None of the visitors who trekked 400 miles, a thirty-hour train journey, complained. The Ukraine appealed to Russian intellectuals, who felt a yearning for a Shangri-La they could idealize, like the Victorian English love affair with Scotland. Anton's newest acolytes - the writers Ivan Shcheglov, Kazimir Barantsevich, and the flautist Aleksandr Ivanenko - and those whom he revered happily joined him for two weeks at Luka. On 20 May the poet Pleshcheev arrived. Ivanenko played duets with Georges Lintvariov; the local girls rowed Pleshcheev on the Psiol and sang romances to him, Anton monitoring the old poet's pulse and breathing.
Early in June two of Anton's brothers, Vania and Kolia, came. Kolia was subdued, for in Moscow he had vanished with Franz Schechtel's money and materials; Schechtel, as architect for a church that Kolia was helping to restore, was facing a fine of 150 roubles for each day's delay. 'I pity myself in the extreme,' he wrote. 'Kolia is not worth pitying.' Aleksandr came to Moscow and left his infant sons with Aunt Fenichka. There, Gruzinsky reported on 21 June, order had disintegrated: 'On the steps of your apartment I saw a charming young maid with a charming young man on her knees (usually it's the other way round).'26 Aleksandr hurried to Sumy, but was quarrelsome and drunk. He mounted the stage of the little Sumy summer theatre and helped the hypnotist and the conjurors: the audience laughed, but Anton removed him. Then Aleksandr wrote a proposal of marriage to Elena Lintvariova, presuming her desperate enough to accept a widowed alcoholic with two retarded sons. Anton tore the letter up. Aleksandr stalked off to the station at two in the morning. In Moscow he accused Aunt Fenichka of poisoning his children. He took them to the Petersburg flat, which had been stripped bare by two dismissed servant girls, and there lapsed into alcoholic stupor. (Some time elapsed before the two little boys were rescued and sent for a few-weeks to Aunt Fenichka in Moscow.)
Kolia and Pleshcheev left two days after Aleksandr walked out. Kolia, after a third-class journey cramped among the household goods of other returning holiday-makers, went to his sick-bed in Anna Ipatieva-Golden's house: from here he tried to extort money from Suvorin to illustrate 'Steppe'. Pleshcheev returned (forgetting his nightshirt) first-class to his genteel apartment in Petersburg. The gap was filled by Misha, back from Taganrog, who now felt closer to Mitrofan's family than his own, particularly to his cousin Georgi.
Anton thought of buying a ranch in the Ukraine for a few thousand roubles. There, he fantasized, he could write, found a spa for other city writers, and practise medicine. Earning 500 to 1000 roubles from each new story or play, Anton could be a man of property. A farmer friend of the Lintvariovs, Aleksandr Smagin, had taken a fancy to Masha, and offered to help find Anton a property near his own estate in Poltava. The Lintvariovs harnessed four horses to their antiquated carriage: Anton with Natalia Lintvariova, her brother George and a girl from Poltava set off to the Smagin estate. Anton started a ten-day tour of the market towns of the northern Ukraine that Gogol had made famous fifty years before. For three years Anton considered properties, but every deal fell through. The 250-mile tour left Chekhov a lover of all things Ukrainian. When he returned to Sumy he was buoyant.
Nightingales hatched their young in the window frame. More visitors came. Anton had asked Gavrilov to give Pavel two weeks' leave from the warehouse. Gavrilov was happy to employ the father of a famous man: his demands on Pavel were nominal, though Pavel liked helping Gavrilov reckon his million-rouble annual profit. On 26 June Pavel arrived, to celebrate his name day jointly with Pavel Lintvariov, an event that contributed touches to Chekhov's story 'The Name-Day Party'. Of the acolytes, only Kazimir Barantsevich came for long. He and Anton caught crayfish together. Barantsevich left, forgetting his waders and a pair of trousers. He wrote a thank-you letter: 'Not a
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day passes without my thinking about suicide (except for my short stay with you).'
Anton missed Suvorin. Sending Anton his comedy The Theatrical Sparrow for comment, Shcheglov said the same: 'I occasionally have Suvorin-schmerzen; it's so wonderful to talk to him now and then -he is sensitivity itself.' After three days by train and boat, on 13 July 1888, Anton was greeted by the Suvorins at their villa in Feodosia. For nine days they bathed, lay in the sun, strolled and talked. Anton wrote neither letters nor fiction: the relationship absorbed him totally. Here they sketched out the play that would later become The Wood Demon. Anna Suvorina watched: We lay on the baking-hot sand or on moonlit nights watched the boundless sea… My husband and Anton when they were together chatted or exchanged stories all the time… We introduced Anton to Aivazovsky [the painter]… Aivazovsky's beautiful second wife, an Armenian, wore a white housecoat and her long black hair, still wet after bathing, flowed loose; lit by the moon she was sorting out roses, freshly picked and strewn over the table, into baskets. Anton said, 'It's a magic fairy tale.' Chekhov wrote nothing that summer, although he was planning a novel. Suvorin's munificence overwhelmed him: rowing boats for fishing on the Psiol, money to buy an estate, a daughter, a partnership in the publishing business, co-authorship for a new play, worldly wisdom, state secrets. Anton made light of Suvorin's offer of his eleven-year-old daughter Nastia, and borrowed a sum too small to embarrass himself, but large enough not to offend Suvorin.
Anton ignored everything else. In Moscow Vania was searching for quarters for himself and Pavel. The Korneev house was a shambles. Vania told his mother: There is a lot of dust and rubbish from well-known persons in your apartment, but what there really are a lot of are cats. For want of anything to do, Auntie talks to them, feeding the poor animals on buns and milk, all the pussy cats have names, the littlest is called Paper Bag.
At 4.00 a.m. on 23 July 1888, Anton set sail with Aleksei Suvorin junior, the Dauphin, for the Caucasus. In heavy seas Anton lost his footing and grabbed the telegraph machine to stop his fall. In the confusion on the bridge the ship, the Dir, narrowly missed another boat.27 Anton and the Dauphin set off across Georgia for the Caspian sea, aiming to reach Persia via Bukhara. A new disaster struck Suvorin. The Dauphin had telegrams: his third brother, Valerian, was ill. Valerian had turned up, complaining of headaches, at Zvenigorod, where Anton would have been working, had he accepted Kiseliov's invitation to Babkino. Here Anton's colleague, Dr Arkhangelsky, diagnosed diphtheria and ordered a trachelotomy. A call to a Moscow surgeon went astray: Valerian died in Zvenigorod on 2 August 1888.
The Dauphin and Anton raced back to the Crimea. Suvorin junior hastened to his father. Anton avoided the bereaved Suvorins and returned to the Lintvariovs and the river Psiol. The Dauphin wrote to Anton on 12 August 1888: I found our father completely shattered and tired, as if after an attack of mental illness… Now everything seems impossible, futile… My father is trying to follow common-sense prescriptions, trying to live 'a normal life', is doing the bookshop accounts, going to the building site… We expected you here, I did my best to make excuses for you. Appeals for compassion came from Moscow as well as the Crimea. Aunt Fenichka wrote to her sister on 11 August: I grieve for the children now that Anna is no more and I wake up at night and think about them… I can't bear it, when the child [little Kolia] misses his mother.' He can't talk and told me - he shows me with his hands - how mama was dressed and put in the coffin and then buried in a hole in the ground, shows me with his hands and simply I have never known such grief; I just cannot calm myself. Anna was a dear and I was quite certain that her relatives would take them in and not let them live like this. I pray that Our Father in Heaven will soften Anton's heart… poor Shura [Anna's 16-year-old son] cried a lot for his mother and fell unconscious, and the daughter [the eleven-year-old Nadid] cried a lot. Anton could not cope with any more demands on his sympathy, his living space, or his purse. His nephews, for whom he felt scarcely more affection than did Pavel, were abandoned to their drunken father, and Suvorin to his wife and surviving sons. Since 'Steppe' in March Chekhov had not maintained his