Anton Chekhov Read online

  1860–8

  TAGANROG HAD imperial status and a cosmopolitan population that made it more of a colonial capital than a provincial city. Visually, it was striking: a decrepit military harbour and a thriving civil port at the foot of a promontory jutting into the shallow Sea of Azov; half a dozen avenues, lined with Greek merchants’ houses, punctuated with Russian government buildings, radiating northeast from the tip of land towards the steppes. You might have thought you were in a dusty city of Thrace, until you reached the wooden shanty town of the Russian suburbs.

  Founded by Peter the Great to establish a foothold on the Sea of Azov and challenge Ottoman suzerainty, Taganrog was, like Petersburg, built without consideration for its inhabitants. Its sandy soil made poor foundations; fresh water was hard to find; it was hot in summer and cold in winter; the sea was so shallow that steam boats had to be unloaded a mile offshore. In 1720 Turks forced the Russians to demolish and abandon Taganrog. It was refounded by Catherine the Great in the 1770s and populated by Greek colonists who, like the Greeks of classical times, took refuge from poverty or tyranny in townships around the northern Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Some Greeks had been Mediterranean pirates and were now tycoons; many lived by cheating Russian farmers and bribing Russian customs officials. They spread wealth, not only by conspicuous consumption, but by generous civic arts, founding orchestras, clubs, schools and churches, bringing in French chefs to cook Lucullian dinners and importing Italian sculptors to carve their tombs in the cemetery. In Chekhov’s boyhood, they were followed by Italian and Russian merchants, and by dealers of all nations, exploiting the wealth of Taganrog’s awakening hinterland. The city developed feverishly.

  Tsar Alexander I also left his mark on the city. He came to Taganrog for spiritual solace at the end of his reign, and settled in a modest single-storeyed ‘palace’ where he died three months later; Taganrog was briefly a shadow capital of the empire. Anton was born when Taganrog’s future still looked bright. The building of railways to the south of Russia still awaited imperial consent. Cartloads of wheat and meat from the steppes – the nearest large town, Kharkov, was three hundred miles north over trackless steppes – descended on Taganrog to be shipped.

  At Anton’s christening in the Russian cathedral the godparents were Greek customers of Pavel and Mitrofan. A Russian nurse was hired, a serf who had been sold by her owners for helping the daughter of the family to elope. The Chekhov family expanded, moving house, sometimes living with members of Mitrofan’s family. They were in the house of Pavel Evtushevsky, Mitrofan’s father-in-law, when, on 18 April 1861, a fourth son, Ivan [Vania], was born. A daughter Maria [Masha] was born on 31 July 1863. The family moved in 1864 to a larger house on a more prestigious street. There a sixth child, Mikhail [Misha], was born on 6 October 1865.

  Memories of Anton in infancy come from his elder brothers. As Kolia, barely thirty years old, lay dying in 1889 he set down childhood memories.1 He recalled the house when Anton was still a baby, and the weeds and the fence which recur in Anton’s late stories:

  I lived in a little one-storey house with a red wooden roof, a cottage ornamented with burdock, nettles, buttercups and such a mass of pleasant flowers as honoured the grey palisade that surrounded these dear creatures on all sides … In this cottage there are five rooms and then three steps lead through the kitchen to the shrine where the great men [the three eldest Chekhov sons] lie, although the eldest of them is only just three feet high.

  Kolia’s memory then leapt to a time when Anton was eight. Uncle Ivan Morozov had carved a toy horseman, ‘Vaska’, out of cane for the four-year old Vania: the four boys slept in one bed and a sunbeam moved across their faces:

  at first Aleksandr waved the sunbeam off as if it were flies, then uttered something like ‘Thrash me? What for?’, stretched out and sat up … Anton dragged from under a pillow a wooden toy … first of all Vaska leapt over his knees and then he and Anton crawled over the marbled wall. Aleksandr and I watched all Vaska’s adventures with great enjoyment until Anton looked round and hid it very quickly under the pillow again. Vania had woken up. ‘Where’s my stick-toy, give me my stick-toy,’ he squealed.

  Kolia also recorded his last sight of Uncle Ivan, who could not bear the rough merchant world:

  We rarely saw uncle Vania’s red beard, he didn’t like to visit us, as he disliked my father who ascribed Uncle’s lack of trade to his incompetence. ‘If Ivan Iakovlevich were given a good thrashing,’ my father used to say, ‘then he’d know how to set up in business.’ Uncle Vania had married for love, but was unhappy. He lived with his wife’s family and heard the accursed ‘a good thrashing’ there as well. Instead of supporting the man, everyone thought up threats, more and more absurd, and finally deranged him and ruined his health. The family hearth he had dreamed of no longer existed for him. Sometimes, to avoid undeserved reproaches, he would shut up shop, not go to his room and spend the night under the fence of his house in the dew, trying to forget the insistent ‘a good thrashing’, ‘a good thrashing’.

  I remember him once running in to see my aunt asking for some vinegar to rub himself with and when she asked questions, he flapped his arms at her, tears in his eyes and quickly ran aw …

  Kolia died of TB before he could write any more. Uncle Vania died of TB shortly after the vinegar incident.

  Aleksandr also recalled the toy Vaska and the shared bed. Aleksandr had often been left in charge of Anton: he remembered the infant Anton straining on his pot, shouting to Aleksandr to ‘get a stick, get a stick’ to help him:

  But sensing my inability to help you, I got nastier and nastier and finally pinched you as painfully and viciously as I could. You ‘let rip’ and I reported to mama when she came to your yelling, as if butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth, that it was all your fault, not mine.2

  When Anton was aged about ten, the scales of dominance swung the other way. For a decade he and his eldest brother jostled for power until Anton became the effective head of the family. Aleksandr recalls his first defeat when they were left minding the stall by the railway station:

  You were chanting ‘Bang your head, bang your head, drop dead!’ … I banged you on the head with a piece of corrugated iron. You left the shop and went to see father. I expected a severe thrashing, but a few hours later you majestically walked past the door of my stall, accompanied by the shop-boy Gavriusha, on some mission for father and purposely did not look at me. I watched you walking off for a long time and, I don’t know why, burst into tears.

  Anton’s earliest years were spent more with the clan than the family. When he was six, the family moved in with Mitrofan and Liudmila, while Aleksandr spent two or three years living with Fenichka. The Chekhov and Morozov marriages tied Pavel and Evgenia to several Taganrog families, both rich and poor. A number of Russified Greek families were related to the Chekhov clan: godparents, and the Kamburovs, close neighbours on Politseiskaia street, rich merchants whose Russian bourgeois veneer was skin-deep, for old man Kamburov would curse the children, ‘Fuck your mother’, in a thick Greek accent. They combined Mediterranean temperament with liberal Russian mores: their daughters Liubov and Liudmila Kamburova were much in demand. In such milieus Aleksandr’s and Kolia’s schoolboy romances began – hence the command of demotic Greek that Aleksandr retained, and the Taganrog urban jargon which he used in his letters. Taganrog’s Greeks called Aleksandr ‘lucky Sasa’ for his fluency.3

  The first eight years of Anton’s life were punctuated by family name days and Church feasts, particularly Easter, which Pavel observed with zeal. Everyday life was freer: in school holidays he and Kolia could follow Aleksandr around Taganrog, catching fish in the smuggler’s bay of Bogudonie, trapping finches in wasteland to sell for kopecks, watching convict gangs catching stray dogs with hooks and clubbing them to death, coming home in the evenings covered with lime and dust or mud.

  Notes

  1 See LN68, 531–7.

  2 See Aleksandr’s letter to Anton 17 Jan. 1886 i
n Pis’ma, 1939, 131–2.

  3 The Jewish boys called him ‘Sashinkoch’. He acquired a smattering of Yiddish and never forgot the Jewish boys’ panic call: Ferkatse di huzen, loif aheim, Roll up your trousers, run home.

  THREE

  Shop, Church and School

  1868–9

  PAVEL CHEKHOV was a bad merchant, taking too much pleasure in calligraphy, copying out price lists, inventories and lists of creditors. He turned his shop into a forum for endless moralizing with customers, a club where they could gossip over a glass of wine or tea. Church music was his opening into Taganrog society. Pavel had an unbounded passion for sung services. Despite limited training and ability, he became the regent (kapellmeister) of the cathedral choir in 1864, after years as an amateur. He refused to omit a bar of music or a word of the liturgy; cathedral services became interminable. Parishioners and clergy asked Evgenia to persuade him to shorten them, but Pavel never compromised over his favourite quality ‘splendour’. In 1867 he was dismissed.

  Pavel moved to the Greek monastery, which, to broaden its congregation, now held services in Russian. The Greek clergy had little Russian and needed a Russian cantor. Pavel formed a choir of blacksmiths, whose powerful bellows-lungs made them strong, rough, basses and baritones. Pavel’s choir lacked altos and sopranos. He rehearsed with two young Taganrog ladies, but their nerves led to a calamity, and the blacksmiths had to take over. Pavel renounced female singers and recruited his three eldest sons. Aleksandr recalled ‘the doctor who treated our family protested at this premature violence to my infant chest and vocal cords’.1 For years church singing became torture, especially at Easter, when the boys were hauled out of bed on a freezing morning for early matins. They would sing at two more long services in the day, before rehearsing all evening in the shop, under a choirmaster who thrashed them. During his adult life, right up until his death, Anton would rarely spend an Easter night in bed; instead he would wander the streets, listening to the church bells. The congregation’s wonderment at the sight of Aleksandr, Kolia and Anton, on their knees on the freezing stones, singing the three-part Motet of the Robber on the Cross, was not shared by the singers. Anton Chekhov recalled that they ‘felt like little convicts’, kneeling, worrying that the holes in their shoes were visible. Joys were few: watching merlins nesting in the bell-tower, an uncalled-for crescendo or peel of bells as their mother entered. The music, but not the doctrines of the Christian church, entered Anton’s blood: ‘The Church bells of Easter Sunday are all that I have left of religion,’ he was to tell his schoolfriend, later the actor, Aleksandr Vishnevsky. To another writer, Shcheglov, he confessed in 1892: ‘In my childhood I had a religious education and a religious upbringing … And the result? When I recall my childhood I now find it rather gloomy; I now have no religion.’

  In 1872 the Greek monastery church had a new priest who had no command of Russian, and Pavel’s Russian choir was dismissed. The church that stood in the new Taganrog market, where Pavel, his blacksmiths and his fellow merchants worshipped and sang, had a paid professional choir. Only in the chapel of Tsar Alexander’s ‘palace’ could Pavel display his family ‘trio’.

  The doctor may well have been right to blame the ill health of the three eldest Chekhov boys on those early services and late rehearsals. The positive side was that Anton’s mind was saturated with the Church Slavonic language of the psalms, of the Orthodox free-verse psalmodic variations known as akafisty. His love of Russian church music long outlasted his faith in God, though he could only sing, or pick out a tune on a piano with one finger. Kolia, on the other hand, played the violin and piano, the latter with what a professional witness called virtuosity. In his brief prosperity in the late 1860s and early 1870s Pavel hired both a music teacher and a French teacher for his children. Both Aleksandr and Kolia acquired fluent French, whereas Anton’s foreign languages, like his musical talents, remained undeveloped.

  Aleksandr was a star pupil at Taganrog gimnazia [grammar school]. Pavel wavered about Kolia and Anton. Greek customers persuaded him that prosperity lay with a job as a broker in a Greek trading firm. This future 1500 roubles a year salary required a command of demotic Greek. When a debt of 100 roubles was unexpectedly paid, Pavel invested in Kolia’s and Anton’s education. For modern Greek, a child had to attend the parish school attached to the Greek Church of St Constantine and St Helen. (Aleksandr had two or three years earlier picked up Greek at this school.) The school, where ‘Nikolaos and Antonos Tsechoph’ were enrolled in September 1867, was a Dothe-boys Hall. In one large room with five long wooden benches one teacher, Nikolaos Voutzinas, took five classes simultaneously, starting with the alphabet and ending with syntax and history. In each corner of the schoolroom was an iron semicircle where an older pupil would test and punish pupils of a lower form, who were each sold a tatty primer. Aleksandr and Anton never forgot Voutzinas’ catch phrase: ‘Their parents will pay for everything.’ Voutzinas would periodically disappear to his private quarters, where a Ukrainian housekeeper met his needs. (It is said he also raped a Greek boy there.) His red beard, loud voice and metal ruler restored order when he reappeared. Voutzinas devised a number of tortures, including strapping a boy to a stepladder to be spat at by the class. The fees, however, were modest, and the boys needed no uniform.

  The school year ended: Pavel decided to demonstrate his sons’ command of Greek to his customers. Despite stickers for ‘diligence’ and ‘exquisite work’ which Voutzinas awarded his pupils, neither Kolia nor Anton had more than the alphabet. In the row that ensued, the boys, not Voutzinas, were punished. In August 1868 they were enrolled into the gimnazia, Anton entering the preparatory class.

  Taganrog school has been portrayed both as the prototype demesne of Chekhov’s degraded fictional schoolteachers and as the Eton of the Pontus Euxine. It was hell and heaven – like a good English ‘public’ school, minus sport, sodomy and the cane. During Anton’s eleven years there it flourished. A survey of its teachers and its pupils shows it evolving into a hotbed of talent. School formed Anton Chekhov as strongly as home, and liberated him from home.

  In September 1809 the city’s leading citizens had founded a gimnazia for their city. In 1843 the school was moved to a light and airy two-storey classical building, situated at Taganrog’s highest point. It began to produce famous alumni – for instance, the poet Shcherbina, translator of Homer into Russian. When the era of reforms began in 1856, the school entered two decades of turbulence. The expansion of cities in southern Russia led to a turnover of staff; the heady atmosphere of Alexander II’s reign brought in radicals who conflicted with authority.

  In 1863, the headmaster was sacked and wandered Taganrog as a mad tramp. The new head, Parunov, gave him a burial in 1865. In 1867 the Minister for Education, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, visited the school, to make it an example of a new conservative, classical gimnazia: dubious subjects were replaced with double and compulsory Greek and Latin; Russian literature, as a ferment of rebellion, was severely restricted. Subversive teachers were squeezed out. Country pupils who boarded with Taganrog families found their quarters under surveillance. Dmitri Tolstoy felt that the education system and the church should shadow the gendarmerie which he had established. His reforms made many teachers into policemen and much teaching into parrot-learning, but created a framework within which canny teachers and able pupils flourished. The school was an avenue for Jews, merchants, petit-bourgeoisie, sons of priests into the new professional classes, the intelligentsia. They became doctors, lawyers, actors, writers – which worried a government, rightly afraid of under-employed intelligentsia as a force for revolution.

  In a Russian gimnazia all pupils were treated as members of the gentry. The only discipline was detention in a whitewashed cell under the school’s vaulted staircase. Physical punishment was forbidden: a teacher who struck a pupil would be dismissed. After the Voutzinas regime of thrashed palms and crucifixion, not to speak of the floggings in Pavel Chekhov’s household, the preparatory class w
as paradise to Anton. He discovered that few fellow-pupils were beaten even at home. That quiet resistance to all authority, the core of Anton’s adult personality, was fomented in the classroom. The gimnazia was a great leveller – upwards, rather than downwards. It gave pupils from poor, clerical, Jewish or merchant households the rights and aspirations of the ruling class. Some parents, however, could no longer afford the fees and uniform, and transferred their sons to technical school, to become tailors or carpenters. Efim Efimiev, who left school at 12 in 1872, eventually to become a watchmaker and fine joiner, recalls:

  We were considered people of plebeian origin … by the cheap cloth uniform … I took a lunch of a small piece of bread and dripping which I often shared with Anton, because he had no nourishment apart from bread, a baked potato and a gherkin.2

  Pavel’s fondness for the rod, exceptional even for the unenlightened merchant class, was an aspect of his personal cruelty. The younger children, especially Misha, were brought up in Moscow, where Pavel was restrained by the urbane prejudices of his landlords from exercising full paternal rights. Masha, the only surviving girl, was treated as a doll: she was remembered as the ‘blushing Murochka’ in her starched pink dress. The elder sons were thrashed mercilessly. While the Chekhovs’ rich in-laws, the Loboda family, were notorious for flogging servants and children, Pavel’s children envied Mitrofan’s family, where the children were preached at, not flogged. Aleksandr was traumatized by floggings – both he and Kolia wetted their beds well into their teens. Efim Efimiev, Anton’s schoolmate from 1869 to 1872, recalls: ‘in the Chekhov household … as soon as his father appeared we went quiet and ran home. He had a heavy hand. He punished children for the most innocent naughtiness. Thrashings.’ In the mature work ‘Three Years’, Chekhov gives a graphic account of a young intellectual alienated from his merchant background, with many details that tally with what we glean from Anton’s correspondence about his own childhood anguish.