Kolia faded out from the College of Art and Architecture. With no military exemption or valid identity papers, he went underground. Only through Anna Ipatieva-Golden could he be traced. He defaulted on all undertakings. Leikin was furious. When spring came Anton was forced to intervene. He decided to take Kolia to Babkino, away from Anna Golden: 'I'll take that fraud Kolia, remove his boots and put him under lock and key.'
At Babkino the Chekhov family could live next door to their hosts, the Kiseliovs. The Kiseliovs completely refurbished the dacha that Boleslav Markevich had occupied. (Anton admitted to Leikin that he expected Markevich's ghost at night.) On 6 May 1885 Anton, Masha and their mother - Kolia, Vania and Misha were to follow - set off. The railway had not yet reached Voskresensk: it was a hard day's cart journey from the railhead. They nearly drowned fording the Istra in the dark, Masha and Evgenia screeching with fear. They found the dacha ready, with ashtrays and cigarette boxes. Nightingales sang in the bushes. Leikin disapproved of Anton's flight to the country. On 9 May Anton tried to lure him: I feel in the seventh heaven and do idle silly things: I eat, drink, sleep, fish, went shooting once. Today we caught a burbot on a long pike hook, the day before yesterday my fellow-huntsman killed a doe hare. Levitan the artist (not your [Adolf\ Levitan, but [Isaak] the landscape painter) is living with me, he's a passionate shooter. It's he who killed the hare… If you come to Moscow this summer and make a pilgrimage to New Jerusalem I promise you something you've never seen anywhere… Luxuriant nature! You could pick it up and eat it.
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Although Anton's happiest stories come from summer 1885 at Bab-kino, he could not escape his new profession. As well as the irrational Kolia, Anton took charge of Isaak Lcvitan. Levitan lived across the river with a potter at the village of Maksimovka. He was a dangerous patient. When Misha and Anton called on Levitan at night, he leapt out at them with a revolver. Anton told Leikin (who told all Petersburg): 'Something ominous is happening to the poor man. Psychosis is beginning… I was told that he'd left for the Caucasus. At the end of April he returned, but not from the Caucasus. He tried to hang himself. I've taken him with me to the country and now I'm walking him.'
Kolia, now taking opium, also needed care, but he was elusive. Pavel wrote to Aleksandr in early June: I haven't seen Kolia for a long time since our people went to Babkino. They say he's in Moscow… A woman came on behalf of Anna [Ipatieva-Golden] from the cottage at Petrovsko-Razumovskoe to fetch his linen… This is what being carried away by women does, they drive a weak man mad. Thus he is given up to idleness, drunkenness and debauchery, so that our labours and cares over his upbringing are naught to him. Woe to his mother, she is worn out with grief over him. Kolia turned up in Babkino: all June Anton dared not leave the country for more than a few hours, lest Kolia vanish back to wine, morphine and Anna Golden's bed.
Misha, the antithesis of his eldest brothers, had matriculated; his father was appeased. On 10 May Misha was lured to Babkino by Anton: 'Before my eyes stretches an extraordinarily warm, gentle landscape: the river, beyond it the forest.' Anton wrote mostly about fish - ruff, gudgeon, chub, burbot, perch, carp - and sent for more tackle. Anton's stories, plays and letters show that he was as much The Com-pleat Angler as Izaac Walton. He was not the only obsessive angler on the Istra: a peasant Nikita was arrested for unbolting railway spikes to use as sinkers for catching burbot - a single-minded character whom Chekhov put in a story 'The Evildoer'.
Fishing inspired Anton to write more lyrically: 'The Burbot' makes poetry out of an angler's obsession. Seeing landscape through Isaak Levi tan's eyes enriched Anton's work: after their long walks in May
JANUARY-JULY 1885
1885 with gun, rod, or paints and easel, landscape is as evocative in Chekhov's art as in Levitan's. The Kiseliov family, too, developed Anton: their anecdotes from the arts world and Maria Kiseliova's reading of French magazines and novels provided material for Fragments. Aleksei Kiseliov, inhibited by his wife, was animated by the bawdiness of Levitan ('Leviathan'), Anton and Kolia. On 20 September Kiseliov wrote: Thank you, dear Anton, for fulfilling my request so punctiliously and for sending an exact representation of your illegitimate children, whose similarity to you is enormous. I immediately took the postcard to Duniasha, the cattle girl, and showed her what you're capable of and what she can expect if she becomes pregnant by you and is abandoned to the mercy of fate. In January 1886 Kiseliov complained: 'The difference between my letters and yours, dear Anton, is that you can boldly read mine to young ladies, whereas I must throw yours into the stove as soon as I've read them in case my wife catches sight of them.'
Anton worked a few days as a doctor, relieving Arkhangelsky at the Chikino hospital in early June and performing an autopsy on a peasant. In mid July the madmen in Anton's care spoilt the idyll. Kolia bolted. Leikin reported: 'A few days ago your brother Kolia turned up with Aleksandr at my dacha. He pressed me for cartoon topics… A good artist, but we can't do magazine business with him for he won't keep his word.'44 A week later Kolia came, drunk, to Leikin's office in Petersburg, took the topics and an advance of 32 roubles. On 20 July he reappeared in Moscow at The Alarm Clock and then vanished. He was not seen by his brothers or their friends until mid October. By the end of June Levitan was also in Moscow, in bed with 'catarrhal fever' (as he called his ÒÂ). Íå sent Anton his gun dog Vesta to look after, and two roubles for his rent. Kolia and Levitan had collaborated in painting sets for the opera; Kolia once painted a figure on Levitan's empty landscape, and Levitan painted a skyscape over Kolia's figures. They complemented each other - Levitan an excitable workaholic, reluctant to paint human beings, and Kolia paralytically idle, with a dislike of painting nature. Reluctant as Kolia to return, Levitan made his excuses to Anton: 'Going to the country now is nonsense: it would be poisoning myself - Moscow would seem a thousand times fouler
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than now and I've got used to the city… in any case I shall soon see the dear inhabitants of Babkino and, among other things, your repulsive face.'
It was very hot at Babkino, and Anton had a haemorrhage. Nevertheless, in mid July, he went to Moscow to take leave of Aleksandr, who had been appointed Customs Chief at Novorossiisk on the Black Sea, and was passing through Moscow with Anna, baby Kolia and the dog. Vania was travelling with them, to support the ailing Anna on the iooo-mile journey beyond the Don and over the Caucasus. Aleksandr and Anton would not see each other for more than a year.
Babkino had worked its magic. Anton sent to Petersburg a story with a game-keeping background, 'The Huntsman' [Jager]. Short and unpretentious, it pays homage to Turgenev, who had died a year before and whose technique Chekhov was emulating, but it owes much to Levitan's subtle perception and to Babkino's atmosphere. Its peasant characters set the pattern for Chekhov's later love stories. A Chekhovian couple, an unresponsive male and a frustrated female, fail to communicate, while nature all around lives its own life. 'The Huntsman' came out in The Petersburg Newspaper on 18 July 1885. Petersburg took heed.
SIXTEEN Ô
Petersburg Calls August 1885-January 1886 AUTUMN 1885 brought Chekhov a social whirlwind. Among Masha's friends, the fiery Dunia Efros stood out. In Moscow, where the authorities were increasingly hostile to Jews, she would not convert, and insisted on her Hebrew name, Reve-Khave. Anton had many liaisons - with his former landlady, Mrs Golub, with the landlady of friends, Baroness Aglaida Shepping, and, it is said, Blanche, a hostess at the Ermitage. A more serious love, his Natashevu, Natalia Golden, was now thirty. She left Moscow for Petersburg, from where in spring 1885 she wrote Anton a bawdy farewelclass="underline" Little bastard Antoshevu, I could hardly bear the wait for your much desired letter. I can feel you are having a merry, free-for-all time in Moscow, and I'm glad for you and envious… I haven't got married yet, but I probably shall soon and I invite you to my wedding. If you wish, you can bring with you your Countess Shepping, but you will have to bring your own sprung mattress, because here there aren't any women of such awful dimensions, and otherwise you won't have anything to be busy on. Since you have turned into a completely debauched man (since I left), you are unlikely to be able to do without - [Natalias dashes]. I can't belong to you any more, since I have found myself a suitable tiger-boy.