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dilapidated stirruppump. When the Chekhovs woke up on Sunday 29 March, they had a new view: the house next door had burned down, and only a smoking pile of beams remained. Anton quickly installed a new well-bucket, a hand-pumped fire engine and a bell, and planned a pond as big as a lake by the house. The Chekhovs had brought the sixty-seven-year-old Mariushka: they recruited cooks, maids and a driver from among the Melikhovo peasants. By mid April the roads would be impassable with floodwater. The Chekhovs had to hurry if they were to start farming. Hay, straw, seed, ploughs, horses, poultry had to be bought, begged and borrowed. Debts spiralled. Anton had brought manuals of agriculture, horticulture and veterinary science. Despite their grandparents' peasant blood, the Chekhovs blundered, to the amusement of the peasantry and the neighbours, like Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet. Their best ploy was to make Misha farm manager. Misha deserted his tax office, bought six horses with his own money and oversaw peasants and contractors. Pavel happily took to the role of gentleman, leading peasants to the barn and stables 'as if he were taking them to be thrashed', forcing visitors to wait because 'the masters are dining', patronizing the clergy. When Chekhov's fictional city-dwellers plough and sow, they are driven out by the peasants' hostility. Anton's initiation was easier. He let the peasants drive cattle down the track that cut his estate in two, and even moved his fence. The peasantry did not at first come round: one of the Chekhov mares, left out at night, was switched for a moribund gelding. Only when Anton set up a free clinic, visited the bedridden, and gave the peasants the right to cut hay in his forest, did he win trust. Of the neighbouring gentry the nearest to Melikhovo were outcasts: the Varenikovs - she ten years older than her lover -were keen farmers who wanted to buy Chekhov's arable land, urging him to build a more habitable home in the 300 acres of woodland that would be left. A mile away was Vaskino, the mansion of Prince Sergei Shakhovskoi, a magistrate and the stentorian and Herculean grandchild of a Decembrist rebel.
The Lintvariovs, Smagins and Ivanenko sent cattle from the Ukraine, and lent ploughshares. Smagin sent hundreds of roubles' worth of seed-corn so that rye and oats could be planted once Misha's horses had ploughed. Smagin's help had a price. Masha's version runs:
MARCH-JUNE 1892
Although it is hard to say now whether I loved him then, I thought hard about getting married… I went to the study and said, 'You know, Anton, I've decided to get married…' My brother naturally realized to whom, but he made no reply. Then I sensed that he found this announcement unpleasant, although he remained silent. Smagin's proposal was Masha's third; she was nearly twenty-nine and it could be her last. Anton told Suvorin, who told Olga Kundasova: Petersburg and Moscow were abuzz. Smagin was coming to Melikhovo on 2 3 March: Masha left to teach in Moscow, and only returned a day or two before Smagin left. Smagin grasped that this flight meant a refusal, and spent two days chatting about farming: he kept his promises and sent the Chekhovs bags of seed, but he seethed. On 31 March 1892 he wrote to Masha: It cost me great efforts to refrain from having a scandalous row at Melikhovo. Do you realize mat I could have crushed you there - I hated you… only Anton's constant hospitable welcome saved me.2 On 28 July 1929 Smagin was to write: although a whole lifetime has passed since 25 March 1892… for me you remain the most enchanting and incomparable woman. I wish you health and a long life, but I should like to meet you again before I die.3 Anton later told Suvorin that his sister was 'one of those rare, incomprehensible women' who did not want to marry, but some years were to pass before Masha became sure that marriage would give her less happiness than her position as her brother's amanuensis. In later life she told her nephew Sergei that she had never really been in love with anybody.4
That spring Anton was as ruthless with his own suitors as with Masha's. Before Easter none of his women friends ventured out to Melikhovo. Few even wrote, so bruised were they by his departure. Anton, busy planting an orchard, had little time for correspondence, but on 7 March he sent a long misogynistic letter to Suvorin: Women are most unlikeable in their lack of justice and because justice is organically alien to them… In a peasant family the man is clever, reasonable and fair and God-fearing, while the woman is - God help us!
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Anton lost Elena Shavrova's manuscript, and sent her fee to famine relief. He recommended her to a dilettante editor, Prince Urusov, but not as a writer: 'She gives a sort of lisping first impression - don't let that bother you. She has a spark and mischief in her. She sings gypsy songs well and can handle her drink. She dresses well, but has a silly hair style.'
Masha, 'with remarkable self-sacrifice', Anton commented, spent the weekend planting out the kitchen garden and her weekdays teaching at the 'Dairy' school. The school was in financial straits, so that Masha worked unpaid. None of her friends came to Melikhovo. Anton's note to Lika was as frosty as the weather: Masha asks you to come the week before Easter and bring perfume. I'd buy it myself but I shan't be in Moscow until the week after Easter. We wish you all the best. The starlings have flown away. The cockroaches haven't left,5 but we've checked the fire engine. Masha's brother. Two days later, he teased Lika that she would again take a summer dacha with Levitan and Kuvshinnikova. His letter ended half flippant, half appealing, paraphrasing Lermontov: 'Lika, it's not you I ardently love! I love in you my former suffering and my lost youth.' On 2 April Anton sent Masha an Easter shopping list, ending: 'Bring Lika.' Lika came, deserting her family's Easter reunion.6 Hard on Lika's heels came Levitan. The Chekhovs brought a priest from the monastery to take the Easter service in Melikhovo church (which had no clergy): the family and guests acted as choir and Pavel relived his Taganrog days as cantor. Anton kept Lika and Levitan apart: the two men went shooting for two days after Easter Sunday, until an incident that foreshadows The Seagull. Anton confessed to Suvorin: Levitan fired at a snipe; the bird was winged and fell in a puddle… Levitan wrinkles his brow, shuts his eyes and asks in a trembling voice: 'Dear boy, bang it on the head with the gunstock.' I said I couldn't. He keeps nervously twitching his shoulders, his head trembling, begging. And the snipe is still looking bewildered. I had to do as Levitan said and kill it. One fine lovelorn creature less, and two fools go home to supper. When Levitan went home next day, he discovered that Anton had treated him less mercifully than the snipe. 'The Grasshopper', in The
MARCH-JUNE 1892
Performing Artist, set all Moscow tittering or seething. The 'heroine' of the 'little' story, 'The Grasshopper', is a married woman (with the features of Lika and the circumstances of Kuvshinnikova) who has an affair with a lecherous artist, very like Levitan; the 'grasshopper' heroine's husband, a saintly doctor (who faintly recalls both Dr Kuvshinnikov and Dr Chekhov), is driven literally to self-destruction by the situation. Dr Kuvshinnikov was alive and well, but his loving tolerance (recognized by his wife in her diaries) imbues the fictional doctor. Sofia Kuvshinnikova, forty-two, swarthy, and a serious painter, saw herself in the heroine, despite Anton's heroine being, like Lika, twenty, blonde and without artistic talent. Others also felt libelled. The actor Lensky, who frequented the Kuvshinnikova salon, and had told Chekhov not to write drama, recognized himself in a minor character.
Sofia Kuvshinnikova never spoke to Anton again; Lensky did not speak to a Chekhov for eight years. Levitan wanted to fight a duel and did not meet Anton for three years. (Levitan had other worries. The police were expelling Jews from Moscow, and he fled 150 miles east, until Dr Kuvshinnikov, a police surgeon, secured his return.) Levitan's relationship with the Kuvshinnikovs broke down. Sofia marked the summer of 1892 as their last. Dr Kuvshinnikov kept a discreet silence, but he never spoke to Anton again.