brother, had been expelled from university for subversive activities.59
The Lintvaryovs had lots of guests over the summer, and the Chekhovs did too. Towards the end of May the venerable writer Pleshcheyev arrived off the Petersburg train at one o'clock in the morning and stayed for three weeks, idolized by the Lintvaryovs as if he was a wonder-working icon.60 He had everyone gripped with his stories of being sentenced to death, only to be reprieved by the Tsar just before he was about to be hanged along with Dostoevsky back in 1849. Then Chekhov's younger brother Misha arrived from his travels in the Crimea, followed by the recently widowed eldest brother, Alexander, and the populist writer Barantsevich, who left his trousers behind when he departed: Chekhov wrote to ask him which museum they should be donated to. (Pleshcheyev, meanwhile, left his shirt behind, which meant, according to Russian superstition, that he would return.)61 Several other friends turned up to stay, as did the two remaining brothers, Ivan and Nikolai at the beginning of June. And at the end of the month, Chekhov's father was given two weeks' leave from his job in Moscow to come for a holiday.
Chekhov himself went visiting too. He decided that he liked the Ukraine so much he wanted to buy a khutor, a farmstead, somewhere deep in the countryside. So, on 13 June, the day after he caught six
crucian carp, he set out with the Lintvaryovs in a huge antique Gogolian sprung carriage with four hired horses, to Sorochintsy. They were going to stay with the Smagins, relatives of the Lintvaryovs who were going to help him find a property. He travelled about 250 miles in ten days, and came back thinking he was going to give up writing. Claiming he was fed up with literature (he had not yet written anything that summer), his new idea was to settle down in a village on the banks of the River Psyol and devote himself to medicine, spending his winters in St Petersburg. Apart from the beauties of the landscape, Chekhov was impressed by the standard of living of the Ukrainian peasants (traditionally much higher than in Russia), whom he characterized as 'intelligent, religious, musical, sober, decent, jolly and well-fed'.62 But it was really the landscape which sent him into ecstasies. 'Everything I saw and heard was so fascinating and new that I hope you won't mind if I don't describe the journey in this letter,' he corresponded afterwards, limiting himself to mentioning quiet nights fragrant with the smell of freshly cut hay, the sound of distant violins, and rivers and lakes glistening in the dusk.63 One letter he began about his trip had to be torn up after three pages, as he had too many impressions, and felt he had been unable to convey even a twentieth of what he wanted to say.64 To Pleshcheyev he mentioned gorgeous landscapes and vistas which had made his heart stop, and which could only be adequately depicted in novels or short stories, languorous sad sunsets, and the wonderful music played at the weddings he had come upon on his journey. The Smagins' estate, with its marvellous poplars, where Chekhov stayed for five days, was equally atmospheric:
The Smagins' estate is huge and spacious, but old, neglected and lifeless, like last year's spider's web. The house has subsided, the doors don't shut, the tiles on the stove are pushing each other out and forming corners, young cherry and plum saplings are growing up through the gaps in the floorboards. A nightingale had made a nest in between the window and shutters in the room in which I slept, and while I was there naked little nightingales which looked like undressed Jewish children hatched from the eggs.65 Well-fed storks live in the threshing barn. And there is an old man living in the apiary who is reminiscent of Tsar Gorokh and Cleopatra.
Everything was decrepit, but incredibly poetic, sad and beautiful. . .??
Chekhov came back to Luka brimming with ideas for what he was going to do when he was rich. Sheltering inside one day during a fierce storm (the boats were all full of water), he dreamt up a scheme to set up what he called a 'climatic station' for Petersburg writers. The idea was that under the influence of all the open space and their meetings with delightful Ukrainians, they would come to see that the focus of their literary endeavours was totally misguided, and give up, as he planned to do.67
Restless as always, Chekhov took off again from Luka in July to go on a trip to the Crimea, which he was visiting for the first time. He had been invited to stay with his new friend, the Petersburg newspaper magnate Alexei Suvorin. After ten days of ceaseless conversation with Suvorin at his palatial dacha on the sea in Feodosia, Chekhov went off on an adventure with his son Alexei Jr, who was two years older than he. They first took a steamship down the Black Sea coast to Sukhumi in Abkhazia, where they stayed in the New Athos Monastery. Chekhov bought his mother an icon and made friends with the local bishop, who was travelling through his diocese on horseback. As if he had not had enough stimulating experiences that summer, he was now smitten by the exotic scenery of the Caucasian peaks, and reeled off lists of unfamiliar sights to his correspondents back home in Russia: eucalyptuses, tea bushes, cypresses, cedars, palms, donkeys, swans, buffaloes, blue-grey cranes, and 'most importantly, mountains, mountains and more mountains . . .' Since the highest peaks Chekhov had seen previously were the hills north of Taganrog (the 'Don Switzerland'), it is understandable that he was impressed. It felt to him that a thousand subjects for stories were peering out of every bush and shadow, and from the sky and the sea, and he cursed himself for not being able to draw.
From Sukhumi, the travellers continued their journey by boat to Batumi, and then travelled inland to Tbilisi and Baku along the Georgian Military Highway, which Chekhov felt was 'poetry, not a road, an amazing, fantastic story'.68 They intended to cross the Caspian Sea and go to Persia via Bukhara and Samarkand, but their epic journey was abruptly curtailed by news of the death of Suvorin Jr's brother from diphtheria. Having guiltily bypassed the grieving family in Feodosia, and now keen to get home, Chekhov did not feel quite in the mood to visit his relatives in Taganrog when his train stopped there: it
was 6 August, the Day of the Transfiguration, and he knew his relatives would be in St Mitrofan's Church, whose cupola he could see from the station.69 Within days Chekhov was back in the Ukraine, but already dreaming of going to Constantinople and Mount Athos the following year.
Ensconced again at the Lintvaryovs' tumbledown estate, he found it hard to imagine he had really seen dolphins, waterfalls, mountain crevasses, and trees entangled with creepers that were like veils in the tropical heat… It was the middle of August and in the Ukraine peasants were bringing the grain to be threshed; an endless string of squeaking carts seemed to pass the Chekhovs' dacha on the way to the barn.70 Looking out through the window at the mass of green foliage sparkling in the late summer sunshine, Chekhov began to grow dejected at the thought of the 'prose of Moscow life' to which he would shortly have to return, with its cold weather, bad plays and 'Russian thoughts'. He made another trip to the Poltava region to try to buy a khutor, but could not agree a price with the owner. Seeing all the grain being threshed made him remember the long summer days of his boyhood that he had to spend by the threshing machine noting down weights, while staying with his grandfather out in the steppe: the slow carts, the clouds of dust, the sweaty faces and low wolf-like noise produced by the machine were etched in his memory as clearly as 'Our Father', he said.71
After the ecstasies of the first summer spent at Luka, Chekhov was keen to return the following year. This time he rented two separate annexes for his family, in order to have more space for guests. At first everything was as before. Chekhov had written very little in the summer of 1888, but now he found he was able to write every day, and the Lintvaryovs seemed even more charming than the previous year. It was soon incredibly hot, which meant having to go swimming at least twice a day, and sleeping with all the windows open. 'I can't believe my eyes,' Chekhov wrote in early May:
… Not long ago it was snowy and cold and now I am sitting by an open window listening to nightingales, hoopoes, orioles and other such creatures shouting unceasingly in the garden. The Psyol is magnificently gentle, the colours of the sky and the horizon are warm. The apples and cherries are in blossom. There are geese walking around with their young. In a word, spring has arrived in full force.72
But the restless Chekhov constantly needed new experiences, and he confessed as much to a friend, adding that his brother's constant coughing in the room next door was not helping his rather flat mood. He wished he were
