Four
In September 2015, I walked into Merihovo with a delegation of Chinese writers and walked into the autumn of Merihovo.
In March 1892, Chekhov, who was in his early thirties but had already won a very high position in the Russian literary world, led his family from Moscow to Mérikhov. The Chekhov family had not lived very well before, and after Chekhov became a great writer, it was finally possible to buy a manor for the family. In 1892, Chekhov saw in the newspaper an advertisement for the sale of Sorokhkin, the owner of the Merryhovo estate, and spent thirteen thousand rubles to buy the real estate here. After that, Chekhov's whole family went into battle, and worked hard to renovate and build new houses, cultivate the land, and finally turn Merryhovo into a decent manor. Chekhov often spoke of his estate in letters to friends. When he first arrived at the manor he wrote: "I stayed in the manor I bought for three days in a row. Good impression. The road from the station to the manor is always hidden in the forest... The estate itself is also beautiful. Years later he wrote: "As you know, I now live in the countryside, on my own estate... I didn't have a family and I wasn't rich as before... My parents live with me, they see old age, but the body is OK. My sister lives here in the summer, runs the estate, and teaches in Moscow in the winter. Several of the brothers had their own jobs. My estate is not big or pretty, and the house is small, like the house of the landlady Korobochka (a character in Gogol's Dead Souls), but life is quiet and cheap, and the summer is very comfortable. ”
National Museum of Literature of Merihovo
The core building of the Merryhovo estate is an eight-room bungalow, in which, in addition to Chekhov's study and bedroom, the bedrooms of Chekhov's father, mother, sister and brother are still preserved. Chekhov's parents lived in Merriehovo, and his siblings and nephews were also residents of Merriehovo, and they formed a large family. Chekhov, after becoming a great writer, still lived with his extended family, which is very rare among Russian writers, for reasons that, in addition to the inherent tradition of the Chekhov family of small merchants, are undoubtedly related to Chekhov's own easy-going and tolerant character.
In this manor, now a national museum of literature, Chekhov's humor can be felt anytime and anywhere. There is a small pond behind the main house, which was dug by the Chekhov family after moving in, and it is said that Chekhov liked to sit on the edge of the pond and fish, he called this pond a "aquarium" (which can also be translated as a "fish tank"); Chekhov's study was directly opposite a vegetable field, and it is said that Chekhov's sister Maria was good at growing vegetables, and every autumn, this vegetable garden was always fruitful, so Chekhov called it "South france"; there was an old elm tree in the garden, which Chekhov called "mantle oak" (the Bible writes, Jehovah appeared to Abraham by the mantle oak tree), and he also installed a "three-bedroom" birdcage in the tree by his own hands, named "Starling Brothers Restaurant"; Chekhov loved dogs, and after staying in Merryhovo, he brought two short-legged hound cubs from his friends, named Hima and Brom, and after a few years, the dogs had grown up, and he thought that they should be given the honorific title of "Xena Markovna" and "Brom Isaevich", just like the Russians did with adults.
A pond that Chekhov called an "aquarium"
Chekhov not only placed his family in Merriehovo, he also regarded Merriehovo and its surrounding areas as his extended family. The "Merriehovo period" (1892-1899) was the prime of Chekhov's life and the period when his social activities were most active. During this period, Chekhov was twice elected to the three-year term of the Sherpkhov Village Council in 1894 and 1897; Chekhov built three schools for the children of peasants here (the former site of these schools is now the Museum of Rural Teachers, the Museum of Village Schools and the Museum of the Protagonist of Chekhov's Works, all branches of the Chekhov Merihovo Literary Museum); and on his suggestion, the Post and Telecommunications Office was established in the town of Lopasnia, where Merriehovo is located (the former site of which is now the Chekhov Epistle Museum). What is even more remembered is that shortly after Chekhov's stay in Merriehovo, cholera epidemics in the region, Chekhov bravely stepped forward as a doctor, at the invitation of the local government, to set up a clinic to see patients free of charge, and the patrol area he was responsible for included twenty-five villages, four factories and a monastery, he had no assistants, no subsidies, all the expenses were paid for by himself and everywhere, he even grew herbs in his own homes, and made his own medicines. Chekhov's medical practice in Merryhovo once made Chekhov himself famously say: "Medicine is my legitimate wife, and literature is my lover." It also made his researchers later summarize: "Chekhov as a writer never prescribes medicine for people, and Chekhov as a doctor always treats diseases and saves people." ”
Chekhov used to make Merriehovo his home, and the vast area where Merriehovo was located is now Chekhov's eternal home. In honor of Chekhov, the Lopasnia district where Merryhovo is located is now named Chekhov District, and the city of Lopasnia, where the district is located, is also renamed Chekhov City.
A vegetable garden that Chekhov called the "South of France"
Forty-two of Chekhov's more than three hundred works written during his lifetime (excluding his large number of early humorous sketches) were written in Merryhovo. From 1886, when he began "seriously writing" at the suggestion of Grigorovich, to his death in 1904, Chekhov's work lasted less than twenty years, of which seven years of writing in Merriehovo can be said to be the golden harvest of his creation. After a long trip to Sakhalin, Chekhov rested in the tranquil Merikhov, meditated, and finished writing "Travels on Sakhalin Island". Chekhov's novellas of this period often take place in the "county seat С" and the surrounding countryside, which refers to the sherpkhov county near Merihovo. Many of Chekhov's novels, such as "The Duel", "Ward Six", "The Black Friar", "The Teacher of Literature", "Anna Hanging Around the Neck", "The House with the Attic", "My Life", "The Man in the Set", "The Peasant", etc., were written in this period.
In Chekhov's study, the docent asked everyone to pay attention to the hue of the room, from the velvet on the writing desk to the sofa and armchair, all green, the docent said that Chekhov suffered from a serious eye disease, and had to lie down for a long time to write, green can alleviate his visual fatigue. The three rectangular windows juxtaposed in the study face the vegetable patch that her sister Maria had run, which was still lush in autumn. Chekhov's famous nose-clipping glasses were also placed in the glass cover on the desk, and next to the glasses was a transparent board with a thick horizontal line, which Chekhov used to put under the manuscript paper and write according to the horizontal grid that came through. On several Chekhov manuscripts on the table, the handwriting is also very large. Looking at the transparencies and manuscripts next to the nose-clamping glasses, I felt that Chekhov's famous, iconic pair of nose-clamping glasses was no longer the elegance of a gentlemanly intellectual, but the hardships of an incomparably diligent writer.
Chekhov wrote the hut of the Seagull
Chekhov's family was thriving, not to mention the large number of visitors, which was a hindrance to a writer, so chekhov built a hut for himself in 1894. Tucked away deep in the garden, this small wooden house has only a study and a small bedroom, the cottage is painted light and the stairs and doors are painted dark red. It was in this small room, which resembled a stage prop, that Chekhov wrote The Seagull. On the outer wall at the entrance to the hut now hangs a white marble slab with a few words engraved on it: "The house where I wrote The Seagull." Chekhov. In this so-called "Seagull Hut," Chekhov wrote other plays such as Uncle Vanya.
Chekhov left Merihovo in 1899 and sold the manor to a Russian nobleman named Stuart, who was shot after the October Revolution, confiscated the manor, and used as an orphanage, a warehouse of a collective farm, and a livestock shed, and almost all of the buildings in the manor were destroyed, and only this hut remained intact (the buildings in the manor were restored in the original form according to the designs and photographs preserved by Chekhov's sister and nephew when the museum was established in 1940). Most of the exhibits are also donated in kind by Chekhov's family), perhaps because it is located in a more unobtrusive position; perhaps because it is too small to be used for other purposes. At the Merriehovo estate, only this cottage is closed to visitors, and we can only peek through the crack in the door to see the cradle of modern Russian drama.
The autumn of Mélihovo is like Leviathan's paintings (Leviathan, as Chekhov's friend, as Chekhov's sister's painting teacher, and a regular visitor to Mérikhov), colorful, quiet but also contains restlessness. When we walked into the manor after a sudden rainstorm, we saw that the green grass was littered with yellow, red, or red, yellow, and green leaves, and the leaves that remained on the branches were still bright green. Ripe apples are either hung on branches or fallen on the ground, and I don't know whether it is museum staff or tourists, who kindly pick up the red apples that have fallen on the ground and put them on benches on the side of the road for others to eat.
Autumn in Merryhovo
In Merriehovo, Chekhov, who was "as unmarried as before," also reaped two of his loves. Shortly after the Chekhov family moved into Merriehovo, Chekhov's sister Maria often brought her female colleague from the Moscow secondary school, Ritia Michinova, to the house, and Maria later wrote in her memoirs: "In the summer, Rika (the nickname of Michnova's name) came to stay with us in Merriejovo for a long time. She had many excellent musical evenings with us. Rika sang well... A rather complex relationship arose between Rika and Anton Pavlovich (i.e. Chekhov). They walked very closely and seemed attached to each other. "Regarding the romance of the two men, some people have written monographs, Mr. Tong Daoming has done delicate speculation and poetic reproduction in the play "Love Chekhov", and the photo of Chekhov and Michnova taken in Merry hop in 1897 has also been used as a poster for the play when it was staged at the National Theatre of China. Judging by the clothes of the two people in this photo and the plants around them, the time is like the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The three-year romance ended with Rika eloping to Paris, but it left a deep mark on Chekhov's creation, and lika can be found in many of Chekhov's characters such as Nina in "The Seagull".
In September 1898, at the scene of the rehearsal of "The Seagull" at the Moscow Art Theater, Chekhov fell in love with the theater actress Kneibir at first sight. In early May of the following year, he took Kneibir back to Merriehovo, where he spent three unforgettable days, around the time of Merijovo, where they made the decision to marry. Chekhov and Michnova, Chekhov and Kneibir, two seven-year romances began in autumn, and two different endings constituted the beginning and end of the emotional life of Chekhov Merryhovo.
Walking along the long linden tree path of Merriehovo, the autumn breeze blows, as if Chekhov, dressed in a trench coat and wearing a top hat, will appear at the end of the road in the blink of an eye. He was so in tune with the autumn atmosphere of the manor that it was the manor that added a lot to his personality or whether he shaped the manor with his style. Chekhov lived in Merriehovo for seven years. Chekhov had seven autumns in Merryhovo. People always like to use autumn to describe Chekhov's creative personality, and indeed, Chekhov's life and creation constitute a certain high degree of fit and echo with Merryhovo's autumn. The autumn of Merihovo is beautiful, but it also exudes inexplicable helplessness; the autumn of Merriehovo is sad, but full of joy of harvest; the autumn of Merriehovo is bright, but also full of mystery and alienation.
Dax dog statue at the National Museum of Literature in Merihovo
As we were about to walk out of the Merihovo estate, we suddenly heard a noise coming from the lawn behind the Chekhov Monument, where the annual "All-Russian Chekhov Short-legged Hound Festival" was being held. The docent proudly told us that Merriehovo hosts two major events of world influence every year: the "International Theatre Festival of the Spring of Merihovo", where theaters from all over the world perform Chekhov's plays every year, and the garden, under the trees and by the pond become the stage for the actors; the other is the "Hound Festival", where short-legged hounds from all over Russia bring their dogs to the competition. We arrived at the arena, but saw dozens of short-legged hounds, who bore a striking resemblance to Chekhov's dogs, Hina and Brom, taking turns on the field, and a german referee scored based on the dogs' appearance and gait, and awarded certificates of varying ranks. Mélihovo is undoubtedly one of the most ideal stages for theatre festivals in Russia and around the world, but such dog carnivals may not be able to please Chekhov, and I found that Chekhov on the monument always had a bronze neck and did not want to look back at the game behind him.
Five
In 1899, Chekhov wrote a short story entitled "The New Villa", in which the engineer Kucherov built a beautiful bridge on the side of a village and asked his wife to come and like the village, "and asked her husband to buy a small piece of land and build a villa here", "Her husband relied on her." They bought twenty acres of land and built a beautiful two-story house on the edge of the forest clearing on the steep shore where the former villagers of Obruchanovo had herded cattle, with a veranda, a balcony, a tower, and a flagpole on the roof, on which a flag was flying every Sunday. The house was built in about three months, and then they planted large trees all winter, and when spring came, there was already woods in the new manor, and the gardener and two workers in white aprons were digging up the land near the main house, a small fountain was spraying water, and a mirrored orb shone brightly, and looking at it made the eyes ache. This estate has been given a name, 'New Villa'". The description of the "new villa" here is almost the "design" made by Chekhov himself for the villa planned to be built in Yalta at that time.
Chekhov's villa in Yalta
This year, Chekhov's tuberculosis was getting worse, and doctors recommended that he move to the warm climate and fresh air of the southern Part of Russia. At this time, Chekhov's father died, and the Merriehovo estate appeared empty, so Chekhov decided to leave Merihovo. He signed a contract with the publisher Adolph Márquez to sell the copyright to the complete works for seventy-five thousand rubles, and used the proceeds of the "advance" fee to purchase a thirty-seven-acre plot of land in the village of Autka, on the outskirts of Yalta, and began to build houses. The construction process lasted ten months, and in September 1899, Chekhov moved into a new home with his mother and sister. It is a three-story building with a total of nine rooms and is known as the "White Villa".
The Russian writer Kuplin, who was a guest of Chekhov's family at that time, had this description of the villa: "The whole villa is painted white, very neat, very light, there is an asymmetrical beauty, built in a style of architecture that is difficult to determine, there is a tower-like attic, there are several unexpected protrusions, there is a balcony with glass windows on the lower level, there is an open terrace on the upper floor, and the open windows are wide and narrow, the villa is somewhat similar to modernism, but there is no doubt that there is someone's very thoughtful and ingenious idea in its design. Have someone's unique interest. The designer That Chekhov invited to design the room, Shapovalov, was a secondary school teacher at the time, and he naturally listened to Chekhov himself during the design process, and the "very thoughtful and ingenious creativity" and "unique fun" in the design of this villa undoubtedly came from Chekhov himself. In the same memoir, Kuplin also wrote that someone told Chekhov that the building was built on a steep slope, that the road next to the house often had dust drifting into the room, and that the garden was located on a slope, and it was difficult to maintain water and soil, but Chekhov listened to it but did not think so: "Before me, it was a wasteland and an unorganized gully, full of stones and weeds. I came and turned this wild land into a beautiful civilized land... Did you know that in another three or four hundred years, this land will be transformed into a garden full of flowers? At that time, life will become particularly easy and comfortable. He also jokingly said: "If I give up literature now and become a gardener, it would be good, it would allow me to live for more than ten years." Chekhov planted more than a hundred kinds of trees on this slope, including cypress, poplar, cedar, willow, magnolia, lilac, palm, mulberry and hawthorn, and today the grass is thriving and has long become a real big garden.
Today, the YaltaChekhov House Museum
From September 1899 to May 1904, Chekhov lived in the White Villa in Yalta for more than four years, the last four years of Chekhov's life and a period of summing up his creations. Here he wrote ten short stories, namely "Baby", "The New Villa", "Tolerance", "The Woman with the Puppy", "At Christmas Season", "In the Canyon", "The Bishop", "The Obstacle of Compensation", "A Letter" and "The Bride", as well as two plays, "The Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard", which are his most mature works, and he also compiled his first complete work here.
When he lived in Yalta, Chekhov was already one of the central figures in the Russian literary scene, and the White Villa thus became one of the centers of Russian cultural life at that time, with a large number of guests and high-end friends. In Yalta, Chekhov left a group photo with Tolstoy and Gorky, Tolstoy was the titan of literature, Gorky was a rookie in the literary world, and Chekhov was like a key figure in Russian literature, who together formed the "troika" of Russian literature. Other important writers of the time, such as Andreyev and Korolenko, as well as the budding Bunin and Kuplin, visited the area. Chekhov's artist friends also visited Chekhov, Leviathan painted the scenery here, Shariabin sang here, and Rachmaninoff played the piano in chekhov's living room. What made Chekhov most happy was the visit of the entire staff of the Moscow Art Theater in April 1900, when Stanislavsky and Danchenko toured chekhov's "Seagull" in Yalta, and before and after the performance, the actors gathered in the white villa, everyone talked and laughed, and Chekhov was in love with Kneyer, the heroine of the art theater.
Chekhov and Kneibir
The White Villa remained unchanged since Chekhov's departure, thanks to Chekhov's sister Maria Chekhova, who is the true patron saint of the villa. Maria is three years younger than her brother, and since her third brother officially began to write literature, she has helped her brother wholeheartedly, taking care of his brother's life, handling his brother's copyright affairs, and she is also the real hostess of Merriehovo and the White Villa, and she has not even married for life. After her brother's death, she devoted her life to protecting and disseminating Chekhov's literary heritage. Shortly after her brother's death, she asked Chekhov's admirers to go into the White Villa to visit the writer's bedroom and study, even though she and her mother had been living on the second and third floors of the White Villa. After the October Revolution, the White House was nationalized, but Maria was appointed life caretaker and was able to live there until her death in 1957 at the age of ninety-four. Under her protection, Chekhov's former home remained the same. According to statistics, there are currently more than a dozen Chekhov museums in various countries in the world, including six in Russia, two in Ukraine, one each in Germany and Sri Lanka, and the chekhov museum with the most abundant collection is the Chekhov House Museum in Yalta, which has a collection of 13,000 pieces, including Chekhov's manuscripts, various editions of publications, Chekhov's living supplies, letters and pictures.
Chekhov's sister Maria Chekhova
Like every city where Chekhov left its deep mark, Yalta is fondly nostalgic for Chekhov, which is also home to the Chekhov Monument and Chekhov Street in addition to the "White Villa" Chekhov House Museum. In the aforementioned novel The New Villa, where the owner of the new villa ends up selling his villa and leaving the village because he cannot get along with the villagers, Chekhov uses this story to show the estrangement between the Russian landlords and peasants, and more broadly, the gap between the rich and the poor, between the natives and outsiders, and even the ubiquitous difficulty in communication between people. But in Yalta's real life, Chekhov was deeply integrated into the local society. Chekhov's most noteworthy act of kindness was his proposal to create a tuberculosis sanatorium here. Around the time Chekhov settled in Yalta, thousands of patients with tuberculosis also came here, hoping that the sun and air would help them overcome the disease, including penniless university students and other poor people, some of whom had turned to Chekhov for help. Knowing this, Chekhov advocated the construction of a charitable nursing home in Yalta, and he published an appeal in the newspaper entitled "Please Help the Dying People!" Chekhov's fundraising aroused a warm response, and in a short period of time it was collected forty thousand rubles, and Chekhov himself took out another five thousand rubles and used this money to buy a property on the outskirts of Yalta and build a sanatorium. This nursing home for tuberculosis patients is still functioning today, saving thousands of patients over the centuries. Yalta failed to save Chekhov's life, but the Chekhov Tuberculosis Sanatorium, which he initiated and funded, restored the health of many tuberculosis patients.
Not far from Taganrog, Chekhov's birthplace, Yalta is located at the northern end of the Sea of Azov and the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula, separated by the not-so-vast Sea of Azov, with a straight-line distance of only four or five hundred kilometers.
Chekhov in Yalta in 1900
Six
In the summer of 2015, I accompanied a delegation from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to the University of Freiburg in Germany, and after the visit, we took a bus from Freiburg to Stuttgart Airport. It's a long way to go, but the scenery along the way is beautiful; Germany's motorways have no speed limit, but our buses only have a speed of more than 100 kilometers per hour. I was quietly admiring the scenery on both sides of the road, and suddenly, in the distance, I saw in the distance that the sign in front of me had a familiar place name Badenweiler – Badenweiler, where Chekhov died! The small town of Badenweiler was on my right hand, and the town, surrounded by forests, flashed by, and the scene of Chekhov's death here a hundred and eleven decades ago came to my mind.
In June 1904, Chekhov's tuberculosis condition worsened, and doctors advised him to go abroad for recuperation, and Chekhov consulted with doctors and his family and chose badenweiler, a small town in southwestern Germany. On June 3, 1904, when Chekhov and his wife left Moscow, he said to those who had come to see him off: "I am going to die." The Chekhovs lived in a nursing home in Badenweiler, but Chekhov's condition did not improve. On the night of July 1, Chekhov woke up, and according to chekhov's son, who had been with him, he later recalled, "For the first time in his life, he asked someone to call a doctor over", and offered to drink some champagne, he sat up from his bed and said loudly in German to the doctor who rushed to the bedside: "Ichsterbe." Then he repeated the meaning of the sentence to his wife in Russian: "I am going to die." After that, he raised his glass, faced his wife, smiled, and said, "I haven't drunk champagne in a long time..." Then calmly drank the champagne, lay down gently, lay down to the left, and soon fell asleep permanently, in his wife's words, "sleeping like a baby", in the early morning of July 2.
Chekhov said, "Everything about man should be beautiful, whether it is a face, or a garment, a heart, or a mind." "Everything about him is indeed beautiful, even his death.
Chekhov Monument in Badenweiler
Badenweiler is a well-known European spa resort, and countless European celebrities have visited Chekhov before and after, but the town still prides itself on chekhov's legacy: a Chekhov monument on a hillside in the town; the sanatorium room where Chekhov lived is turned into a museum, with a bronze relief of Chekhov hanging on the wall next to the balcony, a seagull-shaped sculpture under the balcony, and a sister city relationship with Chekhov's hometown of Taganrog.
Seven
The city where Chekhov left the most traces is probably Moscow, where I was most impressed by the three "Chekhov places".
Moscow Art Theatre
The first is the Moscow Art Theatre. The Moscow Art Theatre was founded by the famous directors Stanislavsky and Danchenko, but its artistic birth owes it to Chekhov, to Chekhov's play The Seagull. Written in 1895 before the founding of the Art Theatre, Seagull was staged in Petersburg without success, but this did not hinder Danchenko's determination to use the play to make a name for himself in the Art Theater, and he painstakingly persuaded Chekhov to come up with a play, in which he called "The Seagull" "the only contemporary play that makes it difficult for me as a director to let go of it.". Finally, "The Seagull" was performed at the Moscow Art Theater in December 1898 with unprecedented success, and Chekhov's close cooperation with the Art Theater began. In the following years, Chekhov wrote famous plays such as "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters" and "Cherry Orchard" for the theater.
Starting with "The Seagull", people have developed a new understanding of the so-called stage reality, the inner world of man has become the main object of reproduction of the drama, and the so-called "undercurrent of emotion" has completely changed the face of the theater. On the lintel at the entrance of the old theater of the Moscow Art Theater today, there is a huge statue of a seagull, and a seagull pattern flying above the waves has also become the emblem of the art theater, and people are showing the immortality of Chekhov and his "Seagull" in this way. A play creates a theater, a theatrical genre, even a theatrical aesthetic, and this is Chekhov's dedication to the Moscow Art Theatre, to Russian theatre and even to the theater of the whole world.
On my first visit to Moscow in 1989, I went to the Art Theatre on a winter night to see Chekhov's play, I remember it was "Three Sisters", at the end of the play, when the eldest of the three sisters put her arm around the shoulders of two sisters and read out the famous monologue on the stage: "How joyful the music is played, how exciting, I really want to live!" Oh, my God! One day, we will be gone forever, people will forget us, our faces, our voices and our age, but our suffering will be transformed into the joy of future generations, happiness and peace will come to the earth, and the people who live now will be blessed. Oh dear sister, our lives are not over yet. We will live on! How joyful the music is played, how cheerful it seems, it seems that it will not be long before we will know that we live for what we live for, that we suffer because of what... If you can know, if you can know! The whole place was extremely quiet, there was no sound, a few moments, yellow leaves fell from above the stage, one, two, more and more, slowly falling in thunderous applause.
Statue of Chekhov at the intersection of the Attendant Officer Alley and Tver Street
Secondly, there is the statue of Chekhov at the intersection of the Attendant Alley and Tver Street, where the Moscow Art Theater is located. In 2004, on the centenary of Chekhov's death, a new statue of Chekhov was inaugurated in a central garden at the intersection of Tver Street, moscow's main street, in the alley where the Moscow Art Theater is located. I came to this monumental statue on a business trip to Moscow, and it was shocking because it best embodied Chekhov's character and manners, and seemed to constitute the eternal embodiment of Chekhov's humility and kindness: the slender Chekhov leaned on a half-man-high platform, his body a little nervous, and seemed to be about to get up to help some passerby in front of him, his thin face showing a tired and even sick face, but his looking eyes clearly contained compassion and understanding.
Much has been left with descriptions and corroborating evidence of Chekhov's kindness. Chekhov's wife, Knebel, later wrote in her memoirs about Chekhov's first impression: "I will never forget the moment I first stood before Chekhov. We all deeply feel the charm of His humanity, his simplicity, his inability to 'teach' and 'guide'..." What impressed Knebel was Chekhov's "simplicity" and "unscoring."
Chekhov was called "Pushkin of the Novel" by Tolstoy, and was recognized as one of the world's most outstanding short story writers when he was alive, but he never regarded himself as a master, but maintained good relations with almost all the writers of his generation; Chekhov, who had a strong sense of equality, always opposed the opposition between "genius" and "philistine", "poet" and "gangster", and so on, and wrote in a letter to a friend in 1888: "To divide man into winners and losers is to use narrow, narrow, A preconceived view of the nature of man. Anticipating that he would die soon, Chekhov made a will to his sister, leaving the property to his mother, sister and wife, and he deliberately emphasized, "After the death of your mother and you, all the property will be donated to the Taganrog Municipal Government for the purpose of the hometown education fund." At the end of his will, he wrote: "Help the poor, love your mother, and keep the harmony of the whole family." ”
Chekhov once said that in his work "there are neither villains nor angels ... I do not condemn or defend anyone.". Standing in front of this statue of Chekhov, we seem to feel his goodness and the greatness and sublimity contained in this goodness, in the current world, Chekhov's peace and "neutrality", Chekhov's calmness and tolerance, compared to those "soul engineers" and "life textbooks", will make us feel closer and closer. Chekhov's kindness and tolerance, Chekhov's sense of equality and the call to "squeeze out servility" are undoubtedly one of the important connotations of the modern meaning of Chekhov's creation.
On a business trip to Moscow last year, I went to see the statue of Chekhov, but suddenly found that a very large monument suddenly stood at the mouth of the alley in front of the statue, and the two people on the monument were tall and imposing, like the Minin and Pozarsky monuments on red square, as if they were intended to contrast greatly with the chekhov statue behind them. Looking closer, fang knew that it was a monument to Stanislavsky and Danchenko. Compared with their monuments, the statue of Chekhov at the corner of the two buildings appears smaller, less conspicuous, and even a little shabby, but I think That Chekhov will not object to the location and size of his monument.
Chekhov's tomb in the New Virgin Cemetery in Moscow
Finally, of course, is Chekhov's tomb in Moscow's New Virgin Cemetery. Once, I led a Chinese writer who loved Chekhov to the New Virgin Cemetery to visit Chekhov's tomb, and asked the gatekeeper for a map Chinese of the cemetery at the entrance of the cemetery. "Before coming to Chekhov's tomb, I saw that the design of the cemetery seemed to have a certain fairy tale color, the cemetery was surrounded by a high iron fence four or five meters square, the pattern on the iron fence was like a rose, the white tombstone was thick, the top was wedge-shaped, there was a tin roof, like a miniature wooden hut, and there were three metal decorations like spears at the top. Chekhov was buried with his father, while his beloved mother and sister were buried in the civic cemetery of Yalta.
Standing quietly in front of Chekhov's tomb, the fallen leaves on the trees and the ground whispering in the breeze, as if to repeat to us what Tolstoy had said at the time of Chekhov's death: "The death of Chekhov is a great loss for us, we have lost not only an incomparable artist, but also a man of distinction, sincerity, integrity... He was a charismatic man, a humble man, a lovely man. ”