Dirt and stress brought on diarrhoea and haemorrhoids; the weather, bronchitis. Running from Anisim, Anton was almost crippled by a varicose vein on his left leg; drinking with an old school friend, Dr Eremeev, made him too ill to appreciate Taganrog's girls. Only cousin Georgi pleased Anton: he rarely went to church, he smoked, talked of women and worked hard at a shipping company.
Two weeks' celebrity in Taganrog was enough for Anton, and he left for the steppe town of Novocherkassk, to be best man at the wedding of Dr Eremeev's sixteen-year-old Cossack sister. First he stayed with the Kravtsovs at Ragozina Gully. Riding and shooting, drinking sour milk and eating eight times a day, he could 'cure 15 consumptions and 22 rheumatisms'. At the wedding, in borrowed clothes, he teased the girls, drank the local pink champagne and stuffed himself on caviar. The journey from Ragozina Gully to Novocherkassk and back was slow; he waited eight hours for a connection. On the way there he slept in a siding, on the way back, 'I went out for a pee and pure miracles outside: the moon, the boundless steppe with its barrows and wilderness; the quiet of the grave, the carriages and rails stand out in the twilight - you'd think the world had died.' At Ragozina Gully he rode fifteen miles to fetch the post. It did not make him homesick. Leikin reported on Palmin's misfortunes and was annoyed that Chekhov should complain of his own diseases: 'For a doctor that is not good at all. Your illness, though a nuisance, is not at all dangerous. As for my health, turpentine helps to expel the gases.'
On 1 May Suvorin's fourth son, the twenty-one-year-old Vladimir, shot himself dead. Aleksandr sent a postcard, discreetly in Latin: 'Plen-issima perturbatio in redactione. Senex aegrotissimus est. Dolor communis…' Suvorin felt guilty for ignoring his son's play, An Old Eye Is No Bar to the Heart. He recalled his first wife's suicide and blamed himself for both deaths:
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MY It EI I III US ' E I'lli PER Yesterday Volodia shot himself… Eternally alone, eternally by himself. Yesterday I listened to his strange comedy - everywhere clever, original. He would've been a talented man. And again I failed to do a thing.13 Leikin wrote to Anton a week later: '[Vladimir] just left a note to say that he was fed up with life and supposed that the next world is better than this. Poor Suvorin, completely shattered with grief, was taken yesterday to his estate in Tula Province.' A theme of The Seagull was born. Chekhov felt for Suvorin. Suvorin's sons were as doomed as Chekhov's elder brothers - despair linked the two men.
The Chekhovs celebrated Easter loudly, but without Anton. Pavel reported: Officer Tyshko came, and Dolgov, who drank three bottles of beer and nearly smashed the piano with his heavy blows. He played well, with verve. Then Mr Korneev and Miles Ianova, Efros and Korneev's niece and in the evening Korneev's children, who amazed me with their gutter language… I remain your loving P. Chekhov. The family was reassured by Kolia: he agreed to spend the summer with them in Babkino. Aleksandr, however, sent them appeal after appeal from Petersburg. His sons had typhoid, but no hospital would take in children who had no birth certificates. Meanwhile, Aleksandr could not cope with his idle, thieving servant girls. He begged Vania and Masha to send out their mother: 'The poor children shriek, ask for the 'potty' and dirty the bed. I'm out all night. Really it wouldn't be wrong for mother to come.'4 Speaking for the whole family, Kolia protested to Masha: When a few years ago little Mosia fell ill in Taganrog, mother went to visit the sick little girl and look after her and what happened? Mother was exhausted, gave it up as a bad job and Aleksandr tore his hair and went to church to weep… If we send mother to Petersburg, the same will happen again, mother will be unhappy and Aleksandr's life poisoned.' Whenever Aleksandr's illegitimate family called for help, the Chekhovs hardened their hearts. They detested Anna and her children by Aleksandr, and would do so until the last of them perished. Aleksandr had to fend for himself; in May his mother and sister left for the country.
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On 5 May Anton went north to the monastery at Sviatye Gory (Sacred Hills) southeast of Kharkov, where 15,000 pilgrims congregated after Easter. The monks gave him a room with a stranger, perhaps a police spy, who told Anton his life story. The impression made on Chekhov by just two days and nights at Sviatye Gory was overwhelming - the hillside forested setting, the church services, the fervent pilgrims. The stories stemming from his travels in the south are infused with a psalmodic reverence for nature, for the pathos, liturgy and clergy, if not the dogma, of Orthodox Christianity. On his way back from Sviatye Gory to Taganrog he met childhood friends: Sasha Selivanova, and Piotr Sergeenko, who would fifteen years later change his life. By 17 May Chekhov was back, penniless, in an unseasonably chilly Moscow: he summoned Schechtel for a frank conversation about the Ianova sisters and sexual frustration, and borrowed 30 roubles. Then Anton joined his mother, sister and Misha in Babkino.
Suvorin, disabled by bereavement, had neglected the publication of Chekhov's new book of stories, In the Twilight. Anton had to write more for New Times in order to pay off Suvorin's advance, and Leikin only received four small stories from him that summer. The Petersburg Newspaper, which paid better and allowed more scope, got nine stories, notably 'His First Love', which Chekhov later worked up into a study of adolescent suicide, 'Volodia'.
The need to recoup Suvorin's advance gave the motivation and the journey south the material for the finest prose of the time in Russia. The first prose-poem (a 'quasi symphony''') of steppe nature, 'Fortune', introduces the motif of the breaking string that punctuates The Cherry Orchard, an ominous mine shaft catastrophe deep beneath a doomed landscape. Chekhov could stake a claim to be Russia's first 'green' writer. Even the acerbic Burenin wrote a panegyric; copies of New Times were stolen from Petersburg's cafes. In 'Tumbleweed', the July story for New Times, the police agent that Anton met at the monastery became the baptized Jew - 'a baptized Jew, a doctored horse, a pardoned thief- all worth the same.' Here too is a 'breaking string' - a falling mine-bucket which cripples the hero.
Chekhov's rootless Jew is the culmination of a series of intelligent well-meaning unfortunates who had dominated Russian fiction, the so-called 'superfluous men' whom Pushkin and Turgenev had created. Chekhov won recognition for renovating a tired tradition, but tributes
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MY III Mil H.S ' E II I'I E to his genius were loudest among musicians, who felt most acutely the musical nature of his prose in its rhythms and the sonata-like structure, where the end recapitulates the beginning after a central development. In May Tchaikovsky was struck by the ecclesiastical story, 'The Laymen' (later known as 'The Letter'): he wrote a letter, that went astray, to Chekhov and also to his brother Modest about it. Through Modest, Piotr Tchaikovsky was to meet the Moscow Chekhovs.16 Anton would not see Anna in Petersburg: he diagnosed by post from Babkino, guessing from Anna's medicines and temperature that OA underlay her typhoid. Anton made only one short trip that summer to Moscow to spend a few days with admirers such as Ezhov and (iruzinsky. Gruzinsky was the only person to recall Anton Chekhov in a rage. The Alarm Clock was printing Anton's sketch, 'The Diary of a Volatile Person', in three parts; when Anton found that they had cut his copy, he exploded like his character and left the deputy editor stunned by authorial fury. Ezhov, however, recalled a milder man: He had a weak voice. His laughter showed that Chekhov was not inclined to get angry. When writing he suddenly smiled. This smile was special, without the usual proportion of irony, not humorous, but tender and soft, a smile of authorial happiness.17 After a few days Anton had to return to Babkino. He was keeping Kolia under guard, while helping Dr Arkhangelsky with a study of Russia's psychiatric institutions - work that would bear fictional fruit five years later. At the end of July Kolia broke free. Schechtel reported from Moscow: We had a heart-to-heart and finally he admitted that he has to abandon his 'big slag' and that this is the only way of burning his boats and,… after giving his appearance, very bedraggled recently, a gendemanly veneer, to re-enter society… That same evening blood gushed, real blood, there's no doubt about it, I saw him spit it. The next day was worse - today he's sent a note; he asks me to send a doctor, he's bleeding to death. Anton did not rush to Moscow, but Kolia was moved to the Korneev house after promising not to infest it with fleas. Anton stayed at Babkino until September, picking gooseberries, raspberries and mushAPRIL-SEPTEMBER 1887 rooms. Inspired by the south, needing money from New Times, he wrote his stories of the steppes. Other pursuits were out of the question, he told Schechtel: 'I could devour a whorelet like Nadia [Ianova]… In Babkino there's still nobody to screw. So much work that there's no time even for a quiet fart.'18
In September Moscow's writers returned to their desks. Palmin boasted of implausible amorous adventures on the Volga. Anton had no love affairs to ponder. His third and last story inspired by the steppes, 'Panpipes', evoked the doomed rivers and forests of the Don basin, and irritated critics who wanted more humanity, morality and plots in fiction. Mikhailovsky, the Northern Herald's purveyor of opinions to the intelligentsia, went for Anton's
