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Doctor Chekhov ô I was frequently more proud of a skilful amputation, of the successful cure of a rash, of progress in riding, or of conquering a woman, than of the praise I heard for my first ventures in literature. Konstantin Leontiev, My Literary Fate
NINE
Ô
Initiation
1879-80
ON 10 AUGUST 1879, in the basement flat on the Grachiovka, after two years away from them, Anton Chekhov was reunited with his family.1 Misha, now eleven, sunning himself at the yard gates, took time to recognize his brother; Pavel was sent a telegram at Gavrilov's across the river. Misha took Anton and his two friends on a walk around Moscow, before the family's first celebratory supper in five years. The next day brought a gentleman from the northern city of Viatka. He asked the Chekhovs to take in his son, Nikolai Korobov, another medical student. Korobov was a virginal, gentle person, unlike the extrovert southerners, Anton's companions from Taganrog, Sevel-iev and Zembulatov, but gruelling studies and the Grachiovka made the four medical students friends for life. The Chekhovs' poverty had been alleviated. Never again would Evgenia take in washing, or Masha cook in neighbours' houses. Evgenia fed her household to satiety, and almost made ends meet. Aleksandr and Kolia rarely came to stay; soon Vania, too, would cut loose. Evgenia and Fenichka had a servant girl. After a month in the basement, the family moved down the Grachiovka to more salubrious quarters. Here they slept two to a room, with a room for dining and entertaining.
Anton and his friends went to register at the University. Medical students had their classes in spacious clinics on the Rozhdestvenka (near the Grachiovka). Moscow University's medical school was in its prime, with professors of world renown, and 200 students graduating annually from a demanding five-year course. The first generation of purely Russian specialists was ousting the Germans who had dominated Russian medicine until now. First-year students, however, did not attend the lectures of the great professors Zakharin, Sklifosovsky and Ostroumov. They were taught by junior assistants. Anton had to study inorganic chemistry, physics, mineralogy, botany and zoology,
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DOC I Î It (II I KIIOV not to mention theology. I le studied the 'anatomy of the healthy human being'. The modern student gets a pickled limb, dissected by dozens before him; in nineteenth century Moscow, as in London and Paris, each student had a corpse from Moscow's poor who had been hanged or drowned, died of alcohol poisoning, cold, typhoid, ÒÂ or starvation, been murdered or crushed by machinery. Anatomy was a testing ground for new students; even those taking philosophy and literature came to the anatomy theatre to steel their nerves. Chekhov was not the first Russian writer whose powers of observation and analysis were trained by the dissection of corpses.
There were mundane reasons for choosing medicine: it was a secure and prestigious profession. Anton was a student who never failed an exam, but not an academic high flyer. In therapeutic medicine he was imadventurous. His bent - for diagnosis and forensics - was apt for a writer too. All his life his eye for a fatal disease and a victim's life expectancy was feared, and his autopsies admired. In psychiatry, then in its infancy, Anton also showed prowess. He lacked, however, a surgeon's callousness and dexterity. Some had reservations about his choice of career. Selivanov wrote: I read the letter of a doctor-to-be who in the not too distant future will in the course of his profession be despatching several dozen people into eternity… I would not like to see you become a bad or mediocre doctor, but to meet you as a sensational Professor of Medicine.2 Anton did not cut the cord tying him to Taganrog. He wrote to Petia Kravtsov, who, after Chekhov's tutoring, was in cadet college (much to Selivanov's gratitude) and also to Uncle Mitrofan. Anton needed friends in Taganrog, and had to grovel to the city fathers, who disliked disbursing their ten scholarships.
Anton now took up with friends he had made in Easter 1877, who were part of Kolia's social circle. Their friend the drawing-teacher Konstantin Makarov died of typhoid in 1879, but another teacher, Mikhail Diukovsky, fanatically admired Kolia, Anton and Masha. Through Diukovsky and Kolia, Anton was befriended by art students who were to shape his future - Franz Schechtel, the future architect who would design the cover for his first collection of stories, and Isaak Levitan, soon to become Russia's leading landscape painter.
1879-80
Aleksandr was for Anton a link to literature, through the Moscow weeklies, where Aleksandr was both a contributor and an editorial hanger-on. Aleksandr, still studying chemistry and mathematics, was at first little help: he was drifting to the gentry with his friends, the rich, sick and dissipated orphans, Leonid and Ivan Tretiakov. Their guardian, Malyshev, was chief inspector of Village Schools for Moscow province and helped to find work for Vania. He sent the lad forty miles west of Moscow to Voskresensk, where there was a school attached to a cloth mill owned by a magnate named Tsurikov. Tsurikov allotted Vania an adequate salary, and a house substantial enough to accommodate all the Chekhovs when, from May to August, Anton, Masha and Misha were free from study. Vania, at eighteen, was transformed from an undesirable lodger into a giver of sanctuary. Pavel was exultant: Voskresensk stood by the famous monastery of New Jerusalem. Mitrofan congratulated the Moscow Chekhovs: 'How pleasant that you have an occasion to visit New Jerusalem often… I live badly, I sin much, pray for me.'
Anton tried to break into the weekly journals, but destroyed the manuscript of Fatherlessness, the play he had sent for Aleksandr's verdict. In October, as 'Chekhonte', a nickname that Father Pokrovsky had given him, he despatched a story, 'Bored Philanthropists', to The Alarm Clock, where Aleksandr was a familiar. He waited for one of The Alarm Clock's acerbic responses, but the rejection, when it came, was polite. On Evgenia's name-day, 24 December 1879, there was no money for a cake. Anton sat down and wrote a parody of his father's and grandfather's ignorant and menacing pomposity, 'A Don Landowner's Letter to a Learned Neighbour' for The Dragonfly. On 13 January he received his first acceptance.
The Dragonfly was a breakthrough, but only for a year. Its editor, Ippolit Vasilevsky, had a poor eye for new talent.3 Two years passed before The Alarm Clock and then The Spectator published Anton, though these journals were a second home for Aleksandr and Kolia. The 5 kopecks a line that Vasilevsky paid his contributors was a pittance: six stories published in the second half of 1880 brought Anton a total of 32 roubles 25 kopecks. Such journals sold to 2000 subscribers and twice as many casual buyers at 10 to 20 kopecks a copy; no editor could offer even regular contributors a living wage. The trap into which Chekhov was falling forced writers to compose
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weekly stories, each under a different pseudonym, for several journals, to earn no more than Pavel Chekhov's wages in a warehouse.
The Dragonfly rejected as many as it accepted of Anton's first sketches. His contributions were as good as any, but he restricted himself to parody. Another piece, 'What do we find most often in novels, stories etc.', printed in March 1880, mocked the cliches of Russian authors and predicted what the mature Chekhov would shun: A count, a countess with traces of long lost beauty, a neighbour (a baron), a liberal writer, an impoverished gentleman, a foreign musician, dim footmen, nurses, a governess, a German estate manager, an esquire and an heir from America… Seven deadly sins and a marriage in the end. That year Anton made no impact on his readers, nor on the family finances. Kolia earned far more and, when he painted stage sets or portraits of the Tsar, could subsidize the family as well as pay for his own dissipation. The Chekhovs still looked on their rich relatives in Shuia with envy, and Mitrofan, impressed when he saw his nephews in print, still saw the Moscow Chekhovs as pitiably poor relations. The Moscow Chekhovs did not put down roots: they had nearly a dozen addresses in Moscow in Anton's student years. Spring 1880 found them in another house on the Grachiovka belonging to a priest, Father Ivan Priklonsky. Even with the lodgers' income and Vania's new career, the Chekhov household sank back into debt. In April 1880, Pavel reproached Anton for our house [in Taganrog] which still has no tenant after two years, and the goods taken on tick from the Grocer's Shop. I am shaken by any unjust action and my health is harmed. I am pleased and content when modesty, moderation and punctuality in life are observed by my children… I'm sorry tbat Kolia… has abandoned art and is busy with things that bring him neither money nor a profession. It is very disagreeable to me that I and your Mother have made efforts to set him straight, but he has gone by his own will and desire, has lost his path and become stuck in a bog… AJeksandr has shortened my life by half and has ruined my healtli. Antosha, my friend, note what I have written and treasure these words and pass them on to your brothers. P. Chekhov.