The preparatory class of 1868-9 was taken by kindly men: the elderly but lively Swiss Montagnerouge, who had been the boarding housemaster, was affectionately known as Stakan (wineglass) Ivanych.
The Latin teacher, Vladimir Starov, left the deepest impression: a gentle, much liked man, he fell in love with the stepdaughter of his colleague Andrei Maltsev, Ariadna Cherets, a wanton beauty known as Rurochka. She married and ruined him. In the late 1880s, when the school's self-appointed secret policeman, a Czech called Urban, denounced him, Starov was removed to a remote school in the steppe: Ariadna abandoned him and eloped with an actor well-known all over Russia, Solovtsov, and began to act herself. Starov died of alcoholism in hospital. Not just Chekhov's stories ('Ariadna', 'My Life') but also the story 'My Marriage' by his geography teacher Fiodor Stulli, were
1868-9
based on Starov and his Ariadna. Another of Chekhov's teachers, Belovin, a radical historian, died of alcoholism. Ippolit Ostrovsky, a mathematics and physics teacher, died in service of ÒÂ.
The teacher who determined the fate of most pupils was the inspektor: in Taganrog gimnazia this was the 'Centipede' A. F. Diakonov, whose sayings were a compendium of moral cliches that pupils memorized and derided: 'If a law exists, it is not for the amusement of the lawmakers and must be observed.' Diakonov is one source for (Ihekhov's automaton of a Greek teacher, The Man in a Case, but in lire his unbending principles, his lack of animosity, even his loneliness and taciturnity, won him grudging respect.
Greek caused the school and Anton Chekhov most problems. Aleksandr and Kolia were good Greek scholars, but Anton did not always manage to achieve the '3' mark necessary to pass into the next form. There were too few classical Greek teachers; finally the authorities recruited Zikos from Athens. A fine teacher, Zikos was, nevertheless, as Filevsky puts it, 'not too fastidious about seeking enrichment'. He took bribes, muttering to pupils with '2' marks 'chremata [money]!' Corruption was endemic in Russian schools. Teachers took laggards as boarders and then charged 350 roubles a year, feeding the boys, as Anton later put it 'like dogs, on the gravy from the roast'. Zikos was so blatantly exploitative that he 'compromised' the school and in the early 1880s was repatriated.
Another recruit was a Czech called Jan Urban. The school bogey, he had worked in Kiev (where somebody broke his leg), and in Simferopol (where his windows were smashed).18 Each town he left after denouncing pupils and staff to the authorities. Taganrog was his last chance, but his denunciations continued. One of the pupils he harassed killed himself. In Anton's last years at the gimnazia boys packed a sardine can with explosives and hurled it at Urban's house. The bang was heard ten blocks away. Urban demanded that the police arrest the anarchists responsible, but the headmaster and police did nothing. Urban had difficulty finding a new landlord. Such was his standing that even the city gendarme forbad his daughter to marry Urban's son. In the 1905 disturbances schoolboys stoned Urban: he picked up the stones and carried them in his pocket until his death.
Some teachers were never recalled by Anton. Yet one wonders how he could forget Edmund-Rufin Dzerzhinsky, 'a pathologically irritable iH I Ë I 111 It I Î I II I MAN man' says Filevsky. Until 1875 Edmund kulin taught mathematics and later fathered the murderous head of Lenin's secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Anton remembered best the teachers who stayed throughout his years there, and those who met grotesque ends.19 In later life he dismissed them as chinodraly (careerists) and used their eccentricities and tragedies for fiction.
In his first years Anton was academically mediocre and not very docile. Only Pavel Vukov, responsible for discipline, when asked after Chekhov's death, spoke out: 'He got on our nerves for nine years.' (Later Vukov put it more tactfully: 'His ideas and witty phrases were taken up by his schoolmates and this became a source of merriment and laughter.') As for Anton's fellow-pupils, friendships were not formed until later. The Chekhov family was still too clannish.
From 1868 Pavel's income grew and provided an education for all of his children. The death of their grandmother, Aleksandra Kokh-makova in 1868, was barely noticed: paralysed, she had been unaware of the world for four years.
Anton's life of a schoolboy and a chorister was made tougher when, early in 1869, the Chekhovs moved into a rented two-storey brick house on a corner site, at the edge of town, on the route taken by the carters and drovers on their way to and from the port and the steppes. On the upper storey they had a drawing room, with a piano; the lower storey was a shop, its side rooms crammed with tenants and stores. Outside, where one of the shop boys or Chekhov children would stand to solicit customers, hung a sign: TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, AND OTHER COLONIAL GOODS. In addition to the family (although Aleksandr often lived elsewhere), two shop boys, the young Khar-chenko brothers, Andriusha and Gavriusha, about 11 and 12 years old, were taken in, receiving no salary for their first five years, not even allowed pockets in their clothes, lest they be tempted to steal, and thrashed even more often than the children of the house. They were trained to give short change and short weight and to pass off rotten goods as sound.20
Here, on 12 October 1869, Evgenia, the last of the Chekhov children, was born. Somehow the Chekhovs found room for tenants -Jewish traders, monks, schoolteachers. One tenant played a key role in the family's last Taganrog years. The Chekhovs never forgot Gavriil Parfentievich Selivanov, who worked in the civil courts by day and at
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night went to the club where he earned another living as a gambler. An elegant bachelor, he fought to keep his straw hat clear of the sunflower seed husks and other debris that blew in the wind around the Chekhov shop. Selivanov soon became a member of the family, even calling Evgenia 'mama'. Another tenant was a pupil in the senior classes of the gimnazia, Ivan Pavlovsky, later to be a journalist-colleague of Chekhov's. Pavlovsky left an indelible mark on the memory of his schoolmates. In 1873 he left to study in Petersburg, but was arrested as a revolutionary and sent to Siberia.
From the upper storey of the Moiseev house the family could see Taganrog's new market square. To this square convicted criminals, their hands tied behind their back, a placard naming their crime round their necks, would be brought on a black tumbril to a scaffold. The drums rolled, the convict was lashed to a pillar, and the sentence was read out, before they were led off to prison or exile. Evgenia and uncle Mitrofan, like many citizens in provincial Russian cities, visited the prison on name days or on feast days.
Pavel's charity was limited: he merely allowed two monk-priests, ostensibly collecting alms for Mount Athos, to shelter in his yard and turned a blind eye to their drinking. Pavel was not so indulgent to his sons. Regardless of school, they were given the duties and punishments that he had endured. Latin homework could be done while keeping an eye on the shop, which was open from before dawn until well into the night. The paternal phrases which Aleksandr remembered ran: 'I had no childhood in my own childhood. Only street urchins play in the street. One beaten boy is worth two unbeaten.'
With a properly equipped shop, scales, a table and chairs for customers, shelves and cupboards everywhere, sheds and attics, Pavel tried to deal in everything. He was, surprisingly, a1* gourmet, who would dine with the devil if the food was good, and he made his own mustard. In his shop he kept the finest coffee and olive oil. Aleksandr tried to reconstruct the inventory forty years later: tea by the pound or ounce, face-cream, pen-knives, phials of castor oil, waistcoat buckles, lamp-wicks, medicinal rhubarb, vodka or San-turini wine by the glass, olive oil, 'S' Bouquet perfume, olives, grapes, marbled backing paper for books, paraffin, macaroni, laxatives, rice, Mocha coffee, tallow candles, used tea-leaves, dried and re-coloured