As the news of Chekhov's illness got around, he received many touching testimonials of concern. Alexander, deeply worried over his brother, wrote: "Petersburg is talking with agitation and sympathy about you, for the news spread quickly and as always in such cases has somewhat exaggerated the situation. It shows that you are very popular and beloved by the public." But this popularity had unpleasant
8 Yakovlev, apparently ashamed of troubling Chekhov on a matter of this sort while he was ill in the clinic, says in his published recollections that the story was not his but that of a friend.
consequences. In a cross mood Chekhov wrote Suvorin on April 7: "I ought to get married. Maybe a spiteful wife could cut down the number of my visitors by at least half. Yesterday they came all day long, it was simply awful. They came in pairs and each begged me not to speak and at the same time asked questions."
Eventually the doctors permitted him to exercise and he roamed unsteadily around the clinic and the grounds. He told Leontiev-Shcheglov on his visit that he had almost become used to the place and that it stimulated his thinking on a variety of subjects. "In the mornings I go ffor a walk to the Novodevichy Cloister, to the grave of Pleshcheev.0 At 'other times I look in at the church, rest against the wall, and listen to the nuns singing. Then my soul becomes strangely quiet." If he rould take no comfort in Tolstoy's vision of immortality, it was still less consoling to think that after death he would simply mingle with the sighs and torments of some universal life and that people would carry him off to the cemetery and then go home and drink tea.
But in the end Chekhov grew impatient to be at Melikhovo. He fully realized that an existence of semi-invalidism might be his future lot, and the question of how well he would be able to continue to sup port himself and his family troubled his mind. He had smiled bitterly when Leontiev-Shcheglov had expatiated on the plight of the writer, ill and surrounded by well-to-do adoring admirers, to no one of whom it occurred to offer a helping hand. Yes, he must work. If he enjoyed leisure, to anticipate an invalid's lifetime of it was abhorrent to him. "You write that my ideal is laziness," he replied to Suvorin, with whom he had been corresponding on his future course of action. "No, it is not laziness. I despise laziness as I despise weakness and a lack of mental and moral energy. I spoke to you not of laziness, but of leisure, and I did not say that it was an ideal, but only one of the essential conditions of personal happiness." (April 7,1897.)
Chekhov left the clinic on April 10, and the next day, aided by his
brother Ivan, he arrived at Melikhovo.
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Chekhov had been home only a few days when Russian Thought appeared with his long story Peasants. Earlier, the printed sheets had
0Pleshcheev had died in 1893 and was buried in the celebrated graveyard of the Novodevichy Cloister, quite close to Dr. Ostroumov's clinic, which was also to be Chekhov's last resting place.
outraged an official of the Moscow censorship commission and he had demanded the story's exclusion from the issue unless certain changes were made. "The position of peasants living in the villages," he declared in his report, "is described in colors that are too gloomy." Quoting objectionable passages, he wrote: "The peasants are 'coarse, dishonest, filthy, and drunken, and do not live together in peace. . . . Who keeps the pothouse and makes drunkards of the people? The peasant. Who embezzles and drinks up the community money? The peasant. Who bears false witness in court for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.'" What particularly pained him was that Chekhov saw not improvement in the existence of the peasantry since the Emancipation Act, but rather retrogression. Under the threat of punishment, Russian Thought had to agree to cut out a whole page of Chekhov's story in the printed version and substitute another in which the most offensive lines were omitted.
The government had reason to be concerned by this stark revelation of rural life, nor could the wealthy, or those elements of the intelligentsia who tended to idealize the peasantry, remain undisturbed by the story. Chekhov, the keenest of observers, had packcd into it the accumulated knowledge and impressions of his last five years of service among these people as a physician and district official.
Nikolai Chikildeev, who has long been a waiter in a Moscow hotel, is forced by illness to return to his native village with his wife Olga and their daughter. By this simple device the life of the numerous Chikildeev family, their neighbors, and of the whole village is seen, in all its agonizing barrenness, through the eyes of peasants who have achieved я smattering of education and some sense of human dignity in the city. Here in the country they live, ten or twelve in a family, in a one-room hovel, stinking, dirty, swarming with flies, and their food consists largely of black bread soaked in water, with a herring added on feast days. Whenever the old fall ill, the children tell them they have lived too long and that it is time to die. Drunkenness is the daily escape of the men. For the women, who are beaten as cruelly as the animals, there is no escape except death, which they often long for. And everywhere is depressing, grinding poverty, and bribery and peculation by the rural officials who stand over the peasants.
Despite the bestiality and harshness of this savage existence, Chekhov brings out the humanity of those whose gentle and resigned lives condemn them to suffer more than the rest. In church or on solemn feast days, emotionally stirred by the tolling bells or the religious procession with its marchers, banners, and singing, they have a vision of a different life:
"It was as though all suddenly understood," wrote Chekhov, "that there was no void between heaven and earth, that the wealthy and powerful had not yet seized everything for themselves, that there was still a defense against insult, bondage, terrible, unendurable poverty, and the horrors of vodka. . . . But the service came to an end, the ikon was removed, and everything went on as before; and again were heard coarse, drunken voices from the tavern."
In a series of striking genre pictures, Chekhov effectively illuminates the characters of Kiryak, Fyolka, Mariya, and Olga. The final scene of Olga, once her husband has died, leaving the Chikildeevs, who have no further use for her, to beg on the highway with her little girl, is executed with beautifully restrained pathos.
Throughout Peasants Chekhov seems to be asking only that some light be brought into the darkness of the lives of these people and that they receive relief from the crushing burden of their poverty. No tale of his up to this point had created such a public stir. Scores of reviews appeared, most of them ecstatically favorable. Their general tone is reflected in the comment of the Northern Herald which declared that the success of Peasants "revives for us that time when a new novel of Turgenev or Dostoevsky appeared." Violent polemics arose in the press over the meaning and significance of the story, and Chekhov received many highly laudatory letters from readers and literary friends whose judgment he valued. In effect they all wrote, as brother Alexander did: "A wonderful thing is Peasants.[10] There's talent for you!" All this was most heartening to Chekhov after the debacle of The Sea Gull and an illness which had brought him face to face with death.
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During the spring and summer at Melikhovo, Chekhov tried to obey the orders of the "scoundrely doctors" who kept him "under surveillance" and forbade him liquor, smoking, and everything else, he said, exccpt correspondence with friends. Though he had many fine themes for stories fermenting in his brain, he did little writing. He refused to treat the sick, but made every effort to secure the services of other physicians for them. Physically he was unable to work much in his garden and confined himself to pruning one rosebush a day and feeding the sparrows.