• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 584 0

arrived in Moscow in a freight train labeled with the words FOR OYSTERS in large letters, and how part of the crowd waiting for Chekhov followed the coffin of General Keller, who had been brought from Manchuria, and they were a little surprised that Chekhov was being buried with full military honors. When the confusion was straightened out, a sad little procession of about a hundred people accompanied Chekhov’s coffin to the Novodevichy Cemetery through the heat and dust of a Moscow summer. “I recall particularly two lawyers,” wrote Gorky. “They were both wearing new boots and spotted neckties, and I heard one of them discoursing on the intelligence of dogs and the other on the comforts of his country home and the beauty of the landscape all round it. Then there was a lady in a lilac dress with a lace-fringed umbrella who was trying to convince an old gentleman in large spectacles about the merits of the deceased. ‘Ah, he was so wonderfully charming, and so witty,’ she said, while the old gentleman coughed incredulously. At the head of the procession a big, fat policeman rode majestically on a fat white horse. It all seemed cruelly common and vulgar, and quite incompatible with the memory of a great and subtle artist.”

But was it so incompatible? Chekhov laughed gaily throughout his life, and he would have laughed at the human absurdities which accompanied his funeral. FOR OYSTERS would have pleased him, and it would have delighted him that he should have been mistaken for General Keller, and he would have listened entranced to all the inane conversations of the people following the coffin, and it would have rejoiced his heart to see the fat policeman on the fat horse. He would have swept off his pince-nez, thrown back his head, and hooted with joy when he discovered that he was being buried next to “the Cossack widow Olga Kookaretnikov,” a name as improbable as any he invented in his stories. Chekhov loved the absurd, and he loved all the splendors and inanities of the human condition.

II

Chekhov was born on January 16, 1860, a year before the freeing of the serfs. He was the son of a man born into slavery, and would himself have been born a serf if it had not been that his grandfather, who managed the vast Chertkov estates, was able to buy his freedom for 3,500 rubles. Chekhov’s father was a heavy-set, deeply religious man, with a talent for painting icons and violin playing, who made his living as a grocer in the small seaport town of Taganrog. At home the father was gruff and unbending, a stern disciplinarian, loving his children but keeping at a distance from them. Chekhov’s mother was the daughter of a cloth merchant, a quiet, beautiful woman, very gentle with the six children, five boys and a girl, born of the marriage. She made all the children’s clothes, and she liked to tell them stories of the days when she traveled with her father in a carriage over the length and breadth of Russia. She had a deep feeling for the Russian countryside, and for people. Chekhov inherited from her his tenderness and sweetness of character, and from his father he inherited his artistic gifts and a formidable capacity for hard work and a kind of stubbornness which enabled him to overcome any obstacles in his path. He had his father’s forehead and eyes, and his mother’s mouth and chin. And they said that in his way of walking and talking he was most like his grandfather, the estate manager who pulled himself out of slavery.

In later years Chekhov would often talk of his childhood, which was neither happy nor unhappy, but curiously somber. Life revolved around the shop and the church. Outside the shop a sign announced in gold letters: “Tea, coffee, soap, sausage, and other colonial products are sold here.” The “colonial products” referred to imports from Turkey—Turkish delight, halva, and dried currants—but in fact the shop sold very nearly every kind of grocery: herbs, dried fish, macaroni, olive oil, vodka, wine, beer, small packets of tea: everything in fact except livestock. Herring swam in barrels of pickling brine. In summer