Despite Aleksandr's pleas, Anton refused to go to Anna's bedside, and called him a 'loathsome blackmailer':
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Urgent medical help is required- È you won't take Anna to Botkin then at least visit him yourself and explain what's the matter… I doubt if mother will come, for her health is not all that good. And she has no passport. She has the same passport as papa, that would mean long discussions with father and going to the police chief etc. The family's postscripts were no comfort: 'Greetings!!!!! N. Chekhov. Mother grieves she can't come.' and: 'My regards, I kiss you, Anna and the children, Masha.' Aleksandr painted for Anton a picture of domestic helclass="underline" The children are running wild: howling, cowering, trying to get to their mother who either cries over them or chases them away. When I get home from the office, more trouble: she demands to see the vile woman I am going to marry, who intends to poison Kolia and Antosha for the sake of her own future children. She demands this woman be searched for behind the door, in the wardrobe, under the table… Just imagine the night, the ravings, the loneliness, the impossibility of consoling her, the crazy words, the sudden transitions from laughter to crying, the children crying in their sleep after being frightened all day. Judge, you Herod's ^sculapius, what a time I'm having and what grief that mother won't come. Aleksandr's siblings showed more concern for strangers. Masha brought home a twelve-year-old boy she found begging. She and Anton gave him money, got him boots from the school where Vania worked, and gave the boy a train ticket to Iaroslavl and a letter to the local celebrity, the poet Trefolev (who looked 'like a plucked crow'). Only Pavel softened to his son: Dear Aleksandr… I sympathize with your grief, but unfortunately can send you nothing, I can only pray, and I advise you to rely on God. He will arrange everything for the best. I wish Anna a Happy Easter and with all my heart a quick recovery, I ask her to forgive me and to forget the past… Your loving father, P. Chekhov. Anton was dreaming of catching perch-pike in the Psiol, 'nobler and sweeter than making love' he told Pleshcheev. Misha was with Uncle Mitrofan: 'Mummy! I'm in Taganrog! happy, cheerful, calm, pleased.' Aleksandr despaired: 'Anna's days are numbered and the catastrophe is inevitable… Please ask our mother and her sister if they'll take the children…' But Anton was adamant in his refusaclass="underline"
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JANUARY-MAY l888 If I add two rooms for the children, nurse and children's junk, then the flat will cost 900… Anyway, in any spacious flat we would be crowded. You know I have an agglomeration of adults living under one roof simply because, thanks to incomprehensible circumstances, we can't go our own ways… There's my mother, sister, the student Misha (who won't leave even when he graduates), Kolia, who is doing nothing and has been jilted by his paramour, drinks and lies about undressed, our aunt and [her son] Aliosha (the latter two just use the accommodation). Add to this Vania hanging about from 3 p.m. to the early hours and all day on holidays, while papa comes for the evenings… These are all nice, cheerful people, but they are selfish, they make claims, they are usually talkative, they stamp about, they have no money… I refuse to take on anyone else, let alone somebody who has to be brought up… Tear this letter up. You should make it a habit to tear up letters, they are scattered all over your apartment. Join us in the south in summer. It's cheap. The children, Anton suggested, could be left with Aunt Fenichka, who would live in the Korneev house, while the Chekhovs were in the country. Aleksandr had to accept these brutal terms. Anton wrote far more mildly about his dependants to his 'dear Captain' Shcheglov on 18 Apriclass="underline" I too have a 'family circle'. For convenience I always take it with me like luggage and am as used to it as a growth on my forehead… it's a benign, not a malignant growth… Anyway, I am more often cheerful than sad though, if I think about it, I am tied hand and foot. Evgenia worried only about her summer in the country, and wrote to Misha: 'It's a pity our dacha is not a success, it's too late now, the luggage was sent at Easter… you wrote little about servants, what the prices are in Sumy, how much they're paid a month.'
On 7 May 1888 Anna took the last rites in Petersburg, while the Chekhovs reached Sumy by train and took a carriage two miles to Luka. Their hosts were friendly, the house comfortable, the weather hot and the setting unspoilt. 'Misha was talking rubbish,' Anton wrote, inviting Vania and Pavel to join them in 6 weeks' time and bring vodka. He invited Shcheglov and wrote again to Vania specifying fish hooks. To Leikin he praised the civilized Ukrainian peasantry. Here, after the diseased and degraded peasants around Babkino, he could
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forget he was a doctor. Soon the- Chckhovs were joined by guests. The arrival of the legendary Pleshcheev thrilled the Lintvariovs: for three weeks they treated him as a god. Belatedly Anton remembered his brothers. On 27 iMay he told Aleksandr to make Aunt Fenichka his children's guardian, and not to pay Anna's doctors: 'If they are waiting for the autopsy to make a diagnosis, then their visits were absurd and the money they dare to take off you cries unto heaven… iMy regards to Anna and the kids.' The next day, before this callous letter had arrived, Aleksandr sent Anton a note: Today at 4.15 a.m. Anna died. Knoch will do the autopsy tonight. After the funeral I shall immediately take the children to Auntie in Moscow and will join you in Sumy. Then we'll talk it all over. Be well for now. Regards. Yours, A. Chekhov.
TWENTY-FOUR Ô
Travel and Travails May-September 1888 THE LINTVARIOVS were very unlike the Kiseliovs. The Kiseliovs had the rakishness and the loftiness of the nobility; the Lintvariovs were principled gentry, hardworking landowners and good employers, radicals ready for self-sacrifice. All they had in common with the Kiseliovs was impecuniousness.
The head of the Lintvariov family was the mother, Aleksandra. She had five adult children, three daughters and two sons. The eldest daughter, Zinaida, impressed Chekhov. He told Suvorin: A doctor, she is the pride of the family, and the peasants say, a saint… She has a brain tumour; this has left her completely blind, she has epilepsy and constant headaches. She knows what to expect, and talks about her imminent death stoically with striking calm… here, seeing a blind woman on the terrace laughing, joking or listening to my In the Twilight being read, I start to think it odd not that the doctor will die but that we don't sense our own death. The second daughter, Elena, plain and assumed unmarriageable, was also a doctor. Natalia, the youngest, was full of song and laughter: she identified with the peasantry, and not only spoke but also taught Ukrainian (then forbidden). The elder son, Pavel, under house arrest for radical activities, was married and expecting his first child. The youngest son, George, was a pianist, enthralled by Tchaikovsky's music and Tolstoy's morality: his career was also curtailed by political activism. Letters sent to Luka, even to Chekhov, were intercepted by the secret police. The Lintvariovs expected intellectuals to devote themselves to the people. Discussions at Luka, despite Natalia's vivacity, had little of Babkino's frivolity. There were no drinking bouts, no romps with peasant girls. The innocent ambience and idyllic setting were to infiltrate a few of Chekhov's works, notably The Wood Demon, and give them a Utopian colouring.
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The house the Chekhovs rented was more habitable than Misha had suggested, despite four dogs that chased the Lintvariov pigs around the yard and burst into the guests' dining room. A Polish girl cooked for the Chekhovs; Evgenia refused to cook, because the kitchen was occupied by another holiday-maker. Anton went fishing and struck up a partnership with a local factory-worker, a keen fisherman. They fished the millponds on the Psiol. The miller's daughter was plump 'like a sultana pudding… such concupiscence, Heaven help me,' Anton wrote to Kiseliov, but gentlemen at Luka did not seduce peasant girls, and Anton was dismayed to discover that Sumy had no brothel. Luka also lacked lavatories: Chekhov's bottom was covered with mosquito bites.