Melikhovo

Chekhov lived in the estate from March 1892 until August 1899, and it is where he wrote some of his most famous plays and stories, including The Seagull and Uncle Vanya.

[2] Besides his desire to be a more active doctor, Chekhov wanted to move to the country to improve his health, which had suffered from his trip to Sakhalin.

[3] A small country house owned by Nikolai Sorokhtin, a set decorator for the Hermitage summer garden theater in Moscow, was on the market.

His desk portraits of the writers and artists he most admired; Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Peter Tchaikovsky, Dmitry Grigorovich, and Viktor Goltsev.

He was particularly busy during the cholera epidemic which struck Russia in 1892 and 1893; he was responsible for the medical care for 26 villages, seven factories, and a monastery in the region.

He visited the local village schools, and found the conditions deplorable and the teachers underpaid and uninspired.

One teacher he met, in the village of Talezh, a young man with a wife and four children raising a family on an income of 23 rubles a month, probably inspired the character Medvedenko in The Seagull.

[6] In the summer of 1894, Chekhov had constructed a small two-story guest cottage not far from the house, with a terrace overlooking the garden.

In 1898, upon his return from Nice, in France, he wrote a trilogy of three famous stories there: The Man in a Case, About Love, and Gooseberries.

In May 1899, after the success of the Seagull at the Moscow Art Theater, he invited the leading actress of the play, Olga Knipper, to visit him.

[7] "I am writing a play," Chekhov wrote to his friend Suvorin from Melikhovo in October 1896, "which I will finish no earlier than the end of November.

"[9] Chekhov told another visitor, the writer Ivan Bunin, "In the morning it's necessary to drink not tea, but coffee, which is a wonderful thing.

"[10] Chekhov was very sociable at Melikhovo, enjoying the company of writers, artists, teachers, actors, and ordinary people.

Within three months of moving in, Chekhov and his sister had studied books of horticulture and planted flowers, fruit trees, and vegetables, including exotic varieties such as eggplant and artichokes.

[13] Chekhov himself worked in the garden, planted ten fruit trees in his first year and ordered vegetable and flower seeds from catalogs.

[19] The estate was nationalized by the Bolsheviks in October 1918, and declared a site of historical and cultural importance, but little was done to protect the house and property.

Melikhovo was declared a state monument in June 1944, even as World War II was underway, and work began again to restore the buildings.