In i S92 Chekhov bought a country house for his family in the village of Melikhovo, about fifty miles from Moscow. The Melikhmo letters are happy letters. Even his father, Pavel Chekhov, finally found a niche for himself: he became the vil- lage choirmaster and the peasants understood and accepted this
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old man who was so like themselves. Chekhov, as the years went on, took an active part in village life. He doctored the peasants, he was a man of importance in local government, he built three schools with his own money, and he worked hard on projects for new roads and new housing. These were good and fruitful years in Melikhovo. Much of his very best work was done in this period.
In 1894, with Suvorin, he took his second trip to Europe. \Vestern Europe was an impressive place for a Russian. The beauty of the cities, the comfort of hotels and railroads and houses, the easy freedom of intellectual life lived without the fears and pressures of censorship—Chekhov was enchanted with all of it. But it is amusing to watch the enchantment wear off. He soon begins to tire of the beauties of Vienna and Venice and to remember the rough virtues of home. It has been said that Russians are the greatest complainers in history, but what- ever it is that holds them to their land holds them forever. Homesick, Chekhov went back to Melikhovo.
Melikhovo, like all the houses of the Chekhov family, was always full of guests. One of the frequent visitors was Lydia Mizinova, a beautiful and charming young girl, a friend of Maria Chekhova's. Letters from Lydia Mizinova, found in re- cently opened archives, are said to prove that she was very much in love with Chekhov. But he was not in love with her. His letters to her are affectionate and flirtatious but they make clear that whatever she wanted, he wanted nothing. Lydia consoled herself with the painter Levitan. But Levitan, a famous beau, never consoled any woman for very long and so, in time, Lydia moved from Levitan to the novelist Potapenko. Chekhov watched this affair carefully and when he sat down to write The Seagull,^ he very possibly made use of the Lydia-Potapenko relationship. Trigorin, in The Seagull, was so like Potapenko
3 The Seagull was, of course, a famous failure in its first production in St. Peiersburg. Two ycars later the newly formed Moscow Art Theatre produced it with great success.
that Suvorin spotted the resemblance immediately. Chekhov altered Trigorin in the next version of the play.
The Seagull was Chekhov's third full length play. (The earlier Wood Demon would later become Uncle Vanya.) The play does not reach the artistic purity and depth of The Three Sisters, but it is full of good things, and a daring departure in stage technique.
The serious theatre can be uncomfortable. How often we go to a play with high expectations which, as the evening wears on, turn into a kind of impatient discomfort. \Ve grow conscious of strains and stresses, and something irritates us although we do not know its name. But sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playvright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business. Neatness in design and execution is, after all, only the proper use of ma- terial, but it has a beauty of its own. It is exhilarating to watch a good workman at work, to see each detail fall into useful place, to know that the shortest line, the smallest stage movement, has an end in view and is not being used to trick us or deceive or pull fashionable wool over our eyes. It is then that we say to ourselves, this writer knows what he is doing, he has paid us the compliment of learning his trade. To such writers, in whatever field they be, we give our full attention and they deserve it.
It is that way with Chekhov. The smallest detail has meaning. In The SeaguU, for example, Arkadina, many years before the play begins, married a man whose social standing she consid- ered too low. This seems of no importance—the line about it is thrown away—until the third act when the whole Hamlet- Gertrude theme of the play is given new meaning: Arkadina, turning on her son, calls him a "Kiev artisan," which is what she had once called his father. And suddenly we understand that the son never had a chance: his father was not a gentleman to Arkadina and the child was made to pay for it from the day he was born. Chekhov knew all there was to know about his char-
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acters and every line he wrote advanced the play and moved it to its end. It is strange that neither his interpreters nor his imitators have been impressed with the fine, hard core of the design.
To ALEXEI SUVORIN
March 9, /890, Moscow
March gth, 40 Martyrs and 1 o,ooo skylarks
We are both mistaken about Sakhalin, but you probably more than I. I am leaving in the firm conviction that my ex- pedition will not yield anything valuable in the way of either literature or science, as I haven't enough knowledge, time or pretensions. I haven't the plans of a Humboldt^ or even of a Kennan.2 I want to write a couple of hundred pages and thereby atone in some degree for my medicine, which, as you know, I have piggishly neglected.
Perhaps I shall not be able to write anything worthwhile, but the trip still has not lost its allure for me: in reading, looking about and listening, my researches will teach me a great deal. Although I have not yet left, thanks to the books I have gone through, I have been forced to learn much that people should be beaten for not knowing and which in my ignorance I had not known before this. Moreover, I am of the opinion that the trip will turn out to be six months at hard labor, physical and mental, and for me this is also essential, as I am a Little Russian and have already begun to get lazy. I have to discipline myself. Though the trip may be nonsense, stubbornness, a whim, still, think it over and tell me what I have to lose by going. Time?
Alexander Humboldt, the German scientist, made a journey to Asiatic Russia in 1829 to get geological and geophysical data.
George Kennan (1845-1924), an American engineer and explorer who, in 1886, made a famous tour of Siberian prisons. He was a great-uncle of George Kennan, former U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Money? Will I have to undergo hardships? My time isn't worth anything, I'll never have any money anyway; as to hardships, I'll be traveling by horse for twenty-five or thirty days, not longer, and all the rest of the time I'll be sitting on the deck of a steamer or in a room and will be bombarding you with letters. Let's say I find the trip absolutely unrewarding. I still feel there are bound to be two or three days which I'll remem- ber all my life with the greatest pleasure or the greatest pain, etc. That's how I figure it, my dear sir. All I say may be uncon- vincing, but certainly you too write just as unconvincingly. For example, you write that Sakhalin is of no use or interest to anybody. Do you really think that's so? Sakhalin is useless and uninteresting only to a society that does not exile thousands of people to it and spends millions maintaining it. Except for Australia in the old days and Cayenne today, Sakhalin is the only place where one can study convict colonization: all Europe is interested in it, but it's no use to us? No more than twenty- five or thirty years back our Russian researchers in Sakhalin did a tremendous job, a job that should make us proud of being men, but we have no use for this sort of thing, have we, nor do we know what kind of people we've got there; so we just sit shut within our four walls and complain of the bad job that God has made of man. Sakhalin is a place of intolerable suffer- ings, the kind that only free and unfree people together can in- flict. Men there and elsewhere have solved terribly serious prob- lems and are doing so now. I regret I am not sentimental, or I would say that we ought to journey to places like Sakhalin to worship as Turks go to Mecca; while sailors and penologists in particular ought to look upon Sakhalin as military men regard Sevastopol. From the books I have read and am now reading it is evident that we have let millions of people rot in prison, let them rot to no good purpose, barbarously, without giving the matter a thought; we have driven people in chains through the cold thousands of miles, infected them with syphilis, de- praved them, multiplied criminals and shifted the blame onto the red-nosed prison overseers. Now, all educated Europe knows it is not the overseers who are the guilty parties, but all of us; but this does not interest us in the slightest. The celebrated sixties did nothing for the sick and imprisoned, thereby trans- gressing against the most important commandment of Christian civilization. In our times something is being done for the sick, but nothing at all for the imprisoned; penology just doesn't interest our jurists. No, I assure you, Sakhalin is of use and of interest and my sole regret is that it is I who goes there and not someone else who knows more about the business and is more capable of arousing public interest. My going won't mean very much. . . .