master of Melikhovo. Following
the long years of humiliating poverty, he liked the new feeling of social superiority that came with living on an estate and having staff. Occasionally he exploited it, and Chekhov then quickly lost his patience, on one occasion berating his father for turning away peasants who had come to receive medical treatment. It turned out they had upset the neatly raked (but pointless) pattern Chekhov senior had made in the gravel outside the house for want of anything better to do.23 And Chekhov drew the line when his father decided to hold an open-air service in the garden at Melikhovo, and arranged for the icons to be brought over specially.24 On their first Easter at Melikhovo, Chekhov was happy to hire a priest from the monastery to come and conduct vespers in the village church, where services were normally only held two or three times a month. And he became an enthusiastic member of the choir along with his family and their guests, which impressed the local peasants in the congregation; they had never been to an Easter service sung so beautifully in their church. Later Chekhov had a belfry built, and he erected crosses on the church's cupolas. They could be seen several miles away, particularly when they reflected the light of the setting sun – an image Chekhov had long been fond of conjuring up in his stories. He did not mind the priest coming to sprinkle holy water in the house, or pour it into the ponds and the well, nor did he object to the occasional icon procession coming through the estate. And he was happy for the local priest and his sexton to be regular guests at lunch, but holding church services in the garden was just a little bit de trop.
With churches in all the local villages and a sixteenth-century monastery nearby (where there were four different churches to choose from), there were many places for Pavel Egorovich to go to take communion, and he was happy at last to be able to give spiritual matters his undivided attention. The family liked to rise early in the country, so bedtime was usually at ten o'clock, which shocked visitors from the city. After lamps were extinguished, the house would fall silent except for the sound of Pavel Egorovich softly chanting his prayers before the large icon in his incense-filled room.
When Chekhov's father was not reading the Bible or playing his violin, he was likely to be sitting at his desk, writing one of his pompous letters or another diary entry in his ornate, sloping script. The diary, published in its entirety for the first time in 1995, is a
magnificent chronicle of the Melikhovo years, albeit seen from a very particular angle. Thus we find out what the temperature was in the early morning and at noon, which church Pavel Egorovich went to on a certain day, when he went to the monastery on foot, and how much he paid when he stayed the night there one time when he was fasting (one rouble). We find out on which hot summer days he went for a dip in the pond (also when Sharik the dog went swimming), when and where a new sleigh was bought, and when Roman, the retired soldier who was employed as the family's main workman, was too drunk to fetch the post. We learn when Pavel Egorovich sent letters to his son Misha in Uglich, and when an errant cow strayed into the garden and ate the Chekhovs' cabbages. We are told exactly how many peasant men, peasant women and peasant children came to pay the traditional visit on Easter Sunday, following the celebratory fireworks and cannon fire, when nightingales sang in the garden, when it snowed, when Ivanenko talked too much, and when Ivanenko spent too long beating himself with birch twigs in the bath-house. Pavel Egorovich's barely suppressed irritation is also apparent in his entry for 12 February 1898, in which he records how many pancakes everyone ate on Shrove Tuesday. He was clearly not fond of Masha's friend Maria Drozdova, and it is hard to believe that Chekhov did not recall this particular diary entry when he created Ferapont's immortal line in Three Sisters about the merchant who died from eating forty pancakes (or was it fifty?):
12. Morning -18°. Everyone ate blini. Midday -10°. Drozdova ate 10 blini, Kolya [Alexander's son] 6, Masha 4. There is no water in the wells. The bull was brought in. Evening: -15°.25
But Pavel Egorovich's diary tells us next to nothing about the inner lives of the inhabitants of Melikhovo – how bad weather made Anton Pavlovich feel as flabby as overcooked macaroni and unable to write, for example, or how the sensation of ageing made him feel as if there was a jug of sour milk in his heart.26 On the terrible day of 19 October 1896, when Chekhov returned home to Melikhovo, in a state of utter despair after the disastrous premiere of The Seagull, his father recorded simply:
Morning: fog, +3°. Roman prepared the window frames for the kitchen. The twigs were chopped. Noon: +5°. Antosha, Masha and [Lidia] Mizinova arrived from Petersburg. The things left behind in the train were returned to Lopasnya untouched. Evening: +2°.27
Pavel Egorovich never wrote very much in his diary – a few lines at most – although he did become slightly more expansive as the years went by. On Easter Monday, 14 April 1897, a few days after Chekhov returned home from Moscow after two weeks lying flat on his back in Dr Ostroumov's clinic recovering from the massive haemorrhage he had suffered, his father was moved to write:
Morning: -1°. Eastern wind. Went to mass at Vaskino at 6.30 but missed it. Noon in the sun: +15°. Everything was delicious at lunch today, there were lots of conversations. Antosha liked the roast beef. Ants appeared in the house and on my desk.28
With a father like this, it would seem obvious where Chekhov got his sense of humour from: irony is present in almost everything he ever wrote. But irony was completely foreign to Pavel Egorovich. He may not have even initially realized he was being made fun of when his children started filling in the occasional blank days in the large accounts books he used for his diary. It started in March 1893. Pavel Egorovich had not always been meticulous about noting something down every day; a few gaps had crept in here and there. First of all Masha contributed a few earnest sentences such as 'Snow and rain. The pond is filling up.' This inspired her brother to join in as well, noting less seriously on 15 March: 'The ram is jumping. Maryushka is happy.' And then, when Pavel Egorovich left for Moscow two days later, Chekhov really got into his stride with a masterly rendition of his father's style:
P. E. Chekhov left for Moscow. +2° during the day. The oats were delivered.
– 1°. It is snowing. Thank goodness, everyone has left and just M-me Chekhov and I remain.
19.-5°. Masha and Mizinova arrived. A clear day. The lentils and
buckwheat were delivered.
– 5°. A clear day. The greenhouses are ready. Mamasha dreamed of a goat on a [chamber?] pot.
+5°. Semashko arrived. We had roast udder.
+ 6° We heard a lark. A crane flew over in the evening. Semashko left.
+3° Mamasha dreamed of a goose in a kamilavka [the cylindrical black hat worn by Orthodox priests]. This is a good sign. Mashka has a stomach upset. We slaughtered the pig.
We made sausages.
– 2° A bright morning.29
Pavel Egorovich took much greater care to write something every day after that. In fact, when Chekhov next had the opportunity to act as ghost-writer for his father, he was completely conscientious: whatever feelings of
