The talent was displayed in church. Beyond running a small grocery store where his sons served long hours — “In my childhood, there was no childhood,” Anton was later to report3 — Pavel Chekhov had a taste for the outward trappings of religion. This was satisfied by unfailing observance of the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church, daily family worship, and, especially, liturgical music. He enrolled his sons in a choir that he founded and conducted, and he aspired to be a pillar of the community.
Taganrog, its once-prosperous port now silted up and neglected, had a population that exceeded fifty thousand during Chekhov’s boyhood. Its residents included wealthy Greek families, the ship-building interests, and a large number of Jews, Tatars, and Armenians. The town benefited from such public amenities of the tsarist civil administration as a pretentious-looking gymnasium, which the Chekhov boys attended, for one of Pavel’s aims was to procure his children the level of education needed for entry into the professions. The upward mobility of the Chekhov generations is reflected in the character of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, a self-made millionaire whose ancestors had been serfs on the estate he succeeds in purchasing. Chekhov’s father, born a serf, had risen from meshchanin, or petty bourgeois,4 to be the member of a merchant guild; and Chekhov himself, as a physician and writer, became influential on the national scene. He was a model of the raznochinets, or person of no settled rank, who began to dominate Russian society in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
To impede mass advancement, the tsarist curriculum laid great stress on Greek and Latin. One recalls the schoolmaster Kulygin in Three Sisters chuckling over the fate of a classmate who missed promotion because he could not master the ut consecutivum construction. Schoolmasters are usually portrayed by Chekhov as narrow-minded, obsequious, and unimaginative, no doubt the result of his own observations as he studied the classics, German, Russian, and, for a brief time, French. His best subject was Scripture. School days were lightened by the fairy tales of his nanny, the picaresque reminiscences of his mother, vacations spent on the estate his grandfather managed, fishing, swimming, and, later, visits to the theater.
As a boy, Chekhov was stage-struck. Although it was against school regulations, he and his classmates, often in false whiskers and dark glasses, frequented the gallery of the active and imposing Taganrog Playhouse. He was also the star performer in domestic theatricals, playing comic roles such as the Mayor in The Inspector and the scrivener Chuprun in the Ukrainian folk opera The Military Magician. While still at school, he wrote a drama called Without Patrimony and a vaudeville (a farce with songs) called The Hen Has Good Reason to Cluck. Later, while a medical student, he tried to revise them, even as he completed another farce, The Cleanshaven Secretary with the Pistol, which his younger brother Mikhail recalls as being very funny. Never submitted to the government censorship office, which passed plays or forbade them from performance, it is now lost.
By 1876 Pavel Chekhov had so mismanaged his business that, fearing imprisonment for debt, he stole off to the next town, where he took the train to Moscow. There his two elder sons, Aleksandr and Nikolay, were pursuing their studies. He had already stopped paying his dues to the merchant guild and had reverted to the status of meshchanin. Whether Anton suffered a psychic trauma at this loss of caste, as had the young Henrik Ibsen when his father went bankrupt, is matter for speculation. Certainly, the repercussions felt at the sale of the home left their trace on many of his plays, including Platonov and The Cherry Orchard. Dispossessed of home and furniture, his mother and the three youngest children also departed for Moscow, abandoning Anton in a house now owned by a friend of his father’s. He had to support himself by tutoring during the three years before he graduated. He did not rejoin his family until Easter 1877, his fare paid by his university-student brother Aleksandr. This first visit to Moscow and its theaters set standards by which he henceforth judged the quality of life in the provinces. Suddenly, Taganrog began to look provincial.
Just before Anton Chekhov left Taganrog for good, a public library opened. This enabled him to read classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet, a work he was to cite recurrently, and, like any Victorian schoolboy, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the adventure stories of Thomas Mayne Reid. Heavier reading included philosophic works that enjoyed a high reputation at the time, such as Thomas Henry Buckle’s positivist and skeptical survey of European culture, The History of Civilization in England. Later in life, Chekhov took a wry view of this omnivorous autodidacticism, and had the clumsy bookkeeper Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard allude to Buckle’s works as a token of self-improvement.
It was at this time that Chekhov began writing prose, sending comic pieces to Aleksandr in Moscow in the hope that they would be accepted by the numerous comic journals that had sprung up in the capitals. He made friends with actors, hung around backstage, and learned how to make up his face. Two of his school fellows did enter the profession: Aleksandr Vishnevsky, who would become a charter member of the Moscow Art Theatre, and Nikolay Solovtsov, who was to create the title role in The Bear.
In 1879 Chekhov moved to Moscow to enter the medical school at the university, funded by a scholarship from the Taganrog municipal authorities. He arrived to find himself the head of the family, which was still in dire straits and living in a cramped basement flat in a disreputable slum. His father, now a humble clerk in a suburban warehouse, boarded at his office; Aleksandr, a journalist, and Nikolay, a painter, led alcoholic and bohemian lives; his three younger siblings, Ivan, Mariya, and Mikhail, still had to complete their educations. Lodging at home, Chekhov was compelled to carve out a career as a journalist at the same time that he was taking the rigorous five-year course in medicine.
At first, he wrote primarily for humor magazines, contributing anecdotes and extended jokes, sometimes as captions to drawings by Nikolay and others; these brought in a niggardly ten to twelve kopeks a line. Gradually, he diversified into parodies, short stories, and serials, including a murder mystery, The Shooting Party, and a romance that proved so popular it was filmed several times in the days of silent cinema (Futile Victory). He was a reporter at the trial of the CEOs of a failed bank. He became a close friend of Nikolay Leykin, editor of the periodical Splinters of Petersburg Life, to which he was a regular contributor from 1883. He conducted a theatrical gossip column, which won him entry to all the greenrooms and side-scenes in Moscow. And he partook of his brothers’ bohemianism. He wrote to an old school chum in a letter his Soviet editors provided only in expurgated form: “I was on a spree all last night and, ‘cept for a 3-ruble drunk didn’t . . . or catch . . . I’m just about to go on a spree again.”5 His writing at this time was published under a variety of pseudonyms, the best known being Antosha Chekhonte, from a schoolboy nickname. He also found time to revise Without Patrimony, which he seriously hoped would be staged; turned down by the leading actress to whom he submitted it, it was burnt by its author. Chekhov always took failure in the theater hard. However, two variant copies survived, minus the title page. It was first published in 1923. It has since become known as Platonov, after the central character.