The little salmon-pink house at No 6 Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya on Moscow's inner ring road stands out from its neighbours. It is a rare and charming survivor from those days before the revolution when houses had their own gardens and Moscow was much smaller than the giant of 12 million souls that exists today.
The first indication of the little house's significance is an old metal plate set into the wall near the side door. It lets passers-by know that this was the house of a general practitioner, and tells us, in plain Russian, who he was. The plate's Cyrillic lettering makes the simple announcement: "Doctor A. P. Chekhov." Here, every afternoon from 12.00 to 3.00 p.m., Dr Anton Chekhov received his patients. Most of the rest of his time was spent writing or entertaining his guests. The composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a frequent visitor, as was the painter Isaac Levitan and Vladimir Gilyarovsky, the most celebrated journalist of the time.
The Chekhovs were from Taganrog, a town in southern Russia with a largely Greek population. The writer's father had been a serf and owned a badly-run, slovenly grocery store at which young Anton was forced to work behind the counter. The business failed and the family moved to Moscow. Anton stayed in the south to complete his secondary education, arrived in Moscow in the autumn of 1879 aged 19 and immediately enrolled in the medical faculty of the university. He qualified in 1884 and set up his practice at Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya two years later.
The house, with an extension housing a lecture hall, now bears the title of "State Literary Museum of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov under the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation" - but things are not at all as formal as the name suggests. Like most other Russian museums, the Chekhov house is run by a clutch of elderly women who take great pride in their jobs and, provided one observes the rules, can be extremely helpful and courteous. The golden rule is to pay the small entry fee, hand in one's overcoat at the garderobe, and don one's tapochki. These are outsized slippers placed over shoes so that the summer dust (or winter snow) is not carried through the house.
After that it's plain sailing - unless one of the tapochki falls off, which it invariably does. A quick re-installation is then necessary before proceeding through the house. The most important room is the study, where an autographed picture of Tchaikovsky stands on the green baize of the table at which young Dr Chekhov wrote more than 100 short stories. These included the autobiographical "Steppe" and the tragic "A Dreary Story", which portrays the mental agony of an elderly and dying professor of medicine. Here, too, he wrote the play Ivanov, which tells of the suicide of a young man his own age.
Chekhov spent just six years in the house before buying a country estate at Melikhovo, 40 miles to the south. Nevertheless, the Moscow house is important in that it was here that he matured as a writer. It also contains many mementoes of his life after he left the metropolis, including his personal library and medical instruments, and posters for the first performances of Uncle Vanya, The Seagull and Three Sisters. In an upstairs room there is a poignant telegram to the Vedomosti newspaper telling of the writer's death at the age of 44 in Badenweiler in Germany in 1904. There are also a number of fine paintings by his brother Nikolai.
Melikhovo, which is also a museum, can be visited by taking the electric train, the Elektrichka, from Moscow and travelling onwards by bus. Visitors can stay overnight at a hotel on the estate. This museum is devoted to the short stories and the one play, The Seagull, definitely known to have been written in the Melikhovo period.
Stricken with tuberculosis, in 1897 Chekhov sold Melikhovo and moved to the Black Sea resort of Yalta, a town that he despised as cheap and provincial. Here he wrote Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard and The Lady with the Dog. The villa at Autka in Yalta houses a third museum, but the trip there is recommended only for the fanatical devotee. The flight from Moscow to Simferopol takes about two hours. A Ukrainian visa is needed - and so is a Russian "double-entry visa" to allow one to return to Moscow.
