Equally poignant memories lurked around every corner as he strolled the streets of his native town. The old family house, empty and de-1 serted — Selivanov the landlord had vanished — depressed him. "How ; could we have lived in it?" he reflected. His feelings about Taganrog 1 were strangely mixed. A nostalgia for remembered sights and scenes and people was countered by the shuttered houses with their peeling plaster,, dirty, drab, and often deserted streets, misspelled signs over shops, dumb faces of dock-workers, dandies with their long overcoats and caps, and the "universal laziness and satisfaction with a futile present and an uncertain future . . ."
The presumption of some of the inhabitants whom Chekhov had hardly known in the past annoyed him. One of them cantered up: "By God, how about coming over to my place! I always read your weekly articles. My old man is quite a type! Come and see for yourself. Say there, I'll bet you forgot that I'm married! My God, I have a little girl now. And how you've changed!" Chekhov thought his old and favorite teacher, Father Pokrovsky, who had become an archdeacon, acted like a cock of the roost on his own dungheap. The old police official, Anisim Vasilich, whom Chekhov had been trying to avoid, finally cornered him: "Wa-al, for the Lord's sake! I've been telling that Yegorushka of yours where I live, so why ain'tcha dropped in?" Not a few old friends of the family, however, dined and wined him royally, and the young ladies present, curious to find out "What kind of bird this Chekhov was," pushed him hard with their attentions. He thought most of them not bad-looking or stupid — "But I am indifferent," he wrote, "for I have diarrhea, which stifles all tender emotions." (April 7-19, 1887.)
Apart from diarrhea, Chekhov was also afflicted by bronchitis, phlebitis of the shin, and his old hemorrhoids. "My infirmities are endless!" he complained to Masha, and they contributed to low moments on the trip which sometimes made him wonder why he had ever left Moscow. However, as soon as he departed from the house of his religious-minded uncle for Novocherkassk, his obstinate diarrhea vanished. "Evidently," he quipped, "the odor of sanctity has a weakening effect on my in- sides." At Novocherkassk, in a borrowed frock coat, he played the part of best man at the wedding of a friend — a regular Cossack affair, with music, old women bleating like goats, and scandalous carousing. "I was so drunk all the time," he wrote Masha, "that I took bottles for girls, and girls for bottles." His wit and gallant behavior attracted the pretty but shy provincial misses, who struck him as being absolute sheep; one of the boldest, in an effort to show him that she was well-versed in the niceties of Moscow young ladies, kept tapping him on the arm with her fan and saying: "You bad boy, you!" He taught her to reply to cavaliers, in the Ukrainian accent of the district: "How nai've you are!" The frequent and resounding kisses of the bridal couple induccd a taste of oversweet raisins in his mouth. "My phlebitis in the left leg got worse, what with all the kissing." (April 25, 1887.)
Chekhov pushed on from Novocherkassk to Ragozina Ravine. He stepped out into the night when the train stopped at a siding. "Veritable marvels" loomed before him — the moon and the limitless steppe, with its barrows and strange emptiness and deathlike stillness. These were among the memories of his youth that he wished to recapture. At Ragozina Ravine he stayed for about ten days on the Don steppe at the home of the Kravtsovs, which he had visited years before as the tutor of their son Peter. Little had changed in the half-primitive existence of this Cossack family — the walls were covered with rifles, pistols, sabers, and whips; cartridges, instruments for mending guns, tins of powder and bags of shot littered the premises. Shooting of all species of wild and domestic birds and animals went on incessantly. To leave the house at night one had to call a Cossack guard for fear the savage dogs of the host would tear a stranger to bits. The food was rough but palatable, except the soup, which reminded Chekhov of the slops left when "a group of fat marketwomen" had a bath. He was amused at the "rational" system of farming that had been introduced by a young Cossack who had bought himself five roubles' worth of recent treatises on agriculture. The most important part of this system, writes Chekhov, is "the wholesale slaughter which does not cease for a single moment. They kill sparrows, swallows, hornets, ants, magpies and crows to prevent them from eating the bees; then they kill the bees to keep them from spoiling the blossoms of the fruit trees; finally they cut down the fruit trees so they will not exhaust the soil. In this way," Chekhov soberly concludes, "they set up a regular cycle which, though somewhat original, is based on the latest scicntific data." (April 30, 1887.) As in his youth, he enjoyed a limited exposure to this kind of raw country existence, despite the discomforts, and he left the Kravtsovs with a mind well stocked with vivid impressions of the steppe and its inhabitants.
A room with a bed and mattress, a washstand, and a chamber pot, all for seventy-five kopecks, in the small provincial town of Slavyansk, to which he journeyed after leaving Ragozina Ravine, seemed like sheer luxury after the wooden sofas and washtubs he had been sleeping on. He stayed there only overnight and set out the next morning, in a carriage, for Holy Mountains Monastery where he expected to spend a couplc of days. On the long drive the weather was lovely, birds sang, and native peasants on the road doffed their caps to him, "taking me probably for Turgenev," he commented jokingly to Masha.
Holy Mountains Monastery, on the bank of the Donets River, at the foot of a huge white rock covered with gardens, oaks, and ancient pines, was a celebrated spot for religious pilgrimages. The pleasant monks gave Chekhov an unpleasant room with a pancake-like mattress.2 Since it was the feast day of Saint Nicholas, Chekhov estimated that some fifteen thousand pilgrims, most of them old women, had gathered at the monastery. Before each of the many services, there could be heard the
2 Chekhov's story, The Rolling Stone (New Times, 1887), was based on his stay in the monastery. His roommate there, who figures in the story, Chekhov later described to a friend as a police spy.
wailing of a bell and a monk crying out in the voice of a creditor who implores his debtor to pay him at least five kopecks on the rouble: "Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon us! Please, come to Mass!" Although Chekhov took part in a Procession of the Cross on the river, for the most part he Avoided the religious services and spent his time ab«a favorite spot on the bank of the Donets observing the hordes of pilgrims. In return for the excellent cabbage Soup, dried fish and porridge which the monks provided free to all, he offered free medical service to a few of the monks and old women.
On the return route to Moscow, Chekhov stopped off again at Taganrog. Though he liked walking in the city gardens of his youth and flirting with "the millions of girls," he still had to put up with the endless chatter of his aunt and the stinking water in the washbasin. Hence he was happy to leave for home on May 17. The trip of some six weeks had served its purpose — it had given him a badly needed rest and change of scene, and it had stored his mind with much fresh material for writing. The only disgusting thing about it, he wrote Leikin, was an everlasting shortage of money which had prevented him from doing many things he wanted to do. He had had to live like a pimp, he complained, and in the end began to feci like a Nizhni-Novgorod swindler
who retains his sleekness while sponging on others.