The teacher there earns 23 roubles a month, has a wife and four children, and hair that is already quite grey although he is only thirty years old. He is so ground down by poverty that whatever you talk to him about, he cannot prevent himself from bringing the conversation round to the subject of salaries. In his opinion, the only subject for poets and prose writers to write about should be salary increases; when the new Tsar appoints new ministers, teachers' salaries will probably be increased, etc.62
The experience of acting as trustee gave Chekhov the idea of building another school in the district. Work began in March 1896; the school opened later that year, in August. The following year, Chekhov returned as examiner, and was appointed assistant to the schools inspector. This involved him in visiting fifty-seven schools and preparing a report. Seeing the operation of village schools from all these different angles provided him with the raw material for 'In the Cart', one of his finest stories. He was to build two more schools in the Melikhovo area, the third one at the special pleading of the peasants themselves. They collected 300 roubles and the local zemstvo was prepared to put up 1,000 roubles, which left at least another 1,500 roubles for Chekhov to raise. The meagre proceeds of a theatrical performance he organized in Serpukhov, performed by excellent actors and attended by ladies in Parisian couture and diamonds, was dispiriting; the most affluent people also proved the most miserly with their donations. In the meantime, Chekhov had started sending regular parcels of books to Taganrog, to be donated to the library there.
In early 1897, Chekhov spent two months hitting his head on the low ceilings of peasant izbas in the course of his duties as the supervisor of fifteen census takers. Immediately this task was finished, he sat down
to finish 'Peasants', the story with which, as he later told Suvorin, he exhausted Melikhovo as a literary source. It certainly represents the literary culmination of his years at Melikhovo. It may not be the best story he wrote in Melikhovo from an artistic point of view, but it was the most important. After a career as a waiter in a Moscow hotel, which ends when he famously drops a tray of ham and peas, the story's protagonist, the terminally ill Nikolai Chikildeyev, returns to his native village with his wife, Olga, and their daughter to die. We see the village and its inhabitants through Olga's shocked eyes as they try to adjust to the poverty and filth they encounter.
The Moscow censor S. Sokolov immediately had a lot of problems with the manuscript when it was submitted. The peasants were portrayed in very 'gloomy colours', he reported, always starving and drunk most of the time. The men physically abused their wives, and no peasant seemed to believe in religion. They lived in squalor. There was one particular page which the Moscow Censorship Committee decided had to go, resolving that the author be arrested if he refused to delete it. The page comes near the end of the story, at a point where another narrative voice seems to intrude into Olga's thoughts:
During the course of the summer and the winter there had been hours and days when it seemed that these people lived worse than cattle, and living with them was frightening; they were rude, dishonest, dirty, drunk, and did not live peacefully but were always rowing, because they did not respect each other, were afraid and suspicious of each other. Who runs the tavern and makes them drink? The peasant. Who embezzles community, school and church money and spends it on drink? The peasant. Who steals from his neighbours, sets their house on fire and perjures himself for a bottle of vodka? The peasant. Who is the first to rail against the peasants at the zemtsvo and other meetings? The peasant.
This was bad enough: the Russian peasantry, post-emancipation, were not shown in a positive light in Chekhov's story. But what was infinitely worse, from the government's point of view, was the fact that Chekhov laid the blame squarely at its door, again seemingly taking over from his character Olga as the narrator in his story:
Yes, living with them was frightening, but they were still people, they suffered and cried like other people, and there was nothing in their life for which justification could not be found. Backbreaking work, from which their whole bodies ached at night, fierce winters, miserable harvests, cramped living space, and there was no help and nowhere to turn for help. Those who were richer and stronger than them could not help because they themselves were rude, dishonest, drunk and cursed in just as vile a way; the most lowly official or bailiff treated the peasants as if they were tramps, and even addressed village elders and church wardens as if they were peasants, believing they had a right to do so. And indeed, could there be any help or any good example set by people so self-serving, grasping, corrupt and lazy, who came to the village only to insult, rob and frighten people?63
Chekhov's story was published in the April issue of the Moscow journal Russian Thought, just after he suffered the massive lung haemorrhage that would turn him into an invalid for the rest of his life. It provoked a passionate debate in the press that went on for over a year, its intensity far exceeding the reaction to anything else he had ever written. Chekhov took no part in the discussion himself, considering his contribution was complete. A sentence he had jotted down in one of his notebooks seems to encapsulate the whole enterprise of writing for him: 'Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.'64 As with the landowner relishing his sour gooseberries, many educated Russian people simply did not want a mirror held up to their blemishes.
IV Croquet on the Lawn
In the sitting room next door to my study there have been people playing the piano and singing romances all day, and so I am constantly in an elegiac mood.
Letter to Lidia Avilova, 1 March 1893
We played croquet and lawn-tennis, then when it grew dark, spent a long time over supper . . .
The House with the Mezzanine
Not many people know about Chekhov's passion for croquet, an ideally democratic game of precision and latent aggression that, for good reasons, became most popular in England, the country with which it is still most strongly associated. By the time of the foundation of the All-England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club in 1869, however, people were playing croquet all over the world – including in Russia. Obviously, in a country where there is winter for nine months and bad weather for three (as Voltaire famously put it),65 opportunities for getting out one's mallet are not as abundant as in foggy Albion, as Russians still like to refer to England, but the game immediately became wildly popular after it was imported by expatriate Britons at the end of the nineteenth century. The extent of its popularity can be gauged by the fact that Soviet citizens were enthusiastically playing kroket well into the 1920s and 1930s: as many as 20,000 copies of Chesnokov's Description and Rules of the Game were printed in 1930. The notion of this decorous game being played against a background of collectivization and five-year plans does seem incongruous – until one studies the admonitions of a pre-revolutionary guide to croquet playing. The player must never forget that he is just a member of a team, exhorts the author: 'if every player only ever thinks about getting his ball through the hoops and hitting the post, never thinking about his comrades, croquet will become pointless and boring'.66
Chekhov's interest in croquet was therefore far from unusual. Indeed croquet was embraced by all sections of Russian society, from the imperial family and celebrities like the opera singer Chaliapin and the ballerina Anna Pavlova to the most humble dachnik. After moving to Melikhovo, Chekhov bought a croquet set in Moscow at the first opportunity, and the game was offered as an entertainment to his many house guests from the first summer there onwards. Chekhov started learning the technique of the krokirovka when he became a dachnik in the mid- 1880s. He was apparently such an ardent player that he would insist on games continuing well after the sun had set. Sometimes it became so dark that he and his opponents would have to light matches in order to see the balls.67 Sadly, we have no chronicle of historic croquet matches played at Melikhovo: this was an occupation that
