• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 539 0

there were flies everywhere, and in winter it was strangely dark and menacing. As soon as he could walk Chekhov had to help out. He hated the long hours and the beatings he received from his father when he was inattentive, but it was in this dark and squalid room, with its overwhelming smell of fish, with strings of peppers and sweetmeats hanging from the roof, with the sacks of flour and meal crowding the wall, and the religious medallions sold to pilgrims glinting in the candlelight, that Chekhov came in contact with men and women of all classes, seeing them pass in an endless procession through the shop as later they were to pass through his stories. He came to know their faces, their smells, the way they dressed and quarreled and haggled and got drunk, and very early in his life, employing the defense mechanism of sensitive children everywhere, he learned to mimic them. Deeply impressed on his imagination were the faces and characters of two or three hundred Russian types.

There was a Greek colony in Taganrog, and for some reason he was sent to the local Greek school, where he learned Latin and ancient Greek, and modern Greek well enough to speak it, but he showed no particular brilliance in his studies. There was talk of sending him later to Athens University, but nothing came of it. Chekhov’s father seems to have had little business sense, and when the family finances became increasingly precarious, there occurred a marked change in the character of the shopkeeper. He became more obsequious to the Greek merchants and began writing begging letters to important dignitaries; and from being a father he became a toadying, wheedling shopkeeper with a reverence for uniforms and an incapacity to think of anything except money. With disgust and fury Chekhov watched his father decline into a kind of senility.

Meanwhile the boy was developing his gifts of mimicry and acting. One day, dressed as a beggar, he walked through the streets of Taganrog and entered the house of his uncle Mitrofan, who failed to penetrate his disguise and gave him three kopecks. This success elated him. Thereafter he began to think seriously of a life as an actor, or perhaps as a clown in one of the traveling circuses. He wrote sketches and plays and acted them out in a barn with his brothers and his sister, taking the part of a bishop or a pompous official or a bearded professor delivering a ludicrous and incomprehensible lecture. He adored false beards and mustaches, and he fell hopelessly in love with the stage when he was thirteen and attended a production of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène at the local theater. He was also developing as a writer, and stories written when he was twelve show him already in full command of the Russian language, with a style as direct and simple as the works of his maturity. He edited the family magazine, which he characteristically called The Stammerer. Many of the stories and sketches written in his early teens were later reworked—“Surgery,” one of the most famous of his early stories, was a reworking of some clownish nonsense performed when he was scarcely more than ten years old, with Chekhov himself playing the role of a dentist extracting with a pair of tongs an enormous tooth, made of cork, from his brother’s mouth.

Many of Chekhov’s stories are quips, jokes, boutades, which can be traced back to the events of his childhood and the days when he was studying medicine. When the stories were printed in book form, he usually omitted the slighter anecdotes, but a surprisingly large amount of purely anecdotal material was retained, perhaps because these casual stories represented an important element in his character. He was happy in his impudence. He reveled in telling stories which are not very far removed from “shaggy dog” stories, and he especially enjoyed farce. He would tell a story about a visit to a graveyard, joking prodigiously, and while still laughing he would suddenly unfold a landscape where the laughter mysteriously changes, becomes frozen, dies on a clap of thunder, but before the story was over he would