The histories of \Vestem Europe and Russia have seldom run paralleclass="underline" similar things don't seem to have happened at the same time. Our society in the last half of the nineteenth century had finished with its revolutions and was entering upon the fattest and smuggest period of modern times. It was a secure and neat world for the \Vestern middle and upper classes and they settled back to enjoy it. In many places the social and cultural standards were high, in many places the breeding and the manners were good, and sometimes even taste. There were new standards of living for large numbers of people, and science was making life easier. But this was not true in Russia. Royal money and trad- ing money were there in great quantities, and sugar money and cotton money, but Russian culture, great as it had been in many places, was spotty now, and the ancient culture of Kiev was almost as unknown to St. Petersburg as it was to us. Great feudal landlords and princes and upper-class sons were learning the refinements of the \Vest—they admired and envied them at the same time that they patriotically rejected them—but they were mixing the good things up and tossing them about. No sooner had the aristocracy learned to play a pretty waltz than the new merchant gentry bought the piano from under them. Fine linens were sent off to Holland to be cleaned, but the owner of the linen forgot to bathe. \Vine was \Vestern-fashionable, but all- night vodka was still preferred. It was not enough to be reli- gious, it was necessary to be priest-ridden. Intellectuals bewailed the lot of the peasant, and cried over the filth of his village, his house, his life, and they cried so hard that they couldn't see the cockroaches above their own beds. There was no ordinary youth- ful mooning about life: there were great inner storms that left men broken or dead, or just too tired. "There's hardly a single Russian landowner or University man who doesn't brag about his past. The present is always worse than the past. \Vhy? Be- cause Russian excitability quickly gives way to fatigue . . .
before he has left his school bench, a man picks up a load he can't carry, takes up schools, the peasant and rational agricul- ture . . . makes speeches, writes to ministers, battles with evil, applauds good, falls in love not simply or any old way ... it must be a blue stocking or a neurotic or a Jewess or even a prostitute, whom he rescues. . . . He's hardly reached the age of thirty or thirty-five when he starts feeling fatigue and boredom." So Chekhov wrote of his Ivan in Ivanov and it was so accurate a picture of the Russian estate gentleman that the play has been called a "medical tragedy." (It is not a tragedy. It is not even a good play, but it is a remarkable picture of upper-class nine- teenth century society).
In some strange way—in whatever manner it is that unrest and excitement communicate themselves from one layer of society to another, so that what is felt in one place is mysteri- ously transmitted to another two thousand miles away—a whole people were on the go. But it is doubtful that the unrest started with the intellectual or the educated rich. It is more likely that the liberalism of nineteenth century Russia came sweeping, in- coherent and unformed, from beIow. Perhaps the Russian in- tellectual whirled in so many directions just because the pressure did come from a direction that was strange to him and from a class that was seldom his own class. Whatever the cause, men were thinking in the light and acting in the dark. But the con- fusion worked a kind of catharsis, and from it came a few artists of the very first rank, and many of the second rank, and the second rank in art is a high rank indeed.
Chekhov wrote: "A reasoned life without a definite outlook is not a life, but a burden and a horror." This was a strange idea for the day it was written and "a reasoned life" were words that had not been heard for a long time. But they are the key words to Chekhov's life and work. They would not have been surprising words from a man of Bernard Shaw's background, but they are startling from a nineteenth century Russian in-
tellectual, born in the middle of social uproar. Chekhov was out of line with his time and his country. It is true that he kept the almost religious kindness of most Russians, the forgiving nature that so often comes with oppression and poverty, the humor of a people who are used to trouble. But he brought to these inherited gifts a toughness of mind and spirit that was new to his world and his time. 'Ve can account for some of the forces that made the man, and give them names.
Chekhov's birth certificate reads: "January i7th, 1860 born and January 27th baptized, boy Antonius. His parents: the Taganrog merchant of the third guild Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov and his lawful wife Evgenia Yakovlevna, both of the Orthodox faith . . . ." Merchant of the third guild was a fancy way of saying that Pavel Chekhov owned a miserable grocery store which he had been able to buy after marrying Evgenia Morozov. (Morozov is a common name in Russia and Anton Chekhov's mother was no relation to the fabulously rich Moscow merchant family.) Pavel's father had been a serf who, by terrible labor and deprivation, had bought the freedom of his family in 1841, twenty years before the abolition of serfdom, in a period when such families found their new freedom almost as hard as their old slavery.
Six children were born to Pavel and Evgenia, of whom Anton was the third. Life was hard, money was short, and Pavel Chekhov was a man far more devoted to Orthodox ritual and church music than he was to his family or to his business. He was more than a devout Christian: he was a fanatic whose ambition was to have the finest family choir in Taganrog. Anton and his brothers worked long hours in the store after school and were then made to serve in the choir. The Greek Orthodox Church has a strange ritual, long services often occur late at night or very early in the morning, and this meant that the boys led a weary life of too little sleep and too much prayer. It was not unusual for the Chekhov boys to rise at three in the morning to be hustled off to an unheated church in the miserable cold
of a Russian winter. Pavel was, indeed, a strange fellow: a good ikon painter, a good violinist, a genial host, and a man of terrifying temper who believed in the whip when he couldn't drive his children fast enough without it. He was also a schle- miel, which is not true of most terrifying men, and it was prob- ably the schlemiel side of his nature that made it possible to live around him at all. Evgenia Chekhova was a kind woman who did her best to alter the iron discipline of the household and to stand between the children and their father. Many biog- raphers have accepted a conventional picture of a sweet, un- educated and simple woman. Evgenia must have been more than that, although she does not come clear. And her relationship with Anton must have been more complex than Anton realized, or, realizing, than he was willing to talk or write about. Anton was devoted to her—or so it seems. Most certainly he was always very good to her. But there are many contradictions in the story of Evgenia and Anton Chehkov. A loving son, long after he is able to live alone, stays on with his family and, almost at the end of his life, plans a house with an eye to pleasing his mother. And yet when he does marry—an important step in his life because he waited so long to take it—he does not consult her, or even tell her of the ceremony until after it is over. What- ever the relationship was between Anton and Evgenia Chekhova —and we do not know much about it—it does not bear the sometimes ugly signs of over-devoted son to over-devoted mother.
Other pieces of the Chekhov family record are missing. Evgenia Chekhova is not the only member of Anton's family who does not come out clearly in his letters or reminiscences. The formal history of the Chekhov brothers and sister is there, but somehow they are not there as people. They lived close to Anton, but they are less close to us than many of the char- acters in his stories and plays. Perhaps he accepted his family without any of that romanticism that makes so many creative people either hate their background with a hate that is destruc- tive, or cling to their parents and their past with a love so little different from hate that its destructiveness is only of another nature.