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There was indeed a great deal to be depressed about in late nineteenth-century Russia, and all stemmed from the iniquities of the country's reactionary and autocratic method of government. The shortcomings of the Romanov regime were later highlighted by the tragedy which occurred on the day of Nicholas IPs official coronation in the Kremlin in May 1896. Thousands of people had converged on Moscow to catch a glimpse of the Tsar, and the imperial family graciously decidcd to issue half a minion token g rts to mark the occasion, plus some special prizes. Provision for their distribution was woefully inadequate, however, and in the stampede wh;ch followed about 2,000 patriotic Russian subjects were crushed to death. The brutality and ndifference shown by the authorities following this tragi; event was deeply shocking to Chekhov.

Against the atmosphere of hopelessness induced by the repressive regime, Moscow was nonetheless booming. The abolition of serfdom and the introduction of self-government in the early 1860s had changed the city's fortunes for ever. Moscow had seen an increase in population of only 60,000 in the thirty-four years between 1830 and 1864, but in the subsequent seven years its population grew by 238,000. If there were 602,000 people living in Moscow in 1871, there were 754,000 by 1882. Of this number, 555,000 (which includes the eight Chekhovs) were not born in the city.40 Moscow had always been the economic centre of Russia, and this status was reinforced by the belated building of a national railway network. All the main railway lines converged on Moscow. Changes to the way the city was governed brought about a shift in power from the hands of the nobility to the people who engaged in trade - the merchants. Chekhov had thus moved to Moscow at one of the most dynamic periods of its history. The city had been a backwater lor most of the nineteenth century, but the forces of capitalism were now taking over from the life of the old-world country estate, which had been financed by the serfs. Moscow's old merchant families shed their patriarchal image and became railway tycoons and factory magnates, investing their new wealth in hospitals, museums and theatres. The city's appearance began to change towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1890s that the building of wooden houses was banned for the first time.

In the 1880s the Moscow that Chekhov inhabited still felt like a big village to people from St Petersburg. After the great fire of 1812, the goal had been to rebuild Moscow as quickly as possible, and this had resulted in the sharp contrasts of the old and new city. A few streets away from modern department stores lit by electricity were Asian-style bazaars with vendors selling pies; elegant, colonnaded classical mansions stood next to m;nuscule wooden houses painted yellow; alongside modern municipal buildings were mediaeval churches with cupolas covered in gold stars, and bustling European boulevards led to winding lanes that seemed not to have changed for centuries. This irregularity was reflected in the diversity of the population thronging Moscow's streets: men and women smartly dressed in the latest European fashions ostled with long-haired, bearded priests n tall black hats; merchant wives in coloured headscarves and strings of pearls and peasants in shabby sheepskins m ngled with an assortment of Tatars, Georg;ans and Armenians, who came from the further reaches of the empire to trade.

Moscow would always seem both more deeply Russian and more Oriental than St Petersburg, and it was precisely these qualities that made Chekhov so attached to the city. He loved its undulating tree- lined streets, the buzz of its restaurants and theatres, and he loved the fact that there was a church on almost every street corner. Most of all he loved the sound of the bells rung in the 450 belfries all over the city, part cularly dur'ng winter when there was snow on the ground. No other city in the world could match it. When the first snow fell each winter, Chekhov was always reminded of Pushkin's magical lines from the beginning of chapter five in Eugene Onegin. Indeed, sitting at his desk one morning in early November 1889, he wrote in a letter that on seeing snow for the first time he felt the same thrill as Pushkin's Tatyana, and regretted that his Petersburg correspondent was not there to see it with him.41 In a more-or-less word for word translation, the verse which Chekhov refers to reads:

.. .Waking in the early morning, Tatyana looked outside and saw white courtyards, flowerbeds, roofs and fences,

light patterns on the windowpanes,

the trees all clothed in \v. ntry silver,

cheerful magpies,

and a dazzling winter carpet

softly covering the hills.

Ail around was brilliant wl te.

By the time of that snowy November morning, Chekhov had been living in the Chest of Drawers for three years. He had worked prodigiously hard during that time, and described his regime as that of a government functionary. Typically, he would write from nine to lunchtime, rece' re patients between twelve and three, then p ck up his pen again from evening tea until bedtime - but often those hours were extended, and not just because Chekhov particularly liked to work by candlelight. So housebound d'd he become on occasi in that his mother and his aunt took to referring to him as an old grandfather.42 In September 1888, he declared to one friend that he had barely been out of the house for ten days, and his fingers were sore from writing.43 In the past twelve months he had not only written 'The Steppe', his first story for a literary journal (a work of novella length), as well as various other pieces of fiction, but a full-length play called Ivanov, and a one- act farce.

It was with Ivanov that Chekhov made his extremely noisy stage debut in November 1887. Everything about his literary career had been iconoclastic so far, beginning w th the unassuming way it had started. If be Steppe' challenged prevailing notions about prose fiction, Ivanov was a play which seemed to turn every stage convention on its head. There was so much that was theatrical about Russian culture that it took a very long time for actors and audiences to acclimatize to the innovations of Chekhovian drama. Theatre was at the heart of the Russian Orthodox religion, and it was the elaborate rituals of its services - its icon processions, mcense-burning, bell-ringing, the lighting of candles, the opening and closing of doors and endless genuflections - to which Chekhov's father was particularly attached. And this is precisely what Chekhov rebelled agamst in his last four plays. The source of his heresy may perhaps be found in the pomp and splendour he had to endure as a child when he and his brothers were forced by their father to sing in church choirs in Taganrog. Chekhovian theatricality, with its unvoiced emotions, silences, and muted climaxes is the antithesis of the drama enacted annually during the Orthodox Church's magnificent long Easter services, in which the clergy in ornate vestments process outside and around the church, carry mg the Cross, the Gospel and icons, followed by the congregration. But as with his religious fa.th, so with the theatre. Chekhov rejected the externals and che dogma, but retained the essence. In their seamless flow, their symbolism, their stylization and their rhythms, Chekhov's plays in fact emulate the synthetic aesthetic structure of the Russian Orthodox liturgy, in which everything is interconnected and subordinate to a common goal. If there is something of the Wagnerian 'endless melody' in Chekhov's plays, which requires them to be performed almost like orchestral scores (and 'conducted' by a director), it is a quality shared by the Russian liturgy, which was explicitly likened to a 'music drama' by the great twentieth-century theologian Father Pavel Florensky. In their unconventional movement towards catharsis, Chekhov's plays, like 1: is stories, can also be termed 're.igious'. Chekhov was as much concerned with the quest on of how one should live as were Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, after all; he just found a more economic way of posing it.