At the end of February the weary Chekhov announced to Suvorin, whose offer of a loan won his deep gratitude, that the sale had been all but completed. The settlement was a three-way affair. He paid four thousand roubles down to Sorokhtin and obtained a mortage from him of five thousand which Chekhov agreed to pay within five years at 5 per cent. The remaining four thousand he secured from the Land Bank in another mortgage. The total interest on the mortgages amounted to considerably less than he would have to pay for his Moscow rent and that of a summer dacha. The mortgage to the artist, he told Suvorin. he hoped to pay off within three years at the most, for he would apply to it all the money he received from his books. As for his personal loan, half of this ought to be liquidated by August, for he had not taken any money recently from the sale of his books. His only wish now, he asserted, was to find a suitable estate for him not far from Melikhovo. "How glad I am that I will no longer have an apartment in Moscow!" he wrote Suvorin a few days later. "This is a solace that I never dreamed of." (March 3,1892.)
On March 5 Chekhov took possession of Melikhovo. Among the many things he brought with him was a eartload of medical supplies; he regretted only that he had not also bought a microseope, for he wished to do some research. His first letter from Melikhovo, to brother Ivan, asked for more prosaie items — a curry eomb and brush for cleaning horses, twenty pounds of nails, twenty of rye bread, and five loaves of French bread. "My impression and state of mind," he added, "are splendid, sueh as they have not been in a long time." (March 5, 1892.)
Chekhov's fondest dream had eome true. The son of a serf, only thirty-two years of age, had become the owner of an estate! He had squeezed out of himself the last drop of the slave. In a lyrical letter to his brother Alexander about the acquisition of Melikhovo, he signed himself with eharacteristie humor, but perhaps in this ease not unmixed with a feeling of pride: Landowner A. Chekhov.
Part IV
THE MELIKHOVO PERIOD 1892-1898
chapter xii
"Drive the Poets and Fiction Writers into the Country"
As the snow melted that first spring on Chekhov's "ducal estate," as he jestingly called it, one unsuspected blemish after another stood out dis- couragingly. Some of the sheds were dilapidated, the fence enclosing the yard needed repairing, and the pond in front of the house was so tiny that he referred to it as an aquarium. The woodland he had bought he described as "switch wood," and the bare fields struck him as plain, flat, naive, stupid, and without beauty. Worse still, he now discovered that the one-story, ten-room house had no charm and needed to be completely done over inside. It swarmed with bedbugs, beetles, and cockroaches, so that one would have to bum it down, he remarked, in order to get rid of them. Every day he trapped a number of mice alive and then carefully released them in a little copse some distance from the house. In his chagrin he recalled the spacious estates of friends where he had spent his summers. Everything at Melikhovo seemed in miniature — the house, the tiny pond, the stunted trees, the small garden and orchard. Like his miniature tales, however, where a few pages may convey a depth of thought and philosophy and a broad picture of Russian life, he sensed that Melikhovo, if treated creatively, could expand to the horizon in the beauty with which he would endow it.
The peasant in Chekhov, of which he often spoke, arose to the challenge to conquer this land, to make things grow, and to turn his house into a snug domicile. Laborers, carpenters, painters, and masons were hired. The sheds and fence were repaired, a new well was dug and a large iron wheel mounted to draw up the bucket, and a watercloset was installed. The whole house was redecorated, papered, painted; partitions were erected, and the inefficient tile stoves were torn down and rebuilt.
Chekhov wrote that he began to see the charms of capitalism when he discovered how cheap it was to hire workmen in the country. It cost only thirty kopecks a day for two laborers to fill the icc cellar. And a young peasant who worked in the fields, cleaned boots, and tended the flower garden earned only five roubles a month.
All in the Chekhov household labored harder than the hired help during this spring of reconstruction. A strict regimen was established. They arose with the sun, had their main meal at noon, and retired early. Each had assigned tasks. The mother did household chores, the father weeded the paths in the ncglcctcd garden and made new ones, sister Masha took chargc of the large vegetable garden, Misha was responsible for the extensive field work, and Chekhov pruned and cared for the orchard and planted bulbs. Often they were so tired at evening that they could hardly drag themselves off to bed. And they slept so soundly that the commotion and ringing of the fire bell in the village failed to awaken them one night when a neighbor's house bumed down.
Despite his misgivings, Chekhov was irresistibly drawn to attempting to farm a part of the many acres of land on the estate in an effort to realize some incomc. Though he admitted that he knew nothing about agriculture save that the earth was black, he tried to obtain knowledge by reading books on various aspects of the subject and by seeking adviee from friends such as Leikin, Yegorov, Smagin, and Kiselev, who farmed their estates. Three more horses were bought to supplement the three sorry jades that had come with the property, and also chickens, geese, and a few sheep, pigs, cows, and a heifer that sang from mom to night in a thick baritone. Though the high price of seed discouraged him, he planted over thirty acres each of oats and clover, some rye, and buckwheat, and quantities of lentils, potatoes, cabbages and peas. During every day he could steal from his post at Alcksin, Misha tirelessly worked at and supervised this farming with the aid of two hired peasants, Frol and Ivan.
Chekhov concentrated on the orchard and flower garden. He added eighty apple and sixty cheriy trees that first spring, and in the coursc of time set out hundreds of pine, elm, oak, and also lilac and rose bushes, and a variety of flowers. If he had little strength for hard, physical labor in the fields and clumsily could not hammer a nail without drawing blood, he willingly spent hours in the orchard and garden. Chekhov loved trees and flowers and imparted the same love to such characters as Mikhail Khrushchev in The Wood Demon and to Mikhail's reincarnation in Uncle Vanya as Dr. Astrov, who felt that he had contributed to man's happiness when he heard the murmuring of the young forest he had planted with his own hands. The unkindest thing Chekhov could say about Laevsky, that intellectual parasite in The Duel, was that he had not planted a single tree or grown a single blade of grass in his own garden. Each tree and flower Chekhov planted aroused in him a special feeling of well-being. lie spoke of the enchantment of the pines in the setting sun which reddened their trunks, and of the oaks which took on a mysterious aspect at twilight. When his roses and tulips bloomed, he proudly showed them to his guests, and when he was away he worried about his plants as about deserted children, and would write his sister to sec that they got proper care. The artist in Chekhov incessantly drove him to beautify Melikhovo. He planned the landscaping, built hothouses, a bam, a bathhouse, and had a much larger pond dug and stocked with so many species of fish that Misha jokingly asserted it could have been used as an experimental station by a learned ichthyologist.