Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Family and Friends | Page 7

duties in the house
and on the land were assigned: Chekhov's sister undertook the
flower-beds and the kitchen garden, his younger brother undertook the
field work. Chekhov himself planted the trees and looked after them.
His father worked from morning till night weeding the paths in the
garden and making new ones.
Everything attracted the new landowner: planting the bulbs and
watching the flight of rooks and starlings, sowing the clover, and the
goose hatching out her goslings. By four o'clock in the morning
Chekhov was up and about. After drinking his coffee he would go out

into the garden and would spend a long time scrutinizing every
fruit-tree and every rose-bush, now cutting off a branch, now training a
shoot, or he would squat on his heels by a stump and gaze at something
on the ground. It turned out that there was more land than they needed
(639 acres), and they farmed it themselves, with no bailiff or steward,
assisted only by two labourers, Frol and Ivan.
At eleven o'clock Chekhov, who got through a good deal of writing in
the morning, would go into the dining-room and look significantly at
the clock. His mother would jump up from her seat and her
sewing-machine and begin to bustle about, crying: "Oh dear! Antosha
wants his dinner!"
When the table was laid there were so many homemade and other
dainties prepared by his mother that there would hardly be space on the
table for them. There was not room to sit at the table either. Besides the
five permanent members of the family there were invariably outsiders
as well. After dinner Chekhov used to go off to his bedroom and lock
himself in to "read." Between his after-dinner nap and tea-time he
wrote again. The time between tea and supper (at seven o'clock in the
evening) was devoted to walks and outdoor work. At ten o'clock they
went to bed. Lights were put out and all was stillness in the house; the
only sound was a subdued singing and monotonous recitation. This was
Pavel Yegorovitch repeating the evening service in his room: he was
religious and liked to say his prayers aloud.
From the first day that Chekhov moved to Melihovo the sick began
flocking to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were
brought in carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance.
Sometimes from early in the morning peasant women and children
were standing before his door waiting. He would go out, listen to them
and sound them, and would never let one go away without advice and
medicine. His expenditure on drugs was considerable, as he had to keep
a regular store of them. Once some wayfarers brought Chekhov a man
they had picked up by the roadside in the middle of the night, stabbed
in the stomach with a pitchfork. The peasant was carried into his study
and put down in the middle of the floor, and Chekhov spent a long time

looking after him, examining his wounds and bandaging them up. But
what was hardest for Chekhov was visiting the sick at their own homes:
sometimes there was a journey of several hours, and in this way the
time essential for writing was wasted.
The first winter at Melihovo was cold; it lasted late and food was short.
Easter came in the snow. There was a church at Melihovo in which a
service was held only once a year, at Easter. Visitors from Moscow
were staying with Chekhov. The family got up a choir among
themselves and sang all the Easter matins and mass. Pavel Yegorovitch
conducted as usual. It was out of the ordinary and touching, and the
peasants were delighted: it warmed their hearts to their new neighbours.
Then the thaw came. The roads became appalling. There were only
three broken-down horses on the estate and not a wisp of hay. The
horses had to be fed on rye straw chopped up with an axe and sprinkled
with flour. One of the horses was vicious and there was no getting it
out of the yard. Another was stolen in the fields and a dead horse left in
its place. And so for a long time there was only one poor spiritless
beast to drive which was nicknamed Anna Petrovna. This Anna
Petrovna contrived to trot to the station, to take Chekhov to his patients,
to haul logs and to eat nothing but straw sprinkled with flour. But
Chekhov and his family did not lose heart. Always affectionate, gay
and plucky, he cheered the others, work went ahead, and in less than
three months everything in the place was changed: the house was
furnished with crockery; there was the ring of carpenters' axes; six
horses were bought, and all