In 1841 a serf belonging to a Russian nobleman purchased his freedom and
the freedom of his family for 3,500 roubles, being at the rate of 700
roubles a soul, with one daughter, Alexandra, thrown in for nothing. The
grandson of this serf was Anton Chekhov, the author; the son of the
nobleman was Tchertkov, the Tolstoyan and friend of Tolstoy.
There is in this nothing striking to a Russian, but to the English student
it is sufficiently significant for several reasons. It illustrates how
recent a growth was the educated middle-class in pre-revolutionary Russia,
and it shows, what is perhaps more significant, the homogeneity of the
Russian people, and their capacity for completely changing their whole way
of life.
Chekhov’s father started life as a slave, but the son of this slave was
even more sensitive to the Arts, more innately civilized and in love with
the things of the mind than the son of the slaveowner. Chekhov’s father,
Pavel Yegorovitch, had a passion for music and singing; while he was still
a serf boy he learned to read music at sight and to play the violin. A few
years after his freedom had been purchased he settled at Taganrog, a town
on the Sea of Azov, where he afterwards opened a “Colonial Stores.”
This business did well until the construction of the railway to
Vladikavkaz, which greatly diminished the importance of Taganrog as a port
and a trading centre. But Pavel Yegorovitch was always inclined to neglect
his business. He took an active part in all the affairs of the town,
devoted himself to church singing, conducted the choir, played on the
violin, and painted ikons.
In 1854 he married Yevgenia Yakovlevna Morozov, the daughter of a cloth
merchant of fairly good education who had settled down at Taganrog after a
life spent in travelling about Russia in the course of his business.
There were six children, five of whom were boys, Anton being the third son.
The family was an ordinary patriarchal household of the kind common at that
time. The father was severe, and in exceptional cases even went so far as
to chastise his children, but they all lived on warm and affectionate
terms. Everyone got up early, the boys went to the high school, and when
they returned learned their lessons. All of them had their hobbies. The
eldest, Alexandr, would construct an electric battery, Nikolay used to
draw, Ivan to bind books, while Anton was always writing stories. In the
evening, when their father came home from the shop, there was choral
singing or a duet.
Pavel Yegorovitch trained his children into a regular choir, taught them to
sing music at sight, and play on the violin, while at one time they had a
music teacher for the piano too. There was also a French governess who came
to teach the children languages. Every Saturday the whole family went to
the evening service, and on their return sang hymns and burned incense. On
Sunday morning they went to early mass, after which they all sang hymns in
chorus at home. Anton had to learn the whole church service by heart and
sing it over with his brothers.
The chief characteristic distinguishing the Chekhov family from their
neighbours was their habit of singing and having religious services at
home.
Though the boys had often to take their father’s place in the shop, they
had leisure enough to enjoy themselves. They sometimes went for whole days
to the sea fishing, played Russian tennis, and went for excursions to their
grandfather’s in the country. Anton was a sturdy, lively boy, extremely
intelligent, and inexhaustible in jokes and enterprises of all kinds. He
used to get up lectures and performances, and was always acting and
mimicking. As children, the brothers got up a performance of Gogol’s
“Inspector General,” in which Anton took the part of Gorodnitchy. One of
Anton’s favourite improvisations was a scene in which the Governor of the
town attended church parade at a festival and stood in the centre of the
church, on a rug surrounded by foreign consuls. Anton, dressed in his
high-school uniform, with his grandfather’s old sabre coming to his
shoulder, used to act the part of the Governor with extraordinary subtlety
and carry out a review of imaginary Cossacks. Often the children would
gather round their mother or their old nurse to hear stories.
Chekhov’s story “Happiness” was written under the influence of one of his
nurse’s tales, which were always of the mysterious, of the extraordinary,
of the terrible, and poetical.
Their mother, on the other hand, told the children stories of real life,
describing how she had travelled all over Russia as a little girl, how the
Allies had bombarded Taganrog during the Crimean War, and how hard life had
been for the peasants in the days of serfdom. She instilled into her
children a hatred of brutality and a feeling of regard for all who were in
an inferior position, and for birds and animals.
Chekhov in later years used to say: “Our talents we got from our father,
but our soul from our mother.”
In 1875 the two elder boys went to Moscow.
After their departure the business went from bad to worse, and the family
sank into poverty.
In 1876 Pavel Yegorovitch closed his shop, and went to join his sons in
Moscow. While earning their own living, one was a student at the
University, and the other a student at the School of Sculpture and
Painting. The house was sold by auction, one of the creditors took all the
furniture, and Chekhov’s mother was left with nothing. Some months
afterwards she went to rejoin her husband in Moscow, taking the younger
children with her, while Anton, who was then sixteen, lived on in solitude
at Taganrog for three whole years, earning his own living, and paying for
his education at the high school.
He lived in the house that had been his father’s, in the family of one
Selivanov, the creditor who had bought it, and gave lessons to the latter’s
nephew, a Cossack. He went with his pupil to the latter’s house in the
country, and learned to ride and shoot. During the last two years he was
very fond of the society of the high-school girls, and used to tell his
brothers that he had had the most delightful flirtations.
At the same time he went frequently to the theatre and was very fond of
French melodramas, so that he was by no means crushed by his early struggle
for existence. In 1879 he went to Moscow to enter the University, bringing
with him two school-fellows who boarded with his family. He found his
father had just succeeded in getting work away from home, so that from the
first day of his arrival he found himself head of the family, every member
of which had to work for their common livelihood. Even little Mihail used
to copy out lectures for students, and so made a little money. It was the
absolute necessity of earning money to pay for his fees at the University
and to help in supporting the household that forced Anton to write. That
winter he wrote his first published story, “A Letter to a Learned
Neighbour.” All the members of the family were closely bound together round
one common centre--Anton. “What will Anton say?” was always their uppermost
thought on every occasion.
Ivan soon became the master of the parish school at Voskresensk, a little
town in the Moscow province. Living was cheap there, so the other members
of the family spent the summer there; they were joined by Anton when he had
taken his degree, and the Chekhovs soon had a large circle of friends in
the neighbourhood. Every day the company met, went long walks, played
croquet, discussed politics, read aloud, and went into raptures over
Shtchedrin. Here Chekhov gained an insight into military society which he
afterwards turned to account in his play “The Three Sisters.”
One day a young doctor called Uspensky came in from Zvenigorod, a small
town fourteen miles away. “Look here,” he said to Chekhov, “I am going away
for a holiday and can’t find anyone to take my place.... You take the job
on. My Pelageya will cook for you, and there is a guitar there....”
Voskresensk and Zvenigorod played an important part in Chekhov’s life as a
writer; a whole series of his tales is founded on his experiences there,
besides which it was his first introduction to the society of literary and
artistic people. Three or four miles from Voskresensk was the estate of a
landowner, A. S. Kiselyov, whose wife was the daughter of Begitchev, the
director of the Moscow Imperial Theatre. The Chekhovs made the acquaintance
of the Kiselyovs, and spent three summers in succession on their estate,
Babkino.
The Kiselyovs were musical and cultivated people, and intimate friends of
Dargomyzhsky, Tchaykovsky the composer, and the Italian actor Salvini.
Madame Kiselyov was passionately fond of fishing, and would spend hours at
a time sitting on the river bank with Anton, fishing and talking about
literature. She was herself a writer. Chekhov was always playing with the
Kiselyov children and running about the old park with them. The people he
met, the huntsman, the gardener, the carpenters, the sick women who came to
him for treatment, and the place itself, river, forests, nightingales--all
provided Chekhov with subjects to write about and put him in the mood for
writing. He always got up early and began writing by seven o’clock in the
morning. After lunch the whole party set off to look for mushrooms in the
woods. Anton was fond of looking for mushrooms, and said it stimulated the
imagination. At this time he was always talking nonsense.
Levitan, the painter, lived in the neighbourhood, and Chekhov and he
dressed up, blacked their faces and put on turbans. Levitan then rode off
on a donkey through the fields, where Anton suddenly sprang out of the
bushes with a gun and began firing blank cartridges at him.
In 1886 Chekhov suffered for the second time from an attack of spitting
blood. There is no doubt that consumption was developing, but apparently he
refused to believe this himself. He went on being as gay as ever, though he
slept badly and often had terrible dreams. It was one of these dreams that
suggested the subject of his story “The Black Monk.”
That year he began to write for the _Novoye Vremya_, which made a special
feature of his work. Under the influence of letters from Grigorovitch, who
was the first person to appreciate his talent, Chekhov began to take his
writing more seriously.
In 1887 he visited the south of Russia and stayed at the Holy Mountains,
which gave him the subjects of two of his stories, “Easter Eve” and
“Uprooted.” In the autumn of that year he was asked by Korsh, a theatrical
manager who knew him as a humorous writer, to write something for his
theatre. Chekhov sat down and wrote “Ivanov” in a fortnight, sending off
every act for rehearsal as it was completed.
By this time he had won a certain amount of recognition, everyone was
talking of him, and there was consequently great curiosity about his new
play. The performance was, however, only partially a success; the audience,
divided into two parties, hissed vigorously and clapped noisily. For a long
time afterwards the newspapers were full of discussions of the character
and personality of the hero, while the novelty of the dramatic method
attracted great attention.
In January, 1889, the play was performed at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in
Petersburg and the controversy broke out again.
“Ivanov” was the turning-point in Chekhov’s mental development, and
literary career. He took up his position definitely as a writer, though his
brass plate continued to hang on the door. Shortly after writing “Ivanov,”
he wrote a one-act play called “The Bear.” The following season Solovtsev,
who had taken the chief character in “The Bear,” opened a theatre of his
own in Moscow, which was not at first a success. He appealed to Chekhov to
save him with a play for Christmas, which was only ten days off. Chekhov
set to work and wrote an act every day. The play was produced in time, but
the author was never satisfied with it, and after a short, very successful
run took it off the stage. Several years later he completely remodelled it
and produced it as “Uncle Vanya” at the Art Theatre in Moscow. At this time
he was writing a long novel, of which he often dreamed aloud, and which he
liked to talk about. He was for several years writing at this novel, but no
doubt finally destroyed it, as no trace of it could be found after his
death. He wanted it to embody his views on life, opinions which he
expressed in a letter to Plestcheyev in these words:
“I am not a Liberal, not a Conservative.... I should have liked to have
been a free artist and nothing more--and I regret that God has not given me
the strength to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms--the
most absolute freedom, freedom from force and fraud in whatever form the
two latter may be expressed, that is the programme I would hold to if I
were a great artist.”
At this time he was always gay and insisted on having people round him
while he worked. His little house in Moscow, which “looked like a chest of
drawers,” was a centre to which people, and especially young people,
flocked in swarms. Upstairs they played the piano, a hired one, while
downstairs he sat writing through it all. “I positively can’t live without
visitors,” he wrote to Suvorin; “when I am alone, for some reason I am
frightened.” This gay life which seemed so full of promise was, however,
interrupted by violent fits of coughing. He tried to persuade other people,
and perhaps himself, that it was not serious, and he would not consent to
be properly examined. He was sometimes so weak from haemorrhage that he
could see no one, but as soon as the attack was over his mood changed, the
doors were thrown open, visitors arrived, there was music again, and
Chekhov was once more in the wildest spirits.
The summers of those two years, 1888 and 1889, he spent with his family in
a summer villa at Luka, in the province of Harkov. He was in ecstasies
beforehand over the deep, broad river, full of fish and crayfish, the pond
full of carp, the woods, the old garden, and the abundance of young ladies.
His expectations were fulfilled in every particular, and he had all the
fishing and musical society he could wish for. Soon after his arrival
Plestcheyev came to stay with him on a month’s visit.
He was an old man in feeble health, but attractive to everyone. Young
ladies in particular were immediately fascinated by him. He used to compose
his works aloud, sometimes shouting at the top of his voice, so that
Chekhov would run in and ask him if he wanted anything. Then the old man
would give a sweet and guilty smile and go on with his work. Chekhov was in
constant anxiety about the old man’s health, as he was very fond of cakes
and pastry, and Chekhov’s mother used to regale him on them to such an
extent that Anton was constantly having to give him medicine. Afterwards
Suvorin, the editor of _Novoye Vremya_, came to stay. Chekhov and he used
to paddle in a canoe, hollowed out of a tree, to an old mill, where they
would spend hours fishing and talking about literature.
Both the grandsons of serfs, both cultivated and talented men, they were
greatly attracted by each other. Their friendship lasted for several years,
and on account of Suvorin’s reactionary opinions, exposed Chekhov to a
great deal of criticism in Russia. Chekhov’s feelings for Suvorin began to
change at the time of the Dreyfus case, but he never broke entirely with
him. Suvorin’s feelings for Chekhov remained unchanged.
In the spring of 1889 his brother Nikolay, the artist, fell ill with
consumption, and his illness occupied Anton entirely, and completely
prevented his working. That summer Nikolay died, and it was under the
influence of this, his first great sorrow, that Chekhov wrote “A Dreary
Story.” For several months after the death of his brother he was extremely
restless and depressed.
In 1890 his younger brother Mihail was taking his degree in law at Moscow,
and studying treatises on the management of prisons. Chekhov got hold of
them, became intensely interested in prisons, and resolved to visit the
penal settlement of Sahalin. He made up his mind to go to the Far East so
unexpectedly that it was difficult for his family to believe that he was in
earnest.
He was afraid that after Kennan’s revelations about the penal system in
Siberia, he would, as a writer, be refused permission to visit the prisons
in Sahalin, and therefore tried to get a free pass from the head of the
prison administration, Galkin-Vrasskoy. When this proved fruitless he set
off in April, 1890, with no credentials but his card as a newspaper
correspondent.
The Siberian railway did not then exist, and only after great hardships,
being held up by floods and by the impassable state of the roads, Chekhov
succeeded in reaching Sahalin on the 11th of July, having driven nearly
3,000 miles. He stayed three months on the island, traversed it from north
to south, made a census of the population, talked to every one of the ten
thousand convicts, and made a careful study of the convict system.
Apparently the chief reason for all this was the consciousness that “We
have destroyed millions of men in prisons.... It is not the superintendents
of the prisons who are to blame, but all of us.” In Russia it was not
possible to be a “free artist and nothing more.”
Chekhov left Sahalin in October and returned to Europe by way of India and
the Suez Canal. He wanted to visit Japan, but the steamer was not allowed
to put in at the port on account of cholera.
In the Indian Ocean he used to bathe by diving off the forecastle deck when
the steamer was going at full speed, and catching a rope which was let down
from the stern. Once while he was doing this he saw a shark and a shoal of
pilot fish close to him in the water, as he describes in his story “Gusev.”
The fruits of this journey were a series of articles in _Russkaya Myssl_
on the island of Sahalin, and two short stories, “Gusev” and “In Exile.”
His articles on Sahalin were looked on with a favourable eye in Petersburg,
and, who knows, it is possible that the reforms which followed in regard to
penal servitude and exile would not have taken place but for their
influence.
After about a month in Moscow, Chekhov went to Petersburg to see Suvorin.
The majority of his Petersburg friends and admirers met him with feelings
of envy and ill-will. People gave dinners in his honour and praised him to
the skies, but at the same time they were ready to “tear him to pieces.”
Even in Moscow such people did not give him a moment for work or rest. He
was so prostrated by the feeling of hostility surrounding him that he
accepted an invitation from Suvorin to go abroad with him. When Chekhov had
completed arrangements for equipping the Sahalin schools with the necessary
books, they set off for the South of Europe. Vienna delighted him, and
Venice surpassed all his expectations and threw him into a state of
childlike ecstasy.
Everything fascinated him--and then there was a change in the weather and a
steady downpour of rain. Chekhov’s spirits drooped. Venice was damp and
seemed horrible, and he longed to escape from it.
He had had just such a change of mood in Singapore, which interested him
immensely and suddenly filled him with such misery that he wanted to cry.
After Venice Chekhov did not get the pleasure he expected from any Italian
town. Florence did not attract him; the sun was not shining. Rome gave him
the impression of a provincial town. He was feeling exhausted, and to add
to his depression he had got into debt, and had the prospect of spending
the summer without any money at all.
Travelling with Suvorin, who did not stint himself, drew him into spending
more than he intended, and he owed Suvorin a sum which was further
increased at Monte Carlo by Chekhov’s losing nine hundred roubles at
roulette. But this loss was a blessing to him in so far as, for some
reason, it made him feel satisfied with himself. At the end of April, 1891,
after a stay in Paris, Chekhov returned to Moscow. Except at Vienna and for
the first days in Venice and at Nice, it had rained the whole time. On his
return he had to work extremely hard to pay for his two tours. His brother
Mihail was at this time inspector of taxes at Alexino, and Chekhov and his
household spent the summer not far from that town in the province of
Kaluga, so as to be near him. They took a house dating from the days of
Catherine. Chekhov’s mother had to sit down and rest halfway when she
crossed the hall, the rooms were so large. He liked the place with its
endless avenues of lime-trees and poetical river, while fishing and
gathering mushrooms soothed him and put him in the mood for work. Here he
went on with his story “The Duel,” which he had begun before going abroad.
From the windows there was the view of an old house which Chekhov described
in “An Artist’s Story,” and which he was very eager to buy. Indeed from
this time he began thinking of buying a country place of his own, not in
Little Russia, but in Central Russia. Petersburg seemed to him more and
more idle, cold and egoistic, and he had lost all faith in his Petersburg
acquaintances. On the other hand, Moscow no longer seemed to him as before
“like a cook,” and he grew to love it. He grew fond of its climate, its
people and its bells. He always delighted in bells. Sometimes in earlier
days he had gathered together a party of friends and gone with them to
Kamenny Bridge to listen to the Easter bells. After eagerly listening to
them he would set off to wander from church to church, and with his legs
giving way under him from fatigue would, only when Easter night was over,
make his way homewards. Meanwhile his father, who was fond of staying till
the end of the service, would return from the parish church, and all the
brothers would sing “Christ is risen” in chorus, and then they all sat down
to break their fast. Chekhov never spent an Easter night in bed.
Meanwhile in the spring of 1892 there began to be fears about the crops.
These apprehensions were soon confirmed. An unfortunate summer was followed
by a hard autumn and winter, in which many districts were famine-stricken.
Side by side with the Government relief of the starving population there
was a widespread movement for organizing relief, in which various societies
and private persons took part. Chekhov naturally was drawn into this
movement. The provinces of Nizhni-Novogorod and Voronezh were in the
greatest distress, and in the former of these two provinces, Yegorov, an
old friend of Chekhov’s Voskresensk days, was a district captain (Zemsky
Natchalnik). Chekhov wrote to Yegorov, got up a subscription fund among his
acquaintance, and finally set off himself for Nizhni-Novogorod. As the
starving peasants were selling their horses and cattle for next to nothing,
or even slaughtering them for food, it was feared that as spring came on
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
to bed even earlier than in the summer, but Chekhov would wake up at one in
the morning, sit down to his work and then go back to bed and sleep again.
At six o’clock in the morning all the household was up. Chekhov wrote a
great deal that winter. But as soon as visitors arrived, life was
completely transformed. There was singing, playing on the piano, laughter.
Chekhov’s mother did her utmost to load the tables with dainties; his
father with a mysterious air would produce various specially prepared
cordials and liqueurs from some hidden recess; and then it seemed that
Melihovo had something of its own, peculiar to it, which could be found in
no other country estate. Chekhov was always particularly pleased at the
visits of Miss Mizinov and of Potapenko. He was particularly fond of them,
and his whole family rejoiced at their arrival. They stayed up long after
midnight on such days, and Chekhov wrote only by snatches. And every time
he wrote five or six lines, he would get up again and go back to his
visitors.
“I have written sixty kopecks’ worth,” he would say with a smile.
Braga’s “Serenade” was the fashion at that time, and Chekhov was fond of
hearing Potapenko play it on the violin while Miss Mizinov sang it.
Having been a student at the Moscow University, Chekhov liked to celebrate
St. Tatyana’s Day. He never missed making a holiday of it when he lived in
Moscow. That winter, for the first time, he chanced to be in Petersburg on
the 12th of January. He did not forget “St. Tatyana,” and assembled all his
literary friends on that day in a Petersburg restaurant. They made speeches
and kept the holiday, and this festivity initiated by him was so successful
that the authors went on meeting regularly afterwards.
Though Melihovo was his permanent home, Chekhov often paid visits to Moscow
and Petersburg. He frequently stayed at hotels, and there he sometimes had
difficulties over his passport. As a landowner he had no need of
credentials from the police in the Serpuhov district, and found his
University diploma sufficient. In Petersburg and Moscow, under the old
passport regulations they would not give him a passport because he resided
permanently in the provinces. Misunderstandings arose, sometimes developing
into disagreeable incidents and compelling Chekhov to return home earlier
than he had intended. Someone suggested to Chekhov that he should enter the
Government service and immediately retire from it, as retired officials
used at that time to receive a permanent passport from the department in
which they had served. Chekhov sent a petition to the Department of
Medicine for a post to be assigned to him, and received an appointment as
an extra junior medical clerk in that Department, and soon afterwards sent
in his resignation, after which he had no more trouble.
Chekhov spent the whole spring of 1893 at Melihovo, planted roses, looked
after his fruit-trees, and was enthusiastic over country life. That summer
Melihovo was especially crowded with visitors. Chekhov was visited not only
by his friends, but also by people whose acquaintance he neither sought nor
desired. People were sleeping on sofas and several in a room; some even
spent the night in the passage. Young ladies, authors, local doctors,
members of the Zemstvo, distant relations with their sons--all these people
flitted through Melihovo. Life was a continual whirl, everyone was gay;
this rush of visitors and the everlasting readiness of Chekhov’s mother to
regale them with food and drink seemed like a return to the good old times
of country life in the past. Chekhov was the centre on which all attention
was concentrated. Everyone sought him, lived in him, and caught up every
word he uttered. When he was with friends he liked taking walks or making
expeditions to the neighbouring monastery. The chaise, the cart, and the
racing droshky were brought out. Chekhov put on his white tunic, buckled a
strap round his waist, and got on the racing droshky. A young lady would
sit sideways behind him, holding on to the strap. The white tunic and strap
used to make Chekhov call himself an Hussar. The party would set off; the
“Hussar” in the racing droshky would lead the way, and then came the cart
and the chaise full of visitors.
The numbers of guests necessitated more building, as the house would not
contain them all. Instead of a farm, new buildings close to the house
itself were begun. Some of the farm buildings were pulled down, others were
put up after Chekhov’s own plans. A new cattle yard made its appearance,
and by it a hut with a well and a hurdle fence in the Little Russian style,
a bathhouse, a barn, and finally Chekhov’s dream--a lodge. It was a little
house with three tiny rooms, in one of which a bedstead was put with
difficulty, and in another a writing-table. At first this lodge was
intended only for visitors, but afterwards Chekhov moved into it and there
he wrote his “Seagull.” This little lodge was built among the fruit-bushes,
and to reach it one had to pass through the orchard. In spring, when the
apples and cherries were in blossom, it was pleasant to live in this lodge,
but in winter it was so buried in the snow that pathways had to be cut to
it through drifts as high as a man.
Chekhov suffered terribly about this time from his cough. It troubled him
particularly in the morning. But he made light of it. He was afraid of
worrying his family. His younger brother once saw his handkerchief
spattered with blood, and asked what it meant. Chekhov seemed disconcerted
and said:
“Oh, nothing; it is no matter.... Don’t tell Masha and Mother.”
The cough was the reason for Chekhov’s going in 1894 to the Crimea. He
stayed in Yalta, though he evidently did not like it and longed to be home.
Chekhov’s activity in the campaign against the cholera resulted in his
being elected a member of the Zemstvo. He was keenly interested in
everything to do with the new roads to be constructed, and the new
hospitals and schools it was intended to open. Besides this public work the
neighbourhood was indebted to him for the making of a highroad from the
station of Lopasnya to Melihovo, and for the building of schools at Talezh,
Novoselka, and Melihovo. He made the plans for these schools himself,
bought the material, and superintended the building of them. When he talked
about them his eyes kindled, and it was evident that if he had had the
means he would have built, not three, but a multitude.
At the opening of the school at Novoselka, the peasants brought him the
ikon and offered him bread and salt. Chekhov was much embarrassed in
responding to their gratitude, but his face and his shining eyes showed
that he was pleased. Besides the schools he built a fire-station for the
village and a belfry for the church, and ordered a cross made of
looking-glass for the cupola, the flash of which in the sun or moonlight
was visible more than eight miles away.
Chekhov spent the year 1894 at Melihovo, began writing “The Seagull,” and
did a great deal of work. He paid a visit to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana,
and returned enchanted with the old man and his family. Chekhov was already
changing; he looked haggard, older, sallower. He coughed, he was tortured
by intestinal trouble. Evidently he was now aware of the gravity of his
illness, but, as before, made no complaint and tried to hide it from
others.
In 1896 “The Seagull” was performed at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in
Petersburg. It was a fiasco. The actors did not know their parts; in the
theatre there was “a strained condition of boredom and bewilderment.” The
notices in the press were prejudiced and stupid. Not wishing to see or meet
anyone, Chekhov kept out of sight after the performance, and by next
morning was in the train on his way back to Melihovo. The subsequent
performances of “The Seagull,” when the actors understood it, were
successful.
Chekhov had collected a large number of books, and in 1896 he resolved to
present them to the public library in his native town of Taganrog. Whole
bales of books were sent by Chekhov from Petersburg and Moscow, and
Iordanov, the mayor of Taganrog, sent him lists of the books needed. At the
same time, at Chekhov’s suggestion, something like an Information Bureau
was instituted in connection with the Taganrog Library. There were to be
catalogues of all the important commercial firms, all the existing
regulations and government enactments on all current questions, everything,
in fact, which might be of immediate service to a reader in any practical
difficulty. The library at Taganrog has now developed into a fine
educational institution, and is lodged in a special building designed and
equipped for it and dedicated to the memory of Chekhov.
Chekhov took an active interest in the census of the people in 1896. It
will be remembered that he had made a census of the whole convict
population of the island of Sahalin on his own initiative and at his own
expense in 1890. Now he was taking part in a census again. He studied
peasant life in all its aspects; he was on intimate terms with his peasant
neighbours, to whom he was now indispensable as a doctor and a friend
always ready to give them good counsel.
Just before the census was completed Chekhov was taken ill with influenza,
but that did not prevent his carrying out his duties. In spite of headache,
he went from hut to hut and village to village, and then had to work at
putting together his materials. He was absolutely alone in his work. The
Zemsky Natchalniks, upon whom the government relied principally to carry
out the census, were inert, and for the most part the work was left to
private initiative.
In February, 1897, Chekhov was completely engrossed by a project of
building a “People’s Palace” in Moscow. “People’s Palaces” had not been
thought of; the common people spent their leisure in drink-shops. The
“People’s Palace” in Moscow was designed on broad principles; there was to
be a library, a reading-room, lecture-rooms, a museum, a theatre. It was
proposed to run it by a company of shareholders with a capital of half a
million roubles. Owing to various causes in no way connected with Chekhov,
this scheme came to nothing.
In March he paid a visit to Moscow, where Suvorin was expecting him. He had
hardly sat down to dinner at The Hermitage when he had a sudden haemorrhage
from the lungs. He was taken to a private hospital, where he remained till
the 10th of April. When his sister, who knew nothing of his illness,
arrived in Moscow, she was met by her brother Ivany who gave her a card of
admission to visit the invalid at the hospital. On the card were the words:
“Please don’t tell father or mother.” His sister went to the hospital.
There casting a casual glance at a little table, she saw on it a diagram of
the lungs, in which the upper part of the left lung was marked with a red
pencil. She guessed at once that this was what was affected in Chekhov’s
case. This and the sight of her brother alarmed her. Chekhov, who had
always been so gay, so full of spirits and vitality, looked terribly ill;
he was forbidden to move or to talk, and had hardly the strength to do so.
He was declared to be suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs, and it was
essential to try and ward it off at all costs, and to escape the
unwholesome northern spring. He recognized himself that this was essential.
When he left the hospital he returned to Melihovo and prepared to go
abroad. He went first to Biarritz, but there he was met by bad weather. A
fashionable, extravagant way of living did not suit his tastes, and
although he was delighted with the sea and the life led (especially by the
children) on the beach, he soon moved on to Nice. Here he stayed for a
considerable time at the Pension Russe in the Rue Gounod. He seemed to be
fully satisfied with the life there. He liked the warmth and the people he
met, M. Kovalevsky, V. M. Sobolesky, V. T. Nemirovitch-Dantchenko, the
artist V. T. Yakobi and I. N. Potapenko. Prince A. I. Sumbatov arrived at
Nice too, and Chekhov used sometimes to go with him to Monte Carlo to
roulette.
Chekhov followed all that he had left behind in Russia with keen attention:
he was anxious about the _Chronicle of Surgery_, which he had more than
once saved from ruin, made arrangements about Melihovo, and so on.
He spent the autumn and winter in Nice, and in February, 1898, meant to go
to Africa. He wanted to visit Algiers and Tunis, but Kovalevsky, with whom
he meant to travel, fell ill, and he had to give up the project. He
contemplated a visit to Corsica, but did not carry out that plan either, as
he was taken seriously ill himself. A wretched dentist used contaminated
forceps in extracting a tooth, and Chekhov was attacked by periostitis in a
malignant form. In his own words, “he was in such pain that he climbed up
the wall.”
As soon as the spring had come he felt an irresistible yearning for Russia.
He was weary of enforced idleness; he missed the snow and the Russian
country, and at the same time he was depressed at having gained no weight
in spite of the climate, good nourishment, and idleness.
While he was at Nice France was in the throes of the Dreyfus affair.
Chekhov began studying the Dreyfus and Zola cases from shorthand notes, and
becoming convinced of the innocence of both, wrote a heated letter to
Suvorin, which led to a coolness between them.
He spent March, 1898, in Paris. He sent three hundred and nineteen volumes
of French literature from Paris to the public library at Taganrog.
The lateness of the spring in Russia forced Chekhov to remain in Paris till
May, when he returned to Melihovo. Melihovo became gay and lively on his
arrival. Visitors began coming again; he was as hospitable as ever, but he
was quieter, no longer jested as in the past, and perhaps owing to his
illness talked little. But he still took as much pleasure in his roses.
After a comparatively good summer there came days of continual rain, and on
the 14th of September Chekhov went away to Yalta. He had to choose between
Nice and Yalta. He did not want to go abroad, and preferred the Crimea,
reckoning that he might possibly seize an opportunity to pay a brief visit
to Moscow, where his plays were to appear at the Art Theatre. His choice
did not disappoint him. That autumn in Yalta was splendid; he felt well
there, and the progress of his disease led him to settle in Yalta
permanently.
Chekhov obtained a piece of land at Autka, and the same autumn began
building. He spent whole days superintending the building. Stone and
plaster was brought, Turks and Tatars dug the ground and laid the
foundation, while he planted little trees and watched with fatherly anxiety
every new shoot on them. Every stone, every tree there is eloquent of
Chekhov’s creative energy. That same autumn he bought the little property
of Kutchuka. It was twenty-four miles from Yalta, and attracted him by its
wildness and primitive beauty. To reach it one had to drive along the road
at a giddy height. He began once more dreaming and drawing plans. The
possible future began to take a different shape to him now, and he was
already dreaming of moving from Melihovo, farming and gardening and living
there as in the country. He wanted to have hens, cows, a horse and donkeys,
and, of course, all of this would have been quite possible and might have
been realized if he had not been slowly dying. His dreams remained dreams,
and Kutchuka stands uninhabited to this day.
The winter of 1898 was extremely severe in the Crimea. The cold, the snow,
the stormy sea, and the complete lack of people akin to him in spirit and
of “interesting women” wearied Chekhov; he began to be depressed. He was
irresistibly drawn to the north, and began to fancy that if he moved for
the winter to Moscow, where his plays were being acted with such success
and where everything was so full of interest for him, it would be no worse
for his health than staying in Yalta, and he began dreaming of buying a
house in Moscow. He wanted at one moment to get something small and snug in
the neighbourhood of Kursk Station, where it might be possible to stay the
three winter months in every comfort; but when such a house was found his
mood changed and he resigned himself to life at Yalta.
The January and February of 1899 were particularly irksome to Chekhov: he
suffered from an intestinal trouble which poisoned his existence. Moreover
consumptive patients from all over Russia began appealing to him to assist
them to come to Yalta. These invalids were almost always poor, and on
reaching Yalta mostly ended their lives in miserable conditions, pining for
their native place. Chekhov exerted himself on behalf of everyone, printed
appeals in the papers, collected money, and did his utmost to alleviate
their condition.
After the unfavourable winter came an exquisite warm spring, and on the
12th of April Chekhov was in Moscow and by May in Melihovo. His father had
died the previous October, and with his death a great link with the place
was broken. The consciousness of having to go away early in the autumn
gradually brought Chekhov to decide to sell the place.
On the 25th of August he went back to his own villa at Yalta, and soon
afterwards Melihovo was sold, and his mother and sister joined him. During
the last four and a half years of his life Chekhov’s health grew rapidly
worse. His chief interest was centred in Moscow, in the Art Theatre, which
had just been started, and the greater part of his dramatic work was done
during this period.
Chekhov was ill all the winter of 1900, and only felt better towards the
spring. During those long winter months he wrote “In the Ravine.” The
detestable spring of that year affected his mood and his health even more.
Snow fell on the 5th of March, and this had a shattering effect on him. In
April he was again very ill. An attack of intestinal trouble prevented him
from eating, drinking, or working. As soon as it was over Chekhov, homesick
for the north, set off for Moscow, but there he was met by severe weather.
Returning in August to Yalta, he wrote “The Three Sisters.”
He spent the autumn in Moscow, and at the beginning of December went to the
French Riviera, settled in Nice, and dreamed again of a visit to Africa,
but went instead to Rome. Here, as usual, he met with severe weather. Early
in February he returned to Yalta. That year there was a soft, sunny spring.
Chekhov spent whole days in the open air, engaged in his favourite
occupations; he planted and pruned trees, looked after his garden, ordered
all sorts of seeds, and watched them coming up. At the same time he was
working on behalf of the invalids coming to Yalta, who appealed to him for
help, and also completing the library he had founded at Taganrog, and
planning to open a picture gallery there.
In May, 1901, Chekhov went to Moscow and was thoroughly examined by a
physician, who urged him to go at once to Switzerland or to take a koumiss
cure. Chekhov preferred the latter.
On the 25th of May he married Olga Knipper, one of the leading actresses at
the Art Theatre, and with her went off to the province of Ufa for the
koumiss cure. On the way they had to wait twenty-four hours for a steamer,
in very unpleasant surroundings, at a place called Pyany Bor (“Drunken
Market”), in the province of Vyatka.
In the autumn of 1901 Tolstoy was staying, for the sake of his health, at
Gaspra. Chekhov was very fond of him and frequently visited him. Altogether
that autumn was an eventful one for him: Kuprin, Bunin and Gorky visited
the Crimea; the writer Elpatyevsky settled there also, and Chekhov felt
fairly well. Tolstoy’s illness was the centre of general attention, and
Chekhov was very uneasy about him.
In 1902 there was suddenly a change for the worse: violent haemorrhage
exhausted him till the beginning of February; he was for over a month
confined to his study. It was at this time that the incident of Gorky’s
election to the Academy and subsequent expulsion from it led Chekhov to
write a letter to the Royal President of the Academy asking that his own
name should be struck off the list of Academicians.
Chekhov had hardly recovered when his wife was taken seriously ill. When
she was a little better he made a tour by the Volga and the Kama as far as
Perm. On his return he settled with his wife in a summer villa not far from
Moscow; he spent July there and returned home to Yalta in August. But the
longing for a life of movement and culture, the desire to be nearer to the
theatre, drew him to the north again, and in September he was back in
Moscow. Here he was not left in peace for one minute; swarms of visitors
jostled each other from morning till night. Such a life exhausted him; he
ran away from it to Yalta in December, but did not escape it there. His
cough was worse; every day he had a high temperature, and these symptoms
were followed by an attack of pleurisy. He did not get up all through the
Christmas holidays; he still had an agonizing cough, and it was in this
enforced idleness that he thought out his play “The Cherry Orchard.”
It is quite possible that if Chekhov had taken care of himself his disease
would not have developed so rapidly or proved fatal. The feverish energy of
his temperament, his readiness to respond to every impression, and his
thirst for activity, drove him from south to north and hack again,
regardless of his health and of the climate. Like all invalids, he ought to
have gone on living in the same place, at Nice or at Yalta, until he was
better, but he lived exactly as though he had been in good health. When he
arrived in the north he was always excited and absorbed by what was going
on, and this exhilaration he mistook for an improvement in his health; but
he had only to return to Yalta for the reaction to set in, and it would
seem to him at once that his case was hopeless, that the Crimea had no
beneficial effect on consumptives, and that the climate was wretched.
The spring of 1903 passed fairly favourably. He recovered sufficiently to
go to Moscow and even to Petersburg. On returning from Petersburg he began
preparing to go to Switzerland. But his state of health was such that his
doctor in Moscow advised him to give up the idea of Switzerland and even of
Yalta, and to stay somewhere not very far from Moscow. He followed this
advice and settled at Nar. Now that it was proposed that he should stay the
winter in the north, all that he had created in Yalta--his house and his
garden--seemed unnecessary and objectless. In the end he returned to Yalta
and set to work on “The Cherry Orchard.”
In October, 1903, the play was finished and he set off to produce it
himself in Moscow. He spent days at a time in the Art Theatre, producing
his “Cherry Orchard,” and incidentally supervising the setting and
performance of the plays of other authors. He gave advice and criticized,
was excited and enthusiastic.
On the 17th of January, 1904, “The Cherry Orchard” was produced for the
first time. The first performance was the occasion of the celebration of
the twenty-fifth anniversary of Chekhov’s literary activity. A great number
of addresses were read and speeches were made. Chekhov was many times
called before the curtain, and this expression of universal sympathy
exhausted him to such a degree that the very day after the performance he
began to think with relief of going back to Yalta, where he spent the
following spring.
His health was completely shattered, and everyone who saw him secretly
thought the end was not far off; but the nearer Chekhov was to the end, the
less he seemed to realize it. Ill as he was, at the beginning of May he set
off for Moscow. He was terribly ill all the way on the journey, and on
arrival took to his bed at once. He was laid up till June.
On the 3rd of June he set off with his wife for a cure abroad to the Black
Forest, and settled in a little spa called Badenweiler. He was dying,
although he wrote to everyone that he had almost recovered, and that health
was coming back to him not by ounces but by hundredweights. He was dying,
but he spent the time dreaming of going to the Italian lakes and returning
to Yalta by sea from Trieste, and was already making inquiries about the
steamers and the times they stopped at Odessa.
He died on the 2nd of July.
His body was taken to Moscow and buried in the Novodyevitchy Monastery,
beside his father’s tomb.