Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  When she returned Anton was gone. He was seeing in the New Year with Suvorin in Petersburg. While Masha faced blizzards in the Ukraine, Anton relaxed for a fortnight. He and Suvorin were up until 4.00 a.m. drinking champagne with the actress Zankovetskaia; in the afternoons they tobogganed down ice mountains. They wanted diversion: they had both spent much of October and November too ill with flu to leave their bedrooms.

  Now Anton’s closest actor-friend, Pavel Svobodin, announced his imminent death:

  Are you sleeping peacefully opposite my windows, across the road, in Suvorin’s house? … What sort of actor am I, when I have, on stage, such attacks of convulsions and spasms in the chest, throat and left elbow that I can’t even call for help? Well sir, and what do I do with three children?9

  Svobodin was not deceived when Anton told him that ‘his disease was trivial.’ Two and a half years had passed since Kolia’s death, and Anton still sought oblivion in selfless work on behalf of the suffering prisoners of Sakhalin. Sakhalin remained a life’s cause: he was despatching books and school programmes there, and contributing a chapter, ‘On Escapees and Tramps’, for charitable publication. Now Anton found a new cause. In central Russia the harvest of 1891 had failed; the government discouraged any intervention. The conservative New Times was one of the first newspapers to call for famine relief. By November peasants were eating grass; terrible hunger was imminent. Anton raised the alarm. Masha’s pupils raised funds. Lika contributed 34 kopecks. Dunia Efros gave a rouble and demanded a receipt. Suvorin, moved by the hunger in Voronezh, his native province, did not blame the peasants for improvidence and even cooperated with rival newspapers. His children contributed their pocket money. Anton, helped by Pavel Svobodin in Petersburg, exacted contributions from friends. (His notebooks show that doctor-friends offered roubles, writers kopecks, while the Writers’ Charitable Fund, with 200,000 roubles capital refused to give the 500 he asked them for.) Petersburg knew of Chekhov’s campaign and marvelled at Suvorin’s involvement in a cause so radical.

  Anton discovered that Lieutenant Evgraf Egorov, Masha’s old admirer, with whom the Chekhov family had quarrelled eight years ago, was now (like Aleksei Kiseliov in Voskresensk and Aleksandr Smagin in Mirgorod) a ‘rural captain’ (a post that gave men enormous power over the peasantry) fighting the famine in Nizhni Novgorod province. Egorov opened soup kitchens for children and devised a practical charity. He used funds to buy horses from the peasants, so that they could buy food and seed-corn. The horses were then kept until spring and sold back on credit, thus saving the animals on which the peasants depended. Egorov welcomed Anton: ‘You shouldn’t even have mentioned our old misunderstanding; such a petty incident cannot break a relationship.’10

  In November, while Anton was too ill to move, he had begun a story ‘The Wife’ (originally entitled ‘In The Country’), in which a doctor, despite the enmity of his estranged wife, devotes his energies to famine relief. He now offered it to The Northern Herald, instead of ‘My Patient’s Story’, which had no hope of passing the censor.11 To the amazement of editor and author, the censor did not alter a word of ‘The Wife’, despite the politically tabu subject of famine. The only shocks were registered by telegraphists as Chekhov and his Petersburg editor decided on the title: ‘Let me leave the wife.’ – ‘All right, leave the wife. Agreed.’ ‘The Wife’ is weak – like other Chekhov stories where a saintly doctor wars with an unprincipled woman, for personal martyrdom sours the altruism, but it achieved more publicity for famine relief than any manifesto.12

  There were uproarious parties in Petersburg. Nobody slept much. After a party on 5/6 January which broke up at six in the morning, Anton was led on foot by his fellow guests all over the freezing city from one cathedral to another to celebrate Epiphany. On 10 January, exhausted, he arrived in Moscow. Four days later, just before the man from the zoo came for Sod, Anton was off in one of the worst winters ever to the wilds of Nizhni Novgorod. He drove through starving villages and was received by the provincial governor. The governor retracted his blame of the peasants for their own misfortune and drove Chekhov to the station on his own horses. A week later Anton was in Moscow, ill with pleurisy, and sick at heart at his discovery that so much of the famine relief was being embezzled.

  Masha had failed to find a country estate. What she dared not at first tell her brother of was a marriage proposal from Aleksandr Smagin on 10 January 1892:

  My desire to be your husband is so strong that neither your love for George Lintvariov nor your negligible affection for me would stop me from fulfilling this desire, assuming you agree to it. The insurmountable obstacle to this desire is my disease [unknown D.R.] … If you don’t believe me I shall write to Anton about my health … And I shall send you his answer. Anyway, sooner or later, I shall tell him about my feelings for you … I am not afraid either of Anton’s judgement – I want it.13

  Anton’s only overt objection to Smagin had been his ‘tragic’ handwriting, no trivial matter to a man who often joked ‘the main thing in life is good handwriting.’ Covertly, however, using arguments that none of the victims ever divulged, Anton took aside every one of Masha’s suitors and dissuaded them. To Masha Anton had only to give a silent look signifying dismay or disapproval for her to reject any man’s proposal.

  Anton was desperate to quit Moscow; he instructed Masha with the help of Misha, now in Moscow, to buy an estate advertised in the Moscow newspapers for sale. It was not in the warm Ukraine but just forty-five miles south of Moscow, six miles over rough roads from a railway station. Too ill to inspect it, Chekhov nevertheless left on 1 February for another famine area. He met Suvorin at the Slav Bazaar. To kill two birds with one stone, he invited Elena Shavrova to join them: she thought Anton ‘in the nicest, most amiable mood, so young and full of the joys of life.’14

  Suvorin was grim and out of his depth in any enterprise so radical as famine relief. Anton was dragging him off to Voronezh, to make the governor adopt Egorov’s horse-buying scheme. They found matters no better than in Nizhni: bread ovens, wheat and fuel were being distributed, but there was no fodder for the horses that were being bought up in order to give the peasants money for seed corn. Suvorin’s sister Zinaida still lived there, and was helping with famine relief, but Suvorin saw no point in his visit. For the first time, he annoyed Anton. Suvorin, Anton told Masha, talked rubbish. (In Petersburg Anton had complained to Shcheglov of ‘the senselessness of Suvorin’s charitable work’.) After a week visiting Suvorin’s (but not Chekhov’s) ancestral villages, they returned north. Suvorin went back to Petersburg.

  By mid February starvation and cold had killed perhaps a million Russian peasants: it was too late for charity. Previously, Anton had played the role of public-spirited landowner, as well as journalist. Now the role was real. Misha had bought on his behalf the estate of Melikhovo. Nearly 600 acres of birch woods and pasture, with a small wooden house and outbuildings in some dilapidation, Melikhovo was priced at 13,000 roubles, of which 5000 had to be paid outright, the rest over ten years. Misha mortgaged the property with the Land Bank, and after his machinations the Chekhovs owed only annual repayments of 300 roubles and 5000 roubles to Suvorin, which new editions of Anton’s books were to pay off. Sullen People was into its third edition, In the Twilight its fifth: Anton’s income reached 1000 roubles a month. Naïvely, the Chekhovs believed that farming 600 acres would be cheaper than renting a flat in Moscow. Pavel expressed his approval to Anton: ‘Your mother wishes her children to buy a country house … God will help in this matter … His holy Will be done.’15 Aleksandr was fired with envy. He proposed settling nearby, for he had new-found prosperity. Prince Sheremetiev had appointed him editor of the fire brigade’s journal The Fireman and installed a telephone in his flat. Anton joked that Aleksandr, as an inveterate bed-wetter, would be good at putting out fires, but Aleksandr was sacked after only three issues of the magazine and his telephone was removed.

  Anton visited his estate – on which rested all his hopes f
or privacy, inspiration, health, and contact with ‘the people’ – only after contracts had been exchanged, on 26 February. A blanket of snow concealed the boundaries, the untilled soil and neglected woodlands. The vendor was unprepossessing: the artist Sorokhtin lived there with his wife, mistress and their ragged children, in what was more like an Australian squatter’s shack than a Russian gentleman’s manor. It crawled with bedbugs and cockroaches. Sorokhtin had put up outbuildings and fences, but farming bored him. He wanted his 5000 roubles in cash, to leave for the warmth of the Crimea and paint. The Chekhovs had signed the papers. On 1 March Pavel, Misha and the baggage moved to Melikhovo. Anton came a few days later.

  Notes

  1 Quoted by Aleksandr in Pis’ma, 1939, 246. Anton used Pavel’s prayer in ‘The Duel’.

  2 See OR, 331 46 33: Anna Ipatieva-Golden’s letter to Anton, 25 Sept. 1891.

  3 See OR, 331 81 25: Pavel’s letters to Mitrofan and Liudmila, 1876–93: 27 Oct. 1891.

  4 See OR, 331 63 4a: Elena Shavrova’s letters to Anton, 1889–91: 17 Nov. 1891.

  5 See MXaT, (Sanin) 5323/ 1933–73: L. S. Mizinova’s letters to Sofia Ioganson, 1877–99.

  6 See OR, 331 46 1a: Ivanenko’s letters to Anton, 1889–91.

  7 See OR, 331 49 12b: Lazarev–Gruzinsky’s letters to Anton, 1889–92: 4 Nov. 1891.

  8 See OR, 331 39 25: Volter’s letter to Anton, 15 Jan. 1892.

  9 See OR, 331 58 27g: P. Svobodin’s letters to Anton, 1891; partly printed in Zapiski OR GBL, 16,

  10 See OR, 331 43 9: Lt Evgraf Egorov’s letters to Anton Chekhov, 1882–92.

  11 This story, the first Chekhov set in western Europe, is told by a terrorist who, assigned to spy on a minister, elopes with the mistress of the minister’s son. Revised, it was published in 1893.

  12 Chekhov had also written ‘A Great Man’, now known as ‘The Grasshopper’, showing a saintly doctor destroyed by his wife’s treachery: this bombshell (for the main characters were recognizable as the Levitan ménage) exploded in spring 1892.

  13 See OR, 331 96 37: Aleksandr Smagin’s thirty-four letters to Masha, 1888–92.

  14 See E. M. Shavrova-Iust’s memoirs in I. M. Sel’vaniuk, V. D. Sedegov, Sbornik statei i materialov 3ii, Rostov, 1963, 267–308.

  15 See OR, 331 81 21: Pavel’s letters to Anton, 1886–96: 3 Jan. 1892.

  V

  Cincinnatus

  They would wake to the song of the lark, to follow the plough, they would take a basket to gather apples, watch butter being made, grain threshed, sheep shorn; they would look after the beehives, would take delight in the lowing of the cows and the smell of new-mown hay. No more writing! No more bosses! No more rent to pay!

  Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet

  THIRTY-SIX

  Sowing and Ploughing

  March–June 1892

  EIGHTEEN MILES from a post office, six miles from the station over rutted ice, Anton felt, on 4 March 1892, like the Roman dictator Cincinnatus who left Rome to till the soil. Until the snow melted, while the family scrubbed floors, papered walls, bought horses, tack, seed and saplings and hired workmen and servants, he was aghast at his decision.1

  The Chekhovs’ ‘manor house’ was a single-storeyed L-shaped wooden building with no bathroom or privy. An outbuilding served as a kitchen. The best room, open to the south and the west, was designated as Anton’s study: Pavel and Masha decorated it in time for Anton’s arrival. Across the drawing room was Masha’s room. A narrow corridor ran one side of the L, leading to Anton’s and Pavel’s bedrooms, the dining room, and Evgenia’s room. When guests tarried, the layout would prove awkward. The largest rooms, Anton’s study and the drawing room, with its balcony, were crowded when more than five – including family, guests and servants – were there. In a few weeks the house was habitable, if sparsely furnished. Pavel’s room was crammed with icons and ledgers and smelt of incense and of medicinal herbs; Masha’s room was like a nun’s, dominated by her brother’s portrait; Evgenia’s bedroom was filled with a trunk, a wardrobe and a sewing machine. The drawing room was furnished with Sorokhtin’s unplayable piano.

  Sorokhtin had left no hay, and the three horses starved on straw. One was unruly, one moribund; an elderly mare was the sole transport. The cow gave no milk. The farm dogs, Sharik and Arapka (Ball and Nigger), had two puppies, which Anton named Muir and Mirrielees, after the Moscow department store. When the ice melted, the pond turned out to be a cesspit and Anton’s carp fingerlings all died. The river Liutorka was two miles away, so that water came from a dilapidated stirruppump. When the Chekhovs woke up on Sunday 29 March, they had a new view: the house next door had burned down, and only a smoking pile of beams remained. Anton quickly installed a new well-bucket, a hand-pumped fire engine and a bell, and planned a pond as big as a lake by the house. The Chekhovs had brought the sixty-seven-year-old Mariushka: they recruited cooks, maids and a driver from among the Melikhovo peasants.

  By mid April the roads would be impassable with floodwater. The Chekhovs had to hurry if they were to start farming. Hay, straw, seed, ploughs, horses, poultry had to be bought, begged and borrowed. Debts spiralled. Anton had brought manuals of agriculture, horticulture and veterinary science. Despite their grandparents’ peasant blood, the Chekhovs blundered, to the amusement of the peasantry and the neighbours, like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet. Their best ploy was to make Misha farm manager. Misha deserted his tax office, bought six horses with his own money and oversaw peasants and contractors. Pavel happily took to the role of gentleman, leading peasants to the barn and stables ‘as if he were taking them to be thrashed’, forcing visitors to wait because ‘the masters are dining’, patronizing the clergy.

  When Chekhov’s fictional city-dwellers plough and sow, they are driven out by the peasants’ hostility. Anton’s initiation was easier. He let the peasants drive cattle down the track that cut his estate in two, and even moved his fence. The peasantry did not at first come round: one of the Chekhov mares, left out at night, was switched for a moribund gelding. Only when Anton set up a free clinic, visited the bedridden, and gave the peasants the right to cut hay in his forest, did he win trust. Of the neighbouring gentry the nearest to Melikhovo were outcasts: the Varenikovs – she ten years older than her lover – were keen farmers who wanted to buy Chekhov’s arable land, urging him to build a more habitable home in the 300 acres of woodland that would be left. A mile away was Vaskino, the mansion of Prince Sergei Shakhovskoi, a magistrate and the stentorian and Herculean grandchild of a Decembrist rebel.

  The Lintvariovs, Smagins and Ivanenko sent cattle from the Ukraine, and lent ploughshares. Smagin sent hundreds of roubles’ worth of seed-corn so that rye and oats could be planted once Misha’s horses had ploughed. Smagin’s help had a price. Masha’s version runs:

  Although it is hard to say now whether I loved him then, I thought hard about getting married … I went to the study and said, ‘You know, Anton, I’ve decided to get married …’ My brother naturally realized to whom, but he made no reply. Then I sensed that he found this announcement unpleasant, although he remained silent.

  Smagin’s proposal was Masha’s third; she was nearly twenty-nine and it could be her last. Anton told Suvorin, who told Olga Kundasova: Petersburg and Moscow were abuzz. Smagin was coming to Melikhovo on 23 March: Masha left to teach in Moscow, and only returned a day or two before Smagin left. Smagin grasped that this flight meant a refusal, and spent two days chatting about farming: he kept his promises and sent the Chekhovs bags of seed, but he seethed. On 31 March 1892 he wrote to Masha:

  It cost me great efforts to refrain from having a scandalous row at Melikhovo. Do you realize that I could have crushed you there – I hated you … only Anton’s constant hospitable welcome saved me.2

  On 28 July 1929 Smagin was to write:

  although a whole lifetime has passed since 25 March 1892 … for me you remain the most enchanting and incomparable woman. I wish you health and a long life, but I should like to meet you again
before I die.3

  Anton later told Suvorin that his sister was ‘one of those rare, incomprehensible women’ who did not want to marry, but some years were to pass before Masha became sure that marriage would give her less happiness than her position as her brother’s amanuensis. In later life she told her nephew Sergei that she had never really been in love with anybody.4

  That spring Anton was as ruthless with his own suitors as with Masha’s. Before Easter none of his women friends ventured out to Melikhovo. Few even wrote, so bruised were they by his departure. Anton, busy planting an orchard, had little time for correspondence, but on 7 March he sent a long misogynistic letter to Suvorin:

  Women are most unlikeable in their lack of justice and because justice is organically alien to them … In a peasant family the man is clever, reasonable and fair and God-fearing, while the woman is – God help us!

  Anton lost Elena Shavrova’s manuscript, and sent her fee to famine relief. He recommended her to a dilettante editor, Prince Urusov, but not as a writer: ‘She gives a sort of lisping first impression – don’t let that bother you. She has a spark and mischief in her. She sings gypsy songs well and can handle her drink. She dresses well, but has a silly hair style.’

  Masha, ‘with remarkable self-sacrifice’, Anton commented, spent the weekend planting out the kitchen garden and her weekdays teaching at the ‘Dairy’ school. The school was in financial straits, so that Masha worked unpaid. None of her friends came to Melikhovo. Anton’s note to Lika was as frosty as the weather:

  Masha asks you to come the week before Easter and bring perfume. I’d buy it myself but I shan’t be in Moscow until the week after Easter. We wish you all the best. The starlings have flown away. The cockroaches haven’t left,5 but we’ve checked the fire engine. Masha’s brother.