the Taganrog District College the following crafts: Ivan, bookbinding; and Nikolai and Anton, cobbling and tailoring, we have the honour of most humbly asking your excellence to permit us to study the above-mentioned trades. 20 October 1873 Kolia and Vania were probably expelled from Technical College, although Vania became a competent bookbinder. Anton persisted for nearly two academic years. Records show Anton making a pair of fashionable stovepipe trousers, which Kolia wore, and early in 1874 a tricot waistcoat and trousers for himself. But never again was Chekhov seen to pick up a needle and thread - except for medical purposes.
Before his first year of double schooling, Chekhov had a holiday with his mother and all his siblings. Leaving Pavel in charge of the shop, they set off slowly by lumbering ox cart, past the Jewish cern-etery, up the Mius river valley and northwards to the springe of Krinichka; they camped under the stars in the settlement of Sambek, where the marmots whistled from their burrows in the steppe. Another
29
day took them twenty-five miles to Kniazhaia, where Egor and Efrosi-nia received - welcomed is too strong a word their family and housed them in the deserted manor house. Watching Ukrainians threshing corn fifteen years later, Anton recalled how, at harvest time, Egor put him to work: For whole days from dawn to dusk I had to sit by the steam-engine and write down the bushels and pounds of grain that had been threshed; the whisdes, the hissing and the bass wolf-cub sound which the steam-engine utters when working at full tilt, the screech of wheels, the slow gait of the oxen, the clouds of dust, tiie black sweaty faces of fifty or so men are all etched into my memory like 'Our Father'.
FIVE O
Disintegration
1874-6
I N 1H74 Pavel Chekhov borrowed to buy stock. As security he used the little brick fortress of a house he had built in 1873 (also on credit) on a plot of land half a mile away. The house had been built to let, but trade in Taganrog was in the doldrums, and the house was empty. The contractor, Mironov, had cheated Pavel by building the walls far too thick: the extra debt to Mironov for the unnecessary materials he had used was to prove ruinous. Others who lent Pavel 200 or 1000 roubles were themselves pressed; they offered his bills of exchange to the banks as security for their own debts, but times were abnormal. Ruin loomed. Taganrog's commercial life was turned upside down by the railway. While the engineers were not sufficiently well bribed to place the station in the centre of town, they did bring the rails down to the port. The rich now became very rich, for wagons of coal from the newly mined steppes and the wheat and wool that was now coming from the mechanized ranches of the Black Earth earned the Greek and Russian commodity dealers millions. (Pavel's in-laws, the Lobodas, flourished, importing cheap haberdashery by rail from Moscow.) But the small traders who lived by supplying steppe farmers and carters were now going bankrupt. The railway that brought the wheat to Taganrog also delivered to the steppes cheap goods from Moscow. Taganrog was no longer a source of haberdashery, 'ironmongery or colonial goods. Few carters now passed Pavel's shop.
In summer 1?74 Pavel surrendered the tenancy of his 'Colonial' shop and moved his family and his tenants, including the canny Gavriil Selivanov, into his new, but mortgaged, house. The shop boys Andri-usha and Gavriusha Kharchenko lost their jobs; poor Andriusha was conscripted into the army and died in training the following year. Ravel continued trading from market stalls, but the writing on the wall was clear to all but himself. He had more dependants. Aleksandr
I A I II h |(II) I M I MAN
1874-6
had moved out to live with the headmaster, but Aunt Fenichka, widowed and destitute, with her nine-year- old son Aleksei, had moved in with the Chekhovs. The new house was crowded, but it had a view of the sea from the upper window.
In 1874 Anton began to write: a satirical quatrain, apparently about the inspektor Diakonov, for a class magazine. His youngest brother Misha remembered another quatrain written by Anton on the garden fence. A schoolgirl who lived next door to the Chekhovs chalked up a sentimental poem on the fence. Anton's response ran: Why don't you wipe the milk off your lips, Fence-writing poetess in skirts? You should be playing with your dolls Rather than trying rhyme and verse. When the heat was unbearable Anton slept outside with the two black yard dogs under a vine, calling himself 'Job beneath the fig-tree'. Once Anton insisted on bringing home from market a live duck and tormenting the bird so that it would let the neighbours know that the Chekhovs could still afford meat. Anton's other activities were those of the town's urchins: he went to the old Quarantine graveyard, where victims of the 1830 cholera epidemic were buried, to search for human skulls; he looked after pigeons in a dovecote; he trapped goldfinches or shot at starlings, steeling himself to the screeches of wounded birds in their cages at night. He never forgot those tormented starlings.
By now the eldest Chekhov fledgling was also ready to fly. In July 1874 Aleksandr, with a few roubles in his pocket, set off by boat to Sevastopol. Dressing up and being taken for a member of the gentry were addictive pleasures. At the first port in the Crimea, Feodosia, he visited the one-kopeck baths: They gave me a sheet and pitcherful of water for my feet. When I came out of the water, it was like being a Lord. Naturally I didn't miss the opportunity to put on airs and strut for a kopeck. Then the ladies took hold of me, put me in a phaeton… and drove me around town.25 On his return, Aleksandr continued to live in gentility with ReutHnger and contrived to keep his petit-bourgeois family at a distance. At Easter 1875 Pavel reproached him: 'Aleksandr, I can see that you don't need us, that we have given you a freedom to live and to manage SO young… you cannot see yourself and a spirit of arrogance lives in you.'
Kolia and Anton also stretched their wings. Anton had passed his examinations in May 1874 and in August joined the fifth year. He became a frequent visitor to the household of a schoolmate Andrei Drossi and his sister Maria.26 Maria was particularly fond of Anton (both were taught by Father Pokrovsky) and allowed him into her bedroom on payment of 20 kopecks' worth of sweets. The Drossis were rich corn merchants, and liberal parents. Visitors took part in charades and amateur dramatics, and the Drossi family governess arranged tea parties. Anton composed and acted in vaudevilles, but destroyed the scripts afterwards. Here Anton befriended a Jewish schoolmate; here too he expanded his acting to parts from Ostrovsky as well as Gogol. Uncle Mitrofan occasionally called to express benign approval, but Pavel never appeared. The dislike between Pavel (Chekhov and the Drossis was mutual. Maria Drossi to her dying day remembered her one purchase at Pavel's shop: she had handed over 3 kopecks for an exercise book and walked out, by mistake, with a 5-kopeck book: Pavel rushed out after her and in silent fury snatched the book out of her hands. It was Maria Drossi who first noticed that Anton referred to Pavel as 'my father', never 'Papa' or 'Dad'.
Pavel had cause to be irritable. In spring 1875 he could not pay his dues for the Second Guild of Merchants and was expelled from the guild and demoted to a simple meshchanin. This entailed loss of privileges for himself and, worse, for his male offspring (if they failed to become university graduates) - as meshchane they became liable to corporal punishment and six years' military service. That spring Anton failed his Greek examinations and had to repeat the fifth year.
The summer holidays of 1875 were the last that the Chekhov brothers were to spend all together, fishing with a special moving cork float that Anton had devised. The boys took with them a frying pan and, if Pavel was out of the way, a bottle of Santurini wine, and cooked their catch on the shore.
In the summer of 1875 Anton was first invited by the family tenant, Gavriil Selivanov, to stay with one of his brothers, Ivan Selivanov (a notorious gambler) and the latter's new wife, a rich widow. It was the first of four or five unforgettable occasions on which Anton went to live on a semisavage Cossack ranch, where the livestock and the }2
J3
FATHER TO THE MAN
Ukrainian peasants were terrorized by the incessant carousing and gun shots from the house. In 1875, on his first visit, after bathing in a cold river, Anton became for the first time so ill that Ivan Selivanov panicked in fear for the boy's life, and drove him to Moisei Moiseich, a Jewish innkeeper. The innkeeper sat up all night applying mustard poultices and compresses to the sick boy, and over the next few days the innkeeper's wife nursed Anton to a state fit for the cart-ride back to Taganrog. (Moisei Moiseich and his wife inspired the Jewish innkeepers in the story 'Steppe' written twelve years later.) In Taganrog Anton's 'peritonitis' was treated by the school doctor, Doctor Schrempf from Dorpat in Estonia, who inspired Anton to take up medicine as a career. After this illness, Anton took an interest in (ierman, the language of instruction at Dorpat, and showed unsuspected motivation.
