Reading Chekhov

Chekhov's oldest brother, Alexander, in a memoir of Anton, wrote of a freezing winter night on which "the future writer," then a nine-year-old schoolboy, was dragged by his father from the warm room where he was doing his homework and made to mind the unheated store. The account lays stress on the cruelty of the father and the misery of the boy, and is crudely written, in a sort of penny-dreadful style. The reticent Anton himself left no memoir of his childhood sorrows, though there are passages in his stories that are assumed to refer to them. In the long story "Three Years" (1895), for example, the hero, Laptev, says to his wife, "I can remember my father correcting me-or, to speak plainly, beating me-before I was five years old. He used to thrash me with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I woke up my first thought was whether he would beat me that day." In a letter of 1894 to his publisher and close friend Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov permitted himself the bitter reflection, "I acquired my belief in progress when still a child; I couldn't help believing in it, because the difference between the period when they flogged me and the period when they stopped flogging me was enormous." Chekhov had what he described to another correspondent in 1899 as "autobiographophobia." The correspondent was Grigory Rossolimo, who had been a classmate in medical school, and had written to Chekhov to ask him for an autobiography for an album he was assembling for a class reunion-which Chekhov supplied, but not before expressing his reluctance to write about himself. Seven years earlier, when V. A. Tikhonov, the editor of a journal called Sever, asked him for biographical information to accompany a photograph, Chekhov made this reply: Do you need my biography? Here it is. In 1860 I was born in Taganrog. In 1879 I finished my studies in the Taganrog school. In 1884 I finished my studies in the medical school of Moscow University. In 1888 I received the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin across Siberia-and back by sea. In 1891 I toured Europe, where I drank splendid wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I strolled with V. A. Tikhonov at [the writer Shcheglov's] name-day party. I began to write in 1879 in Strekosa. My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. I have been translated into all languages with the exception of the foreign ones. However, I was translated into German quite a while ago. The Czechs and Serbs also approve of me. And the French also relate to me. I grasped the secrets of love at the age of thirteen. I remain on excellent terms with friends, both physicians and writers. I am a bachelor. I would like a pension. I busy myself with medicine to such an extent that this summer I am going to perform some autopsies, something I have not done for two or three years. Among writers I prefer Tolstoy, among physicians, Zakharin. However, this is all rubbish. Write what you want. If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical.