help, ordered 1200 copies of Tales of Melpomene from the printers, the / 00-rouble costs to be paid four months after publication. The book made Chekhov 500 roubles - ten times what Leikin had paid him in May. It also won critical attention, but to make a mark in St Petersburg Anton needed 100 roubles for his fare and hotel. But Leikin did not consider Chekhov was yet ready for St Petersburg. Instead he invited him to come with Palmin and tour the lakes of Karelia. Anton did not go.
In May Chekhov had seen a lot of Palmin, often with Kolia and the Golden sisters. He had exercised his diagnostic skills studying Palmin, his consort and their appalling cuisine and, on the eve of his last exam, told Leikin that Palmin would soon die of alcoholism. Perverse to the last, Palmin married his Pelageia and lived seven more years.
At Babkino the aristocratic novelist Boleslav Markevich was less lucky. In June 1884 Chekhov lived by the monastery of New Jerusalem, fishing, writing and gathering mushrooms, helping Dr Rozanov at Voskresensk hospital every other day. Markevich occupied a comfortable dacha on the Kiseliov estate nearby. Anton told Leikin in August: 'This Kammerjunker has angina and will probably give you material for an obituary.' In November Markevich compliantly died and the Kiseliovs offered the Chekhovs his dacha.
Shadows darkened the summer at Voskresensk. Kolia, the devil in paradise, cost Vania his job. At Easter, using his Taganrog bell-ringing skills, to the delight of the children at Vania's school, Kolia played a JUNE 1884- APRiL 1885 carillon on some musical pots he had bought from a drunken potter. The school's governor passed by and dismissed Vania on the spot for blasphemy. Kolia moved to stay with Pushkariov and two of the Golden sisters, before going on to bedevil Pavel in Moscow. His next prank was in July. With Aleksandr's help, Kolia composed a letter in Pavel's name to their mother: Evochka!… It's a pity we have started keeping pigs, they are shitting everywhere. Fenichka sends her regards. Kolia has taken all the money that Aliosha has brought her and she can't buy anything or get anything from the shop… Glory to God… Come home, jam has to be made. P. Chekhov. Next week Kolia had gone too far, and Pavel did write a letter - to Anton. To meet Kolia's debts the bailiffs were holding an auction of his possessions at the house. Pavel nailed Anton's doctor's plate to the door, but to no avail. He and Aunt Fenichka had to endure public humiliation. Anton paid off the bailiffs and Kolia grovelled to his father: Dear, sweet Papa… I've only just learnt what vile dishonest people exist in the world. My inexperience and trusting nature is the reason for everything. I very much wanted for the family's sake (especially for Masha's) to furnish the flat as elegantly as possible… What did the dishonest Utkina do? For that money she sent me not what I'd chosen but old junk, she didn't give me the blinds or curtains c. I had bought.34 Kolia's last tatters of credibility were gone.
Kolia and Anton had new company to distract them. After the Goldens, three more sisters entered their lives, the Markova sisters, Elena, Elizaveta and Margarita, who were staying with their aunt, Liudmila Gamburtseva, at a dacha near Zvenigorod.35 To Kolia and Anton they were Nelli, Lily and Rita and a flirtatious relationship built up. Nelli was a rival to Anna Golden for Kolia's affection; Lily, until she became Mrs Sakharova in 1886, was an actress in Korsh's theatre at Moscow but stayed friends with Kolia and Anton for years to come; Rita married and became Baroness Spengler, but she still frequented Masha and Anton. The Markova sisters shook the sway of the Golden sisters. Kolia had a fling with Nelli, before Anna Golden reclaimed him. Anton took Lily's virginity.36 Medical duties stopped Anton becoming more entangled with the
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Markova sisters. Released from \c hospital by Rozanov to earn a little extra by carrying out autopsies, Anton told Leikin: I've been driving a fast troika with a decrepit coroner, barely breathing and too ancient to be any use, a kind little grey-haired creature, who's been dreaming for 25 years of becoming a judge. I and the district doctor did the autopsy in the open country under the greenery of a young oak, on a cart track… The deceased is 'not local' and the peasants on whose land the body was found begged us in the name of Christ and with tears in their eyes not to do the autopsy in their village. 'The women and children won't sleep for fear.'… The corpse, covered with a sheet, is wearing a red shirt, new trousers. There's a towel and an icon on top. We ask the elder for water… There is water - a pond nearby, but nobody will provide a bucket: we would pollute it… The results of the autopsy are 20 breaks in the ribs, oedema in one lung, a smell of spirits in the stomach. Violent death from strangulation. The drunk was crushed in the chest by something heavy, probably a good peasant knee. A story of 1899, 'On Official Business', was to condense fifteen years of such autopsies.
Rozanov, later the authority on suicide in Russia, was a fine doctor. Two other doctors became long-term friends: Dr Arkhangelsky of Chikino hospital north of Voskresensk and Dr Kurkin at the village clinic in Zvenigorod - not that Anton's skills impressed them. On 2 2 July a boy with an undescended testicle was brought to the Voskresensk clinic: the child squirmed, Anton lost his nerve and summoned Rozanov, who finished the operation. Anton could laugh at incompetence: in 'Surgery' a story for Fragments that August, a student pulls the wrong teeth, while Rozanov calmly advises: 'Keep pulling out healthy ones until you get to the bad one.'
Anton returned to Moscow to write and practise medicine. In Moscow a doctor could earn 10,000 roubles a year, charging 5 roubles a visit, enough to keep the horse and carriage needed for these rounds. Anton earned little when he opened his practice in autumn 1884. His patients, pleading poverty or presuming on friendship, paid him with a picture, a foreign coin or an embroidered cushion. Palmin was typically exploitative: 'The bearer of this letter is my cook's husband, a sickly man whom the advice of an yEsculapius wouldn't hurt… Let him have arsenic or, after examining the attached patient, preJUNE 1884-APRIL 1885 scribe him something of the kind.' Leikin pestered Chekhov with accounts of insomnia and pains, lists of his medicines. In September Anton asked Leikin, privy to the plans of Petersburg city, to tell him of any vacancy for a council doctor.
In Russia every doctor's address was available at any chemist. Patients found Anton. Coping with typhoid, OA and dysentery, frightened of killing his patients or infecting himself, Anton trembled. Patients became attached, and, unlike the doctors in his fiction, he could not shake them off. A typical patient writes: Most kind Dr Chekhov! I ask you very urgently to allow just an hour for a visit to me and to calm my nerves. I need to consult you, I hope you will be so kind as not to refuse my request. My maid is ill, I'm afraid the illness might be catching, I sent her to the clinic, but she is so dim, she didn't ask anything, you know I have children whose lives are dearer than anything in the world to me. I haven't slept for two nights, my thoughts are all 'gloomy'. I expect you this evening, whereby you will greatly oblige Yours Respectfully, Liubov Dankovskaia.37 Anton took up social medicine: with two colleagues and a sheaf of questionnaires, he toured the brothels of Sobolev Lane. Other ways of supporting indigent Chekhovs had to be found. Anton urged Vania, still in search of a post, to set up in Moscow, and pool 'your salary, my pittance'. Anton approached the loathsome Lipskerov, editor of Moscow's sleazy News of the Day, or, as Chekhov called it, Screws of the Day.3S Even judophiles like Chekhov called Lipskerov a yid for his meanness. Lipskerov agreed to serialize Chekhov's first and last novel, A Shooting Party (literally Drama at the Hunt), over thirty-two issues from August 1884 to April 1885, at 3 roubles an instalment. The money was rarely paid; Misha, whom Chekhov detailed to dun Lipskerov, was offered instead a theatre ticket or a pair of trousers from Lipskerov's tailors.
A Shooting Party is unjustly ignored. As in 1882, Chekhov stretched himself in a pastiche, even parody, of melodramatic stories, with decadent aristocrats on rotting estates, fatal girls in red, and wicked intriguing Poles. The novel is extraordinary: not only at 170 pages is it Chekhov's longest piece of fiction, but it anticipates Agatha Christie: the investigating magistrate, Kamyshev, is revealed, apparently by the editor of News of the Day, to be the murderer, who has framed the
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DOC: I OK i e i i, iiov main suspect. In the wild exotic'garden in a mythical south Russian landscape where all falls apart, the world of 'The Black Monk' or The Cherry Orchard is sketched out. The story is poetic, ingenious, and sensational.
Leikin was as worried by such diversions as he was pleased by Anton's reputation. Tales of Melpomene had attracted approving reviews. At the end of September Leikin paid a visit to Moscow, meeting, he told the poet Trefolev, 'the pillars of my Fragments, Chekhonte and Palmin. I boozed with them, gave them parental lectures on what I need.' Anton had ambitious plans. Abandoning his History of Sexual Authority, he assembled a bibliography for a new thesis, Medicine in Russia. This too lapsed, when his stories won attention. Anton's satire now bit harder. 'Noli me tangere' (later to be called 'The Mask'), printed in the Moscow weekly Amusement, drew Tolstoy's attention: a man at a masked ball misbehaves with impunity when he reveals his powerful identity.
The gentrification of the Chekhovs proceeded. The conductor Shostakovsky befriended Kolia after hearing him
