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. Aleksandtf recalled 'the doctor who treated our family protested at this premature violence to my infant chest and vocal cords'.14 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
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1 E I III II I i I II I MAN 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
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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.
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In iH6$, 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 was 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.'1
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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
