Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  A week with their grandparents was enough for Aleksandr and Anton. Aleksandr insisted on walking six miles back to the main village, Krepkaia, and asked Countess Platova to arrange for them to be taken home. A few days later the two boys were loaded onto a cart returning to Taganrog.

  In May 1872, Anton (like a quarter of the pupils) failed to pass the third year examinations – he did not reach the minimum ‘3’ mark required in all subjects, Greek being his Achilles heel. He faced exile in ‘Kamchatka’, the back row in the third year, for 1872/3. That summer, for a while, Anton could forget this humiliation: the Chekhov children were, to their joy, left behind by their parents. Pavel and Evgenia set off on a pilgrimage around Russia, to visit the great monasteries and Holy Relics, Mikhail Chekhov (fatally ill with TB) in Kaluga, the Polytechnical Exhibition in Moscow, and then, on the way home, Evgenia’s rich cousins and in-laws in Shuia. It was this summer which gave Masha, then nine, her first memories: she would try not to harbour grudges, and see the best of the Chekhovs’ childhood. She remembered only peaceful pursuits – Aleksandr making electric batteries, Kolia painting, Vania binding books.

  In 1873 the sons’ horizons broadened, while Pavel’s contracted. Anton had a social life: both older brothers, Aleksandr and Kolia had romances, perhaps love-affairs, with girls from the gimnazia that often collaborated with the boy’s school and was only a few blocks away. Aleksandr was in love and virtually engaged to Maria, the daughter of Franz Faist, the Taganrog watchmaker. Kolia, who was highly attractive, despite his Mongoloid looks and his short stature, was much pursued, particularly by Liubov (‘Love’) Kamburova, a cousin of the Chekhov family. To judge by the letters from the girls of Taganrog to Moscow, when the brothers left town, these were only a few of the daughters of Greek and Russian merchants who found the Chekhov brothers attractive. Aleksandr was clever and articulate; Kolia could clown, act and play music; Anton had wit and exquisite manners. Taganrog families long remembered his considerateness to everyone – a concern that seemed at odds with his mocking mimicry of hosts and guests. Even those to whom his literary fame was irrelevant, such as Irinushka, the nanny in Mitrofan’s household, remained bewitched by Anton. The secret of his appeal not just to women and girls, but to hotel servants and council officials, publishers and tycoons, lay in the tact and restraint which he cultivated even on his deathbed. Charm led Anton into the houses of the rich: he valued not so much their governesses, amateur dramatics, concerts, fluency in French, tea served in china cups, as the respect they seemed to have for others’ dignity and privacy.

  Anton’s tastes and mind were also stimulated by the Taganrog theatre. For decades (it was founded in 1827) it had been regarded by the school as a threat to the morals of the pupils. Pupils were only allowed to visit the theatre after the inspektor had approved the play and was satisfied that the boy would not be distracted from his homework. Teachers patrolled the theatre to spot any unauthorized schoolboys – they might cover the heads with scarves, abandon school uniform, or bribe the doorman to let them in when the auditorium was plunged in darkness. The semiforbidden nature of the theatre allured them. A rich cosmopolitan clientele allowed Taganrog to maintain a theatre and a repertoire out of all proportion to the city’s size or appeal, with singers from Italy and actors from Moscow to challenge local performers.

  Pavel regarded the theatre as the gateway to hell (he is not known to have seen even his son’s plays), though his brother Mitrofan was a keen member of the audience. In 1873 the school’s hostility to the theatre was temporarily neutralized by the appointment of a young inspektor, the appropriately named Aleksandr Voskresensky-Brilliantov, who liked to clown in the classroom, constantly took out a pocket mirror to check on his magnificent red beard and was conspicuous in the theatre, where he would crush nuts with his boot and chew loudly at the most pathetic points. This Narcissus was dismissed within the year, but by then Anton was hooked on the theatre. The first performance he saw from a 15 kopeck seat in the gallery, Vania testifies, was Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène. Offenbach’s Helen of Troy, torn between an ineffectual Menelaus and a trouble-making Paris, was to become the model for Chekhov’s own dramatic heroines.

  In the 1870s, Taganrog’s repertoire had 324 different productions.3 Much was French farce and vaudeville, adapted or merely translated, and operetta. Shakespeare too was performed: Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice. Anton’s fascination with, and variations on, Hamlet were spawned by the Taganrog theatre. Its range of mainstream Russian drama, particularly of Ostrovsky’s beautifully constructed ‘realist’ studies of the horrors of merchant life – Poverty Is No Vice, The Thunderstorm, Wolves and Ewes, The Forest – left Anton an admirer of Ostrovsky. Romantic drama, however – Victor Hugo and Friedrich Schiller – aroused his mockery. The great European operas – Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, especially Rigoletto, Il trovatore, Un ballo in maschera were also performed – evoked in Anton an ambivalent response.

  The Taganrog public was demanding and rowdy. Bad singers were whistled off the stage. The provincial reviewers were well-informed. Schoolboys wore special ties to mark their support for one soprano or another. Close underground bonds linked the school and the theatre: one technician spread information on the programmes to come, another sneaked boys in out of sight of the school’s police. One of the actors, Iakovlev, had a son studying in the gimnazia. Anton and his friends, including the future actor-manager (and rake) Solovtsov, met him and other actors offstage.

  Apart from symphonic concerts in the theatre, there was music elsewhere in Taganrog: the town’s park had a symphony orchestra and for many years entry was free. The repertoire was checked by Diakonov and the headmaster before boys were allowed to attend. Music was the only force that could bring Anton to the verge of tears, while Kolia could replay by ear pieces he had heard just once. What she saw as the pernicious influence of the theatre and the concert hall dismayed Evgenia.

  Amateur dramatics were inspired by the Taganrog professionals. Until illness weakened his voice, Anton took on several parts, notably the mayor in Gogol’s Government Inspector, with Vania playing the antihero Khlestakov, Kolia the servant Osip, and Maria, embarrassed at being publicly kissed, the eligible daughter.

  In 1873 Parunov was replaced as headmaster by the statuesque and stentorian Edmund Rudolfovich Reutlinger. He was related by marriage to the new inspektor Diakonov and, although they avoided each other outside school, they made a triumvirate with Father Pokrovsky. Reutlinger could reassure the ministry of his solid conservatism, while running a school that was innovative and tolerant. Under Reutlinger joint concerts and performances were held with the girls’ gimnazia. The two schools had teachers in common, although male teachers were mercilessly teased in the girls’ school. The French teacher Boussard was entrusted with joint social events: a fine cellist, a well-known Taganrog host, he was loved by both schools. His death in service and his tomb in Taganrog cemetery haunted Chekhov’s adult nightmares.

  Like many successful headmasters, Reutlinger had more style than substance. He may not have been particularly intelligent, but he was fond of his pupils. To the Chekhovs he was a godsend. Like Parunov, he recognized the brilliance of Aleksandr, and made him a proposition. In return for board and lodging, Aleksandr went to live with Reutlinger, where he could study peacefully and repay his host by tutoring one of the headmaster’s boarders. (This gave Aleksandr, like Pavel as alderman on the Police Authority, the reputation of being an informer.) Aleksandr’s pupil was Aleksandr Vishnevetsky, later (as Vishnevsky) to be the handsomest, and stupidest, star in the Moscow Arts Theatre firmament. It was not Reutlinger, however, but an outsider in the school, a law specialist called Ivan Stefanovsky who drew the attention of the school’s examining council to the exceptional literary qualities of Chekhov’s otherwise ‘mediocre’ compositions.

  When Anton passed into the fourth class, he was threatened with losing his new foothold in educated society. Pavel decided to insure against failure. (Anton had a
lready failed one end-of-year exam, while Kolia had failed two.) Kolia, Anton and Vania were made to write to the headmaster:

  Desiring to learn in the trade class of the Taganrog District College the following crafts: Ivan, bookbinding; and Nikolai and Anton, cobbling and tailoring, we have the honour of most humbly asking your excellence to permit us to study the above-mentioned trades. 20 October 1873

  Kolia and Vania were probably expelled from Technical College, although Vania became a competent bookbinder. Anton persisted for nearly two academic years. Records show Anton making a pair of fashionable stovepipe trousers, which Kolia wore, and early in 1874 a tricot waistcoat and trousers for himself. But never again was Chekhov seen to pick up a needle and thread – except for medical purposes.

  Before his first year of double schooling, Chekhov had a holiday with his mother and all his siblings. Leaving Pavel in charge of the shop, they set off slowly by lumbering ox cart, past the Jewish cemetery, up the Mius river valley and northwards to the spring of Krinichka; they camped under the stars in the settlement of Sambek, where the marmots whistled from their burrows in the steppe. Another day took them twenty-five miles to Kniazhaia, where Egor and Efrosinia received – welcomed is too strong a word – their family and housed them in the deserted manor house. Watching Ukrainians threshing corn fifteen years later, Anton recalled how, at harvest time, Egor put him to work:

  For whole days from dawn to dusk I had to sit by the steam-engine and write down the bushels and pounds of grain that had been threshed; the whistles, the hissing and the bass wolf-cub sound which the steam-engine utters when working at full tilt, the screech of wheels, the slow gait of the oxen, the clouds of dust, the black sweaty faces of fifty or so men are all etched into my memory like ‘Our Father’.

  Notes

  1 As the knout was soaked in tar and fish oil, the effect on the boys’ clothes was devastating. The one occasion when the knout struck him, Anton desperately soaked his trousers in chemicals, only to find that he had destroyed the fabric. A school friend’s mother took pity and bought him a new pair, so that the damage was never discovered by Pavel.

  2 See memoir by A. A. Dolzhenko (Anton’s cousin) in Iz shkol’nykh let …, 1962, 14–19.

  3 See M. Semanova, Teatral’nye vpechatleniia … in Sbornik materialov, Rostov, 1960, 157–84.

  FIVE

  Disintegration

  1874–6

  IN 1874 Pavel Chekhov borrowed to buy stock. As security he used the little brick fortress of a house he had built in 1873 (also on credit) on a plot of land half a mile away. The house had been built to let, but trade in Taganrog was in the doldrums, and the house was empty. The contractor, Mironov, had cheated Pavel by building the walls for too thick: the extra debt to Mironov for the unnecessary materials he had used was to prove ruinous. Others who lent Pavel 200 or 1000 roubles were themselves pressed; they offered his bills of exchange to the banks as security for their own debts, but times were abnormal. Ruin loomed. Taganrog’s commercial life was turned upside down by the railway. While the engineers were not sufficiently well bribed to place the station in the centre of town, they did bring the rails down to the port. The rich now became very rich, for wagons of coal from the newly mined steppes and the wheat and wool that was now coming from the mechanized ranches of the Black Earth earned the Greek and Russian commodity dealers millions. (Pavel’s in-laws, the Lobodas flourished, importing cheap haberdashery by rail from Moscow.) But the small traders who lived by supplying steppe farmers and carters were now going bankrupt. The railway that brought the wheat to Taganrog also delivered to the steppes cheap goods from Moscow. Taganrog was no longer a source of haberdashery, ironmongery or colonial goods. Few carters now passed Pavel’s shop.

  In summer 1874 Pavel surrendered the tenancy of his ‘Colonial’ shop and moved his family and his tenants, including the canny Gavriil Selivanov, into his new, but mortgaged, house. The shop boys Andriusha and Gavriusha Kharchenko lost their jobs; poor Andriusha was conscripted into the army and died in training the following year. Pavel continued trading from market stalls, but the writing on the wall was clear to all but himself. He had more dependants. Aleksandr had moved out to live with the headmaster, but Aunt Fenichka, widowed and destitute, with her nine-year-old son Aleksei, had moved in with the Chekhovs. The new house was crowded, but it had a view of the sea from the upper window.

  In 1874 Anton began to write: a satirical quatrain, apparently about the inspektor Diakonov, for a class magazine. His youngest brother Misha remembered another quatrain written by Anton on the garden fence. A schoolgirl who lived next door to the Chekhovs chalked up a sentimental poem on the fence. Anton’s response ran:

  Why don’t you wipe the milk off your lips,

  Fence-writing poetess in skirts?

  You should be playing with your dolls

  Rather than trying rhyme and verse.

  When the heat was unbearable Anton slept outside with the two black yard dogs under a vine, calling himself ‘Job beneath the fig-tree’. Once Anton insisted on bringing home from market a live duck and tormenting the bird so that it would let the neighbours know that the Chekhovs could still afford meat. Anton’s other activities were those of the town’s urchins: he went to the old Quarantine graveyard, where victims of the 1830 cholera epidemic were buried, to search for human skulls; he looked after pigeons in a dovecote; he trapped goldfinches or shot at starlings, steeling himself to the screeches of wounded birds in their cages at night. He never forgot those tormented starlings.

  By now the eldest Chekhov fledgling was also ready to fly. In July 1874 Aleksandr, with a few roubles in his pocket, set off by boat to Sevastopol. Dressing up and being taken for a member of the gentry were addictive pleasures. At the first port in the Crimea, Feodosia, he visited the one-kopeck baths:

  They gave me a sheet and pitcherful of water for my feet. When I came out of the water, it was like being a Lord. Naturally I didn’t miss the opportunity to put on airs and strut for a kopeck. Then the ladies took hold of me, put me in a phaeton … and drove me around town.1

  On his return, Aleksandr continued to live in gentility with Reutlinger and contrived to keep his petit-bourgeois family at a distance. At Easter 1875 Pavel reproached him: ‘Aleksandr, I can see that you don’t need us, that we have given you a freedom to live and to manage so young … you cannot see yourself and a spirit of arrogance lives in you.’

  Kolia and Anton also stretched their wings. Anton had passed his examinations in May 1874 and in August joined the fifth year. He became a frequent visitor to the household of a schoolmate Andrei Drossi and his sister Maria.2 Maria was particularly fond of Anton (both were taught by Father Pokrovsky) and allowed him into her bedroom on payment of 20 kopecks’ worth of sweets. The Drossis were rich corn merchants, and liberal parents. Visitors took part in charades and amateur dramatics, and the Drossi family governess arranged tea parties. Anton composed and acted in vaudevilles, but destroyed the scripts afterwards. Here Anton befriended a Jewish schoolmate; here too he expanded his acting to parts from Ostrovsky as well as Gogol. Uncle Mitrofan occasionally called to express benign approval, but Pavel never appeared. The dislike between Pavel Chekhov and the Drossis was mutual. Maria Drossi to her dying day remembered her one purchase at Pavel’s shop: she had handed over 3 kopecks for an exercise book and walked out, by mistake, with a 5-kopeck book: Pavel rushed out after her and in silent fury snatched the book out of her hands. It was Maria Drossi who first noticed that Anton referred to Pavel as ‘my father’, never ‘Papa’ or ‘Dad’.

  Pavel had cause to be irritable. In spring 1875 he could not Pay his dues for the Second Guild of Merchants and was expelled from the guild and demoted to a simple meshchanin. This entailed loss of privileges for himself and, worse, for his male offspring (if they failed to become university graduates) – as meshchane they became liable to corporal punishment and six years’ military service. That spring Anton failed his Greek examinations and had to repeat the fi
fth year.

  The summer holidays of 1875 were the last that the Chekhov brothers were to spend all together, fishing with a special moving cork float that Anton had devised. The boys took with them a frying pan and, if Pavel was out of the way, a bottle of Santurini wine, and cooked their catch on the shore.

  In the summer of 1875 Anton was first invited by the family tenant, Gavriil Selivanov, to stay with one of his brothers, Ivan Selivanov (a notorious gambler) and the latter’s new wife, a rich widow. It was the first of four or five unforgettable occasions on which Anton went to live on a semisavage Cossack ranch, where the livestock and the Ukrainian peasants were terrorized by the incessant carousing and gun shots from the house. In 1875, on his first visit, after bathing in a cold river, Anton became for the first time so ill that Ivan Selivanov panicked in fear for the boy’s life, and drove him to Moisei Moiseich, a Jewish innkeeper. The innkeeper sat up all night applying mustard poultices and compresses to the sick boy, and over the next few days the innkeeper’s wife nursed Anton to a state fit for the cart-ride back to Taganrog. (Moisei Moiseich and his wife inspired the Jewish innkeepers in the story ‘Steppe’ written twelve years later.) In Taganrog Anton’s ‘peritonitis’ was treated by the school doctor, Doctor Schrempf from Dorpat in Estonia, who inspired Anton to take up medicine as a career. After this illness, Anton took an interest in German, the language of instruction at Dorpat, and showed unsuspected motivation.