Two years after his return from Sakhalin Chekhov settled in the country. Since his student days he had summered there, for much as he loved the bustle and the human contacts of the city, he relished the solitude and serenity that the rural scene offered. Now he bought an estate of six hundred acres near the village of Melihovo, in the province of Moscow, and made a home there for his parents, his sister, and his younger brothers. One reason why he wished to leave town was that his health was poor. He said he was like an old cupboard coming apart. He had never been strong. For years his digestion had been poor, he had been suffering from piles, and since his early twenties he had had a per- sistent cough and from time to time had spat blood. Though he resolutely ignored these symptoms and would not let himself be examined by a physician—he was the opposite of a hypochondriac—he supposed that the country might benefit his health. Besides, living
might be cheaper there, and perhaps he would be able
to write less and in a more leisurely and painstaking,
fashion. Again, there would be fewer visitors and other
distractions.
Some weeks after he was installed at Melihovo he was telling a friend that what with the chores and the fresh air, he was getting so husky that if the place were brought under the hammer, he would hire himself out as a circus athlete. But he was soon forced to realize that the change was doing him little good. He may have lacked a certain spontaneity of feeling and his relations with people may have been pretty much on the surface, but he was incorrigibly gregarious, so that there were as many guests as there had been in Moscow and they were harder to get rid of. Then, too, life in the bosom of the family had its drawbacks. Again there were the patients: in a year nearly a thousand peasants were treated by him, free of charge. It was delightful not to have to pay rent, but the expenses had nowise de- creased. In order to buy the property he had gone into debt, and he was driven to fresh exertions by the oppres- sive thought of the money he owed. Some of it he had borrowed from Suvorin, who, though Chekhov no longer contributed to Novoye vremya, continued to publish his books. He had scarcely made himself at home at Meli- hovo when he was complaining that while his soul wanted to expand and soar, he had to go on scribbling for lucre, without respecting what he wrote, and that his only solace was medicine, which he practiced with- out thought of money. He had grown up among people with whom money played "an infinitely great role," and that, he confessed on another occasion, had terribly depraved him. He should take a sulphuric acid bath, he said, so as to have his old skin eaten away and then grow a new hide. But if his soul had few opportunities to expand and soar, he knew moods of animal con- tentment here, when he neither regretted yesterday nor anticipated tomorrow. Spring in the country was so ex- quisite that he could not but hope there would be spring in paradise. On a walk across the snowy fields he felt as detached, as remote from the humdrum and the hurly-burly as if he were on the moon. At moments he was so happy that he superstitiously brought himself up short by recalling his creditors.
Even at its best, the place could not hold him. The master of Melihovo was a restless man, craving new impressions, eager for all that was strange and fresh. He made frequent trips to Moscow, where he was profusely feted. He visited friends in the provinces, sailed up and down the Volga, traveled to the Crimea and the Cau- casus, and in Suvorin's company saw France and Italy. European comforts, European culture made Russia seem more drab and dingy than ever. His return from Sakha- lin by the Orient route had whetted his appetite for the exotic. He longed to go to South America. He wanted to see Chicago. Lack of funds and lack of courage, according to him, prevented him from realiz- ing these dreams. Probably lack of health also had a good deal to do with it.
On one of his trips to Moscow he was dining in a restaurant with Suvorin when he had a severe hemor- rhage of the lungs. With his usual nonchalance, he went about his business as soon as the bleeding stopped, only to suffer a relapse three days later. He was taken to a hospital. This was in March 1897. An examination—the first he had permitted—showed that he was far gone in consumption.
While he was in the hospital he was correcting the proofs of his story "The Peasants," one of his finest and most substantial pieces. It was the fruit of that intimate knowledge of the people that life in the country had helped to give him. The years at Melihovo had not been as productive as the Moscow period had been. Never- theless, it was then that he wrote most of his long stories and some shorter ones that are among his best.
The doctors prescribed a strict regimen, country air, and residence in a southern climate, and they forbade him to practice medicine. He was not the man to take their orders seriously. But that autumn he did go abroad for his health. He settled in Nice, and in the spring went up to Paris. The Dreyfus case had recently been re- opened, and he became interested in it. He took his stand with the Dreyfusards. He was full of admiration for Zola. Novoye vremya stank in his nostrils; anti- Semitism smelt to him of the slaughter-house. What particularly disgusted him was that the paper reviled Zola in its editorial columns while pirating one of his novels in its supplement. Chekhov stated his position frankly enough to Suvorin, and their former intimacy became impossible, but he did not break completely with the old reactionary. He continued to count Suvorin among his friends, who included Tolstoy, the Christian anarchist, and were soon to be joined by Maxim Gorky, the revolutionist.
He could not stay abroad indefinitely. Whatever in- terest the foreign scene had for him, and that interest paled since he was ill, the pull of home was a strong one. On his return he was forced to give up Melihovo and go to live in Yalta, in the mild air of the southern coast of the Crimea.
He had visited the resort once or twice before, and it had depressed him profoundly. Now he was con- demned to live in the Godforsaken place, where, he said, even the bacilli were asleep. It was exile to a warm Siberia, a balmy Devil's Island. When he had been there over a year he wrote that he still felt like a transplanted tree hesitating whether to take root or begin to wither. Eventually he resigned himself to Yalta, but he never got to like it, in spite of the fact that he had the companionship of several fellow writers there, including Tolstoy, whom he revered. ,
The exile did not do for him what it should have. He did not get the proper diet or nursing, and he kept breaking away to take trips that cannot have benefited his health. His condition grew steadily worse. Neverthe- less he was able to write. Such memorable stories as "The Man in a Shell," "Gooseberries," "The Darling," "On Official Business," "The Lady With the Pet Dog," were composed during those years. He also prepared his collected works for the press—not an unmixed pleasure, since he was dissatisfied with much that he had written and disgusted with his early stuff. They were issued in ten volumes in 1899-1901 under the imprint of A. F. Marx. He had sold his works to that publisher for 75,000 rubles, becoming, as he said, "a Marxist for life."
It was during these years that Chekhov composed his better known plays. He had made a fiasco of his firrt attempt at playwriting with Ivanov, which was written and staged in Moscow in 1887. Two years later he re- wrote the play for a revival in Petersburg and found the work of revision excruciating. He decided that he was no playwright. "Shoot me," he wrote to a friend, "if I go mad and occupy myself with what is not my busi- ness." In its revised form Ivanov proved a success, but his next piece, The Wood Demon, put on the same year, fell flat, and he disliked it so much that he refused to have it published. It was six years before he tried his hand at playwriting again. The Sea Gull was pro- duced in Petersburg in 1896. Its failure verged on a scandal. The unhappy author swore that he would never attempt a play again. Yet in 1898 his Uncle Vanya, a revised version of The Wood Demon, was produced in the provinces and met with a favorable re- ception. At the close of the same year a newly formed company which went by the name of The Moscow Art Theatre performed The Sea Gull with great success. This was the beginning of the association between Chekhov and the Art Theatre, which persisted in spite of the fact that he was not wholly satisfied with the way in which his plays were interpreted. All of them, in- cluding the last two: The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, became the very backbone of the repertory of the Art Theatre, which, in fact, adopted the gull as its emblem.