The lake is huge, about a kilometre long. From the look of it, there is a ton of fish in it.
Tell Papa that we look forward to seeing him, and that it will be quiet for him here. Babkino can't hold a candle to this dacha. The noise at night alone is enough to drive you wild! Everything smells glorious, the garden is completely ancient, the Ukrainians are very amusing, and the courtyard is spick and span. There is not even a trace of a puddle.
It's incredibly hot. I don't have the energy to go around in a starched shirt.
Greetings to everyone; hope you are well. Travelling to Sumy is boring and very tiring. Bring a bottle of vodka with you. The vodka here stinks of the WC.
I'll keep Papa here for 3 weeks. That will be pretty good!
Yours, A. Chekhov
The river is wider than the Moscow river. There are lots of boats and islands. Details to follow tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.49
The dacha may have been convenient, as Chekhov wrote in his follow-up letter, but it did not have any conveniences, and he wondered what it would be like beetling into the bushes when the weather was not so warm and dry.50 But having one's posterior bitten all over by mosquitoes51 was a small price to pay for being able to sit by an open window and hear nightingales, cuckoos and hoopoes singing in the garden, and horses whinnying as villagers rode past on their way to the river to fish.
The river was a major attraction. The Lintvaryovs' estate was situated on the steep southern bank of the River Psyol, a beautiful deep tributary of the mighty Dnieper, fringed with oaks and willows. The opposite bank was gently sloping, and dotted with white cottages and gardens. The previous year Chekhov had watched an icon procession by boat on the feast of St Nikolai during his visit to the Svyatogorsk Monastery; in 1888 on 'Spring Nikola', as it was popularly referred to ('Winter Nikola' being celebrated in December), he enjoyed watching villagers travelling down the river in boats, playing violins. Every day, he went by boat to the watermill to fish, and he decided that rowing
was extremely good exercise.52 The locals were also passionate fishermen and Chekhov reported to his brother Ivan that he had got to know many of them, was learning all their secrets, and had already caught a pike and a perch. He had brought with him a rod and floats, but he asked Ivan to bring from Moscow an assortment of hooks of various sizes necessary for catching cat-fish, plus a selection of novels and lives of saints to give away to the lads who dug worms for him.53 He went fishing all night with the local fishing enthusiasts on the eve of Trinity Sunday (the feast celebrated fifty days after Easter, which traditionally marks the transition from spring to summer in the Russian calendar). 'But what is most important,' Chekhov wrote revealingly in another early letter that summer, 'is that it is so spacious here that I feel I have received for my hundred roubles the right to live in a space which has no visible end to it.'
Despite, or because of, his adventures in the steppe the previous spring, Chekhov's deep-seated need to experience a sense of physical freedom had become, if anything, more intense. He was also utterly intoxicated by the beauty of his surroundings, the sounds, the sights and smells of which became a rich reservoir of memories to draw on in the coming years for the stories and plays he would write. The way of life in Sumy seemed to fit the sort of cliche long ago rejected by editors, and included:
. . . nightingales that sing day and night, the sound of dogs barking far away, old, overgrown gardens, very poetic, sad estates, totally run-down, in which live the souls of beautiful women, not to mention old servants, former serfs with one foot in the grave, and young girls thirsting for the most cliched kind of romance; not far from me there is even the trite cliche of a watermill (with 16 wheels), with a miller and his daughter who always sits at the window obviously waiting for something. Every single thing I see and hear seems familiar to me from ancient lore and fairy tales.54
The Chekhovs joined a well-established community when they arrived at Luka, as the Lintvaryovs' estate was called, and Ivan was sent a diagram showing who lived where; this even included the little cottage that was home to Panas, one of the young boys who dug for worms. The Chekhovs' annexe was a building with a porch and
columns, facing on to a little garden with an olive tree in it. Next door to them was another holidaymaker, and the kitchen where the Polish cook Anna (wife of the local postman) prepared meals for the family: lunch was served at one, tea at four and dinner at ten, although Chekhov liked to eat earlier – he disliked going to bed on a full stomach, and was proud to report that he was not drinking vodka at all. Further along was the house rented by Grigory Artemenko, who had a job at the local factory and an ability to reel in huge cat-fish every night. The widowed Alexandra Lintvaryova, mistress of the estate, lived with her three grown-up daughters and younger son in the unpretentious white manor house surrounded by trees, and the eldest son, Pavel, lived in a separate annexe with his pregnant wife (Chekhov helped with the birth of their baby son in early July).55 The garden was full of tulips and lilac when the Chekhovs arrived, and the white acacia was just about to come into blossom.
Chekhov warmed to the Lintvaryovs, who represented the more earnest, public-spirited side of the Russian educated classes. As at Babkino, he and his siblings tended to spend their evenings sitting in the antique chairs in the main house's drawing room, listening to music and talking about literature. From the descriptions he gave in his letters that summer, the matriarch Alexandra Vasilievna seems like a benevolent and more sprightly version of Uncle Vanya's mother in the play. 'The old mother is a very kind, podgy woman who has had her share of suffering,' he wrote. 'She reads Schopenhauer and goes to church for the akathist;56 she dutifully studies every issue of the Herald of Europe and the Northern Herald and knows writers I haven't even dreamt about.'57 Her two eldest daughters, both about Chekhov's age, were doctors. Zinaida, the eldest, was blind from a brain tumour and also epileptic. She was a fiercely stoic woman, revered as a saint by the local peasants (Chekhov wrote an obituary of her when she died at the age of thirty-four three years later). The stories from Chekhov's new collection, In the Twilight, were read aloud to her, and her laughter and quiet equanimity in the face of death made him feel strange that people had so little consciousness of their own mortality. The second daughter, Elena, who was twenty-nine, was a kind and intelligent woman who sent the family asparagus every day and confessed to Chekhov that -shades of Anna Sergeyevna in 'The Lady with the Little Dog' – she had never been happy and never would be. She was too plain to attract
suitors, Chekhov wrote in a letter, and yet she clearly longed to have a family. In the evenings, when there was music in the drawing room, she could be seen walking frenziedly up and down the tree-lined avenue in the garden like a caged animal. Chekhov spent some time receiving patients with her, and found that he was rather more optimistic than she was in his prognoses, and certainly less inclined to become so emotionally involved with each case.
Long-haired Natalya, the third daughter, had a strong bony body which reminded Chekhov of a bream. Muscular and suntanned, with an extraordinarily loud laugh, she was a teacher who ran a school in the grounds of the estate at her own expense, and – shades of the elder sister Lida in 'The House with a Mezzanine' – defiantly taught Krylov's fables in Ukrainian translation, which was against the law.58 She was also rather plain, according to Chekhov, and somewhat sentimental, despite having read Karl Marx. Georgi, the 23-year-old son, was a fine pianist with a fixation on Tchaikovsky and an admiration for Tolstoy's anarchic ideas about how to live; Pavel, his older
