Many of Chekhov’s stories are quips, jokes, boutades, which can be traced back to the events of his childhood and the days when he was studying medicine. When the stories were printed in book form, he usually omitted the slighter anecdotes, but a surprisingly large amount of purely anecdotal material was retained, perhaps because these casual stories represented an important element in his character. He was happy in his impudence. He reveled in telling stories which are not very far removed from “shaggy dog” stories, and he especially enjoyed farce. He would tell a story about a visit to a graveyard, joking prodigiously, and while still laughing he would suddenly unfold a landscape where the laughter mysteriously changes, becomes frozen, dies on a clap of thunder, but before the story was over he would be laughing again. The great comedians laugh for the sake of tragedy, and Chekhov was of their number. How he would have laughed at Charlie Chaplin!
True comedians can usually be recognized by their tragic air, but there was nothing in the least tragic about Chekhov’s life until he contracted tuberculosis. Though he raged against his father, and remembered with painful accuracy every whipping he received, his childhood was immensely satisfying. He grew up tall and straight, handsome and popular, with a gift for telling stories to admiring schoolboys and schoolgirls. He enjoyed a succession of love affairs, including one with the wife of a teacher, and he remembered later that these love affairs were all “happy and gay.” He was growing quickly, too quickly for his strength. Once he dived into the sea and cut his head on a rock, and the scar remained for the rest of his life. He was fifteen when he caught a chill while bathing, and peritonitis set in. For a few days his life was despaired of. A German doctor who attended him during his convalescence told him about a doctor’s life; and from wanting to be a clown he changed direction and determined to be a doctor. A few words from an obscure German doctor changed his whole life.
In the following year his father’s business, which had been failing for many years, suddenly collapsed, and the father fled to Moscow to escape a debtors’ prison. The two older brothers were already in Moscow before the collapse. Chekhov remained in Taganrog to finish his schooling. He was perfectly cheerful, and perhaps glad to be alone. Earning a pittance from tutoring, he sent every ruble he could spare to Moscow, and with the money went letters full of jokes to keep them amused. He made some extra money by capturing goldfinches and selling them in the market. Soon he was making money by selling short sketches to the newspapers. Long before he left school and enrolled in the faculty of medicine at Moscow University, his writing career had begun.
Most of the early sketches are lost, hidden in obscure newspapers under a baffling array of pseudonyms. He continued to write as a medical student, and he continued to invent more and more pseudonyms depending on his mood at the moment. A teacher in Taganrog had given him the name of Antosha Chekhonte, and this name with its variations (A. Ch-te, Anche, A. Chekhonte) was largely reserved for the stories which gave him the greatest pleasure. He signed lesser stories with sardonic descriptions of himself—Blockhead, A Man Without a Spleen, My Brother’s Brother, A Quick-Tempered Man, A Prosaic Poet, A Doctor Without Patients, Ulysses, Starling. About thirty pseudonyms are known, and there are perhaps thirty more which remain to be discovered. He was writing stories nearly every day to pay for his tuition fees and to provide for his family, which soon came to accept him as its perennial benefactor, and since Chekhov was the soul of generosity, he accepted the burden of providing for them with astonishing gaiety.
He matured quickly, and his early full-length stories published in Moscow while he was struggling with the first year of his medical course have the gay, sardonic, impudent, passionately human quality of the stories he wrote in the last years of his life. There is always the sharp cutting edge, like the bright gleam of a plow breaking through the soil. There is always laughter, and the trace of melancholy. He sets his scenes in the cloudy afternoons, or in the evenings when the lights are coming up, or in the dead of night when his characters are warming themselves over a fire. After spending the day in the anatomy laboratory, he would spend his evenings writing about the quiet villages of southern Russia and the country estates where he sometimes spent his holidays during the last years of his schooling. Gaiety and impudence keep creeping in. “The Little Apples,” written in 1880, when he was twenty, describes a landlord and a farm bailiff who discover two young peasant lovers stealing apples in an orchard; to punish them the landlord makes the boy flog the girl and the girl flog the boy. The story is not in the least sadistic. Chekhov is amused, and only a little horrified, for the young lovers can do no harm to each other, and the landlord is a grotesque vaudeville character blundering among the windfalls. “St. Peter’s Day,” written in the following year, is an excursion into the wilder shores of lunacy, with the author bubbling with good humor as he describes a perfectly ridiculous shooting party, where nothing happens as the hunters expect it to happen, and everyone is at odds with everyone else. “Green Scythe,” written in 1882, is a more serious matter, for though it deals with the lighthearted escapades of a group of young people staying on the estate of a Georgian princess of impeccable ancestry, Chekhov for the first time created characters in three dimensions: the bullying matriarchal princess, the young and beautiful Olya, and Lieutenant Yegorov are all completely credible, and these characters, or characters very similar to them, will appear again and again in his stories. There is a sense in which “Green Scythe” is the first of his stories of character, and in its background and development it is oddly similar to “The Bride,” the story Chekhov was writing in the last year of his life. Once more we see the bullying matriarch and the beautiful daughter and the young suitors vying for her hand, but now the chill of winter has set in, the gardens are fading, and there is very little laughter.
Chekhov put himself into “Green Scythe,” and indeed he put himself into most of his stories. He is present in a surprisingly large number of them, perhaps all the more present because he was so determined to be absent. He is the boy in the shop, the keeper of goldfinches, the peasant wandering across the plain, the family doctor, the dying bishop. We see him in his various disguises, and more often than not the disguise is transparent. Very few of the current translations of Chekhov give the stories in their proper order. Once they are printed in the order of development, we become aware of the autobiographical thread running through them. Far from being the neutral observer, Chekhov was a man who portrayed himself endlessly.