Yet in the same letter in which Chekhov informed Suvorin of the conclusion of this task, he announced: "I'm building a school again. A deputation of peasants came and begged me and I did not have the courage to refuse. The County Council is giving a thousand roubles, the peasants have collected three hundred, and that is all, while the school will cost no less than three thousand. This means that once more I'll have to be thinking all summer about money and scraping it together here and there. In general, life in the country is full of work and care." (February 8,1897.)
The school was to replace an old one in the village of Novoselki, halfway between Melikhovo and Lopasnya. As in the case of the Talezh school, this work absorbed him. Manuscripts of stories on his desk gave way to drawings of the new structure. Again he was both architect and contractor, as well as fund-raiser, not sparing his own money in the process. He promoted two amateur theatrical performances at Serpukhov in the interest of the project, one of which his literary disciple Elena Shavrova helped to arrange. And at about this same time he thought up an insurance program for teachers, agreed to supervise a plan to open public libraries in the area, and accepted the post of trustee of still another rural school. "The Moslem digs a well for the salvation of his soul," he jotted down in his notebook. "It would be good if each of us left after him a school, a well, or something of the kind, so that our life would not pass into eternity without leaving a trace." Here was a design for living perhaps more practical than a whole
Tolstoyan system for achieving the moral perfectibility of man. Chekhov took a positive joy in improving the well-being of his community. Jubilantly he wrote Alexander, when the Sanitary Council settled upon Melikhovo as the site of a new medical center: "They will build a hospital and apartments for physicians. And also an apothecary shop and a rest room. Melikhovo, as you can see, progresses, and you ought to wonder how this Shestakov[7] manages things!" (March 2, 1897.)
The project that now particularly excited Chekhov, however, was the erection of a "People's Palace" in Moscow. The previous year the idea had been broached to him in a vague form by some wealthy ladies who had in mind a kind of cultural center that would attract the city dwellers who now spent their leisure in vodka shops and in idle pastimes. The design called for a huge building that would contain a theater and library, a museum, and reading, lecture, and tea rooms. Chekhov at once asked his friend, the architect Shekhtel, to draw sketches for such a comprehensive structure. And on February 16 he attended a meeting of interested people, which he had called in Moscow, to hear Shekhtel describe the design of the proposed building and to discuss further plans. If government permission could be obtained, it was decided to form a corporation to raise a half million roubles by selling shares. Stanislavsky was present. The day before Chekhov had attended a literary evening to raise funds for needy Moscow University students and had heard Stanislavsky, who had already attracted some notice as an actor and theatrical director, read a scene from Pushkin's play, The Covetous Knight. Feeling that he had performed badly, the hypersensitive Stanislavsky was trying to leave the theater as inconspicuously as possible when he was confronted by Chekhov.
"They say you play my Bear splendidly," Chekhov bluntly began.[8]"See here, why not put it on again? I'll come and have a look at it and may even write a review."
The stiff and formal Stanislavsky remained silent, expecting that the next remark would be about his poor performance that evening.
"And I'll collect royalties, too," Chekhov added after a pause.
There was another silence.
"A rouble and twenty-five kopecks," joked Chekhov.
The offended Stanislavsky hurried off. He did not realize, as he pointed out in his reminiscences years later, that Chekhov's sallies were probably an effort to divert him from unpleasant thoughts over his performance that evening.
The next day at the meeting on the "People's Palace," Stanislavsky, still under the influence of his unfriendly reactions to Chekhov, complained of his walking about the room and making everybody laugh during his own efforts to commcnt on Shckhtel's design. He remembered Chekhov as being tall, ruddy, and unusually buoyant. "I did not understand then," he later wrote, "why he was so overjoyed. Now I know. He was rejoicing over a new and splendid project for Moscow. He was happy that a tiny ray of light would illumine the lives of ignorant people. Throughout his whole life anything that would adorn human existence delighted him. 'Look here! This is wonderful,' he would say on such occasions, and a bright, childlike smile would light up his face." Though the "People's Palace" did not materialize, one of its main features, a "People's Theater," may well have influenced Stanislavsky's conception of the Moscow Art Theater, which he established the following year under its initial title, "The People's Art Theater."
As usual when in Moscow, pleasure as well as business filled Che" khov's days and nights: dinner at the wealthy Madame Morozova's, pancakes with the publisher and art collector К. T. Soldatenkov, followed by a visit to the studio of the ailing Levitan, where Soldatenkov bought a picture and two sketches for eleven hundred roubles, an evening with the well-known doctor and professor of medicine A. A. Ostroumov, and gay dinners on two successive evenings at the Hermitage, with such literary friends as Ertel, Mamin-Sibiryak, Sytin, Tikhomirov, V. I. Sobolevsky, and Goltsev, which did not break up until four or five in the morning. At the Continental Hotel he also attended a large dinner in honor of the great reform (the emancipation of the serfs), on which he commented in his diary: "Boring and ridiculous. To eat, drink champagne, chatter, and make speeches about the people's self-awareness, national conscience, freedom, etc., at a time when slaves in dress coats, those very same serfs, wait on table, and coachmen wait on the street in the cold — this is to deny the Holy Ghost." The intelligentsia's callousness in the face of social inequities, as well as the government's repressions at a time when some alleviation had been anticipated under the new Tsar, troubled Chekhov more than ever. Only a few days before this event at the Continental, he had written Suvorin about the police raid on the house of V. G. Chertkov, Tolstoy's principal follower, and on his harsh sentence of exile to England which followed, a blow aimed as much at the master as at the disciple: "A great many people are going to see him off, even Sytin. And I'm sorry that I cannot do the same. I don't cherish tender feelings for Chertkov, but the way they have treated him fills me with intense, intense indignation." (February 8,1897.)
After sixteen days in Moscow Chekhov returned to Melikhovo in a rather exhausted state. He was sick of jubilee dinners, he wrote Elena Shavrova, and all he wanted was sleep. However, the pressing business of the Novoselki school and the Taganrog library awaited him, as well as a number of guests. And he was desperately trying to finish a long story, Peasants. At this time, also, he had been requested to pose for a portrait. The wealthy collector and art connoisseur, P. M. Tretyakov, who for years had been assembling for his gallery portraits of Russia's greatest writers, had commissioned an able young Petersburg artist, I. E. Braz, to paint Chekhov.