Anton Chekhov

It was at this time that Chekhov began writing, sending comic pieces to Aleksandr in Moscow in the hope they would be accepted by the numerous humour magazines that had sprung up in the capitals. He made friends with actors, hung around backstage, and learned how to make up. One of his school-fellows, Aleksandr Vishnevsky, did enter the profession, and eventually became a charter member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Nikolay Solovtsov, to whom Chekhov dedicated his farce The Bear and who created the title role, was another friend from these Taganrog days.

In 1879 Chekhov came to Moscow to study medicine at the University, aided by a scholarship from the Taganrog municipal authorities. He arrived to discover himself the head of the family, which was still in dire straits and living in a cramped basement flat in a disreputable slum. His father, now a humble clerk, boarded at his office; his elder brothers, Aleksandr, a writer, and Nikolay, a painter, led alcoholic bohemian lives; his three younger siblings, Ivan, Mariya, and Mikhail, had still to complete their educations. Lodging at home, Chekhov was compelled to launch a career as journalist, at the same time he carried out the rigorous five-year medical course.

At first, he wrote primarily for humour magazines, contributing anecdotes and extended jokes, sometimes as captions to Nikolay's drawings; these brought in ten to twelve kopeks a line. Gradually, he diversified into parodies, short stories and serials, including a murder mystery and a romance that proved so popular it was filmed four times in the early days of cinema. He was a reporter at a famous trial. He became close friends with Nikolay Leykin, editor of the periodical Splinters (Oskolki). He conducted a theatrical gossip column, which won him entry to all the greenrooms and side-scenes in Moscow. And he shared in his brothers' bohemianism; he wrote to an old schoolchum, in a letter the Soviets publish only in expur­gated form: 'I was on the trot all last night and, 'cept for a 5-ruble drunk didn't... or catch .... I'm just about to go on the trot again'.⁵ His writing at this time was published under a variety of pseudonyms, the best known Antosha Chekhonte, from a schoolboy nickname. He also found time to revise Without Patrimony which he seriously hoped would be staged; turned down by the leading actress to whom he submitted it, it was burnt by its author. But a copy survived, minus the title-page, and was first published in 1923; it has since become known as Platonov, after the central character.

1884 was a critical date in Chekhov's life. At the age of twenty-four, he set up as a general practitioner and, influ­enced by reading Herbert Spencer, began research on a history of medicine in Russia. Ironically, that December he had bouts of spitting blood, which his medical expertise might have diagnosed as symptoms of pulmonary tuber­culosis. No outside observer would have suspected that this active, well-built, handsome man was suffering from a mortal illness. Only in his last years did he become a semi-invalid and, until that time, he maintained the pre­tence that his symptoms were not fatal. This subterfuge was not carried on simply to allay his family's fears. He wilfully strove to ignore the forecast of his own mortality.

1884 also saw his first published collection of stories, pointedly entitled Fairy Tales of Melpomene: the muse of tragedy compressed into pithy anecdotes of the life of actors. Chekhov had found more prestigious and better- paying periodicals to take his stories and was now an expert on Muscovite life.

He had an opportunity to amplify his subject matter, when he and his family began to spend summers in the country, first with his brother Ivan, master of a village school; then in a cottage on the estate of the Kiselev family. It was during these summers that Chekhov gained first­hand knowledge of the manor-house setting he employed in so many of his plays, and made the acquaintance of officers of a battery, who turn up in Three Sisters. Chekhov's artistic horizons also expanded, for the Kiselevs, intimates of Tchaikovsky, were devoted to classi­cal music. Another summer visitor to become a lifelong friend was the painter Isaak Levitan, whose impressionistic landscapes are the painterly equivalent of Chekhov's prose techniques.