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 i860.10
TWO
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
8
9 FATHER TO III V. MAN
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.' 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 litde one-storey house with a red wooden roof, a cottage ornamented with burdock, netdes, buttercups and such a mass of pleasant flowers as honoured the grey palisade mat 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 e wooden toy… first of all Vaska leapt over his knees and I lien lie and Anton crawled
1860-8
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 OA before he could write any more. Uncle Vania died of OA 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.12 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: li 1
1 1
I E I 11 I E I (» lilt MAN You were chanting 'Bang your head, aiu your head, drop dead!'… I banged you on the head with a piece ol 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 Kam-burovs, 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.13
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. i?•
THREE O
Shop, Church and School
1868-9
PAVEL CHEKHOV was a bad merchant, taking too much pleasure in calligraphy, copying out price lists,
