With the demands of a writing career, an estate to run, guests to entertain, people to see in Moscow and Petersburg, and several members of his family to provide for, not to mention various dogs and horses, one might have thought that was already a full life. But Chekhov was not living in the kind of rural idyll that Goncharov had so famously described in his novel Oblomov. His was no prelapsarian world of happy peasants, bountiful harvests and benevolent patriarchal values, in which a landowner could si mply sleep his way through life, as the lovable Russian bear Oblomov does. Nor was it the kind of world where wisdom and truth were the exclusive preserve of the uneducated people who worked the land, such as Tolstoy presents in his novels. When Chekhov came to describe the world he inhabited in his story 'Peasants' (Muzhwritten after he had been living at Melikhovo for several years, people were shocked. But precisely because what he saw around him was poverty, ignorance, misery, backwardness and disease, his strong ethical sense propelled h;m со do what he could to alleviate it.
The Russian intelligentsia were very good at identifying national problems, but there were a lot of Trofimovs out there - earnest young people like the eternal student in The Cherry Orchard - who were all calk and no action. Chekhov could take justifiable pride in what he bad helped to achieve while he lived at MeHkhovo. There was the open.ng of a post office, the building of a bridge over the river, the construction of a paved road from the station and the stopping at Lopasnya of fast trains; but of far greater significance were the three schools he built, the work he had carried out to contai i cholera in the area, the role he played in conducting the national census and the medical care he gave со thousands of peasants who lived in the area. ' tie vast majority of Chekhov's neighbours, of course, were peasants. As the grandson of a peasant h mself, Chekhov was one of a growing number of Russian landowners who bought their property rather than inheriting it. Despite h ; humble origins, the local peasants n Melikhovo were as suspicious of Chekhov as they were of all newcomers: they knew nothing of hu background, nor had they followed his literar) career with avid interest; hardly any of them could read. What changed their opinion of him was the fact that he was a doctor, as he later explained in a letter:
I live peacefully with the muzhiks, they never steal anything from me and whenever I walk through the village the old women sm.le at me or cross themselves. I use the polite form of address with everyone except children, and never shout, but it was medicine which was the main thing which helped to create good relations.56
Once the peasants heard there was a doctoi in the neighbourhood they came from far and wide to receive medical assistance (some from over fifteen miles away),, particularly when they discovered that he would not charge, them anything. From first light, there would be a queue of people waiting to see Dr Chekhov, m all seasons of the year. In the summer, Dr Chekhov would put up a red flag on the dacha in the garden to indicate he was receiving.
One of the reasons Chekhov did not charge for consultations (or for that matter for the medicines dispensed by Masha) is that he did not want to be seen as an official government doctor. When the cholera epidemic began spreading in 1892, a large number of suDerstitious peasants thought that it had been deliberately organized by the government, with doctors as their agents. One doctor was actually murdered. The cholera did seem to be following doctors, the peasants noticed; doctors were clearly burying the corpses of victims to h de the evidence! One mob of peasants invaded a cholera barracks to 'rescue' patients before burning it to the ground.57
It is hardly surprising there was such suspicion among the peasants. Until the introduction of a rudimentary national health service in the 1880s under the jurisdiction of local zemtsvos, medical care for peasants was wholly inadequate. No self-respecting doctor would want to live in a primitive village and earn next to noth ng, when he could live in the town and charge fees. Peasants had to rely on the local feldsher (from the German word Feldscher, denoting an army surgeon). These medical orderlies often knew little more than the peasants themselves, and might be responsible for some 30,000 patients over a 65-mde radius.58 Chekhov was very familiar with the work of these feldshers, as is evident from his description of the way the peasant Marfa Ivanova's illness is diagnosed in his story 'Rothschild's Violin':
Wrinkling his grey eyebrows and stroking his sideburns, the attendant started to examine the old woman, who was sitting hunched over on the stool. Emaciated and sharp-nosed, with her mouth open, she looked in profile like a b'rd wanting to drink.
'Hmin ... I see,' sa;d the orderly slowly. He sighed. 'Influenza, but maybe it is a fever. There is a lot of typhoid going round the town at the moment. Anyway, the old lady nas done pretty well for herself, praise the Lord. How old is she?'
'A year off seventy, sir.'
'Well, then. She has done all right for herself . . . Time for her to say her farewells.'59
Medical care had not been included as a priority when the first zemstvos were set up in Russia as part of Alexander IPs great reforms. The government's commitment n the 1860s and 1870s was to economic modernization. The young socianst-miiided pny icians who went to work as the first zemstvo doctors continually tried to exert pressure on the government to provide financial support for medical care where none had been forthcoming previously. Such activity was viewed as subversive, but slowly the doctors began to wm the trust of peasants, whose lives they were transforming through the provision of free medical care, their remuneration coming from the zemstvo. Chekhov was a whole-hearted supporter of the progressive doctors who spearheaded the campaign. He was not politi ;ally active himself, but he developed close relationships with many local zemstvo doctors while living at Melikhovo, and immediately volunteered his services to help fight the cholera epidemic He was allocated a district that included twenty-five villages, four factories, and the Davydovo-Pustyn Monastery. A month later, he wrote a long and breathless letter to Suvorin about what he had been up to as a medical sanitary inspector:
I spend my time organizing, getting quarantine shelters erected and so on, and I feel very lonely, because I find everything to do with cholera very alien. The work involves constant travelling, endless conversations and pettifogging details, and ;s exhausting. There is no time to write. Literature has long been abandoned, and I am poor and wretched because I thought it appropriate to my situation and supportive of my independence to decline the salary paid to the local doctors. I am tired of it all, but if you take a bird's eye view of cholera it has many interesting aspects. It's a shame you are out of Russia at the moment;
much good material for your regular columns is going to waste. There is more good than bad about the cholera epidemic, so it differs radically from what we saw with the famine last winter. Everyone is working this time, furiously hard. What is being done at the fai- in Ni/hny is a miracle, enough to make even Tolstoy have some respect for medicine and for cultured people's interference in life generally. It looks as though they've thrown a lasso around the cholera. Not only has the number of infecuons fallen, but the proportion of deaths is lower as well. In the whole enormous area of Moscow there are not more than 50 cases a
ч
week,-whereas on the Don it claims 1,000 victims a day. That is a form lable difference. We district physicians are pretty well prepared: we have a soil i action programme, so there is every reason to suppose that in our own areas we shall also succeed in reducing the proportion of deaths from cholera. We have no assistants, we are obliged to be both doctor and nurse at one and the same time. The peasants are coarse, dirty and suspicious; but the thought that our efforts will not be completely in vain stops one noti ;ng any of th:s. Of all the Serpukhov doctors I am the most pathetic; my carriage and horses are run down, I don't know che roads, I can't see anything when evening falls, I've no money, I Decome exhausted very quickly, most of all, I can never forget that I ought to be wr'ting, and I would really like to turn my back on the cholera and sit down and write. And I would like to to talk to you too. I feel utterly alone.60