Among his guests was the stolid, balding Kazimir Barantsevich, who, in Chekhov's eyes, compensated for his dullness as a person and fiction writer by being a mighty fisherman. Brother Alexander, whose wife had died, also arrived at Luka with his children, after some urging and financial help from Chekhov. Inclined to drown his grief in vodka, Alexander overreached himself when he insisted on participating in the performance of a conjuror at Sumy Park. Although the audience was much amused by the spectacle, Chekhov felt obliged to withdraw with his embarrassed sister and the Lintvarev ladies out of earshot of his drunken brother's language. Apparently ashamed of his behavior, Alexander left hurriedly for Petersburg. However, he had remained long enough at Luka to conceive a passion for Elena Lintvareva and wanted to marry her, although his own wife had been dead but a short time. Chekhov, whom Alexander tried to use as something of an intermediary in the affair, gently argued with him, insisting that any happy marriage must be based on love and that he could see, as yet, no evidence of this on either side. If Alexander were really serious, Chekhov said, he should spend some time with the Lintvarevs and ascertain whether Elena did or could love him. No doubt the suggestion was also designed to protect as good and fine a woman as Elena, for he was aware of the kind of impression Alexander would make on the Lintvarevs, a family of teetotalers, after a prolonged visit. Apparently Alexander also realized it and soon dropped the matter. Besides, he was already drifting into a liaison with Natalya Alexandrovna Golden — whose married sister lived with his brother Nikolai — which eventually ended in marriage.
Luka was not far from the Ukrainian countryside which Gogol had made famous in his Sorochinsky Fair and Mirgorod tales, a fact that had originally attracted Chekhov to this region. So with the greatest anticipation he snapped up an invitation from the Lintvarevs to visit relatives of theirs with whom he had already become acquainted — Alexander and Sergei Smagin, who lived in a village in the Mirgorod District, not far from Sorochinsky in Poltava Province. In leisurely country fashion Chekhov, his sister, Natalya Lintvareva, and her cousin drove almost three hundred miles over the course of a week in a comfortable four-in-hand carriage. The handsome Alexander Smagin had already evinced an interest in Masha. On the road there was no end of laughter, adventures, and comic misunderstandings among this gay company. They took part in weddings in the villages where they
"my holy of holies . . . is absolute freedom" / 15 5.
stopped, heard lovely music in the evening stillness, and went to sleep in an atmosphere heavy with the sweet smell of new-mown hay. Against the background of this bewitched Gogolian landscape, even the crumbling and decrepit estate of the Smagins, where they stayed for five days, seemed to Chekhov poetical, sad, and beautiful in the extreme. "What places! I'm positively charmed," he wrote Leikin. And in his unrestrained delight he impulsively thought of giving up literature, settling in some village on the bank of the Psyol, and devoting himself entirely to the practice of medicine. In conveying his rapture over the Ukrainian countryside to Lazarev-Gruzinsky, he curiously took this occasion to congratulate him on his marriage, which he described, along with that of Yezhov, as a demonstration against his own bachelor state. He would willingly assume the bonds of Hymen, he wrote, but he was prevented by circumstances. Were these family circumstances or those of his precarious health? He does not say. But he frankly told Lazarev- Gruzinsky that he envied him. "I regret that I'm not married, or at least that I have no children." (June 26, 1888.)
In the midst of his dithyrambs about the wonders of the Ukraine, the restless Chekhov suddenly abandoned it all, on July 10, and set out for Feodosiya in the Crimea to visit the Suvorins, who had a summer place there. Some inner urge or presentiment kept driving him on, drawing him always elsewhere, as though he wished to embrace and include everything accessible to man in what he divined would be a short life. Much of this month's trip, like that of the previous year to the Don steppe, he vividly described in letters to his sister as material which he might wish to use later for stories. The journey from Sumy to Simferopol by way of Kharkov bored him, but thereafter his first view of the mountains bathed in moonlight stirred his imagination. He reached Sevastopol at night and the sudden glimpse of the sea delighted him, but in the morning the sight of the stevedores on the docks loading cement — clothed in tatters, their sweaty faces baked red-brick by the sun — filled him with a feeling of dull depression. He next made his way to Yalta, the resort city where he was destined to spend the last few years of his life. At this time the boxlike hotels in which unhappy consumptives were pining, the idle rich longing for cheap adventure, and the young ladies and gentlemen prattling about the beauties of nature, of which they had no understanding, all struck him as shoddy and disgusting. He hastened to leave Yalta for Feodosiya.
The Suvorins, in whose attractive summer home he spent twelve days, greeted him warmly. They were zealous in entertaining him and introduced him to their friends in the neighborhood, including the old and famous marine painter, I. K. Aivazovsky, at whose home he dined sumptuously. Chekhov admired the artist's beautiful young wife, but her ancient husband — who had been personally acquainted with Pushkin — struck him as a combination of general, bishop, artist, Armenian, naive old peasant, and Othello. Aivazovsky was proud of the fact that he had never read a book in his life — because, he explained, he had opinions of his own. Formal social gatherings, however, palled on Chekhov. lie preferred to spend his time on the beach at Feodosiya — where, he said, he could live for a thousand years without being bored, and enjoy sea bathing in water that was as soft as the hair of an innocent girl.
The real friendship that had begun between Chekhov and the Suvorins during his stay with them in Petersburg developed into intimacy at Feodosiya. It was impossible to be with Suvorin and be silent, Chekhov remarked; they discussed all possible subjects day and night. Despite her constant chatter, Suvorin's wife now won his admiration for her originality and cleverness. And her husband, he wrote Leontiev-Shcheglov, "is a great man. In art he is like a setter hunting a snipe — that is, he works with a devilish flair and always burns with passion. lie is a poor theoretician, has no taste for science; there is much he doesn't know and he is self-taught in everything, but from this comes his sheer doglike soundness and wholeness, and hence his independence of mind." (July 18, 1888.) There is some reason to believe that, during this stay at Feodosiya, Chekhov discussed and outlined his play The Wood Demon, which he offered to do in collaboration with Suvorin.
Though Suvorin vowed he would keep his guest there until September, Chekhov soon felt he must get away. He liked these lazy, luxurious days: arising at eleven, coffee on the beach, bathing under the hot sun, games, excursions, meals with rich food, jolly evenings, stimulating conversation, and getting to bed at three in the morning. But his conscience had begun to trouble him. No writing was getting done and news from Masha warned him of the low state of finances at Luka. He seized the occasion to leave with Suvorin's son, Aleksei, on his trip to the Caucasus. They left Feodosiya by steamer for Batum, making brief stops at the New Athos Monastery in Abkhazia, and at Sukhum.