His box of paints sits open on the table, while a portfolio imprinted with his initials stands propped up against the table legs in the foreground. A slightly dreamy looking Chekhov is standing with his legs crossed, leaning up against a bureau, looking down at his brother's picture. One of Nikolai's sketchbooks contains drawings of the famous statue of Pushkin that was unveiled in Moscow with much fanfare in June 1880. The drawings on the sketchbook's yellow, white and blue leaves were studies for illustrations that were to appear in journals like The Alarm Clock and The Spectator, and commemorated an event which was regarded as one of national importance. This was, after all, the first statue of Pushkin to be erected in Russia, and it had been paid
for by public subscription. Turgenev came all the way from Paris, and Dostoevsky from St Petersburg in order to give speeches to mark the occasion, and Chekhov was no doubt with his brother at least some of the time while he was capturing the proceedings on paper. He was as much a devotee of Pushkin as any other educated Russian, and Uncle Mitrofan in Taganrog started crying because he was so moved by what his nephew Anton wrote about the great poet in a letter at that time.21 In addition to their creative collaboration, Anton and Nikolai spent much of their free time together, and sometimes their respective worlds of medicine and art collided. In January 1882, Nikolai drew a cartoon for The Alarm Clock depicting drunken professors and students celebrating St Tatiana's Day (the figure standing in the foreground, glass in hand, is perhaps his brother). It was on 12 January 1755 that the Empress Elizabeth had signed the edict consenting to the foundation of Moscow University, and St Tatiana's Day had marked the beginning of the student vacation ever since. The debauched scenes which took place annually at the Hermitage restaurant (shown in Nikolai's picture) were legendary. As soon as he became a student himself, Chekhov joined in with gusto, and later instituted an annual St Tatiana's Day dinner for his writer friends in St Petersburg. In anticipation of unruly behaviour on St Tatiana's Day, the proprietors of the Hermitage would replace the restaurant's silk furnishings with wooden tables and stools, take up the carpets and throw sawdust on the floor. 'Tatiana' happens to rhyme with the Russian word for drunk (piana) and policemen would be enjoined to remember dien Tatiany, studienty piany and not rush to arrest the inebriated students as they staggered home in the small hours. The Hermitage was located on Trubnaya Square, where the pet market was held, and was one of Moscow's famous restaurants. It had been founded by a Russian merchant and a French chef in the 1860s and was renowned for its superb cuisine, fine wines (some of which were reputed to have come from the cellars of Louis XVI) and smartly dressed waiters, who wore shirts of Dutch linen tied with silk belts. It was a favourite haunt for the Moscow intelligentsia, some of whom had breakfast, lunch and dinner there, doing business from their regular tables. Tchaikovsky celebrated his disastrous wedding here in 1877, and it was at the Hermitage that Dostoevsky and Turgenev were both feted with celebratory dinners. This was where Chekhov liked to come with his friends, and it was on one of these occasions in 1897 that he
suffered the severe lung haemorrhage which led to the official diagnosis of tuberculosis. Chekhov could never have imagined such a scenario in the early 1880s when he was joining in rowdy choruses of 'Gaudeamus igitur'.
Chekhov liked to drink like any other student, but rarely to excess. The reputation for industry and self-control which was such a distinct feature of his adult personality was forged early on. In 1882 he began writing for Fragments, which represented a step up the ladder from the low-grade Moscow journals he had been writing for until then. By 1883, he was earning from his writing not just the 150 roubles a year he had earlier boasted about, but about 100 roubles a month. This was about three times as much as his student stipend and three times as much as his father's salary. But that did not mean writing was always easy, as a letter sent to his editor Nikolai Leikin in August 1883 makes clear. Most Muscovites escaped the city heat and headed for their dacha in the summer months, but Chekhov was still working:
I am writing in the most awful conditions. In front of me is a pile of non-literary work battering mercilessly at my conscience, a visiting relative's baby is howling in the next room and in the room the other side my father is reading aloud to my mother from [Leskov's story] The Sealed Angel. . . Someone has started up the music box, so I have to listen to [Offenbach's] La Belle Helene … I'd like to do a bunk to the dacha, but it's one o'clock in the morning. .. It's hard to imagine a more awful situation for someone who wants to be a writer. My bed is being slept in by the relation who has come to stay; he keeps on coming up to me and engaging me in conversation about medical subjects. 'My daughter's probably got colic; that must be why she's crying all the time.' I have the great misfortune to be a doctor, and there seems to be no single individual who does not think it incumbent on him or her to talk to me about medicine. And if they get tired of discussing medicine, they start off on literature . . ,22
It says something about how Chekhov's attitude to writing was beginning to change at this time that he excluded everything he wrote before 1883 from the edition of his collected works that he put together at the end of his life. In these early years he was still producing hundreds of stories, but he later disowned most of them. Such was the
fate meted out to 'Drama at a Shooting Party', which was published
serially in a Moscow newspaper over the course of many months
beginning in November 1884. Chekhov was later so embarrassed by the
steamy love scenes and melodramatic plot twists of this murder mystery
that he pretended he had never written it. It certainly comes as a
surprise to discover that this master of elegant, chiselled prose ever
wrote a novel, let alone a gripping page-turner. It is an immature work
stylistically, written in the hard-up early years for money which proved
difficult to extract: the newspaper owner tried to fob Chekhov off with
offers of theatre tickets and new pairs of trousers.23 As many Chekhov
critics agree, though, it is under-rated. In 1884, Chekhov also brought
out his first book at his own expense, in a print-run of just over a
thousand copies. Tales of Melpomene, named ironically after the muse
of tragedy, contained six of 'A. Chekhonte's' best stories to date, all on
theatrical themes.
The Chekhovs had acquired a reputation among their Moscow friends for their warm hospitality, but conditions in the small flat on Sretenka were cramped. Apart from the pleasure of making a small profit when Tales of Melpomene sold out, Chekhov had also begun to
make more money from publishing some of his stories in The Petersburg Newspaper, one of the capital's biggest daily broadsheets. This was a definite step up from the comic weeklies, and he decided they could afford to move. So, in the autumn of 1885, a year after Chekhov qualified as a doctor, they relocated to the area south of the river known as the Zamoskvorechie, near to where Pavel Egorovich worked. It was the stronghold of Moscow's
