Word: chekhovs
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...Troyat points out, Chekhov "drew the line at glorifying the 'holy Russian muzhik.' " He knew better; his grandfather was a peasant and his father an incompetent grocer and religious fanatic who spent most of his time praying, preaching and beating his six children. The family lived in Taganrog, a small port, a "deaf town," on the Sea of Azov, and as soon as they were able, the young Chekhovs were put to work in the unheated shop. On Sundays they were made to stand for hours in church. Wrote the author years later: "When I was a child...
...gift of humor. It buffered him from harsh experience and provided the equanimity evident in his work both as a writer and a physician. Medicine suited his compassionate temperament and the need for a career to support his family after his father became a bankrupt and a drunk. Chekhov never shirked this responsibility; it became one reason not to start a family of his own. The other, more powerful rationale was his attraction to writing. In this matter, Troyat is particularly poignant, one might even say Chekhovian: "What was a woman to him, no matter how desirable, when his life...
Mozart once wrote that he composed music as effortlessly as a cow urinates. Chekhov was more genteel about his own fluency. "I wrote serenely, as if eating bliny," he says, and elsewhere picks up an ashtray and offers to have a story about it ready for the next day. Editors of Russia's literary journals appreciated this facility and Chekhov's acceptance of editing to satisfy Czar Alexander III's censors...
When in Three Sisters Olga, Masha and Irina yearn for Moscow, they echo the youthful Chekhov. He fell under the city's spell while attending medical school, where none of his fellow students connected him with "Antosha Chekhonte," the pseudonym under which he wrote comic stories. It was not until 1887, with the staging of his play Ivanov, that the public knew the author as A.P. Chekhov. Reviewers were generally hostile; "a flippantly cynical piece of foolishness, foul and immoral," said the man from the Muscovite Newssheet. But with the appearance of the story The Steppe in 1888, Chekhov...
Fame attracted critics and their pigeonholes. Chekhov would have none of it: "The people I fear are those who look for tendentiousness between the lines . . . I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength...