evening, put her
front paws on his lap and gaze at him adoringly. The love was mutual. Brom was equally affectionate.
With other dogs around, it was only a matter of time before puppies started appearing. Sharik and Arapka, the farm dogs, had produced Muir and Mirrielees, named after Moscow's most famous department store. Brom promptly fell in love with Mile Mirrielees when she came on heat (as Chekhov reported to various friends), while Quinine fell for another yard dog later in the year and produced her first pups in February 1894. Then, the following January, they fell incestuously in love with each other, and Saltpetre (Selitra), the survivor of a litter of two (and the spitting image of Brom, apparently) continued the dynasty.42 Leikin sent Chekhov a photograph of Brom and Quinine's father that spring to show his children; both dogs apparently sniffed it for a long time, but felt nothing and ran off.43 Chekhov had intended giving Saltpetre to Count Orlov-Davydov, a local landowner, but in the end she became the playmate of the six Semenkovich children at Vaskino.44 Confusingly, Chekhov's brother Alexander in St Petersburg acquired a dachshund puppy which he also called Saltpetre in July 1896. She looked just like Quinine, he said. He had hoped his brother would give him one of Brom and Quinine's offspring, and his wife was particularly disgruntled when this failed to happen.45 Chekhov reported to Masha in June 1897 that 'Isayich and Markovna' were once again 'engulfed in passion',46 but it is not clear that any further pure dachshund pups were born. Chekhov had written to Alexander that February to tell him that Quinine was now giving birth three times a year to puppies which were a strange mixture of crocodile and mongrel.47
Chekhov sent regular bulletins to Leikin about Brom and Quinine, writing to him in April 1897, for example, to tell him that they were getting fat on their idle life, but were very happy. After mentioning in this letter that the family's loyal guard dog Sharik had died, Leikin generously offered Chekhov another pair of puppies – laikas, known for their strength and endurance. Unlike the dachshunds, these Siberian huskies, bred for hunting in the taiga (their name comes from the verb 'to bark'), would be perfect as guard dogs. Sharik had been mauled by Zalivai, a hunting dog given to the Chekhovs, and was the only canine member of the household ever to merit an obituary in Pavel Egorovich's diary ('He was a good and faithful watch dog').48 It had not been a good spring: the ferocious Zalivai had also attacked Brom,49 another of
Quinine's puppies died on the same day that a cat was shot,50 and then came the news that there were rabid dogs in the area.51 Leikin cheered Chekhov up when he offered him the laika puppies: Nansen and Laika arrived on 3 August, four days before Quinine had her next litter of puppies. 'They already feel at home, are playing, and whimpering from the heat and from fleas,' Chekhov wrote to Leikin the next day. 'I am in debt to you for the dogs. They are a very, very nice present, and I do not know how to thank you. I keep going to have a look at them. My sister too.' Wildly jealous, Brom and Quinine did their best to growl and be fierce.52
The naming of Nansen provides us with some intriguing insights into Chekhov's character. He was named after Fridtjof Nansen, who just the previous autumn had returned from his second epic expedition. Nansen had set off from Norway with his crew in the summer of 1893, travelling east along the coast of Siberia and then north until their specially designed ship, the Fram, became ice-bound. He was hoping to prove that a ship frozen in the seas off the coast of eastern Siberia would be carried by the current towards the North Pole and then south towards Spitzbergen (as indeed it was). After a year and a half of slow progress, Nansen's restless spirit got the better of him, and he and a companion set off with huskies, sledges and kayaks for the North Pole. When poor conditions forced them to retreat, at a latitude of eighty-six degrees and fourteen minutes, they had come closer to the Pole than anyone in history. Nansen returned home to a hero's welcome in Norway in 1896. Chekhov would have followed the reporting of the expedition in the Russian press with a keen interest. He had been entranced by the idea of the North ever since his trip to Siberia, and had begun expressing a desire in his letters to journey to Scandinavia.
Ill The Muzhiks
Living in the country is inconvenient, the intolerable rasputitsa has begun, but something is going on in nature which is so amazing and moving that it makes up for all the inconveniences of life with its poetry and novelty. Every day brings a surprise better than the one before. The starlings have landed, water is gurgling everywhere, there
is green grass already on thawed ground. The day stretches like eternity. It feels like I'm living in Australia, at the edge of the world; my state of mind is calm, contemplative and animal, in the sense that I'm not worried about what happened yesterday and am not thinking about tomorrow. From here, people seem very decent, and that is natural, because when you move to the country you are hiding not from people but from your own self-love, which can be inaccurate in the town around people, and unreliable. Looking at the spring, I so want there to be paradise on this earth. In a word, I sometimes feel so good, that I have to pinch myself and remember my creditors, who one day will drive me out of my well-acquired Australia.53
Chekhov was in expansive mood when he first moved to Melikhovo and wrote these words to Suvorin. His sense oijoie de vivre was not to last, but the six and a half years he spent on his estate (six, if one bears in mind the one winter spent in Nice) were to prove extraordinarily fruitful. The bulk of his greatest short stories were written at Melikhovo, as were The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. Although Chekhov often felt tired, bored and lonely, as he had when living in Moscow, there were enough moments of feeling ecstatically at one with nature to reassure him of the wisdom of his decision to move. As he wrote to his brother Alexander during his first autumn in Melikhovo, their grandparents and great-grandparents had lived in the country, and he felt he was going back to his roots. 'What a misfortune that we did not have our own place when we were children,' he commented wistfully.54 The moments of epiphany Chekhov experienced outdoors provided the fuel for his creative inspiration during the Melikhovo years. Take the time in May 1894, after he left a meeting with zemtsvo doctors at an old country estate ten miles away from home. The estate had been turned into a psychiatric hospital, and Chekhov and seventy-four other Moscow doctors had met to discuss medical issues:
I returned home late in the evening on my troika. I had to complete two-thirds of the journey through the forest, by moonlight, and my state of mind was extraordinary, such as I've not had for a long time; it was as if I was returning from a tryst. I think that proximity to nature and idleness represent the vital ingredients for happiness; without them it is impossible.55
With the demands of a writing career, an estate to run, guests to entertain, people to see in Moscow and Petersburg, and several members of his family to provide for, not to mention various dogs and horses, one might have thought that was already a full life. But Chekhov was not living in the kind of rural idyll that Goncharov had so famously described in his novel Oblomov. His was no prelapsarian world of happy peasants, bountiful harvests and benevolent patriarchal values, in which a landowner could simply sleep his way through life, as the lovable Russian bear Oblomov does. Nor was it the kind of world where wisdom and truth were the exclusive preserve of the uneducated people who worked the land, such as Tolstoy presents in his novels. When Chekhov came to describe the world he inhabited in his story 'Peasants' (Muzhiki), written after he had been living at Melikhovo for several years, people were shocked. But precisely because what he saw around him was poverty, ignorance, misery, backwardness and disease, his strong ethical sense propelled him to do what he could to alleviate it.
The Russian intelligentsia were very good at identifying national problems, but there were a lot of Trofimovs out there – earnest young people like the eternal student in The Cherry Orchard - who were all talk and no action. Chekhov could take justifiable pride in what he had helped to achieve while he lived at Melikhovo. There was the opening of a post office, the building of a bridge over the river, the construction of a paved road from the station and the stopping at Lopasnya of fast trains; but of far greater significance were the three schools he built, the work he had carried out to contain cholera in the area, the role he played in conducting the national census and the medical care he gave to thousands of peasants who lived in the area. The vast majority of Chekhov's neighbours, of
