News soon spread in the area that the well-known writer Chekhov had settled at Melikhovo and neighbors, members of the local County Council, doctors and officials of the district came to call. They were met with the greatest affability and pressed to come again. They did, and often. Chekhov grew particularly fond of his neighbor Prince S. I. Shakhovskoi, an agreeable young man and head of the district County Council. Making friends with the peasants was another matter. They were naturally suspicious of newcomers and also a bit contemptuous of the family's ideas of farming. Chekhov even confessed to being a bit afraid in approaching them. But once they learned that he was a physician willing to help them in their illnesses, the ice was broken. And before long he could write Suvorin: "The peasants and shopkeepers are in my hands; I've won out. One had a hemorrhage from the throat, another had his arm crushed by a tree, a third, a sick daughter. It seems that they would be in a desperate situation without me. They now bow respectfully to me as Germans do to their pastor, and I am friends with them and all goes well." (May 15, 1892.)
Although Chekhov had mentioned that one of the reasons why he wanted to leave Moscow was to get away from numerous visitors, he had barely completed the initial reconstruction of Melikhovo when nearly every one of scores of letters to his friends contained pressing and repeated invitations to visit him. Now, apart from his natural need to have people around him, he wanted to show off his new estate, in which he took a genuine pride, despite his modest assertion to Suvorin that "very likely it is good for nothing." One strongly suspects that this need arose in part from the boredom he experienced in being alone in the company of his parents.
Barantsevich, a heavy eater, was offered eight meals a day if he would come; to Lazarev-Gruzinsky Chekhov would make a present of five bunches of radishes from his own garden, but he must come to Melikhovo to eat them, and other such whimsical twists were given to his invitations. His friends hardly required any pressure. They came in all seasons of the year, even in the winter. By the summer of 1893 Melikhovo was crowded with visitors, and not only his friends, but people whose acquaintance he had neither sought nor desired — young ladies, authors, local doctors, and distant relatives with their children. Improvised beds had to be set up; they slept four to a room and some even slept in the hallways. One girl — with a head shaped like the top of a bass viol, Chekhov said — with whom the family was barely acquainted, stayed a week and then was tactfully queried by a servant as to when she was leaving. "I'm a guest of Anton Pavlovich and not you," she pouted — and it is very possible that in his vague way Chekhov had invited her and forgotten it. Misha suspected, and with some reason, that one of the guests, a young man recommended to Chekhov, was probably a police inspector in disguise seeking out political subversion in this strangely popular household in the country. The musician
Ivanenko, ailing and out of a job, arrived and stayed for months, making Melikhovo his home while he worked in the nearby office of the County Council, a position that the sympathetic Chekhov had obtained for him. Many of these casual visitors were infatuated worshippers who hung on Chekhov's every word. Yet they consumed quantities of food and drink, and wore out his mother and sister who attended them. At times it became too much even for Chekhov's immense social appetite. He wrote Suvorin: "Ah, if you only knew how weary I am! I'm weary to the point of a breakdown. Guests, guests, guests . . . every passing intellectual regards it as a duty and a necessity to drop in on me and warm himself, and sometimes they even remain and spend the night. There is a whole legion of doctors! It is pleasant, of course, to be hospitable, but the soul must have some measure." (December 8, 1892.)
Old friends, however, who had grown close to the family over the years, were always welcome at Melikhovo. Most of them came from Moscow, such as Semashka, Ivanenko, the beautiful Lika, his cousin A. Dolzhenko, Shekhtel, and Gilyarovsky, who wore out Chekhov's horses with his feats of strength, clambered up trees, smashed huge beams, and terrified the dogs. Others willingly came long distances to visit, like A. I. Smagin, Natalya Lintvareva, Suvorin, and Svobodin. Suvorin had visited earlier, before Melikhovo was fully renovated and the water- closet put in; and this wealthy son of a serf had turned his nose up and soon left, much to Chekhov's distress. The amusing, affectionate actor Svobodin spent many days at Melikhovo during the summer of 1892. Chekhov remarked that he had the aged's thirst for peace and quiet, and he had a premonition about Svobodin that came true — that autumn he died in the course of a performance in Petersburg.
The artist Levitan, who had not yet caught up with the publication of The Grasshopper, which had only recently appeared, had already visited Melikhovo by April 1892. He insisted that Chekhov accompany him hunting, a sport that Anton did not favor. The artist shot a woodcock and Chekhov picked it up. The bird with its long beak and beautiful plumage was still living, and its black eyes stared at him. Levitan pleaded with Chekhov to kill it. He refused at first, but the artist, in a highly nervous state, continued his pleading. "I had to obey Levitan and kill it," Chekhov reported to Suvorin. "One lovely amorous creature less in the world, and two fools returned home and sat down to supper." (April 18,1892.)
As soon as favorite guests arrived Chekhov dropped whatever he was
doing and became the gay host. Although there was a certain Russian charm about the view from Melikhovo, there were very few pleasing placcs for walks, fishing, and picnic expeditions. One of them was the Davydov Monastery, about two miles away, with an attractive mill on j one of the neighborhood ponds which swarmed with fish. Chekhov would organize the family and guests and order the chaise, cart, and 1 racing droshky to be harnessed. Dressed in his white tunic with a strap , bucklcd around his waist, he would mount the droshky, designating a ' pretty lady to sit sideways behind him, holding on to the strap. In this regalia he called himself a Hussar. The racing droshky would jauntily lead the way to the Davydov Monastery, followed by the chaise and the cart with provisions for a picnic and tackle for fishing. Or he would take a guest with him to sit on the dam of the large pond he had constructed on the estate, the banks of which he had planted with trees and flowering bushes. There they would sit and talk while Chekhov watched with boyish delight the shoals of little fish coming suddenly to the surface and then hiding in the depths.
Hilarity and interesting conversation, which Chekhov dominated, ruled at mealtime. Mother Chekhov loaded the table with her best dishes and Father would dispense his mysterious Melikhovo liqueurs. Chekhov liked to tease his guests and play practical jokes on them. Taking advantage of the naivete of nineteen-year-old Tatyana Shchepkina- Kupcmik, a poetess and short-story writer whom Masha had introduced into the family, he solemnly convinced her that his dove with coffee- colored feathers was a cross between a dove and a cat that lived in his yard (the cat had fur of the same color). Though she thought the explanation a bit odd, how could she doubt the authority of Chekhov? When she told the story of Chekhov's remarkable dove bred from a cat in a Moscow literary circle they greeted it with rapture, and it was long before she could live it down.