In July Anton and Kolia took the train south. Anton stayed a month with Vasili Zembulatov. They dissected rats and frogs. He lingered in the steppes with the Zembulatovs, before visiting Taganrog, where he collected 75 roubles from the town hall and sent his father 15. Nevertheless, leaving for Moscow on 26 August, Anton had to beg Zembulatov to advance him the rent. August in Taganrog was expensive. Evgenia and the younger children were with Vania in Voskresensk. Pavel, alone in Moscow, told Anton and Kolia to visit Father Bandakov, to get news of their old nanny, to visit their grandfather’s grave at Tverdokhliobovo 400 miles away, and to list outstanding debts in Taganrog. Most precise was his order for ‘a gallon of Santurini wine from Titov or Iani at the Old Market at 4 roubles the two gallons.’5
The girls of Taganrog in the 1880s were in a predicament that preoccupied Anton Chekhov’s mature prose. Every enterprising, intelligent male school-leaver left for university in Moscow, Petersburg or Kharkov; the girls were left with their impatient parents, playing the piano, embroidering pillow cases, their only potential grooms the sons of merchants and officials, too complacent to leave. Work as schoolteacher or midwife meant poverty and exploitation. Their third choice was to elope with an actor or musician, and blot the family escutcheon. Their predicament was to be lamented in many of Chekhov’s stories of provincial incarceration. In Moscow, among more calculating beauties, Anton had missed the impetuosity of Taganrog’s Greek girls. Now he and Kolia had romantic hopes. Kolia addressed Liubochka Kamburova as ‘Empress of my Soul, Diphtheria of my Thoughts, Carbuncle of my Heart’, though he had been pursuing her friend Kotik (‘Kitten’). Of the Taganrog girls, the boldest on paper was, however, the half Greek Lipochka Agali. In October she wrote: ‘None of your young ladies dares write to you, for fear you will criticize their spelling. But I’m not afraid since I’m sure that you won’t laugh at me, you’re my defender, aren’t you …’6 Selivanov cynically congratulated Kolia on his luck: ‘You’ve had payment in kind which you enjoy, if I’m not mistaken, right left and centre, I mean on canvas and between the sheets – and she’s not bad-looking – I’ve seen her portrait; your adolescent fancy “Kitten …”’
Anton brought back a human skull from Taganrog: it had pride of place in his room, this time in yet another house on the Grachiovka.
Notes
1 See M. P. Chekhov’s memoirs in Vokrug Chekhova, 184–5.
2 See OR, 331 58 29: Gavriil Parfentievich Selivanov’s letters to Anton, 1879–80: 5 Sept. 1879.
3 The Dragonfly had chequered prospects; not until 1906, when Russian censorship collapsed, was it transformed into Satirikon, one of Europe’s sharpest humorous weeklies.
4 See OR, 331 81 20: Pavel’s letters to Anton, 1879–85: 18 June 1880.
5 See OR, 331 81 16: Pavel’s letter to Nikolai, 23 Aug. 1880.
6 See OR, 331 35 9: O. and P. Agali’s letters to Anton 1880–1.
TEN
The Wedding Season
1880–1
THE CHEKHOV FAMILY moved again in November 1880, a quarter of a mile uphill from the Grachiovka, to more reputable, long-term quarters; the landlady, Mrs Golub, had a weakness for Anton. Their lodgers did not follow: Korobov, Saveliev and Zembulatov sought a less turbulent host than Pavel.
Anton’s second year of medicine was demanding: students dissected corpses by day, and studied pharmacology by night. Medicine absorbed Anton more than literature in early 1881. The weekly journals were lukewarm to Anton. The Dragonfly’s rejections became ruder: in December, Vasilevsky printed an opinion, ‘You are fading before you blossom. Great pity.’ It took six months to find an outlet for his work. Politics was stifling the popular press. Censorship in 1881 became so harsh as to endanger the journals in which Anton made his debut. The Talk of the World had an issue confiscated for its cover picture – pens and inkwell in the shape of a gallows with the caption: ‘Our instrument for deciding vital questions.’
The public mood was no longer inclined towards humour. That spring the atmosphere had become oppressive. On 1 March terrorists blew up Tsar Alexander II in Petersburg. Petersburg was shaken by the wave of arrests, and the barbarous spectacle of a multiple hanging by a drunken hangman, before the world’s ambassadors. In Moscow, professors who called on Alexander III to reprieve his father’s murderers were dismissed. The Tsar’s family believed that God had killed Alexander II for adultery and for undermining autocracy, but would not spare his killers. Alexander III, a bluff military man with a love of the bottle, left ideology to his tutor, the Procurer of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. The Procurer was an intellectual – he had presumed to advise Dostoevsky on the composition of The Brothers Karamazov. His views were that the State should only prepare souls for the afterlife. ‘The existence of unbridled newspapers,’ he said, had no part in the salvation of the populace. Police spies were everywhere: Anisim Petrov came from Taganrog to stay with the Chekhovs for a month, almost certainly on official instructions.1 The student body was in turmoil. In student meetings held at the university during March, as far as Nikolai Korobov recalled, Anton was present but silent, ‘neither indifferent nor active’. On anti-Semitism, however, Anton spoke his mind. When his school friend, Solomon Kramariov bemoaned his hardships as a Jew studying law in Kharkov: ‘The Jews are being beaten everywhere and all over, which won’t gladden the heart of Christians like you, for example.’2 Anton offered vigorous support: ‘Come and study and teach in Moscow: things look good for Taganrog men in Moscow … Disraelis, Rothschilds and Kramariovs don’t and won’t get beaten up … If you are beaten in Kharkov, write and tell me: I’ll come. I like beating up those exploiters …’
In this unhappy spring 1881 Anton asserted his authority in the family: he quarrelled with Aleksandr for turning up drunk and sparking off a family row: ‘I don’t let my mother, sister or any woman say a word out of place to me … “being drunk” doesn’t give you a right to shit on anyone’s head …’
Anton published nothing in spring 1881: perhaps he was writing his first surviving play, a monstrous melodrama usually known by the name of its main protagonist, Platonov. Misha recalled copying out the whole text twice, and handing it to the actress Ermolova. She rejected it, and Anton never took up the manuscript again. (It was published nearly twenty years after his death.) To perform it would take five hours; it is full of clichés and provincialisms. Yet Platonov is a blueprint for Chekhovian drama: a decaying estate is to be auctioned, and nobody can save it. Even the mine shafts making ominous noises under the steppe anticipate The Cherry Orchard. The hero, like Uncle Vania, believes he could have been Hamlet or Christopher Columbus and spends his energy on pointless love affairs. The doctor fails to forestall a suicide. The play lacks stagecraft, brevity and wit, but its absurdities and its mood of doom, its allusions to other writers from Shakespeare to Sacher-Masoch make it recognizable as Chekhov’s work. It also proved that Chekhov could write seriously and at length.
In June 1881 The Alarm Clock printed one sketch by Anton. Months passed before Chekhov was a regular, but their office gave him an insight into Moscow’s ‘Grub Street’. The Alarm Clock’s owner was a crooked nonentity. One editor, Piotr Kicheev, was notorious for having murdered a student.
Summer offered relief from oppression. Only Vania had to stay at his post, in his school house at Voskresensk all summer, so that Pavel ordered him: ‘Don’t be absent … prepare to receive your family with the appropriate honours: Mama, your brother [Misha] and your sister.’
While Aleksandr went to the country to stay with his rich friend Leonid Tretiakov, Kolia and Anton decided to represent the Moscow Chekhovs with Gavriil Selivanov and Uncle Mitrofan at Taganrog’s most resplendent social occasion that summer – the wedding of their cousin Onufri Loboda. Anton arrived in a magnificent chapeau-claque, a folding top hat, which kept blowing away on the journey to the church. Kolia drew a caricature, and Anton wrote facetious captions. Taganrog never forgot that wedding, nor the caricature, when it was published in autumn.
Wisely, neither Anton nor Kolia stayed long after the wedding. Anton was not to see his native city again for nearly six years. By late July he had joined his mother and younger siblings in Voskresensk. Here, to judge by a letter to his rich cousin in Shuia, the ‘peritonitis’ that had nearly killed him as a boy recurred. When he recovered he got to know the hospital at Chikino, a mile north of Voskresensk. The Chikino doctors, particularly Piotr Arkhangelsky, reinforced Anton’s vocation. Throughout August 1881 Anton nervously helped Arkhangelsky treat the ill-nourished and diseased peasantry who flocked to the hospital for free relief. Doctor Chekhov found himself dealing with rickets, worms, dysentery, tuberculosis and syphilis, all of them endemic among the Russian peasantry.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 55 21: Anisim [Onisim] Petrov’s letters to Anton. Chekhov used the name Anisim once, for a corrupt, demented and semiliterate policeman in a story, ‘In the Ravine’ (1899).
2 See OR, 331 48 49: Solomon Kramariov’s letters to Anton, 1881, 1904.
ELEVEN
The Spectator
1881–2
IN SEPTEMBER 1881 the third-year medical students were introduced to new subjects: diagnostics, obstetrics and gynaecology. They became familiar with live bodies. Venereal diseases, then under the aegis of ‘skin diseases’, were central to the course, as a primary source of income for many practitioners. In Russian cities, as in France, prostitution was regulated with compulsory inspections and treatment. In Moscow hordes of prostitutes were inspected at police stations, twice weekly if in brothels, once a week if free-lance. A junior doctor could earn a good living. To stop syphilis becoming as endemic in cities as it was in the countryside, this demeaning procedure continued, despite the protests of enlightened doctors. A doctor became, as Anton later put it, ‘a specialist in that department’. If Anton had ‘difficulties with women’, in the sense that his sexual encounters had to be light-hearted, even anonymous, and certainly without emotional involvement, these difficulties may stem from, or have encouraged, his familiarity with the whores of Sobolev lane, the Malaia Bronnaia and the Salon des Variétés, whom he met not only professionally. He never disowned them: even when his women friends were more reputable, he nostalgically recalled the ‘smell of horse sweat’ of the ‘ballerina’ he knew when a second-year student. For his first three years in Moscow, his girlfriends were nameless denizens of the red-light districts.
Literature also took Chekhov into new worlds. He was invited to become a contributor to a new Moscow magazine that came out sometimes weekly, sometimes more often, The Spectator. This journal became the workplace of four Chekhov brothers. On the Strastnoi boulevard, little over a mile from the Chekhov apartment, The Spectator became the brothers’ club: Aleksandr worked on it as an editorial secretary, Kolia as an artist, Anton as a regular humorist, and Misha, who called after school, as an occasional translator and tea boy. The founder editor, Vsevolod Davydov, was saner than Kicheev on The Alarm Clock and kinder than Vasilevsky of The Dragonfly.
Kolia’s best artwork was done for The Spectator, where he felt loved – not just by his colleagues, but also by The Spectator’s secretary, Anna Aleksandrovna Ipatieva-Golden, a divorcee who became his common-law wife for seven years. The ‘three sisters’ motif entered Anton’s life: over the next ten years Anton and his brothers were to be involved with at least five trios of sisters. The first of these trios Anna, Anastasia and Natalia Golden left a deep mark on the Chekhovs. Anastasia Putiata-Golden was, like her sister Anna, an editorial secretary, and lived with the genius Nikolai Pushkariov, editor of Chiaroscuro and Talk of the World.1 Only the youngest, Natalia Golden, was unmarried: she fell in love with Anton for life, a love that he reciprocated for two years. Anna and Anastasia were magnificent blond Valkyries – dubbed by their disparagers as kuvalda (‘sledgehammer’ or ‘big slag’) No. 1 and kuvalda No. 2. Natalia Golden looked utterly different, a thin, obviously Jewish girl with waving black hair and an aquiline nose. Of the Golden sisters’ origins almost nothing is known except that they were Jews who had converted to orthodoxy, but in the early 1880s, with their notorious appetites for eating and making love, they were at the centre of the lives of Anton and Kolia.2
Aleksandr’s affections were focused elsewhere. His story ‘Karl and Emilia’ made an impact at The Alarm Clock and he won the heart of the editorial secretary there, Anna Ivanovna Khrushchiova-Sokolnikova.3 Anna Sokolnikova ousted the Polevaeva sisters from Aleksandr’s heart: she was to be his common-law wife until her death, and bear him three children. Born in 1847, greying and stout, Anna was eight years older than Aleksandr, and she had tuberculosis. Worse, she already had three children and, as the guilty party in a divorce, she was forbidden by a Russian ecclesiastical court to remarry.4 Pavel – with the assent not just of Evgenia but also of Anton – refused to treat Anna or her eventual offspring, his first grandchildren, as family.
Pavel respected Jews: in his diaries he marked off the Jewish Passover as assiduously as the Christian Easter. Natalia Golden, unmarried, was acceptable to Pavel, who raised no objections when Anton stayed the night at her more spacious house. Anton’s pretext was studying for exams; in any case he wanted greater privacy than a room shared with Misha. Soon Anton and Natalia were calling each other Natash-chez-vous and Antosh-chez-vous (i.e. Natasha at your place), Russified as Natashevu and Antoshevu.
Love and literature brought Kolia and Anton to The Spectator and tied Aleksandr to The Alarm Clock. Through Anna Sokolnikova, Anton, too, within the year, became a contributor to The Alarm Clock, and through Anastasia Putiata-Golden, Anton met the editor and owner of Chiaroscuro and Talk of the World, and became a contributor to both.
The sleazy world of the Moscow weeklies and the nightclubs, such as the Salon des Variétés where the contributors congregated, gave Anton material both for personal enjoyment and literary indignation. On one occasion, he exploited a visit he made to the Salon des Variétés at the end of September 1881 with two rich cousins from Shuia, Ivan Ivanovich Liadov and his brother-in-law Gundobin, whom Chekhov nicknamed Mukhtar after the Turkish general who fought the Russians in the Caucasus. Had Anton signed his article with his real name, the doors of the Salon would have closed to all Chekhovs. In it he describes the ‘hostesses’ – the Blanches, Mimis, Fannis, Emmas – whose fortune-seeking in Russia ended in this sordid nightclub – while the customers, named as Kolia, Ivan Ivanovich and Mukhtar, drink and disappear into private rooms. The thrust of the article is in the end: ‘Antosha C.’ advises the management that they would make more money by charging to leave, not to enter. Chekhov wrote many sallies against the Salon: perhaps he was responsible for it closing and reopening as the Theatre Bouffe in 1883. The distaste in Anton’s article is at odds with Kolia’s illustration, a centrefold, crowded with flirtatious hostesses, daring cancan dancers and happy punters.
In September 1881, euphoric after the family wedding, Aunt Marfa Loboda wrote to congratulate Anton on his achievements. Aunt Marfa could not have been more cruelly deceived. Taganrog did not admire Anton long. The issue of The Spectator (No. 9, 4 October 1881) that printed the Salon des Variétés, carried a double-page spread of Kolia’s wicked caricatures and Anton’s disrespectful text, ‘The Wedding Season’. The Lobodas, the Chekhovs and Gavriil Selivanov could see their faces drawn as the various wedding guests: a noisy drunken Mitrofan; the bridegroom, Onufri Loboda, captioned ‘As stupid as a cork … marrying for the dowry’; Gavriil Selivanov as ‘a lady-killer …’ The scandal broke when Aleksandr moved to Taganrog. He advised Kolia and Anton:
If you two value your backs, I advise you not to go to Taganrog. The Lobodas, Selivanov, their kith and kin are all seriously furious with you for ‘The Wedding’ in The Spectator. Here that cartoon is seen as an expression of the blackest ingratitude for hospitality.
Yesterday Selivanov came … with the following speech:
‘I’ll tell you that Anton and Nikolai’s behaviour was caddish and in bad faith, taking material for
their cartoons from houses where they were received as family … I don’t know what I did to deserve this insult.’
Anton was unperturbed: he replied that he disliked all issues of the Lobodas as much as they disliked issue No. 18 of The Spectator. Chekhov had a lifelong blind spot: despite his powers of empathy, he never understood the hurt of people whose private lives he had turned into comedy. Mitrofan had probably never been drunk in his life; he read The Spectator and felt betrayed: how did this barb tally with Anton’s protestations of love four months before? Years passed before Aunt Marfa wrote again. Gavriil Selivanov left Anton’s letters unanswered. The affectionate Lipochka Agali, probably the Hellenic beauty portrayed as ‘the Queen of the Ball’, also fell silent. Not for the last time were those most sure of Anton’s affection embarrassed and humiliated in his fiction, and never would Anton admit, let alone repent, his exploitation.
Anton was now attacking more formidable targets. On 26 November 1881 France’s most renowned actress, Sarah Bernhardt came to Moscow, fresh from America and Vienna, and began twelve nights at the Bolshoi theatre in Dumas-fils’ La Dame aux camélias. Sarah Bernhardt had a poor press from Moscow’s reviewers, but nobody panned her like Anton Chekhonte in The Spectator in November and December 1881.5 Despite Bernhardt’s histrionic skills, he declared her so soulless, so tedious that ‘if the editor paid me 50 kopecks a line I would not write about her again’. The crux of Chekhov’s reaction was: ‘She has no spark, the only thing to make us cry hot tears and swoon. Every sigh of Sarah Bernhardt, her tears, her dying convulsions, all her acting is nothing but a faultlessly and cleverly learnt lesson …’
Anton Chekhov Page 11
