Reading Chekhov

One of my major battles with Sonia was over the issue of a two-hour visit to the Armory in the Kremlin, scheduled for the next day and, in Sonia's view, the high point of my-of every-trip to Russia. I asked Sonia what was in the Armory, and when she told me that it was a "magnificent" collection of armor and ancient gold and gems and Faberge eggs, I said that that kind of thing didn't interest me, and that I would just as soon skip it. Sonia looked at me as if I had gone mad. Then she abruptly said that skipping the Armory was impossible: the tour was scheduled, and it was too late to change the schedule. I repeated that I would prefer not to go to the Armory, and Sonia lapsed into silence. We were in a car, on our way to Melikhovo, Chekhov's country house, forty miles south of Moscow. Sonia began to converse in Russian with Vladimir, the driver, and continued doing so for many miles. In St. Petersburg, when Nelly spoke to our driver, Sergei-usually to give him some direction-she did so tersely and apologetically. Sonia used her talk with the driver as a form of punishment. Finally, she turned to me and said, "It is essential that you see the Armory-even for only forty-five minutes." "All right," I said. But Sonia was not satisfied. My attitude was so clearly wrong. "Tell me something," Sonia said. "When you were in St. Petersburg, did you go to the Hermitage?" "Yes," I said. "Well," Sonia said in a tone of triumph, "the Armory is much more important than the Hermitage."

When we arrived at Melikhovo, I recognized the house from pictures I had seen, but was surprised by the grounds, which were a disorderly spread of wild vegetation, haphazardly placed trees, and untended flower beds. There seemed to be no plan; the grounds made no sense as the setting for a house. Chekhov bought Melikhovo in the winter of 1892 and moved there with his parents, his sister, and his younger brothers, Ivan and Michael, in the spring. It was a small, run-down estate, which Chekhov rapidly transformed: the uncomfortable house was made snug and agreeable, kitchen and flower gardens were put in, an orchard was planted, a pond dug, the surrounding fields planted with rye and clover and oats. It was characteristic of Chekhov to make things work; thirteen years earlier he had arrived in Moscow, to start medical school, and pulled his family out of poverty by what seems like sheer force of character. The father's store had failed and he had fled to Moscow to escape debtor's prison. Alexander and the second-oldest brother, Nikolai, were already in Moscow studying at the university, and the mother and sister and younger brothers followed; sixteen-year-old Anton was left behind in Taganrog to finish high school. Little is known about the three years Chekhov spent alone in Taganrog. He boarded with the man who had, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, bailed out the family at a crucial moment, for the price of their home. Anton was not a brilliant student, but he graduated and received a scholarship from the town for his further studies. He was a tall, robust boy with a large head, a genial nature, and a gift for comedy. (He had entertained his family and now entertained his classmates with imitations and skits.)

When Chekhov rejoined his family in Moscow, in 1880, the possessor of what the critic James Wood has called a "strange, sourceless maturity," he quickly became its head. The authoritarian father, now a pitiable failure, had allowed the family to sink into disorderly destitution. The elder brothers made contributions-Alexander through writing sketches for humor magazines and Nikolai through magazine illustrations-but they lived dissolute lives, and only when Anton, too, began writing humorous sketches did the family's fortunes change. He wrote strictly for money; if some other way of making money had come to hand, he would have taken it. The humor writing was wretchedly paid, but Chekhov wrote so quickly and easily and unceasingly that he was able to bring in considerable income. In the early writings, no hint of the author of "The Duel" or "The Lady with the Dog" is to be found. Most of the sketches were broadly humorous, like pieces in college humor magazines, and if some are less juvenile than others, and a few make one smile, none of them are distinguished. Chekhov began to show signs of becoming Chekhov only when he turned his hand to writing short fiction that wasn't funny. By 1886, his writing was attracting serious critical attention as well as bringing in real money. Because of Chekhov's earnings from his writings (he never made any money as a physician; he mostly treated peasants, free), the family was able to move to progressively better quarters in Moscow. The purchase of Melikhovo was a culminating product of Chekhov's literary success-and of the illusion (one that Russian writers, Chekhov included, are particularly good at mocking) that life in the country is a solution to the problem of living.