turning up drunk and sparking off a family row: 'I don't let my mother, sister or any woman say a word out of place to me… 'being drunk' doesn't give you a right to shit on anyone's head…'
Anton published nothing in spring 1881: perhaps he was writing his first surviving play, a monstrous melodrama usually known by the name of its main protagonist, Platonov. Misha recalled copying out the whole text twice, and handing it to the actress Ermolova. She rejected it, and Anton never took up the manuscript again. (It was published nearly twenty years after his death.) To perform it would take five hours; it is full of cliches and provincialisms. Yet Platonov is a blueprint for Chekhovian drama: a decaying estate is to be auctioned, and nobody can save it. Even the mine shafts making ominous noises under the steppe anticipate The Cherry Orchard. The hero, like Uncle Vania, believes he could have been Hamlet or Christopher Columbus and spends his energy on pointless love affairs. The doctor fails to forestall a suicide. The play lacks stagecraft, brevity and wit, but its absurdities and its mood of doom, its allusions to other writers from Shakespeare to Sacher-Masoch make it recognizable as Chekhov's work. It also proved that Chekhov could write seriously and at length.
In June 1881 The Alarm Clock printed one sketch by Anton. Months passed before Chekhov was a regular, but their office gave him an
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insight into Moscow's 'Grub Street'. The Alarm Clock's owner was a crooked nonentity. One editor, Piotr Kicheev, was notorious for having murdered a student.
Summer offered relief from oppression. Only Vania had to stay at his post, in his school house at Voskresensk all summer, so that Pavel ordered him: 'Don't be absent… prepare to receive your family with the appropriate honours: Mama, your brother [Misha] and your sister.'
While Aleksandr went to the country to stay with his rich friend Leonid Tretiakov, Kolia and Anton decided to represent the Moscow Chekhovs with Gavriil Selivanov and Uncle Mitrofan at Taganrog's most resplendent social occasion that summer - the wedding of their cousin Onufri Loboda. Anton arrived in a magnificent chapeau-claque, a folding top hat, which kept blowing away on the journey to the church. Kolia drew a caricature, and Anton wrote facetious captions. Taganrog never forgot that wedding, nor the caricature, when it was published in autumn.
Wisely, neither Anton nor Kolia stayed long after the wedding. Anton was not to see his native city again for nearly six years. By late July he had joined his mother and younger siblings in Voskresensk. Here, to judge by a letter to his rich cousin in Shuia, the 'peritonitis' that had nearly killed him as a boy recurred. When he recovered he-got to know the hospital at Chikino, a mile north of Voskresensk. The Chikino doctors, particularly Piotr Arkhangelsky, reinforced Anton's vocation. Throughout August 1881 Anton nervously helped Arkhangelsky treat the ill-nourished and diseased peasantry who flocked to the hospital for free relief. Doctor Chekhov found himself dealing with rickets, worms, dysentery, tuberculosis and syphilis, all of them endemic among the Russian peasantry.
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1881-2
ELEVEN
The Spectator
1881-2
IN SEPTEMBER 1881 the third-year medical students were introduced to new subjects: diagnostics, obstetrics and gynaecology. They became familiar with live bodies. Venereal diseases, then under the aegis of 'skin diseases', were central to the course, as a primary source of income for many practitioners. In Russian cities, as in France, prostitution was regulated with compulsory inspections and treatment. In Moscow hordes of prostitutes were inspected at police stations, twice weekly if in brothels, once a week if free-lance. A junior doctor could earn a good living. To stop syphilis becoming as endemic in cities as it was in the countryside, this demeaning procedure continued, despite the protests of enlightened doctors. A doctor became, as Anton later put it, 'a specialist in that department'. If Anton had 'difficulties with women', in the sense that his sexual encounters had to be light-hearted, even anonymous, and certainly without emotional involvement, these difficulties may stem from, or have encouraged, his familiarity with the whores of Sobolev lane, the Malaia Bronnaia and the Salon des Varietes, whom he met not only professionally. He never disowned them: even when his women friends were more reputable, he nostalgically recalled the 'smell of horse sweat' of the 'ballerina' he knew when a second-year student. For his first three years in Moscow, his girlfriends were nameless denizens of the red-light districts.
Literature also took Chekhov into new worlds. He was invited to become a contributor to a new Moscow magazine that came out sometimes weekly, sometimes more often, The Spectator. This journal became the workplace of four Chekhov brothers. On the Strastnoi boulevard, little over a mile from the Chekhov apartment, The Spectator became the brothers' club: Aleksandr worked on it as an editorial secretary, Kolia as an artist, Anton as a regular humorist, and Misha, who called after school, as an occasional translator and tea boy. The founder editor, Vsevolod Davydov, was saner than Kichcev on The Alarm Clock and kinder than Vasilevsky of The Dragonfly.
Kolia's best artwork was done for The Spectator, where he felt loved - not just by his colleagues, but also by The Spectator's secretary, Anna Aleksandrovna Ipatieva-Golden, a divorcee who became his common-law wife for seven years. The 'three sisters' motif entered Anton's life: over the next ten years Anton and his brothers were to be involved with at least five trios of sisters. The first of these trios - Anna, Anastasia and Natalia Golden - left a deep mark on the Chekhovs. Anastasia Putiata-Golden was, like her sister Anna, an editorial secretary, and lived with the genius Nikolai Pushkariov, editor of Chiaroscuro and Talk of the World.9 Only the youngest, Natalia Golden, was unmarried: she fell in love with Anton for life, a love that he reciprocated for two years. Anna and Anastasia were magnificent blond Valkyries - dubbed by their disparagers as kuvalda ('sledgehammer' or 'big slag') No. 1 and kuvalda No. 2. Natalia Golden looked utterly different, a thin, obviously Jewish girl with wavy black hair and an aquiline nose. Of the Golden sisters' origins almost nothing is known except that they were Jews who had converted to orthodoxy, but in the early 1880s, with their notorious appetites for eating and making love, they were at the centre of the lives of Anton and Kolia.10
Aleksandr's affections were focused elsewhere. His story 'Karl and Emilia' made an impact at The Alarm Clock and he won the heart of the editorial secretary there, Anna Ivanovna Khrushchiova-Sokolnikova.' Anna Sokolnikova ousted the Polevaeva sisters from Aleksandr's heart: she was to be his common-law wife until her death, and bear him three children. Born in 1847, greying and stout, Anna was eight years older than Aleksandr, and she had tuberculosis. Worse, she already had three children and, as the guilty party in a divorce, she was forbidden by a Russian ecclesiastical court to remarry.12 Pavel - with the assent not just of Evgenia but also of Anton -refused to treat Anna or her eventual offspring, his first grandchildren, as family.
Pavel respected Jews: in his diaries he marked off the Jewish Passover as assiduously as the Christian Easter. Natalia Golden, unmarried, was acceptable to Pavel, who raised no objections when Anton stayed the night at her more spacious house. Anton's pretext was studying for exams; in any case he wanted greater privacy than a room
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1)«e: l OK «e i E NOV shared with Misha. Soon Anton and Natalia were calling each other Natash-chez-vous and Antosh-chez-vous (i.e. Natasha at your place), Russified as Natashevu and Antoshevu.
Love and literature brought Kolia and Anton to The Spectator and tied Aleksandr to The Alarm Clock. Through Anna Sokolnikova, Anton, too, within the year, became a contributor to The Alarm Clock, and through Anastasia Putiata-Golden, Anton met the editor and owner of Chiaroscuro and Talk of the World, and became a contributor to both.
The sleazy world of the Moscow weeklies and the nightclubs, such as the Salon des Varietes where the contributors congregated, gave Anton material both for personal enjoyment and literary indignation. On one occasion, he exploited a visit he made to the Salon des Varietes at the end of September 1881 with two rich cousins from Shuia, Ivan Ivanovich Liadov and his brother-in-law Gundobin, whom Chekhov nicknamed Mukhtar after the Turkish general who fought the Russians in the Caucasus. Had Anton signed his article with his real name, the doors of the Salon would have closed to all Chekhovs. In it he describes the 'hostesses' - the Blanches, Mimis, Fannis, Emmas -whose fortune-seeking in Russia ended in this sordid nightclub - while the customers, named as Kolia, Ivan Ivanovich and Mukhtar, drink and disappear into private rooms. The thrust of the article is in the end: 'Antosha N advises the management that they would make more money by charging to leave, not to enter. Chekhov wrote many sallies against the Salon: perhaps he was responsible for it closing and reopening as the Theatre Bouffe
