-run of just over a thousand copies. Tales of Melpomene, named ronically after the muse of tragedy, contained six of 'A. Chekhonte's' best stories to date, all on theatr'cal themes.
The Church of St John the Warrior, Moscow, opposite which the Chekhovs lived in 18 85
The Chekhovs had acquired a reputation among their Moscow friends for their warm hospitality, but conditions 'n the small flat on Sretenka were cramped. Apart from the pleasure of making a small profit when Tales of Melpomene sold out, Chekhov had also begun tomake more money from publishing some of his stories in The Petersburg Newspaper, one of the capital's biggest daily broadsheets. This was a definite step up from the conuc weeklies, and he decided they could afford to move. So, in the autumn of 1885, a year after Chekhov qualified as a doctor, they relocated to the area south of the river known as the Zamoskvorechie, near to where Pavel Egorovich worked. It was the stronghold of Moscow's merchants. The first flat proved to be so damp that after a few weeks it was exchanged for a much larger flat on the same street, Yakimanka (whose strange-soundnig name came from the Church of Saints Joachim and Anna which stood in the area). The Chekhovs' flat was on the ground floor of an old house with columns that stood opposite the baroque Church of St John the Warrior. It was the largest property they had rented in Moscow and Chekhov was able to have his own study with a fireplace. Various musician friends started coming to take part in the Tuesday night soirees chat were revived here, some of them pay mg court to Chekhov's sister Masha at the same time. Chekhov, meanwhile, had begun to acquire literary admirers. One friend who came round one ever ng when Chekhov had severe stomach ache later recounted an ingenious method that a local chemist had devised for acquiring his autograph. Ivan Babakin, the young village boy Chekhov had taken under his wing at their summer dacha, was dispatched to procure some castor oil capsules from the chemist. When Chekhov opened the box to find two enormous pills, he had laughed. After writing 'I am not a horse' on the box in large letters, he sent Ivan back to the chemist.24 Thus had the chemist acquired his autograph.
After a while, the flat on Yakimanka proved to have its problems too. The upstairs tenant hired his premises out for wedding receptions, funeral wakes and dinners, and it proved to be very noisy. Another move loomed. Rather than pay rent all summer, the family decided to give up the flat when they moved out of town to their dacha the following spring. Earlier that year, Chekhov had started contributing stories to the Petersburg-based New Times, Russia's most popular and influential daily newspaper, and the fee he earned gave him unprecedented buying power. After seven years of moving from flat to flat, in the autumn of 1886, he was able to rent a whole house for the first time. It would be che family's first proper home in Moscow and they would stay there for the next four years. Just before they moved,
Chekhov published his first short story under his own name and shortly afterwards received an unsolicited fan letter from Dmitry Grigorovich, a well-known Petersburg figure. Grigorovich thought it was time Chekhov started taking his writing seriously:
I'm convinced that you art destined to write several superb, truly artistic works. You wdl be committing a grave sin if you do not justify these expectations. But for that what is necessary is respect for talent, which is such a rare gift after all. Give up writing for deadlines. I do not know what your incofne is, but if it is small, it would be better if you starved, like we starved in our day, and stored up your thoughts for work that s well conceived and thought through, written in happy hours of inner concentration rather than in one sitti.ig . . ,25