His first published piece appeared in the St. Although he believed strongly in artistic freedom and scientific progress, "politically speaking," revealed Ronald Hingley in A New Life of Anton Chekhov, "he might as well have been living on the moon as in Imperial Russia." Chekhov had read and enjoyed the comic weeklies since his schoolboy days, was under no illusions about their literary standards, and simply sought the income they provided. But Chekhov, who was never politically motivated in his writings or committed in his personal views, was not in danger of provoking official ire. His earliest efforts at publication, after his move to Moscow, were directed at the lowbrow comic magazines that flourished during this period of political repression in Russia, when to speak directly and critically of the imperial government and its vast bureaucracy could doom a writer to the penal colony of Sakhalin Island in Siberia. In 1877 Pavel found a position in a clothing warehouse, and in 1879 Chekhov passed his final exams and joined his family in Moscow, where he had obtained a scholarship to study medicine at Moscow University.Ĭhekhov was first prompted to write less by an urge toward artistic expression than by the immediate need to support his family. The family struggled financially while Pavel looked for work, and Chekhov helped by selling off household goods and tutoring younger schoolboys in Taganrog. The episode provided him with a theme-the loss of a home to a conniving middle-class upstart-that was to appear later in the short story "Tsvety zapozdalyie" ( "Late-blooming Flowers," 1882), and to mature in his last play, Vishnyovy Sad: Komediya v chetyryokh deystriyakh ( The Cherry Orchard: A Comedy in Four Acts, 1904). She and the children departed for Moscow in July, 1876, leaving Anton in Taganrog to care for himself and finish school. Yevgeniya, left behind with Anton and the younger children, soon lost her house to a local bureaucrat who had posed as a family friend. Threatened with imprisonment for debt, Pavel left to find work in Moscow, where his two eldest sons were attending the university.
The first real crisis in Chekhov's life occurred in 1875, when his father's business failed.
As an adolescent he tried his hand at writing short "anecdotes," farcical or facetious stories, although he is also known to have written a serious long play at this time, "Fatherless," which he later destroyed. He enjoyed playing in amateur theatricals and often attended performances at the provincial theater. Rather reserved and undemonstrative, he nevertheless gained a reputation for satirical comments, for pranks, and for making up humorous nicknames for his teachers. Although the three younger children recalled a much less terrifying figure in Pavel, Chekhov remarked to Alexander in an 1889 letter reprinted in Avrahm Yarmolinsky's Letters of Anton Chekhov , "Despotism and lying mangled our childhood to such a degree that one feels queasy and fearful recalling it." The writer's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller, and Chekhov is supposed to have acquired his own gift for narrative and to have learned to read and write from her.Īt the age of eight he was sent to the local grammar school, where he proved an average pupil. Chekhov's father, Pavel, was a religious zealot and family tyrant who terrorized Anton and his two older brothers, Alexander and Nicolai.
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