The grocer was a strict disciplinarian who adminis- tered beatings to his children as a parental duty and forced them to attend church services, of which he was himself passionately fond. He was the kind of person who uses religion to make those about him miserable. In addition to attending endless masses, little Anton, though he had neither ear nor voice, had to sing in the church choir organized by his father. As he stood in the chancel under the admiring eyes of the congrega- tion, the high-spirited boy felt like a little convict, and he came to associate religious education with torture behind unctuous smiles. "It is sickening and dreadful to recall," he once wrote to his eldest brother, "the ex- tent to which despotism and lying mutilated our child- hood." He grew up to abhor every form of deceit and coercion.
The population of Taganrog included a great many Greeks, some of them wealthy importers. They main- tained a one-room parish school of their o^ for the children of the poor, which was presided over by an ignorant and brutal master. Anton was sent there in the hope that he might eventually obtain the position of bookkeeper with one of the Greek merchants. After a year's attendance, during which he didn't learn as much as the Greek alphabet, he was transferred, at the age of nine, to the local gimnaziya, a combined gram- mar and high school. There he gave a poor account of himself, partly perhaps because he had little time for study. Among other things, he had to play watchdog for his father at the store, where he became familiar with all the tricks of short-weighting and short-chang- ing.
Anton was sixteen when the store failed and his fa- ther escaped debtors' prison by absconding. He went to Moscow, where his two older sons were studying. The rest of the family soon followed, except Anton. Left to shift for himself, he continued at school, earning his way by tutoring and getting some help from rela- tives. His situation was not a happy one, but at least his natural gaiety was no longer restrained by an op- pressive domestic atmosphere.
After graduating from high school, he joined the family and, having a small stipend from the Taganrog municipality, entered the university as a medical stu- dent. The Chekhovs were in a sad way. Anton became virtually the head of the house, and it was to him that the family looked for support, as it was to go on doing through the years. That winter, the story goes, in order to buy a pie for his mother's birthday, he wrote a piece for a comic weekly. That brought him his first literary earnings.
"Oh, with what trash I began," Chekhov once said, "my God, with what trash!" He supplied the humbler public prints with fillers of all sorts: jokes, legends for cartoons, advertisements, aphorisms, recipes, all in a comic vein. He wrote sketches, theatrical notices, and short short stories. He even produced, on a bet, a ro- mantic tale purporting to be a translation, and a full- length thriller, in which a femme fatale is murdered under baffling circumstances. (Unlike so many of his early pieces, this novel was not allowed to lie decently buried in the files of the paper in which it first appeared, but sixty years later was seized upon by the ghouls of Hollywood.) He also tried his hand at journalism. This was not yet serious writing, but it meant being occupied with serious subject matter. He was turning out a great amount of copy, being able to scribble under any condi- tions, whenever and wherever he pleased, and some- times dashing off a sketch—such as "The Siren"—with- out a single erasure. The stuff wrote itself. For the most part it was farce, innocent banter, calculated to raise a good-natured laugh. Occasionally, however, a note of bitterness, a suggestion of civic feeling, a hint of sym- pathy for the underdog crept in. And, though his work did not show it, the humorist had his moods of self- disgust. The hacks with whom he associated were an unsavory lot. He hated to think of himself in that galley. "A newspaper man is a crook at best . . ." he wrote to one of his brothers. "I am one of them, I work with them, shake hands with them, and people say that at a distance I have begun to look like a crook." At any rate, he told himself he wouldn't die a journalist. Al- though he could not quite see himself as a doctor, per- haps medicine would be his salvation.
On receiving his medical diploma, he was for a while in charge of a hospital in a small town. Even earlier he had begun accumulating the knowledge of the peasant patients and provincial doctors who figure in his stories. After a few months he returned to Moscow to hang out his shingle. He was a hard-working and conscientious physician, but medicine did not prove his salvation, certainly not in a financial sense. His patients were mostly poor people, and in any case he regarded heal- ing the sick as a humane duty, scarcely a means of livelihood. He continued to rely chiefly on his pen for his earnings and although he went on writing at a great rate, only the worst of the worrying and pinching was over. In time he came to take a certain satisfaction in having two occupations. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he wrote to a friend when he had been a doctor for four years, "and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and be- sides, neither of them loses anything through my in- fidelity." EventuaUy the mistress came to supplant the ^tfe.
There were times when he felt that medicine some- what hampered him as a writer. A doctor has few illu- sions and that, he said, "somehow desiccates life." But his better judgment was that medical training helped his writing, giving him a more perceptive and penetrat- ing knowledge of men and women, guarding him against the pitfalls of subjectivity, one of his bugbears. There are few clinical studies among his stories. And even when he deals with a case of typhus or with a woman having a miscarriage, however precise the delineation of the symptoms, he observes the patient for the sake of the human being, never the other way about. Basically his concern is not with illness, but with health.
Meanwhile there began to turn up among his writ- ings, and with increasing frequency, pieces that gave promise of the harvest to come: bits of pure comedy, sharp character sketches, little masterpieces of pathos, candid studies of the folly of the heart. He was matur- ing, slowly, unevenly, yet unmistakably. To his aston- ishment he was discovering that he had a public and that, indeed, he was the object of critical consideration, in spite of the fact that he had not yet made the dignified "stout" monthlies. When, early in 1886, he scraped together enough rubles to take him to Peters- burg, the intellectual and publishing center of the coun- he was received "like the Shah of Persia." And then came a marvelous letter from Grigorovich, one of the Olympians, telling him that he was the foremost of the younger writers and pleading with him to take his talent seriously. Toward the end of the year when he again visited the capital he found that he was "the most fashionable writer" there. In the interim he had brought out a second and successful book of stories (the first had passed unnoticed), and had begun to write for the great daily, Novoye vremya (New Time), which meant bet- ter rates and greater prestige.
He was developing a literary conscience. Formerly, he joked, writing had been like eating pancakes; now when he took up his pen he trembled. He was anxious to undertake something serious, something that would engage all his powers and that he could work at without haste. In the summer of 1887 he fulfilled at least the first of these wishes by writing a drama, which he called Ivanov after its unhappy hero. He had always loved the theater and had written plays even as a schoolboy. Ivanov, however, was a failure, which he was in haste to forget, and he was soon at work on his first serious long narrative, "The Steppe." For this leisurely, tender, evocative "history of a journey" he drew largely upon childhood memories of the great southern plain. But the vein of comedy was not to dry up all at once. In a few days he dashed off The Boor, which he described as "an empty Frenchifled little vaudeville piece." It proved to be a box-office hit that was to entertain generations of Russians. He was to write several more such skits, most of them dramatizations of his own early stories, but henceforth the comic spirit was practically absent from his fiction.