course, were peasants. As the grandson of a peasant himself, Chekhov was one of a growing number of Russian landowners who bought their property rather than inheriting it. Despite his humble origins, the local peasants in Melikhovo were as suspicious of Chekhov as they were of all newcomers: they knew nothing of his background, nor had they followed his literary career with avid interest; hardly any of them could read. What changed their opinion of him was the fact that he was a doctor, as he later explained in a letter:
I live peacefully with the muzhiks, they never steal anything from me and whenever I walk through the village the old women smile at me or cross themselves. I use the polite form of address with everyone except children, and never shout, but it was medicine which was the main thing which helped to create good relations.56
Once the peasants heard there was a doctor in the neighbourhood they came from far and wide to receive medical assistance (some from over fifteen miles away), particularly when they discovered that he would not charge them anything. From first light, there would be a queue of people waiting to see Dr Chekhov, in all seasons of the year. In the summer, Dr Chekhov would put up a red flag on the dacha in the garden to indicate he was receiving.
One of the reasons Chekhov did not charge for consultations (or for that matter for the medicines dispensed by Masha) is that he did not want to be seen as an official government doctor. When the cholera epidemic began spreading in 1892, a large number of superstitious peasants thought that it had been deliberately organized by the government, with doctors as their agents. One doctor was actually murdered. The cholera did seem to be following doctors, the peasants noticed; doctors were clearly burying the corpses of victims to hide the evidence! One mob of peasants invaded a cholera barracks to 'rescue' patients before burning it to the ground.57
It is hardly surprising there was such suspicion among the peasants. Until the introduction of a rudimentary national health service in the 1880s under the jurisdiction of local zemtsvos, medical care for peasants was wholly inadequate. No self-respecting doctor would want to live in a primitive village and earn next to nothing, when he could live in the town and charge fees. Peasants had to rely on the local feldsher ('from the German word Feldscher, denoting an army surgeon). These medical orderlies often knew little more than the peasants themselves, and might be responsible for some 30,000 patients over a 65-mile radius.58 Chekhov was very familiar with the work of these feldshers, as is evident from his description of the way the peasant Marfa Ivanova's illness is diagnosed in his story 'Rothschild's Violin':
Wrinkling his grey eyebrows and stroking his sideburns, the attendant started to examine the old woman, who was sitting hunched over on the
stool. Emaciated and sharp-nosed, with her mouth open, she looked in profile like a bird wanting to drink.
'Hmm … I see,' said the orderly slowly. He sighed. 'Influenza, but maybe it is a fever. There is a lot of typhoid going round the town at the moment. Anyway, the old lady has done pretty well for herself, praise the Lord. How old is she?'
'A year off seventy, sir.'
'Well, then. She has done all right for herself. . . Time for her to say her farewells.'59
Medical care had not been included as a priority when the first zemstvos were set up in Russia as part of Alexander IFs great reforms. The government's commitment in the 1860s and 1870s was to economic modernization. The young socialist-minded physicians who went to work as the first zemstvo doctors continually tried to exert pressure on the government to provide financial support for medical care where none had been forthcoming previously. Such activity was viewed as subversive, but slowly the doctors began to win the trust of peasants, whose lives they were transforming through the provision of free medical care, their remuneration coming from the zemstvo. Chekhov was a whole-hearted supporter of the progressive doctors who spearheaded the campaign. He was not politically active himself, but he developed close relationships with many local zemstvo doctors while living at Melikhovo, and immediately volunteered his services to help fight the cholera epidemic. He was allocated a district that included twenty-five villages, four factories, and the Davydovo-Pustyn Monastery. A month later, he wrote a long and breathless letter to Suvorin about what he had been up to as a medical sanitary inspector:
I spend my time organizing, getting quarantine shelters erected and so on, and I feel very lonely, because I find everything to do with cholera very alien. The work involves constant travelling, endless conversations • and pettifogging details, and is exhausting. There is no time to write. Literature has long been abandoned, and I am poor and wretched because I thought it appropriate to my situation and supportive of my independence to decline the salary paid to the local doctors. I am tired of it all, but if you take a bird's eye view of cholera it has many interesting aspects. It's a shame you are out of Russia at the moment;
much good material for your regular columns is going to waste. There is more good than bad about the cholera epidemic, so it differs radically from what we saw with the famine last winter. Everyone is working this time, furiously hard. What is being done at the fair in Nizhny is a miracle, enough to make even Tolstoy have some respect for medicine and for cultured people's interference in life generally. It looks as though they've thrown a lasso around the cholera. Not only has the number of infections fallen, but the proportion of deaths is lower as well. In the whole enormous area of Moscow there are not more than 50 cases a week, whereas on the Don it claims 1,000 victims a day. That is a formidable difference. We district physicians are pretty well prepared: we have a solid action programme, so there is every reason to suppose that in our own areas we shall also succeed in reducing the proportion of deaths from cholera. We have no assistants, we are obliged to be both doctor and nurse at one and the same time. The peasants are coarse, dirty and suspicious; but the thought that our efforts will not be completely in vain stops one noticing any of this. Of all the Serpukhov doctors I am the most pathetic; my carriage and horses are run down, I don't know the roads, I can't see anything when evening falls, I've no money, I become exhausted very quickly, most of all, I can never forget that I ought to be writing, and I would really like to turn my back on the cholera and sit down and write. And I would like to to talk to you too. I feel utterly alone.60
Chekhov saw over a thousand patients between August and October 1892, when his unit ceased its work. The closest cholera came to his district were eleven cases twenty miles away, diagnosed just after his section was closed. He continued to see patients as well as the many visitors he constantly received at Melikhovo. One friend recalled:
He was not given a minute's peace in the literal sense of the word! From early morning there was some landowner who had come on a visit and sat for a very long time, then a zemstvo doctor came, then the village priest, then someone in military uniform … the Melikhovo police chief, most probably … And from the window in the little annexe where I was staying, I could see first a light carriage roll up to the porch of the modest one-storey Chekhov house, then an old-fashioned springless carriage . . . And in the small passage-way, near Chekhov's study, peasant men and
women did not stop arriving – some had come on business, some for trifling reasons, some for medical care … And then to cap it all, a guest from Moscow turned up . . .61
To the end of his days Chekhov remained a passionate proselytizer for education. He was happy therefore to become trustee of a village school in the nearby village of Talezh at the end of 1894. He wrote to Suvorin to tell him about the young man in charge of the pupils:
