Lika was as badly hurt as the Kuvshinnikovs and Levitan, but she was in love and, in this matter, was wiser than Anton: What a savage you are, Anton… I know full well that if you say or do something hurtful it's not out of any wish to do it on purpose, but because you really don't care how people will take what you do.. J Neither Lika's reproaches, nor the loss of Levitan, a friend of ten years, seemed to mean much to Anton. Nor did the visit of his ex-fiancee Dunia Efros (now married to Konovitser, a lawyer from Taganrog gimnazia). Anton wanted to see only Suvorin and Pavel Svobodin. Suvorin came on 22 April (a day after Dunia Efros left). Suvorin, who owned a palatial mansion in Petersburg and a fine villa in the Crimea, could not stand the ill-heated smoky rooms, with no W.C. and no sprung carriage to take him to the station. On the 24th he took Anton to Moscow to spend three days in luxury at the Slav
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Bazaar. While Suvorin slept, Anion wrote. Melikhovo was modernized over the next five years, but it was hard to persuade Suvorin to go there again: if he passed on his way south, he met Anton at Lopasnia station. Anton returned to Melikhovo with Svobodin, just as Pavel was consecrating the sowing of thirty acres of oats. Apart from the Dauphin, Svobodin was the only guest at the end of April 1892. He returned in late June. The family planned to build him a cottage. Until the theatre season opened, Svobodin devoted himself to Anton, for whom he felt, both as actor and patient, admiration and affection. Anton wrote his new work, 'Ward No. 6', for a Moscow journal, The Russian Review. The editors had paid a 500-rouble advance and would print whatever Chekhov sent, but they disliked the gloom and radicalism of the story. The obvious journal for such a work was the left-wing Russian Thought, but Anton had quarrelled with its editors, Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev, two years before. Svobodin's tact now reconciled Anton to men who had called him 'unprincipled', but it took until 23 June to get Chekhov to transfer his story from The Russian Review, and to conjure an apology from Lavrov. Svobodin pitched Chekhov into the camp of Russian Thought, the bete noire of Suvorin's New Times. Anton could do little in return. Svobodin's heart had tired of pumping blood round tubercular lungs. On 25 June 1892, after Svobodin had left, Anton told Suvorin: He has lost weight, gone grey, his bones are showing and when he's asleep he looks like a dead man. Extraordinary meekness, a calm tone and a morbid revulsion for the theatre. Looking at him I conclude that a man preparing for death cannot love the theatre. Dramaturgy too was stale. On 4 June 1892 Anton complained to Suvorin: 'Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. The damned endings won't come! The hero either gets married or shoots himself.' All Chekhov could write was a story of illicit love and family conflict, called 'Neighbours', with a sidelong glance at the Varenikovs next door to Melikhovo.
'Ward No. 6' depleted Anton's creative resources. Set in the psychiatric ward of a remote hospital, the story is a bleak allegory of the human condition. There is no love interest. The plot is a Greek tragedy in its violent reversal of fortunes. Like 'The Duel', it confronts
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activist with quietist. Now the activist is not a scientist, but a madman, Gromov, who has been incarcerated for proclaiming that truth and justice must triumph one day. The quietist, Dr Ragin, is drawn into dialogue and borrows every excuse devised by Marcus Aurelius or Schopenhauer for condoning evil. By consorting with a madman, Ragin alarms his superiors: he is trapped into his own ward, where, after a beating from the charge nurse, he dies of a stroke. Gromov has to go on living. Chekhov set his story among nettles and grey fences. Suvorin disliked it, but the elderly novelist Leskov recognized its genius, exclaiming 'Ward No. 6 is Russia.'8
Work so harrowing left a void. The Island of Sakhalin lay untouched. A worried editor, Tikhonov, wrote in March 1892, 'I hope that you won't stop writing, like some Cincinnatus'. Fears were well-founded. Chekhov saw medicine and physical labour as salvation. Yet another young writer whom Anton knew, Bibikov, died destitute in Kiev. In Petersburg Barantsevich, Bilibin and Shcheglov moaned to Anton. Tilling the soil gave Anton only the illusion of health. When not planting trees, catching mice to release in the wood, or digging a pond, he slept exhausted. For Leikin he wrote a few trivia, to pay for the dachshunds that Leikin had promised. Anton toiled from five in the morning until after dark. He was as happy in Melikhovo as he ever would be. He ordered almost every freshwater fish of Russia: his pond was an ichthyological museum. He planted fifty cherry trees from Vladimir - the real cherry orchard preceded the fictional one. He summoned stove-makers from Moscow, bought a sprung carriage for the journey to the station and dreamed of building a house in the woods, where he would tend trees and keep chickens and bees. Small disasters brought him down to earth: bad weather and the deaths of a horse, of his only drake, and of the hedgehog that hunted the mice in the barn.
Leikin, himself a recent landowner, sent cucumber seeds and endless advice. Franz Schechtel, a man of many hobbies, sent eggs which hatched into fancy poultry. He also sent mare's tail, a medicinal weed.9 Chekhov told him on 7 June: 'The ground is covered with little penises in erecktirten Zustande. Some places now look as if they'd like to screw…'
Cousins from Taganrog and Kaluga expressed their amazement that a Chekhov had joined the landowning gentry. Women friends
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wondered at Anton's empire. They crowned him 'King of the Medes', a title as apt as Cincinnatus. Aleksandr's envy of 'Cincinnatus' bothered Anton. All spring his elder brother begged for land on which to build. Anton hedged, horrified lest Natalia come near. In early April Natalia's year-old Misha nearly died of the convulsions that had killed Aleksandr's first-born Mosia: 'My wife is destroyed, and I walk about like a cat scalded with sulphuric acid,' Aleksandr wrote. The doctor, Aleksandr hinted, advised a climate warmer than Finland and cooler man Taganrog - near Anton: i) By the way I have absolutely given up drinking… 2) I can't let a roodess, if good, person like my wife go where she wants, as I know from experience. Even less can I let her go to her sisters'… 3) Therefore wouldn't there be a hut, a house, or something similar, near your estate for the summer?… It would only be on the absolute condition that nobody of my family dares to get into your house. My wife herself insists on that. If granny wants to take the infants in, that is her business. The infants and my wife will not be coming to see you uninvited… Natalia says mat… our mother is not fond of her. In the last week in June Aleksandr brought his two elder boys, now aged eight and six, to Melikhovo. He took photographs, and neither argued nor drank. Natalia was not invited, though she had fed Pavel and Anton in Petersburg, and shopped with Masha in Moscow.
In summer the 'Dairy' school closed for the holidays and Misha's tax office in Aleksin condoned his absences. Women friends of Vania and Misha visited. Countess Klara Mamuna, who had befriended Masha in the Crimea two years ago, came to play the piano. She flirted with both Misha and Anton, but seemed, before the summer ended, to be Misha's fiancee. Aleksandra Liosova, a lively and beautiful local schoolteacher, 'the fair daughter of Israel', was to be engaged to Vania, but photographs and letters show that it was Anton who drew her. Natalia Lintvariova alone caused no tension: she avoided flirtation.