In his twenties, and in the supposedly stagnant eighties of Russia’s nineteenth century, Chekhov the writer was still an unusual phenomenon. Forty years ago the cliché of the nineteenth-century Russian writer was evoked by Russia’s wittiest dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–97), in a satirical monologue, a short story called ‘The Graphomaniacs’: ‘They lived on country estates, they knew a foreign language from birth and, in between balls and duels, wrote their novels which were immediately published in all languages of the globe.’ Chekhov had no country estate (until 1892), he was not a member of the gentry, he was nearly forty before he had learnt enough French to read a newspaper, he attended neither balls nor duels and in his lifetime was virtually unknown in most of Western Europe. His life was more like that of the Soviet writer as Sinyavsky portrayed it: ‘the problem of three meals a day, paying for the gas, your shoes have worn out and you owe the typist for two hundred pages at a rouble a page… was this mind of genius really brought up on rotten hamburgers?’
Anton Chekhov and his elder brothers, looking back at how far sheer talent had brought them, used to exclaim: ‘Did such genius really come out of an earth closet?’ True, their origins were humble: but Chekhov’s father had the qualifications to produce genius; like Dickens’ and Ibsen’s fathers, he was a bankrupt shopkeeper. Taganrog, down south, on the Sea of Azov, may have had no sewerage or piped water, but it did have an opera house and an enterprising theatre, not to mention a good grammar school. Some of Chekhov’s teachers were alcoholics, sadists (among them the father of the ‘iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky who was to lead Lenin’s secret police) and police informers. Others, however, were original minds, even published writers. Taganrog gave Chekhov and his brothers a disrespectful, anti-metropolitan and multi-ethnic ethos which no amount of Moscow and St Petersburg sophistication could efface. It also provided the scheme of a southern provincial town to infuse much of Chekhov’s work: its cherry orchards and cemetery statuary are to recur right until Chekhov’s valedictory work, The Cherry Orchard. Its heterogeneous population of merchants, officials, vagabonds, its unhappy provincial heroines were also to populate – sometimes recognizably for themselves – much of Chekhov’s early prose.
Taganrog’s churches played an important, even oppressive, part in Chekhov’s formative years. His father’s tyrannical reign as a cantor gave Chekhov a knowledge and love of the Russian liturgy and its music unparalleled in any other major writer, except Nikolay Leskov. The rhythms of his prose are infused with the psalmodic periods of the Russian akathistos (a psalm improvised by the priest) and the Byzantine hymns for each event in the church calendar, the troparia. At the same time, as he was soon to admit, kneeling on frozen church floors in the early hours of the morning, a torture that alternated with parental thrashings, gave Chekhov an insuperable aversion to religion – in fact to any ideological system. This forced him as a writer to embrace doubt and uncertainty, and prevented him from adopting any of the mantles, Christian or secular, that so many Russian prose-writers felt compelled to don.
The education Chekhov received was like an English public school, minus sport, homosexuality and corporal punishment, strongly oriented towards the classics and to Orthodox Christianity. True, he read most of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and modern European literature when he had already become a writer himself, but lacking the culture of Russia’s gentry literati was not altogether a disadvantage, since it led him to seek his own literary paths.
Chekhov’s first writing was controlled by the strict formulas of the editors of the comic, satirical and didactic weekly magazines who first bought his work when he became an indigent medical student in Moscow. Their demands for simplicity, precision, topicality, exactness and conformity to a sometimes paranoiac censorship were not entirely inhibiting factors for a writer’s development. Like many writers, Chekhov also learnt economy, dispassionate observation and irony from his medical training. Writing a historia morbi for each new case in hospital gave him a new technique for story-writing: ‘A Dreary Story’, ‘Ward No. 6’, ‘The Black Monk’, ‘The Bishop’ are all stories built on the progress of a disease – angina, paranoia, tuberculosis, typhoid – and the parallel disintegration of a persona. As a doctor, Chekhov may not have been particularly distinguished, but what survives of his medical essays are terse models of autopsies that served as kernels for fictional stories. Perhaps it is significant that, though mediocre in surgery, Chekhov had high marks for gynaecology and psychiatry; he had an almost numinous gift for diagnosing fatal illness in colleagues, literary or medical, and he had the patient listening ear which marks off the best psychiatrists and best novelists. Though he deserted medicine as a career (treating first only friends and relatives, then afterwards only peasants), medicine did not desert Chekhov. The doctor as saint in countless stories and the doctor as observer, god, villain or clown in all the plays but the last testify to the parallels that Chekhov, wittingly or not, drew between his ‘mistress’, literature, and his ‘legitimate wife’, medicine.
Medicine had other values for the writer: the medical profession was the stratum in society that the Russian state feared. Its publications were uncensored, its political defiance respected. To be a doctor gave Chekhov a pride that none of the privations and humiliations of Grub Street could break.
A stubborn independence distinguishes Anton Chekhov from his elder brothers. One, Alexander, was a polyglot and polymath, whose letters show a Boswellian talent for self-parody; but dependence on alcohol and sex reduced him from leader of the family to clown. Nikolay, an artist with the talent of a Daumier, was destroyed spiritually, even before he collapsed physically, by similar factors – plus tuberculosis. Chekhov’s defining feature is a refusal to be dependent, on other human beings, their money or their opinions, on drugs, on sex. His brothers’ disastrous lives furnish material for many of his stories: they also served as a horrible warning.
If Anton Chekhov had a need, it was for a replacement father-figure. This is what saved him from remaining a gifted, productive – even prolific – hack. He admired, first of all, that most underestimated of the major Russian novelists, Nikolay Leskov: in Chekhov’s prose the elusiveness of the narrator, the tendency to infuse a narrative with lyricism, the indifference to the preoccupations of Western European writers stems from Leskov’s influence. (Leskov was the only prose fiction writer whom Chekhov’s father read.) Leskov was a cantankerous, isolated figure. Their initial encounter, when Leskov poured salad oil over the young Chekhov’s head to anoint him, was followed by mutual estrangement. By the mid 1880s, a deep but qualified admiration for Tolstoy’s morality, lapidary prose technique and sceptical analysis of all abstractions and received ideas had aroused in Chekhov a deeper admiration: some years were to pass before a personal encounter with Tolstoy (and a doctor’s refusal to accept Tolstoy’s more extreme pontifications on sex, science and the cosmos) led Chekhov to distinguish between Tolstoy the heroic man, the writer of genius and the preacher of absurdities – but the influence, however moderated, remains in Chekhov’s work.
The third of these senior influences was decisive: it was Aleksey Sergeyevich Suvorin, the St Petersburg newspaper magnate, publisher, political éminence grise, who had marked out Anton Chekhov’s potential. The Russian intelligentsia preferred, if they could afford to do so, to stay clear of Suvorin: they were horrified by Suvorin’s tragic aura (his family was beset by suicide and sudden death), Mephistophelean personality and apparent lack of political or moral principle (he was a consistent nationalist conservative anti-semitic radical, with pronounced private anarchic tendencies). Suvorin was twenty-six years older than Chekhov, but they had much in common: Suvorin too came from the provincial peasantry, was exploited by indigent relatives, and had, like Anton Chekhov, a fondness for the company of actresses and for wandering round cemeteries.