Chekhov saw over a thousand patients between August and October 1892, when his unit ceased its work., The closest cholera came to his district were eleven cases twenty miles away, diagnosed just after his section was closed. He continued to see patients as well as the many visitors he constantly received at Melikhovo. One friend recalled:
He was not gi/en a minute's peace in the literal sense of the word! From early morning there was some landowner who had come on a visit and sat for a very long time, then a zemstvo doctor came, then the village priest, then someone in military uniform ... the Melikhovo police chief, most probably ... And from the window in the little annexe where I was staying, I could see first a light carriage roll up to the porch of the modest one-storey Chekhov house, then an old-fashioned springless carriage ... And in the small passage-way, near Chekhov's study, peasant men and women did not stop arriving - some had come on business, some for trifling reasons, some for medical care . .. And then to cap it all, a guest from Moscow turned up . . .61
!o the end of his days Chekhov remained a passionate proselytizer for education. He was happy therefore to become trustee of a village school in the nearby village of Talezh at the end of 1894. He wrote to Suvorin to tell him about the young man in charge of the pupils:
The teacher there earns 23 roubles a month, has a wife and four children, and hair that is already quite grey although he is only thirty years old. He is so ground down by poverty that whatever you talk to him about, he cannot prevent himself from bringing the conversation round to the subject of salaries. In h;s opinion, the only subject for poets and prose writers to write about should be salary increases; when the new Tsar appoints new min ,ters, teachers' salaries will probably be increased, etc.62
The experience of acting as trustee gave Chekhov the idea of building another school in the district. Work began in March 1896; the school opened later that year, in August. The following year, Chekhov returned as examiner, and was appointed assistant to the schools inspector. This nvolved him in visiting fifty-seven schools and preparing a report. Seeing the operation of village schools from all these different angles provided him with the raw material for 'In the Cart', one of his finest stories. He was to build two more schools in the Melikhovo area, the third one at the special pleading of the peasarts themselves. They collected 300 roubles and the local zemstvo was prepared to put up 1,000 roubles, which left at least another 1,500 roubles for Chekhov to raise. The meagre proceeds of a theatrical performance he organized in Serpukhov, performed by excellent actors and attended by ladies in Parisian couture and diamonds, was dispiriting; the most affluent people also proved the most miserly with their donations. In the meantime, Chekhov had started sending regular parcels of books to Taganrog^ to be donated to the library there.
In early 1897, Chekhov spent two months hitting his head on the low ceilings of peasant izbas in the course of his duties as the supervisor of fifteen census takers. Immediately this task was finished, he sat down to finish 'Peasants', the story with which, as he later told Suvorin, he exhausted Melikhovo as a literary source. It certainly represents the literary culmination of his years at Melikhovo. It may not be the best story he wrote in Melikhovo from an artistic point of view, but it was the most important. After a career as a wa ter in a Moscow hotel, which ends when he famously drops a tray of ham and peas, the story's protagonist, the terminally ill Nikolai Cl .Kildeyev, returns to his native village with his wife, Oiga, and their daughter to die. We see the village and its inhabitants through Olga s shocked eyes as they try to adjust to
v
the poverty and filth they encounter.
The Moscow censor S. Sokolov immeo ately had a lot of problems with the manuscript when it was submitted. The peasants were portrayed in very gloomy colours', he reported, always starving and drunk most of the time. The men physically abused their wives, and no peasant seemed to believe in religion. They lived in squalor. There was one particular page which the Moscow Censorship Committee decided had to go, resolving that the author be arrested if he refused to delete it. The page comes near the end of the story, at a point where another narrative voice seems to intrude into Olga's thoughts:
During the course of the summer and the winter there had been hours and days when it seemed that these people lived w orse than cattle, and living with them was frightening; they were rude, dishonest, dirty, drrnk, and did not live peacefully but were always rowing, because they did not respect each other, were afraid and suspicious of each other. Who runs the tavern and makes them drink? The peasant. Who embezzles community, school and church money and spends it on drink? The peasant. Who steals from his neighbours, sets their house on fire and perjures himself for a bottle of vodka? The peasant. Who is the first to rail against the peasants at the zemtsvo and other meetings? The peasant.
This was bad enough, the Russian peasantry, post-emancipation, were not shown in a positive light in Chekhov's story. But what was infinitely worse, from the government's point of view, was the fact that Chekhov laid the blame squarely at its door, agevn seemingly taking over from his character Olga as the narrator in his story:
Yes, living with them was fnghteni ig, but they were still people, they suffered and cried like other people, and there was nothing in their life for wl ch justification could not be found. Backbreaking work, from which the.r whole bodies ached at night, fierce winters, miserable harvests, cramped 'iving space, and there was no help and nowhere to turn for help. Those who were richer and stronger than them could not help because they themselves were rude, dishonest, drunk and cursed in just as vile a way; the most lowly official or bailiff treated the peasants as if they were tramps, and even addressed village elders and church wardens as they were peasants, believing they had a right to do so. And indeed, could there be any help or any good example set by people so self-serving, grasp ng, corrupt and lazy, who came to the vi'lage only to insult, rob and frighten people?63
Chekhov's story was published in the April issue of the Moscow journal Russian Thought, just after he suffered the massive lung haemorrhage that would turn him into an invalid for the rest of his life. It provoked a pass:onate debate in the press that went on for over a year, its intensity far exceeding the react on to anything else he had ever written. Chekhov took no part in the discussion himself, considering his contribution was complete. A sentence he had jotted down in one of his notebooks seems to encapsulate che whole enterprise of writing for him: 'Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.'64 As with the landowner re^shing his sour gooseberries, many educated Russian people s mply did not want a mirror held up to their blemishes.
IV
Croquet on the Lawn
In the sitting room next door to my study there have been people playing the piano and singing romances all day, and so I am constantly in an elegiac mood.