When Chekhov finished tending Levitan that summer in the province of Novgorod, after the artist's suicide attempt, he made a hurried trip to Petersburg to see Suvorin and also visited Leikin, who noted in his diary Chekhov's changed appearance even in the short space of four months since he had last seen him. He seemed ill to Leikin — yellow and thin, and coughing constantly. Though Chekhov had once defended an artist somewhat given to vodka, whom he had recommended to paint Leikin's portait, by declaring that a man who did not drink was not entirely a man, he had to admit that he himself now preferred to sleep rather than drink. It annoyed him that his cough, which he still insisted was a mere habit, had finally given him the reputation of being an unhealthy man, and that people now greeted him by invariably observing how thin he had grown.
There were threats to go to Australia for eight or ten months or to the mouth of the Yenisei River, but actually Chekhov remained at Melikhovo during 1895. Visits to Moscow and two trips to Petersburg seemed to satisfy his persistent itch to travel. Among the many friends he saw in Moscow was Lika, shortly after she returned from Europe in May. Ashamed, perhaps, and consumed with her own sorrow, she made
8 At this time, however, Chekhov was helping to put through school at Taganrog V. A. Yevtushevsky, the bright son of the brother of his aunt, the widow of Uncle Mitrofan. But so well did Chekhov conceal his aid that even the boy's parents were at first unaware of it.
only two brief visits that summer to Melikhovo to the family she so loved. It is possible that on one of his Petersburg trips Chekhov saw Potapenko, whose offense against Lika he seemed now to have forgiven or decided was none of his business. He liked Potapenko's cheerfulness and obligingness, and defended him against the criticism of Suvorin, although he made it clear that he placed no high value on his talents as a writer. Tikhonov remarked in his diary at this time that Chekhov always had to have an adjutant around him, and that Potapenko had obviously been selected.
In December, in Moscow, Chekhov met Ivan Bunin for the first time. They discussed the problems of the short story writer, Chekhov stressing his favorite theme of brevity and even suggesting the wisdom of deleting the beginning and end in one's first draft. A firm friendship began which was of importance to Chekhov in his later years.
Several of Chekhov's trips to Moscow were made on behalf of The Annals of Surgery, a professional journal that was in danger of suspending publication because of inability to make up an annual deficit of fifteen hundred roubles. Chekhov, as he expressed it, became "hot under the collar" at this news, and he plunged into the cause with incredible zeal. He threatened to go to Petersburg and bang on the door of every friend for the money, or even call on S. Witte, the Minister of Finance, rather than see this important professional journal, put out by eminent scientists, fail because of lack of funds. To Suvorin he said that if he had not committed himself to this sum to build the Talezh rural school, he would advance the fifteen hundred himself. Suvorin offered enough money to give the journal another year of life, but this was eventually rejected when the possibility arose, through Chekhov's efforts, of securing sustained publication by Sytin's firm. Though the journal did lapse in 1896, it was revived the following year when Chekhov again came to its aid.
Behind Chekhov's passionate interest in this cause was the reverence he had for medical sciences which had impelled him, shortly after he finished Medical School, to contemplate writing a dissertation in the field. And it was this same esteem which, in part, had driven him on to study the peoples and prisons of Sakhalin and to write a book about that island. Further, there is evidence about this time — the exact date is uncertain — that Chekhov contemplated submitting The Island of Sakhalin as a dissertation to help meet the requirements for a degree of Doctor of Medical Sciences which would have qualified him for the title of privatdocent and allowed him to lecture in the Medical School. Dr. G. I. Rossolimo, a fellow student of Chekhov at Moscow University and later a distinguished professor of neuropathology in its medical faculty, tells in his reminiscences of Chekhov, with whom he became very friendly after 1893, that he expressed a desire to teach in the University. " 'If I were a teacher,' Chekhov said to him, 'I would try to draw my audience as deeply as possible into the area of the subjective feelings of patients, for I think that this would really prove useful to the students.'" Dr. Rossolimo proposed to the Dean of the Medical School the possibility of a place on the staff, and conveyed Chekhov's suggestion that his Island of Sakhalin might be accepted in lieu of the required dissertation. The Dean scornfully walked out of his office, not even deigning to reply. When Dr. Rossolimo informed Chekhov of the results, he laughed and dropped the notion of an academic career.0
In more practical ways than teaching Chekhov relieved his medical conscience at this time by tending patients at Melikhovo, serving as a member of the auxiliary medical fund of the area, and inspecting the health conditions of factories in the district on behalf of the Serpukhov Sanitary Council. At the same time he was becoming more involved in educational problems. On September 25, 1895, the Serpukhov district rural council tendered him a vote of thanks for spending a hundred roubles of his own money to buy desks and other classroom appurtenances for the Talezh school, purchases that should have been made by the authorities themselves. But Chekhov was impatient with administrative red tape in general and especially in the sphere of national education. Ironically he praised an article of Suvorin on the need for physical games in the schools; games, he remarked, should be introduced only after Russian students have ceased to be starved. Describing how a decrepit peasant mother beat her drunken son with a stick because he had been bathing in the pond, and then chased him home barefoot through the snow, he declared to Suvorin: "What baseness it is to postpone the enlightenment of our dark masses." (April 13, 1895.)
Though Chekhov reacted sensitively and often with anguish to the misery, inequity, and cruelty of Russian life, he seemed to lack any deep concern for current questions of government or Russian inter-
9 Some confirmation of Chekhov's desire for a position on the medical faculty of Moscow University may be found in the memoirs of another doctor friend, M. A. Clilenov: "A. P. Chekhov i meditsina," in Russkie vedomosti ("A. P. Chekhov and Medicine," in Russian News), 1906, No. 1.
national policy. There is very little in his voluminous correspondence concerning these questions. Perhaps because he knew of Suvorin's interest in such matters, for he often wrote about them in his newspaper, Chekhov would occasionally make pithy comments in his letters to him about the rejection of reforms by the new Tsar, Nicholas II, the wheat crisis, Witte's clever economic policy, the fear of war with Germany, or Russia's demands on Japan for ice-free ports which, he prophetically declared, would cost Russians more than if they set out then to conquer all of Japan. The human problems that confronted him daily, which he could touch and feel and do something about, appeared to dwarf these larger concerns of state.
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Chekhov's faith in scientific progress as a major factor in human betterment had done much to undermine the early influence on him of Tolstoy's doctrine of moral perfectibility. The gray seer of Yasnaya Polyana, who was almost twice Chekhov's age, was concerned primarily with men's spiritual rather than with their bodily health, with their souls rather than with the material improvement of life which technological advances could bring to modern society. Yet Chekhov never lost his awe of Tolstoy, the great literary artist, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, nor his deep conviction that this colossal figure represented the conscience of humanity, and that as long as he continued his public crusade against the moral failings of mankind, the world was somehow a better place in which to live.