And that is the fault of neither of us.
Even when judged objectively as a writer, I do not deserve to be accused publicly of lack of principle. Hitherto I have led a sheltered life within four walls; you and I meet one another no more than once every two years or so, and I have never in my life come across Mr Machtet. You may judge from this how seldom I leave my house; I studiously avoid literary soirees, parties, conferences and so on. I have never visited any editorial office uninvited, and have taken pains to ensure that my friends should see me more as a doctor than as a writer. In short, I have always conducted myself with discretion in writing circles, and my present letter is the first piece of immodesty I have ever perpetrated in ten years of writing activity. I am on excellent terms with my colleagues; I have never presumed to sit in judgement either on them or on the magazines and newspapers for which they write, since I do not consider myself competent to do so. Moreover, I believe that in the present subservient position of the press, any word uttered against a journal or a writer can be seen not only as an unkind and insensitive attack but as actually criminal. Up till now, the only magazines and newspapers to which I decline to contribute have been those whose manifestly inferior quality is obvious to all, but when I have been obliged to choose between one publication or another, my custom has been to favour those who most needed my services for material or other reasons. This is the reason I have always worked for the Northern Herald rather than for your paper or for the Herald of Europe, and it is also why I have earned no more than half what I could have had I taken a different view of my obligations.
The accusation you have levelled at me is nothing short of libellous. There is no point in asking you to retract it, since it has already been exposed in all its malign force and cannot now be simply chopped out
with an axe. Neither can I excuse it as a careless or irresponsible lapse, because I am quite aware that your editorial office consists of unimpeachably decent and civilized people who, I trust, do not simply write and read articles but take responsibility for every word in them. The only recourse I have is to ensure you are not left in ignorance of the error, and at the same time to ask you to believe in the genuinely heavy heart with which I am writing this letter. It is self-evident that your attack on me makes it impossible to contemplate even conventional social intercourse between us, still less any professional relations.
A. Chekhov46
Thus ended the second period of Chekhov's Moscow life.
Chapter 4
SUMMERS AT THE DACHA
I New Jerusalem
With the countryside all around looking so meek and pensive, Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were filled with love for the landscape in this subdued weather, and both were thinking how magnificent and beautiful their country was.
'Gooseberries'
At the beginning of May, the weather in Moscow can suddenly change. Fur coats have to be hurriedly exchanged for short-sleeved shirts and people start coming out on the streets again, blinking in the bright sunshine. Central Russia's continental climate means that the transition from winter to spring can be extremely abrupt. As soon as it becomes warm, Muscovites start longing to go to their dachas. On cue, Russian newspapers begin publishing advice columns on gardening matters, and the main arteries into Moscow become clogged on Sunday evenings with big jeeps creating new lanes on the hard shoulders in order to circumnavigate the tailbacks, terrorizing into submission the uninsured little Soviet-made cars with their trays of eggs on the back ledge. During the six months of the 'dacha season' all the big Russian cities empty at weekends, and virtually shut down for the whole of July and August as everyone heads for the country to escape the sultry heat of the metropolis. Since most dachas still have no central heating, the dacha season is brought to a natural end with the first snowfalls.
The rhythms of Russian life have not changed much since Chekhov's lifetime. He too was an enthusiastic 'dachnik', and no study of his life and work can really be complete without an appreciation of the role played by the summers he spent with his family at dachas in the Russian
and Ukrainian countryside; references to dachas and dachniks fill his stories and plays from beginning to end, and the wistful green landscapes he looked out on from his dacha (he always placed his desk in front of a window) inspired some of his finest writing.
Deeply enshrined in the Russian psyche, the concept of the dacha is a phenomenon that really has no equal in any other culture. In The Cherry Orchard, the nouveau riche businessman Lopakhin implores the old-world landowner Madame Ranevskaya that she should forgo the pleasures of fragrant white blossom every spring and let out her land as dacha plots so that she can pay off the debts that threaten to engulf her. 'Dachas and dachniks – forgive me but that's so vulgar,' Ranevskaya replies, encapsulating the Russian nobility's traditional feelings of contempt for middle-class aspirations to country living. Exactly a hundred years later, the last mohicans of the intelligentsia (the modern-day equivalent of the pre-revolutionary aristocracy) are similarly scornful of the pretensions of today's nouveau riche Russian who prefers to call his dacha a kottedzh (cottage), even though it will probably be a vast marble-clad gothic pile protected by security fences and leather-jacketed heavies at the gate. The Cherry Orchard is set in early twentieth-century Russia, but it is also entirely prophetic of early twenty-first- century Russia. Ranevskaya's beloved cherry orchard is unequivocally beautiful but it no longer fulfils any useful function; the artistic and intellectual heritage of the intelligentsia is similarly a thing of great beauty, but one that no longer seems to be needed by anybody in the fast new commercial world of contemporary Russia where the businessman is king. This is just one of the many ways in which Chekhov's work proves its timelessness.
The Russian country cottage has certainly undergone a significant evolution since its beginnings as a simple gift of land bestowed by the state (the word 'dacha' comes from the verb 'to give').1 Anxious to consolidate St Petersburg as a conurbation, Peter the Great forced his nobles to build second houses on the plots of land he gave them just outside the city. Throughout the eighteenth century the dacha was thus the preserve of Russia's social elite – a fashionable villa used for socializing in the summer months, and quite distinct from one's city mansion or hereditary manorial estate deep in the Russian heartlands. As the urban populations of St Petersburg and Moscow grew, however, Russian subjects of all backgrounds began to yearn for pastoral holiday
retreats, and the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of residences of all shapes and sizes outside the city, often in purpose-built dacha colonies (which are still popular today). With the belated expansion of Russia's railways at the end of the nineteenth century, it became possible to venture further afield, and the burgeoning middle class began to ape the fabled lifestyle of Russian aristocratic landowners (such as Chekhov's Ranevskaya) whose fortunes were then going into terminal decline. Chekhov was part of this burgeoning middle class, as he himself was only too well aware. It was while mingling with well-to-do dachniks in the Moscow countryside during his final years as a medical student that he first successfully effected the transition from meshchanin to intelligent.
If the southern Russian steppe takes pride of place in the hierarchy of Chekhov's sources of lyrical inspiration, the countryside around Moscow comes a close second. It is well known that he pined for Russia during his long years of exile in the Crimea, where he was surrounded by sea and mountains and lush sub-tropical vegetation: the walls of his Yalta home are pointedly lined with pictures of homely plains, green meadows and quiet rivers, most of them painted by his sister Maria or his friend the landscape painter Isaak Levitan. In a prominent position in the
