nurse, he dies of a stroke. Gromov has to go on living. Chekhov set his story among nettles and grey fences. Suvorin disliked it, but the elderly novelist Leskov recognized its genius, exclaiming 'Ward No. 6 is Russia.'8
Work so harrowing left a void. The Island of Sakhalin lay untouched. A worried editor, Tikhonov, wrote in March 1892, 'I hope that you won't stop writing, like some Cincinnatus'. Fears were well-founded. Chekhov saw medicine and physical labour as salvation. Yet another young writer whom Anton knew, Bibikov, died destitute in Kiev. In Petersburg Barantsevich, Bilibin and Shcheglov moaned to Anton. Tilling the soil gave Anton only the illusion of health. When not planting trees, catching mice to release in the wood, or digging a pond, he slept exhausted. For Leikin he wrote a few trivia, to pay for the dachshunds that Leikin had promised. Anton toiled from five in the morning until after dark. He was as happy in Melikhovo as he ever would be. He ordered almost every freshwater fish of Russia: his pond was an ichthyological museum. He planted fifty cherry trees from Vladimir - the real cherry orchard preceded the fictional one. He summoned stove-makers from Moscow, bought a sprung carriage for the journey to the station and dreamed of building a house in the woods, where he would tend trees and keep chickens and bees. Small disasters brought him down to earth: bad weather and the deaths of a horse, of his only drake, and of the hedgehog that hunted the mice in the barn.
Leikin, himself a recent landowner, sent cucumber seeds and endless advice. Franz Schechtel, a man of many hobbies, sent eggs which hatched into fancy poultry. He also sent mare's tail, a medicinal weed.9 Chekhov told him on 7 June: 'The ground is covered with little penises in erecktirten Zustande. Some places now look as if they'd like to screw…'
Cousins from Taganrog and Kaluga expressed their amazement that a Chekhov had joined the landowning gentry. Women friends
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wondered at Anton's empire. They crowned him 'King of the Medes', a title as apt as Cincinnatus. Aleksandr's envy of 'Cincinnatus' bothered Anton. All spring his elder brother begged for land on which to build. Anton hedged, horrified lest Natalia come near. In early April Natalia's year-old Misha nearly died of the convulsions that had killed Aleksandr's first-born Mosia: 'My wife is destroyed, and I walk about like a cat scalded with sulphuric acid,' Aleksandr wrote. The doctor, Aleksandr hinted, advised a climate warmer than Finland and cooler man Taganrog - near Anton: i) By the way I have absolutely given up drinking… 2) I can't let a roodess, if good, person like my wife go where she wants, as I know from experience. Even less can I let her go to her sisters'… 3) Therefore wouldn't there be a hut, a house, or something similar, near your estate for the summer?… It would only be on the absolute condition that nobody of my family dares to get into your house. My wife herself insists on that. If granny wants to take the infants in, that is her business. The infants and my wife will not be coming to see you uninvited… Natalia says mat… our mother is not fond of her. In the last week in June Aleksandr brought his two elder boys, now aged eight and six, to Melikhovo. He took photographs, and neither argued nor drank. Natalia was not invited, though she had fed Pavel and Anton in Petersburg, and shopped with Masha in Moscow.
In summer the 'Dairy' school closed for the holidays and Misha's tax office in Aleksin condoned his absences. Women friends of Vania and Misha visited. Countess Klara Mamuna, who had befriended Masha in the Crimea two years ago, came to play the piano. She flirted with both Misha and Anton, but seemed, before the summer ended, to be Misha's fiancee. Aleksandra Liosova, a lively and beautiful local schoolteacher, 'the fair daughter of Israel', was to be engaged to Vania, but photographs and letters show that it was Anton who drew her. Natalia Lintvariova alone caused no tension: she avoided flirtation.
Olga Kundasova, as she watched Anton become more and more involved with Lika Mizinova, had begun to show symptoms of manic depression. After astronomy and mathematics, she now took up psychiatry - as therapy for herself, and as a career. In August 1892 Olga
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made her promised visit. She made friends with a local woman doctor, Pavlovskaia, and became both outpatient and assistant to Dr Iakovenko at Meshcherskoe psychiatric hospital ten miles away. Anton's affection was rekindled. 'Kundasova seemed cleverer in the country,' he told Suvorin and in May declared: 'I should be very, very glad to see Kundasova, as glad as seeing a heavenly angel, and would build a separate cottage for her here.' Their intimacy, to judge by the fragments of evidence, remained troubled. Olga responded to a gift: I implore you to treat me, if not gently (that's not in you), then not exactingly and not roughly. I have become impossibly sensitive. In conclusion let me tell you mat you have no grounds for fearing a long stay by such a psychopath as O. Kundasova.10 The piano teacher Aleksandra Pokhlebina, nicknamed 'Vermicelli' for her skinny figure, also visited. Her love for Anton rapidly became demented. Lika Mizinova was unperturbed by these rivals. She knew that Anton preferred her shy beauty, her contralto and her cantaloupe-yellow jacket to Kundasova's intellect and severe black dresses. She was amused as Anton desperately evaded 'Vermicelli'. Lika may have been helpless in love, unable to break free or to secure a response, but she had studied Anton: she guessed that by autumn he would be restless. By June, in fact, he was sounding out Suvorin about a journey to Constantinople; the Lintvariovs were calling him to Sumy. Disillusion creeps into Anton's jokes to Natalia Lintvariova on 20 June 1892: We're finished, there will be no oats… Daria the cook, though quite sober, threw out all the goose eggs: only three of the enemy [the geese] hatched out. The piglet bites and eats the maize in the garden. The dear ponies ate the cauliflowers at night. We bought a calf for 6 roubles, it bellows in a deep baritone from morning til night… In a word, the King of the Medes can only utter a wild warrior cry and flee to the wilderness… Lika acted. She dismissed her suitors, and asked her father for railway tickets to abduct Anton. She told him on 18 June 1892: Throwing aside all pride, I'll tell you I am very sad and want to see you very much. There will be tickets to me Caucasus, that is separate ones for you and me… From Moscow to Sevastopol, then from Batumi to Tiflis and finally from Vladikavkaz to Mineral Waters
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and l);ick to Moscow. Be ready lor die beginning of August, only for the time being please don't tell any one at home about the tickets. Anton beat a quick retreat: Write and see that nothing is done about tickets until the cholera in the Caucasus is over. I don't want to hang about in quarantine… Are the dragoons at Rzhev courting you? I permit you these attentions, but on condition that you, darling, come no later than the end of July. Do you hear?… Do you remember us walking across the fields? Until we meet, Likusia, darling little Cantaloupe. All yours, The King of the Medes. To the non-committal King of the Medes, the cholera epidemic now creeping to Russia from the Caspian Sea was a convenient excuse not to depart. In his letter to Suvorin, however, Dr Chekhov played the cholera down as more sensation than danger.
THIRTY-SEVEN O
Cholera July-September 1892 AFTER FAMINE, cholera struck Russia's heartland. With unusual alacrity the authorities marshalled doctors. Anton did not wait to be asked. On 8 July 1892 he offered to man a village clinic. He forwent a salary: the Serpukhov health commission thanked him, but denied him even a nurse. Council funds had to be topped up by the rich: Anton begged the owners of the tannery and cloth mill, the archimandrite of the monastery and the aristocracy for funds to build quarantine barracks. The archimandrite refused, while Princess Orlova-Davydova - Anton never hit it off with the nobility - treated him like a hired hand.
Anton was soon on good terms, however, with Doctor Vitte in Serpukhov. One local doctor, Dr Kurkin, was an old acquaintance. Few supplies were available, but the Serpukhov authorities ordered the latest anticholera equipment: thermometers, large Cantani syringes for injecting fluids under the skin, tannin enemas to disinfect the gut, carbolic acid, castor oil, calomel, coffee and brandy. All summer Anton rode round twenty-five villages, over dusty or muddy tracks, checking sanitation, treating the dysentery, worms, syphilis and tuberculosis endemic among the peasantry, falling into bed exhausted every night, rising with the sun. Grateful patients gave him a pedigree pig, and three pairs of suede gloves for Masha. Anton's Sakhalin experience served him well. With Dr Kurkin he inspected factories in nearby villages. Three times they inspected a tannery that was polluting the rivers and shamed the owners into action, if only cosmetic. In this fallow creative period, Chekhov saw environmental degradation, human misery, complacency and failed ideals - material for new fiction. The cholera never came to Melikhovo. A neighbouring district had sixteen cases, four fatal.11 Anton's energy won commendation and he was sucked into the committees for improving the
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