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Taganrog, its once-prosperous port, now silted up and neglected, had a population that exceeded fifty thousand during Chekhov's boyhood. Its residents included wealthy Greek families and other Europeans, the ship-building interests. The town benefited from such public amenities of the Tsarist civic system as a pretentious-looking gym­nasium, which the Chekhov boys attended, for one of Pavel's aims was to procure his children the level of education needed for entry into the professions. The upward mobility in the Chekhov generations is reflected in the character of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, a self-made millionaire whose grandfather and father were serfs on the estate he manages to buy. Chekhov's father, born a serf, had risen from meshchanin or petty bourgeois⁴ to be a member of a merchant guild; and Chekhov himself, as a professional physician and writer, became influential on the national scene. He was a model of the raznochinets or person of no settled rank who had begun to dominate Russian society in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

To bar mass advancement, the tsarist curriculum laid great stress on Latin and Greek; one recalls the school­master Kulygin in Three Sisters chuckling over the fate of a friend who missed promotion because he could not master the ut consecutivum construction. Schoolmasters are usually portrayed by Chekhov as narrow, obsequious and deadly to the imagination, no doubt the result of his own experience as he studied the classics, German, Russian and, for a brief time, French. His best subject was Scripture. School days were lightened by the fairy tales of his nanny, the picaresque reminiscences of his mother, vacations spent on the estate his grandfather managed, fishing, swimming, and, later, visits to the theatre.

As a boy, Chekhov was stage-struck. Although it was against school regulations, he and his .classmates fre­quented the gallery, often in false whiskers and dark glasses. Besides attending the active and not inelegant Taganrog Playhouse, Chekhov was the star performer in domestic theatricals, playing comic roles like the Mayor in Gogol's Inspector General and the scribe Chuprun in the Ukrainian folk opera The Military Magician. While still at school, he wrote a drama, called Without Patrimony, and a vaudeville, The Hen Has Good Reason for Clucking. Later, while a medical student, he tried to revise them, even as he completed another farce, The Cleanshaven Secretary and the Pistol, which his younger brother Mikhail recalled as being very funny. It concerned the editing of a sleasy newspaper and featured a double-bed as the major set- piece. Never submitted to the censorship, it is now lost.

By 1876 Pavel Chekhov had so mismanaged his business that, fearing imprisonment for debt, he stole off to the next town, to take the train to Moscow. There his two elder sons were pursuing their studies. He had already stopped paying his dues to the merchant guild and had reverted to the status of meshchanin. Whether Anton suffered a psychic trauma at this loss of caste, as had the young Ibsen when/iw father went bankrupt, is matter for speculation; certainly the repercussions felt at the sale of the home left their trace on many of his plays. Dispossessed of house and furniture, his mother and the three youngest children also departed for Moscow, abandoning him in a home now owned by a friend of his father. He had to support himself by tutoring for the three years needed to complete his course. He did not rejoin his family until Easter 1877, his fare paid by his university student brother Aleksandr; and this first visit to Moscow and its theatres set standards by which he hence­forth judged the quality of life in the provinces. Suddenly, Taganrog began to look narrow and philistine.

Just before Anton Chekhov left Taganrog for good, a public library opened. This enabled him to read classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet, a work he was to cite indefatigably, and, like any Victorian schoolboy, Uncle Tom's Cabin and the adventure stories of Thomas Mayne Reid. Heavier reading included philosophic works that enjoyed a high reputation at the time, such as Buckle's positivist and sceptical survey of European culture, The History of Civilisation in England. Later in life, Chekhov took a wry view of this omnivorous autodidacticism, and had the clumsy bookkeeper Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard read Buckle for self-improvement.