Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Family and Friends | Page 2

came to teach the children languages. Every Saturday
the whole family went to the evening service, and on their return sang
hymns and burned incense. On Sunday morning they went to early
mass, after which they all sang hymns in chorus at home. Anton had to
learn the whole church service by heart and sing it over with his
brothers.
The chief characteristic distinguishing the Chekhov family from their
neighbours was their habit of singing and having religious services at
home.
Though the boys had often to take their father's place in the shop, they
had leisure enough to enjoy themselves. They sometimes went for
whole days to the sea fishing, played Russian tennis, and went for
excursions to their grandfather's in the country. Anton was a sturdy,
lively boy, extremely intelligent, and inexhaustible in jokes and
enterprises of all kinds. He used to get up lectures and performances,
and was always acting and mimicking. As children, the brothers got up
a performance of Gogol's "Inspector General," in which Anton took the
part of Gorodnitchy. One of Anton's favourite improvisations was a
scene in which the Governor of the town attended church parade at a
festival and stood in the centre of the church, on a rug surrounded by
foreign consuls. Anton, dressed in his high-school uniform, with his

grandfather's old sabre coming to his shoulder, used to act the part of
the Governor with extraordinary subtlety and carry out a review of
imaginary Cossacks. Often the children would gather round their
mother or their old nurse to hear stories.
Chekhov's story "Happiness" was written under the influence of one of
his nurse's tales, which were always of the mysterious, of the
extraordinary, of the terrible, and poetical.
Their mother, on the other hand, told the children stories of real life,
describing how she had travelled all over Russia as a little girl, how the
Allies had bombarded Taganrog during the Crimean War, and how
hard life had been for the peasants in the days of serfdom. She instilled
into her children a hatred of brutality and a feeling of regard for all who
were in an inferior position, and for birds and animals.
Chekhov in later years used to say: "Our talents we got from our father,
but our soul from our mother."
In 1875 the two elder boys went to Moscow.
After their departure the business went from bad to worse, and the
family sank into poverty.
In 1876 Pavel Yegorovitch closed his shop, and went to join his sons in
Moscow. While earning their own living, one was a student at the
University, and the other a student at the School of Sculpture and
Painting. The house was sold by auction, one of the creditors took all
the furniture, and Chekhov's mother was left with nothing. Some
months afterwards she went to rejoin her husband in Moscow, taking
the younger children with her, while Anton, who was then sixteen,
lived on in solitude at Taganrog for three whole years, earning his own
living, and paying for his education at the high school.
He lived in the house that had been his father's, in the family of one
Selivanov, the creditor who had bought it, and gave lessons to the
latter's nephew, a Cossack. He went with his pupil to the latter's house
in the country, and learned to ride and shoot. During the last two years

he was very fond of the society of the high-school girls, and used to tell
his brothers that he had had the most delightful flirtations.
At the same time he went frequently to the theatre and was very fond of
French melodramas, so that he was by no means crushed by his early
struggle for existence. In 1879 he went to Moscow to enter the
University, bringing with him two school-fellows who boarded with his
family. He found his father had just succeeded in getting work away
from home, so that from the first day of his arrival he found himself
head of the family, every member of which had to work for their
common livelihood. Even little Mihail used to copy out lectures for
students, and so made a little money. It was the absolute necessity of
earning money to pay for his fees at the University and to help in
supporting the household that forced Anton to write. That winter he
wrote his first published story, "A Letter to a Learned Neighbour." All
the members of the family were closely bound together round one
common centre--Anton. "What will Anton say?" was always their
uppermost thought on every occasion.
Ivan soon became the master of the parish school at Voskresensk, a
little town in the Moscow province. Living was cheap there, so the
other members of the family spent the summer there;