station in St Petersburg, for example), capitalism reached Russia late, but the Westernization of the merchant class finally began to accelerate in the 1860s, the era of the Great Reforms.
A new law passed in 1863 reduced the number of guilds from three to two. To compensate for the fact that the guilds were now open to all
sections of the population following the Emancipation of the Serfs, merchants of the First Guild now acquired privileges that enabled them to be presented at court and wear the official green and red uniform of the regional government with sword and spurs (although they were not allowed to wear different colour cuffs and collars, like members of the nobility). If they had served for twelve years in the First Guild and were Orthodox Christians, merchants were also allowed to enrol their children as boarders in various educational establishments. Merchants had always been identifiable by their long beards and oriental style of dress, but the traditional uniform of kaftans and high boots with pointed toes had finally given way to Western-style frock-coats and top hats by the time Chekhov's father began trading.26 Pavel Chekhov took pride in his appearance even when business was very poor, and the starched linen shirts dutifully ironed by his daughter were always spotless; his son Anton was to inherit his father's neatness, if nothing else.
Like every other social group in Russia, merchants had a distinct culture of their own, which the Chekhov family typified to a certain degree. Direct contact with foreign traders and their Western-style capitalist business practices meant that Taganrog was inevitably more cosmopolitan than most provincial towns in Russia, but its merchants still inhabited a relatively closed world, symbolized by the eternally closed shutters of their houses. It was something Chekhov noticed for the first time when he came back to his home town in 1887, and was in large measure due to the insecurity merchants felt with regard to their tenuous social status, segregated from the rest of society. With their lives ruled largely by financial concerns and the simple problem of survival, it was not surprising that merchants wanted to protect their businesses by keeping them within the family. Sons were expected to work long hours for their fathers from an early age, and merchants like Pavel Chekhov, who kept shops, would trade long hours every day, even on Sundays, closing only for the major religious holidays at Christmas and Easter. Pavel Chekhov opened his doors at five in the morning and would not shut them until at least eleven in the evening – later, if he liked the conversation of customers who had lingered. In the patriarchal family life of the Russian merchant, the father's word was law. This was certainly the case in the Chekhov family, and Evgenia always deferred to her husband, even if she disapproved of his harsh disciplinarian methods.
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Chekhov's family was also typical in its religious devotion. The church was central to the life of Russian merchants, some of whom were so conservative that they clung to the Old Belief, dating from the church schism of the seventeenth century. The financial year for merchants began, significantly, in Easter week, and other dates in the commercial calendar were also timed to coincide with major religious holidays. Merchants regarded the family icons as their most treasured possessions and often invited priests to hold religious services in their homes; when entering the premises of other merchants they crossed themselves and kissed each other three times.27 But Pavel Chekhov was extraordinarily pious even by the standards of Russian merchants, who were known for their particular devotion to the rituals of the Orthodox church, obsessive attendance at services, and their observance of all fasts. Orthodox services tend to be long, but Pavel Chekhov would have been happy for them to be still longer: even the priests complained when he was a choirmaster, because he liked to proceed at such a slow pace, drawing everything out. Chekhov's brother Alexander recalled that their father never missed a service, and ensured that his children did not either. One of the reasons why Pavel was such a poor businessman was probably the excessive amount of time he dedicated to the church. As a major port with several churches, Taganrog had its own Cathedral Church of the Assumption, a spacious building with a single large dome, built in 1829 in the middle of the town's main square. It was here that Pavel Chekhov led the choir for several years, and it was here that his third son, Anton, was baptized, with both godparents from local merchant families.28
Where Pavel Egorovich was unusual was in his interest in education and culture, neither of which were traditionally respected in merchant households. His writer son used to apologize to his correspondents for seeming continually to be thinking about money, and blamed it on the circumstances of his upbringing. Every aspect of life in Taganrog revolved around money, and he lamented the fact that he had been forced to grow up in an environment in which it had played such a large role. His father would lament that he only ever made losses in his trade, a complaint Chekhov may have had in the back of his mind when he later wrote the darkly humorous 'Rothschild's Violin'. In this story a curmudgeonly coffin maker, so mortified by his losses, concludes that he will only ever make a profit when he dies, and no longer needs to feed himself or pay taxes:
Uspensky Cathedral, Taganrog, where Chekhov was christened
As he walked home, he realized that being dead would bring only profit: he would not need to eat or drink, pay tax, or offend people, and since people get to lie in their graves for not just one, but for hundreds and thousands of years, then you would make a huge profit if you added it all up. From life you just made a loss, but from death you made a profit. This was, of course, a reasonable way of looking at things, but it was annoying and painful to come to terms with: why was the world set up in such a strange way so that life, which a human being only gets once, brings no profit?29
Chekhov's father was not a successful merchant, but all the same he was considerably more enlightened than the majority of his class. It is true that he initially sent Anton and Nikolai to the Greek school in Taganrog, believing he would be setting them up for lucrative careers if they could speak the language: the most prosperous businessmen in Taganrog were all Greek, after all, and success was measured by the numbers of clerks one was able to employ. Pavel Chekhov was held in great respect for sending all five of his sons to the Taganrog gymnasium. He, of course, had received only a rudimentary education growing up as a serf, learning to read and write at the age of eight at the village
school. Although he did not write much or have all that much to say, he attached great importance to the ability to write beautifully (even his shopping lists were penned in an ornate calligraphic style), which again seems to betray an excessive attachment to form. As a boy, Pavel had also been taught by the village priest to read music and to play the violin (which he held on his chest rather than under his chin, in the folk music style). He took an active interest in politics and local affairs and liked reading French boulevard novels, but it was newspapers he enjoyed the most. Each issue would be read from beginning to end, before being carefully tied up with string and then stored at the end of the year. Pavel Egorovich subscribed to the first Taganrog newspaper when it appeared in the 1860s, and made his sons read it out aloud. Although it mostly contained news of interest to merchants, the paper also carried a few stories from the national and foreign press, as well as local news.
In 1874, the Chekhovs finally moved into their own house on Elizavetinskaya Street, not far from where Anton was born. Pavel Egorovich was swindled by the contractor who built it, and ended up sinking all his capital into the house's construction. The modest one-storey dwelling was neither well built nor particularly attractive. Matters worsened when the new shop he had opened near the railway station failed to prosper: his business had started to go downhill when the railway network was extended to Rostov and not Taganrog. The grain traders who had brought their deliveries by horse and cart now switched to using trains. The bay had by this time become so shallow that maritime trade was also no longer viable, and by the time the railway line was extended to Taganrog, it was too late to save Pavel Egorovich's business. Less than two years later, he had to abscond in order to avoid being thrown into the debtors' prison. Alexander and Nikolai were students in Moscow by this time, and Pavel's nephew Mikhail was also in Moscow, working for a haberdashery company run by a wealthy merchant called Gavrilov. So Moscow was the obvious destination for Pavel Egorovich to run to. He made a careful list of the clothes and linen he was to take with him to Moscow:
