Generally speaking, the rasputitsa provided a respite from guests, since most people balked at the prospect of negotiating all that mud. The visiting period at Melikhovo peaked in the summer, when the weather was most clement and the roads at their most passable. Some of Chekhov's happiest hours with guests were spent fishing: he caught fifty-seven carp one June day in 1897 (the family had fish soup the next day), and he also spent happy hours sitting by the water's edge on his own. When one of his neighbours wondered why he did not want to go to the river where the fishing was superior, he was informed that the fishing was secondary; what Chekhov valued most of all was being able to sit and think without being disturbed.73 In his euphoria at becoming a landowner for the first time, he succumbed to Leikin's incessant pleading and, in 1892, wrote a handful of humorous stories for Fragments under his old pseudonyms. One of them was clearly inspired by the population in his new pond (whom he joked he would have to give a constitution to). It was so close to the house he claimed that he could fish from the window.74 For Chekhov fans who expect his mature stories to be unremittingly bleak, 'Fish Love' (written in the same year as 'Ward No. 6') might come as a feit of a shock. The story, all of a fewpages long, is about a carp who falls in love with Sonya Mamochkina, a young lady who arrives to stay one summer at a general's dacha. The carp ogles Sonya when she comes to bathe every day, but is not optimistic:
Of course there is no, absolutely no chance of reciprocation. Could such a beautiful woman fall in love with me, a carp? No, a thousand times no! Don't tempt yourself with dreams, you contemptible fish! Only one destiny awaits you.- death! But how to die? There aren't any revolvers or phosphorous marches in the pond. There is only death open to carps and that is via the jaws of a pike. But where can I get hold of a pike? There was actually a pike in the pond at one po'nt, out it died of boredom. Oh, how unfortunate I am!
The guest annexe at Melikhovo, where Chekhov wrote The Seagull
The carp tries to commit suicide by getting itself caught by Sonya's fishing rod one evening, but succeeds only in getting his lower jaw ripped off, at which point he goes mad. Later mistaking a young poetcalled Ivan for his inamorata, he infects him with pessimism by kissing him tenderly on the back. Unbelievably, even a story as light-hearted as this one was held up by the censors for a couple of weeks. Perhaps they objected to Chekhov sending up Russian literature so effectively:
The poet got out of the water, not suspect, щ anything untoward, and set off home, laughing wildly. In a few days he went to Petersburg: after visiting editorial offices, he infected all the poets there with pessimism too, and from that l.me onwards all our poets have been writing dark and gloomy poems.75
By the second summer at Melikhovo, Chekhov had already и ted of the endless numbers of guests filling the small house, several to a room, with an overflow ;n the barn. In 1894 he comn -ssioned his architect friend Franz Shekhtel to build an annexe in the garden, a clapboard cottage with a sloping roof and a balcony, cons'iting of all of two rooms. The Chekhovs now had their very own Flugell It was originally intended as guest accommodat:on but usually ended up accommodating Chekhov himself, plus a writing desk. It was here that he famously wrote The Seagull, and where he sequestered himself when he needed to escape from all the people n the house. Iosif Braz, the Petersburg artist commissioned by the Tretyakov Gallery to paint Chekhov's portrait, came to stay for a month in June 1897. Even after all that time, he had got no nearer to capturing Chekhov's elusive nature on canvas. Both art st and subject were dissatisfied and agreed there should be another attempt.
Not all the guests at Melikhovo were unwelcome, of course. Before they fell out over Chekhov's indiscretions in 'The Grasshopper' (in particular a tL .nly d .sguised artist character, satirically portrayed), Levitan was someone Chekhov was glad to see. With the resumption of their friendly relations a few years later, Lev:tan's visits to Melikhovo also resumed. Among Chekhov's many female friends, most of whom were hopelessly in love with him, Lidia Mizinova continued to occupy a special place. She was, in fact, adored by all the Chekhovs, and particularly by Anton Pavlovich. 'The fair Lika', as she was known by everybody, made her first visit to Melikhovo early on in May 1892. At the end of March Chekhov had written her a long, typically playful letter, in which he used one of his own pet names for her, inspired by Sappho:
I've no money Melita. It's a bit smoky. We can't open any little windows. Father has been burning incense. I've been stinking of turpentine. And there are smells coming from the kitchen. My head aches. I don't have any solitude. But worst of all - Melita is not here, and there is no chance of seeing her in the next day or two . .. Yours from head to toe, with all my soul and all my heart, to the gravestone, to oblivion, to stupefaction, to insanity, Antoine Tchekhoff.76
Lika and Chekhov had become close at the beginning of the 1890s, just before his trip to -Sakhalin, and at Melikhovo they drew even closer. But when it became clear that Chekhov was not ultimately going to rec procate Lika's feelings, she turned m despair to a mutual writer friend, with whom she had an affair. Ignaty Potapenko was married, and he refused to leave his wife and do the decent thing when Lika became pregnant. He ended up abandoning her. Lika's relationship with Chekhov was never quite the same afterwards, but she was nevertheless one of the few people he wanted со see after the Seagull fiasco. The letters she wrote to him over the course of their relationship make sad reading, and Chekhov revealed his coldest, most callous side in his prolonged silences. Lika was a talented musician (she would accompany Potapenko when he sang Tcha Kovsky songs during their stays at Melikhovo), but she failed to become either an opera singer or an actress. She was indirectly immortalized instead in the character of Nina Zarechnaya in The Seagull. The magpie Chekhov also pilfered from Lika's biography when he wrote his story 'Ariadna', about a young woman whose affair with a married man leads to her being abandoned in Europe. Written at roughly the same time as The Seagull, it is one of his more misogynistic stories.
One of the very last visitors to Melikhovo was the actress Olga Knipper, the woman who was finally able to capture Chekhov's heart. They met briefly in the autumn of 1898, at a rehearsal in Moscow, just before Chekhov headed off to spend his first winter in Yalta. Olga Knipper's father was a German factory manager from Alsace who had relocated to Russia as a young man, while her mother came from the German-speaking Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. Mr and Mrs Knipper led Russian lives and brought up their three children, Konstantin, Olga and Vladimir, as true Muscovites. Olga's father had been as horrified by the idea of his only daughter becoming an actress as the pious father in Chekhov's story 'Requiem'. But his unexpected death in 1894 when Olga was twenty-five opened the way for her to pursue her dreams. After three years of drama classes with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Philharmonic School in Moscow, she graduated in 1898, and was immediately taken on by her former teacher and Konstantin Stanislavsky when they formed the Moscow Art Theatre that autumn. One of the f'rst plays they started rehearsing for their inaugural season was The Seagull, and Olga was given the part of Nina. On 9 September 1898, Olga's thirtieth birthday, Chekhov came along for the first time to a rehearsal. Before heading off south to Yalta he came along to two more rehearsals, by which time his head had definitely been turned by the vivacious Miss Knipper.