Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
there would be no beasts to plough with, so that the coming year threatened
to be one of famine also.
Chekhov organized a scheme for buying up the horses and feeding them till
the spring at the expense of a relief fund, and then, as soon as field
labour was possible, distributing them among the peasants who were without
horses.
After visiting the province of Nizhni-Novogorod, Chekhov went with Suvorin
to Voronezh. But this expedition was not a successful one. He was revolted
by the ceremonious dinners with which he was welcomed as an author, while
the whole province was suffering from famine. Moreover travelling with
Suvorin tied him down and hindered his independent action. Chekhov longed
for intense personal activity such as he displayed later in his campaign
against the cholera.
In the winter of the same year his long-cherished dream was realized: he
bought himself an estate. It was in the province of Moscow, near the hamlet
of Melihovo. As an estate it had nothing to recommend it but an old, badly
laid out homestead, wastes of land, and a forest that had been felled. It
had been bought on the spur of the moment, simply because it had happened
to turn up. Chekhov had never been to the place before he bought it, and
only visited it when all the formalities had been completed. One could
hardly turn round near the house for the mass of hurdles and fences.
Moreover the Chekhovs moved into it in the winter when it was under snow,
and all boundaries being obliterated, it was impossible to tell what was
theirs and what was not. But in spite of all that, Chekhov’s first
impression was favourable, and he never showed a sign of being
disappointed. He was delighted by the approach of spring and the fresh
surprises that were continually being revealed by the melting snow.
Suddenly it would appear that a whole haystack belonged to him which he had
supposed to be a neighbour’s, then an avenue of lime-trees came to light
which they had not distinguished before under the snow. Everything that was
amiss in the place, everything he did not like, was at once abolished or
altered. But in spite of all the defects of the house and its surroundings,
and the appalling road from the station (nearly nine miles) and the lack of
rooms, so many visitors came that there was nowhere to put them, and beds
had sometimes to be made up in the passages. Chekhov’s household at this
time consisted of his father and mother, his sister, and his younger
brother Mihail. These were all permanent inmates of Melihovo.
As soon as the snow had disappeared the various duties in the house and on
the land were assigned: Chekhov’s sister undertook the flower-beds and the
kitchen garden, his younger brother undertook the field work. Chekhov
himself planted the trees and looked after them. His father worked from
morning till night weeding the paths in the garden and making new ones.
Everything attracted the new landowner: planting the bulbs and watching the
flight of rooks and starlings, sowing the clover, and the goose hatching
out her goslings. By four o’clock in the morning Chekhov was up and about.
After drinking his coffee he would go out into the garden and would spend a
long time scrutinizing every fruit-tree and every rose-bush, now cutting
off a branch, now training a shoot, or he would squat on his heels by a
stump and gaze at something on the ground. It turned out that there was
more land than they needed (639 acres), and they farmed it themselves, with
no bailiff or steward, assisted only by two labourers, Frol and Ivan.
At eleven o’clock Chekhov, who got through a good deal of writing in the
morning, would go into the dining-room and look significantly at the clock.
His mother would jump up from her seat and her sewing-machine and begin to
bustle about, crying: “Oh dear! Antosha wants his dinner!”
When the table was laid there were so many homemade and other dainties
prepared by his mother that there would hardly be space on the table for
them. There was not room to sit at the table either. Besides the five
permanent members of the family there were invariably outsiders as well.
After dinner Chekhov used to go off to his bedroom and lock himself in to
“read.” Between his after-dinner nap and tea-time he wrote again. The time
between tea and supper (at seven o’clock in the evening) was devoted to
walks and outdoor work. At ten o’clock they went to bed. Lights were put
out and all was stillness in the house; the only sound was a subdued
singing and monotonous recitation. This was Pavel Yegorovitch repeating the
evening service in his room: he was religious and liked to say his prayers
aloud.
From the first day that Chekhov moved to Melihovo the sick began flocking
to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in
carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from
early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his
door waiting. He would go out, listen to them and sound them, and would
never let one go away without advice and medicine. His expenditure on drugs
was considerable, as he had to keep a regular store of them. Once some
wayfarers brought Chekhov a man they had picked up by the roadside in the
middle of the night, stabbed in the stomach with a pitchfork. The peasant
was carried into his study and put down in the middle of the floor, and
Chekhov spent a long time looking after him, examining his wounds and
bandaging them up. But what was hardest for Chekhov was visiting the sick
at their own homes: sometimes there was a journey of several hours, and in
this way the time essential for writing was wasted.
The first winter at Melihovo was cold; it lasted late and food was short.
Easter came in the snow. There was a church at Melihovo in which a service
was held only once a year, at Easter. Visitors from Moscow were staying
with Chekhov. The family got up a choir among themselves and sang all the
Easter matins and mass. Pavel Yegorovitch conducted as usual. It was out of
the ordinary and touching, and the peasants were delighted: it warmed their
hearts to their new neighbours.
Then the thaw came. The roads became appalling. There were only three
broken-down horses on the estate and not a wisp of hay. The horses had to
be fed on rye straw chopped up with an axe and sprinkled with flour. One of
the horses was vicious and there was no getting it out of the yard. Another
was stolen in the fields and a dead horse left in its place. And so for a
long time there was only one poor spiritless beast to drive which was
nicknamed Anna Petrovna. This Anna Petrovna contrived to trot to the
station, to take Chekhov to his patients, to haul logs and to eat nothing
but straw sprinkled with flour. But Chekhov and his family did not lose
heart. Always affectionate, gay and plucky, he cheered the others, work
went ahead, and in less than three months everything in the place was
changed: the house was furnished with crockery; there was the ring of
carpenters’ axes; six horses were bought, and all the field work for the
spring had been completed in good time and in accordance with the rules of
agricultural science. They had no experience at all, but bought masses of
books on the management of the land, and every question, however small, was
debated in common.
Their first successes delighted Chekhov. He had thirty acres under rye,
thirty under oats, and fully thirty under hay. Marvels were being done in
the kitchen garden: tomatoes and artichokes did well in the open air. A dry
spring and summer ruined the oats and the rye; the peasants cut the hay in
return for half the crop, and Chekhov’s half seemed a small stack; only in
the kitchen garden things went well.
The position of Melihovo on the highroad and the news that Chekhov the
author had settled there inevitably led to new acquaintances. Doctors and
members of the local Zemstvos began visiting Chekhov; acquaintance was made
with the officials of the district, and Chekhov was elected a member of the
Serpuhov Sanitary Council.
At that time cholera was raging in the South of Russia. Every day it came
nearer and nearer to the province of Moscow, and everywhere it found
favourable conditions among the population weakened by the famine of autumn
and winter. It was essential to take immediate measures for meeting the
cholera, and the Zemstvo of Serpuhov worked its hardest. Chekhov as a
doctor and a member of the Sanitary Council was asked to take charge of a
section. He immediately gave his services for nothing. He had to drive
about among the manufacturers of the district persuading them to take
adequate measures to combat the cholera. Owing to his efforts the whole
section containing twenty-five villages and hamlets was covered with a
network of the necessary institutions. For several months Chekhov scarcely
got out of his chaise. During that time he had to drive all over his
section, receive patients at home, and do his literary work. He returned
home shattered and exhausted, but always behaved as though he were doing
something trivial; he cracked little jokes and made everyone laugh as
before, and carried on conversations with his dachshund, Quinine, about her
supposed sufferings.
By early autumn the place had become unrecognizable. The outhouses had been
rebuilt, unnecessary fences had been removed, rose-trees had been planted,
a flower-bed had been laid out; in the fields before the gates Chekhov was
planning to dig a big new pond. With what interest he watched each day the
progress of the work upon it! He planted trees round it and dropped into it
tiny carp and perch which he brought with him in a jar from Moscow. The
pond became later on more like an ichthyological station than a pond, as
there was no kind of fish in Russia, except the pike, of which Chekhov had
not representatives in this pond. He liked sitting on the dam on its bank
and watching with ecstasy shoals of little fish coming suddenly to the
surface and then hiding in its depths. An excellent well had been dug in
Melihovo before this. Chekhov had been very anxious that it should be in
Little Russian style with a crane. But the position did not allow of this,
and it was made with a big wheel painted yellow like the wells at Russian
railway stations. The question where to dig this well and whether the water
in it would be good greatly interested Chekhov. He wanted exact information
and a theory based on good grounds, seeing that nine-tenths of Russia uses
water out of wells, and has done so since time immemorial; but whenever he
questioned the well-sinkers who came to him, he received the same vague
answer: “Who can tell? It’s in God’s hands. Can you find out beforehand
what the water will be like?”
But the well, like the pond, was a great success, and the water turned out
to be excellent.
He began seriously planning to build a new house and farm buildings.
Creative activity was his passion. He was never satisfied with what he had
ready-made; he longed to make something new. He planted little trees,
raised pines and fir-trees from seed, looked after them as though they were
his children, and, like Colonel Vershinin in his “Three Sisters,” dreamed
as he looked at them of what they would be like in three or four hundred
years.
The winter of 1893 was a severe one with a great deal of snow. The snow was
so high under the windows that the hares who ran into the garden stood on
their hind-legs and looked into the window of Chekhov’s study. The swept
paths in the garden were like deep trenches. By then Chekhov had finished
his work in connection with the cholera and he began to live the life of a
hermit. His sister found employment in Moscow; only his father and mother
were left with him in the house, and the hours seemed very long. They went