'The carp is a great fish! A carp, your excellency, will never die! You
can keep him for a year in a bucket, and he'll still be alive! I caught these fish a week ago now. I caught them in Perervo, sir, and walked back with them all the way. The carp are two kopecks each, the burbots three, and the minnows are ten for ten, all alive and kicking! You can have them for five. And how about some worms?'
The vendor reaches into the bucket and pulls out with his dirty, stubby fingers a soft little minnow or a baby carp no longer than your nail. Near the buckets are spread out lengths of fishing line, hooks and traps, and pond worms reflect a fiery crimson in the sunshine.12
Chekhov was a passionate fisherman, and Trubnaya Square was where he would sometimes direct his brother Ivan to buy tackle for summer fishing at the dacha. It was also where he came to buy fish to put in his pond when his family moved out of Moscow to Melikhovo in 1892. As a scruffy student standing in the market and logging impressions into his memory for his story, he can hardly have imagined that one day he would have his own pond to fish in. Trubnaya Square was also, of course, where his brother Misha bought the fish for the family aquarium. Many years later, Chekhov sat down to write his story 'In the Cart'. As she is travelling home by cart to the village where she is a teacher, his character Marya suddenly has a flash of recollection: And with amazing clarity, for the first time in all these thirteen years, she was able vividly to remember her mother and father, her brother, the apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with the little fish and everything else down to the smallest detail; suddenly she heard the sound of the piano and her father's voice.' Chekhov was clearly remembering the hard early years in Moscow, and also thinking nostalgically of his Moscow youth when he wrote this story in 1897, having been sent to Nice in the vain hope of curing his tuberculosis.
Living conditions were spartan and very cramped in the flat on Grachevka: there were nine people living in four rooms, three of whom were lodgers taken in by the Chekhovs in order to make ends meet. The situation had eased a little, as Pavel Egorovich was at least earning a regular salary. After long months of unemployment, he had been forced to swallow his pride and take a job as an accounts clerk for a merchant on the other side of town who had a haberdashery firm, and he was to live chiefly on his employer's premises for the next few years. Two of his nephews already had jobs at Gavrilov's warehouse: Mikhail,
the son of his eldest brother, and Aunt Fenichka's only son, Alexei, who had started work at the age of thirteen.13 Pavel Egorovich's meagre income did not go far, and Alexander and Nikolai were reneging on their duty to help. As soon as Chekhov received the first instalment of his student grant, therefore, it was pounced on. A few weeks later the family moved again, the grant from the Taganrog City Council (one of twenty awarded that year) enabling them to take up residence in a superior first-floor flat.
Chekhov had already stepped into his absent father's shoes by this time: Alexander was living in student lodgings on his own, and Nikolai was unreliable. Both brothers had problems with alcoholism, but in their sober moments they enjoyed some success contributing to the comic journals that were published in Moscow and Petersburg. Such publications were to become increasingly popular with the burgeoning literate population of Moscow's lower classes. As soon as he had settled into his student routine, Chekhov followed his brothers' example, and started sending off stories to various editorial offices in the hope of supplementing the family income. It is possible Chekhov had at least one publication already behind him. His Russian biographer Mikhail Gromov provides compelling evidence for ascribing The Dragonfly's inclusion of some humorous verse and a comic dialogue between two young men called Sasha and Kolya (the names of the eldest Chekhov brothers) in November 1878 to Anton Pavlovich.14 That piece, like almost everything else Chekhov wrote for the next five years, was published under a pseudonym. If Gromov's supposition is correct, we need to revise our dating of the beginning of Chekhov's literary career by over two years.
Editors responded to submissions in 'post boxes' on their back pages, and Chekhov was probably crestfallen to see the first piece he submitted after moving to Moscow rejected by The Alarm Clock in November 1879. Two weeks after sending in his next story to the Petersburg weekly The Dragonfly, however, he received the good news that his story was 'not bad at all' and would be published. In his follow-up letter, the editor offered Chekhov a rate of five kopecks a line. That would mean quite a few minnows if he was interested in buying fish, but not much else. The story was published two months later, in March 1880, along with another piece submitted at the same time. To make any money, writers had to be prolific, and they often adopted an array
of pseudonyms to disguise the fact that there was only one author hiding behind them. Chekhov, in addition, had his future reputation as a doctor to think about, and he was to publish under a variety of different names in his first years as a writer. While his brother Nikolai signed his drawings with his own name, he himself usually opted for 'Antosha Chekhonte', a nickname given him back in Taganrog.
Sretenka Street, Moscow
In the autumn of 1880, the Chekhovs upped sticks and moved again, to a first-floor flat in a brick building on nearby Golovin Lane, three houses in from Sretenka Street; it would remain their home for the next five years. Pavel Egorovich was still being chased for debts incurred back in Taganrog, and on one occasion he was threatened with arrest,15 but the family had slowly begun to return to normality. For the first time since moving to Moscow they could manage without lodgers, and could take on a serving girl, Anna, to help with cleaning and cooking. Ivan soon moved out of Moscow to nearby Voskresensk to take up his first teaching job; the youngest Chekhovs, Masha and Misha, were completing their schooling and going on to college, Nikolai seemed set to do well as a painter, and Anton began to work harder than ever as more of his stories were accepted for publication. Over the years the family acquired a second servant, a dog (a whippet called Korbo), a cat (Fyodor
Timofeyich), and a piano, and the new friends they made in Moscow were invited round for meals. Although the scale of the entertainment was modest (no dancing, no cards), guests later remembered evenings spent at Golovin Lane as being particularly convivial. The Chekhovs were nostalgic for southern cooking in Moscow, and so the dishes Evgenia Yakovlevna served were a reminder of the life they had left. Supper almost invariably included the famous Taganrog potato salad with olives and spring onions, and it is telling that the family immediately started growing aubergines, tomatoes and peppers in greenhouses as soon as they acquired their own garden at Melikhovo a decade later.
Chekhov particularly took to Moscow. In May 1881, as he neared the end of his second year as a medical student, a school friend in Kharkov received an ecstatic letter from him. 'Come to Moscow!!!' Chekhov wrote. 'I really love Moscow. No one who gets used to it can ever leave. I am always going to be a Muscovite. Come and work as a writer. You can't do that in Kharkov, but it pays 150 roubles a year in Moscow – that's what I get at any rate.'16 It was later in 1881 that a new journal called The Spectator was founded. Chekhov and his older brothers had soon virtually taken it over, and The Spectator editorial offices became more like their own private club. Chekhov published eleven pieces in The Spectator before it began to fizzle out; insufficient financial backing meant it was unable to compete with other publications at that stage. The general style and quality of these pieces can be gauged from a frivolous little story he published in one of its last numbers that December under the title 'This and That':
A lovely frosty afternoon. The sun sparkles in every snowflake. Not a cloud or a gust of wind.
A couple are sitting on a bench on the boulevard.
'I love you!' he whispers.
