The Duel

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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 17, 1860, in Taganrog, a small provincial port in southern Russia located on the Sea of Azov. His grandfather had been a serf who for 3,500 roubles had purchased the family’s freedom. Chekhov’s domineering father was a lower-middle-class bigot: a petty merchant who kept a grocery store, bullied his wife, and beat his six children. Although Anton Pavlovich’s early life was monotonous and oppressive (“In my childhood there was no childhood,” the writer recalled), he found his own strange way of compensating for the dismal atmosphere. Possessing a natural gift for clowning and mimicry, the boy delighted schoolmates with hilarious imitations of virtually everyone in the village.

Chekhov was sixteen when the family business failed and his father escaped debtor’s prison by fleeing to Moscow. The young man’s mother and siblings soon followed, but Anton Pavlovich remained behind to complete his education at the Taganrog Secondary School; three years later, in 1879, he joined them in Moscow and entered the medical faculty of Moscow University. During his university years Chekhov became the family’s chief breadwinner: He supported them by writing stories, sketches, and parodies for humor magazines. All his early works were signed with pseudonyms, most frequently “Antosha Chekhonte.” He completed medical school in 1884 and practiced medicine intermittently for several years while continuing to write. “Medicine is my lawful wife,” Chekhov wrote to a friend, “and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity.”

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