Anton Chekhov Read online

  MXaT Moscow Arts Theatre Museum Archive

  OR Manuscript Department of Russian State Library (otdel rukopisei)

  RGALI Russian State Archives for Literature and Art

  PSSP A. P. Chekhov Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: 1–18, works (referred to as I–XVIII); 1–12(+ indices), letters (referred to as 1–12), 1973–83.

  Gitovich Letopis´ N. I. Gitovich Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova, 1955

  Pis´ma 1939 I. S. Ezhov Pis´ma A. P. Chekhovu ego brata Aleksandra Pavlovicha, 1939

  Pis´ma 1954 M. P. Chekhova Pis´ma k bratu A. P. Chekhovu, 1954

  Perepiska 1934, 1936 A. P. Derman, Perepiska A. P. Chekhova i O. L. Knipper, 1934, 1936

  Knipper-Chekhova 1972 V. Ia. Vilenkin, Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova, 1972

  Levitan Pis´ma 1956 A Fiodorov-Davydov, A. Shapiro I. I. Levitan: Pis´ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia, 1956

  Perepiska I, II, 1984 M. P. Gromova et al. Perepiska A. P. Chekhova, 1984, 2 vols. (Expanded 1996, 3 vols.)

  Letopisets A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova Melikhovskii letopisets: Dnevnik P. E. Chekhova, 1995

  O semie 1970 Sergei Mikhailovich Chekhov, O semie Iaroslavl, 1970

  Vokrug Chekhova Vokrug Chekhova (comp. E. M. Sakharova), 1990

  V vospominaniiakh Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (comp. N. I. Gitovich), 1986

  LN68 Literaturnoe nasledstvo 68: Chekhov (ed. V. V. Vinogradov), 1960

  LN87 Literaturnoe nasledstvo 87: Iz istorii russkoi literatury … (ed V. R. Shcherbina), 1977

  A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

  Transliteration from Russian is standard British, except that I use i for both and I also transcribe Russian e as e, although initially and after a vowel it is pronounced ye. Russian surnames of transparently French or German origin are given in more familiar forms, thus are rendered Beaunier, Schechtel, not Bonie, Shekhtel’. Tchaikovsky is spelt traditionally; so is Chaliapin. Russian female names are given feminine form: Chekhova, Ternovskaia. Crimean Tatar names are given Turkish spellings. I have taken liberties with Russian first names. Patronymics (the middle names ending in -ovich, -ovna, etc.) have been omitted except where needed; I have reduced the varied forms of Christian names, whose choice depends on degree of acquaintance, intimacy, mood, to the minimum: for example, it may not be clear to an English reader that Maria, Mariushka, Marusia, Mania, Mosia and Masha are all the same person. In the case of Chekhov’s siblings, I hope I may be forgiven for referring to Maria Pavlovna Chekhova as Masha, Nikolai Pavlovich as Kolia, Ivan Pavlovich as Vania, Mikhail Pavlovich as Misha; as there are other Sashas in Chekhov’s life, Aleksandr Pavlovich Chekhov remains Aleksandr. In the interests of clarity, I use the better known pseudonyms of some persons (Gruzinsky for Lazarev, Andreeva for Andreeva-Zheliabuzhskaia, etc.). The index should resolve any ambiguities. Dates are given by the Russian (Julian) calendar, twelve days behind Europe until 12 March 1900, then thirteen days behind. All dates are Russian, except when the action takes place abroad when both dates are given. Russian temperatures in Réaumur have been converted to centigrade.

  I

  Father to the Man

  We could hear screams coming from the dining room … and knew that poor Ernest was being beaten.

  ‘I have sent him up to bed,’ said Theobald, as he returned to the drawing room, ‘and now, Christina, I think we will have the servants in to prayers.’

  Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

  ONE

  Forefathers

  1762–1860

  Who would have thought that such genius could come from an earth closet!

  ANTON CHEKHOV and his eldest brother Aleksandr were bewildered: in two generations the Chekhovs had risen from peasantry to metropolitan intelligentsia. Little in Anton Chekhov’s forebears hints at his gifts for language, or foretells the artistic talents of his brother Nikolai or the polymath versatility of his eldest brother Aleksandr. The key to Chekhov’s character, his gentleness and his toughness, his eloquence and his laconicism, his stoical resolution, is hidden in the genes he inherited as well as in his upbringing.

  Chekhov’s great-grandfather, Mikhail Chekhov (1762–1849), was a serf all his life. He ruled five sons sternly: even as adults, they called him Panochi, Lord Father. The first Chekhov of whom we know more is Mikhail’s second son and Anton Chekhov’s paternal grandfather, Egor Mikhailovich Chekhov. As a child Chekhov met him on a few summer holidays. There was no affection between them.1 Grandfather Egor fought his way out of bondage. He was born in 1798, a serf of Count Chertkov at Olkhovatka in Voronezh province, the heart of Russia, where forests meet steppes, half way between Moscow and the Black Sea. (Chekhovs are traceable in this region to the sixteenth century.) Egor, alone of his kin, could read and write.

  Egor made sugar from beet and fattened cattle on the pulp. Driving Count Chertkov’s cattle to market, he shared the profits. Through luck, ruthlessness and thirty years’ hard work, Egor accumulated 875 roubles.2 In 1841 he offered his money to Chertkov to buy himself, his wife and his three sons out of serfdom into the next class of Russian citizens, the petit-bourgeoisie (meshchane). Chertkov was generous; he freed Egor’s daughter Aleksandra too. Egor’s parents and brothers remained serfs.

  Egor took his family 300 miles south to the new steppe lands, tamed after centuries of occupation by nomadic Turkic tribes. Land was being sold to veterans of the Napoleonic wars and to German immigrants. Here Egor became estate manager to Count Platov at Krepkaia (Strong-point), forty miles north of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. He pushed his three sons onto the next rung in Russia’s social ladder, the merchant class, by apprenticing them. The eldest, Mikhail (born 1821) went to Kaluga, 150 miles southwest of Moscow, to be a bookbinder. The second, Anton Chekhov’s father, Pavel, born 1825 and now sixteen, worked in a sugar-beet factory, then for a cattle drover, and finally as a merchant’s shop boy in Taganrog. The youngest son, Mitrofan became a shop boy to another merchant in Rostov on the Don. Egor’s daughter Aleksandra, her father’s favourite child, married a Vasili Kozhevnikov at Tverdokhliobovo near the steppe town of Boguchar.3

  Egor remained on the Platov estates until he died, aged eighty-one. He was ruthless and eccentric. Like many managers of peasant stock, he was cruel to the peasantry: they called him the ‘viper’. He also earned the dislike of his employers: Countess Platov banished him six miles away to a ranch. Egor could have lived there in a manorial house, but preferred a peasant’s wooden cottage.

  Chekhov’s paternal grandmother Efrosinia Emelianovna, whom her grandchildren saw even less, for she rarely left the farm, was Ukrainian.4 All the loud laughter and singing, the fury and joy that Chekhov associated with Ukrainians, had been beaten out of her. She was as surly as her husband, with whom she lived fifty-eight years before her death in 1878.

  Egor emerged once or twice a year to escort a consignment of the Countess’s wheat to Taganrog, the nearest port, and to buy supplies or spare parts in the town. His eccentricity was notorious: he devised dungarees as formal dress and moved ‘like a bronze statue’. He flogged his sons for any misdemeanour – picking apples, or falling off a roof they were mending. Pavel Chekhov developed a hernia after one punishment, and had to wear a truss for it throughout his adult life.

  Late in life Chekhov admitted:

  I am short-tempered etc., etc., but I have become accustomed to holding back, for it ill behoves a decent person to let himself go … After all, my grandfather was an unrepentant slave-driver.5

  Egor wrote well. He is reported as saying: ‘I deeply envied the gentry not just their freedom, but that they could read.’ He apparently left Olkhovatka with two trunks of books, unusual for a Russian peasant in 1841. (Not a book was seen, however, when his grandsons visited him at the Platov estate thirty-five years later.)

  His efforts for his children were not matched by much affection. A bully in life, on paper he could be rhetorical, obfuscating, or sentimental. A letter of Egor’s to his son and daughter-in-law runs:<
br />
  Dear, quiet Pavel Egorych, I have no time, my dearest children, to continue my conversation on this dead paper because of my lack of leisure. I am busy gathering in the grain which because of the sun’s heat is all dried up and baked. Old man Chekhov is pouring sweat, enduring the blessed boiling sultry sun, though he does sleep soundly at night. I go to bed at 1 in the morning, but up you get, Egorushka, before sunrise, and whether things need doing or not, I want to sleep. Your well-wishing parents Georgi and Efrosinia Chekhov.6

  Like all the Chekhovs, Egor observed name days and the great Church feasts, but he was laconic. Pavel on his name day (25 June) in 1859 received a missive which read: ‘Dear Quiet Pavel Egorych, Long live you and your dear Family for ever, goodbye dear sons, daughters and fine grandchildren.’

  Anton’s maternal line was similar, and Tambov province, where the family came from, was as archetypically Russian as neighbouring Voronezh. Again, a peasant family of thrust and talent had bought its way into the merchant classes. Anton’s mother, Evgenia Iakovlevna Morozova, had a grandfather, Gerasim Morozov, who sent barges laden with corn and timber up the Volga and Oka to market. In 1817, aged fifty-three, he bought for himself and his son, Iakov, freedom from the annual tax which serfs paid their owners. On 4 July 1820 Iakov married Aleksandra Ivanovna Kokhmakova. The Kokhmakovs were wealthy craftsmen: their fine woodwork and iconography were in civil and ecclesiastic demand. The Morozov blood had, however, a sinister side. Some of Gerasim Morozov’s grandchildren – a maternal uncle and an aunt of Anton and his brothers – died of TB.

  Iakov Morozov lacked the stamina of Egor Chekhov: in 1833 he went bankrupt, then found protection (like Egor Chekhov), from a General Papkov in Taganrog, while Aleksandra lived with her two daughters in Shuia. (Their son Ivan was placed with a merchant in Rostov-on-the-Don.) On 11 August 1847 a fire burned down eighty-eight houses in Shuia: the family property was lost. Then, in Novocherkassk, Iakov died of cholera. Aleksandra loaded her belongings and her two daughters, Feodosia (Fenichka) and Evgenia, into a cart and, camping on the steppes, trekked 300 miles to Novocherkassk. She found neither her husband’s grave nor his stock in trade. She travelled 100 miles west to Taganrog and threw herself on General Papkov’s mercy. He took her in to his house and provided Evgenia and Fenichka with a rudimentary education.

  Anton’s maternal uncle Ivan Morozov, forty-five miles away in Rostov-on-the-Don, served under a senior shop boy: Mitrofan Chekhov.7 Either Mitrofan or Ivan introduced Pavel Chekhov to Evgenia Morozova. In his twenties Pavel had a signet ring made. He inscribed on it three Russian words meaning ‘Everywhere is a desert to the lonely man’. (Egor read the inscription and declared, ‘We must get Pavel a wife.’) The autobiographical record that Pavel compiled for his family in his old age has a laconic melancholy that surfaces at the rare moments of frankness in Anton’s letters and frequently in the heroes of his mature prose:

  1830 [he was then 5 years old] I remember my mother came from Kiev and I saw her

  1831 I remember the powerful cholera, they made me drink tar

  1832 I learnt to read and write in the priest’s school, they taught the lay ABC

  1833 I remember the grain harvest failing, famine, we ate grass and oak bark.8

  A church cantor taught Pavel to read music and to play the violin, folk-style. Apart from this, and the ABC, he had no formal education. His passion for church music was the salve for his unhappiness, and he also had artistic ability, but his creativity drained away in compilations of ecclesiastical facts and what casual visitors called his ‘superfluous words’. In 1854 Pavel and Evgenia were married. Evgenia had beauty but no dowry; while Pavel’s appeal as a future merchant compensated for his equine looks.

  Ivan Morozov, sensitive and generous, refused to sell suspect caviar, and was dismissed from Rostov-on-the-Don. He returned to Taganrog where Marfa Ivanovna Loboda, the daughter of a rich city merchant, fell for him. The youngest of the three Morozov children, Fenichka, married a Taganrog official, Aleksei Dolzhenko. She had a son, Aleksei, and was soon widowed.

  Anton’s mother, Evgenia, survived seven live births, financial disaster, the deaths of three of her children and her husband Pavel’s tyranny. She had a shell of self-pity to retreat into, but she had few resources beyond the love of her offspring: she read and wrote with reluctance. Of the three Morozov children only Ivan had talent: he spoke several languages, played the violin, trumpet, flute and drum, drew and painted, repaired watches, made halva, baked pies from which live birds flew out, constructed model ships and tableaux, and invented a fishing rod which automatically landed fish. His tour de force was a screen painted with a mythological battle scene: it divided his shop from his living quarters, where he gave his visitors tea.

  Anton loved and pitied his mother. He deferred to and detested his father, but from the son’s birth to the father’s death father and son never permanently separated. Pavel, like his own father Egor, could behave like a heartless monster or callous humbug, and portray himself as an affectionate self-sacrificing patriarch. He inspired loathing in his eldest son Aleksandr and saccharine affection in his youngest, Misha. Few outside the family could regard him without amusement or irritation. Apart from the Lord God, with whom he constantly communed, his closest friend was his brother Mitrofan.

  Mitrofan was a modestly successful merchant, liked in Taganrog. Constantly gathering and disseminating family news, he was the chief link in the family, a willing host and an effusive, if calculating correspondent. Mitrofan Chekhov and his brothers, Mikhail in Kaluga and Pavel a few hundred yards away, shared a fanatical piety and, sometimes, humbug. They were all founder members of a Brotherhood attached to the Cathedral in Taganrog. It collected money to support the Russian monastery on Mount Athos and to provide charity to Taganrog’s poor. Pavel writes to Mitrofan in summer 1859 (the brothers addressed each other with the formal Vy, never the intimate Ty), giving the first hint of TB in the family:

  go to the trouble in Moscow of asking the Medical men regarding the illness of Evgenia Iakovlevna, the sort of illness is very well known, she spits every moment, this dries her out extremely, she is very fussy, the slightest thing becomes unpleasant to her, she loses her appetite and there is no way now of putting her right, would there be a means or a medicine to give her peace of mind and settle it?9

  Family reunions were melancholy, quarrelsome occasions: from Kharkov in May 1860 Mitrofan writes to his brother:

  this was a heavy day for me, from morning until dinner, I could in no way distract my heart, just the recollection that I am alone depressed me to the point of exhaustion … I was taken to dine at Nikolai Antonovich’s … where I was received with affection and well, which rarely happens with us.

  All three of Egor Chekhov’s sons were life-affirmers in one respect: as patriarchs. Mikhail had four daughters and two sons, Mitrofan three sons and two daughters. Pavel and Evgenia had seven children. They married on 29 November 1854; two more years elapsed before Pavel scraped together 2500 roubles to join the Third Guild of Merchants. Their first child, Aleksandr, was born on 10 August 1855, as the Crimean War ended. Two English ships bombarded Taganrog, demolishing the dome of the cathedral, the port and many houses. Evgenia and her sister-in-law Liudmila abandoned their homes, leaving a chicken still cooking, and fled to the steppes, to stay with Egor Chekhov. Here Evgenia gave birth in the priest’s house. She returned to a tiny house belonging to Efrosinia, Pavel’s mother, which Egor had divided between Pavel and Mitrofan. When Mitrofan married Pavel moved a few streets away to a rented two-room mud-brick house on Politseiskaia Street. In 1857 he began trading; on 9 May 1858 a second son, Nikolai [Kolia], was born. In 1859 the Third Guild was abolished; raising more capital, Pavel became a Second Guild merchant. Evgenia was pregnant again. Pavel was a conformist: he became alderman on the Taganrog Police Authority. In January 1860 he wrote to brother Mitrofan: ‘last Saturday the Church of St Michael was struck by lightning and caught fire right in the dome.’ This seemed to him a
portent before Anton’s birth on 16 January 1860.10

  Notes

  1 However, it is interesting how often Chekhov uses the name Egor (the native Russian form of George) for characters in his work who are associated, however ironically, with the warrior St George.

  2 £3000 at today’s prices, a rouble being ⅔ ounce of silver.

  3 Anton never mentioned Aleksandra, his last surviving aunt by blood. Among Pavel’s papers (331 33 IV, 54a) is a scrap with the names of her children and sons-in-law.

  4 Efrosinia was influential: in 1902 Chekhov claimed to have spoken Ukrainian in his infancy.

  5 To Olga Knipper 2 Feb. 1903.

  6 See OR, 331 81 1: Egor’s letters to Pavel 1859–78.

  7 Pavel Chekhov’s first placement had been with the late Iakov Morozov, who would have been his father-in-law, in Rostov in 1841. The link between the Morozovs and Chekhovs was renewed in Rostov six years later: Ivan Morozov and Pavel Chekhov found they both had siblings in Taganrog.

  8 See Zhizn’ P. E. Chekhova in Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1939, 6.

  9 Family letters to Mitrofan up to 1860 were stitched together into a book: OR, 331 34 1.

  10 His name day, St Antony’s, was the 17th.

  TWO

  Taganrog