Aleksandr an anecdote, but both dressed fashionably and drank, and for much of the time lived apart from their parents or from each other. When Anton stopped sending cheap tobacco from Taganrog, Aleksandr spent his money on sweet, oval Saatchi and Mangoubi cigarettes.
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Money trickled in both direct s. Aleksandr sent Anton 15 roubles for the journey to Moscow in the Kastcr holidays. On 17 March 1877 Anton took the train for his first visit to Moscow, though nobody knew how they would pay his return fare. Aleksandr urged him to stay with him in the sordid Grachiovka, rather than in the crowded family flat-Firstly, because I live alone and therefore you won't be in my way, but will be a welcome guest; secondly, because our parents have just two rooms with a population of five human beings (the cur that lives there doesn't count); thirdly, my place is far more convenient than theirs and there are no Paul de Koks [Pavel], no Ma [Mama], nor 2 Ma [Masha] constandy weeping for any conceivable reason. Fourthly, I don't have the hideous drunken Gavrilov crowd; and fifthly, living with me you'll be free to do and go as you like. Rows were shaking the main family home. Kolia swore five times a day that he was leaving. Pavel and Evgenia were, half way through the academic year, despondently looking for a school for Masha and loudly complaining. Aleksandr was summoned to mediate by Masha. He found Evgenia shivering in a soot-covered overcoat in the kitchen, while Pavel sat in the living room mending his fur-coat, oblivious to the tears he had caused by swearing at his wife. Kolia would try to paint members of his family - his habit of screwing up one eye as he studied his model had earned him the nickname 'Cross-eye' - but Pavel would drive him and his 'stinking paints' into the kitchen. Pavel would then declare that he would no longer support his ungrateful family, muttering 'Blessed is the man that goes not to the council of the ungodly'. Evgenia felt insulted that Aleksandr lived apart. Aleksandr told Anton: I have a nice comfortable room, decent healthy board and clean linen, and above all peace and quiet, where you don't hear the voices of the beaten and the voice of the beater, where nobody fumes, bothers or gets in the way… None has ever asked me if I have any money, where I get it, how I earn it and if I have enough. They don't care. They only know that every month they get at the same date 5 roubles from me and about eight times a month, outside the due time, they send for a loan from me (repaid in the next world in burning coals). They can see I'm dressed decendy, my linen is shining clean, gloves, top hat, and they're sure I'm a millionaire.
1876-7
Aleksandr still dreamed of Marie Faist, even though there was now a Moscow woman whom Aleksandr called his wife. Aleksandr's sexual drive was strong. 'Fuck while the iron's hot,' was his motto. The 'wife' was, perhaps, Maria Polevaeva, his landlady. In summer 1878 Masha spent a week in the country with Maria Polevaeva. She and her sister Karolina Schwarzkopf (known as Kshi-Pshi) were the only women in her brothers' lives about whom Masha publicly said a bad word. Ten years later Aleksandr declared not marrying Marie Faist had wrecked his life. After two years apart, in early 1877, he still wanted her to be his bride: Could I stop loving her or forget her? Daddy and Mummy can set their minds at rest! No devil will make me get married. Let it be known to them that only she will be the wife in my home. But this will not happen before I am completely secure and have stuffed our parents' throats. Anton stayed with Aleksandr in Maria Polevaeva's house for two weeks among the thieves' dens and brothels of the Grachiovka. The most memorable aspects of his stay were visits to the theatre and the cementing of his friendship with his worldly twenty-five-year-old cousin, Misha Chokhov. Misha made the first move; in December 1876 Anton clasped the hand of friendship in tones that recall his father or uncle: Why should I hang back and not take up the blessed chance of getting to know a person like you and moreover I consider, and always have considered, it my obligation to respect the oldest of my cousins and respect a man whom our family regards so warmly. Misha Chokhov and his fellow shop-workers would visit the Chekhov household, down innumerable bottles and sing both church and folk songs at the top of their voices, Pavel rising to conduct the singers as he used to in the Palace chapel at Taganrog. The womenfolk -Evgenia, Masha and Misha Chokhov's sister Liza - would cover up the men when they fell asleep.
After the Easter holidays of 1877 the family scraped the money together to send Anton back to Taganrog and fabricated a medical certificate to explain the delay to the school inspecktor. Anton begged Misha to look after Evgenia: 'she is shattered, physically and morally
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… My mother has a character on which an outsider's moral support acts strongly and beneficially…'.
Moscow stimulated Anton. On his return he contributed to a new school magazine, Leisure, a sketch based on Taganrog scenes. That May examinations distracted him - 'I nearly went mad', he told Misha Chokhov. In the summer Anton resumed his effusive letters, begging his cousin once again to keep an eye on his mother. He expressed an affection that seemed to have survived beatings and tribulations: My father and mother are the only people in the whole wide world for whom I shall never ever grudge anything. If I ever stand high, it is their doing, they are glorious people, and their unbounded love of their children puts them above all praise, compensates for any faults of theirs. Anton missed Pavel and Evgenia badly. On 18 June 1877 Vania left Taganrog to join them in Moscow. Anton was invited to the wedding of Misha Chokhov's sister to a linen pedlar in Kaluga on 13 July, a merchant's extravaganza which Aleksandr, Kolia and Masha all attended (though Aleksandr thought the bride and groom the 'stupidest asses I ever met'). Nobody offered to pay Anton's fare from Taganrog, so he could not go.
EIGHT O
Alone
1877-9
ANTON STARTED the seventh and penultimate class in August 1877, after a month with the Kravtsovs in the steppes at Ragozina Gully and some weeks with Ivan Selivanov, riding to outlying farms. Back in Taganrog, Anton lived in the old family house with Gavriil Selivanov and the Selivanov-Kravtsov offspring, Petia and Sasha. He wrote. I Ie sent sketches and verses via Aleksandr to journals such as The.?Harm Clock, signing himself 'Nettles'. Some were rejected, all were lost.
In late 1877 and early 1878 Anton tried his hand at drama. (Even e fourteen he is reported dramatizing Gogol's historical tale Taras liulba.) At eighteen, he composed a farce The Scythe Strikes the Stone and a full-length drama, Fatherlessness. Fatherlessness is an appropriate title for his last years in Taganrog, but what the play was about we do not know.44 In October 1878 Aleksandr delivered his judgement on his brother's work: Two scenes in Fatherlessness are handled with genius, even, but on the whole it's an unforgivable, if innocent lie… The Scythe Strikes the Stone is written in excellent language which is very typical for each character developed, but your plot is very shallow. The latter I said (for convenience) was mine and read it to friends… the answer was: 'The writing is fine, it has skill, but little observation and no experience of life.'
What Anton read and saw in the 1870s we know from Taganrog's library and theatre. Presumably, Pavel took to Moscow in 1876 his substantial collection of religious books. Anton's own books give us few hints. Perhaps his books from the 1860s and 1870s were bought later; as a schoolboy he could afford little. Translations of Hamlet and Macbeth (1861 -2) may be the first books Anton acquired. Hamlet looks
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like a schoolboy's possession: the owner's name is written five times, and it has pencil marks in the margins. E few books are numbered: a prayer book of 1855 is No. 63, Hamlet is No. 82; Macbeth No. 8 -No. 85, however, is a medical textbook published in 1881. Anton may as a boy have owned from youth Goethe's Faust in a Russian version of 1871 and an 1803 Russian translation of Beccaria's pioneering On Crimes and Punishments^
Medicine, not literature, was the career he contemplated, and he wanted to go straight from Taganrog to Zurich university - the Mecca for Russian medical students. Aleksandr argued against this plan and gave Anton a guide to the universities of Russia, from the distinguished German university of Dorpat to the Armenian academy in Nakhichevan where they taught 'hairdressing, shaving and cutting corns'. Aleksandr himself was happy in the science and mathematics faculty of Moscow university. He focused Anton's ambitions on Moscow.
Anton was set on university; he announced to Aleksandr in June 1877 that he 'sent all young ladies packing'. Aleksandr responded: 'You shouldn't be a skirt-chaser, but there's no need to avoid women.' The Taganrog theatre
