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., hut I have become accustomed to
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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. E 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: 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 line 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, I sinister side. Some of Gerasim Morozov's grandchildren - a maternal mule and an aunt of Anton and his brothers - died of OA. Iakov Morozov lacked the stamina of Egor Chekhov: in 1833 he
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went bankrupt, then found protection (like Kgor 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 n 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 [be 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 unh^ppiness, 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.
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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 Oo), giving the first hint of OA in the family:
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go to the trouble in Moscow of iiskinj; the /Vic-dual 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 i860 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
