By 1876, Pavel Chekhov, merchant of the third guild, was bankrupt and lost his grocery store for good. There was nothing more to hope for in Taganrog and so he decided to move his family to Moscow. The family picked up and pushed on, leav- ing Anton behind to earn his own way through school by tutor- ing other boys. He was lonely and he was very poor, but life was better without Pavel and choir practice. Now there was time for fishing and bathing and an occasional cheap ticket to the local theatre, and sometimes there were nice visits to his grandfather who was the overseer of a large country estate. Pavel's father was as vigorous and cheerful a man as his son was mean and narrow: he was a good fellow for a boy to spend time with. These three years of being entirely on his own were important years to Anton Chekhov. He came out of them a young man equipped to deal with a tough world, and unfright- ened by it.
In 1879 he left Taganrog to join his family and to enter the University of Moscow as a medical student. He arrived in Moscow knowing, of course, that things had not gone well with his father, and that his family had, as always, been having a tough time. But he was shocked to find that they were living in a filthy basement in the brothel section of the city. City poverty had made its usual ugly marks on lower middle-class provincial people. Pavel, the menacing figure of Anton's child- hood, was not even living in the family basement. He had a thirty-ruble-a-month job and he mushed out his lonely life on the other side of town. Anton's older brothers, Alexander and Nikolai, were interesting and talented young men. In revolt, perhaps, against the misery in which they lived, they were, by the time of Anton's arrival, involved in the shabbiest, talkiest, hardest-drinking side of Moscow Bohemia. Chekhov's lifelong contempt for wasters and boasters, his occasional bitter preachi-
ness to his brothers, came from this period of watching Alex- ander and Nikolai and their friends. He felt affection for his brothers, he was good to them all his life, but it was here he took their measure and there was never, unfortunately, any need to alter it.
The money for Chekhov's university scholarship went to pay the family debts. Supporting himself through medical school would have been hard enough, but it was now obvious that the whole family had to be supported, and he sat dowra to do it. In 1880 his first piece for a humorous magazine was accepted. In the next seven years Chekhov wrote more than four hundred short stories, sketches, novels, one-act plays, fillers, jokes, law reports, picture captions, one-line puns and half-page tales. The days were medical school, the nights were work, and work that had to be done in an apartment filled with a large family, noisy neighbors and casual guests. It was not easy then, as it is not easy now, to earn a living as a free lance writer. Chekhov was pushed around and cheated by editors, made to beg for the few rubles they owed him. He had to pay ten visits to one editor to collect three rubles, and another editor offered him a pair of pants in exchange for a short story. Hack literary work is very hard work, and the study of medicine is very hard work, but hack literary work, the study of medicine, and the support of a large family can be killing. Men who take on such burdens are never the men who write easy checks for the family food and rent and think their responsibility finished. Men like Chekhov take on as well the moral and spiritual burdens of the people around them, and those are the heavy burdens and take the largest due. Chekhov, from his days as a student, became the father of his family and remained their father for the rest of his life. In time, with success, the burdens became easicr, but this period, this very young man period, in which terrible work had to be done against terrible odds, deprived him forever of much that he wanted:
"A young man, the son of a serf, who had worked in a shop, been a choir boy . .. was brought up to defer to rank, to kiss the hands of priests and to submit to other people's ideas; who was thankful for every bite of food, was often beaten ... who fought, tormented animals, liked to have dinner with his rich relations; who played the hypocrite before God and man without needing to do so ... this young man squeezed the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and woke up one fine morning to realize that it was not the blood of a slave, but real human blood, that ran through his veins." Again, in contrasting his background with Tolstoy's and Turgenev's, he wrote: "They receive as a gift what we lower-class writers buy with our youth." He bought it high: he had his first hemorrhage at the age of twenty-four.
And at twenty-four he graduated from the medical college of Moscow University. He says that he thought of medicine as his wife and literature as his mistre^, but that could not have been so because hc acted the other way round. By the time he gradu- ated, he was earning money as a \vriter and he was a fairly well known name to Moscow magazines. He did work in a hospital the first summer after he left the university, but after that we hear less and less of medicine and nothing of the practice of medicine as we know it. It is doubtful if he ever amounted to much as a doctor although many times throughout his life he speaks of treating his neighbors or the peasants or prescribing for his friends. But one suspects that it wasn't much more than a well-trained pharmacist might have done. His relations with medicine were courtesy relations: he acted toward medicine as if it were a famous and distinguished cousin, a kind of hero he didn't get to see as often as he would have liked.
But the study of medicine was of great importance to Chekhov and perhaps that is what he meant when he spoke of medicine as his wife. Chekhov is a special kind of creative artist, a \\TI"iter who finds no conflict between the imagination and the scien- tific fact, who sees the one as part of the other in a dependent and happy brotherhood. He said: "Science and letters should go hand in hand. Anatomy and elegant letters have the same enemy—the devil. ... In Goethe the naturalist lived in harmony with the poet." Of course many writers think they feel that way but literary people often resent science as if science were a gruff Philistine intruder in a meeting of cultured men, an aggressive guest who says the things that nobody wants to hear. In Chekhov science not only lived in harmony with literature, but it was the very point of the writer, the taking-off place, the color of the eye, the meat, the marrow, the blood. It is every- where in Chekhov's work and in his life: in his dislike of theorizing, his impatience with metaphysical or religious gen- eralizations, his dislike of 4 a.m. philosophy. (He rejected high- sounding emptiness even when it came from a man he loved and respected: he said of a new Tolstoy theory, "To hell with the philosophy of the great of this world.") It is in his contempt for self-deception and hypocrisy: "You hold that I am intel- ligent. Yes, I am intelligent in that I . . . don't lie to myself and don't cover my own emptiness with other people's intel- lectual rags." He was intelligent, he believed in intelligence, and intelligence for Chekhov meant that you called a spade a spade: laziness was simply not working; too much drink was drunkenness; whoring had nothing to do with love; health was when you felt good and brocaded words could not cover empti- ness or pretensions or waste. He was determined to see life as it was.
Was he this kind of a man because he was a doctor? Or had he become a doctor because he was this kind of a man? It doesn't matter. We only need to know that as a writer he was a good doctor, a sort of family physician to his characters. An honest physician tries hard to make a correct diagnosis: his whole being depends upon his ability to recognize the symptoms and name the disease. Such men are not necessarily more dedicated to the truth than the rest of us but their profession requires that they bear it more closely in mind. Chekhov bore it close.