was fond of pulling corks out of bottles and smashing china. Fortunately, Chekhov did not have to endure the sensation of feeling like a crayfish sitting in a sieve with lots of other crayfish for very long.80 When Levitan and their mutual friend Lika Mizinova travelled down from Moscow by boat for a visit, they met a
neighbouring landowner with the glorious name of Evgeni Bylim-Kolosovsky. Within two days he had sent round two troikas to bring the Chekhovs over to his estate for tea, and not long after that the family had vacated the dacha and moved into the cavernous upper floor of his house. Chekhov liked it so much he was prepared to pay almost twice as many roubles in rent.
Like so many other country estates, Bogimovo was run down and neglected, and therefore almost inevitably poetic in Chekhov's eyes. Catherine the Great had apparently stayed in the enormous mansion while she was on her way to meet up with Potemkin on her grand tour. The main house boasted an enormous columned ballroom on the first floor, with a musicians' gallery, a grand piano and a billiard room. The rooms were so large that they echoed. Chekhov loved it. 'It's delightful, it really is!' he exclaimed in a letter on 18 May. 'The rooms are as big as the ones in the Hall of the Nobility, and the park is glorious, with paths such as I have never seen, a river, a pond, a church for my old folk and absolutely every convenience. The lilac and apple trees are in blossom. It's bliss in a word!'81 Sitting at the pond by the abandoned mill, fishing for carp or perch, he was able to forget all his sorrows.
Chekhov installed himself in the ballroom with the columns and enormous windows, sleeping on an old divan that could have seated twelve people. He rose with the lark, making himself coffee sometimes as early as four in the morning, and then settled down to write on the window sill, from where he could look out on to the park.82 Five years later, he would draw particularly on his experiences living at Bogimovo in 1891 when he came to write 'The House with the Mezzanine', one of the most lyrical of his stories. The narrator is a landscape painter, renting accommodation for the summer from a landowner reminiscent of Bylim-Kolosovsky:
He lived in the grounds, in one of the annexes, while I was in the old mansion, in a vast ballroom with columns, which had no furniture except the large divan I used to sleep on, and a table at which I played patience. Its old pneumatic stoves always used to moan, even when the weather was calm, but during thunderstorms the entire house would start shaking, as if it was about to break into pieces. It was quite frightening, especially at night, when all ten of the large windows would suddenly be lit up by lightning.
The description of a walk the narrator takes one evening seems to sum up what Chekhov perennially found so magical about the lost world of the Russian country estate:
I spent hours on end looking out through my windows at the sky and the birds and at the avenues in the park; I read everything that arrived by post, and I slept. And every now and then I would leave the house and go wandering off somewhere until late in the evening.
Once when I was returning home, I happened to stray into an estate I had never come across before. The sun was already beginning to disappear, and evening shadows stretched along the flowering rye. Two rows of old and very tall fir trees closely planted together stood like solid walls, forming a dark, beautiful avenue. I climbed over the fence without any difficulty and set off down this avenue, slipping on the needles which lay on the ground several inches thick. It was quiet and dark, except high up at the tops of some of the trees, where there was a glimmer of bright golden light, which made rainbows in the spiders' webs. The scent from the needles was so strong it was almost overpowering. Then I turned down the long linden avenue. Here too there were signs of neglect and old age; last year's fallen leaves rustled sadly under my feet, and shadows hid in the twilight between the trees. To my right in an old orchard there was an oriole singing, reluctantly and feebly; it was probably old too. But at this point the lindens came to an end; I walked past a white house with a veranda and a mezzanine, and before me suddenly unfolded a vista of the house's front courtyard, a large pond with a bathing hut and a cluster of green willows, a village on the other side, and a tall narrow bell tower, at the top of which there was a cross, burning in the reflection of the setting sun. For a second I was bewitched by the sense that all this was something familiar and cherished – as though I had seen this exact vista at some point in my childhood.83
As with the previous dachas, there was some interesting company at Bogimovo. A picnic organized so that all the dachniks could get to know each other led to a riotous ride in a tarantas at three in the morning, during which the horses bolted, toppling the carriage; Chekhov landed on his nose.84 (A tarantas was a four-wheel carriage pulled by three horses that could travel at 8 miles an hour. It had a
folding hood but no springs or seats, and travellers simply reclined on its floor on straw or cushions.) Among the dachniks at Bogimovo, Chekhov particularly enjoyed talking to a zoologist with whom he had nightly debates about evolution and degeneration – debates which find their echo in the arguments of his character von Koren in the story 'The Duel', which he was currently working on. Friends came for brief visits, and Chekhov did his best to lure Lika Mizinova, to whom he had begun to grow increasingly attached:
We have a marvellous garden, shady paths, secluded nooks, a river, a mill, a boat, moonlit nights, nightingales, turkeys … There are some very clever frogs in the river and in the pond. We often go for walks, and I usually close my eyes and crook my right arm, imagining you are walking beside me.85
If Lika had hoped to arouse Chekhov's jealousy by consorting with his friend Levitan earlier in the summer, she had been successful, but Chekhov remained in high spirits. Writing to his sister who had gone to stay with the Lintvaryovs in July, he urged her to return as soon as possible, because the household had fallen into disarray. 'As before we very rarely have quarrels,' he wrote to her in his typically deadpan style; 'only at lunch and at dinner.'86 When Masha returned, she went back to her painting, while their father talked endlessly about bishops, Ivan fished and their mother fussed about.87
Soon came St Elijah's Day on 20 July, the last Orthodox feast of the summer, traditionally marking the beginning of the harvest and the turn towards autumn. 'A cold wind started blowing after Elijah,' Chekhov wrote in a letter a few days later. 'It smells of autumn. But I love the Russian autumn. There is something unusually sad, inviting and beautiful about it. I'd like to fly away somewhere with the cranes. Back in my childhood I used to catch singing birds in the autumn and sell them at the market. What joy! Better than selling books.'88 It is not difficult to recall here the numerous stories Chekhov wrote in which he attached particular smells to the seasons, and the discussion about migrating cranes in Three Sisters, which Masha associates with having a meaning in one's life: 'I feel that man should have a faith or be trying to find one, otherwise his life just doesn't make sense,' she says in Act 2. 'Think of living without knowing why cranes fly, why children are born
or why there are stars in the sky. Either you know what you're living for, or else the whole thing's a waste of time and means less than nothing.'
By the end of August, it had become draughty in the enormous ballroom and Chekhov started longing for carpets, fireplaces and learned discussions. Within a few days he would return to rented accommodation in Moscow for the last time.
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Chapter 5 ST PETERSBURG
I Fragments of Fame
