Who keeps the tavern and makes the people drunken? A peasant. Who wastes and spends on drink the funds of the commune, of the schools, of the church? A peasant. Who stole from his neighbours, set fire to their property, gave false witness at the court for a bottle of vodka? At the meetings of the Zemstvo and other local bodies, who was the first to fall foul of the peasants? A peasant.
Anton Chekhov, The Russian Master and other stories
[Chekhov] was very hospitable and loved it when people stayed to dinner, and he knew how to treat guests in his own peculiar way, simply and heartily. He would say, standing behind one’s chair: “Listen, have some vodka. When I was young and healthy I loved it. I would pick mushrooms for a whole morning, get tired out, hardly able to reach home, and before lunch I would have two or three thimblefuls. Wonderful!”
Alexander Kuprin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov
The award for the highest number of times vodka occurs in the works of a Russian writer is easily won by Anton Chekhov. As a writer, he was realistic about the ever-present spirit in Russian life, but as a doctor he did not support over-indulgence in it. Of the great 19th-century Russian writers, he had perhaps the most balanced personality, and as a doctor he was sympathetic and generous.
His own life had been difficult. The son of a shopkeeper, he was born in Yalta in the south of Russia in 1860. Chekhov was left behind at sixteen to finish his schooling when his family escaped to Moscow to avoid their creditors. His father was a poor businessman, and when a drowned rat was found in a barrel of either oil or vodka in his store, he simply asked the priest to sprinkle the barrel with holy water to purify it. In any case, Chekhov eventually followed his family to Moscow where he trained as a doctor.
He made more money as a writer than from medicine, first dipping his pen in neat vodka when he was twenty-five. Several Moscow vodka companies were attacking each other’s products in a series of notices in a Moscow newspaper. Chekhov responded in a satirical article that appeared in a magazine published in St. Petersburg called Oskolki, describing the vodka companies as “Satan’s blood makers”, a phrase that would recur in his fiction as “Satan’s blood peddlers”. The previous year, he had defined vodka as “a colourless drink that paints your nose red and blackens your reputation”, a charge feared by Pyotr Smirnov who worried what such publicity would do to the reputation of his own company. Chekhov wrote:
We have no news about the Afghan borders, but we have war in Moscow already… Englishmen are not waging war. Nor Russians. But Satan’s blood makers – the tavern keepers and the vodka makers do it. Casus belli is a competition. Each enemy, trying to prove that his competitors’ vodkas are no bloody good, sends torpedoes toward them and sinks them… Any means are used to pour pepper into the sleeping competitor’s nose, to snooker him, and to hurt his reputation.
Smirnov probably never read the free advertisement for his famous “No.21” vodka that Chekhov awarded to him in a short story called The Duel in which a character is accused of corrupting small town inhabitants whom he:
…taught to drink beer, which was also unknown here, and they are further indebted to him for an acquaintance with the various kinds of vodka, so that blindfolded they can distinguish Koshelev’s vodka from Smirnov No.21.
Smirnov and Widow Popova, the two vodka makers that Chekhov had mentioned in his satirical attack, are amusingly transformed into the names of the two main characters of his farce, The Bear, which tells the story of how Elena Popova becomes a widow. Neither vodka company felt inclined to make use of the free publicity.
As Chekhov was having to support his entire family, which included two alcoholic brothers, his views on vodka were understandable. He wrote in a letter to one of those brothers that an aspect characterising cultured people was that they “do not swill vodka at all hours of the day and night”.
Chekhov gave up drinking vodka in 1891 after a period of depression. As a realist writer, he could not avoid references to vodka in his fiction and plays, and as a doctor he would have treated alcoholic patients. His cruelly compassionate short story, The Peasant, is a full-scale attack on the destructiveness of vodka, but with a sensitive understanding of why the peasant could not function without it. Elsewhere he wrote that:
The Russian is a great pig. If you ask him why he doesn’t eat meat and fish, he justifies himself by the absence of transport, ways and communications, and so on, and yet vodka is to be found in the remotest villages and as much of it as you please. And yet one would have supposed that it would have been much easier to obtain meat and fish than vodka, which is more expensive and more difficult to transport.
Like Tolstoy, he did not allow his personal views to deny the peasants who worked for him their traditional New Year present of a barrel of vodka. A flag flown from his house, bought from the Moscow department store Muir and Mirrielees, let the peasants know that he was at home and was available to give them free treatment and medicine. They would be greeted by his two mongrel dogs, which were named after the department store’s Scottish founders.
One of Chekhov’s most amusing short stories is on the theme of temperance and sees the widow of an alcoholic hosting an annual celebration in his memory, including a meal where all intoxicating liquor is absent.
Having no illusions about his own health and the progression of his tuberculosis, Chekhov understood the significance of a glass of champagne he was given in bed by a doctor in Berlin. The writer’s wife recorded that he drank a full glass before he remarked that he had not drunk champagne for a long time. He then turned on his side and died. His body was brought to Moscow by train in a refrigerated compartment normally used for oysters, a fact that somehow annoyed Gorky but would have amused Chekhov. He would probably not have been flattered that a brand of vodka would later be named after him and would be widely on sale as a “house” vodka in British pubs.
Anton Chekhov