The guests had hardly settled in when two empty carriages drove up with an invitation to visit Bogimovo about eight miles away. Levitan and Lika explained to the baffled host that on the boat to Aleksin they had become acquainted with a certain E. D. Bylim-Kolosovsky, the proprietor of Bogimovo, and learning that they were friends of Chekhov, he had warmly invited them all to visit his estate. Chekhov at once decided that they must go. The first view of Bogimovo entranced him — the huge brick house in which Catherine the Great had slept on the way to meet her lover Potemkin; the spacious park and lime tree alleys; the lovely garden with lilacs and apple trees in bloom; the pond with a poetic mill and the river in the distance. (Misha asserts that this estate later became the setting for the well-known story, The House with the Attic.) When Chekhov discovered that the whole upper floor with its enormous rooms, including a drawing room with ornate columns, was vacant, he realized how acutely dissatisfied he had been with his plain little dacha. Though it meant more roubles, the upper floor of Bogimovo was rented and the family soon moved in.
Within a few days life at Bogimovo resembled the carefree routine of the family's summer stays with the Kiselevs at Babkino and with the Lintvarevs at Luka. Chekhov quickly established pleasant relations with the owners and two other families that had rented bungalows on the estate. The Bylim-Kolosovskys were cultured and kind people, although the wife bored Chekhov by her gentle persistence in introducing into any discussion what she considered the evil of the age — pessimism. He was more interested in V. A. Wagner and his family and that of the painter, A. A. Kiselev (another Kiselev). The zoologist, Wagner, an enthusiastic admirer of Chekhov's fiction, was at that time engaged on a study of spiders. Chekhov admired the scientific precision of his mind, and in the evenings, when the company gathered, exciting discussions developed on such subjects as natural selection, will power, and
inherited characteristics. Wagner stoutly opposed Chekhov's conviction that will power and wisely directed education could overcome inherited evil traits. He insisted that nature did not joke with its victims. Clear echoes of these debates can be heard in the theories of the scientist Von Koren in The Duel, which Chekhov was writing at this time.
Occasionally dramatic sketches took the place of evening debates. The Kiselev children, drawing on Chekhov's early humorous tales for themes, staged and acted them to the delight of all. The children were fascinated by Chekhov's favorite mongoose. Once when they were sitting in the garden, a large snake appeared and terrified the youngsters. Chekhov shouted to Misha to bring the mongoose from the house. The little animal, seeing the snake, at once coiled itself into a ball, sprang and seized the snake's head in its teeth, crushed it, and dragged the body off into the tall grass. Unfortunately, the destructive instincts of the mongoose, to which Chekhov was so much attached, could not be so readily restricted to slaughtering snakes, and not long after this episode the animal had to be sent to the Moscow Zoo, where Masha regularly visited it.
With his customary enthusiasm for sharing his pleasures, Chekhov sent urgent invitations to friends to come to Bogimovo to walk, fish, and gather mushrooms with him. Suvorin paid two short visits and Natalya Lintvareva a much longer one. Chekhov rejoiced in her loud laughter that filled the house from morning to night. "The enchanting, amazing Lika," however, refused to come a second time, despite repeated pleas cast in the special "kidding" form he reserved for her. One letter accused her of being "captivated by the Circassian Levitan," and was signed with a heart pierced by an arrow. These communications she usually answered in a lingo of similar exaggeration mingled with sarcastic jokes.
But debts were weighing heavily on Chekhov's conscience, and with few exceptions he did not allow the joys of country living to interfere with his writing schedule. He ordinarily arose at four or five in the morning when all was quiet in the house and made his own coffee — one of those bachelor habits, he remarked, to which he had now become resigned. Sitting on the broad window bench in his spacious room, from which he had a fine view of the park, he wrote until eleven, when he would go for a walk to pick mushrooms or to fish. After dinner at one and a brief nap, he would resume his writing until evening.
The book on Sakhalin was both a torment and a comfort to him. He would dig for hours to obtain the facts for a single sentence, a kind of effort that exasperated the creative artist in him. Then he would happily read over a passage in which he had described the fierce weather on the island, convinced that it would chill the reader to the marrow. Recent government decrees, one on building a Siberian railroad and another to allow exiles to return to their native towns or villages once their sentences expired, pleased him and supported his conviction that he was dealing with an important current subject. Suvorin, however, assured him he was wasting his time, and, half- believing him, Chekhov protested that he would finish the book by fall. Then, aware of this self-deception, he burst forth to Suvorin: "I'm writing my Sakhalin and I'm bored, bored. I'm utterly sick of life." (August 28, 1891.) In his next letter, however, he felt it necessary to set the record straight for the benefit of his tormentor: "Sakhalin moves forward. There are times when I long to sit over it for three to five years and work at it furiously; but at other times, I'm overcome by moments of doubt and then I could spit on it. It would be a fine thing, by God, if I could devote three years to it! I shall write much rubbish, because I'm not a specialist, but really I shall also write something worth while. The theme of Sakhalin is so splendid that it might live a hundred years after me, for it could be the literary source and aid for all who studied and were interested in prison organization." (August, 30, 1891.)
What clearly deprived Chekhov of the total concentration he needed was the nagging realization that this time-consuming work took him away from writing the fiction on which his livelihood depended. Before the summer ended, he had to give up any idea of finishing the Sakhalin book by the fall and shift his major attention to The Duel and other stories. He finished The Duel in the middle of August and with some trepidation sent it off to Suvorin who was then at Feodosiya. He also finished a shorter tale, Peasant Wives, for New Times, and there is some evidence that during the summer he sketched out one if not two other stories.
Contributing to the pressures that built up around him at Bogimovo were the "mass of sick people and the smell of iodoform," as he expressed it in a letter to Mariya Kiseleva. For, as usual in his summer vacations, he insisted on offering his medical services to the peasants in the locality. When Suvorin complained to him of the callousness of a physician at Feodosiya who had treated one of his household, Chekhov sprang to the defense of his profession. The doctor, he explained, must be forgiven a great deal because of the loathsome hours and days that make up so much of his life. For, in the face of the incurable, he is forced to preserve his external tranquillity while so often being ashamed of himself and his science. Chekhov had his own fill of such loathsome hours that summer, and grew weary of peasant women and their babies and the endless tedious weighing-out of powders. Yet the strong qualities of these peasant patients would often renew his courage and elevate the humanity in him which was the lodestone of his art. "A peasant woman was carting rye," he wrote Suvorin of one of his patients, "and she fell off the wagon head first. She was terribly injured. . . . They brought her to me. She was moaning and groaning and praying God for death, and yet she looked at the peasant who carried her in and murmured: 'Let the lentils go, Kirila, you can thresh them later, but thresh the oats now.' I told her to forget the oats, that now there was something more serious to talk about, and she said to me: 'But his oats are ever so good!' A bustling peasant woman, one to be envied. Death comes easy to such people." (August 18, 1891.)