into the conversation of Anton's fictional protagonists.46 His correspondence with Suvorin was also enlivened by sympathy with the latter's pro-German and Nietzschean views, often eccentric: Suvorin advocated compulsory cricket in Russian universities, for example, to defect students from idle radicalism.
Anton and Suvorin longed for each other. Suvorin wanted to sit and walk with Anton, 'silently and idly exchanging the odd phrase'. Anton begged Suvorin to come to Moscow in May: 'we could travel round the cemeteries, the monasteries, the woods at the edge of the city.' But Suvorin's newspaper and, above all, his the tre libre, held him captive, and Anton lacked a pretext to abandon Melikhovo. An estate could only be run if every member 'regardless of rank or sex, worked like a peasant'. Mice were stopped from stripping the bark off the cherry trees; a pig was slaughtered and hams smoked; timber was hauled for a new workman's shed. The summer of 1895 brought a drought as bad as the rains of 1894; the birch leaves were stripped by larvae. Fruit blossom was spoilt by frosts; sudden heat generated mosquitoes 'which bite like dogs'. Anton could not leave Masha with
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such drudgery again. In vain Suvorin tempted him with the Volga and Dnepr, or Leikin with the lakes and monasteries of the North. He himself longed for the sea, the Baltic or the Azov, but had to stay at Melikhovo.
Anton's youngest and eldest brothers stayed away in spring 1895. Misha was even in April snowbound in Uglich. He was bound in other respects: the death of Sablin, his protector (the brother of the editor 'granddad' Sablin), had blocked hopes of a transfer to the livelier city of Iaroslavl. Anton lobbied for him, first with Bilibin, who told him that Misha was unqualified to be a postmaster, and then with Suvorin. In Petersburg Natalia angled for an invitation: 'You describe your garden and its inhabitants, so that I salivate'. Aleksandr felt put upon: Natalia ('my whore') was showing signs of increasing eccentricity -hoarding food and clothes; his mother-in-law was dying of emaciation (it took four more years); he was up all night indexing New Times for a paltry 100 roubles a year; he had stopped drinking again, and his 'loins hurt like an onanist's'.
All Anton's irritation of the previous year, his tangle with Lika and Potapenko and his reading of the German misogynists went into a story called 'Ariadna'. The heroine Ariadna Grigorievna is named after the girl who ruined the life of his Latin teacher, Starov. Her flamboyance was Iavorskaia's; her predicament was Lika's. Like Lika, Ariadna fails to ensnare the introverted narrator, Shamokhin, and takes up instead with a frivolous married man, Lubkov, who abandons her in Europe. Unlike Anton, however, Shamokhin rescues Ariadna and brings her back to Russia, and unlike Lika, Ariadna only seems pregnant. Like Potapenko, Lubkov has the gall to sponge money from his rival. Shamokhin paraphrases Schopenhauer when he describes Ariadna's need to charm and to lie as being an innate as spurting ink is to a cuttlefish. Shamokhin tells the story to Chekhov - for once Chekhov appears in his own story - as they sail from Odessa to Yalta. Shamokhin is after all the ship's bore, and this distances Chekhov from his protagonist. 'Ariadna' explores a conflict - between misogyny and common sense - in Chekhov's own mind.
'Ariadna' had been commissioned for The Performing Artist. Its editor, Kumanin, had since incurred Chekhov's disfavour and, as he neared death, his journal folded, Kumanin sold his subscribers and contracts, including Chekhov's 620-rouble advance, to Russian
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Thought, and Lavrov and Goltscv found themselves, at the end of 1895, printing a work offensive to their egalitarianism. Chekhov was able, however, to offset 'Ariadna' with 'Murder', a brooding story of fanatical violence, inspired by what he had seen on Sakhalin and by Misha's stories of Uglich. In May 1895 The Island of Sakhalin passed, as Lavrov put it, 'from tiie belly of the whale' and came out as a book (published by Russian Thought) which proved Chekhov's radical credentials. Chekhov had, however, now finished with the penal island. His hope that the work would win him the right to lecture in Moscow university was thwarted; the University was ill-disposed to a man who 'had it in for professors'.
Misogyny permeated another story conceived that summer, printed in The Russian Gazette in October - 'Anna Round the Neck'. The phrase is Aleksandr's: he called his dying first wife 'Anna round the neck' - a pun on the civil service award of St Anna. Chekhov's Anna is a girl married off to an elderly civil servant to save her destitute family. Realizing she is sexually attractive, she turns the tables and tyrannizes her husband. Anton was, understandably, in no mood for marriage, die cure that Suvorin proposed for his melancholy. On 2 3 March 1895 he retorted: All right, I'll get married if you want me to. But my conditions are: everything must be as it was before, that is she must live in Moscow, and I in the country, and I shall visit her. I couldn't stand a happiness mat went on morning noon and night… I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not rise every night in my sky. NB. Marrying won't make me write any better.
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Incubating The Seagull June-September 1895 IN SUMMER 1895 Anton began to mention his archive. Like his father, Anton scrupulously kept letters and documents. The family always asked Anton if they were looking for a certificate. Anton alarmed Suvorin, who did not want his private thoughts to be widely known, by saying that he had put all his letters in order. This became an annual ritual, which Anton and Masha carried out: letters were sorted into two categories, family and literary, then into boxes, by author, Anton marking the date if the writer had not. Afraid of compromising themselves, people now wrote less spontaneously to Anton, or wrote mainly to provoke a saleable answer. Anton joked at their fears and hopes: he headed a letter to Anna Suvorina 'not for Russian Antiquity', but his own tone, as time went on, became more guarded.
The archive shows Chekhov's growing self-esteem. He could see himself as Russia's greatest living writer of fiction. On 21 February Leskov, who had anointed him as 'Samuel anointed David', had died. Nobody mourned the most cantankerous of Russian novelists. Even Anton expressed only indignation that Leskov in his will demanded an autopsy to prove his doctors wrong. A diary entry two years later, however, shows how deeply he felt Leskov's importance: 'Writers like Leskov… cannot please our critics, because our critics are almost all Jews who do not know the core of Russian life and are alien to it, its spirit, its forms, its humour…' Leskov's idiom - 'you stepped on my favourite corn' - found its way into The Seagull.
Melikhovo became all Anton's. After dinner, on 3 June, Misha, Masha and Vania left Melikhovo for the south. They stayed for two days with Georgi in Taganrog. This was Masha's first visit since she was a child: she bathed in the Sea of Azov. From Taganrog Vania returned to Melikhovo three weeks later, but Misha and Masha took Anton's route of 1888, by sea to Batum and then overland to
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Kislovodsk. They returned late on zH June 'thin, tired, exhausted, yet full of the joys of life,' Vania reported to his wife. While Anton enjoyed three weeks' solitude, Pavel ploughed the parched earth, sold the hay, called out the vet47 to a sick cow, and bought new striking clocks - the elder Chekhovs' main extravagance.
Olga Kundasova began to frequent the house: Pavel recorded her as 'living with us'. To Suvorin Anton complained: 'This person in big doses, no thanks! It's easier hauling water from a deep well.' Olga left to spend the rest of the year with her sister, 1500 miles away in Batum. Anton managed her better, as she acknowledged next April: I am struck by many things in your attitude to me that have come to the surface recently, I am struck because I myself am now stony ground, and there was a time when I was good soil. (I ask you when reading this part of my letter not to indulge in the pornographic ideas so typical of you.) Anton had learnt to say no with yet more determination. He refused to help Olga assemble a library for the psychiatric hospital. He did however defend the peasant arsonist, Epifan Volkov, and after a year, the investigating magistrate, an admirer of Anton's plays, released Volkov. Mitrofan's younger son, Volodia, was expelled from a seminary, and Anton interceded to save him from conscription.
Peace ended on 20 June, when Mitrofan's widow Liudmila came to stay for forty days with her two teenage daughters, Aleksandra and Elena. Anton delighted in their domesticity, and the two girls were exceptionally pretty. Only Pavel counted the days to their departure, despite Liudmila's enthusiasm for Matins and Vespers at Vaskino and the Monastery. Three weeks after these relatives left, Aunt Marfa Loboda, the widow of Ivan Morozov (Evgenia's brother), came for a week. Of all her in-laws Evgenia liked Marfa best: together they prayed at the monastery church.
The gestation of Chekhov's new play, The Seagull, was interrupted by a suicidal incident that Anton was to use as the play's crowning touch. Levitan was at Gorki, a remote estate, halfway between Moscow and Petersburg,
