*
Chekhov and his siblings were well educated, though their father Pavel had been born a serf. Pavel’s father had been, unusually for a serf, literate, and became so much of a wheeler-dealer that he earned enough money to buy himself and his family out of serfdom in 1841.11 When Anton was born, the third of six children, in January of 1860, serfdom in Russia, like slavery in America, was finally on the verge of ending.
Taganrog, a southern Russian port town on the Sea of Azov, is where Chekhov was born and raised. As a boy, Anton and his two older brothers were shown off as singers in the orthodox church by their father. Pavel was artistically minded and outwardly pious but, in regard to his three oldest sons, brutal. He was an ineffective shopkeeper. Mikhail Chekhov, born five years after brother Anton, recalled:
Our father was […] fond of praying, but the more I think about it now, the more I realize that he enjoyed the ritual of religion more than its substance. He liked church services and listened to them standing reverently throughout. He even organized prayers at home, my siblings and I acting as the choir while he played the role of the priest. But the church served more as his club, a place where he could meet his friends […]
But in everyday life, our Father had as little faith as all the rest of us sinners. He sang, played violin, wore a top hat, and visited friends and family on Easter and Christmas. He loved newspapers. […] He always read newspapers out loud from cover to cover. He liked talking politics and discussing the doings of the town’s governor. I never saw him without a starched shirt on. […]
Music was our Father’s calling. He would sing or play his violin […] To satisfy this passion, he put together choirs with our family and others and we would perform at home and in public. He would often forget about the business that earned him a living […] He was also a gifted artist: one of his paintings, “John the Evangelist,” made it into the Chekhov Museum in Yalta. […] He liked philosophizing, but while Uncle Mitrofan read only books of a lofty content, our Father read and reread (always out loud) cheap French novels. Sometimes, preoccupied with his own thoughts, he would stop in the middle of a sentence and ask our Mother [Evgenia], “So, Evochka, what was it that I just read?”12
To Pavel Chekhov’s credit (which he acknowledged to himself generously), he sought opportunities for his children’s education, and the three oldest boys and then their three younger siblings all succeeded in their studies.
Alexander, the eldest child, born in 1855, survived Anton, and in a memoir explained that from Anton’s “very early childhood, owing to the beneficent influence of his mother, he could not look on with indifference when he saw animals being treated cruelly, and almost cried when he saw a driver beating his dray horse. And when he saw people being beaten, he used to tremble nervously…. But in his father’s routine, smacks on the face, cuffs on the nape of the neck, flogging were of most ordinary occurrence, and he extensively applied those corrective measures both to his own children and to his shop boys. Everyone trembled before him and were more afraid of him than of fire. Anton’s mother always rebelled against her husband, but always received the invariable answer: ‘I myself was taught like that, and you see I have turned out a man. One beaten man is worth two unbeaten ones.’ ”13
Alexander described their wearisome and unhappy choir practices and the schoolboy Anton’s duties “at the very small, cheap general store, helping his father. His impressions of carefree childhood were based on observations made from a distance. He never experienced these happy years, filled with joy and pleasant memories. He did not have time to do this because he spent most of his free time at his father’s general store. Besides, his father had rules and prohibitions regarding everything. He could not run around because, as his father told him, ‘You will wear out your boots.’ He could not jump because ‘only street bums hop around.’ He could not play games with other children because ‘your peers will teach you bad habits.’ ”14
I imagine Alexander wincing, remembering his own traumatized childhood, as he noted: “When [Anton] was older, he would tell his friends and relatives, ‘During my childhood, I did not really have a childhood.’ ” When fifteen-year-old Alexander and eleven-year-old Anton went to visit their father’s father on the steppe, “Chekhov was shocked by his Ukrainian grandmother’s revelations: privation and thrashings from Egor, in an outpost surrounded by resentful peasants, had broken her. For the first time the boys understood how their father had been formed, and that his childhood had been even worse than theirs.”15 Pavel may have broken the spirit of Alexander, who as an adult was prone to rages and alcoholism, but Anton seems to have had the temperament and composure to withstand his father.
Alexander and Mikhail became writers and editors. Nikolay, the second son, born in 1858, whom Anton thought the most talented of the family, was a painter and illustrator. Unfortunately he, like Anton, contracted tuberculosis in 1884.16 Unlike Anton, charming Nikolay succumbed to hopelessness. Two of the younger siblings, Ivan (born 1861) and the lone sister, Maria (born 1863), became schoolteachers.17 The biographer Ronald Hingley assesses Chekhov’s younger siblings as “dependable, sympathetic, conventional souls, much respected and beloved by Anton, whom all three idolized. He does not seem to have found them dull. But deadly dull they were by comparison with the two eldest boys Alexander and Nikolay: both so gifted yet so wayward, with their drunken habits, irregular love lives, and financial unreliability…. The talent, the high spirits, the verve of the two eldest sons were Anton’s, but so too were the resourcefulness and persistence of the three youngest children.”18
Even as a teenager, Chekhov was so responsible that when his father’s store went bankrupt, his parents left the sixteen-year-old Anton behind to finish high school. His presence in town covered for his family’s escape from creditors. They fled to Moscow, where the two oldest boys were attending university. Independent Anton tutored for his room and board and eventually was sending any extra money he earned to his family. In 1879, as the recipient of a Taganrog town scholarship, he moved to Moscow to rejoin his family, which he had been able to visit only once since their departure, and began his medical studies. They were living in a rough Moscow neighborhood, but Anton brought with him two student-boarders, whose contributions helped keep the family afloat. Medicine was a respectable but not necessarily lucrative career. He immediately took charge of organizing the family’s finances and through his earnings as a writer became its primary breadwinner for the rest of his life. Anton was the boss, and the family needed him to be. Hingley writes that “the other Chekhovs already looked on him as their rescuer, for little could be expected from the older members of their family. Both parents seemed defeated by poverty and disappointment…. [Pavel] was abdicating as head of his household, but without leaving any obvious successor.”19
With each passing year, Anton moved the family to better neighborhoods and healthier housing. Pavel, the bankrupted shopkeeper, was eventually working as a shop boy on the other side of Moscow; by 1886 he spent many of his nights at his son Ivan’s government-issued apartment, and only rejoined the family for occasional meals and on days off.
As kind and mild and reserved as Chekhov was with friends and acquaintances and patients, he was sometimes sharp and commanding with his siblings. It’s not clear how he spoke to his parents. “Our mother, Evgenia Yakovlevna,” remembered Alexander, “was different from our father. She was a soft and quiet woman. She had a poetic nature. By contrast to the father, who seemed very strict, her motherly care and tenderness were amazing. Later, Anton Pavlovich said very truly: ‘I have inherited the talent from the father’s side, and the soul from the mother’s side.’ ”20