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.'8 Anton's only overt objection to Smagin had been his 'tragic' hand
258
2 59
ANN/is DI I'I:I.I:KINAGE writing, 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 I 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.'59
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
260
AUGUST 189I-FEBRUARY 1892
third edition, In the Twilight its fifth: Anton's income reached 1000 roubles a month. Naively, 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.'60 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 for 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.
261
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 Pecuchet
THIRTY-SIX O
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
265
CI NCINNA I US
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 Pecuchet. 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:
MARCH-JUNE 1892
