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buckwheat, which became yet another weed at Melikhovo. The cycle of presents ended with Chekhov commissioning an artist to paint Leikin in oils for only 200 roubles. Overjoyed, Leikin sent seed of his prize beet and cucumbers.
When Gruzinsky and Ezhov were invited back to a green, warm Melikhovo in early June, Ezhov changed his mind: 'I liked it. The bathhouse we saw is finished and, thanks to Anton's kindness, is a resort for all the Melikhovo peasants.' Perhaps Ezhov felt more gracious because he was about to marry again, this time 'a girl of no means'.45 It took all summer, however, to lure Suvorin, used to greater comforts, to Melikhovo. When he came at the end of August he stayed just one night.
At Easter Ivanenko came. He annoyed Pavel by oversleeping and not kissing the priest. Giliarovsky, the superman-reporter of Anton's student days, visited, Anton received for three days Doctor Korobov, who had boarded with the Chekhovs when he and Anton were first-year students. Nikolai Korobov was now besotted with Nietzsche. Chekhov had once commented: 'I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche in a railway carriage or on a boat and talk the whole night.' Korobov's visit was the next best thing. Nietzschean views and phrases seep into the conversation of Anton's fictional protagonists.46 His correspondence with Suvorin was also enlivened by sympathy with the latter's pro-German and Nietzschean views, often eccentric: Suvorin advocated compulsory cricket in Russian universities, for example, to defect students from idle radicalism.
Anton and Suvorin longed for each other. Suvorin wanted to sit and walk with Anton, 'silently and idly exchanging the odd phrase'. Anton begged Suvorin to come to Moscow in May: 'we could travel round the cemeteries, the monasteries, the woods at the edge of the city.' But Suvorin's newspaper and, above all, his the tre libre, held him captive, and Anton lacked a pretext to abandon Melikhovo. An estate could only be run if every member 'regardless of rank or sex, worked like a peasant'. Mice were stopped from stripping the bark off the cherry trees; a pig was slaughtered and hams smoked; timber was hauled for a new workman's shed. The summer of 1895 brought a drought as bad as the rains of 1894; the birch leaves were stripped by larvae. Fruit blossom was spoilt by frosts; sudden heat generated mosquitoes 'which bite like dogs'. Anton could not leave Masha with
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such drudgery again. In vain Suvorin tempted him with the Volga and Dnepr, or Leikin with the lakes and monasteries of the North. He himself longed for the sea, the Baltic or the Azov, but had to stay at Melikhovo.
Anton's youngest and eldest brothers stayed away in spring 1895. Misha was even in April snowbound in Uglich. He was bound in other respects: the death of Sablin, his protector (the brother of the editor 'granddad' Sablin), had blocked hopes of a transfer to the livelier city of Iaroslavl. Anton lobbied for him, first with Bilibin, who told him that Misha was unqualified to be a postmaster, and then with Suvorin. In Petersburg Natalia angled for an invitation: 'You describe your garden and its inhabitants, so that I salivate'. Aleksandr felt put upon: Natalia ('my whore') was showing signs of increasing eccentricity -hoarding food and clothes; his mother-in-law was dying of emaciation (it took four more years); he was up all night indexing New Times for a paltry 100 roubles a year; he had stopped drinking again, and his 'loins hurt like an onanist's'.
All Anton's irritation of the previous year, his tangle with Lika and Potapenko and his reading of the German misogynists went into a story called 'Ariadna'. The heroine Ariadna Grigorievna is named after the girl who ruined the life of his Latin teacher, Starov. Her flamboyance was Iavorskaia's; her predicament was Lika's. Like Lika, Ariadna fails to ensnare the introverted narrator, Shamokhin, and takes up instead with a frivolous married man, Lubkov, who abandons her in Europe. Unlike Anton, however, Shamokhin rescues Ariadna and brings her back to Russia, and unlike Lika, Ariadna only seems pregnant. Like Potapenko, Lubkov has the gall to sponge money from his rival. Shamokhin paraphrases Schopenhauer when he describes Ariadna's need to charm and to lie as being an innate as spurting ink is to a cuttlefish. Shamokhin tells the story to Chekhov - for once Chekhov appears in his own story - as they sail from Odessa to Yalta. Shamokhin is after all the ship's bore, and this distances Chekhov from his protagonist. 'Ariadna' explores a conflict - between misogyny and common sense - in Chekhov's own mind.
'Ariadna' had been commissioned for The Performing Artist. Its editor, Kumanin, had since incurred Chekhov's disfavour and, as he neared death, his journal folded, Kumanin sold his subscribers and contracts, including Chekhov's 620-rouble advance, to Russian
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Thought, and Lavrov and Goltscv found themselves, at the end of 1895, printing a work offensive to their egalitarianism. Chekhov was able, however, to offset 'Ariadna' with 'Murder', a brooding story of fanatical violence, inspired by what he had seen on Sakhalin and by Misha's stories of Uglich. In May 1895 The Island of Sakhalin passed, as Lavrov put it, 'from tiie belly of the whale' and came out as a book (published by Russian Thought) which proved Chekhov's radical credentials. Chekhov had, however, now finished with the penal island. His hope that the work would win him the right to lecture in Moscow university was thwarted; the University was ill-disposed to a man who 'had it in for professors'.
Misogyny permeated another story conceived that summer, printed in The Russian Gazette in October - 'Anna Round the Neck'. The phrase is Aleksandr's: he called his dying first wife 'Anna round the neck' - a pun on the civil service award of St Anna. Chekhov's Anna is a girl married off to an elderly civil servant to save her destitute family. Realizing she is sexually attractive, she turns the tables and tyrannizes her husband. Anton was, understandably, in no mood for marriage, die cure that Suvorin proposed for his melancholy. On 2 3 March 1895 he retorted: All right, I'll get married if you want me to. But my conditions are: everything must be as it was before, that is she must live in Moscow, and I in the country, and I shall visit her. I couldn't stand a happiness mat went on morning noon and night… I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not rise every night in my sky. NB. Marrying won't make me write any better.
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Incubating The Seagull June-September 1895 IN SUMMER 1895 Anton began to mention his archive. Like his father, Anton scrupulously kept letters and documents. The family always asked Anton if they were looking for a certificate. Anton alarmed Suvorin, who did not want his private thoughts to be widely known, by saying that he had put all his letters in order. This became an annual ritual, which Anton and Masha carried out: letters were sorted into two categories, family and literary, then into boxes, by author, Anton marking the date if the writer had not. Afraid of compromising themselves, people now wrote less spontaneously to Anton, or wrote mainly to provoke a saleable answer. Anton joked at their fears and hopes: he headed a letter to Anna Suvorina 'not for Russian Antiquity', but his own tone, as time went on, became more guarded.
The archive shows Chekhov's growing self-esteem. He could see himself as Russia's greatest living writer of fiction. On 21 February Leskov, who had anointed him as 'Samuel anointed David', had died. Nobody mourned the most cantankerous of Russian novelists. Even Anton expressed only indignation that Leskov in his will demanded an autopsy to prove his doctors wrong. A diary entry two years later, however, shows how deeply he felt Leskov's importance: 'Writers like Leskov… cannot please our critics, because our critics are almost all Jews who do not know the core of Russian life and are alien to it, its spirit, its forms, its humour…' Leskov's idiom - 'you stepped on my favourite corn' - found its way into The Seagull.