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After his travels Chekhov willingly settled down at Melikhovo over the fall and winter months. During his absence the faithful Masha had redecorated the rooms and had new stoves put in, so that all was snug and warm against the cold. Only the mice annoyed him. The villians had eaten the wallpaper in the living room up to five feet from the floor, he wrote Masha in Moscow, and he pleaded with her to buy something to eliminate them. For the remainder of 1894 he made only one trip to Moscow.
Despite his worsening health, Chekhov continued his full energetic daily existence, which contrasts so sharply with the popular image of him as an inert, passive and melancholy singer of tender melodies in a minor key. ITiough he liked to joke about his laziness, and, when the pressures on him were great, to dwell upon the virtues of an idle life, in reality nervous energy and a dominating will drove him on to prodigies of labor. He resumed his medical practice when he returned to Melikhovo. In driving over the rutted roads to neighboring villages to visit the sick, all his innards, he told Masha, were turned inside out. When the Province School Council invited him to become a trustee of the Talezh village school, he gladly accepted this post, which ultimately involved him in extensive activities. That November, he also served on the Serpukhov jury. In the several cases he sat on he was made foreman, and the fact that nobles and peasants, the educated and the uneducated, could have such power of decision in vital matters impressed him. On the other hand, Chekhov was not impressed by the capabilities of the urban intelligentsia, in the face of the impending coronation of Nicholas II, to make known to the nation the need for reform. Their desires were extremely indefinite, he wrote Suvorin; they were naive, superstitious, had little knowledge, and were afraid to voice their own opinions. When Suvorin countered by asking him what a Russian should desire, Chekhov responded: "Here is my answer: To desire. Most of all he must have some sort of desire, temperament. One gets weary of this sourness." (December 12,1894.)
In addition to civic responsibilities, there were the ceaseless personal favors asked of Chekhov which he rarely refused. In the course of several weeks, for example, he urged Suvorin, at the request of the author Ertel, to send books to a library in Voronezh for peasants; provided a detailed bibliography on the Amur region which his friend Gorbunov-Posadov asked for, and at the same time requested him in return to aid an impoverished writer whose needs had been thrust upon Chekhov; agreed to help raise funds among his friends to erect a monument to Peter the Great in Taganrog; sent off a large parcel of books to the public library in that town; criticized the stories which budding authors sent him; and, with the aid of his sister, even undertook to teach two peasant servant girls how to read.
A mysterious form of personal aid at this time has left all commentators baffled. Chekhov wrote to Goltscv: "Obtain from somewhere for me two hundred roubles . . . and send them to the prodigal son. Hold this letter in confidence, and don't show it to anyone. I'll repay the two hundred roubles at the beginning of December." And in a postscript he wrote: "I'm ashamed to trouble you, but, in truth, I don't know how to act otherwise." (November 25, 1894.) ^ known that the money was given to the "prodigal son," but who he was and what relation he bore to Chekhov are unknown.
Of course, in the midst of all these activities and of entertaining the usual guests, the major portion of Chekhov's time was spent on his writing. There were moments when he longed to conquer new worlds in fiction. "I'm tired of one and the same thing," he declared with some levity to Elena Shavrova, "I want to write about devils, terrible volcanic women, sorcerers — but alas! they demand well-intentioned novellas and tales out of the life of the Ivan Gavrilyches and their wives." (December 4, 1894.) To his growing volumes of collected stories was added another this winter: Stories and Tales, a careful reworking of his best pieces over the last two years, and this time published by the popular firm of I. D. Sytin, who offered a better financial arrangement than Suvorin had.
In December The Tale of an Old Gardener appeared in Moscow News, which he had been favoring as an outlet for his brief pieces since he deserted New Times. This slight story has the flavor of Tolstoy's moral tales, although it lacks their utter simplicity of language. The legend narrated by the old gardener is intended to illustrate the moral that it is better to let the guilty go unpunished rather than destroy absolute faith in the goodness of man. In the description of the doctor, whose murderer the judges refuse to convict because they simply cannot believe that anyone would kill such a good and universally revered man, Chekhov seemed unconsciously to draw upon his own traits: "He was a consumptive; he coughed; but when they summoned him to the sick, he forgot his own illness and did not spare himself. . . ."
But the literary effort that principally occupied Chekhov over the winter months of 1894 was the long story Three Years, which he had begun to think about much earlier according to various entries relating to it in his notebook. He finished this major undertaking in the middle of December and turned the manuscript over to the editors of Russian Thought, where it was published at the beginning of 1895.10
Three Years may be regarded as Chekhov's last attempt to write a novel (it runs to eighty-six pages in the Russian edition), but again he seemed incapable of making the necessary sustained effort; the ending clcarly suggests the continuation — Yartscv's dawning love for Yuliya as the resolution of her unhappy marriage. The corc of the story is the married life of Laptev, the younger son of a wealthy Moscow merchant, and his wife Yuliya, the daughter of a provincial doctor. Three Years is essentially a profound psychological study of character, but in it Chekhov is also intent upon revealing the deterioration of a merchant family portrayed against a brilliantly realistic backdrop of Moscow life. There arc a few autobiographical touches that recall the miseries of Chekhov's childhood, and many details of the old merchant's business must have been drawn from Chekhov's knowledge of Gavrilov's enterprise, for which his father had worked. Laptev, whose will to live has been stunted by an upbringing spent in fear of his father, makes a furtive bid for independence after his university education. His marriage to Yuliya is another step in the process of cmanicipation and of achieving a purpose in life; but the struggle ends after he discovers that she has married him to escape her father and live in Moscow. When she does cxpcriencc a genuine affection for him after the death of their child, it is too late. Like Anna in A Woman's Kingdom, Laptev has become a captive of the very wealth he detests, but he realizes that in the end it will blunt his sensibilities and turn him into a philistine. On the whole, contemporary critics did not like Three Years, but in the richness of its detail, its rather leisurely pace, and the psychological density in the analysis of a considerable number of characters, it offers more of the flavor of a novel than does anything else Chekhov wrote.