on to speak of unpleasant experiences she had had with certain previous American clients who had put her down. 'They considered themselves superior to me,' she said, but when I asked her how they had shown this she couldn't say. 'I just felt it.' Then she added (as I somehow knew she would) that it was never the rich Americans who made her feel inferior, always the other kind.
One of my major battles with Sonia was over the issue of a two-hour visit to the Armory in the Kremlin, scheduled for the next day and, in Sonia's view, the high point of my-of every-trip to Russia. I asked Sonia what was in the Armory, and when she told me that it was a 'magnificent' collection of armor and ancient gold and gems and Faberge eggs, I said that that kind of thing didn't interest me, and that I would just as soon skip it. Sonia looked at me as if I had gone mad. Then she abruptly said that skipping the Armory was impossible: the tour was scheduled, and it was too late to change the schedule. I repeated that I would prefer not to go to the Armory, and Sonia lapsed into silence. We were in a car, on our way to Melikhovo, Chekhov's country house, forty miles south of Moscow. Sonia began to converse in Russian with Vladimir, the driver, and continued doing so for many miles. In St. Petersburg, when Nelly spoke to our driver, Sergei-usually to give him some direction-she did so tersely and apologetically. Sonia used her talk with the driver as a form of punishment. Finally, she turned to me and said, 'It is essential that you see the Armory-even for only forty-five minutes.' 'All right,' I said. But Sonia was not satisfied. My attitude was so clearly wrong. 'Tell me something,' Sonia said. 'When you were in St. Petersburg, did you go to the Hermitage?' 'Yes,' I said. 'Well,' Sonia said in a tone of triumph, 'the Armory is much more important than the Hermitage.'
When we arrived at Melikhovo, I recognized the house from pictures I had seen, but was surprised by the grounds, which were a disorderly spread of wild vegetation, haphazardly placed trees, and untended flower beds. There seemed to be no plan; the grounds made no sense as the setting for a house. Chekhov bought Melikhovo in the winter of 1892 and moved there with his parents, his sister, and his younger brothers, Ivan and Michael, in the spring. It was a small, run-down estate, which Chekhov rapidly transformed: the uncomfortable house was made snug and agreeable, kitchen and flower gardens were put in, an orchard was planted, a pond dug, the surrounding fields planted with rye and clover and oats. It was characteristic of Chekhov to make things work; thirteen years earlier he had arrived in Moscow, to start medical school, and pulled his family out of poverty by what seems like sheer force of character. The father's store had failed and he had fled to Moscow to escape debtor's prison. Alexander and the second-oldest brother, Nikolai, were already in Moscow studying at the university, and the mother and sister and younger brothers followed; sixteen-year-old Anton was left behind in Taganrog to finish high school. Little is known about the three years Chekhov spent alone in Taganrog. He boarded with the man who had, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, bailed out the family at a crucial moment, for the price of their home. Anton was not a brilliant student, but he graduated and received a scholarship from the town for his further studies. He was a tall, robust boy with a large head, a genial nature, and a gift for comedy. (He had entertained his family and now entertained his classmates with imitations and skits.)
When Chekhov rejoined his family in Moscow, in 1880, the possessor of what the critic James Wood has called a 'strange, sourceless maturity,' he quickly became its head. The authoritarian father, now a pitiable failure, had allowed the family to sink into disorderly destitution. The elder brothers made contributions-Alexander through writing sketches for humor magazines and Nikolai through magazine illustrations-but they lived dissolute lives, and only when Anton, too, began writing humorous sketches did the family's fortunes change. He wrote strictly for money; if some other way of making money had come to hand, he would have taken it. The humor writing was wretchedly paid, but Chekhov wrote so quickly and easily and unceasingly that he was able to bring in considerable income. In the early writings, no hint of the author of 'The Duel' or 'The Lady with the Dog' is to be found. Most of the sketches were broadly humorous, like pieces in college humor magazines, and if some are less juvenile than others, and a few make one smile, none of them are distinguished. Chekhov began to show signs of becoming Chekhov only when he turned his hand to writing short fiction that wasn't funny. By 1886, his writing was attracting serious critical attention as well as bringing in real money. Because of Chekhov's earnings from his writings (he never made any money as a physician; he mostly treated peasants, free), the family was able to move to progressively better quarters in Moscow. The purchase of Melikhovo was a culminating product of Chekhov's literary success-and of the illusion (one that Russian writers, Chekhov included, are particularly good at mocking) that life in the country is a solution to the problem of living.
With his characteristic energy and dispatch, Chekhov organized his family so that there was a productive division of labor-the mother cooked, the sister took care of the kitchen garden, Ivan did the agriculture, and Anton took charge of horticulture, for which he proved to have great talent. (The father, who had been and remained a religious fanatic, would retreat to his room for his observances and the making of herbal remedies.) Chekhov came remarkably close to living out the pastoral ideal, and even passed the test that city people who moved to the country in nineteenth-century Russia invariably, ingloriously flunked- that of being helpful to the peasants. Chekhov built three schools, donated his services as a doctor, and worked in famine and cholera relief-all the while writing some of his best stories, and almost never being without a houseful of visitors. (His frequent, abrupt removals to Moscow or St. Petersburg suggest that the problem of living remained.)
Although I recognized the house, I was actually seeing not the one in the photographs-which had been torn down in the 1920s-but a replica, built in the late '40s. (Resurrecting destroyed buildings seems to be a national tic. In Moscow I saw a huge church with gold domes that was a recently completed replica of one of the churches Stalin wantonly tore down.) The interiors of Melikhovo had been carefully restored, re-created from photographs supplied by Maria Chekhova, then in her eighties. The rooms were small and appealingly furnished; they gave a sense of a pleasant, very well-run home. The walls were covered with Morris-printlike wallpapers, and over them paintings and family photographs hung in dense arrangements. Everything was simple, handsome, unaffected. But I think that Chekhov would have found it absurd. The idea of rebuilding his house from scratch would have offended his sense of the fitness of things. I can imagine him walking through the rooms with a look of irony on his face as he listened to the prepared speech of our tour guide, Ludmilla. Ludmilla was a youngish woman with glasses, dressed in trousers and a shabby maroon snow jacket, who was full of knowledge of Chekhov's life but had read little of his work. She spoke of Chekhov with a radiant expression on her face. She told me (through Sonia) that a good deal of the furniture and many objects in the house were original; when the house was being torn down the local peasants had sacked it, but during the restoration returned much of what they had taken. I asked if they had been forced to do so by the Soviet authorities, and she said, 'Oh, no. They did so gladly. Everyone loved Anton Pavlovich.' When I questioned her about how she came to be working at the museum she gave a long reply: She had never been able to read Chekhov; his writing left her cold. But one day she visited Melikhovo (she lived in a nearby town) and while in the house had had some sort of incredible spiritual experience, which she cannot explain. She kept returning to Melikhovo-it drew her like a magnet-and finally the director of the museum had given her a job.
After finishing her tour of the ersatz house and the disorderly garden, Ludmilla walked out to the exit with Sonia and me, and from her answer to one of my questions it appeared that she wasn't paid for her work. 'So you work here as a volunteer,' I said. 'No,' she said, she just wasn't paid, the way many people in Russia were not being paid now. Wages were frequently 'delayed' for months, even years. I asked Ludmilla how she lived if she wasn't paid. Did she have another job that did pay? Sonia-not relaying my question-looked at me angrily and said, 'We will not talk about this. This is not your subject. We will talk about Chekhov.'
I debated with myself whether to challenge Sonia, and decided I would. I said, 'Look, if we're going to talk about Chekhov, we need to say that Anton Pavlovich cared about truth above all else. He did not look away from reality. People not being paid for work is something he would have talked about-not brushed away with 'Let's talk about Chekhov.' ' I sounded a little ridiculous to myself-like someone doing an imitation of a character in a socialist realist novel-but I enjoyed Sonia's discomposure, and when she started to answer I cut her off with 'Tell Ludmilla what I just said.' Sonia obeyed, and Ludmilla, smiling her sweet smile, said, 'This is why I find it hard to read Chekhov. There is too much sadness in it. It is his spirituality that attracts me-the spirituality I receive from learning about his life.' On the drive back to Moscow, Sonia praised the 'good taste' of Melikhovo, before relapsing into conversation with Vladimir. He was a large, swarthy man of around fifty, wearing a black leather coat and exuding a New York taxi driver's gruff savoir faire. The contrast between him and Sergei, my St. Petersburg driver, a slender young man who dressed in jeans and carried a book, was like the contrast between Moscow and St. Petersburg themselves. St. Petersburg was small and faded and elegant and a little unreal; Moscow was big and unlovely and the real thing in a city. St. Petersburg came at you sideways; Moscow immediately delivered the message of its scale and power. Chekhov loved Moscow and had reserved feelings about St. Petersburg, even though his literary career got properly under way only when, in 1882, the St. Petersburg editor and publisher A. N. Leikin invited him to
