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9 amazing facts about Anton Chekhov
His grandfather was a serf, and he renounced the title of noble
Yegor Mikhailovich Chekhov (his last name, by the way, has nothing to do with his nationality, but comes from the old name Chekh) was a serf of the Voronezh landowner Chertkov. He worked not only on the land, but also at the sugar factory located in his native village of Olkhovatka. Chertkov noticed the smart boy Yegor at a young age, ordered him to learn to read and write, and transferred him to the factory as soon as it was completed, in 1834, when Yegor Mikhailovich was 35 years old. Chekhov lived up to his expectations — not only quickly rose to the rank of clerk, but also came up with the idea of using the waste from sugar refining to feed the bulls. Moreover, not only the owner’s, but also his own, which gave him the opportunity to sell them at a great profit. At first, Yegor Mikhailovich put the money he earned into circulation: while running errands for his landowner in other regions, he would buy salt and dried fish there, and upon his return, he would sell them at a premium. Things were going so well that by 1841, Chekhov had already managed to save enough money to buy his entire family – his wife and six children – from the landowner. After his release, Chekhov Sr. went to Rostov, where he joined the bourgeoisie. Chekhov’s father, Pavel Yegorovich, already had his own grocery store, where the future writer had to work from an early age. A notable feature of the entire family was their honesty – none of them ever claimed more than they deserved. When Emperor Nicholas II awarded Anton Pavlovich the title of hereditary nobleman in 1899, Chekhov never accepted this privilege. He did the same with the title of Honorary Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He wrote for others.
He did this for 5 years. And it was all because of money – or rather, the lack of it. Chekhov had to learn to feed himself from a young age. His father went bankrupt in 1876 and sold all his property to pay off his creditors, and then fled to Moscow with his wife and younger children. From then on, Anton, who was still studying at the gymnasium, was forced to earn his own living. At first, he gave private lessons to noble children, then entered the medical faculty in Moscow and began to help doctors with patients. His first publication happened in his first year – it was a satirical story in the magazine “Strekoza”. After that, he quickly learned to use his talent for simple humorous texts, which were often published under pseudonyms. The most famous one, Antosha Chekhonte, is familiar to us from school, but there were about fifty lesser known ones: Arkhip Indeikin, Schiller Shakespearean Goethe, Akaki Tarantulov, My Brother’s Brother, Gaika No. 6 and Gaika No. 9, A Man Without a Spleen, Vasily Spiridonov Svolachev, and even just “Someone.”
Sweet tooth and collector of stamps and funny names
Chekhov loved sweets, especially marmalade and homemade jam. When he was a child, his mother forbade the children to eat a lot of sweets, so Anton and his brothers and sister called the cupboard where the goodies were hidden «dear and highly respected». The habit of addressing the soulless keeper of sweets in this manner remained with the writer for the rest of his life. Another unusual hobby of Chekhov was collecting funny surnames of real people. He always wrote down the most interesting ones that he managed to learn, and then used them in his works. Chimsha-Gimalaisky in «The Man in a Case», Svinchutka, Zevulya, Trakhtenbauer and others are taken from life, and the story «Horse Surname» best reflects this hobby of his. But Anton Pavlovich, unlike many of his contemporaries, was completely indifferent to gambling. Once, during a trip to Europe, he stopped in the casino city of Monte Carlo and even left 900 francs there, but reacted to this with his usual gentle humor — he said that now he would have something to tell his grandchildren: «I played roulette and am familiar with the feeling that this game arouses.»
Chekhov visited brothels for 13 years
The process of his father’s ruin lasted for several years, and all this time the teenager Anton remained, in fact, without much supervision from his parents. In his own words, «I learned all the secrets of life at the age of 13.» He continued to use the services of women with reduced social responsibility later, after moving to Moscow. With age, he became more discerning — he began to purposefully seduce decent ladies and in one of his letters even boasted that he could «bang» any girl he liked. Anton Pavlovich used women not only in physics, but also closely watched them in order to later include the noticed details in his texts. When Chekhov became a famous playwright, fans began to hunt him. However, the writer was already seriously ill by that time and did not respond to their calls. He jokingly called the wild girls who pursued him on the embankments of Yalta «Antonovkas.»
He made up strange nicknames for his wife
Chekhov had no intention of getting married (his phrase «I would be bored with my wife» is well known) and even wrote to friends about his nightmares connected with the bonds of marriage. But then he met the actress Olga Knipper, who played in his play «The Seagull», and gradually changed his mind. Chekhov’s correspondence with his wife was very extensive — from the summer of 1899 to the spring of 1904, they each wrote about 400 letters, and these are only the known messages confirmed by surviving documents. And all because the couple spent most of the period of courtship and family life at a distance from each other — Anton Pavlovich went to Yalta for treatment and to foreign resorts, and Olga Leonardovna continued to work at the Moscow Art Theater. She would have been glad to travel everywhere with her husband, whom she married in 1901, but he himself did not allow her to do so. In addition to the usual compliments and kind words, Chekhov in his letters awarded Olga with the epithets «little actress», «my dog», «snake» and «my dunce». However, the tone of the letters was generally very sweet and kind. Just look at this confession: «Don’t forget the writer, don’t forget, otherwise I’ll drown myself here or marry a centipede.»
He joked too much.
The jokes were not malicious, but they seem to indicate his desire to make fun of any situation. He named his favorite dachshunds Brom Isaich and Khina Markovna. He made fun of his dearly beloved mother because of her increased religiosity: «Mama, do monks wear long johns?» In his letters, he even mocked himself and his fatal illness: «See what a cripple I am. But I carefully hide it and try to seem like a cheerful young man of 28, which I often succeed in doing, since I buy expensive ties and wear Vera-Violetta perfume.» A close friend of the writer, another classic of Russian literature, Ivan Bunin recalled that this cheerfulness concealed unimaginable pain and tragedy. Once, when the authors were walking together in Yalta, Chekhov asked a woman he accidentally noticed in the window if she knew that Bunin had been killed the other day. And this despite the fact that the «killed man» nearby was choking with laughter! Only later in the evening did Bunin learn that Chekhov had been coughing up blood and thinking about death the day before the walk.
Chekhov did not have a home library
Chekhov bought and read a lot of books, but he didn’t keep them at home, and then gave them to friends and donated them to city libraries. But Anton Pavlovich carefully kept his notebooks. He had a lot of them, they were divided by topic (diary, address book, notebook with prescriptions for patients, notes on gardening, bibliographic notes, etc.) and were always kept in perfect order.
He was embarrassed to be sick
Chekhov was a modest man and only opened up in correspondence with close friends. He did not like to talk about himself with others, refused to give interviews to newspapers and got by with only listing dry facts from his life, justifying it with an invented disease — «autobiographophobia». That is why he hid his illness from those around him for a long time. Tuberculosis (then it was called consumption) tormented him for about 20 years, but Anton Pavlovich never complained and asked for help only in the most extreme cases, when the disease had completely exhausted him.
Chekhov managed to predict one death of someone else and another one of his own
The famous director Stanislavsky, whom Chekhov knew from their work together on the stage, recalled how the writer once noticed a well-known man in his house. Everyone around him always considered this man to be very cheerful and happy, and only Chekhov was suddenly concerned about his behavior. When Stanislavsky asked what had attracted his attention, the writer said outright that he saw a man who was probably going to commit suicide. Stanislavsky only laughed at the time, and a few years later he learned that his acquaintance had poisoned himself. In the summer of 1904, doctors realized that there was no hope for Chekhov’s recovery. He went to a resort in Germany to die, and therefore allowed his wife to go with him. On the night of July 1-2, the writer woke up and for the first time in the memory of his loved ones, he himself ordered a doctor to be sent for. He loudly declared to the doctor and his wife that he was dying, then asked for a glass of champagne, drank it calmly, quietly lay down on his left side and died. He was 44 years old at the time.