Chekhov later drew directly on the wellspring of his own experience of growing up in a merchant's family when he came to write such stories as 'The Steppe', 'Three Years' and 'A Woman's Kingdom', and the play The Cherry Orchard. Indeed, after the publication in 1895 of 'Three Years', which depicts the life of a prominent Moscow merchant family, his friend Suvorin immediately assumed that the character of the despotic, pious patriarch, Fyodor Laptev senior, was a thinly veiled portrait of the author's father. Chekhov demurred, explaining that his father possessed neither Laptev's talent nor his vision, yet there were clearly some resemblances, particularly concerning questions of filial obedience and obsessive devotion to religious ritual. The description Alexei Laptev gives his wife about how he and his brother Fyodor were brought up contains distinct echoes of Chekhov's childhood:
I remember my father starting to teach me, or to put it more simply, beat me before I was even five years old. He flogged me with a birch rod, boxed my ears, and hit me round the head and every morning when I woke up the first thing I would think about would be: was I going to get beaten? Fyodor and I were forbidden to play or lark about; we had to go to matins and early mass, kiss the hands of priests and monks and read akathists at home. You are religious and you love all of that, but I am afraid of religion and when I go past a church I remember my childhood and feel terrified. I was taken off to the warehouse when I was just eight; I worked like an ordinary apprentice, and it was not good for me, because I was beaten there almost every day. And then when I was sent to the gymnasium I studied until dinner, but from dinner I had to sit in that warehouse all evening, and it went on until I was twenty-two years old . . . 24
This passage describes nothing out of the ordinary for the young sons of merchant households in Russia; in fact it was the classic model of a merchant childhood. Chekhov, too, was regularly beaten by his father, made to serve in his father's shop and repelled by religion, having been dragged to church so often as a child. Suvorin thought that the young
Laptev's irritation with religion struck a false note, but Chekhov retorted that it was far more plausible than the kind of paternalistic love for religion felt by some people, who were 'like those who love blizzards and storms while sitting in their study'. Since merchants inhabited a closed cultural world in which there was no literary culture to speak of beyond that of the Holy Scriptures, comparatively little is known about their way of life. The mid- nineteenth-century playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, who came from a wealthy merchant background in Moscow, had earlier created a series of largely unflattering portraits -almost caricatures – of people from that milieu in his plays, depicting them as uneducated and brutish. Chekhov was really the first great Russian writer to treat merchants as complex and sympathetic human beings in his stories and plays.
Ever since Peter the Great had sought to advance the interests of his empire by creating the hierarchical Table of Ranks in 1722, the Russian population had been rigidly stratified and controlled by the state. Unlike class systems in other countries, Russian social segregation was actually enshrined in laws, which dictated everything from educational rights to the clothes people were allowed to wear. The obsession with status that this inevitably produced (particularly among minor bureaucrats) was a frequent target of Chekhov's satire in many of the comic stories he wrote in the early 1880s, which betray a clear debt to his illustrious forebear Gogol. In 'Fat and Thin', for example, an official suddenly becomes obsequious when he discovers that an old school friend he has just met at a railway station has attained a much higher rank: 'The fat man wanted to say something, but there was so much awe, sycophancy and reverential sourness written on the thin man's face that the Privy Councillor started to feel nauseous.'25 In the equally popular early story 'The Chameleon', a policeman's attitude to a white borzoi puppy, which has bitten the finger of a local goldsmith, changes several times according to whether or not he thinks it belongs to a general.
Until the very end of the nineteenth century in Russia there was no middle class as such: people who belonged neither to the rural peasant class of 22 million serfs (who finally acquired their freedom in 1861) nor to the noble class – the educated elite which controlled them – were either clergy, raznochintsy (non-noble educated), urban lower class, or merchants, but no one escaped classification in some form or other.
Approximately half of those who lived in towns were registered as mesbchanin, or urban lower class, thus liable to pay a demeaning poll tax ('petty bourgeois' does not fully convey the word's meaning). Becoming a kupets, or merchant, offered the only viable path to social advancement, but to be able to call oneself a merchant it was necessary to join a guild, and to do that one had to possess a certain amount of capital. The tiered system of merchant guilds had been initially based by Peter the Great on the Western model, and was later reorganized by his successor Catherine, particularly in the provinces, in the hope of stimulating economic development (not to mention bringing in more state revenue). As well as adding a third guild, she gave freed serfs the choice of becoming either a meshchanin or a kupets, relieved merchants from paying the poll tax, raised their social status as 'valued' citizens, and granted them other generous privileges such as exemption from corporal punishment. People who paid for the annual guild certificate licensing them to engage in trade thus constituted a particular social class that had no equal elsewhere. Culturally, the Russian merchant class was the most subservient and static section of Russian society, but as it was determined solely by financial status, it was also the least stable, as demonstrated by the short-lived career of Chekhov's father.
Pavel Chekhov had spent the first sixteen years of his life as the personal property of Count Chertkov, a landowner with estates in the fertile area of central Russia south of Voronezh, half way between Moscow and Taganrog (his grandson later became Tolstoy's close associate). In 1841, twenty years before the abolition of serfdom, Pavel's enterprising father had managed to buy his family's freedom and moved south to the steppe, taking a job as an estate manager for another aristocratic landowner. His three sons were apprenticed to different businesses in different cities as they came of age, with both Pavel and his brother Mitrofan eventually becoming tradesmen in Taganrog, and thus members of the merchant class. Pavel's wife, Evgenia, was also not without ambition for social betterment, and the family's later relegation to the ranks of the lower-class meshchanin was a huge blow to her. A meek and mild-mannered person, ten years younger than her husband, she also came from a rural background, but her grandfather had bought freedom for himself and his son somewhat earlier, in 1817, and so she had never been a serf. Evgenia had also grown up in the Russian heartland, but further north, with relatives
who were wealthy icon painters. Her father, Yakov Morozov, ran a fabric business, and when it went bankrupt he was fortunate in finding employment with General Papkov, the former governor of Taganrog, initially leaving his wife, Alexandra, and two daughters behind. When her father suddenly died from cholera in 1847 and the family home was destroyed in a fire, his widow and daughters were forced to take to the road. They also appealed to General Papkov for protection. Evgenia's elder brother Ivan (Chekhov's red-haired Uncle Vanya) had earlier been apprenticed to a merchant in Rostov-on-Don, where he worked under Pavel Chekhov's brother Mitrofan; both subsequently moved to Taganrog.
Merchants had traditionally represented the more Asiatic face of Russian society due to the fact that their trade links had initially developed with the Orient. During the two and a half centuries of the Tatar yoke, the Tatar-Mongols had exacted humiliating tributes from Russian principalities, but they also stimulated trade via the great caravan routes spanning the length of their enormous empire. Russian merchants profited from the trading opportunities that opened up with Persia, Central Asia and China, acquiring a Tatar-based commercial vocabulary along the way. Tovar, the Russian word for merchandise, for example, is derived from the Tatar term for possessions or cattle, as is tovarishch ('comrade'), which meant business partner long before it was commandeered by the Bolsheviks. The pro-Asiatic orientation of Russian trade continued long after the Mongols were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century. Of all the social classes in Russia, the merchant class was the most passive, and most supportive of the autocratic regime, and it was really only in the nineteenth century that it began to change its patriarchal ways and succumb to the processes of modernization. Due to the restrictive practices of the imperial government, which did its best to inhibit any activity that might threaten its authority (it took several years merely to decide which government department should pay for the replacement of kerosene with electricity at one police
