Melikhovo

Melikhovo (Russian: Ме́лихово) is a writer's house museum in the former country estate of the Russian playwright and writer Anton Chekhov. 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. The estate is located about forty miles south of Moscow near Chekhov.

After his return from Sakhalin island in 1891, Chekhov wrote in a letter: "If I am a doctor, then I need sick people and a hospital; if I am a writer, then I need to live among people, and not on Malaya Dimotrovka [a street in Moscow.]... I need a piece of social and political life,". 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.

A small country house owned by Nikolai Sorokhtin, a set decorator for the Hermitage summer garden theater in Moscow, was on the market. it was located in the small settlement of Melikhovo, which in 1890 had three country estates and a population of three hundred. The wooden house had been built in the 1840s in the Russian neoclassical style, and Sorokhtin had remodeled it in a more picturesque style. Sorokhtin ran short of funds and in the beginning of 1892 he placed an advertisement in the newspaper Moskovskiy Vedomosti. Chekhov saw the advertisement, met with him on February 2, 1892, and purchased the house. The Chekhov family moved there on March 1, 1892, and Chekhov himself arrived on March 4.

Chekhov lived in the one-story main house with his mother, his sister, Maria Chekhova, and his father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov. He had his study and library with a desk by a window looking at the garden. His desk portraits of the writers and artists he most admired; Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Peter Tchaikovsky, Dmitry Grigorovich, and Viktor Goltsev. In his early years at Melikhovo, his study also served as his medical office, where he saw patients. Sick residents of the region began gathering outside the house from five to six o'clock in the morning. He kept medicines in a cabinet on the wall of his study for his patients. 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.

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