beings, Anton reckoned that the higher the social development in mammals the more nearly equal the sexes become, but he was convinced of the inferiority of even the educated female human being: She is not a thinker… We must help nature as man helps nature when he creates heads like Newton's, heads that approach organic perfection. If you've grasped my idea, then 1) the problem, as you see, is very real, not like the fucking-about of our female emancipationist publicists and skull-measurers… The history of universities for women. Curious: in all the 30 years they have existed, women medics (excellent medics!) haven't produced a single serious dissertation, which proves that mey are schwach in the creative line. Anton had been reading the potentially feminist arguments of Herbert Spencer and Sacher-Masoch, but his thinking is shot through with the misogyny of Schopenhauer's 'Essay on Women'. On a personal
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level Anton's difficulties with women were beginning to torment him. Not that his sexual drive was monstrous: his promiscuity stemmed from a rapid loss of interest in any one woman. Zoologists might compare Anton's sexuality with that of the cheetah, which can only mate with a stranger. Once intimacy is established, cheetahs cohabit impotently. Anton's impotence had something to do - perhaps as cause, perhaps as consequence - with his transactions with prostitutes. Not aroused by women he liked (and, worse, not liking women who aroused him), Chekhov was troubled, until he was too ill to be aroused at all. He told Aleksandr and Anna: There's no way I can tie myself to our woman, though there are a lot of opportunities… You screw her once, but the next time you can't get it in. I have all the equipment, but I don't function - my talent is buried in the ground… I fancy a Greek girl now… forgive me, jealous Anna, for writing to your patient [the sick Aleksandr] about Greek girls.24 Student pranks gave Chekhov some joy, but they too tended to have sinister outcomes. Anton, Kolia and Levitan, with another art student, bought a stallholder's oranges and sold them so outrageously cheaply to the public that the stallholder had them arrested. After the exams were over, in Voskresensk, Anton, Kolia, Vania and Misha and three young doctors from the hospital at Chikino set out on a sixteen-mile pilgrimage to the monastery of St Sawa and walked on to see a colleague, Dr Persidsky, at the hospital in Zvenigorod. At tea in Per-sidsky's garden they sang the popular, but banned, 'Show me the home, Where the Russian peasant does not suffer'. The local policeman charged them with subversion. Although a newspaper, the Russian Gazette, and powerful friends intervened, the Governor of Moscow forced Persidsky out of Zvenigorod. After Anton's first experience of injustice indignation seeps into his prose.
Summer 1883 in Voskresensk gave Anton his first footing in genteel society. If Aleksandr and Kolia dragged him down, Vania raised him up, by introducing him to the officers of the battalion stationed at Voskresensk - Lieutenants Egorov, Rudolf and Eduard Tyshko, and Colonel Maevsky and his three children. Known as Tyshko in the Headgear, Eduard Tyshko, irresistible to women, had been wounded in the Turkish war and was never seen in public without black silk .98 ?ir 1. End 1860s: sitting Efrosinia and Egor (left and centre, paternal grandparents), an Anton's Aunt Liudmila (right); standing Evgenia, Pavel, Mitrofan 2. 1874 family portrait: standing Vania, Anton, Kolia, Aleksandr, Uncle Mitrofan; sitting Misha, Masha, Pavel, Evgenia, Aunt Liudmila, cousin Georgi i ei3~4 headgear to disguise his wounds; he became a close friend of the Chekhovs. Anton's friendship with the officers was tested when Lieutenant Egorov asked for Masha's hand in marriage. She referred the proposal to Anton, who warned Egorov off. The lieutenant, not surprisingly, then behaved badly when Evgenia rented a cottage from him for the summer of 1884. She complained to Masha: 'We want to move out of this lousy flat, since Egorov has left us nothing, we'll have to move all the crockery from Moscow… He's left all the furniture locked and sealed.' Only in 1890 would Lieutenant Egorov make his peace with Anton.
Other Voskresensk friendships extended to Vania's brothers. Once, stranded at a Christmas ball by a blizzard, Vania was offered a lift home in a guest's sledge. The stranger was Aleksei Kiseliov, who owned an estate at Babkino two miles up the river Istra from Voskresensk. Aleksei Kiseliov was a very well-connected, if impoverished, aristocrat, with a nostalgia for his rakish past. His wife Maria was an amateur writer and a prude. The Kiseliovs were charmed by Masha and Anton. These Voskresensk friendships were lifelong. Anton had glimpses of new worlds - the officers' life he was to portray so expertly in Three Sisters, and the rundown Arcadia of the landowner. Babkino taught Masha how to be a lady. Anton got to know intellectuals, for instance Pavel Golokhvastov, a magistrate who was a Slavophile activist and his wife, a playwright. The IGseliovs and Chekhovs fished and played croquet together. Anton flirted with their servants and dairymaids. He joined the Russian intellectual establishment. Nevertheless, unlike Misha and Masha, Anton also had business in Voskresensk. He was useful to Dr Arkhangelsky at the Chikino clinic. The stories of summer 1884, with Vania and the Kiseliovs in Voskresensk, show newly acquired surgical, as well as social, skills.
In Anton's absence Pavel grumbled: 'Nice children you are, you've left Mother ailing, and are having fun. It's lucky that God has saved her, but you have no pity. Pavel the Long-Suffering.'
Evgenia too was soon to leave the Moscow household. Anton persuaded Aleksandr that she would be more use to him in Taganrog than Aunt Fenichka: 'Mother badly wants to visit you. Take her on, if you can. Mother still has spirit and is not as heavy going as Aunt.' Evgenia duly went to Taganrog. It was a mistake. Aleksandr's household was sunk in irremediable filth and chaos. The servants did as
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DOC i oi«:n i KIIOV they liked, Aleksandr spent each month's salary within a few days, Aeia could not do housework. Evgenia, never good at crises, did not even have her refuge of coffee and a clean bed. Mitrofan and his wife Liudmila were no support: a few days after her arrival on 26 June 1883, they went, with two of their children, to Moscow to see Pavel and then to Voskresensk. Before the week was out Evgenia was desperate: Antosha for God's sake send me just a rouble and quickly I'm afraid to ask your father I need to buy bread for my tea, not to speak of supper… When Mitrofan returns, send me money for the fare back. In any case, I can't leave while they're away. I've lent them my wicker trunk, such anguish, I'm afraid I shall fall ill… Aleksandr is as unhappy as can be, if only at least Kolia came. E. Chekhova. Please, answer and don't mention to anyone that I am complaining.2' Nobody could rely on Evgenia: she herself thirsted for protection. After a fortnight she begged her fare back to Moscow from her children.
Anton left Voskresensk for Moscow, from where it was easier to send Leikin a constant stream of prose. Aleksandr, Anna and baby Mosia had, however, followed Evgenia from Taganrog, so that to find peace Anton stayed in 'Natashevu' Golden's house or with Palmin at Bogorodskoe in the suburbs. Here he wrote. Leikin restricted Anton from experimenting with new forms, and was petulant if Chekhov made a debut in a Moscow weekly, tolerating only The Spectator as a Chekhov family concern. Leikin turned down the only long work Chekhov wrote that year, 'He Understood', a charming piece set in Voskresensk. A peasant shoots a starling, is detained for poaching and wins his release by persuading the angry landowner that his yearning to shoot is as incurable as the latter's alcoholism. At the end of 1883 Chekhov placed the story in Nature and Field Sports, under his real name for the first time.26
Two pieces written in summer 1883 stand out: one is a melancholy story for The Alarm Clock, 'The Dowry': the heroine loses her dowry to a drunken uncle and her fiance cannot help her. The story's effect lies in the narrator's ineffectual sympathy; the ending 'Where are you, Manechka?' introduces the helpless pathos of the typical Chekhovian 'hero'. The other piece, 'The Daughter of Albion', about an ugly
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English governess enduring the barbarity of her employer, was the first piece Chekhov wrote for Fragments to win renown. Russians joked about frigid Englishwomen - Chekhov himself had written that 'if the Russian evolved from a magpie and the German from a fox, the English evolved from frozen fish' - but 'The Daughter of Albion' has the nature poetry of a 'fishing' story based on Anton's summer angling at Babkino. Not for the last time, Anton's mockery of his hero and heroine is tempered by a lyrical celebration of the countryside.
Leikin wanted even more from his most popular author: 'Fragments of Moscow Life' came out every week: under two pseudonyms Anton might supply half the material for an issue. Kolia, less reliable, was Leikin's best illustrator; Leikin sent him special torchon paper from St Petersburg. As August ended and Anton's final year of medicine approached, he complained to Leikin: in the next room a baby is crying (it belongs to my brother who has come to stay), in another room father is reading mother [Leskov's] 'Sealed Angel'. Someone has wound up a musical box and I can hear 'La Belle Helene'. I'd like to run off to the country, but it's 1 in the morning… For a writer it would be hard to invent anything fouler than these surroundings. My bed is occupied by my brother who keeps on coming up to me and raising the topic of medicine. 'My daughter must have colic in the belly, that's why she's crying.' I have the great misfortune to be a medic and everyone thinks they have to 'discuss' medicine with me… I solemnly promise never to have any children. The gods took note of that promise.
