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would change his expression and say in a broken old man's voice: 'Quinine! You poor old thing! You ought to go to hospital, you'd feel better there.' He spent a whole thirty minutes talking to the dog and made everyone in the house helpless with laughter. Then came Brom's turn. He too would put his front paws on Anton's knee and the fun would start again. In late April the starving cows and sheep left the sheds to graze with the communal flocks. Ploughing and sowing started. The Chekhov family was up from dawn to dusk. Warm weather brought patients with sores, wounds and mental illness. Epidemics of scarlet fever and measles raged; it was also a critical time for tuberculosis victims. Anton barely mentioned his own cough, but wrote about his patients. The Tolokonnikovs, peasants turned mill-owners, disgusted him: after a vigorously celebrated marriage Chekhov was summoned urgently for the couple's inflamed genitals; another old man demanded treatment for his aching balls after marrying a young bride.
Once again the authorities feared cholera, and Anton was asked not to leave the district for more than a few days. This time the council paid for an assistant, a feldsheritsa (paramedic) called Maria Arkadak-skaia. Her notes alarmed Anton. On n July she wrote 'send me cocaine, my teeth are killing me'. By August, when cholera was only twelve miles away, Maria was so addicted to morphine that Chekhov could not leave her in charge for a day. In early August he put her in Iakovenko's asylum at Meshcherskoe - Iakovenko took only Anton's more interesting cases - and coped alone. Anton needed morphine too, he told Franz Schechtel on 19 April 1893: 'I have haemorrhoids, awful, like grapes, growing in bunches from my behind… from the part of me which my father used to thrash.' He steeled himself for an operation in Moscow but became too ill to traveclass="underline" I have two dozen or so diseases, with haemorrhoids the main one. Haemorrhoids make the whole body very irritated. These ailments affect one's psyche in the most undesirable way: I am irritated, I turn nasty etc. I am treating it by celibacy and solitude…" Haemorrhoids were his excuse for not seeing Lika: 'a general's disease - can't travel,' he told her. The dachshunds, not Lika, were caressed that spring. Anton complained to Aleksandr that Suvorin was not getting his
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letters. The Dauphin demanded that Anton edit Aleksandr's copy for New Times, but the brothers would not let the Dauphin sow discord between them. That summer they were closer. Aleksandr was unhappy with Natalia, and saw her and the children only at weekends forty miles outside Petersburg. After five months without alcohol, he was suffering again from 'ambulatory typhoid', and from toothache, which he treated with a mixture of resin, ether, ammonia and menthol that Anton prescribed. For Anton's ills Aleksandr, on 15 May, prescribed marriage: When you decide to get 'hitched', then things will be fine up top. A wife must not argue. 'Shut up!' deals with that… All you have to do is follow the general law, submit to Aunt Liudmila's desires and take some lessons in God-fearing coitus from Uncle Mitrofan. Aleksandr came to Melikhovo for a week in June: he found the suppressed unhappiness of its inhabitants unbearable. On 9 June IHOJ, as he waited at Lopasnia for the train to Moscow and Petersburg, he scribbled a rambling letter (which Lika, who was arriving, took wiili her to Melikhovo): I left Melikhovo without saying goodbye to the Tramontane) \thtit nickname for Pavel]. He was asleep, so let him be. May he dream ol smoked sturgeons and olives… I suffered all the time I watched you, the foul way you live… In [mother's] opinion you are I lit I man… and the dogs, damn them, she isn't going to feed them any more… The only way to stop all these misunderstandings and mutual insults, tears, inevitable suffering, muffled sighs and bitter tears is your final decision, only your departure. Mother absolutely can't understand you and never will… Throw everything up: your dreams of the country, your love of Melikhovo and the labour and feelings… What sense is there in the Tramontani eating up your soul as rats eat tallow candles?… You and our sister have a false relationship. One kind word from you with a sincere note and she is all yours… Lika is approaching. I have to finish. After Aleksandr had gone (leaving in the new pond a bottle with a polyglot message from a shipwreck), Evgenia went to a convent for three days' retreat. Only those who were closest to Anton, as was Aleksandr, understood how irritable physical pain, mental stress and loneliness made him and how much he could, without intending to, torment his mother and sister.
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In summer 1893 Anton wrote- almost nothing new. He denied that he was writing a comedy about Siberian exiles and their jailors. He kept up his reputation with old work. When Russian Thought published 'An Anonymous Story', in March 1893, few readers knew that Chekhov had abandoned it five years before, before taking it up again, because of its political theme. A revolutionary (the anonymous narrator) is planted as a servant to spy on a minister's son, but reneges on his mission and elopes with his target's mistress, who dies abroad of ÒÂ (only three heroines in all Chekhov's mature work die, and two of ÒÂ). When the narrator returns to Russia, he surrenders the heroine's baby girl to the enemy. 'An Anonymous Story' is Chekhov's only story with revolutionaries, aristocratic protagonists, or a Petersburg setting: the work is more like Turgenev's than Chekhov's. Anton's own world is better reflected in 'Big Volodia and Little Volo-dia', whose forlorn heroine might have suggested to Lika Mizinova that she was Anton's raw material, not muse. Many more times she would see her vulnerable character and unlucky fate mirrored, even anticipated, in Anton's fiction.
In 1893 Anton's reading was as important as his writing. Zola's novel Dr Pascal was serialized in Russia. Dr Pascal devotes himself to the welfare of mankind, defending humanism against the Christian piety of his niece Clotilde. She nevertheless comforts him and becomes his mistress. Anton's life at Melikhovo with Masha seemed to outsiders an idealization of Dr Pascal. No wonder that he discussed the novel heatedly with Suvorin, once communication between them was reestablished. There was one 'happy' event at Melikhovo: on 9 July Vania married Sofia in the local church. Six weeks later, Anton was telling Suvorin that he felt crowded by the presence of Vania, his wife and the homeless flautist Ivanenko. Real inspiration visited Anton once, after a heavy dinner. He awoke from a nightmare, telling Misha he had dreamt of a black monk. Into 'The Black Monk' he wrote at the end of 1893 comes imagery from his orchard, where workmen desperately tried to shield the blossom from frost. A story of overwork leading to madness and ÒÂ, it shows Vsevolod Garshin's ghost working on Chekhov. It needed a musical theme for the plot to crystallize. The bringer of music to Melikhovo in August 1893 was Ignati Potapenko, and the bringer of Potapenko was Suvorin. By May Suvorin was in Paris, seeking distraction in Le Moulin Rouge, with the
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dot lors of La Salpetriere, or in jewellers' shops. Only on 7/19 June does his diary show animation: Back at my hotel I found a letter from Potapenko asking me for 300-400 roubles. Today I gave him 300 roubles… Maria [Pota-penko'ssecond wife]… said that she needed treatment, some operation had to be done, but they had no money. Potapenko works a lot, far too hard, and doesn't conceal from himself that this is wearing him out; but he works fast. Potapenko invited himself and Sergeenko to Melikhovo. Anton groaned: he recalled Sergeenko taking him to see Potapenko,' 'the god of boredom', in 1889. Sergeenko had proved unmitigated tedium all 1893 he had urged Anton to make a pilgrimage with him to see Tolstoy. Anton resisted, fleeing a Moscow bathhouse when he found 1 hat Tolstoy was there. He wanted to see Tolstoy alone, and hid from Sergeenko and even Tolstoy's son, Liovushka.