A sunny day. Early autumn. In the foreground is a veranda of a stone house, with a small area in front of it. On the right are trees with yellow and green foliage. In the distance are green fields, a forest and a cloudy sky. This is the Babkino estate in the Moscow region, where the Chekhovs spent their summers and where a family friend, the artist Isaac Ilyich Levitan, stayed with them.

Summer seasons in Babkino were very fruitful, free and invigorating. Anton Chekhov wrote dozens of stories there, and Levitan painted a series of studies from life. On warm evenings some funny games and performances were often arranged in the vast meadow, and people swam and fished in the Istra river. Mikhail Chekhov, the writer’s younger brother, reminisced,

At “Babkino” evenings people shared all kinds of stories, many of which turned into the plots of Chekhov’s stories (. Chekhov’s room overlooked the picturesque Istra environs, and Anton described this view in a letter to his brother Mikhail,

When Levitan fell ill and had to leave for Moscow, he wrote a letter to Chekhov expressing his “heartfelt gratitude to all local people” and asked him to tell them that he was looking forward to “seeing this poetic Babkino again”. However, the painter experienced bouts of melancholy a few times here, slipping into a severe depression, he had suffered from since early adolescence. Anton Pavlovich would take long walks with his friend around Babkino, went woodcock hunting with him, and the artist benefited from Chekhov’s calm and harmonious disposition.