hoar-frost in the sun on an icy day,
sledges, and the pink glow
Of snow in a late dawn.37
The semi-detached house that the Chekhovs moved into in the autumn of 1886 was situated on Moscow's Garden Ring Road, a very wide and rather quiet street which ran round the northern edge of the city and
was lined with trees (like the inner boulevard parallel with it). Chekhov never lived in the most elegant part of Moscow, the 'white city' district located immediately west of the Kremlin, but the area where his new home was located was thoroughly respectable. Because of its unusual box-like shape, with four protruding front windows on two floors -somewhat untypical for Moscow – Chekhov referred to the new house as a chest of drawers, and he liked to quip about the liberal colour of its masonry (i.e. red, like the carpet on the stairs and the velvet-covered banister). There were trees surrounding the house and hedges growing behind its iron railings in the front garden.
Much had happened in Chekhov's life by the time he signed the lease for the Chest of Drawers in 1886. As a qualified doctor and an increasingly successful writer, he was now indisputably the chief breadwinner in the family, and he would continue to provide for his parents and his sister until the end of his life (Pavel Egorovich contributed a little from his warehouse job, where he still had his main lodgings, but when he retired four years later, at the age of sixty-five, he became totally dependent on his son). During the three and a half extraordinarily productive years that Chekhov lived in the house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya, he became nationally famous as a writer and playwright, and was acclaimed as a major star in Russia's literary firmament before he was thirty years old.
The relatively opulent surroundings in which the family now lived reflected Chekhov's changing fortunes. The new house was certainly the most well-appointed accommodation they had ever occupied; they had eight rooms at their disposal. Apart from Chekhov's book-lined study on the ground floor, there were rooms for the rest of the family and its retainers, and a spacious sitting room upstairs where Nikolai could play his favourite Chopin nocturnes on the rented piano. The various musician friends the family had acquired continued to take part in convivial soirees each week, and the Chest of Drawers now also began to attract figures from Moscow's literary and theatrical world. Tchaikovsky was one of the more illustrious visitors. He was another person who wrote Chekhov an unsolicited fan letter, having been bowled over by the musicality of his stories and their human warmth, and the admiration was mutual. On one occasion he came to pay a call, and the cigarettes he left behind were smoked by some of Chekhov's less illustrious visitors.
Increasing numbers of young ladies also paid calls to the house. Chekhov's sister Masha took a job teaching at a girls' gymnasium, and often brought home attractive female friends who would be eyed up by her brothers. This was particularly the case with Masha's colleague Lidia Mizinova, who first visited the house in 1889. While she waited shyly downstairs in the hall on her first visit, she came to the conclusion that Masha had lots of brothers, not realizing that Anton and Misha were going up and down the stairs repeatedly in order to look at the beautiful girl their sister had become friends with. Chekhov was no stranger to female company. He was tall and handsome and attracted strings of admirers throughout his life, but his flirtations rarely developed into serious relationships.
With the opening up of the archives in the last years of the Soviet regime, it has become possible to study previously censored passages of Chekhov's correspondence which confirm that he was by no means celibate before he fell in love with Olga Knipper at the end of his life. That much is suggested by various early stories in his output, such as one he wrote in 1888 (usually translated as An Attack of Nerves') about a student's violent reaction to visiting a brothel for the first time in Moscow's red-light district, near to where the Chekhov family had first made their home in the city. By the end of the twentieth century, Chekhov critics had largely removed the halo that Stalinist morality had rather effectively placed over his head in the 1930s, and shown a much earthier side to his personality. But revelations of encounters with prostitutes cannot disguise the fact that Chekhov mostly resisted the overtures of the women who became infatuated with him. He liked to keep his cards close to his chest where romantic feelings were concerned, and he liked to maintain self-control. In his memoirs, the director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko recalls just one occasion when Chekhov dropped his guard and revealed that one married woman he had been pursuing had turned out to be a virgin – and even then he did not say whether their relationship was ever consummated.38
Misogyny is one way of explaining the reserve Chekhov maintained in his relationships with women, whose sexuality he appears to have seen as a threat to his creativity (misogyny is certainly present in his writing). The strong ethical code he developed is another. There was a brief, secret engagement with a young Russian-Jewish girl in early 1886,
but no other serious involvement – although he came close on a number of occasions to yielding. Indeed, until he met Olga Knipper much later in his life and started exchanging letters with her, Chekhov's romantic life remained something of a mystery, at least where his feelings were concerned.
There were about six other women with whom he had relationships of varying intensity, and their much more demonstrative natures are clear from the letters they wrote to him. Of these, the first and most important of them was Lidia Mizinova. So adept was the writer at keeping his feelings hidden that his family, and most of his friends, were under the illusion that it was he who was more infatuated with her. Only after his death did it emerge that it had been the other way around. The beautiful Lidia, or Lika, as she was known, had ash-blonde hair and grey eyes (was she an inspiration for the grey-eyed Anna in 'The Lady with the Little Dog'?), and she was smart and funny. Chekhov was immediately attracted to her. As they became acquainted shortly before he set out on his epic trip to Siberia, it was some while before their relationship was able to develop, but Lika's name crops up several times in the letters he sent home. 'Tell Lika not to leave such large margins on her letters,' he wrote on one occasion to his family, slightly piqued that she had not written to him at all.39
It was perhaps fortunate that Chekhov had started his literary career working for low-grade comic journals, since the 1880s were generally a very bleak time for Russian belles-lettres, and this was one of the reasons why he felt compelled to seek a complete change of scene in 1890 and go to the other end of the world. The sweeping changes brought about in national life by the great reforms of the 1860s had initially given the intelligentsia hope that further democratization would follow. When these hopes were not fulfilled, its more radical members decided to take matters into their own hands and resort to violence. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881. How Chekhov reacted to this event we do not know; he was not a political animal. But it was he who would later most vividly convey what it was like to live under a Tsar determined to preserve the status quo at all costs. Stories such as 'Ward No. 6' and 'The Man in a Case' stand as eloquent, albeit indirect, condemnations of Alexander Ill's reactionary policies. And dealing with censors was an unpleasant fact of life that even contributors to comic journals had to contend with. Russian intellectual and literary life was
crippled by increased surveillance and various other restrictive measures during the 1880s. Working for comic journals did not attract so much attention from the authorities, but despondency settled on Russia's educated population like a cloud of fine dust, permeating everything, and affecting even as positive-thinking a person as Chekhov. With stories called 'Sorrow' and 'Misery', and his next two collections called In the Twilight and Gloomy People, it was not all that surprising that his readers began to label him as a pessimistic writer.
There was indeed a great deal to be depressed about in late nineteenth-century Russia, and all stemmed from the iniquities of the country's reactionary and autocratic method of government. The shortcomings of the Romanov regime were later highlighted by the tragedy which occurred on the day of Nicholas IPs official coronation
