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. My father began to 'teach' me, or, to put it simply, to beat me, when I was less than five years old. He mrashed me with a cane, he boxed my ears, he punched my head and every morning, as I woke up, I wondered, first of all, would I be beaten today? In his late twenties Anton recalled to Aleksandr: Tyranny and lies crippled our childhood so much that it makes me sick and afraid to remember. Remember the horror and revulsion we felt in those days when father would flare up because the soup was over-salted, or would curse mother for a fool. At the end of the century Aleksandr told his sister: It was a sheer Tatar Yoke, without a glimmer of light… I look back on my childhood with crushing anguish.16 The journalist Nikolai Ezhov's memoir of 1909 confirms the horror: After thrashing his children, Pavel Egorovich went to church and told the victims to sit and read so many pages of the psalter. Chekhov… told a fellow-writer: 'You know, my father thrashed me so much
[6 ?7
AA I III E III I II I MAN
when I was a child that 1 still cannot lor^ei it.' And the writer's voice quivered. The teacher of Religious Knowledge at the school was Father Fiodor Pokrovsky, then in his early thirties. He preferred to visit Mitrofan Chekhov's house rather than Pavel's: in Mitrofan's family the hospitality was not punctuated by children being beaten or by Pavel's ranting. Pokrovsky misjudged the Chekhov boys, telling Evgenia: 'Something may come of your eldest [Aleksandr], but absolutely nothing can come of the two younger ones.' Pavel Filevsky, an ex-pupil and a fellow-teacher, described Pokrovsky as follows: 'Appearance, stance, musical voice, inventiveness, the gift of the gab - everything was attractive. But he was insincere… he had little erudition, his theology was 'from the gut'.'7 The children, however, saw Pokrovsky as their defender. He often overrode the headmaster Parunov at meetings. He argued with the deputy-head, the inspektor, a key figure in a Russian gimnazia, on behalf of pupils whose parents could not pay the fees (from ten to twenty roubles a year). He lobbied for the Chekhov brothers, too. In class he would forget the catechism and talk of his war exploits or of Goethe, Shakespeare and Pushkin. Chekhov kept in touch with the priest until he died in 1898, and Pokrovsky eagerly read what his ex-pupil wrote. Years later Mitrofan was to report to Pavel: 'Antosha told me in his letter that he owes the Priest not just his knowledge of scripture but literature, the ability to understand the living word and to clothe it in elegant form.'
The preparatory class of 1868-9 was taken by kindly men: the elderly but lively Swiss Montagnerouge, who had been the boarding housemaster, was affectionately known as Stakan (wineglass) Ivanych.
The Latin teacher, Vladimir Starov, left the deepest impression: a gentle, much liked man, he fell in love with the stepdaughter of his colleague Andrei Maltsev, Ariadna Cherets, a wanton beauty known as Rurochka. She married and ruined him. In the late 1880s, when the school's self-appointed secret policeman, a Czech called Urban, denounced him, Starov was removed to a remote school in the steppe: Ariadna abandoned him and eloped with an actor well-known all over Russia, Solovtsov, and began to act herself. Starov died of alcoholism in hospital. Not just Chekhov's stories ('Ariadna', 'My Life') but also the story 'My Marriage' by his geography teacher Fiodor Stulli, were
1868-9
based on Starov and his Ariadna. Another of Chekhov's teachers, Belovin, a radical historian, died of alcoholism. Ippolit Ostrovsky, a mathematics and physics teacher, died in service of OA.
The teacher who determined the fate of most pupils was the inspektor: in Taganrog gimnazia this was the 'Centipede' A. F. Diakonov, whose sayings were a compendium of moral cliches that pupils memorized and derided: 'If a law exists, it is not for the amusement of the lawmakers and must be observed.' Diakonov is one source for (Ihekhov's automaton of a Greek teacher, The Man in a Case, but in lire his unbending principles, his lack of animosity, even his loneliness and taciturnity, won him grudging respect.
Greek caused the school and Anton Chekhov most problems. Aleksandr and Kolia were good Greek scholars, but Anton did not always manage to achieve the '3' mark necessary to pass into the next form. There were too few classical Greek teachers; finally the authorities recruited Zikos from Athens. A fine teacher, Zikos was, nevertheless, as Filevsky puts it, 'not too fastidious about seeking enrichment'. He took bribes, muttering to pupils with '2' marks 'chremata [money]!' Corruption was endemic in Russian schools. Teachers took laggards as boarders and then charged 350 roubles a year, feeding the boys, as Anton later put it 'like dogs, on the gravy from the roast'. Zikos was so blatantly exploitative that he 'compromised' the school and in the early 1880s was repatriated.
Another recruit was a Czech called Jan Urban. The school bogey, he had worked in Kiev (where somebody broke his leg), and in Simferopol (where his windows were smashed).18 Each town he left after denouncing pupils and staff to the authorities. Taganrog was his last chance, but his denunciations continued. One of the pupils he harassed killed himself. In Anton's last years at the gimnazia boys packed a sardine can with explosives and hurled it at Urban's house. The bang was heard ten blocks away. Urban demanded that the police arrest the anarchists responsible, but the headmaster and police did nothing. Urban had difficulty finding a new landlord. Such was his standing that even the city gendarme forbad his daughter to marry Urban's son. In the 1905 disturbances schoolboys stoned Urban: he picked up the stones and carried them in his pocket until his death.
Some teachers were never recalled by Anton. Yet one wonders how he could forget Edmund-Rufin Dzerzhinsky, 'a pathologically irritable iH I E I 111 It I I I II I MAN man' says Filevsky. Until 1875 Edmund kulin taught mathematics and later fathered the murderous head of Lenin's secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Anton remembered best the teachers who stayed throughout his years there, and those who met grotesque ends.19 In later life he dismissed them as chinodraly (careerists) and used their eccentricities and tragedies for fiction.
In his first years Anton was academically mediocre and not very docile. Only Pavel Vukov, responsible for discipline, when asked after Chekhov's death, spoke out: 'He got on our nerves for nine years.' (Later Vukov put it more tactfully: 'His ideas and witty phrases were taken up by his schoolmates and this became a source of merriment and laughter.') As for Anton's fellow-pupils, friendships were not formed until later. The Chekhov family was still too clannish.
From 1868 Pavel's income grew and provided an education for all of his children. The death of their grandmother, Aleksandra Kokh-makova in 1868, was barely noticed: paralysed, she had been unaware of the world for four years.
Anton's life of a schoolboy and a chorister was made tougher when, early in 1869, the Chekhovs moved into a rented two-storey brick house on a corner site, at the edge of town, on the route taken by the carters and drovers on their way to and from the port and the steppes. On the upper storey they had a drawing room, with a piano; the lower storey was a shop, its side rooms crammed with tenants and stores. Outside, where one of the shop boys or Chekhov children would stand to solicit customers, hung a sign: TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, AND OTHER COLONIAL GOODS. In addition to the family (although Aleksandr often lived elsewhere), two shop boys, the young Khar- chenko brothers, Andriusha and Gavriusha, about 11 and 12 years old, were taken in, receiving no salary for their first five years, not even allowed pockets in their clothes, lest they be tempted to steal, and thrashed even more often than the children of the house. They were trained to give short change and short weight and to pass off rotten goods as sound.20
Here, on 12 October 1869, Evgenia, the last of the Chekhov children, was born. Somehow the Chekhovs found room for tenants -Jewish traders, monks, schoolteachers. One tenant played a key role in the family's last Taganrog years. The Chekhovs never forgot Gavriil Parfentievich Selivanov, who worked in the civil courts by day and at
1868-9
night went to the club where he earned another living as a gambler. An elegant bachelor, he fought to keep his straw hat clear of the sunflower seed husks and other debris that blew in the wind around the Chekhov shop. Selivanov soon became a member of the family, even calling Evgenia 'mama'. Another tenant was a pupil in the senior classes of the gimnazia, Ivan Pavlovsky, later to be a journalist-colleague of Chekhov's. Pavlovsky left an indelible mark on the memory of his schoolmates. In 1873 he left to study in Petersburg, but was arrested as a revolutionary and sent to Siberia.
From the upper storey of the Moiseev house the family could see Taganrog's new market square. To this square convicted criminals, their hands tied behind their back, a placard naming their crime round their necks,
