The Best Stories of Anton Chekhov

Начало книги

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on january 17, 1860, in the southern Russian seaport town of Taganrog. He was the third child in a family of five boys and a girl. If not for 3,500 rubles scraped together by a shrewd and ambitious grandfather, with which he purchased his own and his family's freedom, the future writer would have been born a serf. The writer's father, Pavel, rose further into lower-middle-class respectability as the proprietor of a small grocery in Taganrog. He was a religious, church-going man and a strict disciplinarian who took it as his parental duty to beat his children. Chekhov thought him a tyrant. "It is sickening and dreadful to recall," he wrote to his brother Alexander, "the extent to which despotism and lying mutilated our childhood."

Chekhov's mother, on the other hand, was kind but unable to alter the course of the situation at home. When the grocery business failed in 1876, Pavel fled to Moscow to escape an angry creditor. The rest of the family soon followed—all but the sixteen-year-old Anton, who remained behind to appease the creditor by tutoring his son for a pit- tance. Left to fend for himself, Chekhov finished high school in Taganrog, then rejoined the family and enrolled in Moscow University to study medicine.

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