in 1883. The distaste in Anton's article is at odds with Kolia's illustration, a centrefold, crowded with flirtatious hostesses, daring cancan dancers and happy punters.
In September 1881, euphoric after the family wedding, Aunt Marfa Loboda wrote to congratulate Anton on his achievements. Aunt Marfa could not have been more cruelly deceived. Taganrog did not admire Anton long. The issue of The Spectator (No. 9, 4 October 1881) that printed the Salon des Varietes, carried a double-page spread of Kolia's wicked caricatures and Anton's disrespectful text, 'The Wedding Season'. The Lobodas, the Chekhovs and Gavriil Selivanov could see their faces drawn as the various wedding guests: a noisy drunken Mitrofan; the bridegroom, Onufri Loboda, captioned 'As stupid as a cork… marrying for the dowry'; Gavriil Selivanov as 'a lady- killer…'
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The scandal broke when Aleksandr moved to Taganrog. He advised Kolia and Anton: If you two value your backs, I advise you not to go to Taganrog. The Lobodas, Selivanov, their kith and kin are all seriously furious with you for 'The Wedding' in The Spectator. Here that cartoon is seen as an expression of the blackest ingratitude for hospitality. Yesterday Selivanov came… with the following speech: 'I'll tell you that Anton and Nikolai's behaviour was caddish and in bad faith, taking material for their cartoons from houses where they were received as family… I don't know what I did to deserve this insult.' Anton was unperturbed: he replied that he disliked all issues of the Lobodas as much as they disliked issue No. 18 of The Spectator. Chekhov had a lifelong blind spot: despite his powers of empathy, he never understood the hurt of people whose private lives he had turned into comedy. Mitrofan had probably never been drunk in his life; he read The Spectator and felt betrayed: how did this barb tally with Anton's protestations of love four months before? Years passed before Aunt Marfa wrote again. Gavriil Selivanov left Anton's letters unanswered. The affectionate Lipochka Agali, probably the Hellenic beauty portrayed as 'the Queen of the Ball', also fell silent. Not for the last time were those most sure of Anton's affection embarrassed and humiliated in his fiction, and never would Anton admit, let alone repent, his exploitation.
Anton was now attacking more formidable targets. On 26 November 1881 France's most renowned actress, Sarah Bernhardt, came to Moscow, fresh from America and Vienna, and began twelve nights at the Bolshoi theatre in Dumas-fils' La Dame aux camelias. Sarah Bernhardt had a poor press from Moscow's reviewers, but nobody panned her like Anton Chekhonte in The Spectator in November and December 1881.13 Despite Bernhardt's histrionic skills, he declared her so soulless, so tedious that 'if the editor paid me 50 kopecks a line I would not write about her again'. The crux of Chekhov's reaction was: 'She has no spark, the only thing to make us cry hot tears and swoon. Every sigh of Sarah Bernhardt, her tears, her dying convulsions, all her acting is nothing but a faultlessly and cleverly learnt lesson…' The actress in Chekhov's drama - Arkadina in The Seagull - is
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likewise an egocentric exhibitionist who has to be curbed. This review of Bernhardt is the first shot in a war that Chekhov as dramatist and later Stanislavsky as director were to wage against the stars of the stage and their pretensions. Like the Salon des Varietes, actresses were frequented by Anton in private and denounced in public.
Chekhov was becoming a journalist. Frequenting The Alarm Clock he got to know Moscow's most fearless reporter, Giliarovsky ('Uncle Giliai'), the linchpin of Moscow's best newspaper, the Moscow Gazette. Kolia and Anton had been invited to become founder members of Moscow's gymnastic society (in 1882 Anton was muscular and broad-shouldered). Their first sight in the gym was Russia's champion boxer, Seletsky sparring with the bear-like Uncle Giliai. Giliai represented for a while Anton's ideal of versatility. True, Anton did not frequent thieves in the slums around the Khitrovo market, drink spirits by the gallon, uproot large trees without a spade, stop a speeding cab by grabbing hold of the rear of the carriage, break the test-your-strength machine at the Ermitage, tame a horse so vicious that it had been expelled from the cavalry, lift friends bodily off the platform onto a departing train, nor perform any other of Giliarovsky's legendary feats, but in his later determination to be a journalist, an explorer and a farmer, as well as a doctor and writer, Anton was to emulate Uncle Giliai.
As much as a nervous censorship allowed, Chekhov wrote of crime. In 1881-2 three scandals rocked Russia: a railway crash at Kukuevka on 30 June 1882, on the line to Moscow from Kursk (and Taganrog), where an embankment collapsed and entombed hundreds of passengers; the Rykov affair (which lasted until 1884), the embezzlement by a bank's directors of millions of roubles; and the arrests of Taganrog merchants and customs officials, for smuggling. In all cases the accused were punished so leniently, that the stench of corruption hung in the air. After the Kukuevka affair everyone feared for their lives on Russia's jerry-built railways: the government forbad further discussion of accidents. Kukuevka injected into Chekhov's stories the same morbid distrust of railways that we find in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Dosto-evsky's The Idiot.
The Taganrog customs scandal affected the Chekhovs most. In June 1882 Aleksandr graduated from Moscow university. He wanted to set up house with Anna Sokolnikova and escape Pavel's strictures, so he applied for one of the posts vacated by Taganrog's imprisoned officials.
By mid 1882, Anton had enough published in The Spectator and The Alarm Clock to swell the family income. (Nevertheless, he accepted an Easter job tutoring the seven-year-old son of a senator, Anatoli Iakovlev.) He was invited to write for a serious weekly illustrated magazine, Moscow, and he collaborated with Kolia on a miniature novel The Green Spit of Land, about a country house on the Black Sea. Again, the characters bear the names of real people: the artist Chekhov, Maria Egorovna (presumably Polevaeva), while the narrator, unnamed, resembles Anton, for he teaches the heroine's daughter German and goldfinch trapping. The Green Spit of Land showed that Chekhov could parody the pseudo-aristocratic pap - the 'boulevard novel' - which was then in demand; now he was challenged by Kurepin to give The Alarm Clock a pastiche tbat the reader might take for the real thing. The result, 'The Unnecessary Victory', was serialized from June until September 1882 and earned 'Antosha Chekhonte' several hundred roubles. This pastiche, too, apes the boulevard novel - a singer, exploited and then triumphant, a desperate aristocratic lover. Readers took it to be a translation of a novel by the Hungarian Iia Jokai.14 It stretched Chekhov's narrative ambitions.
In summer 1882, after the exams, Chekhov published in Moscow his first bid for literary renown. Called 'The Lady', the story is full of modish cliches: a selfish lustful widow, a villainous Polish manager, a noble peasant, a violent denouement, and the narrator's radical indignation. It is, nevertheless, a harbinger of better things. Anton's later stories of oppressed peasantry, and his fiction of the mid 1880s, where sexuality leads to violence, grow out of 'The Lady'.
So encouraged was Chekhov by success, that he devised more pseudonyms - Chekhonte spawned 'the Man without a Spleen' and 'Mr Baldastov'. With Kolia as illustrator, Anton compiled 160 pages of his best work to print and bind on credit. He himself would market the book (which had several titles - At Leisure, Idlers and Easygoers, Naughty Tricks). On 19 June 1882 the censor rejected the application. When a second request was submitted, pointing out that these stories had already passed the censor once, the argument was accepted, but, in an ever more repressive atmosphere, the book was banned in page proof.
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If Anton was to support the family, he would have to write a hundred stories a year for Moscow's weekly magazines. Vania was independent now and Aleksandr, as a customs officer, would receive a regular salary, hut Masha and Misha were still students, while neither Kolia nor Pavel brought much to the household. There were other dependants too: Aunt Fenichka, Korbo the whippet, and Fiodor Timofeich the tomcat. Aleksandr had brought home Fiodor as a kitten who had been abandoned in a freezing latrine. Anton was much comforted when Fiodor stretched out on his lap and to this cat he first addressed an expression he applied to himself and his brothers: 'Who would have thought that such genius would come out of an earth closet?'
TWELVE O
Fragmentation
1882-3
ON 25 JULY 1882, in bad debt, and not telling the Chekhovs that Anna was two months pregnant, Aleksandr, his common-law wife and her teenage son Shura left their dog with Aunt Fenichka and Korbo and caught the train south for Tula. There they stayed for a day, entrusting Shura to Anna's relatives, before travelling to Taganrog.
