about the cherry orchard he had left behind at his estate in Melikhovo in 1898. 'I was sorry you weren't here when the garden was all white with blossom and there were nightingales singing,' he wrote to Suvorin during his first spring there in 1892.2 Chekhov was told there were cherry trees in the garden at Melikhovo when he moved in, but at first he had to take this on trust because it was not until the snows melted that he could actually discover where they were. Despite the fact that his orchard started producing so many cherries in July that his family did not know what to do with them, planting more trees was one of Chekhov's first priorities. By the time the snow fell again that autumn,
Chekhov's house and garden at Melikhovo
he had planted sixty more cherry trees, of the renowned Vladimir variety whose fruit is deep red in colour, large and sweet.
As he sat at his desk in Yalta conjuring up the clouds of white blossom that would fill the play which would be his last completed literary work, Chekhov may have been thinking back particularly to the summer of 1897. The cherry trees at Melikhovo produced an abundance of fruit that year. 'I am going away soon, so I am doing nothing at the moment but wandering round the garden eating cherries,' he wrote to Nikolai Leikin; 'I pick twenty at a time and stuff them all into my mouth at once. They taste better like that.'3 Or maybe he was thinking of the hot July days of the following summer at Melikhovo, when his father made sixteen and a half pounds of cherry jam. (And this was despite Pavel Egorovich recording in his Melikhovo diary a few days earlier that the sparrows had pecked all the cherries from the trees.)4 Notwithstanding the change in his lifestyle necessitated by the onset of tuberculosis, the unexpected death of Pavel Egorovich a few months later brought one of the happiest periods of Chekhov's life to an abrupt end. The estate was sold in 1899 to a timber merchant who proceeded to chop down the cherry trees. He could not help thinking back wistfully to his orchard in Melikhovo, where the cherries blossomed each successive spring.
Chekhov loved cherry blossom simply because it was beautiful, but he also associated it with his childhood and southern upbringing. In 'The Steppe', his first story for a literary journal, we see cherry trees through the eyes of nine-year-old Egorushka. The carriage the boy is travelling in has just set off from his southern home town one early July morning at the beginning of the long journey across the steppe, and is passing the cemetery:
Looking like white blobs from far off, white crosses and gravestones peered out happily from behind the wall, nestled among the green leaves of cherry trees. Egorushka remembered that when the cherry trees blossomed, these white blobs merged with the white cherry blossom to become a white sea; and when they ripened, the white gravestones and crosses were spattered with crimson dots like blood . . .5
The leafy Taganrog cemetery also stood on the edge of town, and Chekhov knew it well. It might have been one of the many places where he came to pick cherries as a boy. As he stood eating cherries underneath his very own trees for the first time in July 1892 in Melikhovo, Chekhov experienced a long-forgotten frisson. 'It feels strange that no one is chasing me away,' he wrote to Suvorin; 'I used to get my ears boxed every day for picking fruit when I was a child.'6 Rather more chilling, in the light of what the cherry orchard comes to symbolize in his play, is the connection made in this passage from 'The Steppe' between the white blossom of a tree and the maturing of its red fruit (which ought to represent life forces) with blood, death and sterility. In the play, the cherry orchard comes to stand for a whole social system which has many beautiful qualities, but is fundamentally superannuated. On a much more private level, since Chekhov would not have forgotten the haunting image he created fifteen years earlier in 'The Steppe', the orchard stands for life itself, and his own life in particular.
Cherry orchards may have been subliminally linked with death in Chekhov's mind from an early age, but they were also inextricably linked for him with the mystique of the Russian country estate – the usadba - which had traditionally been one of the bedrocks of the country's feudal ways. The fortunes of Russian landowners were already in decline when Chekhov was growing up; it was a natural
consequence of the Emancipation of the Serfs, which took place when he was one year old. As a young boy he had heard the mother of a school friend talk about the huge cherry orchards she used to have on her Ukrainian estates before she became impoverished, like so many other members of the gentry. From his vantage point in dusty, cramped Taganrog, a country estate must have seemed like an Arcadian paradise, a fairytale world of endless space and beauty, which was all the more entrancing since it was so far from his own life; also, it was beginning to disappear. When he was able to escape from Taganrog and travel into the steppe, Chekhov finally saw acres of white cherry blossom for himself. It was an image which was implanted more vividly in his creative imagination when he travelled back south to the steppe in the spring of 1887 to visit his friends the Kravtsovs, and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the flowering orchards on their estate.7 It made him long all the more to have an estate of his own.
Chekhov was not interested in having an estate in order to be lord of the manor and have a retinue of staff; it was the idea of shady paths, cool stretches of water and blossoming trees which captivated him. This becomes clear when one reads his early thriller Drama at a Shooting Party, in which there are several lyrical passages mixed in with the parody and racy dialogue, and phrases ending poetically with his signature … They are, significantly, exclusively concerned with evoking the manorial estate where the action takes place: 'I remember the Count's garden with its luxurious cool orangeries and the shade of its narrow neglected paths … Those paths, protected from the sun by an arch of interlaced green boughs of old lime trees, know me well. . .'8 When Chekhov's narrator describes the beauty of a white-blossoming cherry orchard on the far side of the lake, and its once sumptuous grounds, one has the distinct impression the author is expressing his own feelings: that this estate is located in the southern Russia of Chekhov's childhood we know from the reference to a kurgan. A few months after the last instalment of Drama at a Shooting Party appeared, Chekhov wrote to Leikin to congratulate him on buying Count Stroganov's old estate outside St Petersburg. 'I love everything that goes under the word estate in Russia,' he commented revealingly; 'that word has still not lost its poetic colouring.'9 Chekhov was not a sentimental man, and there was no higher word in his lexicon than 'poetic'. It invariably implied an elegiac kind of beauty. His reaction upon setting
eyes on Leikin's new property a few months later is also revealing, however. The former merchant's son was revelling in being able to reside in luxury, but his nouveau riche lifestyle repelled Chekhov, who retained modest tastes to the end of his days. Melikhovo, indeed, was the very opposite of Leikin's opulent palace.
Melikhovo lay some forty-five miles south of Moscow, about fifteen miles from the town of Serpukhov, and six miles from the nearest railway station of Lopasnya, which was on the main line (Lopasnya was also the name of the local river). The purchase of the estate had been an impulsive move: Chekhov bought it, sight unseen, in the dead of winter. Inspired by his summers at Luka and his trips into the outlying countryside, he had initially set his heart on somewhere in the Ukraine. When these plans did not work out, he became somewhat reckless. He had been desperate to move out of Moscow ever since his return from Siberia at the end of 1890. After the magical summer spent at the rundown estate at Bogimovo, his desire for space only intensified. He found everything to do with business and money boring, and he was often swindled by the more unscrupulous people he dealt with because of it, so his younger brother Misha was brought in to negotiate on his behalf when the Melikhovo estate came up for sale. Chekhov visited the property only when the deeds had been signed, on a snowy day in late February 1892. With an eye to getting out his fishing rod at the earliest opportunity, he brought down with him from Moscow twenty small tench in a jar, which he had purchased in a fish shop in the city. They were immediately deposited in the pond, and thus became the estate's first new residents, a week before the Chekhovs themselves moved in; carp followed shortly afterwards.10 Tench were certainly a good choice for the pond. From experience (and perhaps study of Sabaneev's Fishes of Russia), Chekhov would have known that they grew quickly, could be fished in spring, were easy to catch, and were generally rather lazy ('phlegmatic' was Sabaneev's choice description). Tench liked to
