live in still waters, preferably deep down in the slime.
For those brought up on a diet of Tolstoy and Turgenev, the words 'Russian country estate' will conjure up visions of majestic classical mansions, grand staircases and colonnaded ballrooms with exquisite marquetry floors, belvederes and enfilades, elegant empire furniture, orangeries, pavilions and parks. But there were estates and estates, and Melikhovo was at the other end of the scale. There were no belvederes,
and there were certainly no orangeries, as Chekhov commented sadly to Suvorin after he taken his first tour of inspection of the estate. With less than a dozen low-ceilinged rooms, the main house was actually smaller than many of the residences built for the stewards of some of the more imposing aristocratic properties. Its only columns had been installed by the previous owner to support the roof on the veranda, whose quaint, vaguely oriental design led the locals to think he must be a Tatar. The house did not even have a mezzanine (the half-floor which was a staple of even modest country houses), let alone a bathroom. What it did have was a tin roof and a profusion of klopy and tarakany. bedbugs and cockroaches. The previous owner, an artist of dubious taste who painted sets for a theatre in Moscow, had clearly lived in some style with his wife and mistress, their filthy children and some malodorous cats. For his 13,000 roubles Chekhov did get a lot of land, however -some 570 acres – about half of which was covered with spindly young birch trees. There was a ramshackle barn, a hen house, a cattle shed, and various other wooden outbuildings with thatched roofs. There was a well, an orchard and vegetable garden, a couple of ponds, and a wooden fence which went all the way round the perimeter of the estate from its red entrance gates. Most importantly there was a lipovaya alleya - a lime tree path – that quintessential ingredient of the Russian country estate. For Chekhov it was the very best thing about Melikhovo.
Along with the buildings, Chekhov inherited an out-of-tune grand piano, some carts and various farming implements, plus a variety of rather clapped-out animals, namely three horses, a cow, ten old hens, four geese and two shaggy dogs, Sharik and Arapka. This line-up was to change, with the canine contingent soon augmented by Byeloloby (Whitebrow), who gave his name to a children's story about a dog which Chekhov was to write at Melikhovo. But none of the Chekhovs had all that much of an interest in animal husbandry. In 1894 a family friend compiled an inventory of Melikhovo's sleighs, carriages, carts, ploughs and livestock, listing the horses with accompanying thumbnail biographical sketches, thus:
Kirghiz: 8 years old. For going to meet the express train 100 times and throwing his owner just as many times, he gets the top prize. Malchik [Boy]: 5 years old. A horse who likes to perform; dances elegantly in harness.
Anna Petrovna: 98 years old. Too old to be fertile, but we live in hope. Bites coachmen.
Kazachka [Cossack girl]: 10 years old. Hates having a bit in her mouth. Kubar [topsy-turvy]: 7 years old. Docile and patient.11
It was Kubar who was Chekhov's favourite, and the horse he would ask to be sent to the station to meet him when he arrived by train from Moscow. Apart from playing the piano in the evenings, this inventory was perhaps the most valuable service performed by Alexander Ivanenko, who in the early years was Melikhovo's resident prizhivalshchik - another indispensable feature of the Russian country estate. The prizhivalshchik (fern, prizhivalka), a relative or family friend who had no income and was given free board and lodging on a longterm basis, was as familiar a figure in Russian households as the old nanny and the ageing retainer. Constantly aware that they were there on sufferance, such people tended to be excessively ingratiating, as unobtrusive as possible and usually very dull. The comic character of the impoverished landowner Telegin in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya is a classic example of a prizhivalshchik (the play, which is subtitled 'Scenes from Country Life', was completed at Melikhovo). Telegin is so much part of the furniture that the voluptuous Yelena has not even bothered to learn his name, which provokes him to remind her who he is: T live with you now, ma'am, on this estate … I have lunch with you everyday, if you would care to notice.'12 Although Ivanenko was rather younger and far more interesting, he was another of life's unfortunates, and Chekhov clearly had elements of his personality in mind when was creating the character of the hapless bungler Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard. He was a talented musician and had won a place to study piano at the Moscow Conservatoire. When he arrived late in his first year due to illness, however, he was forced instead to take up the flute: all the pianos had already been committed to other students.
As was common, Melikhovo was also the name of the village in which the estate was situated. Melikhovo was a relatively common name for a Russian village, and was derived from 'melissa', the Greek word for bee. Not surprisingly, the area around Chekhov's estate was renowned for its apiaries. The beekeeping brothers at the nearby monastery even won medals for their honey in the 1860s, and Chekhov
himself nurtured hopes of installing hives when he moved into his estate. 'How I would like to have an apiary!' he wrote to Suvorin after just a few weeks in his new home. 'I have an excellent place for one. There's room for 200 hives. And it would be so interesting.'13 He had many dreams when he first moved in; like his plan to build an orangery and keep 2,000 hens,14 this one was not fulfilled.
Chekhov was proud finally to become a landowner himself – it was the fulfilment of his long-cherished dream – but his attitude to his new status was always ironic, not least because of the large mortgage he had taken on to buy Melikhovo. And there is more than a dash of self-referential irony in 'Gooseberries', his satirical portrait of a minor official who scrimps and saves in order to acquire a country estate. The story was one of the last pieces of prose Chekhov wrote at Melikhovo. It was completed in the summer of 1898 before he left for Yalta, and portrays a self-satisfied man so bent on pursuing his dream of cultivating gooseberries that he fails to notice they are completely sour. Tolstoy had written a story claiming that a person only needed six feet of earth. Chekhov countered provocatively that actually people needed the whole globe:
People say that a person only needs six feet of earth. But in fact it's a corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person. And people also say these days that it's a good thing when members of our intelligentsia feel drawn to the land and want to live on country estates. But those country houses with their plots of land are nothing other than those six feet of earth. Leaving city life and all its struggles and stresses; leaving all that in order to lock oneself away in the country – that's no life, that's being selfish and lazy; it's a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without any sacrifice. People don't need six feet of earth, or even a house in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature in its entirety, so they can have the space to express all the capacities and particularities of their free spirit.15
Of the neighbouring landowners, Chekhov became most friendly with Prince Sergei Shakhovskoi, who in 1894 made Chekhov the godfather of his daughter Natalya. Shakhovskoi's much grander seigneurial residence, a mile down the road at Vaskino, fitted rather more closely the traditional image of the Russian country estate. The
main house was wooden, but built in the classical style with a long enfilade of rooms with shuttered windows and columns, and a couple of libraries whose bound volumes Chekhov enjoyed poring over. The house was flanked by the obligatory annexes and a carriage house, these built in brick, and was located in the middle of an eighteenth-century landscaped park which came complete with its own church. Its lands were three times the size of Melikhovo.
Shakhovskoi came from a family with a distinguished lineage. His grandfather had been a Decembrist – one of the liberal-minded nobles who had tried unsuccessfully to stage a coup in December 1825 in order to introduce a democratic form of government – but these were hard times for Russian aristocrats. In the spirit of the times, Shakhovskoi worked conscientiously for the zemstvo, Russia's first form of local government, but this did not help him pay off his debts. By the spring of 1894, he had become so hard up he had to sell his ancestral home. In an
