1877-9
and literature. His behaviour was 'excellent', his attendance and effort 'very good'.
In August Taganrog's administration for the meshebane (petit bourgeoisie) issued Anton with a 'ticket of leave' for study in Moscow. This includes a physical description: height 6' 1' (2 arshins, 9 vershki, i.e. 1.84 m.), dark auburn hair and eyebrows, black eyes, moderate nose, mouth and chin, long unmarked face, special marks: scar on forehead under hairline.
He left for Moscow at the last possible moment. Pavel and Evgenia begged him to sell the kitchen table and the shop scales. Anton was to bring with him Pavel's iconostasis, ledger books and shop drawers, Misha's bedstead, and buckets and baskets filled with Fenichka's belongings. Evgenia asked him to shame Selivanov into returning the house. Pavel issued him with a sermon: Fight your bad tendencies… I give you good advice and so does Mama: never do anything according to your own will, always act as we desire; live as God commanded, Your friends, your true friends are Papa and Mama. Anton lingered in Taganrog - he planned to stay the summer at Ragozina Gully and at Kotlomino, twenty miles from the city, with a school friend, Vasili Zembulatov. Pavel wrote to him that 'we shall just be looking forward to you and withering'.
In late July Anton prepared to leave for Moscow. On 2 August Taganrog gave Anton his 'ticket of absence'; on the 4th he had his permit to study at Moscow university signed by the city elder for the meshchane. He was also awarded what he had lobbied for all summer: one of ten new bursaries of 25 silver roubles a month that Taganrog city council awarded its best school-leavers. Anton recruited two tenants: his school friends Dmitri Saveliev and Vasili Zembulatov, two years older than Anton, who were also starting medicine at Moscow University. They each offered 20 roubles a month to the household on the Grachiovka. On 6 August, laden with baggage, Anton boarded the train to a new life.
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Doctor Chekhov o I was frequently more proud of a skilful amputation, of the successful cure of a rash, of progress in riding, or of conquering a woman, than of the praise I heard for my first ventures in literature. Konstantin Leontiev, My Literary Fate
NINE
O
Initiation
1879-80
ON 10 AUGUST 1879, in the basement flat on the Grachiovka, after two years away from them, Anton Chekhov was reunited with his family.1 Misha, now eleven, sunning himself at the yard gates, took time to recognize his brother; Pavel was sent a telegram at Gavrilov's across the river. Misha took Anton and his two friends on a walk around Moscow, before the family's first celebratory supper in five years. The next day brought a gentleman from the northern city of Viatka. He asked the Chekhovs to take in his son, Nikolai Korobov, another medical student. Korobov was a virginal, gentle person, unlike the extrovert southerners, Anton's companions from Taganrog, Sevel-iev and Zembulatov, but gruelling studies and the Grachiovka made the four medical students friends for life. The Chekhovs' poverty had been alleviated. Never again would Evgenia take in washing, or Masha cook in neighbours' houses. Evgenia fed her household to satiety, and almost made ends meet. Aleksandr and Kolia rarely came to stay; soon Vania, too, would cut loose. Evgenia and Fenichka had a servant girl. After a month in the basement, the family moved down the Grachiovka to more salubrious quarters. Here they slept two to a room, with a room for dining and entertaining.
Anton and his friends went to register at the University. Medical students had their classes in spacious clinics on the Rozhdestvenka (near the Grachiovka). Moscow University's medical school was in its prime, with professors of world renown, and 200 students graduating annually from a demanding five-year course. The first generation of purely Russian specialists was ousting the Germans who had dominated Russian medicine until now. First-year students, however, did not attend the lectures of the great professors Zakharin, Sklifosovsky and Ostroumov. They were taught by junior assistants. Anton had to study inorganic chemistry, physics, mineralogy, botany and zoology,
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DOC I I It (II I KIIOV not to mention theology. I le studied the 'anatomy of the healthy human being'. The modern student gets a pickled limb, dissected by dozens before him; in nineteenth century Moscow, as in London and Paris, each student had a corpse from Moscow's poor who had been hanged or drowned, died of alcohol poisoning, cold, typhoid, OA or starvation, been murdered or crushed by machinery. Anatomy was a testing ground for new students; even those taking philosophy and literature came to the anatomy theatre to steel their nerves. Chekhov was not the first Russian writer whose powers of observation and analysis were trained by the dissection of corpses.
There were mundane reasons for choosing medicine: it was a secure and prestigious profession. Anton was a student who never failed an exam, but not an academic high flyer. In therapeutic medicine he was imadventurous. His bent - for diagnosis and forensics - was apt for a writer too. All his life his eye for a fatal disease and a victim's life expectancy was feared, and his autopsies admired. In psychiatry, then in its infancy, Anton also showed prowess. He lacked, however, a surgeon's callousness and dexterity. Some had reservations about his choice of career. Selivanov wrote: I read the letter of a doctor-to-be who in the not too distant future will in the course of his profession be despatching several dozen people into eternity… I would not like to see you become a bad or mediocre doctor, but to meet you as a sensational Professor of Medicine.2 Anton did not cut the cord tying him to Taganrog. He wrote to Petia Kravtsov, who, after Chekhov's tutoring, was in cadet college (much to Selivanov's gratitude) and also to Uncle Mitrofan. Anton needed friends in Taganrog, and had to grovel to the city fathers, who disliked disbursing their ten scholarships.
Anton now took up with friends he had made in Easter 1877, who were part of Kolia's social circle. Their friend the drawing-teacher Konstantin Makarov died of typhoid in 1879, but another teacher, Mikhail Diukovsky, fanatically admired Kolia, Anton and Masha. Through Diukovsky and Kolia, Anton was befriended by art students who were to shape his future - Franz Schechtel, the future architect who would design the cover for his first collection of stories, and Isaak Levitan, soon to become Russia's leading landscape painter.
1879-80
Aleksandr was for Anton a link to literature, through the Moscow weeklies, where Aleksandr was both a contributor and an editorial hanger-on. Aleksandr, still studying chemistry and mathematics, was at first little help: he was drifting to the gentry with his friends, the rich, sick and dissipated orphans, Leonid and Ivan Tretiakov. Their guardian, Malyshev, was chief inspector of Village Schools for Moscow province and helped to find work for Vania. He sent the lad forty miles west of Moscow to Voskresensk, where there was a school attached to a cloth mill owned by a magnate named Tsurikov. Tsurikov allotted Vania an adequate salary, and a house substantial enough to accommodate all the Chekhovs when, from May to August, Anton, Masha and Misha were free from study. Vania, at eighteen, was transformed from an undesirable lodger into a giver of sanctuary. Pavel was exultant: Voskresensk stood by the famous monastery of New Jerusalem. Mitrofan congratulated the Moscow Chekhovs: 'How pleasant that you have an occasion to visit New Jerusalem often… I live badly, I sin much, pray for me.'
Anton tried to break into the weekly journals, but destroyed the manuscript of Fatherlessness, the play he had sent for Aleksandr's verdict. In October, as 'Chekhonte', a nickname that Father Pokrovsky had given him, he despatched a story, 'Bored Philanthropists', to The Alarm Clock, where Aleksandr was a familiar. He waited for one of The Alarm Clock's acerbic responses, but the rejection, when it came, was polite. On Evgenia's name-day, 24 December 1879, there was no money for a cake. Anton sat down and wrote a parody of his father's and grandfather's ignorant and menacing pomposity, 'A Don Landowner's Letter to a Learned Neighbour' for The Dragonfly. On 13 January he received his first acceptance.
The Dragonfly was a breakthrough, but only for a year. Its editor, Ippolit Vasilevsky, had a poor eye for new talent.3 Two years passed before The Alarm Clock and then The Spectator published Anton, though these journals were a second home for Aleksandr and Kolia. The 5 kopecks a line that Vasilevsky paid his contributors was a pittance: six stories published in the second half of 1880 brought Anton a total of 32 roubles 25 kopecks. Such journals sold to 2000 subscribers and twice as many casual buyers at 10 to 20 kopecks a copy; no editor could offer even regular contributors a living wage. The trap into which Chekhov was falling forced writers to compose
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