No description, Chekhov felt, could do justice to the setting of the monastery — eucalyptus and olive trees, cypresses, tea plants, and the magnificent background of sea and mountain. If he stayed there a month, he remarked, he could write fifty fascinating tales; a thousand subjects peered out of every bush, the shadows and half-shadows on the mountains, and the sky and sea. His narration, in a letter to Misha, of his trip from Sukhum to Poti in a wretched little cargo steamer, the Dir, is related with all the detail and finish of a short story. In the night the boat narrowly avoided being wrecked in a collision with another steamer, a fate that actually overtook the Dir the following autumn. From Poti they proceeded to Batum, which seemed to Chekhov to have nothing special about it except its great number of brothels. Though he found the road to Tiflis original and poetical, that to Baku he pronounced an abomination of desolation. And Baku itself, with its extreme heat, the smell of kerosene, and naptha-soaked mud squelching under one's feet, disgusted him. Though the two travelers intended to push on to Samarkand, Aleksei Suvorin received a telegram at Baku informing him of the sudden death of his younger brother Valerian, and he hurried back to Feodosiya. With some regret over not continuing the journey, Chekhov also decided to return home to Luka and arrived at Sumy on August 7.
He had hardly got resettled in his dacha when he began to busy himself with an idea that had occurred to him on his visit to the Smagins. How wonderful it would be to buy a farm in the lush Mirgorod area! He would build a wing on the property and offer it to friends and authors. Yes, he would set up a colony of writers! Like him, they would surely enjoy a retreat from the noisy cities to the quiet of this lovely countryside. The purchase could easily be financed by a mortgage, and he hoped that Suvorin, to whom he broached the idea, would help. Chekhov made another visit to the Smagins in August to search out an ideal spot. And he found a farm in "a remote, poetic place," situated between two large villages which had no physician, a fact that increased his interest in the location. The only trouble was that the owner demanded more than he thought the farm was worth. He wrote Suvorin that if he should decide to buy, then he might avail himself of his offer of fifteen hundred roubles, but only on the strict condition that it was to be regarded as a loan. With considerable firmness Chekhov pressed home this point, as though his very integrity were at stake. "I tell you frankly and confidentially," he wrote, "that when I first began to work for New Times ... I promised myself to write as often as possible in order to earn more. There was nothing bad in that. But when I got to know you better and you became a friend, my anxiety grew acute and work for the paper for the sake of money lost its real value for me, and I began to speak and promise more than I could do; I began to fear that our relations would be clouded by the thought that I needed you as a publisher and not as a man ... All this is silly and offensive and merely indicates that I attach too great importance to money, but there is nothing I can do about it." (August 29, 1888.)
Chekhov's dream of buying a farm in the Ukraine and starting a writers' colony continued to obsess him for some time until he reluctantly abandoned the idea.
"Ah, how I hate to leave here!" Chekhov wrote to Pleshcheev. ". . . Every day it grows more beautiful . . . Moscow with its cold, its rotten plays, restaurants, and Russian thoughts terrifies my imagination. I would willingly live the winter as far as possible from it." (August 13, 1888.) Nevertheless, at the beginning of September he had to return to Moscow.
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Ten days of hard work after his return (he had accumulated a debt of five hundred roubles over the summer) left Chekhov yearning for spring again and the idle pleasures of the Ukraine. But Suvorin's advice at this point — that he give up medicine and devote himself entirely to literature — rubbed him the wrong way: "... I feel more contented and more satisfied with myself when I realize that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress. When I grow weary of one, I spend the night with the other. Although this may seem disorderly, it is not so dull, and besides neither of them loses anything at all from my infidelity. If I did not have my medical work, I could hardly give my leisure and my spare thoughts to literature.3 There is no discipline in me." (September 11, 1888.) With some pleasure he later pointed out to Suvorin that the ladies were singing his praises over "The Name-Day Party," a story he wrote that
3 In Chekhov's correspondence there are variants of this well-known statement of his dual devotion to medicine and literature. A curious one, in a lost letter of 1897 to his Czech translator B. Prusik, is quoted in an article by Prusik about Chekhov: " 'You ask what I'm interested in apart from literature. I'm occupied with medicine. I regard medicine as my lawful wife and literature as my mistress, who is dearer to me than a wife.'" See Literaturnoe Nasledstvo (Literary Heritage), Moscow, i960, LXVIII, 212.
"my holy of holies ... is absolute freedom" / 159
year. "It really isn't bad to be a doctor and to understand what you are writing about. The ladies say the description of the confinement is true." (November 15, 1888.)
As usual, family difficulties interfered with Chekhov's concentration on work and taxed his nervous energy. In the autumn he agreed to take into the house the young son of his friends at Babkino, Seryozha Kiselev, who planned to enter a Moscow gymnasium. Apart from helping out the Kiselevs, Chekhov thought that the presence of the youngster would freshen up the household. However, the responsibility he assumed for Seryozha's conduct and illnesses imposed a further strain on him. And brother Nikolai's behavior had reached a point of scandal where all members of the family, except Chekhov, wished him elsewhere. Nikolai had deeply offended his most faithful friend, the architect Shekhtel. And now the police were on his trail. Since he had never finished school or had a regular position, and hence lacked a passport, the authorities were attempting to compel him to fulfill his military service. Though this may have been exactly what the incorrigibly wayward artist most needed, the thought filled Chekhov with horror and he sought the influence of highly placed friends to save Nikolai from this fate.
To add to his worries, Suvorin, who had stopped off at Chekhov's house on his way back to Petersburg from Feodosiya, sheepishly confessed that in a moment of anger he had written an offensive letter to Alexander over one of his tales which he had published in New Times and signed Al. Chekhov. It is possible to write bad stories, Suvorin had declared, but one ought not to usurp the name of another. This public confusion of names was by now an old matter which the brothers had amicably settled between themselves. But aware of the extreme instability of Alexander, Chekhov hastened to write him to patch up the affair: "We cannot escape the hour of death and we have not long to live, and hence I do not attribute serious significance to my own writing, to my name, or to my literary mistakes. I advise you to do the same. The more simply we regard these delicate questions such as Suvorin touches upon the more equable will we be in our lives and relations." And he wearily concluded: "An. Chekhov or Al. Chekhov — is it not all the same?" (September 24, 1888.) Shortly after this incident Suvorin wrote Chekhov that Alexander had got into a drunken brawl and offended members of the staff of New Times. This might mean the end of Alexander's job on the newspaper. Chekhov worried. He at once dispatchcd a diplomatic letter to Suvorin, in which he frankly admitted that his brother was a chronic drunkard and tried to explain the reasons for his behavior. lie would send Alexander, he promised, a politic- scolding-tender letter —which usually had an effect on him.