was far too frivolous to be recorded in Pavel Egorovich's annals. A single photograph of a game in progress suggests croquet was taken seriously, however.68 It is safe to assume that it was Russian croquet which was
played at Melikhovo. Like so many other cultural imports over the centuries, croquet was Russianized, with changes made to the layout of hoops (there was the 'Eagle' and the Andreyev Cross' style, for example), the number used (nine or ten), and the size of the court. Ironically, though, it is only in Russia where traditions of playing croquet with wooden balls have been preserved to this day at international level.
Chekhov was probably glad to have something with which to distract his guests. He was besieged by visitors at Melikhovo and it was often difficult for him to find time to write. 'If you only knew how worn out I was!' he wrote to Suvorin in December 1892. 'I'm unbelievably worn out. Visitors, visitors, visitors … My estate stands right on the highway to Kashira, and every passing educated person considers it necessary and obligatory to come and warm themselves up at my place, and sometimes even to stay the night. There's a whole legion of doctors alone! It's nice to be hospitable, of course, but there are limits. It was to get away from visitors that I left Moscow, after all.'69 Like all human beings, Chekhov was a contradictory creature. He was miserable when no one came to visit him, and miserable when too many of his friends showed up. He both wanted and did not want to show off Melikhovo to Suvorin, his closest friend, who was one of the estate's very first visitors. Sensing that Suvorin would be expecting something much grander, Chekhov tried to lower his expectations, writing just after Easter in 1892:
You won't like Melikhovo, at least not at first. Everything is in miniature here; the lime tree avenue is small, the pond is the size of an aquarium, the garden and the park are small, the trees are small, but after a while, when you look around again, the feeling of smallness disappears.70
Chekhov's misgivings were well founded. Suvorin did not like Melikhovo when he came that April, and only stayed two nights before going back to his life of comfort, where he could travel on proper roads in sprung carriages. He took care to meet up with Chekhov in Moscow after that, but he certainly did not see Melikhovo at its best. The trees had only started to come out, the snow had not completely melted and it was still cold.
March and April were, in fact, always the worst months of the year
for people who lived in the country. As soon as the snows began to melt, effortless travel by troika gave way to agonizingly slow journeys plodding through deep mud. Russians refer to this brief but dreadful season as the rasputitsa, a glorious word conveying a sense of roads literally coming undone – and in autumn it would all begin again. Compared to many country estates, Melikhovo was relatively accessible. Several trains a day made the two- to three-hour journey from Moscow to the local station, but during the rasputitsa it often took far longer to travel the last few miles to the estate on the unpaved road. And to begin with the Chekhovs had to rely on the ancient Anna Petrovna as their only means of transport. Chekhov vividly conveyed what it was like to travel during the rasputitsa in his story 'In the Cart'. The local landowner in his four-horse carriage is being followed by the school teacher, travelling in a cart driven by the peasant Semyon:
They turned off the highway on to the road leading to the village, Khanov in front and Semyon following behind. The four horses were moving along at a walking pace, straining to drag the heavy carriage through the mud. Semyon was trying to manoeuvre by going over hillocks and through the field in order to avoid the road, and he kept having to get off the cart to help the horses.. . Marya Vasilievna was still thinking about school and whether the exam would be difficult or easy .. . The road was getting worse and worse . .. They had entered a forest. There was nowhere to turn off here, the ruts were very deep and gurgling water was streaming along them. And prickly branches were hitting her face.71
When the mud hardened, journey times decreased, but comfort often did not. In November 1894, Chekhov complained to a friend that he had been jolted about so painfully the last time he had made the journey from the station that his heart had been torn out and he could no longer love.72 Heavy rain meant having to travel through water so deep it might come up to the horse's belly. Whatever the weather, trips were made from Melikhovo to the station almost daily to pick up the mail and provisions, with the three farm dogs usually following the cart there and back. And horses would be sent along the tree-lined road to pick up guests, who would sit drinking cognac with the French waitress in the station buffet while they waited.
During the rasputitsa, Chekhov relied more than ever on being able to remain in contact with people by letter, particularly since there was no telephone at Melikhovo. The sheer volume of mail generated by his correspondence during the Melikhovo years with friends like Lika, Suvorin and the various literary editors, other writers and theatrical figures, as well as his numerous subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals, in fact, created a problem. In the six and a half years he lived at Melikhovo, Chekhov sent about 2,500 letters, but there was no post office at Lopasnya. The nearest post office was fifteen miles away, and anything other than ordinary letters sometimes incurred long delays before they were delivered. Chekhov depended on letters, so he renewed the appeal for a post office to be established at Lopasnya after he moved to Melikhovo, and then helped gather donations when permission was granted in 1894. When the post office opened, on 1 January 1896, next to the railway station, the station master was finally able to relinquish the task of keeping letters in his cupboard. In order to support its meagre income, Chekhov continued to buy stamps from the Lopasnya post office even after he left Melikhovo.
Generally speaking, the rasputitsa provided a respite from guests, since most people balked at the prospect of negotiating all that mud. The visiting period at Melikhovo peaked in the summer, when the weather was most clement and the roads at their most passable. Some of Chekhov's happiest hours with guests were spent fishing: he caught fifty-seven carp one June day in 1897 (the family had fish soup the next day), and he also spent happy hours sitting by the water's edge on his own. When one of his neighbours wondered why he did not want to go to the river where the fishing was superior, he was informed that the fishing was secondary; what Chekhov valued most of all was being able to sit and think without being disturbed.73 In his euphoria at becoming a landowner for the first time, he succumbed to Leikin's incessant pleading and, in 1892, wrote a handful of humorous stories for Fragments under his old pseudonyms. One of them was clearly inspired by the population in his new pond (whom he joked he would have to give a constitution to). It was so close to the house he claimed that he could fish from the window.74 For Chekhov fans who expect his mature stories to be unremittingly bleak, 'Fish Love' (written in the same year as 'Ward No. 6') might come as a bit of a shock. The story, all of a few
pages long, is about a carp who falls in love with Sonya Mamochkina, a young lady who arrives to stay one summer at a general's dacha. The carp ogles Sonya when she comes to bathe every day, but is not optimistic:
Of course there is no, absolutely no chance of reciprocation. Could such a beautiful woman fall in love with me, a carp? No, a thousand times no! Don't tempt yourself with dreams, you contemptible fish! Only one destiny awaits you – death! But how to die? There aren't any revolvers or phosphorous matches in the pond. There is only death open to carps and that is via the jaws of a pike. But where can I get hold of a pike? There was actually a pike in the pond at one point, but it died of boredom. Oh, how unfortunate I am!
The guest annexe at Melikhovo, where Chekhov wrote The Seagull
The carp tries to commit suicide by getting itself caught by Sonya's fishing rod one evening, but succeeds only in getting his lower jaw ripped off, at which point he goes mad. Later mistaking a young poet
called Ivan for his inamorata, he infects him with pessimism by kissing him tenderly on the back. Unbelievably, even a story as light-hearted as this one was held up by the censors for a couple of weeks. Perhaps they objected to Chekhov sending up Russian literature so effectively:
