mirth he had for the absurdity of some of the diary entries now mingled with affection and respect for the enterprise. Thus in the middle of the diary page for October 1895, Pavel Egorovich's curling calligraphic script is suddenly replaced by the refined but spare lettering of his son's distinctive small hand:
Morning: -3°; the garden and the fields are white with frost. The flowers have been caught by the frost. A clear day. Weather: +15°. We planted tulips. We dug over the vegetable garden.
Overcast. Weather: +6. Levitan left.
Morning: +5°. There was no frost during the night. Firewood is being brought from the forest. It was warm and clear all day. The roses were covered with straw.
On 13 October, after Chekhov had started filling in the entry for the day: ('During the night and in the morning: +8°. Overcast. Weather: + 11°'), his father arrived home to complete it: 'P.E. returned from Moscow at 1.30pm.'30
The source of Chekhov's glorious sense of the absurd becomes easier to understand in the light of Pavel Egorovich's chronicle of their lives. Perhaps his father's literary style, a naive mixture of the high and the low, even influenced the surreal mixture of ideas for stories, snippets of overheard conversation and quirky observations to be found in his notebooks. While sometimes serious, the lapidary
phrases Chekhov jotted down are often extremely funny, their brevity providing an ironic counterpoint to his father's terse sentences:
The opinion of a professor: it's not Shakespeare who is important, but the notes to his works
A dachshund was walking down the street and was ashamed that it had crooked legs
He married, furnished a house, bought a writing desk, got everything in order, but found he had nothing to write
The girl spoke enthusiastically about her aunt: she is very beautiful, as beautiful as our dog!
I was happy only once in my life – under an umbrella
A Play: The Bean of Life31
Perhaps Chekhov's masterful economy of expression was even influenced by Pavel Egorovich's concise literary style, which was undoubtedly honed much earlier during the Taganrog years – some of his father's bald sentences vividly evoke the atmosphere at Melikhovo. Chekhov never really became close to his father, who continued to exasperate him in all sorts of ways, and he could never forgive him for the lashings he had received as a child. Yet there is something touching in Chekhov's careful preservation of the plodding letters his father had sent him when he was out in Siberia – letters which accompanied him all the way back to Moscow – that is not just explained by a fastidious nature. At Melikhovo father and son managed to live harmoniously for six years in close proximity. As time went by, and Pavel Egorovich continued to mellow, he and his diary imperceptibly became an indispensable fixture of Melikhovo life. Chekhov was certainly grateful for all the digging that the old man had started to do in the garden. In September 1898, less than a month before his father's death, Chekhov had written to him from Yalta with instructions regarding the new apple trees, larches and poplars he had ordered, and a request that his roses be covered with leaves before the first frost.32 It did not occur to him that he would not be spending the
following summer at Melikhovo, so news of Pavel Egorovich's sudden death came as a great shock. Chekhov was probably taken aback by how much he had taken his father's presence in Melikhovo for granted. 'I don't think life at Melikhovo will be the same after father's death,' he wrote to Masha as soon as he heard the news; 'it is as if the flow of Melikhovo life stopped when his diary stopped.'33 Pavel Egorovich had been particularly fond of peonies, sometimes going so far as to note in his diary when the red Moscow peonies came into flower, when the white ones were in bloom, and when there were four peonies blooming at once.34 In memory of his father, Chekhov had some of them dug up and shipped to Yalta, where he planted them in his new garden.
The flowers in the garden were definitely Chekhov's province, along with the trees. The hundreds of bulbs planted in autumn produced tulips, narcissi, hyacinths and irises in the spring, to be joined by carnations, lilies and roses, sweet-scented jasmine, lupins, violets, stocks, fritillaries, tobacco plants, and a host of other carefully chosen shrubs and plants. As well as the trees in the orchard, many other new trees were planted, including firs and pines from seed.35 This was Chekhov's first garden, so he made a few false starts here and there, as he readily admitted. He also had the occasional spot of bad luck (his newly planted apple tree saplings were eaten by hares in the first spring, for example),36 but his flowers soon began to bloom in profusion, and by 1895 he was writing to his friends to boast of their glorious scent, especially in the evenings.37 He was particularly proud of his roses, and lady dachniks staying next door at Vaskino were thrilled to be presented with hand-picked bouquets when they came to visit. To their great disappointment, though, the petals would sometimes start falling off on the way home: Chekhov slyly only picked roses in full bloom from stems that needed pruning anyway.38 The garden inevitably found its way into Chekhov's writing. Apart from the famous blossoming cherry trees, there is a reference to fragrant heliotrope in The Seagull, worked on at Melikhovo in the summer of 1895, and to sweet-smelling mignonette and oleander in 'The House with the Mezzanine', completed the following year. The story 'The Black Monk', meanwhile, written in 1893, has as its setting a garden run by a famous horticulturalist:
Kovrin had never seen such amazing roses, lilies and camellias like the ones Pesotsky had, or such tulips in every imaginable colour, from snow-white to jet black; in fact he had never seen such an incredible profusion of flowers anywhere else. Spring had only just begun and the most opulent blooms were still hiding away in hothouses, but what was blossoming along the paths and in the flower beds was enough to make you feel that you were in a kingdom of delicate colours as you wandered about the garden, especially in the early morning when dew drops sparkled on every petal.39
Chekhov had two 'assistants', a pair of black and tan dachshunds, and they would accompany him faithfully on his daily horticultural inspections. Bromide and Quinine were a gift from Leikin. They were born sometime in the spring of 1892, and Chekhov wrote excitedly to Leikin after moving into Melikhovo in order to expedite their arrival.40 It was actually a whole year before they made the journey by train from St Petersburg. The puppies immediately started causing chaos once they stepped over the threshold, as Chekhov reported to Leikin on 16 April 1893:
The dachshunds finally arrived yesterday. They got very cold and hungry and tired coming from the station, and were fantastically happy to get here. They raced around all the rooms jumping up affectionately on everyone and barking at the servants. Once they had been fed they felt completely at home. During the night they dug up the soil from the window boxes, complete with the seeds which had been sown in them, and distributed the galoshes from the front porch to all the rooms. In the morning, when I was walking them in the garden, they caused panic in the breasts of our yard dogs, who had never in all their lives seen such monstrous creatures . . . Everybody has fallen for the dachshunds; they now constitute the main topic of conversation. Huge thanks to you.41
It was Masha who thought up the names Bromide and Quinine, while her brother supplied the patronymics, viz. Brom Isayevich and Khina Markovna. The dogs slept in Chekhov's study. Quinine's legs were so short that her stomach seemed almost to drag along the ground when she walked, but she would come up to Chekhov every
