Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Family and Friends | Page 6

and which he was very eager to buy. Indeed from this
time he began thinking of buying a country place of his own, not in
Little Russia, but in Central Russia. Petersburg seemed to him more
and more idle, cold and egoistic, and he had lost all faith in his
Petersburg acquaintances. On the other hand, Moscow no longer
seemed to him as before "like a cook," and he grew to love it. He grew
fond of its climate, its people and its bells. He always delighted in bells.
Sometimes in earlier days he had gathered together a party of friends
and gone with them to Kamenny Bridge to listen to the Easter bells.

After eagerly listening to them he would set off to wander from church
to church, and with his legs giving way under him from fatigue would,
only when Easter night was over, make his way homewards.
Meanwhile his father, who was fond of staying till the end of the
service, would return from the parish church, and all the brothers would
sing "Christ is risen" in chorus, and then they all sat down to break their
fast. Chekhov never spent an Easter night in bed.
Meanwhile in the spring of 1892 there began to be fears about the crops.
These apprehensions were soon confirmed. An unfortunate summer
was followed by a hard autumn and winter, in which many districts
were famine-stricken. Side by side with the Government relief of the
starving population there was a widespread movement for organizing
relief, in which various societies and private persons took part.
Chekhov naturally was drawn into this movement. The provinces of
Nizhni-Novogorod and Voronezh were in the greatest distress, and in
the former of these two provinces, Yegorov, an old friend of Chekhov's
Voskresensk days, was a district captain (Zemsky Natchalnik).
Chekhov wrote to Yegorov, got up a subscription fund among his
acquaintance, and finally set off himself for Nizhni-Novogorod. As the
starving peasants were selling their horses and cattle for next to nothing,
or even slaughtering them for food, it was feared that as spring came on
there would be no beasts to plough with, so that the coming year
threatened to be one of famine also.
Chekhov organized a scheme for buying up the horses and feeding
them till the spring at the expense of a relief fund, and then, as soon as
field labour was possible, distributing them among the peasants who
were without horses.
After visiting the province of Nizhni-Novogorod, Chekhov went with
Suvorin to Voronezh. But this expedition was not a successful one. He
was revolted by the ceremonious dinners with which he was welcomed
as an author, while the whole province was suffering from famine.
Moreover travelling with Suvorin tied him down and hindered his
independent action. Chekhov longed for intense personal activity such
as he displayed later in his campaign against the cholera.

In the winter of the same year his long-cherished dream was realized:
he bought himself an estate. It was in the province of Moscow, near the
hamlet of Melihovo. As an estate it had nothing to recommend it but an
old, badly laid out homestead, wastes of land, and a forest that had been
felled. It had been bought on the spur of the moment, simply because it
had happened to turn up. Chekhov had never been to the place before
he bought it, and only visited it when all the formalities had been
completed. One could hardly turn round near the house for the mass of
hurdles and fences. Moreover the Chekhovs moved into it in the winter
when it was under snow, and all boundaries being obliterated, it was
impossible to tell what was theirs and what was not. But in spite of all
that, Chekhov's first impression was favourable, and he never showed a
sign of being disappointed. He was delighted by the approach of spring
and the fresh surprises that were continually being revealed by the
melting snow. Suddenly it would appear that a whole haystack
belonged to him which he had supposed to be a neighbour's, then an
avenue of lime-trees came to light which they had not distinguished
before under the snow. Everything that was amiss in the place,
everything he did not like, was at once abolished or altered. But in spite
of all the defects of the house and its surroundings, and the appalling
road from the station (nearly nine miles) and the lack of rooms, so
many visitors came that there was nowhere to put them, and beds had
sometimes to be made up in the passages. Chekhov's household at this
time consisted of his father and mother, his sister, and his younger
brother Mihail. These were all permanent inmates of Melihovo.
As soon as the snow had disappeared the various