not a doctor and so aware of what was going on.
The thirty-year-old artist Nikolai was indeed now very sick with tuberculosis, and the hours Chekhov spent crayfishing were dominated by gloomy thoughts of his brother's imminent death. They had brought Nikolai down from Moscow in a first-class compartment, and were waiting on him hand and foot. For the first month he had been able to go outside, but now he was mostly confined indoors and unable to breathe easily lying down. He dreamed of getting well and being able to paint again. On 4 June, Chekhov wrote with a heavy heart to his doctor colleague Nikolai Obolonsky about his condition.73 Guests helped -Chekhov confessed that he felt he was in a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean when he was alone. His friend Suvorin came down from Petersburg to visit in early May, and he and Chekhov did a lot of fishing. But the strain was beginning to take its toll, and Chekhov was relieved when his brother Alexander also arrived from Petersburg to take over some of the duties of caring for Nikolai. Chekhov needed a break, and on 16 June he set out with his brother Ivan, his guest Pavel Svobodin, and the Lintvaryovs on a visit to the Smagins' estate. As luck would have it, Nikolai died early the following morning, and a telegram brought everyone back home on an excruciating journey involving an eight-hour wait at a remote railway station until two in the morning. For want of anything better to do, Chekhov set off to look round the town, and had sat freezing on a park bench where he overheard actors rehearsing a melodrama behind a wall.
Chekhov was overcome with guilt, and felt that the dreadful weather on the journey had been his punishment for abandoning Nikolai:
Wet and cold, we arrived at the Smagins at night, got into cold beds and went to sleep to the sound of cold rain. In the morning there was the same revolting Vologda weather; I'll never forget the muddy road, the grey sky or the tears on the trees for my whole life – it will be impossible to forget because the next morning a man came from Mirgorod with a wet telegram: 'Kolya has died.'74
With the exception of the early loss of the infant Evgenia, the Chekhovs had not really experienced death in the family and were completely grief-stricken to see Nikolai in a coffin; Anton was the only one not to cry, Alexander wrote bitterly to their father in Moscow.75 Nikolai was buried in the tranquil village cemetery, which smelled of creeping velvetgrass and was full of birds singing their hearts out, Chekhov told one of his brother's friends by letter, with his grave marked by a cross you could see from a long way off. The funeral proceeded according to the local custom, with the family carrying the open coffin on their shoulders, accompanied by banners and the tolling of the church bells. A memorial service was conducted on the ninth day, as was traditional in the Orthodox Church. The detail of the extremely long letter Misha sent to Pavel Egorovich in Moscow two days after Nikolai's death speaks eloquently of how shaken the family were:
Soon they started ringing the bell for the deceased in the church on someone's instruction, the priest came with his assistant, they served a service for the dead, during which many tears were shed; then the services for the dead started to be held every day, twice, at 11 in the morning and 7 in the evening. The deceased lay surrounded by flowers with an incredibly peaceful, but very emaciated, expression on his face. The first day was dreadful for us. Towards evening the assistant came and started to read psalms, and three old women who had agreed to sit with the body all night. I made Mama go and lie down; she wanted to stay up and keep watch over Kolya all night came too. We sent Masha, who was worn out with crying, to stay the night in the big house with the Lintvaryovs. It was an awful night. The next morning the crying started again, and everyone sobbed during the service for the dead in the morning; our family, other people too, our landlords and the peasants. At midday a coffin with white brocade was brought from town and we put Kolya into it only during the evening service, on Mama's insistence. The coffin was covered with a veil and surrounded with wreaths and flowers. Psalms were read all the following night again, and you could hear the muffled conversations of the old ladies sitting by the coffin. When we started to take Kolya to the church the next morning, mother and Masha were sobbing so much it was terrible to look at them. Masha and the Lintvaryov ladies took out the coffin lid, but the coffin was carried by six of us: Antosha, Vanya, Sasha, me, Ivanenko and Egor Mikhailovich Lintvaryov. We said prayers at every corner. The service
was very formal, with the church completely lit up; everyone there held candles. During the service a cross was taken out to the cemetery, and at home all the rooms were cleaned and swept and the furniture was taken outside. We took the coffin out of the church the same way. We carried it still open and only closed it by the grave itself. We said prayers at every corner and the priest read the Gospel. A lot of people followed the coffin. Icons were carried with the coffin, like in Taganrog, as if it was a church procession. Everyone sobbed at the cemetery when we had to say goodbye, mother was grieving and could not bring herself to part with the body. The coffin was lowered into the grave, it was covered over, a cross was put up and Kolya was buried. The wake was very modest: all the locals who had taken part in the funeral were given a pie, a handkerchief and a glass of vodka, and the clergy and the Linrvaryovs had lunch and tea with us. After lunch Mama and I went to the cemetery again, Mama mourned and cried, and then we came back.76
After taking his family off to another town for a few days to give them a change of scene, Chekhov felt desperate to escape to somewhere far away, and on 2 July he got on a train, intending to join Suvorin in the Tyrol. But in the end he was in such low spirits he only got as far as Odessa, where it was so hot he spent half his money on ice cream.77 After a change of plan, he spent several weeks leading a pointlessly sybaritic life in Yalta, feeling guilty that he had abandoned his grieving, scared family. Soon, he found he was regretting having so many acquaintances, and rarely had the chance to be alone. He told his sister he missed Luka, and spent hours by the shore listening to crashing waves and rolling pebbles, the sounds of which reminded him of the laughter of people on the estate. He returned finally to Sumy in the middle of August for the last few weeks of the summer. It was a grim end to a grim summer, as one of his last letters testifies:
Nikolai's last days, his suffering and his funeral had the most depressing impact on me and on our whole family. I felt so awful inside that the summer, the dacha and the Psyol all became loathsome. The only diversion was letters from kind people who hastened to offer their sympathy having found out about Nikolai's death in the papers. Letters don't amount to much, of course, but when you read them, you don't feel lonely, and loneliness is the most rotten and tedious feeling.78
Ill Aleksin
I'm leaving for Aleksin today to listen to the nightingales.
Letter to A. Urusov, 3 May 1891
Nikolai's death was one of the factors which played a role in Chekhov's decision to undertake his eight-month journey to Siberia the following year, so it was not until 1891 that the time came round for the family to rent a summer dacha again. In March Chekhov travelled to Western Europe for the first time; the day after his return to Moscow, the family left for the dacha that Misha had managed to find for them at the last minute – anything rather than stay in steamy Moscow all summer. It was located in Aleksin, a small town on the River Oka, a hundred or so miles south of Moscow, but the little wooden house at the edge of a birch wood was not as heavenly as the previous dachas had been. It was quiet, there was a good view of the Oka and the railway bridge stretching over it, but there were only four rather cramped rooms, it was six minutes' walk to the river, the walk back was uphill, and there were too many other dachniks in the vicinity for Chekhov's liking. After his amazing trip through Italy and France, dacha life seemed a bit flat, and he felt as though he had been taken prisoner and put in a fortress.79
Chekhov was keen to get a lot of writing done that summer. He allocated Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays to his book about the penal colony on Sakhalin; Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays were devoted to the mythical novel that he had been working on over the years (which would never actually materialize), and he reserved Sundays for dashing off 'little stories'. It was a bit of a squash with all his family there, including his father who had now finally retired from his job. There was also the mongoose he had brought back from the tropics, which
