Chekhov's major community effort in 1896, however, was the building of the new schoolhouse in Talezh. As a trustee, he had visited the old school often and was appalled at its wretched state and the shocking existence of the teacher and some of the students. He arranged hot meals for the poorer students and for those who came long distances. "The teacher," he had written Suvorin, "is paid twenty-three roubles a month, has a wife and four children, and is already gray though he is only thirty. He has been so beaten down by need that he can talk of nothing else except remuneration. In his opinion, poets and novelists ought to write only about increasing wages." (November 27, 1894.) This teacher provided the model for Medvedenko in The Sea Gull.
Since the school Chekhov wished to replace at Talezh was a parochial one, he met with unpleasant opposition from some of the village faithful. And the district authorities, who were in charge of educational matters, gave him only token support and very little financial aid. None of this discouraged him. He organized amateur concerts and plays to obtain funds, pleaded for contributions among the well-to-do in the neighborhood, and spent a considerable amount of his own money. Building anything fascinated him. He designed the schoolhouse with a functional skill rare at that time, aiming at a bright, airy building with a maximum of window exposure. All the materials he ordered himself, down to the tiles and doors for the Dutch ovens, and he supervised the work of bricklayers, plumbers, and carpenters. He seemed as much at home with lime and cement, foundations, beams and pilasters as a professional in the field.
Finally the school was finished and its formal opening was set for August 4. That distinguished pedagogue from Moscow, Ivan Chekhov, was the guest of honor at the ceremony. An ikon, two silver salt cellars, and loaves of bread, the traditional peasant symbols of greeting and hospitality, were presented to Chekhov. Three priests officiated at prayers, and an old peasant, on behalf of the village, spoke, "and he spoke very well," remarked Chekhov. The district board passed a vote of thanks for his efforts, but he derived much more satisfaction from the knowledge, in which all agreed, that the new Talezh schoolhouse was the finest in the area.
This experience served only to intensify Chekhov's interest in rural education, and encouraged him to plan the erection of additional schools. He even seriously contemplated writing a book, along the scholarly and scientific lines of his Island of Sakhalin, which would expose the economic lacks and the inadequate education of all sixty rural schools in the district, but this project was sacrificed to other activities that crowded in on him.
One of the most time-consuming in 1896 was his old project of aiding the Taganrog library, which now took on new life because of the enterprise of P. F. Iordanov, a member of the town council and later mayor of Taganrog. Under his zealous direction Chekhov's conception of the library's needs was significantly broadened. Instead of a special section of books inscribed by authors, which he continued to further, he now set out to make the library of his native town one of the best provincial libraries in Russia. At his request Iordanov sent him long lists of wanted books, and Chekhov combed the catalogues of publishers and bookstores for these items. Often he wrote authors for their works, asking at the same time that they inscribe them, but not informing them that they were destined for Taganrog. Some of the required books, he had to buy, and the money was refunded; but many of them he obtained gratis, and eventually some two thousand volumes from his own library were shipped. He offered discriminating advice on titles and translations, and also urged the establishment of an extensive information and reference division, for he believed this to be one of the most valuable adjuncts to a public library. When Iordanov approved the suggestion, Chekhov again busied himself writing to friends, publishers, and organizations for catalogues of important commercial firms, all the standing regulations and government enactments on current matters, various kinds of reference books — for anything, in fact, that might answer the questions of average citizens. Bales and boxes of books soon began to pour into the Taganrog library from Melikhovo, Moscow, and Petersburg. Chekhov also promoted the idea of a museum as a setting for the library, and encouraged Iordanov's dream of securing a bigger and better building for the collection. It was not glory he wanted but love, he said to one of his correspondents, and it must have been love for his fellow men that sustained a famous author, ill, busy, and hard-pressed, in all this activity, and in those long lists of books which he patiently copied out in his letters to Iordanov, carefully indicating whether he had paid for them or received them free. And the only thing he asked in return, since it had deeply annoyed him to have his name appear in the press in connection with his aid to the Talezh school, was that Iordanov strictly preserve his anonymity as a benefactor of the Taganrog library.
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The rural activities of the schoolteacher Lidiya Volchaninova in the nostalgically poetic tale, The House with the Attic, which Chekhov completed in the first half of this year,® are in many respects faithful reflections of his own country experiences. In her concern for the peasants and in her practical endeavors on their behalf in education, dispensaries, and libraries, the coldly beautiful, well-born Lidiya represents the liberal-minded rural worker in contrast to the estate owners in the countryside who do nothing to aid the peasantry. The artist in the story, whom she scorns as a shiftless landscape painter utterly lacking in principles and social responsibility, condemns her activities: "In my opinion, medical stations, schools, libraries, apothecary shops, under existing conditions, serve only to enslave the people. They are fettered by a great chain, and you do not break that chain, you simply add new links to it — that is my conviction." And he goes on to develop a rather anarchistic line of thought in opposition to the gradualism of the liberals in achieving human betterment. He offers instead not schools but universities for the masses, in the hope they will realize that man's real vocation is spiritual activity — the continual search for truth and the meaning of life.
Critics have often identified the artist's views with those of his creator, as though Chekhov deplored individual practical efforts to improve the lot of the underprivileged as hopeless substitutes for a vast radical or revolutionary solution of all social and spiritual evils. Engaged in just such practical efforts himself, Chekhov could hardly take exception to Lidiya's warm defense of her similar efforts: "I'm telling you only one thing: It is impossible just to sit with your hands in your lap. True, we are not saving mankind, and perhaps we do make many mistakes, but we do what we can, and in that we are right. The highest and most sacred task of a civilized man is to serve his neighbor, and we are endeavoring to serve as best we can."
In fact, the views of the artist are entirely in keeping with his feckless, pessimistic nature — that of the defeatist segment of the intelligentsia, who sublimated their inactivity in sweeping verbal panaceas for social and moral improvement. Chekhov suspected this kind of pretentiousness, just as he suspected the pretentious messianism of Dostoevsky and the omniscient spirituality of Tolstoy's preaching.
6 First published in Russian Thought, April 1896.
If Lidiya Volchaninova emerges as an unsympathetic character, despite her good deeds, it is because of her harsh and narrow crusading zeal, which Chekhov always deplored in people, and he points the moral of it in her wanton execution of her younger sister's love for the artist. For the ideological debate is only a motivational device in working out the destinies of two of Chekhov's most charmingly portrayed lovers. More than anything else The House with the Attic is a tale of vanished happiness suffused with all the poetry of the star-crossed fates of a Romeo and Juliet. There is an emotional wisp of Chekhov in the artist, which he himself suggested in a comment to Elena Shavrova when he began the story: "Now I'm writing a little tale: 'My Betrothed.' Once I had a betrothed. They called her 'Misyus.'"7 (November 20, 1895.) Though the allusion is lost in the mist of Chekhov's secretive love life, he endowed Misyus, an enchanting wraith of feminine loveliness, with a background, appcarance, and sentiments that belong to the heroines of fairy tales. But the moonlit recognition of love vanishes in the cold light of day when Lidiya, whose word is law for her younger sister, sends Misyus packing to a distant aunt. Time helps the artist to forget the house with the attic and the bewitching Misyus. Yet he often recalls the green light in the attic window, and a feeling of loneliness and sadness oppresses him. Then it seems to him that "I too am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet. . . . Misyus, where are you?"