After taking his family off to another town for a few days to give them a cnange of scene, Chekhov felt desperate to escape to somewhere far away, and on 2 July he got on a train, ntend ng to join Suvorin in the Tyrol. But in the end he was in such low spirits he only got as far as Odessa, where it was so hot he spent half his money on ice cream.77 After a change of plan, he spent several weeks leading a pointlessly sybaritic life in Yalta, feeling guilty that he had abandoned his grieving, scared family. Soon, he found he was regretting having so many acquaintances, and rarely had the chance to be alone. He told his sister he missed Luka, and spent hours by the shore listening to crashing waves and rolling pebbles, the sounds of which reminded him of the laughter of people on the estate. He returned finally to Sumy in the middle of August for the last few weeks of the summer. It was a grim end to a grim summer, as one of his last letters testifies:
Nikolai's last days, his suffering and his funeral had the most depressing impact on me and on our whole family. I felt so awful inside that the summer, the dacha and the Psyol all became loathsome,, The only diversion was letters from kind people who hastened to offer their sympathy having found out about Nikolai's death in the papers. Letters don't amount to much, of course, but when you read them, you don't feel lonely, and loneliness is the most rotten and tedious feeling."78
SUMMERS AT THE DACHA III
Aleksin
I'm leaving for Aleksin today to listen to the nightingales.
Letter to A. Urusov, 3 May 1891
Nikolai's death was one of the factors which played a role in Chekhov's decision to undertake his eight-mo nth journey to Siberia the following year, so it was not until 1891 that the time came round for the family to rent a summer dacha again. In March Chekhov travelled to Western Europe for the first time; the day after Vis return to Moscow, the family left for the dacha that Misha had managed to find for them at the last minute - anything rather than stay in steamy Moscow all summer. It was located in Aleksin, a small town on the River Oka, a hundred or so miles south of Moscow, but the little wooden house at the edge of a birch wood was not as heavenly as the previous dachas had been. It was qu;et, there was a good view of the Oka and the railway bridge stretching over it, but there were only four rather cramped rooms, it was six minutes' walk to the river, the walk back was uphill, and there were too many other dachniks in the vicinity for Chekhov's liking. After his amazing trip through Italy and France, dacha life seemed a bit flat, and he felt as though he had been taken prisoner and put in a fortress.79
Chekhov was keen to get a lot of writing done that summer. He allocated Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays to his book about the penal colony on Sakhalin; Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays were devoted to the mythical novel that he had been working on over the years (which would never actually materialize), and he reserved Sundays for dashing off 'little stories'. It was a bit of a squash with all his family there, including his father who had now finally retired from his job. There was also the mongoose he had brought back from the tropics, which was fond of pulling corks out of bottles and smashing china. Fortunately, Chekhov did not have to endure the sensation of feeling like a crayfish sitting in a aieve with lots of other crayfish for very long.80 When Levitan and their mutual friend Lika Mizinova travelled down from Moscow by boat for a visit, they met a neighbouring landowner with the glorious name of Evgeni Bylim- Kolosovsky. Within two days he had sent round two troikas to bring the Chekhovs over to his estate for tea, and not long after that the family had vacated the dacha and moved into the cavernous upper floor of his house. Chekhov liked it so much he was prepared to pay almost twice as many roubles in rent.
Like so many other country estates, Bogimovo was run down and neglected, and therefore almost inevitably poetic in Chekhov's eyes. Catherine the Great had apparently stayed in the enormous mansion while she was on her way to meet up with Potemkin on her grand tour. The main house boasted an enormous columned ballroom on the first floor, with a musicians' gallery, a grand piano and a bill:ard room. The rooms were so large that they echoed. Chekhov loved it. 'It's delightful, it really is!' he exclaimed i a letter on 18 May. 'The rooms are as big as the ones in the Hall of the Nobility, and the park is glorious, with paths such as I have never seen, a river, a pond, a church for my old folk and absolutely every conven mce. The lilac and apple trees are in blossom. It's bliss in a word!'81 Sitting at the pond by the abandoned mill, fisning for carp or perch, he was able to forget all his sorrows.
Chekhov installed Hmself in the ballroom with the columns and enormous windows, sleeping on an old divan that could have seated twelve people. He rose with the lark, making himself coffee sometimes as early as four in the morning, and then settled down to write on the window sill, from where he could look out on to the park.82 Five years later, he would draw particularly on his experiences living at Bogimovo in 1891 when he came to write 'The House with the Mezzanine', one of the most lyrical of his stories. The narrator is a landscape painter, renting accommodation for the summer from a landowner reminiscent of Bylim-Kolosovsky:
He lived in the grounds, in one of the annexes, while I was in the old mansion, in a vast ballroom with columns, which had no furniture except the large divan I used to sleep on, and a table at which I played patience. Its old pneumatic stoves always used to moan, even when the weather was calm, but during thunderstorms the entire house would start shaking, as if it was about to break into pieces. It was quite frightening, especially at night, when all ten of the large windows would suddenly be lit up by lightning.
The description of a walk the narrator takes one evening seems to sum up what Chekhov perennially found so magical about the lost world of the Russian country estate:
I spent hours on end looking out through my windows at the sky and the birds and at the avenues ti the park; I read everything that arrived by post, and 1 slept. And every now and then I would leave the house and go wandering off somewhere until late in the evening.