Anton Chekhov. A life

Soon, Aleksandr found 'affection' for himself and a mother for his sons. Natalia Golden, Anton's old love Natashevu, re-entered the Chekhov circle. Aleksandr's letter to Anton of 24 October 1888 had a sting in the tail: 'Natalia is living in my apartment, running the household, fussing over the children and keeping me up to scratch. And if she crosses sometimes into concubinage, that's not your business.'

New Times had printed an article on the dying Putiata. Into the office came Natalia to ask where Putiata was living. (Her sister Anastasia was Putiata's estranged wife.) We got chatting. I invited her to visit and have a look at my boys. She agreed, visited and after a few evenings spent between 'the widower and the maid' the end result is that we are living together. She has one room, I have the other. We live, we curse each other from morning to night, but our relationship is entirely conjugal. She fits me like a glove. If our parents, whose old age I intend to console by exemplary behaviour, don't view this 'intimacy' as incest, fornication and onanism, then I have nothing against marriage in church. Anton received a wry note from Natalia: Dear Anton, I know that this letter will astound you gready, but I'm just as astounded. The things that happen! I would love to know your opinion about all that has happened. Sincerely devoted to you, N. Golden.29 Anton answered nothing, until he had another death to announce in Latin, that of Korbo the whippet. The decrepit dog's death in early November took the brothers back to their early days in Moscow in 1877 and brought them together more than the transfer of Nata-shevu's affections. Aleksandr confessed to purloining money from Anton's earnings from New Times. He appended condolences in Latin from his dog, Gershka-Penchuk, who had outlived Korbo.

Within a week Natalia, who, like the other Golden sisters, had a gargantuan appetite for food and sex, was more than Aleksandr could cope with: I could put under her portrait the inscription I saw in childhood in an inn on a picture which showed gorillas grabbing and gnawing at negro women while Englishmen in bowler hats fired guns at them. The inscription is simple but expressive: 'This passionate and sensual beast…'

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ËÈ autumn 1888 Anton received letters from 'the Dauphin'. The Dauphin, an apologist of pogroms, sent anti-Semitic ravings.30 The only effect was to confirm Anton's own respect for Jews and to sow doubts about the whole Suvorin empire's noxiousness. On his other favourite topic the Dauphin found a more sympathetic ear: 'Never marry, Anton, for longer than three months, and if you do, leave your wife before she is thirty, for after thirty a woman, even the most selfless, sees her husband primarily as a convenience.'

Suvorin senior, who had over the past year done little more than tinker with his villa and organize the publication of two books of Chekhov's stories, shook off his torpor at the end of September. He spent a day with Anton in Moscow before going to Petersburg to take control. Suvorin confirmed what Anton already knew: the Russian Academy's 1888 prize for literature was half his. Even before 'Steppe' was published, the committee - run by Grigorovich - had ensured the outcome in Anton's favour. The 500 roubles, added to the income from increased sales of Anton's books, In the Twilight of 1887, and, now, Stories, pulled the Chekhovs out of debt. Suvorin came to congratulate him, followed by Anna Suvorina. Visits from the Suvorins were prestigious, but made Anton a target for Moscow's radicals who fell upon any intimate of New Times.

Suvorin found a distraction after his two sons' deaths: he started a theatre. For the next two decades he surrounded himself with pretty actresses and more or less talented playwrights, while New Times slid into the hands of the Dauphin. Now Suvorin had a play of his own to produce in Moscow, Tatiana Repina. Suvorin and Chekhov agreed to produce each other's plays in their respective cities. Chekhov was to see Tatiana Repina through rehearsal at Korsh's theatre, while Suvorin would have Ivanov performed in Petersburg, a crucial debut for Chekhov. Anton overhauled his play again.

Anton's letters to Suvorin became longer, and more frequent; the relationship was closer than ever. On 14 October 1888 he revealed his secret, but pretended that he was not seriously ill: Every winter, autumn, spring and every wet summer's day I cough. But all this frightens me only when I see blood: in blood that flows from your mouth there is something ominous like a red sunset… consumption or any serious lung illness is recognized only by a syndrome and I happen not to have that syndrome; blood sometimes pours from a lung all day, it gushes, the household and patient are horrified and it ends with the patient not dying - more often than not. Only four days before Anton had had another haemorrhage.

Rather than ÒÂ Chekhov preferred to discuss sex with Suvorin. He had written a story, 'An Attack', after some pressure, to commemorate Garshin. Chekhov chose a controversial topic: the brothels of Sobolev Lane. The story has a simple 'three friends' plot: three students trawl the brothels; one is so convinced that prostitution is evil that he preaches on the streets. His friends take him to a psychiatrist who tells him it is he, not society, which is sick. The two 'healthy' students resemble Schechtel and Levitan; the rebel resembles Kolia. The narrator sides with the rebel, who is very much in 'the Garshin spirit', pure, ardent and on the verge of insanity. It is the first Chekhov story where we ask if the sane are the real madmen. Anton found his own experience of prostitution as a medical student a cause for ambiguous feelings. To Suvorin he wrote, on n November 1888: 'I talk a lot about prostitution, but decide nothing. Why isn't anything written about prostitution in your paper? It's the most terrible evil.' To Plesh-cheev (whose views were as broad-minded as Kiseliov's) Chekhov wrote the next day in a different tone: 'As a medic I think that I described the mental pain correctly, following all the rules of psychiatry. As for the girls, I used to be a great specialist in that department in days of yore.' To Shcheglov in late December Chekhov showed complete tolerance: 'Why do you so dislike talking about Sobolev Lane? I love people who go there, although I go as rarely as you do. One mustn't disdain life.'

That autumn the disparity between sex in real life and sex in literature irritated Anton. When Suvorin praised Zola's expertise, Chekhov responded angrily: I have seen quite a few wayward women and have sinned many times personally, but I don't believe Zola or that lady who told you, 'Wham-bam, and it's done.' Dissipated people and writers like to make out they are gourmets and fine connoisseurs of fornication; they are daring, decisive, inventive, they have sex 33 different ways, on virtually everything but a knife edge, but all that is just talk, in fact they have sex with their cooks and go to one-rouble brothels… I have never seen a single decent apartment where circumstances

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would allow you to topple a woman dressed in a corset, skirts and a proper dress onto a chest or a divan or the floor and have sex with her without the servants noticing. All these terms for doing it 'standing up', 'sitting down' and so on are nonsense. The easiest way is on a bed, and die other 33 are difficult and feasible only in a hotel room or a shed… If Zola himself had sex on tables, under tables, on fences, in dog kennels, in mail coaches or saw with his own eyes others doing so, then trust his novels, but if he wrote on the basis of rumours and friends' stories, then he was hasty and careless.31 Rather than discuss such matters on paper, the Suvorins invited Anton and Masha to Petersburg. The Dauphin expected Chekhov to come home drunk: 'Let your sister have your rooms, you take the library… the one near the hall. I recommend the divan there. A separate entrance. When you come in at night, try to fall to the left and you'll hit the door.' By early December Anton and Masha were installed at the Suvorins'. Anton talked all night with Pleshcheev, Modest Tchaikovsky, Davydov and George Lintvariov. On 11 December Anton went with Suvorin to the first night of Tatiana Repina. The next day he read his story 'An Attack' to the Literary Society. He avoided public readings, not just out of shyness but because he would lose his voice after only a few minutes: an ominous symptom of ÒÂ. Fortunately Davydov took over. Anton tried to explain Ivanov to uncomprehending professionals. In that fortnight in Petersburg the crucial meeting was with the composer Piotr Tchaikovsky: like Levitan and, in the future Rachmaninov and the painter Repin, Tchaikovsky proved that musicians and painters best understood Anton's art.

Anton spent time interceding for others: introducing George Lintvariov to Tchaikovsky ('nice, not at all like a demigod', Anton asserted), persuading editors to pay Maria Kiseliova more for her children's stories. He found no time for Grigorovich, and hurt his feelings. His most traumatic experience was a visit, without Masha, to see Aleksandr. He was not jealous: over the years Natalia Golden's serpentine figure had filled out and now her black tresses were hidden under a headscarf. Nevertheless, although Anton had never protested at his brother's abuse of Anna Sokolnikova, Aleksandr's drunken, obscene bullying of his old love Natashevu outraged him. He left the house after a row and got drunk. Suvorin had to guide him to bed.

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Back in Moscow, Anton, on Aleksei Suvorin's behalf, cast Tatiana Repina at the Maly theatre. He decided that 'actresses are cows who fancy they are goddesses… Machiavellis in skirts'. Suvorin was producing Ivanov at the Aleksandrinsky theatre in Petersburg. Anton became as ruthless as any producer. 'The women are devious. Don't reply to their telegrams and letters, if you get any, without my say-so,' he ordered Suvorin. The stress of fighting theatrical egos made his haemorrhoids painful. He was fighting for Suvorin, and, through Suvorin, fighting Petersburg actors' incomprehension of even the revised version of Ivanov. Anton sent Suvorin medical graphs of Ivanov's depression. He felt he would never win unstinted praise: Petersburg loathed psychological drama.

The prize and the play overshadowed new trends in Chekhov's prose. 'The Attack' was not his only puritanical Tolstoyan indictment of society. In another story, 'The Princess', an ascetic doctor accuses a princess of masking her hypocrisy as charity. A very substantial story 'The Name-Day Party', like Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party', gets at the private falsity which underlies a public celebration; 'The Name-Day Party' ends dramatically, with a thunderstorm to wash away the party and a miscarriage to shock the heroine out of her pretences. All three stories are studies of lies and the way in which physiology reveals the lie. The techniques are Tolstoy's: the author monitors the character's body language and makes the simpleton soothsayer to the sophisticate. Nobody foresaw that Chekhov, after weighing Tolstoyanism, would reject it. The liberal and hedonistic elements in Chekhov's make-up rebelled against Tolstoy's puritanism, just as Chekhov's expressive understatement was ill suited to Tolstoy's lapidary edifying style.

One short article said more than anything else about Chekhov's intentions and aspirations. In October 1888 the explorer of China and Tibet, Nikolai Przhevalsky, now known as the discoverer of Przewalski's horse, died by a remote lake on the border of Kirgizia and China. He died as Tchaikovsky would, sick with homosexual love, after drinking infected water. Chekhov wrote an unsigned obituary for Przhevalsky in New Times, praising his heroism, saying that one Przhevalsky was worth a dozen educational institutions and a hundred good books. Chekhov had not read Przhevalsky's last book in which the explorer recommends exterminating the inhabitants of Mongolia

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M Y 11 It Î I 11 I Ê S Ê I'. 1.1» Ê It and Tibet, replacing them with Cossacks, and starting a war with China. What aroused Chekhov's enthusiasm was the image of the lone traveller deserting family and friends, trekking to the ends of the earth to die.

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The Petersburg Ivanov January-February 1889 IN THE NEW YEAR OF 1889 Suvorin and Chekhov were like twins: they produced each other's plays; they planned to write together The Wood Demon, a country comedy, dividing between themselves the characters and the acts. Suvorin would come to Moscow for Tatiana Repina; then Anton would see Ivanov performed in Petersburg. All Petersburg was gossiping about their relationship. 'Suvorin the Father, Suvorin the Son and Chekhov the Holy Ghost,' they quipped when the two friends appeared with the Dauphin.32 Rumour had it that Suvorin paid Anton 6000 roubles a year; that either the eleven-year-old Nastia Suvorina or Pleshcheev's daughter Elena was to be Anton's bride. No Chekhov brother was yet married, unlike all Anton's doctor friends, and nearly all his acolytes, Bilibin, Shcheglov, Gruzinsky, Ezhov. Anton pleaded poverty. Evreinova's joke at The Northern Herald became a rumour: Chekhov was betrothed to Sibiriakova, a millionaire widow.

Anton prepared for Suvorin's arrival, searching the Moscow hotels for a suite with central heating. He could not shake off his horror at Aleksandr's treatment of Natalia. On 2 January 1889, as he had done with Kolia two years before, he spared his eldest brother nothing: I was driven from you by your horrible, completely unjustified treatment of Natalia and the cook… Constant foul language of the lowest sort, raising your voice, reproaches, rows at lunch and dinner, constant complaints at your hard labour and cursed life - isn't that an expression of coarse tyranny? However pathetic and guilty the woman, however intimate she is with you, you have no right to sit in her presence wim no trousers on, to be drunk in her presence, to use language that not even factory workers use when they see women around… No decent husband or lover would let himself talk coarsely to a woman about pissing, about lavatory paper, to

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make an ironic joke of their relations in bed, to poke about verbally in her sexual organs. This debauches a woman and distances her from God in whom she believes. A man who respects a woman, who is well-bred and loving, will not appear in front of the chambermaid without his trousers, shouting at the top of his voice, 'Katka, bring the piss-pot!'… Between the woman who sleeps on clean sheets and the woman who dosses down on dirty sheets and roars with laughter when her lover farts is the same distance as between a drawing room and a pub… You can't get away with obscenities in front of the children, insulting the servants or spitefully telling Natalia 'Clear off and go to hell! I'm not keeping you.'33 After this salvo, Natalia got the upper hand in her marriage: Aleksandr drank, the flat was sordid and the children unhappy, but he never abused her again. Anton was, in Natalia's eyes, her rescuer.

In a letter that January, Anton told Suvorin he was glad he had not written a novel - perhaps the novel which has been lost - when he still lacked 'a feeling of personal freedom', although, looking back at his life so far, he saw it as a victory: What writers of the gentry had free from birth, we the underclass have to pay for with our youth. Why don't you write the story of a young man, the son of a serf, a former shop boy, chorister, schoolboy and student, brought up on deferring to rank, on kissing priests' hands, submitting to others' ideas, thankful for every crust, thrashed many times, who tormented animals, who loved having dinner with rich relatives, who was quite needlessly hypocritical before God and people, just because he knew he was a nonentity - write about this young man squeezing drop by drop the slave out of himself and waking one fine morning feeling that real human blood, not a slave's, is flowing in his veins. Slave's blood still ran in his brothers' veins. Aleksandr was bonded to Suvorin's New Times, Vania to the inspector of primary schools, Misha, shortly to graduate, to the Tax Inspectorate, Kolia to drink and drugs. Anton alone seemed free.

Anton extended his charity to other derelicts. Despite Palmin's drunken slanders - he had spread rumours to Leikin that Anton was mad and suicidal - Anton rode out to treat him for a cut, and was touched by Palmin's gift of a bottle of Ylang-Ylang perfume. Anton visited the dying Putiata, and discreetly placed an envelope of JANUARY-FEBRUARY l88o banknotes under Putiata's pillow. Putiata was more embarrassed than relieved: 'as a poor man with a family you ought not to have done this.'

On 10 January 1889 Suvorin came to Moscow to watch rehearsals of Tatiana Repina. It had mixed success, but one critic, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was in the next decade to be cofounder of the Moscow Arts Theatre and a close associate of Chekhov, did protest at Suvorin's provocative prejudices: 'Why did the author have to put two Jews as the most antipathetic figures on stage?… Why did the author have to deal so inappropriately with the women's question?' For the time being Suvorin's anti-Semitism and sexual chauvinism did not impair his friendship with Anton. They celebrated Tatiana's day so thoroughly that Anton's hand still shook when, the next day, he wrote to Lily Markova, now Sakharova.34 The following week Suvorin and Chekhov set off together for Petersburg. Chekhov had a contract with the Aleksandrinsky theatre for 10 per cent of the gross from Ivanov, and sold them the rights to The Bear. Ivanov had been passed, after further revision, by the censor for the Imperial Theatres, but the play's defenders were faint-hearted. One Petersburg theatregoer, the playwright Sazonova, records: 'Davydov and Sazonov are both unwilling to act in the play, all its absurdities and inconsistencies are even more striking.'35 Anton spent evenings arguing with Davydov that the new version, where the doctor taunts Ivanov into suicide, was plausible. Despite the difficulties with Ivanov, made worse by the author attending the rehearsals, Anton thought about future plays. He contemplated joint authorship of a farce with Shcheglov: they improvised a plot.36 Suvorin and Anton did the literary rounds: a surreptitious sketch by Repin shows Chekhov bored to tears and Suvorin smouldering with anger at a meeting of the Society of Russian Writers.

Anton went to see Khudekov, the editor of The Petersburg Gazette: Khudekov's wife attracted Anton, but it was Khudekov's sister-in-law who responded. Lidia Avilova, mother of two and writer of children's stories, was infatuated. She had little encouragement - Anton avoided affairs with married women with children - but saw herself as the love of Chekhov's life, encrypted into Chekhov's fiction. Other female company was uncomplicated. Pleshcheev and Shcheglov left Anton free tickets to go out with George Lintvariov to the Prikazchik club:

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MY It Ê (» I 11 I Ê '• ' Ê Ã. E 1» E Ê 'If you're going there for "erotic" purposes, we are superfluous.' With Nastia Suvorina Anton established a joking avuncular relationship.37 Only Grigorovich still hoped to see them married. Anna Suvorina recalled: 'My daughter was interested in anything but famous writers. Anton often told her that he wouldn't mind doing what Grigorovich wanted but on condition "Nastia, your daddy has to give us a dowry: his publishing firm as my property and his monthly magazine…"' On 31 January 1889 the Petersburg premiere of Ivanov took place. It had, even its enemies admitted, great success. Davydov's obesity expressed Ivanov's moral paralysis. Russia's unhappiest actress, Strepe-tova, put her suffering into Sarra. They brought the house down at the end of Act 3. Strepetova could not stop crying. Anton momentarily felt the cast were 'kith and kin'. Modest Tchaikovsky, Bilibin, and Barantsevich were moved. Many proclaimed the play the equal of Griboedov's or Gogol's dramas. Some had doubts: Shcheglov's diary noted 'drafts blowing across the stage, the author's inexperience and the absence of finish.' Suvorin felt that Ivanov's character never develops, that the women characters were sketchy - allegations which Anton repudiated. Lidia Avilova, however, was watching him intently at the party backstage: Anton kept his word and sent me a ticket to Ivanov… How he stood, strained and awkward, as if he was tied down. And in that glimmer of a smile I sensed a morbid tension, such tiredness and anguish that my arms drooped with helplessness. I had no doubt, despite the noisy success, that Anton was dissatisfied and unhappy. Anton fled to Moscow before the second performance on 3 February. The play had only five performances that season, although every house enthused. More sober evaluations came by post. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, then a playwright, but not yet a director, spoke for posterity on Ivanov: You are die most talented… and I subscribe to this without the slightest feeling of envy, but I shan't consider Ivanov to be among your best work… but to be among the original drafts of beautiful pieces.38 Ivanov brought Anton two new friends. Nemirovich-Danchenko was in ten years to be the interpreter of Chekhov's drama and then a close friend of Anton's wife. The other was Pavel Svobodin, who played

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Ivanov's uncle Shabelsky. Svobodin was bewitched by Anton for the rest of his short life. Svobodin and Anton were two over-worked consumptives, with contradictory streaks of idealism and cynicism. Svobodin believed in Chekhov's genius and, with Suvorin, pushed Anton into finishing his next play, The Wood Demon.

In Moscow Anton tried to help his less fortunate friends Gruzinsky, Ezhov and Barantsevich: he offered to revise their work, he persuaded Suvorin to take them on, but the acolytes felt insecure when they visited the Chekhovs in the winter of 1888-9. Gruzinsky, normally a good-natured man, resented the claims that Kolia, Vania, Masha and Pavel had on Anton. He and Ezhov loathed losing at whist to Vania (a game that Anton refused to learn). They disliked Masha and found Pavel sinister. Gruzinsky's letters to Ezhov snarl: Ivan Chekhov is a weird character and, as Bilibin says of his older brother Aleksandr, 'a crooked personality'… I don't like Chekhov's father. Yes, certainly he was a tyrant and a wild beast. That sort almost always develop into 'unctuous' types… Maria Chekhova in passing argued that there is nothing more selfish man talent and genius. That was an allusion to her brother who is bursting his guts for them.39 Ezhov saw Anton's parents in a poor light. He recalled Easter 1889: Once Chekhov told his friends at tea: 'Do you know, gentlemen, our cook is getting married. I'd like to take you to the wedding, but I'm afraid the cook's guests will start beating us up.' - 'Antosha,' remarked his mother, 'You should read them your poetry and they won't.' Chekhov… suddenly frowned and said, 'Mother still thinks I write poetry.'40 It was true that Anton's parents may never have read, or listened to, a word of his stories or plays. Ezhov was as envious as he was protective, and he soured his crony Gruzinsky, who complained to Ezhov: Anton Chekhov is strange: he says it's terribly easy to go to Petersburg. His talent gives him perverted ideas about money… He asked me how much Leikin was paying me. [Anton said:] 'Too little, awfully little… I get 70-80, once I got 90 roubles.' And I'm grateful for 40! Anton found celebrities better company. Pleshcheev came to Moscow to celebrate his birthday and Shrovetide: he gorged on pancakes.

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MY ÍÏÎ I III lis' KEEPER Anton summoned his colleague I)r Obolonsky to treat the elderly poet. Suvorin promised to come and watch his Tatiana Repina, which, unlike Ivanov, was still running. He sent a balalaika (with no strings) and some photo-portraits of Chekhov; then came a telegram from Anna Suvorina: 'HUSBAND NOW LEFT FOR Moscow DON'T FORGET MEET HIM CHEER HIM AND AMUSE PROPERLY BUT SAME TIME REMEMBER ME.'41 Suvorin did not stay long. Renewed links encouraged the Dauphin to resume writing to Anton: he kept off Jews but, in the spirit of New Times, praised the Cossack Ashinov for invading the Horn of Africa. Anton, with embarrassment, confessed that he knew two of the invaders.42 The Dauphin also reported that their Tatar neighbour in Feodosia had seen Ivanov: the play had induced a fit of hysterics in a lady in the audience.

Ivanov brought in nearly a thousand roubles: 'A play is a pension,' declared Anton. The Chekhovs made merry. Leikin pricked the bubble and told Chekhov that he had lost money by putting the play on late in the season (State Theatres closed on the first day of Lent), that his play gave actors no breaks for applause. Leikin added every drop of gall he could: he reported Palmin's wild slanders. Anton responded: I haven't seen Palmin once this month. How does he know I am losing blood, ill and afraid of madness? I haven't had any haemorrhage, thank God, since I left Petersburg (only just a little)… I have no reasons to fear sudden insanity for I don't drink vodka for days on end, I don't go in for spiritualism or masturbation, I don't read the poet Palmin. Palmin, when challenged, told Leikin that his information came from Kolia. Leikin's dogs, not his opinions, interested Anton. Leikin had acquired a pair of dachshunds and was so much in love with them that he finally had to promise puppies to Anton.

Friendly with so many of the Lintvariov circle, the Chekhovs were bound to return to Luka that summer. Anton began composing The Wood Demon in his head, to write in its natural setting, the Lintvariov estate and the mills on the Psiol. He spent money: he bought a set of Dostoevsky and read it, apparently for the first time: 'good, but very long and immodest. A lot of pretensions.' For fun Anton then composed his most extraordinary play: a sequel to Suvorin's Tatiana

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Repina. Chekhov shows Suvorin's hero, who drove Repina to suicide, marrying in church: the marriage service is ruined by a mysterious lady in black who takes poison, and 'the rest I leave to the imagination of A. S. Suvorin'. The genius of Chekhov's parody sequel lies in the mingling of casual gossip by minor characters with the text of the liturgy which Chekhov knew so well. Anton sent the play to Suvorin: Suvorin went to his print room and had two copies printed, one for himself and one for Anton.

This playful gift for absurdly mixing trivial and serious speech was to lead to two elements that mark out Chekhov's mature drama: inconsequential conversation acting as a counterpoint to tragic utterances, and a plot which hangs on a character who has died before the action starts and about whom we shall never be told the truth. The corpse of Tatiana Repina haunts Chekhov's gift to Suvorin, just as the professor's first wife haunts Uncle Vania, Colonel Prozorov the Three Sisters, or Ranevskaia's drowned son The Cherry Orchard.

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A Death at Luka March-June 1889 CHEKHOV TOOK UP his novel. He also made a mysterious trip to Kharkov, ostensibly to look at a ranch for Suvorin, but perhaps in response to Lily Markova's (now Sakharova) invitation. The trip was, to judge by the hellish aura around Kharkov in his fiction, disagreeable. When Anton returned to Moscow on 15 March 1889, the horse-trams had stopped and blizzards had piled snowdrifts five feet high in front of the house. His mother showed him a postcard from Kolia: 11 March 1889… Dear Mama, Illness has prevented me from visiting you. Two weeks ago I caught a bad chill: I was shaking with fever and my side was hurting desperately. But now, thanks to quinine and various ointments I am better and hasten to work to make up for lost time…43 ÒÂ had struck Kolia's intestines. Anton diagnosed typhoid as well. On 29 March Anton, unsure of himself, summoned Nikolai Obolon-sky again to Kolia's bedside, back at Anna Ipatieva-Golden's house: Anna told them that Kolia had not touched alcohol for two months. For ten days, longing to escape, Anton visited the feverish emaciated Kolia. It took four hours to cross Moscow's thawing snow to see him. Anton brought Kolia home. Kolia described his rescue to a Taganrog friend: My bromer sent me broth. Then on Easter Saturday a carriage was sent for me, they dressed me, and sent me to my mother and family. Almost nobody recognized me. They immediately put me to bed. At 2 a.m. on Easter Sunday everybody celebrates, shouting, noise, drinking wine, and I am lying out of the way, an outcast. The week after Easter there was a concilium with Karneevsky [Korneev?] and it was decided mat I should eat as much as possible, drink vodka, beer, wine, and eat ham, herring, caviar.44

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Anton could only muse about his unwritten novel, a work 'with all thoughts and hopes of good people, their norms and deviations, the framework being freedom'. Little freedom was in prospect. There was no money to take Kolia to a warm climate where he might rally, and he could not get a passport. Anton sought consolation in the stoic maxims of Marcus Aurelius, a book he marked heavily with his pencil.

Meanwhile the servants made merry. Pavel and Evgenia were giving their cook, Olga, away in marriage. In late February, at the betrothal, the kitchen had rung with the sound of the harmonica and stamping boots. On 14 April, while Kolia lay moribund upstairs, the wedding feast began. Anton did not feel festive. He invited Schechtel to take leave of Kolia, who was now able to stand, and sent Misha and their mother to prepare the arrival of patient and doctor in the Ukraine. After he had seen them off, Anton went to a meeting of the Dramatic Society and afterwards, he confided in a letter to Dr Obolonsky, looked at the dawn then went for a walk, then I was in a foul pub where I watched two crooks play an excellent game of billiards, then I went to the sordid places where I chatted with a mathematics student and musicians, then I returned home, drank some vodka, had breakfast and then (at 6 a.m.) went to bed, was woken up early and am now suffering. Posting that letter, Chekhov took Kolia to the station and, in a first-class sleeping car, made the journey to Sumy. For the first time in months Kolia slept and ate well. Masha followed a few days later with shoes, a string for the mandolin, and paper and frames for Kolia. Despite, or because of, Kolia's illness, many friends were invited down: Davydov, Barantsevich, the cellist Semashko, not to mention Vania. Suvorin proposed to call on his way to Austria and France. Anton told him: 'How I'd love to go now somewhere like Biarritz where music is playing and there are lots of women. Were it not for the artist, I'd chase after you.'

Aleksandr was not invited. Anton sternly told him that money was the only practical help. Aleksandr offered to marry Natalia - she would not risk pregnancy until she was married. Aleksandr became the first Russian male recorded buying a contraceptive. On a chit for Anton's eyes alone he wrote, on 5 May:

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MY it ê î i 11 in ÷' ê!•: ê i» ê ê Kngulfed by carnal lusts (after long abstinence) 1 bought in a chemists' a condon (or condom - the devil knows) for 35 kopecks. But as soon as I tried to put it on, it burst, probably from fear at the sight of my shaft. So I had no luck. I had to tame the flesh again.4'

Kolia was too weak to flee. By day he sat, or lay in a hammock, sunbathing in the orchard. He ate for four, but could not digest food and could hardly walk. He coughed incessantly and he quarrelled with his mother. Other people's deference to the dying made him more capricious. He was given creosote, ipecacuanha and menthol. Death cast a pall over the Psiol: the fishing and the songbirds lost their appeal. Anton tried to distract himself. He dreamed of Mile Emilie, the Suvorins' governess; he went to the Sumy theatre that Aleksandr had disrupted the previous year; he buried himself in work. He wrote the first act of The Wood Demon to an outline agreed with Suvorin: the core of this play, which eventually became Uncle Vania, is in the doctor-landowner who finds ecstasy in planting a birch tree, but there was little drama yet. The original plan was based on the Suvorins. The elderly professor, his young second wife, his daredevil son, two children called Boris and Nastia and a French governess called Mile Emilie are the Suvorin family transferred to Luka; the idealists and cranks who cross their path have aspects of the Lintvariovs and the Chekhovs. From the start, the material is unstageable, for it is as rich and broad as Middle-march. Suvorin would soon back out, but Chekhov persisted.

On 8 May Suvorin arrived for six days, on his way to more comfortable summer quarters. His arrival caused as much tension as that of the professor in Uncle Vania. The Lintvariovs, principled radicals, ostracized Suvorin (not that this stopped them from later asking Suvorin to send their village school free books). Anton was torn between two sets of friends. Worse, Kolia begged Suvorin for an advance for book cover designs. (Anton forbad Suvorin to pay him.) Meanwhile Kolia's mistress, Anna Ipatieva-Golden, at her wit's end near Moscow, was begging both Suvorin and Anton for financial help and a job.

Suvorin promised Anton 30 kopecks a line for the novel. He tactfully talked of buying a dacha nearby, but soon left for his villa in the Crimea. From there he discussed with Anton Paul Bourget's novel, The Disciple. Suvorin sympathized with Bourget's attacks on freeMARCH-JUNE 1889 thinkers as the godfathers of anarchy and murder. Russian readers, said Anton, liked Bourget only because French culture was better: 'a Russian writer lives in drainpipes, eating slugs, making love to sluts and laundresses, he knows no history, geography, natural sciences.' Anton wrote grimly to Leikin: he yearned for a time 'when I shall have my own corner, my own wife, not somebody else's… free of vanity and quarrels.'

Kolia also longed to be elsewhere. He wrote letters, mostly unposted, in all directions, begging for help. Kolia wanted to be back in his birthplace: I definitely need to visit Taganrog on business and, while I'm there, bathe in the sea… Get me a ticket from Kharkov to Taganrog and back… The class of ticket should correspond to my social position and take account of my weak state. In exchange I'll send you a woman's head painted in oils (very nicely done, I don't want to part with it)… I impatiently wait for a letter with 'Yes' and 'No' but with no 'ifs' etc.4* Kolia still had a sharp eye and steady hand. He wrote a calligraphic masterpiece to Dr Obolonsky, and illustrated it with a stout passenger in a first-class compartment and a train steaming across the steppes. Misha's letters to his cousin Georgi draw a veil over Kolia. He had to give up revisiting Taganrog: 'The poor man is so bad that really it would be awkward to leave him.' As Kolia declined, Misha ignored him. On 29 May 1889 he told Georgi: If you knew how good our evenings are, you'd drop everything, dacha, family, and come straight away to us… The smell of flowering lime trees, elder and jasmine and the scent of newly mown hay, scattered over our terrace for Trinity Day and the moon, like a pancake hanging over us… Next to me Masha is sitting, just back from Poltava, and a little further is nice Ivanenko. Both are reading. Through the open window come the conversations of Suvorin, who's come to stay with us, and… Anton… Semashko has taken a room with us for the whole summer, so all summer we shall be enjoying music. At the end of May the irrepressible actor Pavel Svobodin came, but could not bear the spectre - he too was dying of tuberculosis. He took a train back for Moscow, but Vania persuaded Svobodin to turn

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back and give the Chekhovs moral support in a seemingly interminable vigil. Kolia, Anton reported to Dv Obolonsky on 4 June, was bedridden, losing weight every day. He was taking atropine and quinine, dozing, sometimes deliriously. A priest gave last rites: Kolia confessed to maltreating his mother. Then he wrote with frenzy: graphic childhood memories, letters to Uncle Mitrofan and Suvorin, begging for loans, promising paintings.

Aleksandr insisted on coming: he gave Suvorin a reason so odd that Suvorin passed it to Anton: 'ambulatory typhoid' became the Chekhov term for alcoholism: I am fettered to my bed. I had ambulatory typhoid. I was able to walk, attend events and fires and give the paper reports. Now the doctor says I have a relapse. The doctor is urging me south; give me leave and the right to take 2 months' salary (140 roubles) in advance.47 At 2 p.m. on 15 June Aleksandr arrived with the children and Natalia, and for one hour all five Chekhov brothers were together. After two harrowing months on duty, sleeping in the room next to Kolia, Anton suddenly snapped. Taking Vania, Svobodin, and George Lintvariov with him, at 3 p.m. he took the carriage to see the Smagins, a hundred miles away in Poltava. Evgenia, exhausted, could not cope; Misha refused to recognize Kolia's agony and went to an annexe to sleep. Aleksandr alone nursed Kolia for two nights. Anton had left no morphine, and few medicines. The three local doctors - including two Lintvariov daughters - stayed away.

In a long letter to Pavel (who was not summoned to Sumy that summer), Aleksandr showed himself at his best. As I drove up to the manor house I met Anton in the courtyard, then Masha, Vania and Misha came onto the porch. Mama met us in the hall and began kissing her grandchildren. 'Have you seen Kolia?' Vania asked me… I went into the room and saw that instead of the old Kolia a skeleton was lying there. He was horribly emaciated. His cheeks had sunk, his eyes fallen in and shining… To the last he didn't know he had ÒÂ. Anton hid it from him and he thought he just had typhoid.

'Brother, stay with me, I'm an orphan without you. I'm alone all the time. Mother, brothers and sister come to see me, but I'm alone.'… When I lifted him from the bed onto the pot I was always afraid

MARCH-JUNE 1889

that I might break his legs… The next morning I went crayfishing in the river, not for the crayfish but to get strength for the next night.48 Kolia talked of living in Petersburg with Aleksandr and said that he loved his father. At supper I said 'God grant Kolia lives till morning'… Our sister said I was talking rubbish, that Kolia was alive, would go on living, that he often had these attacks. I calmed down… Everyone went to bed… Kolia was completely rational. He kept going to sleep and waking. At 2 in the morning he wanted to go outside; I tried to lift him onto a wheelchair but he decided to wait and asked me to fluff up his pillows. While I was doing that he burst like a fountain. 'Look, brother, I've shat myself like a baby in bed.' At 3 a.m. he became very bad; he began choking on mucus… Around 6 a.m. Kolia started choking. I ran to the annexe to ask Misha what dose to give Kolia. Misha turned over in bed and replied, 'Aleksandr, you keep exaggerating.'… I raced back to Kolia. He seemed to be dozing. At 7 a.m. he spoke. 'Aleksandr lift me. Are you asleep?' I lifted him. 'No, I'm better lying.' I laid him down. 'Lift me up a bit.' He offered me both arms. I raised him, he sat up, tried to cough but couldn't. He wanted to vomit. I supported him with one arm and tried to get the pot from the floor with the other. 'Water, water.' But it was too late. I called, shouted 'Mama, Masha, Nata [Natalia Lintvariova].' Nobody came to help. They ran in when it was all over. Kolia died in my arms. Mama came very late and I had to wake Misha to tell him that Kolia had died.

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Shaking the Dust June-September 1889 THE DEATH OF KOLIA on 17 June 1889 shook Anton to the core: for years to come he hinted how much he was haunted by it. He knew: last year Anna, this year Kolia, in a year or two Fenichka, Svobodin, and then himself, not to mention a dozen other friends, would die of the 'white plague'. He became restless and could not stay in one place more than a month.

As soon as Kolia died, the family summoned him back to Luka from the Smagins. He wrote to Pleshcheev: For the rest of my life I shall never forget that filthy road, the grey sky, the tears on the trees; I say never forget because a ragged peasant came from Mirgorod that morning with a soaking wet telegram: 'Kolia dead.' You can imagine my feelings. I had to gallop back to the station, take the train and wait at stations for eight hours at a time… I remember sitting in a park; it was dark terribly cold, hellishly dreary; behind the brown wall where I was sitting actors were rehearsing a melodrama. The Lintvariovs took charge. Elena led Masha and Evgenia away, while peasant women laid out the body - 'dry as tinder and yellow as wax', Misha noted - on the floor. The church bells rang; the priest and cantor held a requiem. Elena offered money for the burial; Alek-sandr found a carpenter to make a cross. Aleksandr's two boys spent the night with their grandmother. Masha was taken in by the Lintvariovs. Three old women from the estate kept vigil over the corpse, while the cantor chanted psalms. At noon the next day a white coffin lined with brocade came from Sumy: Kolia was lifted in. Evgenia, in black, prostrated herself by the coffin. Letters and telegrams were sent off. Misha went to Sumy to find a photographer. That evening Anton returned. Misha flared up at Aleksandr and Natalia, and

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demanded that they move to separate quarters. After Kolia's death the two brothers loathed each other. Aleksandr wrote a note asking Anton to intervene.

After another vigil with whispering old women and a chanting cantor, a truce reigned. The Lintariovs had Kolia buried in their graveyard, on the hill behind the dacha where he had died. Misha described the funeral to Pavel in Moscow: Mother and Masha were sobbing so much that we couldn't bear to look at them. When we took the coffin out Masha and the Lintvariov girls carried the lid, while six of us - Antosha, Vania, Sasha, I, Ivanenko and George Lintvariov carried the coffin. We said a prayer for the dead at each corner of the church. There was a solemn matins, the church was fully lit and everyone held a candle. While matins was said a cross was taken to the cemetery and all the furniture was removed from the house and the floors were scrubbed… A mass of people followed the coffin, with icons, as in Taganrog: like a procession with the cross. At the cemetery, when we took our leave, everyone was sobbing, mother was in anguish and couldn't be parted from the body… all the ordinary people in the funeral were issued a pie, a headscarf and a glass of vodka, while the clergy and the Lintariovs had lunch and tea. After dinner mama and I went back to the cemetery, mama grieved, wept, and we went back.49 Aleksandr's account to his father adds one detail: 'Everyone is howling. The only one not crying is Anton and that is awful.'50 Anton refused to weep, perhaps for fear his grief might turn to self-pity. The new cross, with Kolia's name painted by Misha, could be seen for miles around from the north, the west and the south.

Obituaries were printed; Kolia's friends forgot their grudges. Diukovsky, the school inspector, who had loved the Chekhovs from their first Moscow years, declared that Kolia was 'my only friend, the most disinterested and sincere of men'. Franz Schechtel wept for a 'lost brother': It's good that he spent his last, perhaps his happiest, days in his family; and, had he not broken with his family for that nomadic life, which drew him so much, he would most probably have been healthy and happy." (Jruzinsky wrote to Ezhov:

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I'm sad, Hedgehog, sad, as if he were one of my close relatives… Peace to the disorderly but talented and dearest of artists… Poor Anton!" There were requiems and tears in Taganrog. In Moscow Pavel showed fortitude: Dear Antosha, At your aunt Fenichka's request I send 10 roubles belonging to Aleksandr. I read your letter to your aunt, it is very joyful for my parental heart that Kolia took Last Communion and that the burial followed Christian rites. I sincerely thank you for the love which you showed your brother Kolia with respect to the burial and memorial. For this God will show you much mercy and health. Fenichka is grieving, groaning and coughing, she hadn't known about Kolia's death, I hadn't told her. Kolia's obituary is in News of the Day… I should like to visit Kolia's grave, to look and say a prayer. May he rest in peace.'3 Three days later Anton took the family thirty miles to spend a few days at the monastery of Akhtyrka, where they had, only weeks before, clowned and laughed with Natalia Lintvariova and Pavel Svobodin, and Anton had announced himself to the monks as Count Wild-Boar.

When Anton returned to Luka, there were tempting invitations. He was expected by Grigorovich and the Suvorins in Vienna, for a tour of Europe. The actor-manager Lensky and his wife Lika Lenskaia had taken the Moscow Maly theatre on tour to Odessa and invited Anton to recuperate there. Telling Suvorin he was 'yours to the end of my days', on 2 July Anton (with Vania) set off not to Europe but in the opposite direction. Two days later they were dining with Lensky's actors. A journalist greeted Anton: it was Piotr Sergeenko, a Taganrog schoolmate, who took Anton to see Odessa's rising star, Ignati Pota-penko. Potapenko sang, played the violin, told funny stories and wrote plays. Four years later Potapenko was to become an alter ego, both genial and sinister, in Anton's life, but now he was 'the god of boredom'.

The actresses were kindly goddesses. Anton drifted to room 48 in The Northern Hotel: there Kleopatra Karatygina and Glafira Panova dispensed tea, chatter, flattery, flirtation and consolation. The only 'older woman' in Chekhov's life, Kleopatra, at forty-one, was neither sociable nor pretty. Known as 'Beetle', she was the thinnest and most ill-used actress in the Maly. She knew she would never play Ophelia: she played Death in Don Juan. Homeless, widowed young, she understood Anton's unhappiness. Her description of Chekhov that summer has gentle irony as well as motherly concern. She first saw him on the sea-shore: A young man, handsome, elegant, a pleasant face, with a small bushy beard; wearing a grey suit, a soft pork-pie hat, a beautiful tie and a shirt with a frilly neckline and cuffs. Overall, an impression of elegance but… Î horror!! he was holding a big one-pound paper bag and nibbling sunflower seeds (a southerner's habit).'4 'Antony and Cleopatra' were the talk of the town, but Glafira Panova, a pretty debutante of nineteen, also fascinated Anton. To Vania, who had gone back to Luka, he described his ten days in Odessa: At 12 I take Panova to Zembrini's for ice cream (60 kopecks) and trail after her to the milliner's, the shops for lace etc. The heat, of course, is unbelievable. At 2 I have been going to Sergeenko's and then to Olga's for borshch and sauce. At 5 tea with Karatygina, which is always very noisy and fun; at 8, after tea, we go to the theatre. Offstage. Treating coughing actresses and planning the next day. Lika Lenskaia alarmed, afraid of spending money; Panova, her black eyes searching for whomever she needs… After the show, a glass of vodka in the buffet downstairs and then wine in a cellar, waiting for the actresses to gather for tea in Karatygina's room. More tea, we take our time, until 2 in the morning and gossip about the most devilish things… I'm completely feminized. I've practically been wearing skirts and not a day has passed without virtuous Lika Lenskaia telling me with a meaningful look that Medvedev [the director] is afraid of letting Panova go on tour and that Mme Pravdina (also virtuous but a very nasty person) is gossiping to everyone and about her, Lika, for supposedly conniving at sin. To Anton's horror, the Lenskys, supposing Anton had seduced and compromised Glafira Panova, tried to engineer a marriage between him and the girl, but, Anton insisted years later to Olga Knipper, he 'had not seduced a single soul'. He asked Kleopatra Karatygina in Petersburg in January 1890: 'Why is that Lenskaia poking her nose in where it's not wanted? Actors and artists should never get married. Any artist, writer, actor loves only their art, is entirely, only absorbed by it:

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Kleopatra's relations with Chekhov began lightly. Chekhov brought laughter into her life. When she complained about playing skeletons and death, Chekhov gave her a prescription; she was taking it to the chemist's when she saw that it was for 'poison for Pravdin and Grekov', the Maly's lead actors. She fell in love; Anton's friendship was not disinterested. Karatygina had spent half of her life in Siberia, partly as a governess in Kiakhta on the Mongolian border, and she sowed in Anton the seed of an idea. He questioned her about Siberia.

Anton ignored Suvorin's telegrams, although Grigorovich met the train from Russia at Vienna Hauptbahnhof day after day. Grigorovich wrote to Suvorin: 'Chekhov has absolutely no languages and is unused to foreign travel… he hasn't been treating us like a European… lie's a Slav, disorderly with no firm support to help him control himself… I'm now angry with him.'55

Anton was in fact on a boat to the Crimea. At Luka, meanwhile, he had missed an event. Less than four weeks after Kolia's death, Aleksandr wrote to Pavel: Dear Papa, I have kept the promise I made you. Today at 12 I married Natalia Golden. Mama and Misha gave their blessing. Father Mitrofan conducted the wedding. After the wedding we went to Kolia's grave. Aleksandr's timing is matched by an implausibility in the play which Chekhov was writing: Act 3 of The Wood Demon ends with the suicide of Uncle Georges; in Act 4, two weeks later, the cast celebrates marriage. The Chekhovs, teeth gritted, accepted Aleksandr's marriage. Natalia, too, had demanded marriage: since she had arrived as 'children's maid' at Luka, she had found her humiliating status excruciating, even more so perhaps than hearing Anton use her pet-name Natashevu for another Natalia, Natalia Lintvariova. Aleksandr, Natalia and the children left for Petersburg. In Moscow Fenichka had to beg Pavel: 'Natalia asks for 2 roubles, she hasn't got the fare, as soon as they get home she'll send it, she has 50 roubles hidden from Aleksandr.'56 Not for fifteen years did Aleksandr and Natalia visit their relatives en famille. Natalia Golden, no longer a concubine but the wife of a Chekhov, was still a pariah.

On 16 July 1889, reeling from the heavy seas, Anton landed at Yalta. There another three sisters entered his life. With a troupe of JUNE-SEPTEMBER l88o actors in Yalta was the widowed Mrs Shavrova and her three daughters, Elena, Olga and Anna. Elena was a precocious fifteen. She accosted Anton in a cafe; she had written a story 'Sophie', about a Georgian prince's love for her mother. Anton rewrote it for her, making the prince in love with the daughter. Chekhov had opened a school of creative writing - a task he liked, even if the pupil was not a pretty girl. A flirtation started with Elena: a Biblical seven years would pass before she offered Anton her body.

Anton stayed three weeks in the Crimea. When he was not charming the Shavrova girls, he mused aloud to aspiring writers: one, the twenty-four-year-old Ilia Gurliand, noted Chekhov's rules for drama: Things on stage should be as complicated and yet as simple as in life. People dine, just dine, while their happiness is made and their lives are smashed. If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. There's nothing harder than to write a good farce. Friends at home and abroad were, like Grigorovich, aggrieved; the actor Pavel Svobodin wrote, 'Villain, to drop Rome for Deribasova street in Odessa.'57 Leikin asked: 'I was flabbergasted, how could you head abroad, not reach the frontier and turn away. What weak will! How could you fail to take a ticket to Vienna… I have spent two weeks in Yalta. It is a bandit town.'58

By August Anton was sated with women. He told Pleshcheev that they now all seemed ugly, Masha that they all smelt of ice cream. Pavel was writing to Anton c/o the Suvorins in Paris, but Anton did not go abroad. He did not know where Suvorin was, he had no money and he had to write. He had promised Svobodin The Wood Demon and The Northern Herald a long story. Besides, his unruly father had to be quelled - Pavel was harassing Anna Golden for Kolia's paintings. By 11 August 1889 Anton was back at Sumy, with Misha, Masha and Evgenia. Vania was back in Moscow, where, Pavel reported, Aunt Fenichka had taken a turn for the worse. Kolia's death had broken her heart, and Gavrilov demanded, on pain of dismissal, that her son Aliosha stay in the warehouse. Nobody nursed her.

For a fortnight Anton worked at 'My Name and Ã, his bleakest and most powerful piece so far, later titled 'A Dreary Story'. Told by a professor of medicine, incurably ill, it surveys life with the despondent

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MY 11 IMP i Ml' US' KKKPEK wisdom of Solomon. The professor is alienated from the wife he loved, the students who adore him, even the actress to whom an ambiguous affection binds him. He loathes his daughter's music and her fiance. His disillusion with all things Russian is so wittily expressed, his fear of death so moving that the reader forgives him the torture he inflicts on others. Readers saw parallels with real medical luminaries, or read the story as a retort to Tolstoy's recent Death of Ivan Ilyich. The despair implicit in Chekhov's story, however, was the aftermath of Kolia's death. Not yet thirty, Anton felt like his moribund professor.

The play that Anton, at Pavel Svobodin's insistence, struggled to write also centres on an elderly professor. This professor is, however, a nuisance and a pedant, and The Wood Demon is hopeful, not despairing, even though a central character, Uncle Georges, kills himself. Only the 'Wood Demon', a highly strung doctor, saving forests from the professor's predation, has any autobiographical input. The Wood Demon however is strikingly clumsy and tedious. Anton, inspired by his own thoughts of death, was unable to make a drama out of another person's idyll. His finest prose and most awkward drama arose at the same desk. Death infiltrated other work: revising for Suvorin the story of an unhappy adolescent, 'His First Love', for a new book, Chekhov retitled it Volodia. Like Suvorin's Volodia two years before, the fictional Volodia, too, shoots himself dead.59

On ç September 1889 Valentina Ivanova, a schoolteacher who admired Anton and for whom Vania pined, packed the Chekhov bags. At four on a freezing morning, the surviving Chekhovs and Marian Semashko said goodbye to the Lintvariovs. The death of Kolia had brought them close: Aleksandra Lintvariova refused rent for that summer. Anton felt an enduring affection for them: 'If it were acceptable to pray to sacred women and maidens before the heavenly angels take their souls to heaven, I'd long ago have written a psalm to you and your sisters,' he told Elena. The Chekhovs took a slow train for Moscow. In their carriage sat Professor Storozhenko, Masha's examiner. Chekhov made Masha's embarrassment worse: 'I talked loudly about working as a cook for Countess Keller and what nice masters I had; before I took a drink I bowed to mother and said I hoped she'd find a good position in Moscow. Semashko pretended to be a valet.' In November 1889 Chekhov would tell Suvorin, and his play would prove it, 'I have it in for professors.'60

IV

Annees de Pelerinage I sometimes feel now it is just possible that, setting off on his journeys, he was not looking for something so much as running away from something… V. Nabokov, The Gift

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Exorcizing the Demon October-December 1889 IN Moscow Kleopatra Karatygina awaited Anton: she had left the Maly theatre and was looking for a new company. Her letter of 13 September sets the tone: 'Hellishly elegant writer!… Dear man, for old time's sake come and see me and don't forget to bring the photo you promised." In November a grateful Elena Shavrova arrived in Moscow: Suvorin had printed her story, 'Sophie'. Her mother wrote to Anton 'If you remember your Yalta friends, come and see us: the Slav Bazaar No. 94.'2 By December the Shavrovas were living on the Volkhonka, only twenty minutes from the Chekhovs. Anton deputed Misha to see Elena. Olga Kundasova frequented the Chekhov household: she was teaching Masha English; she later tried to teach Anton French. The house resounded with loud female voices: Olga Kundasova laid down the law, Natalia Lintvariova stayed three weeks in November, infecting Anton with her laughter. A piano teacher, Alek-sandra Pokhlebina, nicknamed 'Vermicelli', was an inconspicuous visitor, nursing a passion for Anton that later exploded into paranoia.

A new woman entered Anton's life. She was, like Masha, a Guerrier student teaching at the Rzhevskaia girls' school. She was Lidia Mizi-nova: the Chekhovs called her Lika, after the actress Lidia (Lika) Lenskaia. Only nineteen when Masha introduced her, Lika is best described by the writer and familiar of the Chekhovs, Tatiana Shchep-kina-Kupernik, a connoisseur of female beauty: A real Swan Princess from the Russian fairy tale. Her ash-blonde flowing locks, her wonderful grey eyes and 'sable' eyebrows, her extraordinary softness and elusive charm, combined with total absence of affectation and an almost severe simplicity, made her spellbinding. Masha recalled:

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ANNf I S 1)1 I'f I.K RINAGE People could not take their eyes off her. My girl friends often stopped me and asked, 'Chekhova, tell me, who is that beauty with you?'… Lika was always very shy. She huddled against the hat stand and half-covered her face in the collar of her fur coat. ButMisha managed to get a look. He entered Anton's study and said, 'Listen, Anton, there's a really pretty girl come to see Masha! She's in the hall.' Lika was of genteel family: her mother was a concert pianist, Lidia Iurgeneva, but her father had deserted the family when she was only three. Lika was brought up by a great-aunt, Sofia Ioganson, 'Granny'. She was not content to be a teacher. She wanted to be an actress, but inveterate stage fright frustrated her. Her charm and wit were undermined by an inability to protect her interests, which made her vulnerable to ruthless men. Eighteen months earlier, she had written Anton a heart-felt anonymous fan letter.

No woman yet affected Anton as much as another visitor, Piotr Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky had loved Chekhov's prose (and Chekhov his music) for two years. He called on 14 October 1889: they agreed to collaborate on an opera, Bela, about the abduction of a Circassian princess by a Russian officer, based on part of Lermontov's A Hero of our Time. Anton gave Tchaikovsky his books, inscribing his latest collection, entitled simply Stories, 'from your future librettist'. Tchaikovsky responded with a photograph 'from your ardent admirer.' When the composer left, he forgot his cigarette case: Semashko the cellist, Ivanenko the flautist and Vania the schoolteacher each took a cigarette and solemnly smoked it before letting Anton post the case back. Tchaikovsky responded by sending a season ticket to the Russian Musical Society's symphonic concerts in Moscow, a ticket which Masha used. Anton dedicated his new collection of stories Sullen People to Tchaikovsky. Literary friends were bemused. Gruzinsky grumbled to Ezhov: 'Why should Chekhov dedicate a book to Tchaikovsky? He ought to dedicate it to Suvorin, oughtn't he?'3

Suvorin had forgiven Anton his failure to meet in Vienna. Others had not. Grigorovich was telling the Suvorins that there were now better writers, and that Anton had libelled the Suvorins in The Wood Demon. Anton blustered: You're not in the play and can't be, although Grigorovich with his usual insight sees the opposite. The play is about a bore, egotistical, wooden, lecturing on art for 25 years… For God's sake don't OCTOBER-DECEMBER l88y believe these gendemen who… ascribe to others their personal foxy and badgery features. Oh how glad that Grigorovich is! And how pleased they'd be if I'd put arsenic in your tea or turned out to be a secret police spy. Grigorovich never quite forgave Anton for all the trains he had met in vain. Anna Suvorina, however, on 12 November 1889 accepted Anton's apology: 'I know, and they say, you're in love again. Is it true or not? That was the only explanation I had for your botched journey abroad and the only reason I forgave your bad manners. Î how furious I was with you!'4 Anna, unlike Suvorin, was amused to see her family in the play.

In November 1889 The Northern Herald saved itself from extinction by printing Chekhov's 'A Dreary Story'. The work made a tremendous impact. Chekhov had found a voice and a viewpoint in his disillusioned professor of medicine: the existentialism of a man dying in a world from which he is totally alienated seemed a generation ahead of Tolstoy. The Petersburg Professor of Medicine, Botkin, died of liver cancer that winter, and Chekhov's work seemed prophetic. Even Leikin conceded: 'Charming. It is your best piece.' Anton proudly inscribed a copy to the playwright Prince Sumbatov: From a successful author who's Managed to combine and fuse A soul at peace, a mind on fire, The enema tube and poet's lyre. The Wood Demon was, however, to be widely deplored. All autumn Pavel Svobodin pestered Anton to complete it by the end of October for his benefit performance in Petersburg. His letters to Anton that autumn are frantic: I'm superstitious and afraid of November every year, that's the month for disasters in my life (I was married on 12 November 1873) and therefore… in November - it's better to have no play at all…

I hope you were lying when you said you'd thrown two acts of The Wood Demon into the Psiol… God forbid!!!

We really have to spend two weeks living together, or at least see each other every day - and the Wood Demon would sprout. You would go fully armed after him into the forest and I would part the thorny branches in your path, clear the trail and the two of us would

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ANNf I '. Ill I'i II KINASE find him and drag him out.., lor the.sake of God who created the Psiol, write, Antoine! Svobodin set his benefit night for 31 October. In mid October Svo-bodin took a train to Moscow, grabbed the script and went back; his family copied out the play to submit to the Theatrical-Literary Committee of the Aleksandrinsky Theatre.

On 9 October Svobodin read the play to the committee, which included one man disillusioned with Anton, Grigorovich. The committee rejected The Wood Demon, not simply because Grigorovich was hostile. They were unhappy on many counts: a university professor was vilified, in a country where professors had the rank of general (within living memory a student had been flogged to death for assaulting a Moscow professor). They also wanted a 'safe' play, for the heir to the throne was to attend Svobodin's benefit performance, and The Wood Demon was unorthodox, undramatic, and obscure.

Svobodin cancelled his benefit night, telling the editor Vukol Lav-rov that The Wood Demon might be 'boring, drawn-out, strange', but was worth double the hackneyed vulgarities the Aleksandrinsky audiences preferred.5 He begged Anton: Dear friend, go to your 2 2-rouble wash-stand, have a wash and a think, couldn't something be done with The Wood Demon so that it appeals not just to me and Suvorin… but to those who advised you to burn it? Svobodin dared to be frank. Suvorin's comments are not on record. The actor Lensky was brutal: I'll say one thing: write stories. Your attitude to the stage and to dramatic form is too contemptuous, you respect them too little to write drama… Pleshcheev, the following spring, delivered judgement: This is the first piece by you that has left no impression on me… As for Voinitsky, strike me dead, I can't understand why he shot himself. Anton felt he might as well take 500 roubles advance from the Abramova troupe in Moscow. They hurriedly rehearsed. The male actors did not know their parts, the women couldn't act. At the premi210

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ere on 27 November 1889 the audience booed. A claque from Korsh's theatre wolf-whistled to punish the breakaway author and actors. The reviewers were scathing: 'boring', 'pointless', 'clumsily constructed'. Chekhov withdrew his play and refused to print it, though no lithographed copies were circulating in the provinces. Seven years would pass before, by a mixture of alchemy and surgery, he transmuted The Wood Demon into Uncle Vania.

Anton had expected to live for three to four months off The Wood Demon, and was now in financial straits. He had only one other publication of any significance that autumn: 'Ordinary People', later the first half of'The Literature Teacher'. A schoolteacher in a dead provincial town, seduced by the prospects of wealth, decides to marry one of his ex-pupils. Allusions to real figures link the story to Chekhov's stay with the Suvorins and their children in the Crimea in summer 1888, and to the offer of little Nastia as a bride: the story is a coded 'no, thanks' to Suvorin6 (who without comment printed it in New Times). The Northern Herald took time to pay for 'A Dreary Story'. The sales of three books of stories, constantly reissued by Suvorin, and the 'pension' from lvanov and the farces Anton had written, kept the Chekhovs solvent.

Family life seemed to settle: Aleksandr in Petersburg was married and sober; Vania lived in his schoolhouse with Pavel; Misha was with the Suvorins in Petersburg and soon to leave home. Aunt Fenichka was meekly dying. Of Kolia only debts remained: his paintings vanished into his creditors' hands. Anton and his brothers agreed to pay off the monetary debts. There were other liabilities: Anna Ipatieva-Golden, as Kolia's common-law widow, wrote on 30 November 1889: There's not a soul in Moscow I could turn to, I can't ask my family, they're all (except for Natasha) virtually dying of hunger. The fact is I am stuck even now in the country at Razumovskoe with no firewood, no fur coat and so I appeal to you, for Christ's sake, send me 15 roubles.7 Anton gave her money, and asked Suvorin to give her work. The Suvorins, however, demanded a hefty deposit from those employed in their bookshops: Anna was unemployable. After another hand-out she resumed her old job as companion to unmarried mothers and

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ANNEES OK I'l I I KINAGE landlady to students. Anna's gratitude was effusive: 'I wept with gratitude, that is from feeling your kindness to the point of tears. And I'd never thought you were like that.'

Anton began an affair with Kleopatra Karatygina. He took her, at her request, to see Les Huguenots, and prescribed her laxatives. Never did he bring her home or mention her. He also saw Glafira Panova, sometimes at the same address and time as Karatygina. She was clearly in his mind when he wrote to his editor, Evreinova, at The Northern Herald and mused about settling down 'with a nice little actress', or to Suvorin, for whom he drew Glafira's foot: 'I have known actresses who used to be ballerinas. Yesterday, before a stag night, I visited one such actress. She now despises ballet and looks down on it, but she can't get rid of her ballet body movements.'

Writing to Elena Lintvariova, Anton laughed at commitment: he signed himself 'A. Panov', to make fun of the rumours that he was to marry Glafira Panova. Kleopatra had agreed to humiliating conditions from her 'hellishly elegant writer': she was not to talk about the relationship in case Anton's mother and sister found out. Glafira had more pride, Kleopatra wrote: Glafira is with me… She asks me to tell you that if you grudge 20 kopecks, she takes on the travel costs… everything she would like to throw at our bosses will be thrown at you. Although, as she says, you will get what you deserve. In a word, you are going to be bawled out, she doesn't care that you're a fashionable writer and hellishly elegant. So if you wish to make up for your negligence towards her come and fetch me (if you're not embarrassed to drive down the street with an actress nobody wants)… You are ordered to come on Monday from 12 to 2. You are to have your hair curled and to put on a pink tie. Glafira left for Petersburg. Karatygina followed, clutching letters of recommendation and a copy of 'A Dreary Story' (a work she loathed for its portrayal of acting as moral perdition) inscribed 'For the famous actress K. K.'s bloody nerves, from her doctor'. About this time Anton confided in Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he had seduced a married woman and found her to be a virgin. (He also told the playwright that none of his affairs had lasted more than a year.)8 Anton hated being a 'fashionable writer': when an admirer in a

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restaurant started to recite a page by heart, he hissed at his companion, 'Take her away, I have a knuckle-duster in my pocket.' He felt ill all autumn: he told Dr Obolonsky that he had 'flu, Mesopotamian plague, sap, hydrophobia, impotence and all sorts of typhoids'. At his desk Anton was as paralysed as his professor of medicine. Instead of picking up the discarded novel, he encouraged Suvorin to send him unsolicited manuscripts to sift. Some of the beneficiaries were the young men and women who had accosted him in the Crimea. Ilia Gurliand had his story of a civil servant 'Gorshkov' polished and published. Anton took Elena Shavrova's next story, 'The Chorus Girl', about a girl seduced and abandoned by an actor who has another mistress. Anton recognized the protagonists. He told Suvorin: I've made the middle of'The Chorus Girl' the beginning, the beginning the middle, and I've put on a totally new ending. When the girl reads it she'll be horrified. And mummy will give her a thrashing for an immoral ending… The girl is trying to portray an operetta troupe that was singing this summer in Yalta… I used to know chorus girls. I remember a 19-year-old whom I treated and who flirted splendidly with her legs. For the first time I noted their skill at demonstrating the beauty of thighs without undressing or kicking up their legs… Chorus girls felt awful; they went hungry, whored out of poverty, it was hot, stifling, people smelt of sweat, like horses. If even an innocent girl had noticed and described that, then you can judge their position… On literature Chekhov sounded as embittered as his dying professor in 'A Dreary Story' or his neurotic The Wood Demon. On 27 December 1889 he berated the intelligentsia to Suvorin: The best modern writers, whom I love, serve evil, since they destroy. Some of them, like Tolstoy, say 'Don't have sex with women, because they have mucous discharges; woman is revolting because her breath smells.'… these writers… help the devil multiply the slugs and woodlice we call intellectuals. Jaded, apathetic, idly philosophizing, a cold intelligentsia, which… is unpatriotic, miserable, colourless, which gets drunk on one glass and visits 50-kopeck brothels. Anton defended only medical science: A society that doesn't believe in God but is afraid of omens and the devil, which denies all doctors and then hypocritically mourns Botkin

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ANNlS.KS 1)1 \'i: I. IK I NAG E and bows down to [Professor of Medicine] Zakharin, should not dare hint that it knows what justice is. Suvorin realized what was coming: Anton was abandoning Literature his mistress for Medicine his wife.

THIRTY Ô

Arming for the Crusade December 1889-April 1890 BY THE END OF 1889 Anton had resolved to make a long journey -from which he thought he might not return - over Siberia to the edge of the Russian empire, the island of Sakhalin, Russia's grimmest penal colony. His family and friends had hints - his ardent obituary of the explorer of Central Asia, Nikolai Przhevalsky; his reading of Misha's old law-lecture notes, geography textbooks, maps, political journalism; contact with administrators of Siberia's prison empire. Ever since childhood Anton had been an avid reader of explorers' biographies and geographers' descriptions. Now, shaken by Kolia's death, he was seeking to emulate Przhevalsky's heroic exploits. After The Wood Demon, the writer felt humiliated, and the doctor-scientist in his personality took the lead. Not for the last time, Anton's entangled love life made the life of a solitary wanderer seem particularly alluring to him.

After the first performance of The Wood Demon friends expected Chekhov to flee, as he had after both premieres of Ivanov, to the other capital city, but Anton put off his New Year visit to Petersburg. The Suvorins drank Anton's health in his absence. He had fled to the Kiseliovs at Babkino. He composed for Maria Kiseliova an opening line of a story 'On such and such a date hunters wounded a young female elk in the Daragan forest' and left the rest for her to write. Anton, however, had an ulterior motive for going back to Babkino: he needed to talk to Maria's brother-in-law, a Senator Golubev, who could get him a berth on a ship that returned via China and India from Sakhalin to Odessa. In exchange for the Kiseliovs' help he agreed to examine Maria's father who was dying in Petersburg.

Around 4 January 1890, Chekhov took horses from Babkino and rejoined the railway north: he went to Petersburg with Maria Kiseliova and her younger daughter. In Petersburg, too he had business: he

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ANNIES Dl' I'fc I.HIIINAGE wanted to ask the Department of Taxes to give his brother Misha a job, and Kleopatra Karatygina asked him to persuade Suvorin to give her work. Above all, he needed official support for his journey to Sakhalin.

Anton spent a month lobbying in the city. Suvorin's name opened the doors of ministries and the prison administration, but Suvorin disapproved of Chekhov's journey: it was hazardous, and would take his closest friend away for a year. Chekhov saw the director of prisons, Galkin-Vraskoi, who, when Anton undertook to review his report, promised that Siberia's prison gates would be opened to Chekhov (and then sent a secret telegram to ensure the opposite). Suvorin gave Anton a newspaper correspondent's card.

Chekhov's plans were praised in the newspapers. Many Russian writers had made involuntary, often one-way, journeys to Siberia; none had undertaken voluntary exploration. This journey to the heart of evil was a Dantean exploit that rehabilitated Chekhov in radical eyes. They hoped Chekhov would discover on Sakhalin a set of coherent 'ideals'. Perhaps Anton's main reason for making this suicidal journey was to silence accusations that he was indifferent to the suffering he portrayed. The Russian Zolas - Korolenko and Ertel - withdrew their strictures. The animals in the literary zoo were envious of Chekhov's limelight; some of them were even glad that he would be out of the way for the rest of the year. From Petersburg Gruzinsky wrote to Ezhov (in Moscow playing whist with Vania and Misha): 'It's excellent that Chekhov is going; Sakhalin is not the point, the point is travelling the great oceans and meeting prisoners.' The right wing, however, sneered: before Anton set off, Burenin wrote: The talented writer Chekhov To distant Sakhalin trekked off. He searched its grim quarries For ideas for stories, But finding there a total lack, Took the earliest steamboat back. Inspiration, says this fable, Lies beneath the kitchen table. Obsessed with his expedition, Anton lost interest in his elder brother. When Suvorin asked, Anton demurred:

DECEMBER 1889-APRIL 189O

I don't know what to do with Aleksandr. It's not just that he drinks. That would be all right, but he is inextricably stuck in surroundings where it is literally impossible not to drink. Between us: his spouse also drinks. Grey, nasty, gloomy… And that man since he was 14, practically, has wanted to marry. All his life he's been marrying and swearing that he'll never marry again. Anton alternated hard work with frivolity. He read everything about Siberia. Suvorin had a collection of forbidden books, which included pamphlets on political prisoners, as well as Tolstoy's diatribe against sex and marriage, The Kreutzer Sonata - a book it was hard to ban, since Tsar Alexander III had liked it. Anton went to Shcheglov's name-day party; he went with the Suvorins and their Tresor to the Petersburg Dog Show. Shcheglov was exhausted by the parties until three or four in the morning. Anton had surreptitious encounters with Kleopatra Karatygina. He channelled her energy into making notes on Siberia and Sakhalin, some from the Public Library, some from her own experience. She gave him lists of friends to tap for hospitality; she taught him Siberian etiquette - never ask why anyone is in Siberia; she gave him the dates for navigation on Siberia's rivers; for his birthday she made him a travelling pillow - 'for when you're sick on the boat'. In return she wanted affection. Her weapon was Anton's anxiety not to be found out: 'Where did I put the letter to you? Which envelope did I put it in?… The letter to my sister!'9 When Anton's family did find out, Kleopatra denied responsibility: 'If your mama and sister find out your secret d'un polichinelle of course it isn't my fault. You did ask me not to blurt things out in Moscow.' Like Olga Kundasova, Kleopatra resigned herself to being unloved. She wrote dozens of notes, some in doggerel, some reproachful. She touched Chekhov for loans that she never repaid. She hoped that his dream of 'a room to share with Lika Mizinova' would prove a curse.

Anton and Suvorin clung to one another: they travelled back to Moscow together, and Suvorin took a room in the Slav Bazaar. They discussed illness, real and imaginary. One night they watched Racine's Phedre; the next they went to the Literary Society's fancy dress ball; the following night they dined with Grigorovich, and healed the breach between him and Chekhov. As Anton recuperated from his 'Sakhalin fever', his women, and libraries, he summed up his Petersburg month to Pleshcheev: 'I think of the sins I have committed, of the thousand

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barrels of wine I have drunk… In one month in Petersburg I committed so many great and petty deeds that I should be both promoted to general and hanged.'

The Suvorins left. Anton lacked congenial company. Levitan was in Paris, from where he complained of 'psychopathic' impressionists and women 'overworked by centuries of screwing'.10 Anton studied atlases, ancient and modern, and dreamed of river boats. 'I feel like crossing 12 or 18 months out of my life,' he told one journalist. He wrote just one story for New Times: 'Devils', later 'Thieves', portrays a nest of horse thieves in the steppes. Suvorin was upset that Chekhov romanticized criminals. Anton just edited Suvorin's unsolicited manuscripts, and compiled a geographical introduction to a future book on Sakhalin. In Moscow he sent Masha, Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizi-nova to the Rumiantsev Museum (now the Russian State Library) to copy what he had marked about Sakhalin and Siberia in hundreds of journals and books. From Petersburg, from Aleksandr and from Kleopatra, came facts, opinions and pleas. Karatygina reverted to a motherly style: Forgive me for poking my Roman Catholic profile where I shouldn't, but I am awfully reluctant to have you in my Siberian kingdom playing the part of a hopeless floating point (out of boredom and ignorance) and therefore I have taken it on myself, my bold child, without your knowledge, to get for you letters of recommendation. Anton was deeply upset that February by a reminder of Kolia's death: Ezhov was sitting at the table crying: his young wife is ill with consumption. He has to take her south quickly. I asked him if he had money, he said yes. He spoilt my mood with his tears. He reminded me of certain things, and anyway I'm sorry for him. Of the many forces that pursued Chekhov to the Hades of Sakhalin, 'certain things' - i.e. Kolia's ghost - were the most persistent, if not the avowed motives.

From intimations of mortality Anton was rescued by Lika Mizinova. She and Anton began to exert a pull on each other. Granny Sofia's diary traces day by day Lika falling in thrall: 5 March. Monday. Lika at 8 p.m. went to the Chekhovs, she came back at 3 a.m., very pleased that she had been mere…

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10 March. Saturday. Lidia [Lika's mother] is writing… advice for Lika, to bring her to her senses, to pull her back from an idle, disorientated life, she is never home and every night comes back late; she doesn't like the house or home life. This upsets us terribly, especially her mother, and it's impossible to talk to her, she starts yelling immediately and it ends widi her walking out angry with family life, saying tliat it's hell, not life. 13 March. Tuesday. Lika has been out and about until 2 a.m., she went to the Rumiantsev museum to make notes about Sakhalin island… 28 March. Wednesday. I happened to make the acquaintance of die mother of Maria Chekhova, Lika and I met her in the arcade, very nice, simple manners, we were introduced and had a chat there and then. 29 March. Thursday. Lika was to go to All Night Vigil at some nunnery with her girl friends. She deceived us! She went with the Chekhovs and came back at 1.30 a.m. 31 March. Saturday. The brazen Kundasova appeared to ask us to let Lika come to the Chekhovs, to which Lidia [her mother] said that we had a long-standing custom of a family Easter at home… 5 April. Thursday… We liked Anton very much - he's a doctor and a writer, such a nice personality, simple manners, considerate… 21 April. Saturday. Today, finally, Anton Chekhov is setting off. So Lika will have some rest. At 1 Anton came to say goodbye. His family and many friends, among them Olga Kundasova, she really is infatuated, are off to the station at 7 to see him off. He spent half an hour with us and set off with Lika… I'm afraid, is our Lika involved with him? It looks very like it… But he's a fine man, an alluring personality." Anton was swamped with affection on the eve of his departure. He told Suvorin 'such girls that if I rounded them all up to my country cottage I'd have a really wild ball, pregnant with consequences.'

It was easier to part with his brothers and men friends: he promised to bring back Manila cigars and ivory carvings of naked Japanese girls. Shcheglov, Ezhov and Gruzinsky lauded Anton's courage. Pavel Svobodin declared that he would be called Chekhov of Sakhalin. Anton fobbed off Misha, who fancied meeting in Japan and returning to Russia together. Lily Markova's husband, Sakharov, asked to be the expedition's artist (for a fee of 1000 roubles): the husband of an ex-mistress was no travelling companion for Anton in Siberia: he begged Suvorin to put Sakharov off the idea.

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Suvorin could not see the point of the crusade, of expense, suffering and wasted time. To him Anton addressed a fiery missive: You write that Sakhalin is of no use, no interest to anyone. Can that be true? Sakhalin can be useless and uninteresting only to a society that does not exile thousands of people there and spend millions on it. After Australia in the past and Cayenne, Sakhalin is the only place where criminal colonization can be studied… Sakhalin is a place of the most unendurable sufferings free or enslaved man can endure… I'd say that places like Sakhalin should be visited for homage, as Turks go to Mecca… We have rotted alive millions of people, rotted them for nothing, without thinking, barbarically; we have herded people through the cold in fetters tens of thousands of miles, infected them with syphilis, debauched them, bred criminals and blamed all this on red-nosed prison warders. All educated Europe now knows that it's not the warders but all of us that are guilty, but we don't care, we're not interested. Rarely had Anton been so emotionally stoked up. He felt mortally insulted by a reviewer's phrase 'priests of unprincipled writing like Mr Chekhov' in the March issue of the radical monthly Russian Thought, and raged to Vukol Lavrov, its editor: I would not reply even to slander were it not that I am soon leaving Russia for a long time, perhaps never to return, and I have not the strength to refrain from replying… After your accusation not only are business relations but the most ordinary nodding acquaintance between us is impossible. Had Chekhov perished on Sakhalin, Russian Thought would have been blamed, as Burenin was blamed for killing Nadson. It was to take two years' diplomacy by Pavel Svobodin to undo the damage done to Chekhov and to Russian Thought by a careless remark and Anton's pride. Anton left in high dudgeon and high spirits.

On 21 April, fortified by three glasses of Santurini wine from Dr Korneev, he took the train to Iaroslavl. Here he took a river boat down the Volga and up the Kama into the Urals. He left his mother Masha and Lika weeping at the station. (He had told them he would be back in September, knowing well that he would be away until December.) Lika was left a photograph inscribed: 'To the kindly creature I am running from to Sakhalin and who scratched my nose… P.S. This inscription, like an exchange of cards, obliges me to nothing.'

DECEMBER 1889-APRIL 1890

Chekhov dropped hints in Siberia that he and Lika were betrothed. Friends travelled with Anton the first thirty miles to the St Sergei monastery: his brother Vania, the Levitan menage a trois - the mistress Sofia Kuvshinnikova and her husband Dr Kuvshinnikov (who gave Anton a bottle of cognac to open on the Pacific Ocean). Olga Kunda-sova stayed on the train as far as Iaroslavl and accompanied Anton down the Volga. Next day, when they had passed Kineshma, she disembarked. Anton was at last truly alone, travelling into unknown territory.

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Ô

Crossing Siberia 22 April-June 1890 STEAMING DOWN THE VOLGA to Nizhni and up the Kama to Perm, his stomach churning from the farewell, Chekhov wrote greetings to friends and instructions to family. At Perm the river journey ended; here, on the slopes of the Urals, heavy rain turned the snow to mud. Chekhov arrived at Perm at 2.00 a.m.; the train across the Urals left at six in the evening. A 200-mile train journey took all night to Ekaterinburg. Here Anton had the addresses of his mother's relatives. One visited Anton in the American Hotel, but did not invite him to dine.

Anton stayed three days in Ekaterinburg reconnoitring. The railhead ended another 200 miles east at Tiumen. America had been joined coast-to-coast for twenty years; Russia had no Trans-Siberian railway. From Tiumen Chekhov hoped to spare himself 1000 miles overland through blizzards and floods to Tomsk: ships went down the Tobol and the Irtysh and then upstream, southeast up the Ob and the Tom, to Tomsk, from where travellers had to go overland. Siberia's major rivers flow from south to north, and travellers head from west to east. The great Siberian road was a rutted belt of mud, snow or dust (depending on the season), interrupted by ferry crossings over wide, dangerous rivers. Prisoners and exiles and the crude birch-pole carts (tarantasy) of officials and carters were the traffic.

To reach the Russian Far East - Vladivostok, Kamchatka or Sakhalin - by sea a Voluntary Fleet had been launched by public subscription. Anton, in Nikolai Przhevalsky's footsteps, was crossing the hard way. Arriving in Ekaterinburg on 28 April, he was told that until 18 May no passenger ships could leave Tiumen: ice obstructed the Tobol, but the Irtysh had already melted and flooded for miles. He had left two weeks too early or four weeks too late. Nevertheless, on 1 May Chekhov took the train, pursued by furious blizzards,

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to Tiumen. Here he bought a cart, and hired horses to Tomsk.

Anton kept a pencilled diary. He wrote few letters: he was too bruised and exhausted, wet and cold, and the post to Russia took weeks. He was also ill-equipped. Misha had bought him a wooden trunk which crashed about the cart as it bumped over the ruts and lumps of ice and nearly brained him. Others had soft leather bags as mattresses to sleep on or cushions to brace against. Only the thick leather coat that Aleksei Kiseliov had provided protected Anton's body from hypothermia and broken bones when he was flung from the cart. The revolver he had brought he never even drew. Though Siberia was full of prisoners, escaped and settled, its lonely roadhouses were cleaner and friendlier than European Russia's inns. He starved. On Russia's rivers he gorged himself on sterlets. In Siberia, in spring, there was only bread, wild garlic and coarse powdered tea. Evgenia had given Anton a portable coffee stove and coffee: it took him three weeks to learn how to brew up.

On 7 May, paying his drivers double or treble the standard tariff, he reached the shores of the Irtysh, 450 miles in four days by cart from Tiumen. He was now stranded: the roads were so flooded that he could not turn back, and the winds so furious that the ferryman would not row across. He wrote not to his mother, who feared for his life, but to Maria Kiseliova, who had in her letters been hinting for years that suffering would do him good: A second troika, also at top speed; we veer right, it veers left. 'We're colliding' flashes in my head. One instant and a crashing sound, the horses entangle in a black mass, my cart is on its rear, I tumble to the ground all my suitcases and bundles on top of me. I leap up and see a third troika. My mother must have been praying for me last night. If I had been asleep or the third troika had come straight after the second I'd have been crushed to death or crippled… I feel a complete loneliness that I have never known before. It took a week to reach Tomsk: this time the flooded Tom held him up. It was the coldest May in Siberia for almost forty years. Not a leaf on the birches, not a blade of grass on the ground, and three inches of snow. Only flocks of geese and ducks heralded spring. At Tomsk Anton recuperated for a week. He wrote at length to his family: there were no murders in Siberia; men did not beat their wives;

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'even' the Jews and Poles were decent farmers; the beds were soft, the rooms were clean. The bread and the salty soup of half-cooked duck innards, however, unsettled Anton's stomach.

Anton mentioned the crash that nearly killed him. He told 'sweet Misha' it was as well he had declined his offer of company. In Tomsk, before the even worse overland stage - noo miles to Irkutsk - he ordered a wickerwork superstructure for his cart. The streets were swamped with mud; there was only one bathhouse. Chekhov was the first traveller of the season, and in central Siberia travellers on pleasure were objects of curiosity and hospitality. Sitting in his hotel room, writing to Suvorin, Anton was interrupted by a man in uniform with long moustaches, Arshaulov, police chief of Tomsk. They got talking: the police chief ordered vodka. Anton read Arshaulov's literary efforts and wrote him a letter of recommendation to Suvorin.

Arshaulov took Anton around the brothels of Tomsk. They got back to the hotel at two in the morning. The experience had not been gratifying: 'Tomsk is a boring, drunken town; no beautiful women at all, Asiatic lawlessness. The only notable thing about this town is that governors die.' For the return journey travellers in Tomsk advised an American boat via San Francisco and New York, rather than the austerity of the Russian Voluntary Fleet.

On 21 May Anton left Tomsk, in company. Three army officers -two lieutenants and a military doctor - travelling east by sledge on official business offered to share expenses with Anton. They were rough, sometimes obnoxious company, but they gave the novice traveller confidence. One of them, Lieutenant von Schmidt, had been sent to Siberia (where he was to have a successful career) for beating up his batman. Garrulous and abusive, he may have inspired some of the features of Lieutenant Soliony in Three Sisters - the most Siberian of Chekhov's plays. Von Schmidt took to Anton (and later wrote him an apologetic letter): he suggested Anton find himself female company: 'I can't,' he [Chekhov] said, 'I have a bride in Moscow.' Then after a short silence he added in an odd voice, as if thinking aloud: 'Only I doubt if I'll be happy with her - she's too beautiful.'12 Lika was on Anton's mind. He was to tell his host on Sakhalin, Bulgar-evich, that he planned to marry. His letters to Lika constantly invent

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little tasks for her, he enquires after her admirers, he teases her by proxy. But Lika, or as Anton now called her Jamais, did not write. She was being escorted by the flautist Ivanenko and by Anton's younger brothers - none of whom Anton took seriously enough to feel jealousy. Through the Chekhovs, however, Lika knew Sofia Kuvshinnikova and her lover, Levitan. Of all Chekhov's circle Levitan was the most irresistible womanizer, and gave Anton cause to fear for Lika's fidelity.

The Chekhov family scattered all over Russia as soon as Anton was away. It was as if in Anton they had lost their centre of gravity. School ended in May: Masha and her mother stayed with the Lintvariovs, taking a wreath for Kolia's grave. Misha went with them but the very next day left for Taganrog. After his return to Luka, Masha would venture with Natalia Lintvariova for a month in the Crimea. Pavel too was on the move, to stay with Aleksandr's family in Petersburg and even to travel with Aleksandr to Finland.

The Chekhov family had shrunk to just Masha, Anton and their parents. Neither parent was sure that Anton would return. The 'chest of drawers' house seemed absurdly large, and the family surrendered the tenancy: they would look for new quarters in September. Vania had, again by bad luck, lost his job, and could find a post only in the peat bogs of Vladimir province, 150 miles from Moscow. Misha from September would be a tax inspector 200 miles south of Moscow. Aunt Fenichka was only just alive.

Ivanenko wrote to Anton at the end of May: his letter reached Sakhalin months later, so that Anton did not realize how badly his family coped without him. Masha and Evgenia fell ill with distress.13

The move to the country was joyless. Masha found herself in love with George Lintvariov and her feelings unreciprocated. Worse, Misha had quarrelled with the Lintvariovs. Masha, nevertheless, had to stay there all May.14

By the end of May, when Misha had returned from Taganrog, Masha set off with her friend 'Natashevu' Lintvariova for a happy month, free of parents and brothers, in the Crimea. On 20 June she wrote to Pavel: 'Thanks to Antosha, I'm very happy to be in such a wonderful fairy tale place. I had a telegram from Irkutsk asking me not to grudge the money, that he's well and rich. Thanks to him I have many friends in Yalta.'

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ANNA'S I) li PKLERINAGE Others were unhappy. Vania was angry that Misha had abandoned Evgenia for Taganrog, and he reported to Masha on Lika: She is obeying her mama and stays home, not leaving the house after six. Amazing… Things are bad with her, she has no job… I want to drag Lika off to the Sparrow Hills, but doubt she will submit: she is awfully obstinate. Kuvshinnikova left with Levitan 4 days ago for the Volga. Lika had given up her dreams of being an actress and singer. She was shortly to take up work as a clerk in Moscow's town council offices. Far worse, however, was the plight of Ezhov. He wrote on 10 June: My wife Liudia died on 3 June at 4.30 a.m. I don't know where you are, Anton, but I'm in the cold tundra and there's not a spark of hope of my life being happy or making sense. Liudia loved me like nobody else. My tiny successes were happiness for her. On the evening before she died her face was worn out with disease, and she never took her loving eyes off me as if asking, 'Save me, save me!' Letters reached Anton too slowly to be worth answering and he stoically accepted his inability to help or console his correspondents. The telegraph linked Europe and Siberia, but the Chekhovs were too thrifty to send telegrams, however much Anton begged them to do so. (He was sparing himself, however, the expense of telegrams.) Anna Suvorina telegraphed to the river boat Anton was catching in eastern Siberia, discreetly but flirtatiously encoding Anton as Mikita and herself as Marina: HUSBAND ODESSA WHAT CAN I SAY GLAD YOUR SUCCESS GRIEVE YOU NOT HERE WHO PROMISED WRITE GOD HELP YOU MIKITA NO HAPPINESS FOR YOU MARINA. After 400 miles Anton reached the banks of the Yenisei. At Krasnoyarsk, mountainous forests replaced the desolation of the Siberian plains. The road was atrocious: hemmed in by hills, the driver could not avoid the ruts and holes. It took two weeks to reach Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia. All roads ended. Anton put his cart up for sale. He stayed at Irkutsk a week, drawing money, writing letters. He liked the city- 'just like Europe' - but his companions were spending his money as well as their own on drink. They sickened him. Anton pined. He

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thought again of buying a ranch; he longed for female company, and wrote to Masha: I must be in love with Jamais [Lika], since I dreamt of her last night. Compared with these Siberian Parashas [the name also means chamber pot], all these whorefaces that don't know how to dress, sing or laugh, our Jamais, Drishka and Gundasikha [Lika, Daria Musina-Pushkina, Olga Kundasova] are queens. Siberian ladies, married or not, are frozen fish. You'd have to be a walrus or a seal to have fun with them. Irkutsk was hard to leave. When they finally reached Lake Baikal, the ferry had gone. Anton complained: We searched the village all evening to buy a chicken, but didn't find one. But there is vodka! Russians are terrible pigs. If you ask why they don't eat meat or fish, they explain that there is no transport, roads are bad etc., but there's as much vodka as you like even in the remotest villages. The next day Anton spotted smoke from the funnel of a small boat; after appalling discomfort it disembarked them on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. A week later, on 20 June, Chekhov, Homo sachaliensis as he now called himself, made Sretensk and boarded the Ermak an hour before it departed. Relief - no more rutted mud tracks - made Anton euphoric.

On the Ermak Anton read his telegrams from the Suvorins; he was free of Lieutenant von Schmidt, there was a washroom (where the crew's pet fox watched the passengers' ablutions). He gazed at the wild shores of the Amur, and spied on the Chinese villagers on the right bank. The steamboat shook, it ran aground in two and a half feet of water and the crew took a day and a night to repair the holes. The Far East of the Russian empire, recently acquired from China, was another land. The monsoon climate made it lush in summer. The Manchurian border brought it prosperity. Above all, there was freedom. Anton told his family: 'Here people are not afraid to talk loudly. There's nobody to arrest them here and nowhere to exile them to, you can be as liberal as you like… A fugitive political prisoner can freely take a boat to the ocean.'

On 27 June, intoxicated with the Amur air - 'free and warm' -Anton reached Blagoveshchensk. He was bewitched by the Chinese

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ANNEKS 1)1. 1'El.ERINAGE traders and Japanese girls. In;i Blagoveshchensk brothel, as a letter to Suvorin shows, Anton was happy: a nice clean room, sentimental in an Asiatic way, furnished with bric-a-brac. No ewers, no rubber devices, no portraits of generals… The Japanese girl has her own concept of modesty. She doesn't put out the light and when you ask what the Japanese is for one thing or another, she gives a straight answer and as she does so, because she doesn't understand much Russian, points her fingers and even puts her hand on it. What's more, she doesn't put on airs or go coy, like Russian women. And all the time she is laughing and making lots of tsu noises. She is amazingly skilled at her job, so that you feel you are not having intercourse but taking part in a top level equitation class. When you come, the Japanese girl pulls widi her teeth a sheet of cotton wool from her sleeve, catches you by the 'boy'… gives you a massage, and die cotton wool tickles your belly. And all this is done widi coquetry, laughing, singing and saying ø.ú Anton touched foreign soil when he crossed the Amur to the Chinese port of Aigun. Then he took the Muraviov down to the Amur, to the ocean at Nikolaevsk on the final stage of his journey to Sakhalin.

THIRTY-TWO Ô

Sakhalin June-December 1890 CHEKHOV SHARED HIS CABIN to Nikolaevsk with a Chinese citizen, Sung Liu Li, who chattered about decapitation and appended his greetings in Chinese when Chekhov wrote to the family. Turning northeast along the Amur, the boat brought Anton into a bleak landscape, the gateway to the penal settlement. Nikolaevsk had no accommodation and Anton had to board another ship to sleep. After a week he set sail in the steamer Baikal, with soldiers and a few prisoners, across the shallow straits to Sakhalin. The Baikal soon stopped: the sandbanks were too treacherous to navigate and Anton was rowed ashore at Cape Jaore. There, tormented by the mosquitoes, he stayed for two days at the lonely house of a naval officer and his wife. Then, at 5 a.m. on II July 1890, after eighty-one days' travelling, Chekhov finally disembarked at Aleksandrovsk, a cluster of wooden buildings that housed the administration for the prison colonies of central Sakhalin. At dinner in the prison he was introduced to a man who was, Anton said, the spitting image of Ibsen - the prison doctor Dr Perlin, who later took Anton as a lodger.

Anton's reading had ill prepared him for the island. Six hundred miles long, but with a land area of Scotland, Sakhalin is a hilly sliver of Arctic tundra, thinly covered with coniferous scrub. For half the year the temperature is below o°C; for the other half chilly fog and rain alternate. The island barely supported a few thousand aborigines, Gilyaks and Ainu, who lived off berries, seeds and fish. A little coal was mined to supply passing ships, but Sakhalin's only use to Russia was as a penal colony that hardened criminals would fear. Nothing could convey the awfulness of Sakhalin: its bogs rendered impassable by tree-roots, its cold, rain, fog and murderous insects. The officials disingenuously claimed to know nothing of his arrival (despite the newspaper reports and government telegrams they had received).

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ANNl':i:s DE I'El.KRINAGE They lived in a dream world. General Vladimir Kononovich, the island's governor, promised full cooperation16 as soon as the visit of Baron Korf, governor of the whole Amur and Sakhalin province, was over. A week later, Korf dined with Anton and Kononovich. Both governors seemed liberal: they deplored corporal and capital punishment, perpetual servitude and exile. Baron Korf had not visited Sakhalin for five years and proclaimed himself delighted by its progress; Kononovich apparently knew nothing of the daily floggings, the embezzlement of food and medicine, the enforced prostitution of women, the murder of native Gilyaks - barbarities which Anton heard of in his first days on the island.

Kononovich was forced to retire: he was too humane a man for the government, although he closed his eyes to his subordinates' misdeeds. Dr Perlin, disloyal by nature, was an excellent informant, though an uncongenial host. After a month Anton moved in with a young civil servant, Daniil Bulgarevich. Bulgarevich's brother had been exiled to Siberia for political offences: Daniil was a decent, melancholy individual. His household was the hearth from which Anton worked. Like many officials and prisoners, Bulgarevich showed the best of his character to Anton. Anton's medical training ensured that he hid his revulsion and relaxed prisoners and guards. They talked. Anton was the only Russian on the island who was neither prisoner nor jailer. Exiles wept and gave him presents. From his dwindling funds he dispensed charity - he bought one exile a heifer. Psychopathic killers and sadistic guards were equally responsive. They showed a humanity that their colleagues, after Chekhov published his book, found incredible.

The 10,000 prisoners, the 10,000 men and their families who guarded them, the few thousand released prisoners and exiles who tried to farm the intractable Sakhalin bogs, the few hundred aborigines, Gilyaks and Ainu, who had survived the diseases brought by the Japanese (who had territorial claims to Sakhalin) and Russians and the savage plunder by escaped convicts and renegade guards, lived in hell. Until 1888 exile to Sakhalin was for life; even in 1890 exiles were allowed to resettle only in eastern Siberia. The guards, too, were likely to succumb to disease or violence on the island. In late July Kononovich let Chekhov print 10,000 questionnaires in the island's print shop and interview prisoners and exiles. All August Anton surJUNE-DECEMBER 189O veyed the west coast around Aleksandrovsk and the Òóò river valley that runs north from the centre of the island to the Sea of Okhotsk. In mid September he took a boat to Korsakovsk in Aniva Bay on the south side. At Korsakovsk Anton found hospitality with the Feldmans, a family of policemen and prison officials. Despite their notorious brutality, they showed their best side to Chekhov. Aniva Bay was cosmopolitan: Anton picnicked with the Japanese consul, and met shipwrecked American whalers.

The cards that Chekhov distributed to prisoners and exiles recorded name, address, married state, age, religion, place of birth, year of arrival, trade, literacy, source of income, diseases. They provided statistics that the Russian authorities lacked. In poor health, in two regions, each of 10,000 square miles, travelling on foot over treacherous paths, Anton collected data for 10,000 individuals in one short Arctic summer. In August and September 1890 the sun shone exceptionally often on Sakhalin, but Anton's achievement, nevertheless, was Herculean. He recorded hundreds of conversations with men, women and children of every status and nationality (though he met few aborigines); he inspected farms, mines, hospitals; he watched floggings. If he had the wherewithal, he treated the sick. He arrived too late to witness a mass hanging; the death penalty for murder had been abolished in Russia, but on Sakhalin murderers were hanged.

Chekhov's indignation focused on the plight not of the prisoners or guards, but of the children. The schools were closed for the summer, but, even when they were open, they were clearly as fictitious as the hospitals, where there were no scalpels or medicines and the doctors spent the money on brandy for themselves. Chekhov remonstrated with Kononovich: he made his officials order textbooks from Suvorin and telegraphed Vania to send school programmes and books.

Anton sent a few telegrams home: he accustomed his mother to the idea that he would be back later than he had originally said. At the end of his stay he received a letter from her: Dear Antosha, look after your health, don't risk travelling by horse at night, boats are also dangerous… Excuse me Antosha for asking, please bring if you can a collar for Masha, I think it's called Arctic fox, I don't know what fashions you have there, and 4 sables for

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Anton learnt that he now had no home in Moscow, that Vania had lost his job, that Ezhov was widowed, that Ivanenko was writing to Lika, and that Olga Kundasova had vanished. In two and a half months on the island he sent only one substantial letter to Russia, to Suvorin, as he sailed to the south of the island. It is a wary letter: I don't know what will come of it, but I have done quite a lot. There'd be enough for three dissertations. I got up every day at 5 a.m., went to bed late and every day was tense witb the thought that I had still a lot to do, and now that I have finished forced labour, I have the feeling I have seen every small detail but missed the elephant… I have visited all the famous. I witnessed a flogging, after which I dreamt of the executioner and the revolting flogging-horse for three or four nights. I chatted with men fettered to wheelbarrows. Once I was having tea in a mine and the former Petersburg merchant Borodavkin, sent here for arson, took from his pocket a teaspoon and gave it to me, and as a result my nerves were upset and I promised never to go to Sakhalin again. The Chekhovs received a telegram dated 12 October 1890 from a ship of the Voluntary Fleet, Petersburg: 'Unloaded convicts, left Korsakovsk 10th, will pick up Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, leaving [for] Odessa 13th."8 In Vladivostok Anton got a foreign passport from the chief of police, and telegraphed to Aleksandr in Petersburg, the only sibling whose address he had: 'Sailing Singapore Chekhov'.

The family had endured its own Sakhalin. They knew little of Anton's adventures. In his absence they sought protection from Suvorin. On his way to his Crimean villa, Suvorin called on Masha. He offered both her and Vania work; he invited Misha to Feodosia. Misha was, thanks to Suvorin, a tax inspector, but he was unhappy in his provincial hotel room. All Anton's siblings were under Suvorin's wing. Only Evgenia felt abandoned. All July at Luka she nagged Pavel: for God's sake, ask Vania to find us a flat, we are leaving here on the 2nd [of September] and I'm worn out with worry… we need money badly… Masha sent a letter to Aleksandr the day after we had his letter and he still isn't sending us any money.19 In September Evgenia and Pavel found new quarters. Olga Kundasova came to live there for a few weeks; Suvorin called twice. Pavel, quelled for once, described to Vania the shouting matches between the reac232 JUNE-DECEMBER l8oO tionary tycoon and the radical feminist, whom Suvorin called 'Psychopath!' The Chekhovs moved again, but this house was expensive and small. Evgenia wrote to Vania on 8 October: On 4 October we moved to new quarters, Malaia Dmitrovka. Fir-gang's house, a detached house, 2 floors, 800 roubles. Antosha and Masha upstairs, two rooms, downstairs papa and I and the dining room, you're welcome to come, you'll be fed, it's hard for you and I miss you and I'm very sorry, Misha went to Efremov on 1 October, he'll stay there 2 weeks and then be transferred to Aleksin, somewhere the other side of Serpukhov, no news from Anton, we don't know where he is, we meant to telegraph Suvorin to ask, we don't know where Suvorin is either, we are all exhausted… I'm sorry for Masha, she has been most unhappy of all. If I miss anyone it's you. I keep mourning, my lovely hawks have all flown the nest. Lika Mizinova has been in the country for two weeks… Fenichka is barely alive, she can't hold anything.20 The new Moscow flat with its two servants, the elderly retainer and cook Mariushka and a new chambermaid, never felt like home. The carters had broken Evgenia's sewing machine and Masha's wardrobe. From Petersburg (where he was entertaining Pavel) Aleksandr urged Masha: Dearest Sister, Why are you moving like matchmakers almost every day from one flat to another?… Nobody knows where Anton is now. Probably he's not even writing to Suvorin… What ties you and mother to Moscow? Essentially, apart from many years' habit, nothing. Come and live with me in Petersburg. I have been saying this to Vater in Petersburg, but he has some weighty considerations on this account.21 Natalia added: 'Dear Masha, I am sincerely sorry for you, now you are completely alone, but God grant Anton will soon arrive and you will have your happy days.' The telegram from Vladivostok with news of Anton's return relieved Masha. She told Misha: We are very pleased with the flat, we have settled very well indeed, come and look. The day before yesterday Suvorin came. He came specially to offer me a post in his bookshop, at first just as a shop assistant… I was very pleased of course, but remembered that Anton might not be especially pleased… I asked Suvorin to wait for Anton to arrive.22

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The literary world could relax in Chekhov's absence. Only a few travel sketches from Siberia had appeared in print under his name. The dramatist and editor V. A. Tikhonov recorded in his diary: What a powerful, sheer elemental force Anton Chekhov is! But how many enviers he has attracted from among our authors… The most repellent in this respect is Shcheglov; he slobbered over Chekhov as a most devoted friend; now he has started hissing at him behind his back.23 Chekhov enjoyed the Petersburg, a sturdy 300-foot steamer built in Scotland twenty years before. It was lightly loaded - no prisoners ever came back from Sakhalin. Leaving Vladivostok on 19 October 1890, the ship held a mere 364 sailors, soldiers and guards, relieved from service in the Far East. The American whalers were to be dropped at Hong Kong. A few passengers occupied the cabins. One was Father Irakli, a Buriat Mongol who had been given a free passage to Russia to report in Moscow on his missionary work with the Gilyaks and Ainu. The Captain appeared only during a storm in the China Sea and told passengers who had revolvers to keep them loaded, since death by shooting was preferable to death by drowning. A midshipman Glinka struck up an acquaintance with Anton: he was the son of a Baroness Ikskul who in Petersburg had given (and broken) a promise to use her power to smooth Anton's passage.

Sakhalin was the evil face of colonialism; Hong Kong impressed Chekhov as the opposite. The ship stayed there eighty hours. Anton told Suvorin, on his return: A wonderful bay, such movement on the sea as I have never seen even in pictures; nine roads, horse-trams, a railway up the mountain, museums, botanical gardens; wherever you look you see the Englishmen's most tender concern for their employees, there is even a sailors' club. I… was annoyed to hear my Russian companions cursing the English for exploiting the natives. I thought: yes, the English exploit the Chinese, the Sepoys, the Indians, but they do give them roads, piped water, museums, Christianity, you [Russians] exploit them and what do you give them? As they crossed the China Sea, the storms died away. On 20 October, just one day into the voyage home, one soldier died of 'acute pneumonia' in the ship's hospital: his body was thrown overboard in a

JUNE-DECEMBER 189O

sailcloth shroud. As they left Hong Kong, on 29 October, another soldier died and was buried at sea. Anton's mood plunged. He barely remembered Singapore for the tears that he was holding back (although in his few hours on shore he ordered a Javanese pony as a present for Suvorin).

Burial at sea inspired Chekhov to write the first fiction he had composed for a year, 'Gusev', an awesome portrayal of nature's indifference to death. The grim philosophy of 'A Dreary Story' was now matched with the vision of nature in 'Steppe': Chekhov's post-Sakhalin phase had begun. The story had the by-line Colombo. Fifty-eight hours spent in Ceylon, the legendary Eden, revived Anton's spirits. He took a train to Kandy in the mountains, and watched the Salvation Army: 'girls in Indian dresses and glasses, drum, harmonicas, guitars, a flag, a crowd of bare-arsed little boys… Virgins sing something wild, and the drum goes boom boom! And all that in the dark, on the shores of a lake.' After the Salvation Army Kandy offered something more to his taste: I was sated to the throat with palm groves and bronze-skinned women. When I have children then I shall tell them not without pride, 'You sons of bitches, in my day I had intercourse with a black-eyed Indian girl… and where? In a coconut plantation on a moonlit night.' This was the exploit of which he was to boast to his Petersburg friends - 'the real charmers are coloured women,' he told Ezhov.24

There was another transaction in Colombo. Midshipman Glinka and Chekhov went to an Indian animal-dealer and each bought a tame male mongoose; Chekhov went back to the dealer and bought another animal, too wild to handle and sold as a female mongoose. With these animals they returned to the Petersburg. On 12 November 1890 the ship left Colombo. Thirteen days passed without a port. Midshipman Glinka and Anton Chekhov sat on deck with their mongooses. In late November Chekhov passed through the Suez Canal. Pavel wrote: 'Greetings to Holy Palestine, in which the world's Redeemer lived. You will be passing Jerusalem'. Uncle Mitrofan was so moved, Georgi reported, that 'my father put Anton's letter on the chest of drawers, covered it with his hat and went to church.' Pavel was tracing Anton's journey on a wall map of Siberia; he wrote to Vania just before Anton

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ANNl'llS!)!?: I'fcl.K RINAGE docked in Odessa: 'I think only about Antosha, may he return safe and sound. Such separation is unbearable. Come and meet him. Misha will come too.'25 Anton saw Mt Sinai, and then sailed past the island of Santurini which supplied Taganrog with wine. On 2 December the ship reached Odessa. After three days' quarantine the passengers disembarked. Anton, Glinka, Father Irakli and the mongooses took the express to Moscow. On 7 December Evgenia and Misha intercepted the train at Tula. Misha recalled: We found Anton dining in the station restaurant with Midshipman Glinka… and a strange looking man, an aborigine with a broad, flat face and narrow slanting eyes. This was the chief priest of Sakhalin, monk-priest Irakli… wearing an ordinary suit of an absurd Sakhalin cut. As they ate, the mongooses stood on their hind legs and kept peeking at their plates. The Sakhalin priest, his face as flat as a board and without a hint of facial hair, and the mongooses seemed so exotic that a whole crowd gathered around the diners, gawping at them. 'Is he a Red Indian?' 'Are they apes?' came the questions. After a touching reunion with the writer, mother and I got in the same carriage and the five of us set off for Moscow. Apart from the mongoose Anton had brought in a cage a very wild female mongoose which soon turned out to be a palm cat.26 Misha and Anton drank and played with the mongooses for the four hour journey. Father Irakli and Midshipman Glinka's mongoose stayed with the Chekhovs for some time. The Firgang house was crowded. Pavel now came home every evening. (He was soon to retire from Gavrilov's warehouse.) While he put up with the mongooses, which dug up potted plants and scrabbled in his beard, the palm cat was unbearable. It would emerge at night and bite the twitching feet of any guest sleeping in the dining room. (For Pavel, Anton's 'mongooses' were a bench mark of animal delinquency.) The male mongoose was christened Svoloch, best translated as 'Sod'. Sod and Suvorin were uppermost in Anton's mind. Sick with the change of climate (he had a cold, constipation, haemorrhoids and, he claimed, impotence), he stayed at home and wrote letters. He told Leikin that mongooses were better than dachshunds, 'a mixture of rat and crocodile, tiger and monkey'. To Shcheglov he wrote: If only you knew what lovely animals I brought from India! They are mongooses, the size of half-grown kittens, very cheerful lively

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beasts. Their qualities are: daring, curiosity and affection for man. They fight rattle snakes and always win, they are afraid of nothing and nobody and, as for curiosity, there isn't a parcel or package in the room they don't open; when they meet anyone they first of all poke around in pockets to see what's there? When they're left alone in the room they start to cry. He did not mention mongooses to Suvorin: instead he confessed his disillusionment with humanity - after Sakhalin his contempt for the Russian intelligentsia extended to Suvorin's closest collaborators: I passionately want to talk to you. My soul is seething. I want nobody but you, for you are the only one I can talk to… When shall I see you and Anna? How is Anna? Greetings to Boria and Nastia; to prove I have been a convict I shall, when I come to see you, attack them with a knife and yell wildly. I shall set fire to Anna's room… I embrace you and all your house warmly, except for… Burenin who… should long ago have been exiled to Sakhalin. For a month Anton was too ill to leave the house, let alone visit Petersburg. He spent Christmas and New Year with his family.

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The Flight to Europe January-May 1891 ANTON SPENT DECEMBER 1890 sorting out boxes of cards and papers from Sakhalin and revising his story 'Gusev'. Winter in Russia that year was harsh: Moscow plunged to minus 300, in Taganrog snow reached the eaves. Irregular heart beats and a cough kept Chekhov awake; by day haemorrhoids made sitting painful. The house was crowded - Vania had caught typhoid in the marshes of Sudogda and came to recuperate. Mentally, Anton had changed. His fiction was to show how Sakhalin had destroyed his respect for authority and strong men. His affection for Suvorin survived, but he now felt contempt for New Times. He rarely referred to Sakhalin in his fiction, but his confirmed distrust of ideology, and his preference for unspoilt nature over spoiled humanity are Sakhalin's legacy. Chekhov's remarks to Suvorin that December echo those he would give to his fictional heroes: 'God's world is good. One thing is not good: us.'

Lika Mizinova, Olga Kundasova - who brought her seventeen-year-old sister Zoe along - and the piano teacher Aleksandra Pokhlebina all danced attendance on Anton. In the Crimea Masha had met Countess Klara Mamuna: she became Misha's fiancee, but for a year she too focused on Anton. In Petersburg others were waiting. New rumours of impending marriage were spreading. While Anton was away, the old poet Pleshcheev had unexpectedly inherited two million roubles from a cousin who died intestate. His daughter Elena became an heiress. All Petersburg, from Anna Suvorina to AJeksandr Chekhov, urged Anton, half in jest, to propose.

To Burenin the journey to Sakhalin had been radical posturing by a failed talent. The radicals, however, acclaimed a politicized Chekhov. 'Gusev' won praise all round: the story's hero, a doomed tubercular soldier buried at sea, was seen by the left as a victim of a ruthless system and by the right as a model of Christian resignation. Tchaikovsky

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was moved. Natalia's dentist refused to accept payment from her, as Chekhov's sister-in-law. Two years late, the Dauphin sent a promised gift of Santurini wine, with a letter in fine Latin, ending: 'Dii te servent, nymphae ament, doctores que ne curent. Tuus A.27 The Gods were not obliging, and Anton would not let any doctor treat him, but the nymphs were loving. The Dauphin's wine helped Anton cope with his friends' misery.

Ezhov was still suicidal after his wife's death; he survived because he now wrote for Suvorin, and, vouched for by Masha, was teaching drawing to girls in a school run by a Madame Mangus [Mongoose].1* Ivanenko, his sister-in-law dead, his brother dying of ÒÂ, had lost hope and abandoned his flute, while Zinaida Lintvariova, ill with a brain tumour, Ivanenko reported, 'is sincerely and patiently waiting for her end. She keeps asking with great interest after you and your family, the poor woman cannot bear it.'29 The 'white plague' struck old friends in Taganrog. Death was gathering in Aunt Fenichka in Moscow and Anton's friend the actor Svobodin in Petersburg. After watching a soldier die on board the Petersburg, how could Anton not think of his own inevitable end? Nor had he forgotten Anna and Kolia: in March 1891 he put in his new notebook: 'The trouble is that both these deaths (A. and N.) are not an accident and not an event in human life, but an ordinary thing.'

On 7 January Anton went to Petersburg for three weeks, Shcheglov could see that he 'was ailing', but Anton wanted a 'feast in the time of plague'. On arrival he went with Svobodin to Shcheglov's name-day party, and panicked the gathering: he was announced as an emissary of the Chief of Police. Anton became drunk and arrogant. Shcheglov records words30 that foreshadow Chekhov's Dr Astrov (in Uncle Vania) who, drunk, 'does the most difficult operations and has his own philosophy'. He boasted that he would seduce his Petersburg admirer, the virtuous Lidia Avilova. He laid down the law to Shcheglov: 'The theatre should be like the church - the same for the peasant and the general… You ought to have an affair with a dark-skinned woman.' The next day Anton saw Tolstoy's comedy Fruits of Enlightenment. Stanislavsky directed it, and Vera Komissarzhevskaia made her debut. Anton had no idea who they were. Carousing with friends, Anton exhausted himself and his hosts. The Suvorins' telephone broke down under the strain of Anton's

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ANNl:i \S 1)1 I'1-I.KKINAGE social whirl. Anton evaded Klcop;itra, but took up with another actress, Daria Musina-Pushkina, once of Masha's circle. Daria had come to Petersburg to escape her fiance and meet another suitor. She lived in the same building as the Suvorins, and was eager to have Anton as an escort. Daria besieged Anton with notes: Listen, cockroach, I couldn't resist the temptation and am coming to Svobodin's… I won't deny that I'd very much like you to come and fetch me, not me fetch you, but I know how stubborn you are… Darling Anton, if you came and saw me right now, how I should thank you, because I'm alone, terribly unhappy. Little cockroach, aren't you ashamed to ask if it's too late? Remember the saying: 'better late than never.'… But all the same you're better than I thought. Cicada. I expect you - you'd better come!31 In Petersburg there were women who disliked Anton: Zinaida Gip-pius, already a literary lioness, baited Chekhov: listening wide-eyed, she disingenuously asked: 'Does your mongoose eat people?'

For his Moscow womenfolk Anton found answers. He told Masha: 'I've been talking to Suvorin about you: you will not be working for him - I've decided. He is terribly fond of you, but in love with Kundasova.' Elena Shavrova rejected Anton's advice to change her pseudonym, and abandon her drama course. 'I'll make my breakthrough anywhere,' she asserted. The more she was opposed, the tougher the sixteen-year-old Elena got.32 She persuaded Anton to make Suvorin pay her 8 instead of 7 kopecks a line for the stories she was feeding New Times after Chekhov had revised them.

Lika Mizinova, however, wanted Anton, body and soul. She resumed the romance and set the tone for the coming nine years in her first letter to Anton in Petersburg: Today in the Council I wrote you a long letter and I'm glad I couldn't send it, I've just read it and am horrified - sheer weeping… I've been coughing blood (the very day after you left). Granny is angry with me for going out and not looking after myself, she prophesies consumption -1 can just imagine you laughing about that… When you get back don't forget to go to Vagankovo cemetery to say hello to my remains… In the morning I could write such a JANUARY-MAY l8oi gloomy letter, now I think it's all rubbish I shall enjoy upsetting you… write a letter without the usual little sarcasms… surely I deserve something other than irony?33 Anton's response was remorselessly teasing: As for your coughing… stop smoking and don't chatter in the street. If you die, Trofim will shoot himself and Spotty-face will get puerperal convulsions. I'll be the only one glad of your death. I hate you so much that just the memory of you is enough to make me utter sounds like your granny 'Eh… Eh… Eh'. I'd gladly scald you with boiling water… My lady writer, Misha's friend [Elena Shavrova], writes to tell me 'Things are bad -1 am seriously thinking of leaving for Australia.' You to the Aleutian islands, she to Australia! Where am I to go? You've grabbed the better half of the earth. Farewell, villainess of my heart. Your Well-known Writer. A few days later, sending him birthday greetings, Lika tried a different tack: 'I've just got back from your family… I'm writing in the dark and what's more after Levitan saw me home! And whom are you seeing home?' Anton relented a little. His reply ended: 'Bibikov [a consumptive poet whom Anton knew]… saw you and my sister and wrote to Petersburg "at Chekhov's I saw a girl of amazing beauty." There's a pretext for you and Masha to have a quarrel, even a fight.' Lika's next letter, on 21 January 1891, was the first (and almost the last) that she wrote to Anton in the intimate ty form: Knowing your meanness, my dear Antosha, and wishing to hang on to a chance to write to you, I am sending you a stamp which I had much need of. Will you come back soon? I'm bored and I dream of meeting you as the sterlets in the Strelna \park] pool dream of a pure transparent river. I don't know how to be tactful and when I try to be it doesn't work out. But all the same come on the 26th and you will see that I can be tactful not just verbally… So I expect you, I hope, that you will give me at least V2 an hour! She can't have it all! For my love I deserve Vi an hour. Goodbye, I kiss you and wait. Yours for ever, Lika Mizinova. Olga Kundasova, scolding the great men of Moscow and Petersburg in their dens, or Elena Shavrova, cajoling and wheedling, left Anton in total command of himself. Lika got under his skin, as no other

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ANNf I S III l»E LERINAGE woman had done. I lis responses to her are always ironic, never passionate or jealous, but their frequency, length and extravagance betray the disturbing effect Lika had on him.

Anton called on his brother Aleksandr. He told Masha: 'His kids made a very good impression on me… Aleksandr's spouse is a kind woman, but the same stories happen every day as at Luka.' Anton's sober days in Petersburg were spent lobbying for Sakhalin's children. Through Koni, the radical lawyer, he contacted Princess Naryshkina who ran the Imperial children's charities: orphanages were set up for 120 of Sakhalin's child beggars and prostitutes. Through Vania and Suvorin, Anton had thousands of books sent to Sakhalin: the authorities paid. Chekhov, loth to meet aristocrats, made Suvorin and Koni talk to influential courtiers.

In Petersburg Anton began his monograph The Island of Sakhalin: he wanted it to be dry and impersonal. He would publish it only in its entirety to heighten the impact. The Siberian penal system and Sakhalin were in the news: an illegal Russian edition of the American George Kennan's survey of Siberia's prisons had been circulating. A work so anti-establishment as a survey of Sakhalin could not expect to be published by Suvorin. Anton's unbroken association with New Times puzzled the radicals even more. One political exile (Ertel) told another (Vladimir Korolenko): 'Pity that Chekhov is tied to that nest of robbers.'

At the end of January Anton returned to Moscow. He began a new story, 'The Duel': it grew as long as a novel. He nursed the mongoose which a Russian winter had made too ill to break crockery or leap on the table. He consoled Olga Kundasova, tantalized Lika Mizinova and flirted with Daria Musina-Pushkina (who had followed him back to Moscow). When the mongoose recovered its joie de vivre the flat seemed too small.

Anton endured two cramped weeks. Suvorin came to Moscow and took him to dinner and the theatre. Then Anton decided they should take the European tour that he had missed two years previously. On 5 March he wrote to Suvorin: 'Let's go!!! I agree, wherever and whenever you like.' Accounts at New Times were chaotic: Anton believed he was still 2000 roubles in Suvorin's debt, but he would not stay in Moscow working the debt off. He prevaricated: he assured his family that he would be back for Orthodox Easter. Elena Shavrova begged JANUARY-MAY l8ol him to stay. Lika, snubbed, was proudly silent. Vania pleaded with him to come to Sudogda, where Vania's only friends were his pet starlings and canaries.

On 11 March Anton left family, mongoose and friends for Petersburg. (Kundasova and Musina-Pushkina also made their way there.) At 1.30 p.m. on 17 March, Suvorin, the Dauphin, and Anton - Father, Son and Holy Ghost - took the Petersburg-Vienna express. Daria Musina-Pushkina spotted them on their way to the station: 'I was riding down the Liteinaia and met you travelling in a cab, and you looked straight at me but for some reason didn't greet me.' Anton's pince-nez was broken, so he had left it behind in Moscow. As a result, he had trouble recognizing friends, and no doubt a blurred view of Europe.

Neither did he understand all he heard. Anton had only schoolboy German. He was to tell Ezhov, 'I speak all languages except foreign ones. Getting from one station to another in Paris is for me a game of blind man's buff.' The Suvorins bore the brunt of the expense, decided the itinerary and did the talking. On the one hand Anton liked being treated 'like a kept woman' - he called himself the 'Nana of the Railways' and enjoyed the physical comforts: the Pullman sleeping cars with mirrors, carpets and soft beds; the flushing lavatories. He was amazed, as he had been on the Amur, by free speech - frank conversations with strangers in Moscow could lead to trouble with the secret police. In Vienna, he told his family, 'It is strange that you can read and talk about whatever you want.' On the other hand, he was quickly soured: when he crossed the border into Austro-Hungary his only note was 'A lot of Yids. The customs charged more than my tobacco cost.' As he came over the Alps to Venice, he declared them inferior to the Caucasus or the mountains of Ceylon.

Venice, however, aroused his enthusiasm: Desdemona's house and Canova's tomb sent Anton into ecstasy. He told Vania: 'For a Russian, poor and degraded, here in the world of beauty, wealth and freedom, it is not hard to go mad… when you stand in church listening to the organ you want to convert to Catholicism.' In Venice Zinaida Gippius turned up and pricked the bubble. Like many Petersburg snobs, she felt impelled to put provincial upstarts down, and wilfully misinformed Anton that the hotel charges were by the week, not the day. She noted in her diary that he was 'A normal provincial doctor.

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ANNA'S 1)1 1'i.l.IRINAGE he had fine powers of observation within his limits, and rather coarse manners, which was also normal.'

By 30 March the party was in Rome. Anton was wan. He asked the hotel porter, Suvorin claimed, for the address of Rome's most luxurious brothel. He reported to Uncle Mitrofan that the Vatican had 11,000 rooms; later he said that Rome was just like Kharkov. Letters home ask only after the mongoose. About Lika and her cough, or the convalescent Vania and his dormitories full of workers' children, he did not enquire. On 3 April the Suvorins and Anton went to Naples; on the 6th they toured Pompeii. Years later Suvorin recalled: He was litde interested in art, statues, pictures, churches, but as soon as we got to Rome he wanted to get out of town, to lie on die green grass. In Venice it was the originality, most of all the life, serenades, not its Doges' palace and so on, that held him. In Pompeii he wandered bored over the open city - it is boring in fact - but immediately he took pleasure in riding a horse to Vesuvius over a very difficult route and kept edging towards the crater. Abroad, cemeteries interested him everywhere - cemeteries and circuses with clowns, which he saw as real comedians.34 The party then took the coastal railway to Nice, a city Anton little suspected was to become a second home (it was a resort for Russians, rich and sick, and the Russian navy). Lika did not write. Pavel reported: 'The mongoose is well, its behaviour is incorrigible but deserves leniency.' To Vania Pavel was franker: 'The mongoose gives us no peace, it bit off a piece of mama's nose in the night, she was frightened when she saw the blood. Now it has healed.'35 Anton wrote back. He confessed that he would miss Easter. He and the Dauphin discovered Monte Carlo. For several days they took the train there to play roulette. In two days Anton lost 800 francs.

Three days later the party took the express to Paris. Anton celebrated Easter in the Russian Orthodox church, amazed that French and Greek Christians should be singing the Bortniansky anthems he had sung as a boy in Taganrog. May Day in Paris gave Anton food for thought. He mingled with a crowd of rioting Paris workers and was himself manhandled by the police. Three days later he sat in the public gallery of the French parliament and listened to something unimaginable in Russia - deputies calling on the Minister for the Interior to account for the deaths of seven workers. Paris, as much JANUARY-MAY l8oi as Sakhalin, developed Anton's political consciousness. Meanwhile Suvorin decided to commission a bronze bust of himself (which he was later to present to Chekhov), and while the sculptor carved, Anton and the Dauphin toured the nightclubs and watched naked women. On 2/14 May Anton was back in Moscow.

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Ô

Summer at Bogimovo May-July 1891 ANTON STAYED ONE DAY on the Malaia Dmitrovka. (Of the twenty months that the family rented Firgang's house, Anton lived there fewer than five.) The day after his arrival Evgenia, Masha, Anton and Sod the mongoose left for a dacha that Misha had found them near Aleksin on the river Oka, a beautiful region of wooded hills that was somewhat fancifully called the 'Russian Switzerland'. Probably the palm cat came to a sticky end that spring. Floor-polishers came to the Firgang house while Pavel was in charge and flushed it from its lair beneath the wash-stand: one workman, his little finger badly bitten, reacted violently.36

Pavel retired on 30 April 1891. With his sons in Petersburg, Sudogda, Aleksin and Nice, he portrayed his future as bleak. His employer of the last fourteen years, Gavrilov's parting remark was, 'Your children are bastards'.37

Cousin Aliosha Dolzhenko also left Gavrilov - for a more generous employer. As his family left for the country Pavel told Vania: I remain in Moscow to put the flat in order. Antosha had brought you remarkable gifts: a purse with two French gold coins, paper and envelopes from the Louvre shop… I can choose my life and my locality. I think it best for me to spend my days among my own family, rather than in coarse and rude society. All this time I have been living for the family and have laboured for it, I have left the Slough of Gavrilov without a penny, I hope that my family will not leave me penniless… I shall be well fed, clothed and not want for anything.38 The dacha, surrounded by woods, was just across the river Oka from Aleksin. There were no latrines - Anton was constantly running to a gully - the house was cramped and trains noisily crossed the Oka on a rickety bridge. When Pavel arrived three days later, conditions were

MAY-JULY 1891

intolerable. The mongoose was breaking crockery and uncorking bottles. Chekhov could not work: 'Writing, I'm like a crayfish sitting in a trap with other crayfish.'

After a breach of three months in their relationship, Lika brought Anton salvation. She arrived with Levitan by river-boat; she flaunted the painter all summer to flush Anton out. Anton reacted only with more irony: he openly referred to Levitan as Phaon, to Levitan's mistress Sofia Kuvshinnikova as Sappho, and to Lika as Sappho's young rival Melitta.39 On the boat Lika and Levitan were accosted by a local landowner Evgenii Bylim-Kolosovsky, a tiresome idealist with a large estate at Bogimovo, ten miles from Aleksin. Bylim-Kolosovsky needed sympathetic ears and a supplementary income: when he heard that the Chekhovs were dissatisfied with their quarters he sent two troikas to fetch them to Bogimovo, where he offered them the upper storey of the manor house for the summer. Masha recalls: 'We saw a large neglected estate with an enormous two-storey house, two or three cottages and a splendid old park with avenues and ponds.'

Amenaisa Chaleeva, a toothless red-head ('dim and vicious', decided Anton) was Bylim-Kolosovsky's mistress and ran his model dairy. She recalled Chekhov: A man who looked about thirty, pale, thin, seemingly very pleasant. A home-made sailcloth jacket, a broad grey hat. I thought, he can't afford our dacha - 160 roubles for the summer… We enter the drawing room, a long room with windows looking out on a lime avenue, columns in the middle, a parquet floor, long leather divans along the walls, a big round table, a few ancient armchairs. The man saw all this and even cried out with pleasure: 'Oh I've been looking for something like this! And the parquet squeaks with age, the divans are antediluvian… What happiness. This will be my room and I'll work here.'40 In the move from Aleksin to Bogimovo the mongoose vanished into the woods. Anton stirred up neighbouring landowners. The one reply was distraught: Dear Mr Chekhov, I inform you of the terrible grief that has struck me today: at 6 this morning my father died of acute pneumonia. I have asked many people in Seianovo about the mongoose, but it hasn't turned up.41

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ANNf'I'S i)l I'flKKlNAGE Lika and Levitan had left. Anton, his affections revived, invited Lika back to Bogimovo; he also invited Suvorin, Vania and Aliosha Dolzh-enko. Bogimovo, which still stands, was magnificently placed near the top of a steep hill. Great windows to the west overlooked a stream; the morning light came through equally large windows and the park on the east. Anton established an arduous regime. He rose at 4.00 a.m., made coffee and worked while the household slept until eleven. Then they walked, played, lunched, gathered mushrooms, caught fish and rested. Anton sat down to work again at three and worked until dark, at 9.00 p.m., after which came supper, cards, bonfires, charades, arguments, personal and philosophical, and visits to neighbours. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays he wrote The Island of Sakhalin; on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays 'The Duel'; on Sundays he composed bread-and-butter fiction, such as 'Peasant Women', a story of indignant women listening to a traveller telling them how he drove a neighbour's wife to her death. He kept up a furious rhythm, with only two or three hours' sleep a night, for three months, despite toothache, stomach upsets and coughing.

As well as Sod, Anton had mislaid Lika. His invocations lost their power. Signing himself as a laxative mineral water, Hunyadi Janos, he appealed: Golden, mother-of-pearl, fil d'Ecosse Lika! The mongoose ran away the day before yesterday and will never ever return. He's kicked it… Come and sniff flowers, catch fish, go for walks and howl. O, fair Lika! When you watered my right shoulder with your howling tears (I've removed the stains with benzene) and ate our bread in big slices and our beef, we were greedily devouring your face and the back of your neck. It was Levitan who answered, not altogether in jest: Everything, beginning with the air and ending, God forbid me, with the most insignificant bug on earth, is imbued with the divine Lika! She isn't here yet but she will be, for she doesn't love you, me tow-haired, but me, the volcanic dark-haired man, and she will only go where I am. It hurts you to read tbis but love of truth prevents me from hiding the fact. We have settled in Tver province near the estate of Panafidin, [Lika's uncle]… I'm a sheer psychopath! You'll find it interesting if you come - wonderful fishing and our rather

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nice company, consisting of Sofia [Kuvshinnikova], me, the Friend and the Vestal Virgin. Suvorin came for a few days and contemplated buying a neighbouring estate, a house with a mezzanine, where he might spend summers next to Chekhov. Masha fell ill with symptoms of typhoid. This concerned Levitan, who wrote again: Lika says that if there were anything serious about Masha's illness you wouldn't have written in such a playful tone. How did you lose the mongoose? What the devil is all this? It's simply obscene to bring an animal from Ceylon only to lose it in Kaluga province!!! You are all phlegm - to write about Masha's illness and the loss of the mongoose in cold blood as if they were only to be expected! Sofia Kuvshinnikova (like Zinaida Gippius, she loathed Chekhov as he loathed her) added reproaches: I don't understand how you could let this little foreign mongoose go to his doom. I am beginning simply to think that you, Chekhov, were terribly envious of its popularity and so neglected your rival on purpose! Anton felt deserted: first by Lika, then by Sod, and now by his sister, for Masha soon recovered and left for Sumy to be with Natalia Lintvariova.

Anton was discussing sex by letter with Suvorin. In mid May 1891 Petersburg buzzed with the delinquencies of a schoolgirl, daughter of a senior civil servant: her lover's trial went into closed session. Suvorin knew the details. Anton reacted by saying that nymphomaniacs should be incarcerated, and that the schoolgirl, 'if she doesn't die of consumption, will be writing edifying tracts, plays and letters from Berlin or Vienna - she has an expressive and very literary style.'42 Suvorin responded with another letter on the depravity of modern schoolgirls. On 27 May Anton pointed out that they were no worse than Shakespeare's fourteen-year-old Juliet. He added: 'By the way, about little girls' but the next fourteen lines are so heavily inked out, by Suvorin or Masha, that Anton's views remain unfathomable. In him, as in Suvorin, prurience and prudishness alternated unpredictably. Anton, like Suvorin, appreciated female sexuality, but unlike

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Suvorin, feared sex as an addiction which, were he to surrender to it, would annul his freedom and stifle his creativity. On 2 June hunters on the other side of the Oka found an animal hiding in a crack in a quarry. It came out to greet them and they recognized it as Chekhov's mongoose. Sod was captured and taken to Bogimovo, where he enjoyed prancing with the children of the neighbouring families. When Anton spotted a snake in the grass, Sod was brought out to show his prowess.

June 1891 was an exotic pastorale. Lika and Anton resumed their correspondence in mid-June, Anton teasing, Lika pretending to be evasive. She spent a few days in Moscow vainly looking for a better flat for the Chekhovs; back with Levitan, she stressed that Sofia Kuv-shinnikova watched, that she was too unwell to go outdoors in the evening. Anton told his 'enchanting, amazing Lika' to come, despite 'being carried away by the Circassian Levitan' or 'things will go badly'. He sent her a photograph of an officer on the Petersburg and signed it 'Your Petia'. Lika did not come. Her assurances of her innocence were unconvincing: We have a splendid garden and what's more Levitan, whom, anyway, I can only lick my lips at, since he doesn't dare come near me, and we're never left alone. Sofia is very nice; she is now very kind and utterly sincere with me. Clearly, she is now quite sure that I cannot be a danger to her.43 Sofia Kuvshinnikova, everyone knew, had lasted so long because she put up with Levitan's polygamy. At the height of summer, however, Sofia Kuvshinnikova left Zatishie. Levitan was untrammelled: Lika gave him her photograph. At the end of July 1891 Anton sent Lika one last letter, but signed it Masha (the handwriting is Anton's), as if his sister had written it: 'If you have decided to break off your touching triple alliance for a few days, then I'll persuade my brother put off his departure [for Moscow]…' Lika was silent. Suvorin returned briefly, advising Anton not to marry Lika.44

Anton's reaction to what he regarded as Levitan's seduction of Lika was vicious but hidden. His letters stopped. Instead, on 18 August, although work on The Island of Sakhalin was far from complete and his long story, 'The Duel', had only been despatched to Suvorin that

MAY-JULY 189I

day, he wrote to a Petersburg lawyer called Chervinsky. He asked him to find out from the editor of The Cornfield how much they would pay for 'a suitable little story'. Chervinsky took the idea to Tikhonov, editor of The North. Chekhov's revenge on Levitan, Kuvshinnikova and Lika now had an outlet in a story that would be known as 'The Grasshopper'. (Anton's host, Bylim-Kolosovsky, was to wait three years to be even more cruelly caricatured.)

As 'The Duel' neared completion, Anton was inspired by a tenant of Bylim-Kolosovsky. An entomologist, Dr Vagner, whom the locals called 'Spider', was embroiled in a polemic between biologist Professor Timiriazev and Moscow Zoo, where amateurish 'experiments' were carried out on the animals by a Professor Bogdanov, From Vagner, a vehement Darwinist, Anton borrowed many features and arguments for the protagonist, von Koren, of 'The Duel'. Chekhov also edited and extended Vagner's own diatribe against Moscow Zoo into a sketch called 'The Tricksters'.

Bogimovo turned cold as August ended. Chekhov had to face the autumn. Aunt Fenichka, camping in the Firgang house, wrote to her sister for the last time: Dearest sister don't send any more, I cannot cook at all, we simply weep… on the Feast of the Holy Apostles I made soup and on Sunday I was very ill, now I want Ukrainian cherry pie I have no strength… don't invite me, take me to a small flat, here I can't cope… everything is bitter in my throat and I've been miserable so long.4' Anton wrote back to her son, briskly telling him to feed her olives, baked fish and cough powders, asking why he had not called a doctor. A month passed before Anton visited his dying aunt. In August he travelled to Moscow for a day, not to treat Aunt Fenichka, but to inspect the zoo for his article.

On 28 August Pavel arrived in Moscow: he moved Aunt Fenichka and Aliosha out of the house and swept it clean, grateful at least that Fenichka's dog Kartuzik had exterminated the rats which Sod had spared. Pavel too was moving out, for, thanks to Suvorin, Vania had a job in a Moscow school with magnificent accommodation. Anton's heart was with the Suvorins. He consoled Suvorin over the sudden death of his manservant from a 'twisted gut' (in today's terminology,

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intestinal gangrene); he reassured him over the Dauphin who, fearful that he had ÒÂ, had gone to the Volga to drink fermented mares' milk; he congratulated both Suvorins on their womenfolk, who left them to holiday as they wished, and concluded, in accord with the Suvorin philosophy: In women I love above all beauty, in the history of mankind culture… in the form of carpets, sprung carriages and witty thinking.

THIRTY-FIVE

'The Duel' and the Famine August 1891-February 1892 ON 16 AUGUST 1891, her thirty-sixth birthday, Aleksandr's wife Natalia had given birth to a boy, Mikhail. Pavel exalted in his first legitimate grandchild: The Chekhov surname has expanded in the North and the South 'Magnify, î Lord, and visit this vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted.' I arrived here early as the Baptist to make ready the way and clear the Mansions, in which we shall live like herrings in a barrel.46 Aleksandr cherished his baby son: he paid for a designated cow to provide milk of proven origin, but the Chekhov-Golden family was not happy for long. Anastasia Golden, the eldest and once most prosperous sister, was destitute. Pushkariov, her consort, had lost all his money. Anastasia and her children moved in with Anna Ipatieva-Golden, who begged Anton: If 30 roubles doesn't come, we'll all be out on the street. Anton, for the sake of everything holy, help us, I expect we will pay it back, though not soon, and it's hard to ask others, you're different, nobody will know and neither Pushkariov's nor our pride will suffer.47 Anton appears to have sent money, but the Goldens' mother went to live with Aleksandr and Natalia. Called 'Gagara' she spent eight years, as Aleksandr put it, 'applying for admission to the Elysian fields'.

Anton was preoccupied by death. Leonid Tretiakov, the Chekhov brothers' student friend, had died of ÒÂ. That autumn Kurepin, the editor of The Alarm Clock, who had nurtured Anton's early work, was dying of cancer of the neck; Aunt Fenichka's days, Anton told Suvorin, 'are numbered. She was a glorious woman. A saint.' On 25 October Fenichka died.48 Suvorin and the Dauphin had come to stay in the Slav Bazaar in

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ANN II N IH IMI.I. ItlNAGE Moscow, only to catch flu and infect Anton. Anton felt so ill that he gave up vodka for good. Suvorin and Anton were both depressed by bereavement. Suvorin had lost his man-servant; Anton had been to three funerals that autumn; Zinaida Lintvariova had died at last and Anton had written her obituary. Anton expressed his despair so vehemently to Aleksandr that his brother destroyed the letter. Aleksandr, who had won respect for two articles on dosshouses and lunatic asylums, responded sympathetically: I deeply and sincerely want to warm you with affection. Poor man, you really have a lot on your shoulders. Your last letter (sealed) created such an impression that my wife burst out howling, and my spectacles clouded over. My dear Antosha, there's nobody to take pity on you. You lack the affection that is given to anyone who loves a woman. Anton, however, shut out women's affection. Elena Pleshcheeva was lost, betrothed to a Baron von Stael. Kundasova had gone to Batum on the Black Sea (hoping he might join her). Lika was ostracized for fickleness. Anton would not see Elena Shavrova. On 16 September 1891 he told her off for her story 'Dead People', where 'gynaecologists were cynics' and 'old bachelors smelt like dogs': Gynaecologists have to deal with a frenzy of tedium that you couldn't even dream of and which… you would find smelt worse than dog… All gynaecologists are idealists… I dare to remind you of justice, which an objective writer needs more than air. When Elena called, Anton announced that he was 'not at home'.49 Lika, feeling drawn to Anton again, was made to feel unwanted, and complained to Granny: 'I see the Chekhovs, and Sofia Kuvshinnikova too, rather seldom… I repent not staying for the winter in Pok-rovskoe [the family country estate]. Sometimes I want so much to see you and get out of here.'50 Lika left the city council; she had seven pupils in the Rzhevskaia school and a few private lessons. Her father had surfaced and was promising her money. She had hopes of studying to be a singer, but, ignored by Anton, she lapsed into hypochondria. All winter she complained to Granny of consumptive symptoms.

Anton's male friends needed him too. Ivanenko the flautist sought work: 'If you reject my request, please send the revolver which we bought together and if you don't, then I'll still borrow one.'51 Anton

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asked Tchaikovsky to find Semashko the cellist a place in the Bolshoi opera orchestra. Others appealed in vain. In early November 1891 Gruzinsky wrote: 'I sit and grieve, Anton! My wife has caught a chill looking after her sick sister. The sister is better, my wife has collapsed and something serious has begun… Not visiting the healthy, perhaps you call on the sick?'52

Anton gave all his attention to the novel-length story he had sent Suvorin. Suvorin wanted to call it not 'The Duel' but 'The Lies'. Anton stuck by his title. Here was a story far more traditionally Russian than his preceding fiction: two heroes - one with a faintly Polish name, Laevsky, the other distinctly Germanic, von Koren - each preach a set of ideas, one lazily Slavonic, the other manically Germanic, and fight a duel. The novelty of the story is that the author's sympathies lie with neither set of ideas, even though he loves both his characters. Nobody would know from 'The Duel' that Chekhov had been in Sakhalin: the setting resembles Sukhum or Batum on the Caucasian Black Sea coast, and recalls Chekhov's tour with the Dauphin in 1888. The story opens and closes with the sea drowning out the hero's words. The positive figures are the natives who gather in harmony while the Russian colonists quarrel, the naive deacon who interrupts the duel, and the forbearing doctor who mediates between Laevsky and von Koren. Sakhalin's indigenous Ainu and the Buriat Father Irakli contribute only a few touches to 'The Duel'.

'The Duel' has a satisfying plot. Laevsky has come to the Black Sea with another man's wife, Nadezhda. When he finds her husband has died and he will have to marry her, he tries to borrow money to flee. The marine biologist Von Koren has come to prepare for an expedition. Laevsky parodies Tolstoy's ideas on the wickedness of women to justify his cowardice. Von Koren argues that love of humanity requires helping natural selection by killing off the weak. To justify his scientific outlook he proposes to kill Laevsky in a duel. The climax is as conventional as the conflict. Nadezhda is physically and morally sickened, and when Laevsky finds that she has been prostituting herself to pay the shopkeeper's bill, he too is profoundly shaken. The shock of the duel alters everyone: Laevsky and Nadezhda are reformed, Von Koren is chastened into admitting that 'nobody knows the real truth.' The instinctive faith of Dr Samoilenko, the deacon and the natives survives the wreck of intellectual structures. The

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ANNfI S I) I I' EI. Ê RINAGE upbeat ending is not very cogent; tire story is shackled to fashionable ideas of the time - Tolstoy's asceticism and Darwin's 'struggle for existence'. Laevsky's hysterical, good-natured delinquency recalls Aleksandr Chekhov; von Koren has the megalomania of Przhevalsky, the logic of Dr Vagner and even Anton's own toughness. Yet we can sense the protagonists, von Koren and Laevsky, activist and quietist, as two sides of Chekhov, against a background of indifferent nature. From now on he would write works which argue ideas, not until the authorial mouthpiece is victorious, but until the reader senses that all ideas are futile.

Suvorin liked 'The Duel' so much that he allowed it to fill the literary supplement of New Times for most of October and November, and although Chekhov made enemies in Petersburg - there was after all no room for other contributors - his reputation as Russia's greatest living storyteller was now established. His second publication that autumn, the anonymous polemic 'The Tricksters', appeared in New Times on 9 October 1891. It created a scandal which persuaded the Imperial Society for Acclimatizing Plants and Animals to rebuild Moscow zoo along the lines of Hagenbeck's Hamburg zoo, and buy new, healthy animals.

When Anton had described Fenichka dying, he had mentioned, with mounting irritation, the mongoose leaping. 'I'm auctioning the mongoose,' he wrote to Natasha Lintvariova. Anton now showed two faces. In 'The Tricksters' he raged: The Moscow public calls the Zoo 'the animals' graveyard'. It stinks, the animals die of hunger, the management hands its wolves over for wolf-baiting, it's cold in winter… there are drunken rowdies and animals which are not yet dead of hunger can't sleep. Anton's letter to the Zoo director on 14 January 1892, however, ingratiates: Last year I brought from Ceylon a male mongoose {mungo in Brehm). The animal is utterly healthy and in good spirits. As I am leaving Moscow for some time and cannot take it with me, I humbly ask the Management to accept this animal from me and to fetch it today or tomorrow. The best way of carrying it is a small basket with a lid and a blanket. The animal is tame. I have been feeding it on meat, fish and eggs.

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Thanks to Suvorin's indiscretion, it was widely known that Chekhov was the author of 'The Tricksters', but Dr Volter of the zoo did not question why the zoo's most articulate enemy should offer them a free mongoose. He sent for it, and reported: 'The mongoose has arrived safely and does not seem to have frozen. I hasten to carry out my promise about a free ticket to the zoo.'53 Poor Sod was visited by Masha, using the free ticket. Sod put his paws through the bars and removed her hair-combs. He survived two years in this 'animals' graveyard'. No mongoose is listed among the fallen and sick for 1892, but there is no mongoose in the zoo's inventory for 1895. Sod, like Lika, could reflect on the fate of those who loved Anton, but whose demands for a response were too insistent.

Living in a crowded flat with a mongoose meant to Chekhov remoteness from reality and 'the people'. The revealing remark, to Suvorin in October, is: 'There is nothing I love so much as personal freedom.' Freedom from being crowded by others made the dream of a country estate an obsession. Anton had a substantial income, not just from 'The Duel' but from editions of collected stories and from farces, and Suvorin was eager to advance or underwrite money. Anton could spend 5000 roubles and mortgage a property for much more. Aleksandra Lintvariova and the Smagin brothers were put on alert, Anton relying on Aleksandr Smagin's love for Masha as an incentive to drive him around the farms of Mirgorod. All through December 1891 Smagin bargained with Ukrainian landowners. Just before Christmas, Anton sent Masha down to inspect a short list, make decisions and exchange contracts. Masha was flustered by the responsibility, yet seized the reins of power. Ukrainian farmers, however, did not like dealing with a woman. By New Year's Eve Masha was exhausted and begged Anton to come in person. She went back to Moscow empty-handed.

When she returned Anton was gone. He was seeing in the New Year with Suvorin in Petersburg. While Masha faced blizzards in the Ukraine, Anton relaxed for a fortnight. He and Suvorin were up until 4.00 a.m. drinking champagne with the actress Zankovetskaia; in the afternoons they tobogganed down ice mountains. They wanted diversion: they had both spent much of October and November too ill with flu to leave their bedrooms.

Now Anton's closest actor-friend, Pavel Svobodin, announced his imminent death:

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Are you sleeping peacefully opposite my windows, across the road, in Suvorin's house?… What sort of actor am I, when I have, on stage, such attacks of convulsions and spasms in the chest, throat and left elbow that I can't even call for help? Well sir, and what do I do with three children?54 Svobodin was not deceived when Anton told him that 'his disease was trivial.' Two and a half years had passed since Kolia's death, and Anton still sought oblivion in selfless work on behalf of the suffering prisoners of Sakhalin. Sakhalin remained a life's cause: he was despatching books and school programmes there, and contributing a chapter, 'On Escapees and Tramps', for charitable publication. Now Anton found a new cause. In central Russia the harvest of 1891 had failed; the government discouraged any intervention. The conservative New Times was one of the first newspapers to call for famine relief. By November peasants were eating grass; terrible hunger was imminent. Anton raised the alarm. Masha's pupils raised funds. Lika contributed 34 kopecks. Dunia Efros gave a rouble and demanded a receipt. Suvo-rin, moved by the hunger in Voronezh, his native province, did not blame the peasants for improvidence and even cooperated with rival newspapers. His children contributed their pocket money. Anton, helped by Pavel Svobodin in Petersburg, exacted contributions from friends. (His notebooks show that doctor-friends offered roubles, writers kopecks, while the Writers' Charitable Fund, with 200,000 roubles' capital, refused to give the 500 he asked them for.) Petersburg knew of Chekhov's campaign and marvelled at Suvorin's involvement in a cause so radical.

Anton discovered that Lieutenant Evgraf Egorov, Masha's old admirer, with whom the Chekhov family had quarrelled eight years ago, was now (like Aleksei Kiseliov in Voskresensk and Aleksandr Smagin in Mirgorod) a 'rural captain' (a post that gave men enormous power over the peasantry) fighting the famine in Nizhni Novgorod province. Egorov opened soup kitchens for children and devised a practical charity. He used funds to buy horses from the peasants, so that they could buy food and seed-corn. The horses were then kept until spring and sold back on credit, thus saving the animals on which the peasants depended. Egorov welcomed Anton: 'You shouldn't even have mentioned our old misunderstanding; such a petty incident cannot break a relationship.'55

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In November, while Anton was too ill to move, he had begun a story 'The Wife' (originally entitled 'In the Country'), in which a doctor, despite the enmity of his estranged wife, devotes his energies to famine relief. He now offered it to The Northern Herald, instead of 'My Patient's Story', which had no hope of passing the censor.56 To the amazement of editor and author, the censor did not alter a word of 'The Wife', despite the politically tabu subject of famine. The only shocks were registered by telegraphists as Chekhov and his Petersburg editor decided on the title: 'Let me leave the wife.' - 'All right, leave the wife. Agreed.' 'The Wife' is weak - like other Chekhov stories where a saintly doctor wars with an unprincipled woman, for personal martyrdom sours the altruism, but it achieved more publicity for famine relief than any manifesto.57

There were uproarious parties in Petersburg. Nobody slept much. After a party on 5/6 January which broke up at six in the morning, Anton was led on foot by his fellow guests all over the freezing city from one cathedral to another to celebrate Epiphany. On 10 January, exhausted, he arrived in Moscow. Four days later, just before the man from the zoo came for Sod, Anton was off in one of the worst winters ever to the wilds of Nizhni Novgorod. He drove through starving villages and was received by the provincial governor. The governor retracted his blame of the peasants for their own misfortune and drove Chekhov to the station on his own horses. A week later Anton was in Moscow, ill with pleurisy, and sick at heart at his discovery that so much of the famine relief was being embezzled.

Masha had failed to find a country estate. What she dared not at first tell her brother of was a marriage proposal from Aleksandr Smagin on 10 January 1892: My desire to be your husband is so strong that neither your love for George Lintvariov nor your negligible affection for me would stop me from fulfilling this desire, assuming you agree to it. The insurmountable obstacle to this desire is my disease [unknown D.R.]… If you don't believe me I shall write to Anton about my health… And I shall send you his answer. Anyway, sooner or later, I shall tell him about my. feelings for you… I am not afraid either of Anton's judgement - I want it.'8 Anton's only overt objection to Smagin had been his 'tragic' hand

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ANN/is DI I'I:I.I:KINAGE writing, no trivial matter to a man who often joked 'the main thing in life is good handwriting.' Covertly, however, using arguments that none of the victims ever divulged, Anton took aside every one of Masha's suitors and dissuaded them. To Masha Anton had only to give a silent look signifying dismay or disapproval for her to reject any man's proposal.

Anton was desperate to quit Moscow; he instructed Masha with the help of Misha, now in Moscow, to buy an estate advertised in the Moscow newspapers for sale. It was not in the warm Ukraine but just forty-five miles south of Moscow, six miles over rough roads from a railway station. Too ill to inspect it, Chekhov nevertheless left on I February for another famine area. He met Suvorin at the Slav Bazaar. To kill two birds with one stone, he invited Elena Shavrova to join them: she thought Anton 'in the nicest, most amiable mood, so young and full of the joys of life.'59

Suvorin was grim and out of his depth in any enterprise so radical as famine relief. Anton was dragging him off to Voronezh, to make the governor adopt Egorov's horse-buying scheme. They found matters no better than in Nizhni: bread ovens, wheat and fuel were being distributed, but there was no fodder for the horses that were being bought up in order to give the peasants money for seed corn. Suvorin's sister Zinaida still lived there, and was helping with famine relief, but Suvorin saw no point in his visit. For the first time, he annoyed Anton. Suvorin, Anton told Masha, talked rubbish. (In Petersburg Anton had complained to Shcheglov of 'the senselessness of Suvorin's charitable work'.) After a week visiting Suvorin's (but not Chekhov's) ancestral villages, they returned north. Suvorin went back to Petersburg.

By mid February starvation and cold had killed perhaps a million Russian peasants: it was too late for charity. Previously, Anton had played the role of public-spirited landowner, as well as journalist. Now the role was real. Misha had bought on his behalf the estate of Melikhovo. Nearly 600 acres of birch woods and pasture, with a small wooden house and outbuildings in some dilapidation, Melikhovo was priced at 13,000 roubles, of which 5000 had to be paid outright, the rest over ten years. Misha mortgaged the property with the Land Bank, and after his machinations the Chekhovs owed only annual repayments of 300 roubles and 5000 roubles to Suvorin, which new editions of Anton's books were to pay off. Sullen People was into its

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third edition, In the Twilight its fifth: Anton's income reached 1000 roubles a month. Naively, the Chekhovs believed that farming 600 acres would be cheaper than renting a flat in Moscow. Pavel expressed his approval to Anton: 'Your mother wishes her children to buy a country house… God will help in this matter… His holy Will be done.'60 Aleksandr was fired with envy. He proposed settling nearby, for he had new-found prosperity. Prince Sheremetiev had appointed him editor of the fire brigade's journal The Fireman and installed a telephone in his flat. Anton joked that Aleksandr, as an inveterate bed-wetter, would be good at putting out fires, but Aleksandr was sacked after only three issues of the magazine and his telephone was removed.

Anton visited his estate - on which rested all his hopes for privacy, inspiration, health, and contact with 'the people' - only after contracts had been exchanged, on 26 February. A blanket of snow concealed the boundaries, the untilled soil and neglected woodlands. The vendor was unprepossessing: the artist Sorokhtin lived there with his wife, mistress and their ragged children, in what was more like an Australian squatter's shack than a Russian gentleman's manor. It crawled with bedbugs and cockroaches. Sorokhtin had put up outbuildings and fences, but farming bored him. He wanted his 5000 roubles in cash, to leave for the warmth of the Crimea and paint. The Chekhovs had signed the papers. On 1 March Pavel, Misha and the baggage moved to Melikhovo. Anton came a few days later.

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Cincinnatus They would wake to the song of the lark, to follow the plough, they would take a basket to gather apples, watch butter being made, grain threshed, sheep shorn; they would look after the beehives, would take delight in the lowing of the cows and the smell of new-mown hay. No more writing! No more bosses! No more rent to pay! Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet

THIRTY-SIX Ô

Sowing and Ploughing March-June 1892 EIGHTEEN MILES from a post office, six miles from the station over rutted ice, Anton felt, on 4 March 1892, like the Roman dictator Cincinnatus who left Rome to till the soil. Until the snow melted, while the family scrubbed floors, papered walls, bought horses, tack, seed and saplings and hired workmen and servants, he was aghast at his decision.1

The Chekhovs' 'manor house' was a single-storeyed L-shaped wooden building with no bathroom or privy. An outbuilding served as a kitchen. The best room, open to the south and the west, was designated as Anton's study: Pavel and Masha decorated it in time for Anton's arrival. Across the drawing room was Masha's room. A narrow corridor ran one side of the L, leading to Anton's and Pavel's bedrooms, the dining room, and Evgenia's room. When guests tarried, the layout would prove awkward. The largest rooms, Anton's study and the drawing room, with its balcony, were crowded when more than five - including family, guests and servants - were there. In a few weeks the house was habitable, if sparsely furnished. Pavel's room was crammed with icons and ledgers and smelt of incense and of medicinal herbs; Masha's room was like a nun's, dominated by her brother's portrait; Evgenia's bedroom was filled with a trunk, a wardrobe and a sewing machine. The drawing room was furnished with Sorokhtin's unplayable piano.

Sorokhtin had left no hay, and the three horses starved on straw. One was unruly, one moribund; an elderly mare was the sole transport. The cow gave no milk. The farm dogs, Sharik and Arapka (Ball and Nigger), had two puppies, which Anton named Muir and Mirrielees, after the Moscow department store. When the ice melted, the pond turned out to be a cesspit and Anton's carp fingerlings all died. The river Liutorka was two miles away, so that water came from a

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dilapidated stirruppump. When the Chekhovs woke up on Sunday 29 March, they had a new view: the house next door had burned down, and only a smoking pile of beams remained. Anton quickly installed a new well-bucket, a hand-pumped fire engine and a bell, and planned a pond as big as a lake by the house. The Chekhovs had brought the sixty-seven-year-old Mariushka: they recruited cooks, maids and a driver from among the Melikhovo peasants. By mid April the roads would be impassable with floodwater. The Chekhovs had to hurry if they were to start farming. Hay, straw, seed, ploughs, horses, poultry had to be bought, begged and borrowed. Debts spiralled. Anton had brought manuals of agriculture, horticulture and veterinary science. Despite their grandparents' peasant blood, the Chekhovs blundered, to the amusement of the peasantry and the neighbours, like Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet. Their best ploy was to make Misha farm manager. Misha deserted his tax office, bought six horses with his own money and oversaw peasants and contractors. Pavel happily took to the role of gentleman, leading peasants to the barn and stables 'as if he were taking them to be thrashed', forcing visitors to wait because 'the masters are dining', patronizing the clergy. When Chekhov's fictional city-dwellers plough and sow, they are driven out by the peasants' hostility. Anton's initiation was easier. He let the peasants drive cattle down the track that cut his estate in two, and even moved his fence. The peasantry did not at first come round: one of the Chekhov mares, left out at night, was switched for a moribund gelding. Only when Anton set up a free clinic, visited the bedridden, and gave the peasants the right to cut hay in his forest, did he win trust. Of the neighbouring gentry the nearest to Melikhovo were outcasts: the Varenikovs - she ten years older than her lover -were keen farmers who wanted to buy Chekhov's arable land, urging him to build a more habitable home in the 300 acres of woodland that would be left. A mile away was Vaskino, the mansion of Prince Sergei Shakhovskoi, a magistrate and the stentorian and Herculean grandchild of a Decembrist rebel.

The Lintvariovs, Smagins and Ivanenko sent cattle from the Ukraine, and lent ploughshares. Smagin sent hundreds of roubles' worth of seed-corn so that rye and oats could be planted once Misha's horses had ploughed. Smagin's help had a price. Masha's version runs:

MARCH-JUNE 1892

Although it is hard to say now whether I loved him then, I thought hard about getting married… I went to the study and said, 'You know, Anton, I've decided to get married…' My brother naturally realized to whom, but he made no reply. Then I sensed that he found this announcement unpleasant, although he remained silent. Smagin's proposal was Masha's third; she was nearly twenty-nine and it could be her last. Anton told Suvorin, who told Olga Kundasova: Petersburg and Moscow were abuzz. Smagin was coming to Melikhovo on 2 3 March: Masha left to teach in Moscow, and only returned a day or two before Smagin left. Smagin grasped that this flight meant a refusal, and spent two days chatting about farming: he kept his promises and sent the Chekhovs bags of seed, but he seethed. On 31 March 1892 he wrote to Masha: It cost me great efforts to refrain from having a scandalous row at Melikhovo. Do you realize mat I could have crushed you there - I hated you… only Anton's constant hospitable welcome saved me.2 On 28 July 1929 Smagin was to write: although a whole lifetime has passed since 25 March 1892… for me you remain the most enchanting and incomparable woman. I wish you health and a long life, but I should like to meet you again before I die.3 Anton later told Suvorin that his sister was 'one of those rare, incomprehensible women' who did not want to marry, but some years were to pass before Masha became sure that marriage would give her less happiness than her position as her brother's amanuensis. In later life she told her nephew Sergei that she had never really been in love with anybody.4

That spring Anton was as ruthless with his own suitors as with Masha's. Before Easter none of his women friends ventured out to Melikhovo. Few even wrote, so bruised were they by his departure. Anton, busy planting an orchard, had little time for correspondence, but on 7 March he sent a long misogynistic letter to Suvorin: Women are most unlikeable in their lack of justice and because justice is organically alien to them… In a peasant family the man is clever, reasonable and fair and God-fearing, while the woman is - God help us!

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Anton lost Elena Shavrova's manuscript, and sent her fee to famine relief. He recommended her to a dilettante editor, Prince Urusov, but not as a writer: 'She gives a sort of lisping first impression - don't let that bother you. She has a spark and mischief in her. She sings gypsy songs well and can handle her drink. She dresses well, but has a silly hair style.'

Masha, 'with remarkable self-sacrifice', Anton commented, spent the weekend planting out the kitchen garden and her weekdays teaching at the 'Dairy' school. The school was in financial straits, so that Masha worked unpaid. None of her friends came to Melikhovo. Anton's note to Lika was as frosty as the weather: Masha asks you to come the week before Easter and bring perfume. I'd buy it myself but I shan't be in Moscow until the week after Easter. We wish you all the best. The starlings have flown away. The cockroaches haven't left,5 but we've checked the fire engine. Masha's brother. Two days later, he teased Lika that she would again take a summer dacha with Levitan and Kuvshinnikova. His letter ended half flippant, half appealing, paraphrasing Lermontov: 'Lika, it's not you I ardently love! I love in you my former suffering and my lost youth.' On 2 April Anton sent Masha an Easter shopping list, ending: 'Bring Lika.' Lika came, deserting her family's Easter reunion.6 Hard on Lika's heels came Levitan. The Chekhovs brought a priest from the monastery to take the Easter service in Melikhovo church (which had no clergy): the family and guests acted as choir and Pavel relived his Taganrog days as cantor. Anton kept Lika and Levitan apart: the two men went shooting for two days after Easter Sunday, until an incident that foreshadows The Seagull. Anton confessed to Suvorin: Levitan fired at a snipe; the bird was winged and fell in a puddle… Levitan wrinkles his brow, shuts his eyes and asks in a trembling voice: 'Dear boy, bang it on the head with the gunstock.' I said I couldn't. He keeps nervously twitching his shoulders, his head trembling, begging. And the snipe is still looking bewildered. I had to do as Levitan said and kill it. One fine lovelorn creature less, and two fools go home to supper. When Levitan went home next day, he discovered that Anton had treated him less mercifully than the snipe. 'The Grasshopper', in The

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Performing Artist, set all Moscow tittering or seething. The 'heroine' of the 'little' story, 'The Grasshopper', is a married woman (with the features of Lika and the circumstances of Kuvshinnikova) who has an affair with a lecherous artist, very like Levitan; the 'grasshopper' heroine's husband, a saintly doctor (who faintly recalls both Dr Kuvshinnikov and Dr Chekhov), is driven literally to self-destruction by the situation. Dr Kuvshinnikov was alive and well, but his loving tolerance (recognized by his wife in her diaries) imbues the fictional doctor. Sofia Kuvshinnikova, forty-two, swarthy, and a serious painter, saw herself in the heroine, despite Anton's heroine being, like Lika, twenty, blonde and without artistic talent. Others also felt libelled. The actor Lensky, who frequented the Kuvshinnikova salon, and had told Chekhov not to write drama, recognized himself in a minor character.

Sofia Kuvshinnikova never spoke to Anton again; Lensky did not speak to a Chekhov for eight years. Levitan wanted to fight a duel and did not meet Anton for three years. (Levitan had other worries. The police were expelling Jews from Moscow, and he fled 150 miles east, until Dr Kuvshinnikov, a police surgeon, secured his return.) Levitan's relationship with the Kuvshinnikovs broke down. Sofia marked the summer of 1892 as their last. Dr Kuvshinnikov kept a discreet silence, but he never spoke to Anton again.

Lika was as badly hurt as the Kuvshinnikovs and Levitan, but she was in love and, in this matter, was wiser than Anton: What a savage you are, Anton… I know full well that if you say or do something hurtful it's not out of any wish to do it on purpose, but because you really don't care how people will take what you do.. J Neither Lika's reproaches, nor the loss of Levitan, a friend of ten years, seemed to mean much to Anton. Nor did the visit of his ex-fiancee Dunia Efros (now married to Konovitser, a lawyer from Taganrog gimnazia). Anton wanted to see only Suvorin and Pavel Svobodin. Suvorin came on 22 April (a day after Dunia Efros left). Suvorin, who owned a palatial mansion in Petersburg and a fine villa in the Crimea, could not stand the ill-heated smoky rooms, with no W.C. and no sprung carriage to take him to the station. On the 24th he took Anton to Moscow to spend three days in luxury at the Slav

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Bazaar. While Suvorin slept, Anion wrote. Melikhovo was modernized over the next five years, but it was hard to persuade Suvorin to go there again: if he passed on his way south, he met Anton at Lopasnia station. Anton returned to Melikhovo with Svobodin, just as Pavel was consecrating the sowing of thirty acres of oats. Apart from the Dauphin, Svobodin was the only guest at the end of April 1892. He returned in late June. The family planned to build him a cottage. Until the theatre season opened, Svobodin devoted himself to Anton, for whom he felt, both as actor and patient, admiration and affection. Anton wrote his new work, 'Ward No. 6', for a Moscow journal, The Russian Review. The editors had paid a 500-rouble advance and would print whatever Chekhov sent, but they disliked the gloom and radicalism of the story. The obvious journal for such a work was the left-wing Russian Thought, but Anton had quarrelled with its editors, Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev, two years before. Svobodin's tact now reconciled Anton to men who had called him 'unprincipled', but it took until 23 June to get Chekhov to transfer his story from The Russian Review, and to conjure an apology from Lavrov. Svobodin pitched Chekhov into the camp of Russian Thought, the bete noire of Suvorin's New Times. Anton could do little in return. Svobodin's heart had tired of pumping blood round tubercular lungs. On 25 June 1892, after Svobodin had left, Anton told Suvorin: He has lost weight, gone grey, his bones are showing and when he's asleep he looks like a dead man. Extraordinary meekness, a calm tone and a morbid revulsion for the theatre. Looking at him I conclude that a man preparing for death cannot love the theatre. Dramaturgy too was stale. On 4 June 1892 Anton complained to Suvorin: 'Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. The damned endings won't come! The hero either gets married or shoots himself.' All Chekhov could write was a story of illicit love and family conflict, called 'Neighbours', with a sidelong glance at the Varenikovs next door to Melikhovo.

'Ward No. 6' depleted Anton's creative resources. Set in the psychiatric ward of a remote hospital, the story is a bleak allegory of the human condition. There is no love interest. The plot is a Greek tragedy in its violent reversal of fortunes. Like 'The Duel', it confronts

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activist with quietist. Now the activist is not a scientist, but a madman, Gromov, who has been incarcerated for proclaiming that truth and justice must triumph one day. The quietist, Dr Ragin, is drawn into dialogue and borrows every excuse devised by Marcus Aurelius or Schopenhauer for condoning evil. By consorting with a madman, Ragin alarms his superiors: he is trapped into his own ward, where, after a beating from the charge nurse, he dies of a stroke. Gromov has to go on living. Chekhov set his story among nettles and grey fences. Suvorin disliked it, but the elderly novelist Leskov recognized its genius, exclaiming 'Ward No. 6 is Russia.'8

Work so harrowing left a void. The Island of Sakhalin lay untouched. A worried editor, Tikhonov, wrote in March 1892, 'I hope that you won't stop writing, like some Cincinnatus'. Fears were well-founded. Chekhov saw medicine and physical labour as salvation. Yet another young writer whom Anton knew, Bibikov, died destitute in Kiev. In Petersburg Barantsevich, Bilibin and Shcheglov moaned to Anton. Tilling the soil gave Anton only the illusion of health. When not planting trees, catching mice to release in the wood, or digging a pond, he slept exhausted. For Leikin he wrote a few trivia, to pay for the dachshunds that Leikin had promised. Anton toiled from five in the morning until after dark. He was as happy in Melikhovo as he ever would be. He ordered almost every freshwater fish of Russia: his pond was an ichthyological museum. He planted fifty cherry trees from Vladimir - the real cherry orchard preceded the fictional one. He summoned stove-makers from Moscow, bought a sprung carriage for the journey to the station and dreamed of building a house in the woods, where he would tend trees and keep chickens and bees. Small disasters brought him down to earth: bad weather and the deaths of a horse, of his only drake, and of the hedgehog that hunted the mice in the barn.

Leikin, himself a recent landowner, sent cucumber seeds and endless advice. Franz Schechtel, a man of many hobbies, sent eggs which hatched into fancy poultry. He also sent mare's tail, a medicinal weed.9 Chekhov told him on 7 June: 'The ground is covered with little penises in erecktirten Zustande. Some places now look as if they'd like to screw…'

Cousins from Taganrog and Kaluga expressed their amazement that a Chekhov had joined the landowning gentry. Women friends

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wondered at Anton's empire. They crowned him 'King of the Medes', a title as apt as Cincinnatus. Aleksandr's envy of 'Cincinnatus' bothered Anton. All spring his elder brother begged for land on which to build. Anton hedged, horrified lest Natalia come near. In early April Natalia's year-old Misha nearly died of the convulsions that had killed Aleksandr's first-born Mosia: 'My wife is destroyed, and I walk about like a cat scalded with sulphuric acid,' Aleksandr wrote. The doctor, Aleksandr hinted, advised a climate warmer than Finland and cooler man Taganrog - near Anton: i) By the way I have absolutely given up drinking… 2) I can't let a roodess, if good, person like my wife go where she wants, as I know from experience. Even less can I let her go to her sisters'… 3) Therefore wouldn't there be a hut, a house, or something similar, near your estate for the summer?… It would only be on the absolute condition that nobody of my family dares to get into your house. My wife herself insists on that. If granny wants to take the infants in, that is her business. The infants and my wife will not be coming to see you uninvited… Natalia says mat… our mother is not fond of her. In the last week in June Aleksandr brought his two elder boys, now aged eight and six, to Melikhovo. He took photographs, and neither argued nor drank. Natalia was not invited, though she had fed Pavel and Anton in Petersburg, and shopped with Masha in Moscow.

In summer the 'Dairy' school closed for the holidays and Misha's tax office in Aleksin condoned his absences. Women friends of Vania and Misha visited. Countess Klara Mamuna, who had befriended Masha in the Crimea two years ago, came to play the piano. She flirted with both Misha and Anton, but seemed, before the summer ended, to be Misha's fiancee. Aleksandra Liosova, a lively and beautiful local schoolteacher, 'the fair daughter of Israel', was to be engaged to Vania, but photographs and letters show that it was Anton who drew her. Natalia Lintvariova alone caused no tension: she avoided flirtation.

Olga Kundasova, as she watched Anton become more and more involved with Lika Mizinova, had begun to show symptoms of manic depression. After astronomy and mathematics, she now took up psychiatry - as therapy for herself, and as a career. In August 1892 Olga

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made her promised visit. She made friends with a local woman doctor, Pavlovskaia, and became both outpatient and assistant to Dr Iakovenko at Meshcherskoe psychiatric hospital ten miles away. Anton's affection was rekindled. 'Kundasova seemed cleverer in the country,' he told Suvorin and in May declared: 'I should be very, very glad to see Kundasova, as glad as seeing a heavenly angel, and would build a separate cottage for her here.' Their intimacy, to judge by the fragments of evidence, remained troubled. Olga responded to a gift: I implore you to treat me, if not gently (that's not in you), then not exactingly and not roughly. I have become impossibly sensitive. In conclusion let me tell you mat you have no grounds for fearing a long stay by such a psychopath as O. Kundasova.10 The piano teacher Aleksandra Pokhlebina, nicknamed 'Vermicelli' for her skinny figure, also visited. Her love for Anton rapidly became demented. Lika Mizinova was unperturbed by these rivals. She knew that Anton preferred her shy beauty, her contralto and her cantaloupe-yellow jacket to Kundasova's intellect and severe black dresses. She was amused as Anton desperately evaded 'Vermicelli'. Lika may have been helpless in love, unable to break free or to secure a response, but she had studied Anton: she guessed that by autumn he would be restless. By June, in fact, he was sounding out Suvorin about a journey to Constantinople; the Lintvariovs were calling him to Sumy. Disillusion creeps into Anton's jokes to Natalia Lintvariova on 20 June 1892: We're finished, there will be no oats… Daria the cook, though quite sober, threw out all the goose eggs: only three of the enemy [the geese] hatched out. The piglet bites and eats the maize in the garden. The dear ponies ate the cauliflowers at night. We bought a calf for 6 roubles, it bellows in a deep baritone from morning til night… In a word, the King of the Medes can only utter a wild warrior cry and flee to the wilderness… Lika acted. She dismissed her suitors, and asked her father for railway tickets to abduct Anton. She told him on 18 June 1892: Throwing aside all pride, I'll tell you I am very sad and want to see you very much. There will be tickets to me Caucasus, that is separate ones for you and me… From Moscow to Sevastopol, then from Batumi to Tiflis and finally from Vladikavkaz to Mineral Waters

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and l);ick to Moscow. Be ready lor die beginning of August, only for the time being please don't tell any one at home about the tickets. Anton beat a quick retreat: Write and see that nothing is done about tickets until the cholera in the Caucasus is over. I don't want to hang about in quarantine… Are the dragoons at Rzhev courting you? I permit you these attentions, but on condition that you, darling, come no later than the end of July. Do you hear?… Do you remember us walking across the fields? Until we meet, Likusia, darling little Cantaloupe. All yours, The King of the Medes. To the non-committal King of the Medes, the cholera epidemic now creeping to Russia from the Caspian Sea was a convenient excuse not to depart. In his letter to Suvorin, however, Dr Chekhov played the cholera down as more sensation than danger.

THIRTY-SEVEN Ô

Cholera July-September 1892 AFTER FAMINE, cholera struck Russia's heartland. With unusual alacrity the authorities marshalled doctors. Anton did not wait to be asked. On 8 July 1892 he offered to man a village clinic. He forwent a salary: the Serpukhov health commission thanked him, but denied him even a nurse. Council funds had to be topped up by the rich: Anton begged the owners of the tannery and cloth mill, the archimandrite of the monastery and the aristocracy for funds to build quarantine barracks. The archimandrite refused, while Princess Orlova-Davydova - Anton never hit it off with the nobility - treated him like a hired hand.

Anton was soon on good terms, however, with Doctor Vitte in Serpukhov. One local doctor, Dr Kurkin, was an old acquaintance. Few supplies were available, but the Serpukhov authorities ordered the latest anticholera equipment: thermometers, large Cantani syringes for injecting fluids under the skin, tannin enemas to disinfect the gut, carbolic acid, castor oil, calomel, coffee and brandy. All summer Anton rode round twenty-five villages, over dusty or muddy tracks, checking sanitation, treating the dysentery, worms, syphilis and tuberculosis endemic among the peasantry, falling into bed exhausted every night, rising with the sun. Grateful patients gave him a pedigree pig, and three pairs of suede gloves for Masha. Anton's Sakhalin experience served him well. With Dr Kurkin he inspected factories in nearby villages. Three times they inspected a tannery that was polluting the rivers and shamed the owners into action, if only cosmetic. In this fallow creative period, Chekhov saw environmental degradation, human misery, complacency and failed ideals - material for new fiction. The cholera never came to Melikhovo. A neighbouring district had sixteen cases, four fatal.11 Anton's energy won commendation and he was sucked into the committees for improving the