Chekhov warmed to the Lintvaryovs, who represented the more earnest, public-spirited side of the Russian educated classes. As at ВаЬюпо, he and his siblings tended to spend theii evenings sitting n the antique chairs in the mam house's drawing room, listening to music and :alking about literature. From the descriptions he gave in his letters that summer, the matriarch Alexandra Vas;1;evna seems like a benevolent and more sprightly version of Uncle Vanya's mother in the play. 'The old mother is a very kind, podgy woman who has had her share of suffering,' he wote. 'She reads Schopenhauer and goes to church for the akathist;56 she dutifully studies every issue of the Herald of Europe and the Northern Herald and knows writers I haven't even dreamt about.'57 Her two eldest daughters, both about Chekhov's age, were doctors. Zinaida, the eldest, was blind from a brain tumour and also epilcptic. She was a fiercely st( ic woman, revered as a saint by the local peasants (Chekhov wrote an obituary of her when she died at the age of thirty-four three years later). The stores' from Chekhov's new collection, In the Twilight, were read aloud to her, and her laughter and quiet equanimity in the face of death made him feel strange that people had so l;ttle consciousness of their own mortality. The second daughter, Elena, who was twenty-nine, was a k nd and ntelhgent woman who sent the fam ly asparagus every day and confessed to Chekhov that - shades of Anna Sergeyevna in 'The Lady with the Little Dog' - she had never been happy and never would be. She was too plain to attract suitors, Chekhov wrote in a letter, and yet she clearly longed to have a family. In the evenings, when there was music in the drawing room, she could be seen walk:ng frenziedly up and down the tree-lined avenue in the garden like a caged animal. Chekhov spent some t me receiving patients with her, and found that he was rather more optimis с than she was in his prognoses, and certainly less inclined to become so emotionally involved with each case.
Long-haired Natalya, the tlvrd daugnter, had a strong bony body which reminded Chekhov of a bream. Muscular and suntanned, with an extraordinarily loud laugh, she was a teacher who ran a school' n the grounds of the estate at her own expense, and - shades of the elder sister Lida in 'The House with a Mezzanine' - de:' lantly taught Krylov's fables in Ukrainian translation, which was against the law.58 She was also rather plain, according to Chekhov, and somewhat sentimental, despite having read Karl Marx. Georgy, the 23-year-old son, was a fine pianist with a fixation on Tchaikovsky and an admi ration for Tolstoy's anarchic ideas about how to live; Pavel, his older brother, had been expelled from university for subversive activities.59
The Lintvaryovs had lots of guests over the summer, and the Chekhovs did too. Towards the end of May the venerable writer Pleshcheyev arrived off the Petersburg train at one o'clock in the morning and stayed for three weeks, idolized by the Lintvaryovs as if he was a wonder-working xon.60 He had everyone gripped with his stories of being sentenced to death, only to be reprieved by the Tsar just before he was about to be hanged along with Dostoevsky back in 1849. Then Chekhov's younger brother Misha arrived from his travels in the Crimea, followed by the recently widowed eldest brother, Alexander, and the populist writer Barantsev ^h, who left his trousers behind when he departed: Chekhov wrote to ask him which museum they should be donated to. (Pleshcheyev, meanwhile, left his shirt behind, which meant, according to Russian superstition, that he would return.)61 Several other friends turned up to stay, as did the two remaining brothers, Ivan and Nikolai at the beginning of June. And at the end of the month, Chekhov's father was given two weeks' leave from his job in Moscow to come for a holiday.
Chekhov himself went visiting too. He decided that he liked the Ukraine so much he wanted to buy a khutor, a farmstead, somewhere deep in the countryside. So, on 13 June, the day after he caught six crucian carp, he set out with the Lintvaryovs in a huge antique Gogolian sprung carriage with four hired horses, to SorocLintsy. They were going to stay with the Smagins, relatives of the Lintvaryovs who were going to help him find a property. He travelled about 25 0 miles in ten days, and came back thinking he was going to give up w 'ting. Claiming he was fed up with literature (he had not yet written anything that summer), his new idea was to settle down n a v illage on the banks of the River Psyol and devote himself to medicine, spending his winters in St Petersburg. Apart from the beauties of the landscape, Chekhov was impressed by the standard of living of the Ukrainian peasants (traditionally much higher than in Russia), whom he characterized as 'intelligent, religious, musical, sober, decent, jolly and well-fed'.62 3ut it was really the landscape which sent him into ecstasies. 'Everything 1 saw and heard was so fascinating and new that I hope you won't mind if I don't describe the journey n this letter,' he corresponded afterwards, limit' lg himself to mentioning quiet nights fragrant with the smell of freshly cut hay, the sound of distant violins, and rivers ana lakes glistening :n the dusk.63 One letter he began about his trip had to be torn up after three pages, as he had too many impressions, and felt he had been unable to convey even a twentieth of what he wanted to say.64 To Pleshcheyev he mentioned gorgeous landscapes and vistas wh ch had made his heart stop, and which could only be adequately depicted in novels or short stories, languorous sad sunsets, and the wonderful music played at the weddings he had come upon on his journey. The Smag ns' estate, with its marvellous poplars, where Chekhov stayed for five days, was equally atmospheric:
The Smagins' estate is huge and spacious, but old, neglected and lifeless, like last year's spider's web. The house has subsided, the doors don't shut, the tiles on the stove are push'ng each other out and forming corners, young cherry and plum saplings are growing up through the gaps in the floorboards. A nightingale had made a nest in between the window and shutters in the room in winch I slept, and while I was there naked little nightingales which looked like undressed Jewish children hatched from the eggs.65 Well-fed storks live in the threshing barn. And there is an old man living in the apiary who is reminiscent of Tsar Gorokh ana Cleopatra.
Everything was decrepit, but incredibly poetic, sad and beautiful.. .66
Chekhov came back to Luka bbmming with ideas for what he was going to do when he was rich. Sheltering inside one day during a fierce storm (the boats were all full of water), he dreamt up a scheme to set up what he called a 'climatic station' for Petersburg writers. The idea was that under the influence of all the open space and their meetings with delightful Ukrainians, they would come to see that the focus of their literary endeavours was totally misgi ided, and give up, as he planned to do/
Restless as always, Chekhov took off again from Luka in July to go on a trip со the Crimea, which he was visiting for the first time. He had been invited to stay with his new friend, the Petersburg newspaper magnate Alexei Suvonn After ten days of ceaseless conversation with Suvorin at his palatial dacha on the sea in Feodosia, Chekhov went off on an adventure with his son Alexe. }r, who was two years older than he. They first took a steamship down the Black Sea coast to Sukhumi in Abkhazia, where they stayed in the New Athos Monastery. Chekhov bought h: s mother an icon and made friends with the local bishop, who was travelling through his diocese on horseback. As Ј he had not had enough stimulating experi mces that summer, he was now smitten by the exotic scenery of the Caucasian peaks, and reeled off 1ists of unfamviar sights to his correspondents back home in Russia: eucalyptuses, tea bushes, cypresses, cedars, palms, donkeys, swans, buffaloes, blue-grey cranes, and 'most mportantly, mountains, mountains and more mountains . ..' Since the highest peaks Chekhov had seen previously were the hills north of Taganrog (the 'Don Switzerland'), it is understandable that he was :mpressed. It felt to him that a thousand subjects for stories were peering out of every bush and shadow, and from the sky and the sea, and he cursed himself for not being able to draw.