Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  My father began to ‘teach’ me, or, to put it simply, to beat me, when I was less than five years old. He thrashed me with a cane, he boxed my ears, he punched my head and every morning, as I woke up, I wondered, first of all, would I be beaten today?

  In his late twenties Anton recalled to Aleksandr:

  Tyranny and lies crippled our childhood so much that it makes me sick and afraid to remember. Remember the horror and revulsion we felt in those days when father would flare up because the soup was over-salted, or would curse mother for a fool.

  At the end of the century Aleksandr told his sister:

  It was a sheer Tatar Yoke, without a glimmer of light … I look back on my childhood with crushing anguish.3

  The journalist Nikolai Ezhov’s memoir of 1909 confirms the horror:

  After thrashing his children, Pavel Egorovich went to church and told the victims to sit and read so many pages of the psalter. Chekhov … told a fellow-writer: ‘You know, my father thrashed me so much when I was a child that I still cannot forget it.’ And the writer’s voice quivered.

  The teacher of Religious Knowledge at the school was Father Fiodor Pokrovsky, then in his early thirties. He preferred to visit Mitrofan Chekhov’s house rather than Pavel’s: in Mitrofan’s family the hospitality was not punctuated by children being beaten or by Pavel’s ranting. Pokrovsky misjudged the Chekhov boys, telling Evgenia: ‘Something may come of your eldest [Aleksandr], but absolutely nothing can come of the two younger ones.’ Pavel Filevsky, an ex-pupil and a fellow-teacher, described Pokrovsky as follows: ‘Appearance, stance, musical voice, inventiveness, the gift of the gab – everything was attractive. But he was insincere … he had little erudition, his theology was “from the gut”.’4 The children, however, saw Pokrovsky as their defender. He often overrode the headmaster Parunov at meetings. He argued with the deputy-head, the inspektor, a key figure in a Russian gimnazia, on behalf of pupils whose parents could not pay the fees (from ten to twenty roubles a year). He lobbied for the Chekhov brothers, too. In class he would forget the catechism and talk of his war exploits or of Goethe, Shakespeare and Pushkin. Chekhov kept in touch with the priest until he died in 1898, and Pokrovsky eagerly read what his ex-pupil wrote. Years later Mitrofan was to report to Pavel: ‘Antosha told me in his letter that he owes the Priest not just his knowledge of scripture but literature, the ability to understand the living word and to clothe it in elegant form.’

  The preparatory class of 1868–9 was taken by kindly men: the elderly but lively Swiss Montagnerouge, who had been the boarding housemaster, was affectionately known as Stakan (wineglass) Ivanych.

  The Latin teacher, Vladimir Starov, left the deepest impression: a gentle, much liked man, he fell in love with the stepdaughter of his colleague Andrei Maltsev, Ariadna Cherets, a wanton beauty known as Rurochka. She married and ruined him. In the late 1880s, when the school’s self-appointed secret policeman, a Czech called Urban, denounced him, Starov was removed to a remote school in the steppe: Ariadna abandoned him and eloped with an actor well-known all over Russia, Solovtsov, and began to act herself. Starov died of alcoholism in hospital. Not just Chekhov’s stories (‘Ariadna’, ‘My Life’) but also the story ‘My Marriage’ by his geography teacher Fiodor Stulli, were based on Starov and his Ariadna. Another of Chekhov’s teachers, Belovin, a radical historian, died of alcoholism. Ippolit Ostrovsky, a mathematics and physics teacher, died in service of TB.

  The teacher who determined the fate of most pupils was the inspektor: in Taganrog gimnazia this was the ‘Centipede’ A. F. Diakonov, whose sayings were a compendium of moral clichés that pupils memorized and derided: ‘If a law exists, it is not for the amusement of the lawmakers and must be observed.’ Diakonov is one source for Chekhov’s automaton of a Greek teacher, The Man in a Case, but in life his unbending principles, his lack of animosity, even his loneliness and taciturnity, won him grudging respect.

  Greek caused the school and Anton Chekhov most problems. Aleksandr and Kolia were good Greek scholars, but Anton did not always manage to achieve the ‘3’ mark necessary to pass into the next form. There were too few classical Greek teachers; finally the authorities recruited Zikos from Athens. A fine teacher, Zikos was, nevertheless, as Filevsky puts it, ‘not too fastidious about seeking enrichment’. He took bribes, muttering to pupils with ‘2’ marks ‘chremata [money]!’ Corruption was endemic in Russian schools. Teachers took laggards as boarders and then charged 350 roubles a year, feeding the boys, as Anton later put it ‘like dogs, on the gravy from the roast’. Zikos was so blatantly exploitative that he ‘compromised’ the school and in the early 1880s was repatriated.

  Another recruit was a Czech called Jan Urban. The school bogey, he had worked in Kiev (where somebody broke his leg), and in Simferopol (where his windows were smashed).5 Each town he left after denouncing pupils and staff to the authorities. Taganrog was his last chance, but his denunciations continued. One of the pupils he harassed killed himself. In Anton’s last years at the gimnazia boys packed a sardine can with explosives and hurled it at Urban’s house. The bang was heard ten blocks away. Urban demanded that the police arrest the anarchists responsible, but the headmaster and police did nothing. Urban had difficulty finding a new landlord. Such was his standing that even the city gendarme forbad his daughter to marry Urban’s son. In the 1905 disturbances schoolboys stoned Urban: he picked up the stones and carried them in his pocket until his death.

  Some teachers were never recalled by Anton. Yet one wonders how he could forget Edmund-Rufin Dzerzhinsky, ‘a pathologically irritable man’ says Filevsky? Until 1875 Edmund-Rufin taught mathematics and later fathered the murderous head of Lenin’s secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Anton remembered best the teachers who stayed throughout his years there, and those who met grotesque ends.6 In later life he dismissed them as chinodraly (careerists) and used their eccentricities and tragedies for fiction.

  In his first years Anton was academically mediocre and not very docile. Only Pavel Vukov, responsible for discipline, when asked after Chekhov’s death, spoke out: ‘He got on our nerves for nine years.’ (Later Vukov put it more tactfully: ‘His ideas and witty phrases were taken up by his schoolmates and this became a source of merriment and laughter.’) As for Anton’s fellow-pupils, friendships were not formed until later. The Chekhov family was still too clannish.

  From 1868 Pavel’s income grew and provided an education for all of his children. The death of their grandmother, Aleksandra Kokhmakova in 1868, was barely noticed: paralysed, she had been unaware of the world for four years.

  Anton’s life of a schoolboy and a chorister was made tougher when, early in 1869, the Chekhovs moved into a rented two-storey brick house on a corner site, at the edge of town, on the route taken by the carters and drovers on their way to and from the port and the steppes. On the upper storey they had a drawing room, with a piano; the lower storey was a shop, its side rooms crammed with tenants and stores. Outside, where one of the shop boys or Chekhov children would stand to solicit customers, hung a sign: TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, AND OTHER COLONIAL GOODS. In addition to the family (although Aleksandr often lived elsewhere), two shop boys, the young Kharchenko brothers, Andriusha and Gavriusha, about 11 and 12 years old, were taken in, receiving no salary for their first five years, not even allowed pockets in their clothes, lest they be tempted to steal, and thrashed even more often than the children of the house. They were trained to give short change and short weight and to pass off rotten goods as sound.7

  Here, on 12 October 1869, Evgenia, the last of the Chekhov children, was born. Somehow the Chekhovs found room for tenants – Jewish traders, monks, schoolteachers. One tenant played a key role in the family’s last Taganrog years. The Chekhovs never forgot Gavriil Parfentievich Selivanov, who worked in the civil courts by day and at night went to the club where he earned another living as a gambler. An elegant bachelor, he fought to keep his straw hat clear of the sunflower seed husks and other debris that blew in the wind around th
e Chekhov shop. Selivanov soon became a member of the family, even calling Evgenia ‘mama’. Another tenant was a pupil in the senior classes of the gimnazia, Ivan Pavlovsky, later to be a journalist-colleague of Chekhov’s. Pavlovsky left an indelible mark on the memory of his schoolmates. In 1873 he left to study in Petersburg, but was arrested as a revolutionary and sent to Siberia.

  From the upper storey of the Moiseev house the family could see Taganrog’s new market square. To this square convicted criminals, their hands tied behind their back, a placard naming their crime round their necks, would be brought on a black tumbril to a scaffold. The drums rolled, the convict was lashed to a pillar, and the sentence was read out, before they were led off to prison or exile. Evgenia and uncle Mitrofan, like many citizens in provincial Russian cities, visited the prison on name days or on feast days.

  Pavel’s charity was limited: he merely allowed two monk-priests, ostensibly collecting alms for Mount Athos, to shelter in his yard and turned a blind eye to their drinking. Pavel was not so indulgent to his sons. Regardless of school, they were given the duties and punishments that he had endured. Latin homework could be done while keeping an eye on the shop, which was open from before dawn until well into the night. The paternal phrases which Aleksandr remembered ran: ‘I had no childhood in my own childhood. Only street urchins play in the street. One beaten boy is worth two unbeaten.’

  With a properly equipped shop, scales, a table and chairs for customers, shelves and cupboards everywhere, sheds and attics, Pavel tried to deal in everything. He was, surprisingly, a gourmet, who would dine with the devil if the food was good, and he made his own mustard. In his shop he kept the finest coffee and olive oil. Aleksandr tried to reconstruct the inventory forty years later:

  tea by the pound or ounce, face-cream, pen-knives, phials of castor oil, waistcoat buckles, lamp-wicks, medicinal rhubarb, vodka or Santurini wine by the glass, olive oil, ‘S’ Bouquet perfume, olives, grapes, marbled backing paper for books, paraffin, macaroni, laxatives, rice, Mocha coffee, tallow candles, used tea-leaves, dried and re-coloured [bought from hotels, for servants], honey sweets and fruit-gums – next to floor polish, sardines, sandalwood, herrings, canisters for paraffin or cannabis oil, flour, soap, buckwheat, home-grown tobacco, ammonia, wire mouse-traps, camphor, bay leaves, ‘Leo Wissor’ Riga cigars, birch brooms, sulphur matches, raisins, strychnine … cardamom, cloves, Crimean sea salt in the same niche as lemons, smoked fish and leather belts.

  Pavel also sold a number of medicines. One of them, called ‘bird’s nest’, contained among other ingredients mineral oil, mercury, nitric acid, ‘seven brothers blood’, strychnine, and corrosive sublimate. Bought by customers for their wives, it was an abortifacient. ‘That “birds nest” probably despatched many people to the next world,’ Anton remarked after finishing medical training. Serving customers vodka and sweet red Santurini wine,8 Pavel still traded unprofitably. The intense labour involved in drying out and repackaging used tea leaves was unrewarding. To important customers Pavel was servile, but when anyone complained that the tea stank of fish or the coffee of candle wax, he would publicly punch and kick the shop boys, Andriusha and Gavriusha Kharchenko. (Pavel was summoned to the Taganrog magistrate for excessive beating.) Pavel’s ideas of hygiene and safety did not meet even the lax standards of the time: he assured his youngest son that flies cleared the air. When Pavel found a rat in a barrel of his olive oil, he was too honest to say nothing, too mean to pour the oil away, too lazy to boil and re-filter it. He chose consecration: Father Pokrovsky conducted a service in the shop. The incident of the drowned rat was enough to drive away the least fastidious customer, and heralded the collapse of Pavel Chekhov’s Colonial Store.

  Notes

  1 See RGALI, 2540 53 1: Aleksandr’s memoirs (extracts in Vokrug Chekhova, 1990)

  2 See I. Bondarenko, Biografia eshchio ne okonchena in I. M. Sel’vaniuk, V. D. Sedegov, Sbornik statei i materialov 3, Rostov, 1963, 309–30.

  3 See OR, 331 82 4: Aleksandr’s letters to Masha, 1890–8.

  4 Our main source for information about Chekhov’s teachers is P. P. Filevskii, Ocherki iz proshlogo Taganrogskoi Gimnazii, Taganrog, 1906.

  5 See RGALI, 540 1 382: Zelenenko, Vospominaniia o Taganrogskoi gimnazii, typescript.

  6 Many teachers recalled Chekhov, but Aleksei Markevich, a history teacher, proudly proclaimed at the end of the century, ‘I am not in the habit of reading stories like Chekhov’s.’

  7 A third boy, Misha Cheremis, remembered as the Pederast, also worked for a time in the Chekhov shop: the children remembered only his phrase, ‘Let’s not be sensible.’

  8 Chekhov drank Santurini most of his life, though he admitted it tasted like ‘bad Marsala’.

  FOUR

  The Theatres of Life and Art

  1870–3

  A WELL-FITTED SHOP and a bourgeois drawing room overlooking two tree-lined avenues, soon to be lit by gas, formed the European façade of the Moiseev house. The crowded bedrooms, the sheds in the yard, the kitchen without running water, the absence of a bath, represented the Asiatic reality behind the façade. The image of a provincial home with stinking, cockroach-infested back rooms and a magnificent façade would haunt Anton’s prose to his last story. The prosperous European façade was fragile, for Pavel lacked financial acumen. Within a year he had competition just across the road; he bought unsaleable wine on credit. Debts mounted, and the family fortunes turned. In September 1871 Anton’s baby sister Evgenia died. Evgenia was far more deeply affected by this than by the later deaths of three adult sons. Even sixteen years later Aleksandr remarked that his mother remembered that death ‘as if it were today’.

  Pavel extended his opening hours and rented a stall on the square by the new railway station. When the stall failed to cover even the costs of its paraffin lamp, he rented a stall in the new market. Worst of all, in the summer holidays he forced his sons – including the twelve-year-old Anton – to run these outposts, opening a stall at 5 a.m. and staying until midnight to return with pitiful takings.

  The summer holidays gave relief in Anton’s childhood: fishing the rivers and roaming the countryside were to be prerequisites of happiness in his adult life and his fiction. On Anton the sea left a mark even stronger than the countryside. Taganrog boys fished from the piles driven into the shallow bed of the unfinished port, or went west, to the stony beach of Bogudonie, known as Smuggler’s Bay. Diving into the water one day, Anton cut open his head, acquiring the scar listed on his identity papers. Here he sat with his eldest brother, often next to the school inspektor Diakonov, like prey and predator visiting the same watering hole. They angled for the tiny, edible Gobius fish. A thread was passed through the gills of each one; the chain of transfixed fish was left writhing in the water, to keep them fresh until they were taken to market. There were diversions on the way back: schoolboys would slash the sacks of clementines or walnuts in the carts that climbed slowly from the port to the town. If the driver caught the thieves, he would lash out with his knout.1 Fishing gave Anton the stillness he desperately missed at home. More exciting sport was found on wasteland, with a school friend, Aleksandr Drossi, catching finches. (Some of the Chekhov brothers were to keep finches and songbirds, flying around their living rooms, in adult life.) The other sport was in the cemetery, whose mixture of Orthodox austerity, flamboyant Italian statuary and permanent decrepitude haunts much of Chekhov’s prose. Here Anton caught tarantula spiders with a ball of wax.2

  Even in boyhood the sea and the river Mius had a primarily melancholic effect on Anton, becoming memento mori in his mature stories. Writing to his patron, the novelist Grigorovich, in 1886, Chekhov would recall:

  When my blanket falls off me at night, I begin to dream of enormous slippery rocks, the cold autumn water, the bare shores – all this is vague, in a mist, with not a fragment of blue sky … When I run away from the river, I pass the tumbledown cemetery gates, the funerals of my schoolteachers.

  Anton’s life broadened
in the early 1870s. He explored the surroundings of the town and visited school friends and their parents. Aunt Fenichka’s laissez-faire household allowed pillow fights, while the families of Taganrog’s officials and merchants gave still greater relief from a grim home life. Anton now had intimations of future torments: migraine, and abdominal illness, then called ‘catarrh of the stomach’ or ‘peritonitis’, and attributed to bathing in cold water. Summer brought malarial fevers. Anton thought of diarrhœa and a constant cough as normal. Although Evgenia had shown symptoms – spitting blood, fever – Uncle Vania Morozov had already died of TB, and Aunt Fenichka suffered fits of coughing and debilitation, nobody suggested that tuberculosis might have struck Anton. For the time being, Anton’s vitality fought off recurrent infection. The boy looked very different from the man. We know a face honed by suffering, a chest hollowed by coughing: the broad-shouldered, wide-cheeked peasant boy before the mid 1880s is a shocking contrast to the later stereotype. He was known as ‘bomba’ at school for his large head.

  In July 1871, when Anton was eleven, an ox cart stopped at the shop: it was the engineer from Krepkaia, where grandfather Egor was employed. He had come to Taganrog to buy a piece of farm machinery. Aleksandr and Anton begged their parents to allow them to ride the ox cart and stay with their grandparents. They left in such haste that they had no protection from the rainstorms that struck the cart as it trundled over the steppe: it took two days to cover forty-five miles. Being soaked in the storm, getting lost in the reeds of a steppe lake, being berated by the drunken carter, meeting a Jewish innkeeper (whom the carter and engineer cheated) – all these incidents were transmuted sixteen years later into Chekhov’s masterpiece ‘Steppe’. And just as ‘Steppe’ climaxes in a great disillusionment when the mysterious old man who is the object of the first part of the journey turns out to be of little interest, so Aleksandr and Anton finally reached their grandfather’s estate to find that he had long been posted to an outlying village, Kniazhaia, where he was hated as ‘the viper’. Egor himself expressed no animation when he finally saw his grandchildren. Worse, as soon as the peasants realized that these boys were the grandchildren of the manager, they turned away and cursed them as the ‘viper’s’ offspring. Egor and Efrosinia lived like peasants. The boys camped among the dustsheets in the house of the absentee young countess. After nearly a week, Aleksandr and Anton struck up a relationship with the blacksmith and purloined a sheet to trawl the millpond for fish. Old Egor did not back up his reputation as a self-taught man of books: he dismissed his grandsons’ grammar-school education as a hotbed for ‘learned fools’. Anton was shocked by his grandmother’s revelations: privation and thrashings from Egor, in an outpost surrounded by resentful peasants, had broken her. For the first time the boys understood how their father had been formed, and that his childhood had been even worse than theirs.