Leikin had become used to such requests. With his own sense of thrift and a large income, he could never understand what Chekhov did with his relatively small income. "I don't dissipate, I'm not a dandy," Chekhov told him once. "I have no debts, and not even any kept women: Fragments and love I receive gratis." (April 13, 1886.) As on nearly every other such occasion, Leikin obliged on this one, and promptly. He had every confidence that Chekhov would work out these advances in stories. With this assistance, Chekhov returned to Moscow at the end of August.
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Two weeks after renting this expensive house on fashionable Sadovaya- Kudrinskaya Street, near the center of the city, Chekhov had to pawn his watch and keepsake Turkish gold coin to raise money in a hurry. But the increase in his earnings and his constant effort to improve the material conditions of himself and family seemed to him to justify the move. The two-story house with bay windows looking out on the greenery of the street reminded Chekhov of a "chest of drawers." His combination study and medical office was on the ground floor, and also his bedroom, Misha's, quarters for the maid and the cook, and the kitchen. A fine wolfskin adorned the platform of the ornamented cast- iron spiral staircase that joined the two floors. Chekhov's sister and mother had their rooms on the top floor. Here, too, were the dining room and a living room furnished with a rented piano (the regular payments on it plagued Chekhov), an aquarium, and odds and ends of furniture, some of which had come from the editors of Alarm Clock as "honorariums" for contributions by the Chekhov brothers. On the wall hung a large unfinished canvas of a seamstress falling asleep over her work in the early light of dawn, a memento of both the artistic ability and shiftlessness of Nikolai.
In Chekhov's study and along the wall to his bedroom were open bookcases from floor to ceiling. On the foundation of the volumes he had inherited from his dead friend Popudoglo, he had begun to build a substantial library. He haunted the secondhand bookshops and his purchases were extremely varied — mostly Russian belles lettres, but also some foreign works, sets of magazines, and quantities of travel books, memoirs, collections of letters, and reference works. For the most part it was a working library, and the well-thumbed appearance of some of the volumes testified to their frequent use by Chekhov in his writing.1
Chekhov's growing reputation had begun to work its magic on members of the family. They now realized that his incessant scribbling, which they had formerly regarded solely as an important factor in the family budget, concealed also a precious talent whose possession involved serious duties as well as pleasant privileges. Even his half-literate mother, becoming hypersensitive with advancing years and prone to burst into tears for no apparent reason, observed the strange "gleam of glory" in her son's face. "Yes," she told a visitor, "it seems that Antosha is no longer mine." But this sense of loss did not lessen her nagging him on his failure to marry the daughter of a rich merchant. Chekhov was not only the center of their world; he was their world. All appreciated the labor and determination that had brought them, in seven years, from the dank, crowded basement in the brothel-infested Grachevka district to the clean, spacious two-story house on fashionable Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya. Old Pavel Yegorovich, now more gentle and kind, had completely capitulated to his son's authority in the household. Though he admired Chekhov's achievements, he secretly despaired of his irreligious attitude. With his old-fashioned values and Taganrog passion for official uniforms, he took more parental pride in Ivan, who, as head of a public school, wore a cockade in his hat and a teacher's dress coat with shiny brass buttons. Ivan kept a room for his father whenever he cared to stay with him in the government apartment, with its free heat and light, which had been allotted to him. Misha, who was finishing his studies in the School of Jurisprudence, came in for a good deal of teasing from Chekhov as a "philosopher" and lovelorn swain. But with a furtive desire, himself, to write, he worshiped his brother and was ever ready to perform endless tasks for him, however menial. Sister Masha fully shared this reverence. In fact, she already sensed the implications of Chekhov's future career and was prepared to devote her life to it.
The brilliant Alexander with his trained critical insight was better equipped than the others to discern not only the superior talent but the
1 In 1954 his house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street, where the family lived four years, was designated as a museum in honor of Chekhov.
literary genius of his younger brother. Enthusiastic admiration and genuine affection struggled with envy and regret over his own waning hopes. But he too eventually placed himself entirely at the service of Chekhov, who, at the end of 1886, helped to obtain a position for him as a reporter and copy reader on New Times. And soon this older brother — who could write letters "devilishly, infernally, monstrously artistic," as Chekhov once declared, and an occasional jewel of a short story among a spate of conventional ones — willingly became a kind of literary errand boy for Chekhov in Petersburg, dunning the newspapers and magazines for his brother's fees, taking care of all the details of publishing his books, and carrying messages to editors and authors. Yet Chekhov avoided any expression of condescension to Alexander, and his efforts to assist him never flagged. If he often criticized him sharply, it was always with a desire to jolt him out of his lethargy and bad habits and bring him to an active respect for and realization of his indubitable talents.
The rigorous self-discipline which Chekhov had exercised over himself since his youthful days had established a pattern of behavior which he somehow felt was communicable to others. Moderation in all things was one of his precepts, and he kept telling himself that he must not drink or smoke too much, and he willingly submitted to a milk diet to keep down his weight. Above all, indefatigable work he regarded as the sovereign antidote for all the foolish excesses of mankind. The instinct of the teacher lay deep within him and he possessed almost a naive faith in the power of education to form and guide the moral nature of men and women.
This tendency to instruct was rarely absent from Chekhov's letters to his two older and erring brothers. With a fine pedagogical flair, however, he sugarcoated his instruction, reprimands, and moral aphorisms with jokes and witty language. Alexander was enjoined to teach his little daughter the aesthetics of the stomach by not giving her any old food, and not to soil her eardrums and corrupt the maid by his swearing. More directly he was admonished not to pile up debts. "When a husband and wife have no money, they do not keep servants — this is a commonplace rule." (April 6, 1886.)
Unlike Alexander, however, Nikolai could not easily tolerate advice in any form. By now he had become very much of a dipsomaniac. His tramplike existence, pursuit of loose women, and his reckless squandering of talent pained and grieved Chekhov, who repeatedly brought him home from his hideouts, seriously ill, and nursed him back to health, only to have him vanish once again. These flights Nikolai blamed on the criticism of his way of life by Chekhov or other members of the family. On one such occasion Chekhov wrote his well-known letter of moral instruction to Nikolai. Except for the beginning, he made no attempt to use the familiar bantering style in which he so often wrote to his wayward brothers. Nikolai's case now seemed too desperate. The result was a series of moral judgments which, though they are keyed directly to the various lapses of Nikolai, reflect at the same time some of the principles that guided Chekhov's own behavior.