Anton Chekhov. A life

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lot of the peasantry. From cholera officer he would become medical officer of health, and builder of schools, libraries, post offices, roads and bridges over ioo square miles.

Anton's medical duties left him little energy for the harvest, but with the loan of machinery from Prince Shakhovskoi, and Masha toiling in the kitchen garden, a little of what they sowed was reaped, even though the geese and cows helped themselves to the cabbages. Anton found it odd to pick cherries and not be beaten for it. Visitors were few. Muscovites feared the cholera, and Anton's friends knew that he came home only to sleep. He visited Moscow just once between 16 May and 15 October, although trains ran every three hours and reached the city centre in two to three hours. The devoted Gruzinsky and Ezhov, despite invitations, stayed away. Ivanenko the unemployed flautist came to live in Melikhovo until autumn 1893; he was enthusiastic but incompetent - Chekhov called him nedotiopa ('ninny'), the sobriquet of Epikhodov, the manager in The Cherry Orchard. Prince Shakhovskoi gave Ivanenko a sinecure as secretary, and he would accompany, on piano or flute, any visitor who sang. One relative came for a week with his son: Piotr Petrov, the husband of Anton's cousin Ekaterina Chokhova.12

Lika could not accept Anton's excuses for not travelling. Anton deflected her again: he entrusted her with Sudermann's play Sodom's End to translate: he would edit it for the stage. Lika just passed the play to a German woman friend, which angered Anton. All summer they struggled by letter; he played her like a fish he was reluctant to land; she took the bait and could not tear out the hook. They swore devotion and indifference to each other. Anton blew hot and cold on 28 June: Noble, decent Lika! As soon as you wrote to me that my letters did not tie me in any way, I breathed a sigh of relief and now I am writing you a long letter without fear of some aunt seeing these lines and marrying me to a monster like you… Do you dream of Levitan and his black eyes full of African passion? Are you still getting letters from my 70-year-old rival and hypocritically answering them? A big crocodile is inside you, Lika, and really I do well to follow common sense and not my heart, which you have bitten. Get away from me! Or no, Lika, whatever die consequences, let your perfume make my head spin and help me tighten the lasso you have thrown round my neck… don't forget your victim, The King of the Mcdes

JULY-SEPTEMBER 1892

On 2 July 1892 Lika wrote: 'Why do you want so intensely to remind me of Levitan and my "dreams"? I think about nobody. I want nobody and I need nobody.' And the next day: 'O how I'd like (if I could) to tighten the lasso as hard as I can! But I've bitten off more than I can chew! For the first time in life I have no luck!'

On 16 July Anton teased her mercilessly about growing old in a menage-a-trois with a balding Levitan and a hard-drinking Kuvshinni-kova. He invited Lika to Melikhovo: the cholera had attracted interesting young men. He promised to knock bad habits out of her. 'Above all I shall shield you from Sappho.' After refusing to travel with her, Anton now mused about going to the Crimea on his own. She spent August, furious, with Granny at the family estate, Pokrovskoe. Lika summed up Anton, the summer and cholera on 3 August: 'The cholera hasn't come yet… Anyway, I doubt if you'll move yourself for anyone, especially not for me - well, I'm not offended! Farewell.' One of Anton's replies was too abusive to send. Lika distracted herself with suitors. She wrote to Masha on 18 July: 'In Moscow I've been seeing all my lovers (excuse the expression, but it's your brother's).'13 Nevertheless, Pavel's diary records,14 she travelled 150 miles from Pokrovskoe to Melikhovo to see Anton on 14 September. Whatever transpired, they stopped writing to each other for three weeks.

As soon as Lika retreated, another woman desperately in love with Anton asserted herself. Aleksandra Pokhlebina, 'Vermicelli', was very determined. A piano teacher who tied brass weights to her pupils' wrists and elbows, she turned the screw on Anton: Half the summer has passed and nothing has been talked over… You might have forgotten about my existence, there is nothing amazing about that, but once it is an affair of the heart, I felt it can't be forgotten… I think you will not wish to embarrass me in front of my family." On 3 August, after an evasive response, she wrote again: So you're fed up with me! I can just imagine you looking at the signature and saying Oh My God, she's writing again. Unfortunately for you I care too much about you. She had no reply, and wrote on 28 August:

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CIN«:iNNA I US I rather need to see you yesterday I had a letter from my family and 1 have something to tell yon about husiness… Yesterday I saw Masha and I heard from her a great many unpleasant things about you. Anton said nothing, and Pokhlebina smouldered. Olga Kundasova lost control. Established with Dr Pavlovskaia nearby, she made two brief visits to Anton that summer. On 25 August her letter about medical matters veered towards the personal: Come on Friday and Saturday with Masha, I can assure you by all that is dear to me in this world that you will feel better at my place man I did at yours. Really, was it worth my coming for the sessions you awarded me? Anton was not the only member of the household to fear the post. On the same day Smagin wrote to Masha with similar passionate resentment. He resigned his post as country magistrate, he complained of consumption. Smagin was equally scared of a visit and of a final breach. He wrote to Masha on 19 August 1892: I still haven't forgotten the reception I had in March in Moscow province. Your request about burning your letters I shall not carry out, and in the event of my death I shall make arrangements… You can rest at ease: nobody will dare to read a single line of yours. You are very unkind. Three women judged the right tone to take with Anton: Natalia Lintvariova, Vania's fiancee Aleksandra Liosova and Misha's love, Countess Mamuna. Liosova concealed her interest in Anton. Mamuna made a joke of hers. On 15 September she wrote: 'Why not see me in Moscow and share my isolation?… It's not bad to be carried away by both Chekhov brothers!!!"6 Misha, Masha and the Chekhov parents brought harmony into Melikhovo. Morning and evening Pavel recorded in the family diary the outside temperature. An odourless earth closet was installed; the Chekhovs acquired pigs, calves and a pair of prolific Romanov sheep. Gherkins were pickled; potatoes were buried for the winter; double glazing was fitted; the Assumption and Dormition were celebrated with a liturgy. Misha lauded Cincinnatus's realm in a letter to cousin Georgi in Taganrog:

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I have six horses here, we shall go riding, I shall take you over our virgin forests where you can go for three miles and all the land is ours. My rye is magnificent, but the oats and grass have been burnt by the heat and drought, while my sister's kitchen garden is a wonder to behold; she has 800 head just of cabbage. We have made hay… and if you could see the cartloads come into the yard and it being piled into stacks!17 Misha wrote to Uncle Mitrofan on 7 October 1892: Antosha is sitting in his room and has locked himself in, he is stoking the stove, the stove is warming up and he is freezing. He'll freeze and freeze then come out and say, 'What weather! Mama, isn't it time for supper?' Misha tended to paint a rosy picture. He did not mention the servants. Two were dismissed - Pelageia had been robbing family and guests, and Daria had murdered the goslings - and others were hired - Olga and two pert Aniutas, Chufarova and Naryshkina. Vania and Aleksandr could not share Anton's life among the country gentry. Vania was now head teacher at a Moscow school, on the Basmannaia, a post he held for years to come. Pavel set off to Petersburg to stay with Aleksandr; on the way he reported Vania's privations to Anton: he has a room for visitors, but you have to sleep on the floor, his bedstead was left at Melikhovo… and he can't buy one, he has no money. Vania acts energetically at his school, putting everything in order, trying hard. The school is terribly neglected, there is dirt everywhere, the walls, the floors, the window frames are old and frail and the double glazing hasn't been put in yet. He runs round all the classrooms alone and gives the women teachers instructions, they at first looked askance.18 Using a free railway ticket from Gavrilov and posing as a Customs official, Pavel arrived in Petersburg. He saw little of Aleksandr and his children but he attended every important church service in the city. He stayed for more than two weeks. Although he tolerated his daughter-in-law, conflicts arose, Aleksandr reported, over the soup, in which Natalia boiled one onion, for which both Pavel and Natalia's mother, Gagara, fought. Aleksandr was drinking less, but poverty bothered him. He asked Suvorin to increase his 5 kopecks per line.

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Suvorin merely scribbled on the request: 'Who among my reporters [apart from you] is paid a salary?"'

Anton neglected literature, but in Moscow Pavel Svobodin ensured that his name still appeared in print. After 'Ward No. 6', Russian Thought was to print 'An Anonymous Story'. (Both stories had been written a year before.) Anton found another editor - Chertkov, grandson of the man who had sold the Chekhov family their freedom. This Chertkov, Tolstoy's closest acolyte, published reprints for the masses and, despite poor recompense and poor proof-reading, Chekhov sold him the more radical stories. Monthly journals gave Anton large advances, to shame him into writing. Despite the cost of rebuilding Melikhovo, the income from advances and Chertkov's reprints kept Chekhov solvent. Anton was grateful for Svobodin's selfless work in placing Anton's stories with Russian Thought: 'serious illness has forced him to undergo a spiritual metamorphosis,' he told Suvorin. Svobodin handled the tricky withdrawal and re-offering of 'Ward No. 6', and he offered Anton sympathy. He complained only of the theatre, saying he acted only to pay 'tailors, butchers, decorators, lamp-makers, cabs, innkeepers and loan-sharks'. On 9 October 1892, Suvorin wired Anton: 'Svobodin just died during performance phy Jokers come dear boy.'

THIRTY-EIGHT Ô

Summoned by Suvorin October 1892-Jarmary 1893 THE ILLEGITIMATE SON of a groom, Svobodin had dominated the Petersburg stage. He died from ÒÂ at the age of forty-two. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was there: Svobodin fell down in the doorway. Perhaps the audience took this to be an extra effect, not in the stage directions. It was the first deadly attack. Svobodin still had enough strength to come out for two curtain calls. Then he went to his dressing room, began changing for the last act and suddenly, clutching his throat, shouting 'Tear it, tear it' fell on his back. Anton was handed Suvorin's telegram as he left for his clinic. He told Suvorin of Svobodin's love for him, rather than his for the actor, and he did not go to the funeral. He had attended too many. In Petersburg he wanted to talk only to Suvorin. In any case, cholera required him to stay: new cases had occurred only eighteen miles away.

In Petersburg Pavel, an eager mourner, told Anton on 12 October 1892: I attended Requiems twice with the numerous presence of his admirers at the Volkovo cemetery, the sung requiem was solemn… for his two visits to us at Melikhovo I said a heartfelt prayer for his soul's peace… The last time he had not wanted to leave us, he kept taking his leave…

Aleksandr and his family send their regards and he asks you to sell him 12 to 15 acres of land to build a House just in case for his family, for his family is multiplying and he proposes to make himself a settlement. I am very pleased that sobriety, love, harmony, peace and calm have settled in their family. God grant that we be the same.

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Aleksandr had forsworn not only alcohol, but also meat. Anton's publication in the 'enemy' Russian Thought made Aleksandr fear for his job, all the more since Suvorin, sliding into depression, was letting his paper slip into the hands of the Dauphin, who loathed Aleksandr. Anton had to mend fences with Suvorin: over eighteen months he had written nothing for him.

Anton was content among the peasantry, his Serpukhov colleagues, and even his neighbours. Only police officials repelled him. Siren voices called Anton to Moscow. Lika was desperate for comfort. On 8 October she broke her silence and appealed: I am burning my life, come and help as soon as possible burn it out, because the sooner the better… You used to say that you loved immoral women - so you won't be bored with me, either. Even though you won't answer my letters, now perhaps you will write something, because writing to a woman such as I'm becoming really doesn't put you under any obligations, and anyway I am dying, perishing day by day and all par depit. Oh, save me and come! Till we meet. L. Mizinova. Vania had cleaned up his school house, and the Chekhovs had accommodation. On 15 October 1892, when cholera was declared vanquished, Anton came to Moscow for two days. He dined with his editors and erstwhile enemies, Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev, but spurned Gruzinsky and Ezhov. He must have contacted Lika, for at the weekend, classes over, Lika and Masha left for Melikhovo, followed by Anton with Pavel.

Lika had, however, received little comfort. Anton told Suvorin that he was bored without 'strong love', and Smagin 'there are no new attachments and the old are gone rusty'. Anton wanted to travel even further than in 1890: he would write all winter to earn the fare to Chicago to visit, with the Dauphin, the 1893 International Exhibition. First he had to go to Petersburg. Anna Suvorina summoned him twice: Anton, has my image utterly vanished from your heart? Do you really not want to see me? I suddenly felt a terrible desire to meet you and talk… Can you really not get over Lenochka Pleshcheeva choosing somebody else? Well it was all your own fault and who could have supposed afterwards!!! Come, my dear Anton, I'll find you a bride here.20

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The next day (26 October) Anna wrote:

… now I'm writing seriously with an outright demand that you come. Aleksei [Suvorin] is unwell, he has fainting fits, Liolia [the Dauphin] and I are at our wits' end and awfully worried. We ask you to help us. Anton did not come. He told Suvorin, in the callous tone of the doctors in his plays, to take valerian, and to carry a folding chair wherever he went. Suvorin's desperate reply, however, panicked Anton. He told Shcheglov that he was rushing to Suvorin's bedside, for fear of a death 'that would age me about ten years'. On 30 October 1892 Anton went to Petersburg. News of Suvorin's illness spread through Moscow.21

Anton found Suvorin physically well: the only visible cause for depression was that the ceiling of his mansion had collapsed. He and Anton talked, drank and ate oysters.22 When Suvorin fell silent, Anton reviewed manuscripts for the Dauphin. One was a ghastly survey by Dr Sviatlovsky called How Doctors Live and Die - suicide, tuberculosis and typhus.

Back in Moscow on 7 November, Anton felt ill: to save money he had travelled third class, and was choked by cigar smoke. The road to Melikhovo, now under snow, was passable, and the next weekend the Chekhov brothers' women friends, Lika, Countess Mamuna and Aleksandra Liosova, descended. Lika did not enjoy her stay: she was sought out only by Countess Mamuna, who did not want to be alone with Misha. Lika returned to Moscow with Masha the following Tuesday. In Moscow she met a new friend of Anton's, the young poetess Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik. This was a new blow to Lika, and her letters, by late November, become plaintive: 'I am annoyed that I… went to Melikhovo… and again I have no idea where to get away from anguish and the realization that no one needs me.' Anton refused to respond seriously: Masha had seen Lika at a symphony concert in a new blue dress. He answered with a spoof from one of'Lika's Lovers' to another: Trofim! If you, you son of a bitch, don't stop chasing after Lika, then, you sod, I shall stick a corkscrew up the bit of you that rhymes with farce. You turd! Don't you know L. is mine and that we have two children?

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As November ended blizzards nil Melikhovo off. Anton wrote The Island of Sakhalin and reports on the Tolokonnikovs' tannery at the nearby village of Kriukovo. Lika's phrase, par dipt, also inspired him. He began 'Big Volodia and Little Volodia': a young woman, married par depit to an older man, is seduced by a younger man. Neither loves her. That freezing week Anton wrote a passionate apologia for his own 'mediocrity' to Suvorin. (Suvorin had read 'Ward No. 6' with all the more distaste because it was in Russian Thought) You are a hardened drunkard and I have treated you to sweet lemonade and while you grant lemonade its due, you righdy note that lemonade has no spirit. There is none of the alcohol which would make you drunk and enthralled… The reasons are not stupidity or mediocrity or arrogance, as Burenin thinks, but a disease worse for an artist than syphilis and sexual exhaustion. We haven't got 'it', true, and so, if you lift up our muse's skirt, you will find a flat place. Remember, that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind but your whole being that mey have a goal, like die ghost of Hamlet's father. Suvorin was so bewildered by the letter that he asked his Petersburg crony, Sazonova, if Chekhov had gone mad. Sazonova, yet another Petersburg woman who did not take to Anton, wrote in her diary that, on the contrary, Chekhov was 'all there'; to Suvorin she berated Chekhov for not taking life as it came. Suvorin sent her letter to Anton, who sneered that Sazonova was 'a person who is far from life-enhancing'.

December's stiller weather brought fresh company every day - old friends like Kundasova, as well as casual visitors who shamelessly ate the Chekhovs' food, bedded down in their drawing room and bearded the writer in his den. Suvorin, addicted to painkillers, now appealed for help. Anton went back to Petersburg. On 20 December, as blizzards hit Melikhovo, he came into the warm. He stayed away from family and Moscow for over five weeks - well past his name day. Anton brought Suvorin his last gasp for New Times, a Christmas story called 'Fears'. He dined with Leikin. Moscow friends were hurt that Anton did not even mention his passing through. In Moscow he called on Lika and Masha for a few minutes only, but took the actress

OCTOBER 1892-JANUARY 1893

/ankovetskaia to the music hall.23 He did not warn Aleksandr and Natalia that he was coming to Petersburg.

Anton wrote to Lika, inviting her to Petersburg, knowing full well that she was too shy to come to the Suvorins, with whom Chekhov so frankly discussed his private affairs. Anton taunted her: he was dreaming of Countess Mamuna, he liked the idea of telling his friends that a blonde was being unfaithful to him. On 28 December he enclosed a newspaper cutting, should Lika wish to marry 'par depif: Wishing to marry, mere being no suitable brides in our area, I invite girls desiring marriage to send their terms. The bride must be no older than 23, blonde, good-looking, of medium height and of lively, cheerful character; no dowry required. Apply to Evgeni Insarov, Almetevo, Bugulma district. Lika replied by return of post: Par depit I am burning up my life now!… and if you tell your friends at supper that a blonde is being unfaithful to you, that will probably amaze nobody, since I shouldn't think anyone would suppose that someone could be faithful to you. Anton was supping with literary friends that night and the next four. Sergeenko tried to recruit Chekhov into a club of twelve - writers, painters, composers - for suppers, teas and story-telling. In Petersburg the temperature was ~35°C. (At Melikhovo, too, it was colder than anyone could recall.) Party-going and terrible cold took their toll. Suvorin's house turned into a sickbay. Anton coughed uncontrollably, but treated everybody else. Suvorin had flu and otitis. Anton bandaged Kmilie Bijon's leg: the governess had fallen off a wardrobe. He introduced to Petersburg a Moscow tradition: Tatiana-day celebrations with Suvorin, Grigorovich and Leikin, Barantsevich, Ezhov and Tikhonov. 'We drank little, but it was an extremely lively dinner,' recorded Leikin. Anton announced: 'We must all unite, or they'll pick us off one by one.'24

Accounts at New Times, controlled by Suvorin's eldest son, Mikhail, were a muddle. Anton needed to offset the 5000 roubles in advances and loans he had taken from Suvorin. He wanted to pay off Natalia Lintvariova, who had lent him 500 roubles to buy seed and equipment for Melikhovo. He was puzzled: no matter how many of his books Suvorin sold, he seemed to be in debt. At Suvorin's, he wrote only a

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short discourse, 'What Disease Did Herod Die Of?', and an enquiry on behalf of the painter Repin into whether the moon shone on Gethsemane.

Even in Petersburg Anton could not escape the demands on his time, pocket and affections. Pavel, who received a pension through Suvorin's office, ostensibly from his sons, angry that payment was late, protested to Aleksandr: I am the father of famous children. I must in no way find myself embarrassed or humble myself before anyone. I shall not go begging from anybody. It is a disgrace! I need freedom, I shall live where I wish, I shall go whither I wish, and I need money for that.25 Lika lamented still more loudly on 15 January 1893: I haven't seen Masha since December… You say that you will come on a Monday? That's stupid - there are Mondays in March and July and that explains nothing… I am counting the days and hours which must pass before the happy moment comes when I see you. Your Likula.26 Anton felt he had to surrender to Lika, and to return home. On Sunday 24 January 1893, just before he left, he reluctantly dined tete-a-tete with the sister of Maria Kiseliova - Nadezhda Golubeva, a senator's wife and amateur writer. Anton had last met her at Babkino in the summer of 1887. Anton was forthright with Nadezhda: neither her nor Maria's writing was any good, because it was done without sweat; his own success came not from genius, but luck and toil. Nadezhda observed Anton closely: He cast a quick eye around the room; I understood that look and hastened to tell him that my husband would not be dining with him as he was away. Chekhov brightened up suddenly and barked out as of old: 'Oh, how glad I am! You know, Nadezhda, I don't have your husband's good manners. My papa and mama sold herrings.'… Chekhov was turning the napkin in an astoundingly odd way, as if it irritated him terribly, he crumpled it, twisted it, finally put it behind him. He was on tenterhooks. I couldn't understand what this all meant. Suddenly he fired: 'I'm sorry, Nadezhda, I'm not used to sitting down to dinner, I always eat as I walk… In the last six years I've aged by twenty years.'… There was such tiredness in his face!

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I thought: the springtime of his life has passed, there has been no summer, autumn has come straight away. That tired disillusionment is equally strong in Shcheglov's diary entry for the next day: 'Chekhov and Co. is not literature, but [quoting Nutlstm] "Our useless ant hill, our world of pygmies not of men."'28 ()n 26 January 1893, Anton was back in his Moscow ant hill, climbing the stairs to see Lika. After nearly three years' evasion, she must have tclt, Anton had surrendered.

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Sickbay February-March 1893 ANTON HAD ENJOYED PETERSBURG SO much that he thought of renting an apartment there. In the frozen countryside, he forgot such frivolity. Pavel, after watching the cow give birth, collapsed and prepared to die. Anton fetched Masha, delirious with a temperature of 40°C, from Moscow. She grew worse, and Countess Mamuna came down to nurse her. Lika, always ill at ease in times of crisis, stayed away. Then Anton himself fell ill. He wrote to Aleksandr on 6 February 1893: 1) Father is ill. He has bad spinal pains and numb fingers. Not continuously, it comes in attacks like angina. The symptoms seem to be senile. He needs treatment, but 'his lordship is dining' furiously, rejecting moderation: pancakes all day, hot flour dishes for supper and all sorts of rubbishy snacks. He says 'I'm stricken with paralysis', but won't obey. 2) Masha is ill. She was in bed for a week with a high temperature. We thought it was typhoid. Now she's better. 3) I have flu. I am doing nothing and am irritable. 4) The pedigree calf has frostbitten ears. 5) The geese pecked off the cockerel's comb. 6) Visitors keep coming and staying the night. 7) The rural authorities are demanding a medical report from me. 8) The house has subsidence and some doors won't shut.

9) The sub-zero temperatures continue. 10) The sparrows are copulating. Now Anton needed Aleksandr's help. While in Petersburg Anton had found he had no right to live there. A humble townsman, no longer a Moscow resident, he needed a permit to reside in either capital city. He had to obtain dvorianin (noble) status to enjoy full civic freedom.

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Suvorin found the solution and Aleksandr did the work. Aleksandr lobbied with the Medical Department of the Interior Ministry to appoint Anton a supernumerary civil servant. Now, like Aleksandr and Vania, he had rank and civic rights. Employed by a Petersburg ministry (he forwent a salary), Anton could reside only in Petersburg; to reside in Moscow as well, he had to take leave or, better, retire. The first half of 1893 was spent securing appointment, the second retirement. Then Anton Chekhov could live and travel anywhere. (I lis parents still needed, to reside in Melikhovo, an annual passport issued by the police in Taganrog.) Aleksandr's reward was to be invited, with his elder boys, but without Natalia, to Melikhovo. Now that Misha was two, Natalia's passion fixed on her son; her stepsons were left to Aleksandr's care. Aleksandr won little sympathy or thanks from Anton. He sent photographs, taken at Melikhovo or printed from Sakhalin plates. Anton grumbled that he had no room to display them and that he despised Aleksandr's hobbies, fretwork and photography.

Lika reappeared. In February, as the patients in Melikhovo recovered, she came with Masha for weekends there. In March she spent a whole week, from the 23rd (her name day) to Easter Sunday, but Anton was still hard to lure to Moscow. She wrote on 1 April i8y«: 'I've made you some perfume, if you don't come soon, I'll give it to somebody else… All men are bastards. Come!' Pavel set off to see Vania and do the rounds of Moscow's churches. Masha and Anton took over Pavel's diary and parodied his lugubrious style: 18 March: -1°. Glory to God, all have left and only two, myself and Mme. Chekhova remain. 19: Masha and Mizinova came… 20: Mama dreamt of a nanny goat on a chamberpot, this is a good sign. 21 Sunday: Semashko came. We ate roast udder. 22 We heard a lark. A crane flew by in the evening. Semashko left. 23 Mama dreamt of a goose in a priest's hat. This is a good omen. Masha's belly aches. We slaughtered a pig. 24. We made sausages. Anton was again hiding from admirers. In February Aleksandra Pokh-lebina had lost her pupils and her sanity. She raved that a morphine-addicted rival for Anton's affections had hired men to attack her. Anton heard from her again in March 1893: 'Just the thought that you don't care about my suffering drives me mad, I feel I won't survive.

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If you really don't care what happens to me, then at least pretend, make believe that you like me…' Pokhlebina's life and Anton's peace of mind were saved when her family set up a metallurgical plant, and she went to work there. Anton also persuaded The Performing Artist to publish her eccentric New Ways of Getting Piano Technique.

War broke out between the two camps, Suvorin's and Lavrov's, in which Chekhov had pitched his tents. Russian Thought accused the Suvorins of profiting from the Panama Canal scandal.29 On i March Anton went to Moscow, with Lika, and calmly drank five glasses of vodka with Lavrov at Russian Thought. On the 5th, two days later, the Dauphin came to Russian Thought, struck Lavrov, and took the night train back to Petersburg. Suvorin was as upset by the distress that 'Liolia', his darling Dauphin, had undergone as by public hostility to all Suvorins. Two weeks later Suvorin, Grigorovich and their wives set off for Vienna. Suvorin spent most of 1893 abroad.

Anton was not only deprived of a friend, but his most important relationship was damaged. Few of his letters reached Suvorin that spring and summer: the Dauphin and his brother were intercepting their father's mail. New Times turned vicious as the Dauphin took over. Aleksandr trembled for his job: the Dauphin would not speak to him or print him. The office of New Times felt that Anton's involvement in Russian Thought was black ingratitude to Suvorin, his maker. The Dauphin claimed that Anton had written abuse to his father. Hearing of the assault on Lavrov, Chekhov told Masha on 11 March: So between me and Suvorin [junior] everything is now finished, even mough he is writing me snivelling letters. A son of a bitch who swears at people every day and is famous for it, struck a man for swearing at him. Anton told Aleksandr that the breach was only partially mended: The old building has cracked and must collapse. I'm sorry for the old man, he wrote me a penitent letter; probably, I shan't have to break with him permanently; but as for the office and the Dauphin's clique, there seems little chance of any sort of relations with them. New Times had lost Chekhov as a writer. It was to lose all its respectable contributors, and its verve degenerated into chauvinism. Even its editors resigned, went mad, or wrote anonymous denunciations. As Suvo290

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1 m senior failed to hold back the anti-Semitic barbarities of New I Hues, the breach affected the two men personally. Anton dropped lhe idea of going to the Chicago Exhibition because the Dauphin intended to come.30

«)lga Kundasova, crossing Russia from Novocherkassk, where she researched into mathematics, to Moscow and Petersburg, where she disseminated her findings, felt more for Suvorin. On 10 March she appealed to Anton: Anton, Suvorin was about to go to Feodosia today, but has put it off. I have, by the way, given him a[nother] letter addressed to you and written that he must not be left alone in his present nervous state. I even suggested that you should accompany Aleksei to Feodosia. Be a good friend, do that and distract him if only a little bit… He wants to call you out to Lopasnia station. So be ready. I ask just one thing: not a word to him about the letter which you will have from his hands. Tear it up. Anton replied to Kundasova so strongly about his own shattered nerves that she did not dare show the letter to Suvorin. Soon, however, Suvorin was in Vienna listening to Grigorovich's tales of sexual exploits. In late March he was ill in Venice, nursed by the Grigoro viches. In mid April the Grigoroviches and Anna Suvorina tinned back. Suvorin bought himself 1650 francs worth of furniture and began I lonely peregrination to Biarritz and Paris.

Unlike Anton, his younger brothers had decided to marry. Alter November 1892 Vania's fiancee, Aleksandra Liosova, had stopped coming to Melikhovo, but by Easter 1893 Vania was betrothed to Sofia Andreeva, a teacher at the Basmannaia school - 'a long-nosed gentlewoman from Kostroma', Anton sneered. (Liosova later told Anton 'Ivan asked me not to meet him again, for his hatred for me is too great.') Countess Mamuna continued to visit Melikhovo, where Misha, to Anton's irritation, lived throughout 1893, employed at a tax office in nearby Serpukhov. Less was said of Misha's engagement to Mamuna, although he visited Moscow to see what the family jokingly called 'the government offices - brunette in a red jacket'. On 26 April Anton, however, told Suvorin: At Easter the countess writes she is off to see her aunt in Kostroma. There have been no more letters until recently. Misha yearns, hears

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she is in Moscow, goes to see her and, Î wonders, sees people hanging about the windows and die gates. What is it? It turns out diere is a marriage in the house, die countess is marrying some goldminer. How's that? Misha comes back in despair and thrusts under my nose the countess's tender letters, full of love, asking me to solve this psychological problem. Anton had discovered Kipling's substitute for women, and told his architect friend Franz Schechtel in March 1893: Dear Franz, can you imagine, I smoke cigars… I find they taste far better, they're healthier and cleaner, although, more expensive. You're an expert in cigars, I'm still an ignoramus and dilettante. Please instruct me: what cigars should I smoke and where in Moscow can I buy diem? I now smoke Petersburg Ten-Kate, called El Armado, Londres, made there from imported Havana tobacco, strong; you can judge their length by… [Schechtel blacked out a phallus] Schechtel, who was now a rich and fashionable man, sent back a hundred Havana cigars from Riga. In gratitude Anton called on Schechtel on 1 May 1893 and left him a banded cigar with instructions: 'It must be smoked not just standing and with hat doffed, but also "God Save the Tsar" must be played and gendarmes must prance around you.' The best cigar in the world, however, provides only an hour of bliss. Leikin had promised Anton his heart's desire. The arrangements kept on falling through, but finally, on 5 April, as Lei-kin's diary shows, Anton's desires were met: Khudekov's servants are taking the Khudekov birds from the Bird Show to the country, to Riazan province, and will at the same dme deliver, it's not out of their way, two dachshunds to Chekhov in Moscow.

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+ Dachshund Summer April-August 1893 ON THURSDAY 15 APRIL Masha brought to Mehkhovo 5 lb of lard, lolb of pork breast, 10 lb of candles, and two dachshunds. She named the blackish dog Brom {bromine) and the tan bitch Quinine (Anton christened them Brom Isaevich and Khina Markovna.) They were frozen on the cart journey, after a week in Vania's house, where they had been banished to the privy. Anton thanked Leikin: The dachshunds have been running through all the rooms, being affectionate, barking at the servants. They were fed and then they began to feel utterly at home. At night they dug the earth and newly-sown seed from the window boxes and distributed the galoshes from the lobby round all the rooms and in the morning, when I took them for a walk round the garden they horrified the farm dogs who have never seen such monstrosities. The bitch is nicer than the dog… But both have kind, grateful eyes. The dachshunds spent the day chasing hens and geese out of the garden. Anton told Leikin 4 August 1893: Brom is nimble and supple, polite and sensitive, Quinine is awkward, fat, idle and cunning. Brom likes birds, Quinine digs her nose into the ground. They both love to cry from excess of emotion. They know why they are punished. Brom often vomits. He is in love with a farm bitch. Quinine, however, is still an innocent maiden. They love going for walks across the fields and in the woods, but only with us. I have to smack diem almost every day: they grab patients by me trousers, diey quarrel when mey eat, and so on. They sleep in my room. Misha was amazed by Anton's affection: Every evening Quinine would come up to Anton, put her front paws on his knees and look into his eyes pathetically and devotedly. I Ie '93

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would change his expression and say in a broken old man's voice: 'Quinine! You poor old thing! You ought to go to hospital, you'd feel better there.' He spent a whole thirty minutes talking to the dog and made everyone in the house helpless with laughter. Then came Brom's turn. He too would put his front paws on Anton's knee and the fun would start again. In late April the starving cows and sheep left the sheds to graze with the communal flocks. Ploughing and sowing started. The Chekhov family was up from dawn to dusk. Warm weather brought patients with sores, wounds and mental illness. Epidemics of scarlet fever and measles raged; it was also a critical time for tuberculosis victims. Anton barely mentioned his own cough, but wrote about his patients. The Tolokonnikovs, peasants turned mill-owners, disgusted him: after a vigorously celebrated marriage Chekhov was summoned urgently for the couple's inflamed genitals; another old man demanded treatment for his aching balls after marrying a young bride.

Once again the authorities feared cholera, and Anton was asked not to leave the district for more than a few days. This time the council paid for an assistant, a feldsheritsa (paramedic) called Maria Arkadak-skaia. Her notes alarmed Anton. On n July she wrote 'send me cocaine, my teeth are killing me'. By August, when cholera was only twelve miles away, Maria was so addicted to morphine that Chekhov could not leave her in charge for a day. In early August he put her in Iakovenko's asylum at Meshcherskoe - Iakovenko took only Anton's more interesting cases - and coped alone. Anton needed morphine too, he told Franz Schechtel on 19 April 1893: 'I have haemorrhoids, awful, like grapes, growing in bunches from my behind… from the part of me which my father used to thrash.' He steeled himself for an operation in Moscow but became too ill to travel: I have two dozen or so diseases, with haemorrhoids the main one. Haemorrhoids make the whole body very irritated. These ailments affect one's psyche in the most undesirable way: I am irritated, I turn nasty etc. I am treating it by celibacy and solitude…" Haemorrhoids were his excuse for not seeing Lika: 'a general's disease - can't travel,' he told her. The dachshunds, not Lika, were caressed that spring. Anton complained to Aleksandr that Suvorin was not getting his

APRIL-AUGUST 1893

letters. The Dauphin demanded that Anton edit Aleksandr's copy for New Times, but the brothers would not let the Dauphin sow discord between them. That summer they were closer. Aleksandr was unhappy with Natalia, and saw her and the children only at weekends forty miles outside Petersburg. After five months without alcohol, he was suffering again from 'ambulatory typhoid', and from toothache, which he treated with a mixture of resin, ether, ammonia and menthol that Anton prescribed. For Anton's ills Aleksandr, on 15 May, prescribed marriage: When you decide to get 'hitched', then things will be fine up top. A wife must not argue. 'Shut up!' deals with that… All you have to do is follow the general law, submit to Aunt Liudmila's desires and take some lessons in God-fearing coitus from Uncle Mitrofan. Aleksandr came to Melikhovo for a week in June: he found the suppressed unhappiness of its inhabitants unbearable. On 9 June IHOJ, as he waited at Lopasnia for the train to Moscow and Petersburg, he scribbled a rambling letter (which Lika, who was arriving, took wiili her to Melikhovo): I left Melikhovo without saying goodbye to the Tramontane) \thtit nickname for Pavel]. He was asleep, so let him be. May he dream ol smoked sturgeons and olives… I suffered all the time I watched you, the foul way you live… In [mother's] opinion you are I lit I man… and the dogs, damn them, she isn't going to feed them any more… The only way to stop all these misunderstandings and mutual insults, tears, inevitable suffering, muffled sighs and bitter tears is your final decision, only your departure. Mother absolutely can't understand you and never will… Throw everything up: your dreams of the country, your love of Melikhovo and the labour and feelings… What sense is there in the Tramontani eating up your soul as rats eat tallow candles?… You and our sister have a false relationship. One kind word from you with a sincere note and she is all yours… Lika is approaching. I have to finish. After Aleksandr had gone (leaving in the new pond a bottle with a polyglot message from a shipwreck), Evgenia went to a convent for three days' retreat. Only those who were closest to Anton, as was Aleksandr, understood how irritable physical pain, mental stress and loneliness made him and how much he could, without intending to, torment his mother and sister.

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In summer 1893 Anton wrote- almost nothing new. He denied that he was writing a comedy about Siberian exiles and their jailors. He kept up his reputation with old work. When Russian Thought published 'An Anonymous Story', in March 1893, few readers knew that Chekhov had abandoned it five years before, before taking it up again, because of its political theme. A revolutionary (the anonymous narrator) is planted as a servant to spy on a minister's son, but reneges on his mission and elopes with his target's mistress, who dies abroad of ÒÂ (only three heroines in all Chekhov's mature work die, and two of ÒÂ). When the narrator returns to Russia, he surrenders the heroine's baby girl to the enemy. 'An Anonymous Story' is Chekhov's only story with revolutionaries, aristocratic protagonists, or a Petersburg setting: the work is more like Turgenev's than Chekhov's. Anton's own world is better reflected in 'Big Volodia and Little Volo-dia', whose forlorn heroine might have suggested to Lika Mizinova that she was Anton's raw material, not muse. Many more times she would see her vulnerable character and unlucky fate mirrored, even anticipated, in Anton's fiction.

In 1893 Anton's reading was as important as his writing. Zola's novel Dr Pascal was serialized in Russia. Dr Pascal devotes himself to the welfare of mankind, defending humanism against the Christian piety of his niece Clotilde. She nevertheless comforts him and becomes his mistress. Anton's life at Melikhovo with Masha seemed to outsiders an idealization of Dr Pascal. No wonder that he discussed the novel heatedly with Suvorin, once communication between them was reestablished. There was one 'happy' event at Melikhovo: on 9 July Vania married Sofia in the local church. Six weeks later, Anton was telling Suvorin that he felt crowded by the presence of Vania, his wife and the homeless flautist Ivanenko. Real inspiration visited Anton once, after a heavy dinner. He awoke from a nightmare, telling Misha he had dreamt of a black monk. Into 'The Black Monk' he wrote at the end of 1893 comes imagery from his orchard, where workmen desperately tried to shield the blossom from frost. A story of overwork leading to madness and ÒÂ, it shows Vsevolod Garshin's ghost working on Chekhov. It needed a musical theme for the plot to crystallize. The bringer of music to Melikhovo in August 1893 was Ignati Potapenko, and the bringer of Potapenko was Suvorin. By May Suvorin was in Paris, seeking distraction in Le Moulin Rouge, with the

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dot lors of La Salpetriere, or in jewellers' shops. Only on 7/19 June does his diary show animation: Back at my hotel I found a letter from Potapenko asking me for 300-400 roubles. Today I gave him 300 roubles… Maria [Pota-penko'ssecond wife]… said that she needed treatment, some operation had to be done, but they had no money. Potapenko works a lot, far too hard, and doesn't conceal from himself that this is wearing him out; but he works fast. Potapenko invited himself and Sergeenko to Melikhovo. Anton groaned: he recalled Sergeenko taking him to see Potapenko,' 'the god of boredom', in 1889. Sergeenko had proved unmitigated tedium all 1893 he had urged Anton to make a pilgrimage with him to see Tolstoy. Anton resisted, fleeing a Moscow bathhouse when he found 1 hat Tolstoy was there. He wanted to see Tolstoy alone, and hid from Sergeenko and even Tolstoy's son, Liovushka.

Patients died. A rainy summer washed away the harvest. With Sergeenko, Potapenko arrived on 1 August and, as the god of amusement, lightened Anton's gloom. He plunged into everything, even the muddy pond Anton had dug. Anton recanted to Suvorin (who warned that Potapenko might be a crook): 'My Odessa impression misled me… Potapenko sings very nicely and plays the violin, he and I had a very interesting time, quite apart from the violin and drawing room songs.' In Anton's phrase, the 'crow' of Odessa had become the 'eagle' of Moscow. Anton talked as intimately to him as to Suvorin. Potapenko became an alter ego in a few days. He fell under Anton's spell and respected his secrets. Potapenko recalled: The head of me house was Anton. His tastes dominated everything, everything was done to please him. He treated his mother with tenderness, but showed his father only filial respect… And he said that his father had been a cruel man… He had cast a pall on his childhood and aroused in his soul a protest against the despotic imposition of belief." Anton, for all his memories of enforced church services, sang with Potapenko: 'not love songs but church music… He had a fairly resonant bass. He knew the liturgy extremely well and loved improvising a family choir.' Again, as she had used Levitan, Lika used Potapenko to arouse Anton. Lika joined the men, singing to the

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«: IN c IN NAT US accompaniment of Potapenko's violin. The music was Braga's 'Wal-lachian Legend'. The main motif of'The Black Monk' was born, and the form too, for as Shostakovich noted, 'The Black Monk' has a perfect sonata form. Potapenko and Lika were thrown together; other harmonies, as ominous as those of Braga's 'Legend', were born.

That summer Potapenko was a deus ex macbina in many of Anton's plots. In Petersburg he made Suvorin's accountants recalculate Anton's debt: instead of owing Suvorin 3482 roubles, Anton found he was owed 2000 and could abandon a plan to sell Suvorin ten years' rights to his books.33 Potapenko prided himself on extracting money from publishers. He was paying for a sick second wife in Paris and an embittered first wife in the Crimea. Potapenko's unsinkable temperament made all problems, even Anton's, a pretext for merriment. He made things work. Anton's haemorrhoids, coughing, and the depression, which Aleksandr's letter had tried to pinpoint, vanished.

On 30 July/i 1 August, in Stuttgart, coming home, Suvorin wrote a poem that showed in what deep gulfs he was drowning. It ends: I feel the flies are crawling Over the membrane of my brain… 'It's not flies sitting in your head,' The surgeon answers with a laugh. 'Old age has come, and your brain Is being eaten all the time While water is filling up the holes.' Suvorin reached Petersburg in August; he described his symptoms to Anton. Anton told him-not to worry and Suvorin took the train, alone, back to western Europe.

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Happy Avelan October-December 1893 NOT UNTIL LATE OCTOBER could Chekhov visit Moscow. He made only day trips to Serpukhov, to council meetings, or to meet Olga Kundasova. After Potapenko's arrival, his mood remained buoyant, despite the washed-out harvest. A new well was dug; fish swam in the new pond; there were watermelons from the kitchen garden. Russian Thought began serial publication of The Island of Sakhalin. (Its publication as a book was to come afterwards.) Despite its understated quality, it earned Chekhov esteem: he was now a conscience for the nation, like Tolstoy.

The desire to revisit Petersburg receded - Anton was not to go there for nearly two years. Suvorin was abroad, talking to novelists lie published in Russia: Zola and Daudet. Aleksandr, after being so outspoken, was ignored. After Potapenko, Anton was seeking new confidants and setting aside old friends. He was apparently unmoved when the poet Pleshcheev died of a stroke in Paris. Some of the women who loved Anton recognized a change, and stood back: in autumn 1893 Olga Kundasova wrote: (2 5 September) I don't think it's bad for you to be in solitude. (17 November) I want, and I don't want, to visit you. One lives mostly on illusions and feels even worse when they scatter. Devoted to you with all my soul, Kund. Both Olga Kundasova and Suvorin recognized that they had in common not only a love for Anton, but symptoms of mental illness, manic depression. Kundasova sought treatment, while Suvorin sought distraction. Despite their diametrically opposed political views, Kundasova and Suvorin had respect, even affection, for each other and, for the next decade, gave each other support. Suvorin's support was

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monetary, which Olga ne;irly choked on. 'Don't think that I am charmed by the prospects of free provision at others' expense.'™

Another woman also withdrew from Anton on 16 October 1893: 'I feel I shall write a lot of various stupid things today, so - farewell! With far more than respect, Aleksandra Pokhlebina.'

Once autumn came, Lika visited less often. A more varied social life, as well as teaching in the Rzhevskaia School, kept her in Moscow. Acolytes also retreated. Bilibin, Shcheglov and Gruzinsky all felt neglected. Ezhov was becoming demented: 'Critics have started leaping from behind gates, biting my trousers… I've become a complete swine and write to you like a drunken peasant.'35 All editors slammed their doors in Ezhov's face after he offered Amusement a sketch called 'The Sad Boy'. Two women ask a street urchin where he lives: ' "In a cunt," replied the rude boy and went his way.'

Grim news came from Petersburg. On 25 October Tchaikovsky died, apparently of cholera. Suvorin, who recorded every scrap of gossip, had noted Tchaikovsky living as man and 'wife' with the poet Apukhtin, but heard not a whisper about suicide or homosexual scandal. All Russia felt bereaved and blamed, if anyone, Dr Bertenson who failed to save the composer. Anton took Tchaikovsky's death as calmly as Pleshcheev's. On the same day he heard from Aleksandr of his own demise: You, my friend, are dangerously ill witfr consumption and will soon die. Rest in peace! Today Leikin came to our office with tbis sad newsith tbiȺ he shed bitter tears while he spoke, claiming that you had confided to him alone in the world the tale of your so early extinction from an incurable ailment. Aleksandr warned Anton that if he didn't die soon, he would be accused of publicity-seeking.

Anton leapt into action as if to scotch the rumours and to live to the full. On 27 October 1893 he broke free to Moscow and stayed until 7 November. On 25 November he was back in Moscow for four weeks, ostensibly to read the proofs of Sakhalin. In Moscow Anton had a new nickname, 'Happy Avelan'. In France the Russian Admiral Avelan was received with Bacchic hospitality, to celebrate the new Franco-Russian alliance. Anton, like Admiral Avelan, began to relish wine, acclaim and beautiful women. Lika's happiness was soon underOCTOBER-DECEMBER 1893 mined by the knowledge that she was now one of several women in Anton's life.

Anton-Avelan's 'squadron' included Potapenko, Sergeenko, the Miperman-reporter Uncle Giliai (Giliarovsky) and the wheezing editor of The Performing Artist, Kumanin (whose life the squadron's expeditions shortened). They haunted the Loskutnaia, Louvre and Madrid hotels. They were entertained by Lika and her friend, the budding opera singer, Varia Eberle. Two women from Kiev also joined them.

()ne was Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik. Nineteen years old, less than live foot tall, the daughter of a rake, the lawyer Kupernik, she had the blood of Russia's great actor Shchepkin in her veins. She was.ilready famed as a verse translator from French and English: she singled out plays with a strong female role - Sappho, The Taming of the Shrew, The Distant Princess. She was a Sapphic love poet. Misha (ihekhov already knew her; now she moved into Anton's life. Tania charmed men, too, and Anton would value her above any other woman writer. She was called 'topsy-turvy' (kuvyrkom sounded like Kupernik) for her impetuosity.

Tania lived in the Hotel Madrid, which was linked to the Hotel Louvre through corridors (known as the 'catacombs' or 'Pyrenees'). In the Hotel Louvre lived the love of Tania's life, also from Kiev, the twenty-three-year-old actress Lidia lavorskaia. Their love affair began as loudly as it ended: Tania had come to deny that she had slandered I æÏà in Kiev. For 1893 anc^ J^94» Lidia's heart was Tania's, although she devoted the rest of her person to her manager, Korsh (of the Korsh theatre), to a lover in the Customs Department, to Anton Chekhov and, perhaps, to Ignati Potapenko. Like Tania, lavorskaia was a vivacious polyglot. Her background was darker. Her father, I lubbenett, of Huguenot origin, was Chief of Police in Kiev and, like her, promiscuous, self-important, vindictive, yet generous. Hubbenett helped lavorskaia literally to force herself on stage. Sensuality made up for shallowness. In Moscow she hypnotized Korsh into hiring her as La Dame aux camelias. Lidia lavorskaia stormed through Anton's life: she aroused both lust and disgust in him. The 'sirens of the Louvre', however, romped with Isaak Levitan, who called them his 'little girls', and Anton found this off-putting. Avelan's expeditions to theatres, restaurants and long sessions in

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hotel rooms were fuelled by the passion between Tania and Lidia Iavorskaia. Iavorskaia destroyed Tania's letters; Tania kept everything. Bits of paper and card, in Russian and French, in prose and verse, show Lidia responding to the poetess's affection: let's go… I await you. I kiss you as strongly as I love you. Lidia… Cette nuit d'Athenes etait belle. Le beau est inoubliable. Cher poete, si vous saviez quel mal de tete… J'attends le vice supreme et je vous envoie votre dot. Ma petite Sappho. Venez immediatement, urgent..? Anton saw Lidia act Napoleon's mistress Katrina Hubsche in Sar-dou's Madame Sans-Gine. He raved to Suvorin on n November 1893: I spent two weeks in intoxication. Beca use my life in Moscow has been nothing but feasts and new friendships, they call me Avelan to tease me. Never before have I felt so free. Firsdy, I have no flat -I can live where I want, secondly, I still haven't got my passport and… girls, girls, girls… Recently frivolity has taken me over and I feel drawn to people as never before, and literature has become my Abishag [King David's comforter] In the same letter Anton asserted that all thinkers are impotent by forty: sexual potency, he implied, was for savages, even though he hoped, in Apuleius' phrase, to go on 'drawing his bow'.

Both Tania and Lidia did their best. After he left on 7 November Tania sent him a poem (drafted on the back of one of Lidia's love-letters to her): All, all our dreams see Avelan All that we see recalls this man, Through the rosy mist he looms And quietly sails into our rooms.37 Tania wrote her Avelan notes on Lidia's behalf as her own. One sent to room No. 54 at the end of November runs: 'Perhaps you will honour with your presence the modest room No. 8. And I shan't say how happy the hostess will be. Tatiana K.' Iavorskaia set her sights on Anton and frightened Lika. Lika enjoyed the party, and even added her phrases to joint messages to Anton, but, embarrassed, humiliated, even shocked, she now wanted out. Anton had that summer claimed

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he was too old to be a lover; now she saw him in thrall to the 'sirens of the Louvre'. On 2 November she fired across his bows: I also know your attitude - either condescending pity or complete neglect… don't invite me to your place - don't meet me! - that's not so important for you, but it may help me to forget you. I cannot leave earlier than December or January - otherwise I would go now… Two days later, when Anton was back in Melikhovo, Lika wrote: I got to bed at 8 a.m. Mme Iavorskaia was wim us, she said that Chekhov is a charmer and that she definitely intended to marry him, she asked me to help and I promised to do everytbing for your mutual happiness. You are so nice and accessible that I thought I wouldn't find it hard. I ddia met Anton at Masha's empty flat (Masha was in Melikhovo). In spring 1894 she recalled the talk they had one November night: I was fleeing a man who was harassing me and I tlirew myself on your hospitality… You kept asking me 'what was I after?' When revulsion and pity for die man battled inside me, you, an artist, as a psychologist, as a human being, told me about a person's right to dispose of their affections, to love or not to love, freely submitting to inner feeling.'8 Lidia Iavorskaia extracted a promise of a play for her, to be called Daydreams.

The sirens had made Anton forget Suvorin. He wrote on 28 November: 'For mysterious reasons I shall not stay with you but in the Hotel Russia on the Moika.' Suvorin was badly upset. A draft of his reply runs: 30 November 1893. 7 a.m. Yes, 7 a.m. Things are bad, dear boy, I don't sleep at all and I don't know how and when it will end… When can I summon you to Petersburg? Well, if you stay in die Hotel Russia in the back and beyond, might you not as well be in Moscow, from my point of view, at least? It may be more advantageous for you, though I don't think we were much bother to you, but this really is hateful to me…" Anton's next letter to Suvorin was a kick in the teeth. He had met the Moscow publisher Sytin and liked 'the only publishing firm in

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Russia that has a Russian smell about it and doesn't push the peasant-customer about'. He drew up a contract with Sytin, receiving 2300 roubles for the book rights to old stories. Anton's publications were now in Moscow, not Petersburg, journals. The new editor of The Northern Herald, Liubov Gurevich, gave up all hope of persuading Chekhov to give the journal a major work: in November 1893, to Chekhov's fury - he cursed her Jewishness - she insisted on immediate repayment of 400 roubles she had advanced: Anton telegraphed Suvo-rin, who paid without demurring. Anton rarely paid back an advance. Shcheglov's diary boasts: 'There are four kings of advances: me, Chekhov, Potapenko and Sergeenko.'40

On 19 December, Anton felt ill. He stood Lika up - she had expected to see him - and left for Melikhovo. The clan gathered: Vania brought Sofia down. Lika was invited for the holidays. Her acceptance of 23 December 1893 had a new name in it, Ignati Potapenko's: Dear [crossed out: Igna…] Anton, I keep travelling and travelling but I can't get to Melikhovo - the cold is so terrible that I dare to beg you (of course, if this letter reaches you) to send something warm for me and Potapenko, who at your request and out of friendship for me will accompany me. Poor man!… At the Ermitage they keep asking why you haven't been seen there so long. I answer that you are busy writing a play for Iavorskaia's benefit night. Potapenko added a postscript, asserting his right to bring Lika to Melikhovo.41 Ivanenko warned Chekhov that Christmas: Hurry to Moscow and save her from perdition, not me but her. You are awaited like a god. Lika is very fond of white and black beer and a few other things that are her secret and which she will reveal to you.42 Anton did nothing to save Lika, who now understood that she was being handed over. On 27 December cousin Georgi arrived from Taganrog. Pavel had gone to Moscow to attend as many church services as he could. Anton wrote to his editor at Russian Thought, Viktor Goltsev: 'Potapenko and Lika have just arrived. Potapenko is already singing. But so sadly, you can't imagine!' Anton ended: 'Lika has started singing too.'

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The Women Scatter January-February 1894 ON NEW YEAR'S DAY 1894, Potapenko and Lika left Melikhovo together: Anton told Suvorin the next day: I can't take any more guests. Though there was one pleasant guest - Potapenko, who sang all the time… In the dining room the astronomer [Kundasova] is drinking coffee and laughing hysterically. Ivanenko is with her and in the next room my brother's wife, and so on. As guests and relatives left, they were met in Moscow by Pavel, happier that winter in the company of Vania, his 'positive' son. Pavel stayed in Moscow until 10 January: in Moscow, not Melikhovo, Aleksandr met his father. The last irksome guest left Melikhovo for Taganrog on Tatiana's day, 12 January, when Anton reappeared in the city, in the Hotel Louvre, room No. 54, near his sirens. Anton's brother, Misha, whom Anton made feel unwanted at Melikhovo, decided to leave for good. Despite his work on the estate, Anton was disparaging him for selfishness. (Potapenko also took a dislike to him, calling him 'enigmatic, like all tax inspectors'.) Misha applied for a transfer from Serpukhov tax office. On 15 February 1894 he went for an interview in Uglich, a northern city where mediaeval Tsars had exiled undesirables. Misha was appointed tax inspector in Uglich and left Melikhovo for good on 28 February. His labour at Melikhovo was distilled into a manual for smallholders, The Granary, A Dictionary of Agriculture. A year passed before The Granary was published by Russian Thought. It sold 77 copies in four years.

Anton's fallow period was over: from 28 December 1893 to the first week of January 1894, Moscow readers had a new instalment of The Island of Sakhalin, and three stories, 'Big Volodia and Little Volo-dia' in the newspaper The Russian Gazette; 'The Black Monk' in The

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Performing Artist, and 'A Woman's Kingdom' in Russian Thought. None of the stories was acclaimed: the editors of'Big Volodia and Little Volodia' took fright at the story's sexuality and cut it. (Anton gave his French translator, Jules Legras from Bordeaux, the manuscript for a full version in French.) 'The Black Monk' only later became famous - the first Chekhov story to be published in English. Its medical expertise in the study of ÒÂ and megalomania is striking, even though its plot is a tragic love story. A brilliant academic marries the daughter of the man who brought him up, and then, mad and sick, deserts her. The story has a Hoffmanesque mix of music (Braga's elegy) and of the supernatural (the vision of a black monk). But it is as pregnant with political meaning as 'Ward No. 6' or The Cherry Orchard, for much of the story centres on a great orchard, which goes to rack and ruin together with the hero. No reader could fail to align the tyrannical gardener, the hero's father-in-law with autocracy, or the mad hero with rebellion, and Russia with the orchard - an association that would become explicit in The Cherry Orchard. 'The Black Monk' 's publisher, Kumanin, told Shcheglov, however: 'Very watery and unnatural. But, you know, Chekhov is still a name. It would be awkward not to print it.'

'A Woman's Kingdom' is a new departure: in three episodes set in an iron foundry it sketches the disparity and parallel between the workers' misery and the desolation of the owner, a young woman. The story shows the influence of Zola and Dostoevsky - Zola in his portrait of an industrial hell, Dostoevsky in the heroine's disastrous attempt to mete out charity. If Sazonova's guess in her diary is right, and the heroine is based on Anna Suvorina, then the iron foundry is an allegory of the Suvorin empire. The radicals saw none of this: they felt that Chekhov's depiction of the foundry was 'immoral' and 'obsessed with detail', and for the critics 'The Black Monk' was too melodramatic a psychiatric case history. Anton was disappointed that his new works aroused muted reactions. In vain Suvorin lobbied for The Island of Sakhalin to be awarded a prize, while Moscow University rejected the work as a thesis that would entitle Chekhov to lecture on social medicine.

Spurned by critics and academics, Anton connived, to say the very least, at being superseded in Lika's affections too. Olga Kundasova noticed an opportunity to regain Anton's love and made herself known

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at the end of January 1894: 'If you want to behold me at your place, send horses to meet the post-train and collect your mail on Friday 4 [February]. I shall stay the night and then leave for Meshcherskoe. Until we meet beyond the tomb.' Anton told Suvorin she was mad. She did not come. Although she was still attached to Iakovenko's hospital, a year passed before she re-entered Anton's life.

Everyone at Lopasnia and Melikhovo noticed that on 29 January and 22 February Lika Mizinova came and left not with Anton, but with Ignati Potapenko. On Anton's thirty-fourth birthday, 16 January 1894, and for one last time, on 25 February, she saw Anton without Potapenko. When she and Potapenko left Melikhovo on 31 January they took with them on the sleighs to the station what was to be Anton's standard consolation present, two puppies from Quinine, who had mated in the kitchen with one of the farm dogs, Catarrh. The closer Potapenko became to Lika, the more Anton lauded him. 'You are absolutely wrong about Potapenko, there's not an ounce of devi-ousness about him,' he told Suvorin on 10 January. Potapenko and Lika were not deceiving Anton. Potapenko invited 'Signor Antonio' to celebrate Tatiana's day in Moscow and warned Anton: '(8 January)… Lika is away travelling, as a consequence of which I am pining, since I am almost head over heels in love with Lika.' Potapenko was writing frantically to finance his new life. He went on acting as Anton's agent, collecting royalties, handling manuscripts, even in mid February negotiating with the hard-headed publisher Adolf Marx an advance for a novel that Anton would write by 1895 for the popular monthly journal The Cornfield. On the back of Marx's letter of agreement, Potapenko wrote to Chekhov: I told him I thought Chekhov needed to get away to some blissful country but is prevented by worries about family business… Anton, dear boy, go away somewhere to clear skies, to Italy, to Egypt, to Australia, does it matter? It's vital, for I notice a weariness in you… Forgive my interfering in your life, but I love you almost as I would a girl. Lika's letters hinted that Anton could still retrieve her: I am completely in love with Potapenko! What can we do, daddy! All the same you will always know how to get rid of me and dump me on somebody else! I am sorry for poor Ignati - he had to go

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CINCIN NA I USSUch a long way (that is, to Melikhovo) and, worse, talk! Awful! Ask him to forgive you for suhiiiittiiu; linn to such a punishment for two days. (22 January) Dear Anton. I have something important to ask you. When I was in Melikhovo I forgot my cross and I feel very bad without it… For God's sake, tell Aniuta to have a look and then you wear it and bring it to me. You must wear it, or else you will lose it or forget it some other way. Come and see me, uncle, and don't forget about me. Your Lika?? In Anton's notes to Lika, on 20 and 21 February, when he, Lika and Potapenko were together in Moscow, a note of regret, even desire creeps in: Lika, give me your little hand [in Russian 'rucbka' also means 'pen']; the one I was given smells of herring. I got up a long time ago, I had coffee at Filippov's. A. Chekhov… Darling Lika, today at 6.30 p.m. I shall leave for Melikhovo. Would you like to come with me? We'd return together to Moscow on Saturday. If you don't want to go to Melikhovo, come to the station. A clay after Anton, Lika came to Melikhovo for five days with Potapenko. In the last days of this strange menage Lika conceived a child by Potapenko.

Masha became resentful. She felt angry at what she believed to be Lika's desertion and Potapenko's betrayal of Anton; at the same time she envied Lika her passionate love life. Masha made the new couple feel awkward. On 25 January Potapenko and Lika left Melikhovo; the next day Anton followed them to Moscow. Anton and Potapenko stayed with Suvorin in the same apartment. On 27 January, Potapenko left Moscow for Petersburg and Paris, where his second wife was waiting. He made Masha a present of English watercolour paints and a disquisition on how women artists might eventually rival men. Masha was icy. On Tuesday 1 March 1894 Lika appealed to her: Dear Masha. Take pity on me and come for God's sake to say goodbye for ever to an unfortunate woman like me. On Saturday evening I am leaving, first for home, and from there straight to Paris. The affair was settled only yesterday… Surely your dressmakers would let you say goodbye to a person whom you used to

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1894

consider a close friend! No, joking apart, I somehow hope you will want to meet me…43 By 15 March 1894 Lika was in Berlin, on her way to join Potapenko in Paris.

Anton decided to leave the frozen north himself. He made enquiries about a sunny hotel room at Gurzuf, near Yalta in the Crimea, to spend a month recuperating in the warmth, while Masha and Pavel coped with ploughing and sowing. In five days of February spent in Moscow, Anton rejoined a minage-a-trois with Tania and Lidia Iavorskaia in the Hotel Louvre. He posed for a photograph in which the two women look adoringly at him, while his attention has been caught by the photographer: the picture became known as The Temptations of St Antony. Iavorskaia's adoration had a price. She wrote on 1 February: On 18 February I have my benefit night in Moscow… I hope you remember the promise you made to write me at least a one-act play. You told me the plot, it is so entertaining that I am still under its spell and have decided, for some reason, that the play will be called Daydreams. i Anton never wrote a word of Daydreams. Tania, instead, wrote for her a one-act comedy called At the Station. She wanted to present Iavorskaia with a framed blotting-pad - the frame to be engraved with autographs from her admirers. Anton refused to inscribe his name on it. Levitan had offered. 'Believe in yourself, I. Levitan', and Anton would not join his old friend, even on a piece of silver.

In February 1894 the managers of the Hotel Louvre and Madrid decided that the comings and goings through the 'Pyrenees' brought the hotels more notoriety than profit: Tania and Iavorskaia were asked to leave. By April they were living as lovers in the Vesuvius Hotel in Naples.

On 2 March, after seeing Potapenko off to Petersburg, Anton left for the Crimea. He steamed past Melikhovo without stopping at Lopasnia station.

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Lika Disparue ô Ariane, ma soeur, de quel amour blessee Vous mourutes aux bords ou vous futes laissee! Racine, Phedre The spirit in which Albertine had left was doubtless like that of peoples who use a demonstration of their armed strength to further the work of their diplomacy. Proust, Albertine disparue

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Ô

Abishag cherishes David March-June 1894 IN MARCH 1894 the Chekhov squadron scattered south and west from Moscow and Melikhovo. On the 4th Anton came ashore at Yalta, storm-tossed but not seasick. Instead of the tiny resort of Gurzuf, he chose Yalta. Settled in a hotel, he had a telegram from Tania and Iiivorskaia in Warsaw. Masha wrote on 13 March: 'I was sad to see I «ika off and I miss her very badly. Be well and don't cough… Mother asks, should she slaughter the bigger pig for Easter?' Lika Mizinova and her 'chaperone' Varia Eberle joined Potapenko in Paris on 16 March: Lika wrote to Anton from Berlin on the 15th: I shall die soon and shan't see anything more. Darling, write for old time's sake and don't forget that you gave me your word of honour to come to Paris in June. I shall wait for you and if you write, shall come and meet you. You can count on accommodation, meals and all comforts from me: only the travel will cost you anything. Well, till we meet, hurry, till we meet, definitely in Paris. Don't forget the woman you rejected, [wavy line] L. Mizinova.1 Anton was in no hurry even to reply. He merely told his French translator (while ordering 100 bottles of best Bordeaux) to look up Potapenko and 'a plump blonde Mile Mizinova' in Paris. Anton slept till eleven in the morning, and in the evenings chatted to the intellectuals who, hoping for an early spring, were in Yalta for the good of their lungs. They offered no stimulation, although Miroliubov, an opera singer,2 and an actress adopted Anton and took him over the mountains. Through Miroliubov Chekhov met a medical colleague, I)r Sredin, as consumptive as his patients. Only a few officials fostered culture in Yalta, a seaside town too small to support more than a bookshop, amateur theatricals and a three-form girl's grammar school. Lika had jumped from one menage-a-trois into another. Potapenko's

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wife was waiting in Paris. Lika told 'Ciranny' that she was settled in a pleasant house with a life on Rue I lamelin, seeking a singing teacher. To Masha she was frank: 'Ignati said that he found his spouse very ill and thinks that she has consumption, but I think that she is faking again.'3

Lidia Iavorskaia was happier in her new love life, but in Milan she received a letter which her spurned lover, a customs official, had written to her father, Chief of Police Hiibbenett. It ran: Your daughter has left for Italy with Madame Shchepkina-Kupernik, this departure naturally forces me to burn my boats and I shall not direct a single word of reproach at your daughter. Her liaison with Shchepkina-Kupernik has become a vile legend in Moscow, and no wonder… nobody can pass undefiled by contact with her.4 On 23 March Lidia scrawled a letter to Anton, asking him to protect Tania's name. She was proud to be loved by Tania and wanted Anton to use his connections in Petersburg to silence her former lover in the Customs department.

Far from friends, Anton could write again. He was preoccupied with his shortest mature story, 'The Student' - a work which he himself singled out for its concise perfection, as Beethoven did his Eighth Symphony. A student priest crossing a valley before Easter awkwardly retells the betrayal of Christ to two peasant widows, mother and daughter. The women cry, and he intuits a connection between their misery, the tragedy around Christ, the human condition and history. The priest once again represents the creative writer, communicating a force he cannot comprehend to others even more helpless. Poetic economy and subtle symbolic detail distinguish 'The Student'. This is 'late Chekhov', where the protagonist's and the author's eyes become one, and where all is evoked, not stated. Solitude had sprung an inner lock. His friends and mistresses scattered, Anton found an affinity in his fictional characters, and his prose develops an intimate warmth. Anton had shaken off ideological constraints, too. He told Suvorin: Perhaps because I've stopped smoking, Tolstoy's morality has stopped moving me, in the depth of my soul I am hostile to it, and that of course is unjust. Peasant blood flows in me, and you can't astound me with peasant virtues. Since I was a child I have believed

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in progress and could not do otherwise, since the difference between the time when I was thrashed and the times when thrashing stopped has been enormous. I love clever people, sensitivity, politeness, wit… I was affected not by the basic propositions, which were known earlier, but the Tolstoyan way of expressing oneself, the didacticism and probably a sort of hypnotism. Now something in me protests; calculation and justice tell me that electricity and steam show more love for humanity than chastity and vegetarianism. Sleeping better (and alone), not smoking, drinking little, Anton was bored in Yalta. His heart showed only physical symptoms, arrhythmia. On 27 March 1894 he wrote curtly to Lika: he was not coming to Paris, he told her, and Potapenko should buy her a ticket home. Irony drowns affection: Dear Lika, when you are a big singer and have a good salary, give me alms: make me your husband and feed me at your expense, so that I can be idle. But if you are dying, then let Varia Eberle, whom as you know I love, do it. We hear the first hints of The Seagull, to which Lika was to contribute so much. As Trigorin tells Nina in the play, Anton tells Lika: Not for a minute am I free of the thought that I must, am obliged to write. Write, write and write.' To write and write was not easy in a hotel room: visitors were importunate. One even removed the manuscript of The Island of Sakhalin to read at leisure.

Money was running out. Yalta was dearer than Nice. Anton sold his moulting fox-fur coat, and told Masha to send horses to Lopasnia station for the 10, 12 and 15 April. He arrived a week earlier, to a Melikhovo baking in the sunshine that had eluded the Crimea.

In Anton's absence, Pavel had bustled. He supervised confession, communion, christenings and shrivings among the servants, had the priest for dinner and tea, visited the nearby churches and the monastery. Pavel travelled to Moscow to see his sons, Vania and Misha, his nephews Aliosha Dolzhenko and Misha Chokhov, and the clerks at (lavrilov's warehouse. He visited the public baths, bought 'very broad' underpants and attended all the church services he could.

Anton was pleased to find Melikhovo free of guests, but, like Masha, he was upset by Lika's fate. When Anton had encouraged, and Masha

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condoned, Lika's flight with Potapenko, they had not known that Potapenko's second wife Maria was in Paris. Lika's next letter (3/15 April) said that she was crying, coughing blood, drinking creosote and cod liver oil; her doctor was ordering her to Switzerland. She hated her lodgings, full of foreign girls who wanted to be singers. Potapenko was the cause of her misery: I virtually don't see Potapenko, there's no question of coming to Russia with him. Sometimes he comes for half an hour in the morning and, presumably, without his wife knowing. Every day she stages scenes with hysterics and tears every half hour. He attributes it all to her illnesses but I think that it's all pretence and acting! They are off to Italy soon… To everyone here I am a married lady -Varia has shown your picture to the landlady as that of my husband! The landlady told her to show her, so she had to. So write to me as Mme not Mile and don't be angry. Anton wrote and told Potapenko he was a pig. Potapenko replied disarmingly on 10 May: What fantasies, dear Antonio, make you think that I am a pig? Suffice it to admit that I am a human being to expect greater piggery than from the very lowest pig…' Masha hit out harder. She was going to slaughter Ignasha, the lamb that they had named after Potapenko. Potapenko was abject to Masha in June: 'Dear Masha… I am an all-round scoundrel and what's more a bastard and a cad. People like that are either ostracized or forgiven everything. I advise you to choose the latter. Oh, if only you knew, Masha.'6

Anton's disbanded squadron was regrouping in Paris. Iavorskaia and Tania (in a menage-a-trois with the theatre-owner Korsh) introduced themselves to Alexandre Dumas fils and Edmond Rostand. Tania would translate them, Korsh stage them, and Iavorskaia act their heroines. Levitan, too, was in Paris. Nevertheless, Lika, Tania and Iavorskaia all acclaimed Anton as the man they loved. From Naples on 11 April Tania flirted in verse and prose: 'You have been with him, stay with us, and when you return to the south of our homeland, tell him about us… all the wondrous sounds that sing in our hearts, all the kisses that burn on our lips we shall save for the land of snows.' That's what I told the wind… from

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the Girl in Violet [Tania]. The Girl in Green [Iavorskaia] kisses you (so do I, I swear).7 The friendship that Anton wanted to rebuild was Suvorin's, and he invited him after Easter to tour the Volga and the Dnepr together. Anton was seeking health and peace, but on Easter Sunday, 17 April, he collapsed. Four days later he described the attack to Suvorin: For a minute I thought I was dying: I was walking with my neighbour Prince Shakhovskoi down the avenue, talking - suddenly something tore in my chest, a feeling of warmth and stifling, a buzz in my ears, I remembered that I'd had irregular heart beats for some time -significant, I think; I quickly moved to the terrace and the guests, with one thought: it's embarrassing to drop dead in front of strangers. A glass of water miraculously restored him.

At about that time Anton had two ideas to improve his life. He needed a proper mail service: driving six miles to Lopasnia, he could collect only ordinary letters; parcels and registered letters were delivered after a delay from Serpukhov. Guests made unreliable postmen: Anton's letters often lay forgotten in their pockets. Anton made himself an ally of Blagoveshchensky, the mail clerk at Lopasnia station, and lobbied for a full post office. He reactivated his friendship with Bilibin, the secretary of Fragments, whose 'real job' was in the Postal Service. Bilibin was not fooled - he wrote to Gruzinsky, 'had a letter from Chekhov, part pleasantries, part business'8 - but set the machine in motion. Chekhov's second idea, conceived the previous autumn, was to build in the garden a two-storey cottage in Brothers Grimm style for male guests (female guests would stay in the main house). Anton's first architectural venture was entrusted to Masha, now that school was closed for the summer, as subcontractor. She ordered timber and hired carpenters. Pavel quarrelled with the workmen; he was kept off site. His diary for 11 May reads: 'Mid Pentecost. 240 in the shade. A procession with crosses around the village. The Tower of Babel on four legs is being built in the garden.'

Anton that May was comforted by Aleksandra Liosova, the girl who had been Vania's fiancee. Seven months ago, on 30 September 1893 Liosova, for the first time since Vania jilted her, had come with Anton

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and Lika Mizinova from Moscow. Now she wanted books for the factory school where she taught: The daughter of Israel comes to you with a request… You haven't responded to my ardent feelings with feelings, so oblige me. I should very much like to see you, but fate is cruel. What are you doing, abandoned by the cruel Lika?… But Russian women are not like us Israelites. You advised me to call my dog Vomit (it is a lady), but you forgot that I am an old maid and love everything sentimental… Be well and try to find her, but a woman less beautiful and cruel than Lika.9 Ten days later, 23 May 1894, Liosova was ardent: Accept ten passionate kisses from me. But to feel their full ardour, first heat your iron as hot as you can and give it 10 French kisses. But I'm afraid the iron won't be hot enough! It's just as well the weather is bad or I'd burn up, a bit of rain puts out a fire… 'No, I cannot stop loving you.' But meeting you is impossible… Liosova hoped in a year's time to enter a nunnery 100 miles away; she harped on Lika's fate. Melikhovo frightened her, but her affection was fired by contact. In autumn 1894 Liosova renounced Anton (but not for a nunnery): Do you know, I am now completely happy?… I want nothing more from life. Tell me something about Lika - she interests me… I humbly ask pardon for getting fat and having vulgar red cheeks. By the time we meet I shall try to dry out. Much-respected King David, accept the fiery kiss of your Abishag, as long as you don't have a cold. Anton was little bothered by women. The pianist Aleksandra Pokhleb-ina appeared just once in Melikhovo, free of infatuation. Olga Kunda-sova visited on 5 May, attending with Anton a doctors' conference at Meshcherskoe. She then vanished until the end of the year. Absent women played a more important role in Anton's fiction than in his life. 'Three Years', at first a novel which poured all summer 1894 from his notebooks, incorporates in its two main heroines phrases and traits of both Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizinova: the hero, torn between intelligence that does not arouse and beauty which does not satisfy, embodies Anton's own dilemma. Chekhov kept at bay the unhappiness of others. His Petersburg

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editor Tikhonov had been dismissed from The North and was destitute. Kumanin of The Performing Artist was facing both his own demise and his journal's. Anton was unmoved. His brothers, at least, were living peaceably. Easter brought from Moscow Vania and Sonia, and from Uglich Misha. Pavel had bought the replica of Christ's shroud he wanted. Aleksandr had rented a dacha and no longer perturbed Anton with talk of settling nearby: he brought his two elder sons and left them for a few days at Melikhovo. Only Aleksandr Ivanenko, the Melikhovo court fool, came too often, stayed too long and talked too much.

On 1 June 1894, the day he left, Ivanenko completed his best composition, An Inventory ofChekhov's Estate in the Village of Melikhovo: Carts, 2; Light droshky, 1; Charabancs 1; Passenger sledges, 2; Flat tops, 1; Broken low sledges 1; Bee-hive carts 1; Wickwork cabs for sledges, 2; Wheels for flat-tops, 17; Riding yokes, 4; ordinary yokes, 4; Swingle-trees 3; Sledge shafts, 2; Cart shafts 3 pairs;… Axes 3; Chisels, 1;… Watering cans, 6; Spouts, 7;… Horses: Kirgiz, aged 8, Has overtaken the mail train 100 times and thrown its owner just as often. Has won top prize; Boy, aged 5, A trained horse, dances very elegandy when harnessed up; Anna, aged 98, too old to be fertile, but shows promise every year; bites drivers; Cossack Girl, aged 10, infertile, can't stand bits, has to be harnessed with a bit of rope or gallops off the road; Head-over-Heels, aged 7, calm and patient.10 Ivanenko listed five cows, three bullocks, three sheep, a sow and two piglets, three yard dogs. The inventory continues: Dachshunds: Quinine, distinguished by immobility and stoutness (idle and irritable); Brom, distinguished by liveliness and hatred of Whitebrow (a yard dog), noble and sincere. Pigeons: Brown, pedigree, crested, 1 pair; White with black spots (pedigree) 1 pair. Poultry: Old ducks, 4; Drakes, 1; Ducklings, 70; Old hens, 30; Chicks, 50 Servants: Mariushka, widow of indeterminate age, excellent cook and lover of livestock, cows, bullocks, hens, chicks etc.; Katerina, the cow girl; Efim, Katerina's son; Aniuta, chambermaid, spontaneous nature, aged 16. Loves laughing and dances splendidly (suffers, so Mariushka says, from an 'innard' disease); Mashutka, Mariushka's under-cook, covered in freckles, aged 16. Loves bright colours. The

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workman Roman, has shown punctuality and energy, is polite. Answers briefly: 'yes, sir; no sir'. I las served in the army, no medals. Parents: Pavel Egorovich Chekhov and his spouse Evgenia Iakovlevna Chekhova most happy of mortals! 42 years in lawful wedlock (Hurrah!) Children: Anton, lawful owner of Melikhovo kingdom, of the 2nd plot, Sazoni-kha woods, of Struzhkino, King of the Medes etc. etc. Also writer and doctor. Is about to write a tale The Man with the Big Arse. Masha, kind, clever, elegant, beautiful, gracious, short-tempered and forgiving, strict but just. Loves sweets and perfume, a good book, good clever people. Not amorous (has been in love only 1700 times). Avoids handsome young men (soon off to Luka…). Recommends to all her friends the theory 'To hell with it.' A remarkable woman about the house: kitchen gardener, flower grower etc…

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Potapenko the Bounder July-August 1894 IVANENKO SAW MELIKHOVO AS EDEN. He left it for what he called a tomb: his tyrannical father was paralysed, his mother crippled, his brother dead, he himself had ÒÂ of the throat and now would run a farm that even hard work could not make viable. 'I'll have to live like a humorous badger,' he wrote despondently." Anton's Melikhovo seemed a fairy-tale realm for a man who had come to Moscow fifteen years before to live in two crowded basement rooms.

Shcheglov's diary for 8 July 1894 reads: 'Chekhov on his estate. He is entitled, but how enviably happy his life has turned out."2 Masha, now that Misha was in distant Uglich, ran the house and estate. Pavel paid tribute to her achievements in the wet summer of 1894: 'On the farm Masha is invaluable for field work, her arrangements are very remarkably clever and calm. Glory to God, she puts any man to shame. Anton reveres her. We're just amazed by her intelligence and order."3

Anton found a week or two sufficient in his kingdom. Incessant rain spoilt the clover that twenty-five peasants had mown. Only uninvited guests came: not Schechtel, Shcheglov, or Suvorin. Misha and Vania, when the tax office and the school released them, gave Anton no pleasure. Vania could not spend the summer with his pregnant wife: he felt despised by her parents, with whom she was staying, but he missed her and found Melikhovo dreary.

Anton tried to lure Shcheglov: 'We are making hay, the perfidious haymaking. The smell of hay makes me drunk and giddy, so that I only have to sit on the stack for an hour or two to imagine I am in the embraces of a naked woman.' The embraces would remain imaginary. Lika was, despite Anton's advice and Potapenko's neglect, not coming home. First she invited her mother, who loathed Potapenko,14 to Paris, then she told Granny loganson that she was moving to Switzerland for the summer.15

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In mid June 1894 Anton was in Moscow, avoiding his brother Aleksandr and his two nephews in Melikhovo. In Moscow Anton met Suvorin for the first time since February. Suvorin and the Dauphin had come to Moscow to sack the manager of their stationery shop. Anton and Suvorin passed three days and nights together, and agreed to travel. They talked frankly. Suvorin told Sazonova: Chekhov is philosophizing as usual, he's very pleasant, as usual, but I don't think he's well. I said to him, 'Why don't you let a doctor take a look at you?' - 'It makes no difference, I have five to ten years left to live, whether I consult a doctor or not."6 Anton longed to travel, and as far from relatives as he could. Deserted in France, Lika hoped he might keep his promise and come. She wrote to Anton on 14 July a letter which he did not receive until autumn: Your pictures are placed all round my room and every day I address them with some warm words which I still haven't forgotten. Predominantly they begin with the letter S. [swine, sod]. I don't have the custom of hanging my friends' pictures where you put them… I'd give 10 years of my life (and I'm thirty [she was 24]) to find myself in Melikhovo. Just for a day. But there's no chance of coming before winter. Oh what a swine you are not to come and see us. But above all for not stopping me from going to Paris… I should like to have a half-hour chat with you! I mink in half an hour you could put some sense into me. Your girl friends Tania and Iavorskaia have finally left Paris. Varia and I are very glad, although in general we kept them away. They were boasting about a letter you wrote them and of course I couldn't resist the pleasure of compromising you and I told them you write to me every day! So there! Everyone has forgotten me. My last admirer Potapenko has also cunningly deceived me and is running off to Russia. But what a b**** his wife is! Just before Anton received this letter, Ignati Potapenko turned up at Melikhovo: the carpenters had just finished the guest cottage. Anton was, according to Vania's letter to his wife that day, 'ill, horribly depressed'. On Sunday 17 July Potapenko put his side of the story. He left for Moscow the next day. Masha was indignant, but Anton indulgent. Potapenko told neither that Lika was pregnant. Potapenko was now a source of strife between brother and sister:

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when Anton went to Moscow on 22 July, ostensibly to see Suvorin off to Feodosia, he hid from Masha that he had slept in the same flat as Potapenko. Only in September did Misha let their sister know: 'Now it's over, I can confess to an involuntary lie: I did meet Anton and Potapenko in Moscow and my lie was due to the need to hide their secret.' Anton and Potapenko spent five days with 'Grand-dad Mikhail Sablin'17, an eminence grise in the lives of Lika, Potapenko and the Chekhov brothers. Sablin told Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik that Potapenko and Anton were staying with him; the news leaked to Lika. Anton said he was in Moscow to see The Island of Sakhalin through the press. In fact, doubting that Suvorin would ever set off for Italy, Anton was planning a journey with Potapenko. He was desperate to travel.

St George, instead of rescuing the maiden (not having received her last letter), was off with the dragon. Anton returned to Melikhovo for six days and on 2 August left with Potapenko for the Volga. Retracing Anton's route to Siberia, they took a boat from Iaroslavl to Nizhni, to sail down the Volga to Tsaritsyn [Volgograd], and thence to Taganrog. A fortnight later Anton summed up an idiotic trip to Suvorin: In Nizhni we were met by Sergeenko, Lev Tolstoy's friend [and Potapenko's]. The heat, the dry wind, the noise of the fair and Ser-geenko's chat suddenly stifled, bored and sickened me, I picked up my suitcase and fled in disgrace… to the station. Potapenko followed. We took the train back to Moscow. But it was embarrassing to return empty-handed, so we decided to go anywhere, Lapland if need be. If it weren't for his wife [the first Mrs Potapenko], our choice would have been Feodosia, but - alas! in Feodosia we have the wife. We thought, we talked, we counted our money and we went to the Psiol. On their way to the Lintvariovs, Anton and Potapenko stopped off at Lopasnia for letters. They went on to Sumy without contacting anyone at Melikhovo. On 14 August they brought Natalia Lintvariova home with them. Potapenko then vanished to Petersburg, where he sorted out his own and Anton's finances with Suvorin, found himself a typist, and plunged into the literary cesspit.

Anton's family now demanded his care. On 9 August a son, Volodia, was born to Vania and Sonia: after a harrowing birth the baby was well, but Sonia was ill. Uncle Mitrofan, at fifty-eight, was dying. In

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l.IKA UISPARUE July Eton's pretext for going to Taganrog had been to examine Uncle Mitrofan, debilitated by three years of illness. Fleeing Sergeenko, Anton had also abandoned Mitrofan. At Melikhovo lay a letter that Mitrofan had dictated to his daughters, addressed to Pavel, asking why Anton had not come: Our good Taganrog clergy in all the churches are offering ardent prayers for me in my sickness. My pain is in the left side, in the stomach, sometimes in the head, and my legs are painfully swollen, so that without others' help I cannot cross the room, I cannot eat, I have no appetite; my left side stops me sleeping, I sit on the bed almost all night, dozing… When you receive the news of my departure to eternity, would you, the only relative in all our family who has loved and considers it a duty to think of one's kin, for the rest of your life have offertories said for me. Christian faith sustained Mitrofan for a month. Anton set off for Taganrog, and stayed not with his uncle but in the best hotel. When Anton appeared at the sickbed, Mitrofan wept with joy and declared he 'was experiencing unearthly feelings'. Anton spent a week, but could not prescribe anything other than the heart stimulants which the Taganrog doctors were giving. Anton declared that he could have helped if he had been consulted earlier. He resolutely refused to discuss his own illness, let alone take measures to treat it.18 Telling Leikin that the best treatment for eyes was nothing, Anna Suvorina that the boldest treatment for a bad throat was to leave it alone, and advising the singer Miroliubov that to ensure good health one should lie in bed covered from head to toes with a blanket and rub one's body with tincture of blackcurrant buds, Anton was formulating the facetious approach of Dr Dorn in The Seagull. All that he did for his uncle's family was to send their elder daughter, the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra, to Moscow to train as couturier. Anton then called on the mayor of Taganrog, and asked him to offer Aleksandra a post of sewing teacher. On the eve of Anton's departure The Taganrog Herald annoyed him: Mr Chekhov has been called as a doctor to his seriously ill relative Mitrofan Chekhov, elder of St Michael church. From here the talented writer is setting off to the Crimea, where he has been summoned by Mr Suvorin who has fallen ill and is now living on his estate in Feodosia.

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Chekhov went to the Taganrog Herald office, where an old school friend, Mikhail Psalti, worked, to protest that he was not Suvorin's doctor. He did not call at Taganrog post office, where Lika's letter of 14 July (addressed to Potapenko, as a man more likely to collect his mail) had lain all August. Then Anton boarded the train for a two-day journey to Feodosia (the direct sea route was too rough).

Anton stayed with Suvorin for four days. It was cold in Feodosia: Suvorin had built a magnificent villa with no stoves. The two men set off, via Yalta and Odessa, to western Europe. At Yalta, where plaster copies of Chekhov's bust were on sale, they dined in the park cafe. Elena Shavrova, there on her honeymoon, saw them, but was too shaken to speak to Anton.

Deserted among strangers in Switzerland, Lika longed to be rescued. The family in Melikhovo felt deserted, too. Evgenia was worried about her newborn grandson, and Pavel was distressed by Mitrofan. Masha bore the full weight of running a house in disarray. She complained to Misha: This is the third week we have been rebuilding the stoves, relaying the floors… The stove makers get in the carpenters' way, the carpenters in the painters' and Papa gets in everybody's way… Roman asks for two weeks' leave and he is my only help… Quinine and Brom are howling, they have nowhere to sleep… I'm at the end of my tether, Misha, it really is a terrible amount for one woman to cope with!… I'm also afraid that Anton will be displeased. Never have I felt so much like leaving, throwing up everything, never to come back!'9 Uncle Mitrofan sank into death; his eldest son Georgi gave him water from a teaspoon, while Aunt Liudmila, heavily sedated, wept inconsol-ably. On 9 August, telegrams reached Melikhovo and Yalta: 'God's will our dear parent died eighth evening. Chekhovs.' Pavel grieved. He wrote to Anton, Vania, Aleksandr and Misha, 'how kind Mitrofan was to everybody… Now I have no friend.'20 (Nobody, however, wrote to Mitrofan's and Pavel's sister Aleksandra in Boguchar, nor to any of her children.) Pavel was too busy with building at Melikhovo to attend the funeral in Taganrog. Mitrofan's requiem, one of Taganrog's most memorable services, was conducted by Father Pokrovsky and four junior priests. Pavel was sent a handwritten copy of the

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],IKA IJ I.SPA RUE forty-minute speech that one of the Church Brethren made as Mitro-fan was buried within the church precinct. It began: Before the grave-digger's spade has touched the coffin lid to conceal it in the bowels of the earth, so fateful for so many, by the coffin I hasten with a final farewell word for the man who lies within. You have left us, dear Mitrofan, and left us for ever!…21

FORTY-FIVE Ô

The Birth of Christina September-November 1894 ANTON'S SECOND TOUR of Europe with Suvorin was secret. His family was led to believe he was returning after a short recuperation in Feodosia, but Anton was as naive as Potapenko in hiding his movements. When he and Suvorin reached Odessa on 13 September and left the next day for Vienna, the newspapers proclaimed their arrival and departure. Odessa's actors lamented that they would be staging Ivanov without the author. The Odessa authorities refused Anton a foreign passport. Suvorin had to throw his full weight at General Zelenoi, Odessa's mayor: in the night Zelenoi sent two men to break open the passport office and bring Chekhov's documents. From Odessa Anton sent consolations to Georgi and his family; he also warned Masha not to expect him home until October (November, he told Mikhail Psalti at The Taganrog Herald) and told her how to save asparagus and tulips from autumn frosts. She was to bring a warm hat to the station when he returned.

The two men reached Vienna on 18/30 September. Lika meanwhile, seven months pregnant, languished in Switzerland. She had moved from a guest house in Lucerne, where English tourists stared at her, into lodgings at Veytaux, on Lake Geneva. With Anton's photographs around her room, lonely and afraid, Lika pretended to be a married woman of frail health in an interesting condition. To (iranny she wrote that, despite a chill, she was in paradise. She went to the post office daily. In Vienna Anton bought an inkwell and wrote to Paris: You obstinately refuse to answer my letters, dear Lika, but I am still annoying and pestering you with my letters… I remember Potapenko telling me you and Varia Eberle would be in Switzerland. If so, write to me where in Switzerland I might find you… I beg you, don't tell anyone in Russia that I am abroad. I left secretly, like

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a thief, and Masha dunks I am in b'eodosia. If they find out I'm abroad, they will be hurt, lor they have long been fed up with my frequent journeys.

I'm not very well. I have an almost continuous cough. I seem to have lost my health as I lost you. Lika did not know where Anton was: two days later she sent a plea to Melikhovo: Not a trace of the old Lika is left and I think, and I can't refrain from saying so, it is all your fault! Anyway, that's fate, it seems! I'll say one thing, I have lived through moments I thought I would never live through! I am alone! There is not a soul around me to tell all that I am going through! God forbid anyone should experience anything like this! All this is vague, but I think it will all be clear to you\ You are supposed to be a psychologist! Why I am writing all this to you, I don't know! All I know is that I am writing to nobody but you! And therefore don't show this letter even to Masha and say nothing! I am in despair: there is no ground beneath one's feet and one feels somewhere, I don't know, somewhere very nasty! I don't know if you will sympathize with me! Since you're a balanced, calm and rational person! Your whole life is for others and you don't seem to want a personal life of your own! Write to me, darling, soon!… Your promises to come are all rubbish! You will never move. Now Suvorin and Anton were in Abbazia, then a fashionable Adriatic resort under Austrian rule. It rained constantly and, Anton told Natalia Lintvariova: 'There are crowds of Yids here; they speak Russian.' To Anton, the only friendly Russian face was that of a wet nurse Anton had once treated. Abbazia reminded Anton of Maupassant's Mont-Oriol: the journey revived Maupassant's influence in Chekhov's work. On 22 September/4 October he and Suvorin fled to Venice. Lika had replied to Anton, but her letter lay in Abbazia post office, before trailing Anton across Italy: I warn you, be amazed by nothing! If you don't fear being disillusioned by your old Lika, then come! There's no trace of her left! Yes, just six montfrs have turned my life over, not leaving, as they say, a stone standing! Though I don't tiiink you'll throw the first stone at me! I believe you've always been indifferent to people, their failings and weaknesses! Even if you don't come (very likely, given your laziness), then keep everything I write a secret between us,

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uncle! You are not to tell anybody anything, even Masha!… Are you alone! Or with Suvorin? He is the last person to be told about my existence [Suvorin was a notorious gossip]… Potapenko wrote that he might come to Montreux between 25-30 September. The letter reached Chekhov in Nice two weeks late. Anton told Masha, 'Potapenko is a Yid and a swine.' Lika wrote again: 'Darling I'm alone, very unhappy. Come alone and don't talk about me to anybody.'

By now Anton had Lika's last three letters; he could be in no doubt that Lika was pregnant. He needed a new excuse not to come to her rescue. He chose to use Suvorin as a pretext. On 2/14 October 1894, the same day that he denounced Potapenko to Masha, he sent Lika  chilly note: I can't go to Switzerland: I'm with Suvorin who has to go to Paris. I'll spend 5-7 days in Nice, then go to Paris for 3-4 days, then Melikhovo. I'll be at the Grand Hotel in Paris. You had no cause to write about my indifference to people. Don't pine, be cheerful, look after your health. I bow deeply and firmly, firmly shake your hand. Yours A. Chekhov.

Had I got your letter in Abbazia then I'd have gone via Switzerland to Nice to see you, but now it's awkward to drag Suvorin along. Potapenko too let Lika down: from Petersburg he came for forty-eight hours to Moscow, not to Montreux: he wanted to talk Masha Chekhova round.

Avoiding Switzerland and Lika, Anton found Europe less thrilling than in 1891. He bought three silk ties, a tiepin and some glass in Venice, and caught nettle rash. In Milan he watched a dramatization of Crime and Punishment: he felt that Russian actors were pigs compared with the Italians - an opinion which boded ill for the play he was germinating. He visited first the cathedral, then the crematorium. In Genoa, Anton and Suvorin strolled around the cemetery, then left for what Maupassant called 'the flowering cemetery of Europe', the Cote d'Azur. They spent four days in Nice; here Anton worked on 'Three Years', and 'coughed and coughed and coughed'. He felt misanthropic and told Masha to see that she alone met him at the station when he got back. Suvorin, too, was disgrunded. Sazonova noted: 'A letter from Suvorin in Nice. He and Chekhov are fed up with each

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other, they are both roaming from place to place and saying nothing.' Suvorin never forgot a spat with Anton on the Promenade des Anglais. He asked Anton why he no longer wrote for New Times. Anton curtly told him to change the subject, and his 'eyes flashed'.22 On 6/18 October Anton and Suvorin set off for Paris. They left Paris three days later, just before Lika came down to Paris from the Swiss Alps to seek new lodgings and a midwife.

After a day in Berlin, Anton arrived in Moscow on 14 October. Autumn rains had made the journey to Melikhovo hazardous, so he stayed there for five days and read proofs. He thanked Masha for her hard work with a ring and a promise of 25 roubles. He sent a note to the Louvre and Madrid hotel, for Tania and lavorskaia, who, no longer dressed in violet and green, still astounded Moscow's theatregoers. Anton's note, on a blue card, was in their style: 'At last the waves have cast the madman ashore… and he stretched his arms to two white seagulls…' Lidia lavorskaia responded eagerly: Waiting for you is a hot samovar, a glass of vodka, anything you want, and above all, me. Joking apart, please come tomorrow. You will be off to your village and again I shan't see you for ages. And with you I relax from everybody and everything, my friend, my kind, good man. On 19 October nine degrees of frost hardened the mud roads: Anton returned to Melikhovo, where the family had installed new bedroom floors, a well, a flushing lavatory and new stoves, though they could not raise the temperature in me house that freezing autumn above I5°C. Anton was to stay a whole month in Melikhovo, writing and sleeping in the new guest cottage. Pavel, as he put it, 'moved into His Cell, into the Kingdom of Earth';23 Franz Schechtel had presented the family with their most valuable possession, an Art-Nouveau mantelpiece. There was one drawback. Anton wrote twice to Masha, who was teaching in Moscow: Find out in the shops what the best mouse poison is; the bastards have eaten the wallpaper up to four feet from the floor in the drawing room… If you can't find mouse poison, bring 1 or 2 mousetraps. Soon there was little need for Anton or Masha to leave the estate for Moscow. In mourning for Tsar Alexander III, who died on 20

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October, Moscow's schools and theatres closed. Until the first snow came, in any case, travelling over icy ruts was torture. One journey to a patient nearby made Anton's 'innards turn inside out'.

Lika, in Paris, believed that Anton was still in Nice. Her last letter from Veytaux eventually reached Melikhovo: Lika, in the literal sense, very very much wants to see you, despite my fear that if you ever did have a decent opinion of me it will now change when you see me! But all the same, come! I'm sad, darling, infinitely! Masha shared Lika's mood. On 10 October Masha had gone to Moscow for an event so distressing that the ioth became a bad omen for her. On 10 January 1895 she wrote to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik: 'a sad event that happened on this very day three months ago makes my mood quite unsuitable for merriment.'24 We do not know what this sad event was: had Masha renounced yet another man? Unhappy, sleepless, she stayed away from Melikhovo until 4 November. She did not meet Tania or lavorskaia. She was taking cod liver oil and putting a cold compress on her heart. When she came, she brought Ivanenko, because she could not face the train journey alone. To judge by his evasive tact, Anton had an inkling of what was behind her anguish -conceivably, she had been seeing Levitan. Anton told Masha to consult his colleague the neurologist Professor Vasili Shervinsky ('and take 5 roubles just in case'): he would help her sleep.

In Moscow Vania, Sonia and the baby Volodia had become a loving trio, closed to outsiders. Misha was unhappy in Uglich, but hoped that his protectors could transfer him to another tax office. Cousin Aliosha Dolzhenko, free of Gavrilov's warehouse, won Anton's respect. He was now a violinist in an amateur orchestra. Aleksandr in Petersburg, however, was distressed, even though little Misha, Natalia believed, was 'something outstanding'. The more affectionate Natalia's postscripts to Anton, the more Aleksandr disparaged his wife: 'Natalia gives birth almost every day to whole ribbons of some tapeworm.' Aleksandr's unhappiness led to new aberrations. On the night of 12 November 1894 he arrived at Melikhovo with Vania and Ivanenko. The next day a note arrived from Natalia: Dear Anton, I beg you to write and tell me if my husband is with you. This strange man left when I was out. I am worn out. Where

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is he? What's wrong with liiin? Please, dear Anton, don't show him my letter.25 Aleksandr stayed for the celebrations of Tsar Nicolas II's marriage. Anton thanked Natalia wryly 'for letting him come and see me.'

While Aleksandr took refuge at Melikhovo, his wayward behaviour infected the village. A drunken peasant, Epifan Volkov, set fire to the thatched roof of his cottage. Despite Aleksandr's experience with the fire brigade, the hut burnt down, and Volkov was arrested for arson. Otherwise, Anton had an undisturbed November. Only Elena Shav-rova accosted Anton, asking him to return six stories which had vanished in Anton's absence. Anton denied having them and told her to rewrite them from memory. This, said Shavrova sulkily, was untrue and impossible.

Prince Shakhovskoi, ruined by debt, had sold his estate of Vaskino to an engineer, Vladimir Semenkovich. The new neighbour seemed at first just a monstrous reactionary,26 and gave Anton no reason to emerge from solitude. A month in Melikhovo relatively free of visitors, in a cottage apart, gave Anton the conditions he needed to write. When he rose from his desk in the cottage, Anton talked only to his inferiors. Occasionally he helped Masha teach the two maids, Aniuta Chufarova and Mashutka, to read and write. (Anton would soon be a governor and builder of schools.) He was kind to Mikhail Plotov, the schoolteacher in the nearby village of Shchegliatevo, and gave him medical advice, a gun, a gundog and tickets to the theatre. The schoolteacher at the village of Talezh, Aleksei Mikhailov, an even needier figure, was also befriended. Grey at thirty, with four children, Mikhailov spoke only of misery on 24 roubles a month.27

In near solitude, Anton completed the book version of The Island of Sakhalin and the long story he had pondered since 1891, 'Three Years'. Not since his journey to Sakhalin had he been so absent from literary circles. Viktor Bilibin told Gruzinsky: 'It's said in Petersburg that Chekhov has consumption and that the Moscow doctors have given him only a year to live.'28 Russia's minor writers, fed by Suvorin's gossip, buzzed with rumours. Gruzinsky told Ezhov, who told Anton: 'Kindest Anton!… inviting you to my Moscow flat is like sowing semolina and expecting maize to sprout. You are unattainable for us little people. I remain the friend of your youth, now your enemy.'29

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Anton responded with enough warmth to persuade Gruzinsky and Fzhov to visit Melikhovo before the winter was over. To Lika he gave not a word of encouragement or comfort.

Lika was no longer alone in Paris. Potapenko, pocketing more advances, had rushed there. (He told Masha he was in Kherson province by his father's sickbed.) By early November Potapenko was with the second Mrs Potapenko, on Rue des Mathurins, a couple of miles from Lika. On 9/21 November Lika gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Christina. She coped alone for nine days; she and the baby were both ill. A wet nurse was found. Maria Potapenko offered to bring the baby up as her own. Lika spurned the offer as a ploy to recapture Potapenko. Lika told Masha in February 1895 that Maria Potapenko threatened to kill herself and her own children, and Ignati to shoot just himself.30 While Lika was still prostrate, Potapenko wrote to Anton from Paris, unusually legibly: First: keep my location absolutely secret, for that is essential. Secondly, the following: I have got into a tout a fait desperate situation… here I am shivering with cold and other misfortunes. This is hard to understand for a man who is sitting in a warm house in front of a newly constructed fireplace, but an artist must imagine it. The reason I am here is hard to explain, and better left entirely unexplained. But I can neither leave nor pay certain bills… throw off your rural laziness and go to Moscow, take these resources, go to the Credit Lyonnais (or better Junker's) and make a telegraphic transfer in my name to 60 rue des Mathurins, Paris, Potapenko… save me, or else I shall be thinking about suicide. The next day Potapenko took his leave of Lika. They never met again. On receiving Potapenko's letter Anton broke his month's retreat. Over frozen ruts he made his way to Lopasnia and Moscow with Aleksandr and Masha. (Aleksandr was being repatriated to Petersburg and Natalia.) Anton sent no money until he returned to Melikhovo four days later and asked Goltsev at Russian Thought 'in absolute secrecy' to borrow 200 roubles and either send them 'to the prodigal son', or - which would break the secrecy - ask Suvorin to do so. Potapenko would ask Anton for another 200 roubles in March, but their friendship was suspended. He and Lika were both frozen out of Anton's charmed circle. Lidia Iavorskaia now tried to fire Anton's senses.

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0 Charudatta! December 1894-Februaiy 1895 'I FIND OBLIVION in the theatre,' Lidia Iavorskaia wrote to Tania in December 1894.31 The two had brought bold ventures back from Paris and Antwerp and drew Anton into the whirlpool of their notoriety. Iavorskaia created two 'courtesan' roles. She was the laundress whose son becomes Napoleon's marshal in Sardou's 'relentlessly vulgar' Madame Sans-Gene, an apt title for Iavorskaia, and she was the courtesan Vasantasena in the Russian premiere of Poor Charudatta, a Sanskrit drama attributed to King Sudraka. A poor Brahman, Charudatta, helps Vasantasena escape a prince's wiles: Vasantasena is nearly strangled, Charudatta nearly beheaded, but all ends happily. In winter 1894-5, at tne sight of Anton, Iavorskaia, posing as the adoring Vasantasena, would sink to her knees, crying, 'O worthy Charudatta'. Anton acquiesced in the game.

The two women had other projects: Chekhov recommended a perfect vehicle for Iavorskaia, Zola's adulterous and lethal Therese Raquin. For Lidia, Tania had translated Edmond Rostand's parody of Romeo and Juliet, Les Romanesques. She showed the text to Anton at Meli-khovo; he made fun of Rostand's precious style in Tania's rendering. Anton was at ease in her company, though Tania quarrelled with Anton as often as with Iavorskaia. She accused Anton of prejudice against lesbians, then abjectly apologized. (Anton warned Suvorin that she was underhand.)

On 2 December snow fell; visitors raced from the station on sledges. Tania came for a fortnight and charmed all Melikhovo. Anton drove the dachshunds to a frenzy with Tania's sable. When Pavel left for Moscow, he let Tania write up the diary: she parodied it perfectly. Tania went to pray at the monastery with Evgenia; lost in the snow, she was led back by Prince Shakhovskoi's workman. Laughter rang out all day. On 6 December she was bonded with Anton, as no other

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woman. They became godfather and godmother of Prince Shakhovskoi's daughter Natalia: forever Anton was kum (fellow godparent, a significant relationship in Russia) to Tania and she was êèòà to him.

As Anton finished his brooding 'Three Years', Tania's presence cheered him. He wrote notes on the violet or pink paper that Lidia Iavorskaia had brought from Paris. On 18 December, two days after ' I ania left for Moscow, Anton followed her. Until Christmas Eve, his mother's name day, he settled into room No. 1 (handy for the W.C.) in the Great Moscow hotel, where he was the favourite of the staff, and worked.

'Three Years', the 'novel', for which Potapenko had negotiated terms with Adolf Marx, the proprietor of The Cornfield, came out in Russian Thought in January and February 1895. The story was, as Anton said to Shavrova and Suvorin, made not of 'silk', but of 'rough cambric'. 'Three Years' - after Sakhalin, his longest work since 'The Duel' - was disturbingly naturalist and autobiographical in its evocation of the haberdashery firm Laptev and Sons from which the hero breaks free. Laptev, rich and gauche, is not Anton, but his introversion and revulsion against his merchant heritage, his hovering between the 'blue stocking' Rassudina and the idle beauty Iulia, and his reaction to a Rubinstein concert and a Levitan painting make Laptev very Chekhovian. The feckless brother-in-law Panaurov reminds one of Potapenko. Olga Kundasova and Lika also infuse the story. 'Three Years' is a languid work: Laptev breaks his emotional and class ties slowly. The story seems the prelude to a long Bildungsroman. Critics ignored its poetry, while friends were shocked at the exploitation of Olga Kundasova's love for Chekhov. Worse autobiographical frankness was to come.

In The Russian Gazette Chekhov published uplifting Christmas reading, 'The Senior Gardener's Story'. Anton had discussed the death penalty in Sakhalin and talked about it when he stayed in the Crimea. In this story the gardener tells of a judge who cannot sentence the murderer of the town's doctor, for his faith in humanity makes such a murder unbelievable. The censor cut Chekhov's moral: Believing in God is easy. Inquisitors, Biron and Arakcheev [the Russian empire's cruellest ministers} believed in Him. No, you believe in man! That faith is possible only for the few who understand and feel Christ.

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1.1ÊË D1IPARUE Christmas was too crowded for comfort at Melikhovo: Dr Kurkin slept in Anton's bedroom, Vania in his study. Anton skulked in Masha's room. After Christmas Anton went to a Yuletide party in the 'violent' ward of the Meshcherskoe hospital and brought Olga Kundasova back with him to Melikhovo. The following night Pavel groaned all night and in the morning announced that he had just seen Beelzebub. New Year's eve was muted. Pavel's diary reads: 'Masha returned from Sumy. There were no visitors. We didn't see in the New Year, we went to bed at 10 after supper. Masha got the lucky penny.'

On the first day of 1895, as the peasants wished the family a happy New Year and received the traditional gallon of vodka, Anton considered his health. He told his cousin Georgi that his cough was so bad he might spend twelve months in Taganrog: could he buy the seaside mansion belonging to Ippolit Tchaikovsky? The next day Anton received a summons: By their majesties' command, issued in Moscow 1 January 1895, Literary General and Knight of the Orders of the Sacred Names of Tatiana and Lidia the First and Private of our Personal Escorts Anton Chekhov son of Pavel is allowed until 3 February to rest in all cities of the Empire and Abroad, as long as he sends two deputies and appears at the set time indicated to carry out double duties.32 On 2 January, while the Chekhovs slept, one of their majesties came. Tania recalled: On my way to Melikhovo I dropped in on Levitan who had promised to show me some sketches… The Levitan that met me in his velvet blouse looked like a Velasquez portrait; I was laden with shopping as always when I travelled to Melikhovo. When Levitan realized where I was going he began, as was his habit, uttering lengthy sighs, saying how unhappy he was about their stupid quarrel and how much he wanted to go mere as he had used to. 'What's stopping you?' I said. After a slight pause, when they arrived, Anton shook Levitan's hand. They talked as if three years' silence had never intervened. The next morning, while Anton slept, Roman drove Levitan to the station. Anton found only a note at breakfast: Tm sorry I shan't see you today. Will you drop in to see me? I am ineffably happy to be here at the

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Chekhovs' again. I have come back to what was precious and really has never stopped being precious.' Tania and lavorskaia could now see two ardent courtiers together. On 4 January Anton went to the Great Moscow hotel for over two weeks. Evgenia came too: she was off to Petersburg, to see Natalia for the first time since Kolia's death. The longing to see her first legitimate grandchild had overcome her distaste for her daughter-in-law.

Anton told Suvorin that he was in Moscow: he would not say why he had neither written nor come. He asked on Tania's and Iavorskaia's behalf if Renan's UAbbesse de Jouarre or Ibsen's Little Eyolf could pass the censor. In another letter to Suvorin he asserted that lavorskaia was 'a very nice woman'. He celebrated Tatiana's day and his name day. He watched Lidia act Madame Sans-Gene at Korsh's theatre. Vasantasena gave Charudatta a rug and more: Come immediately, Antosha! We thirst to see you and adore you. That is me writing for lavorskaia, I just love you. Yours Tania. I am awfully sad parting with you, as if the best part of my heart is being torn out… wrap yourself up in this Tartan rug, it will warm you like my hot kisses… Don't forget the woman who loves only you. Your Vasantasena… I'm lonely without you… I'm in despair. Come, darling. And there's no salad. Order some. I kiss you hard, Lidia. Anton loved the luxury around lavorskaia. He wrote to Suvorin that he needed to earn 20,000 roubles a year 'since I now can't sleep with a woman unless she wears a silk petticoat.' In December 1894 Lika offered a more austere affection from Paris: I think I'd give half my life to find myself in Melikhovo, to sit on your divan, talk to you for 10 minutes, have supper and just pretend that this whole year had not happened… I am singing, learning English, getting old and thin! From January I shall study massage too, so as to have some chance of a future… Soon I shall have consumption, so say all who have seen me. Before the end, if you like, I shall bequeath you my diary, from which you can borrow a lot for a humorous story. After three months' silence Lika and Anton were briefly in touch, but never did either mention Lika's child. It was as if Christina had never been born. On 22 December Lika invited Masha to Paris: 'You vile

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IIKA DI.Si'ARUK girl, you lie when you say you wnnl to sec me! You are now involved with all sorts of trash, so how can you remember me?' Whom she was calling trash was clear from Lika's letter to Anton on 2 January: Well, has Tania settled in Melikhovo and occupied my place on the divan? Is your wedding to Iavorskaia soon? Invite me so that I can stop it by creating a scene in the church… may all heaven's munders fall on you if you don't answer. Your Lika.33 Olga Kundasova became hyperactive. She no longer held any post. Her friends - Drs Kurkin, Iakovenko and Pavlovskaia, Anton, and Suvorin - financed her; they were worried by her 'conspiratorial' journeys around Serpukhov and Moscow, where she engaged biologists and philosophers in debate. She longed to break free of the psychiatric hospital at Meshcherskoe; she blamed Anton for her headaches, fever and 'unimaginable melancholy', and showered him with notes. He tried to placate her, but her retort on 12 January 1895 had all the virulence of the fictional Rassudina in 'Three Years': 'I'd like to congratulate in person a fully-qualified little Don Juan like you. I attach a stamp for the reply. Yours. O. Kundasova.'34 Anton endured her reproaches: more were to come. Kundasova recognized that she was ill - 'dementia primaria to use our terminology. I'm frightened but not desperately so' - but she believed in the prophylactic effects of travel, sleep, food and talk in Melikhovo. Chekhov contacted Dr Kurkin, who wrote to Dr Iakovenko. They agreed not to give Kundasova enough money to go far from Meshcherskoe (where she believed she was a pioneering psychiatrist, not a patient). Dr Kurkin advised Anton 13 January 1895: 'You shouldn't let your "lady friend" out of your sight, for she tends to get entangled in situations from which she cannot disentangle herself.'35

Anton's colleagues coped with Kundasova, but, as though the attentions of Kundasova, Tania, Iavorskaia and Lika were not enough, Anton was seeking for another woman. On 30 December he wrote a jocular letter to Aleksandr with one serious request: to find the address of Anton's admirer, the children's writer Lidia Avilova, in Petersburg and to do so 'in passing, without any talk'. Aleksandr gave Anton Avilova's address and Anton slowly prepared for a journey to Petersburg. He had a pretext: Suvorin required Anton's intervention, for, alone among publishers, he had made himself an object of vituperation

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by refusing to sign a petition to the Tsar for freedom of the press. (The Tsar dismissed the request as 'senseless dreams', the secret police noted the signatories, and Chekhov, as an author printed by radical journals, came under surveillance.) Ostracized by the intelligentsia, Suvorin fell into a depression that even his theatre company, the Literary-Artistic Circle, failed to lift. On 9 January 1895 Sazonova's diary records: Suvorin was complaining of his loneliness, that his newspaper and wealth gave him no happiness, that he had known virtually no personal happiness, that life had passed him by. He was so tense, so upset, that I could sense tears in his voice. At times he simply couldn't speak.36 Anna Suvorina wrote about the same time: Anton, I ask you again to cheer up Aleksei. I'm told you're in Moscow now. Tempt him into coming if only for a few days, while you are there. He is grumbling a lot that you write him only business letters!… Write him something nice and interesting and cheer him up a little. After all he doesn't love or value anybody but you. He is very melancholy and, worse, doesn't sleep at night. He can't work at all.37 Anton responded, twice offering Suvorin the bait of a drive round Moscow's cemeteries. He even offered to introduce him to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, but Suvorin was not to be wooed. Anton went back home for just a week. He inspected the false teeth that Aleksandr had bought Evgenia in Petersburg: she would not use them because they had been made on the 13th of the month. Anton left again on 27 January. He spent four days in Moscow, during which time he visited the sick Grigorovich and saw his childhood love Sasha Seliva-nova, newly widowed, plump, leaving school-teaching for midwifery. On 31 January 1895 he went to Petersburg. Moscow's Grub Street looked on with envy: Shcheglov's diary records: 'Cruel cold, a thin rag of an overcoat, no money and now I have to write a humorous novel!… Really you have to become an egotist like Chekhov to manage to get anything done!!'38 In Petersburg Suvorin gave Anton a copy, printed on fine paper, of the half puritanical, half pornographic novel he had published, At the End of the Century: Love, and inscribed it 'from the kind and virtuous author'. Suvorin introduced Anton to Sazonova, the lady writer and diarist to whom he entrusted his secrets:

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II Ê ë DIIPARUE Suvorin's two confidants hacked away from each other. Sazonova recorded: 'We silently shook hands, he advised me not to drink Russian wines and went to his room, gathered a company there and then left to see Leikin.' Sazonova found Anton's hostility adamant. Anton had other agendas. He renegotiated his royalties from Suvorin: now Suvorin paid Chekhov 200 roubles monthly. While Anna's beloved Italian tenors sang, Anton wrote letters, read manuscripts and began a new story in the next room. A prodigious year had begun. Visiting Leikin, Anton met his neglected acolytes - the melancholy Kazimir Barantsevich and ever-loyal Gruzinsky. He even met Pota-penko. Lika weighed on Chekhov's mind, and he consulted Suvorin. Again, Suvorin confided in Sazonova, whose diary later records: Chekhov had an affair with the Mizinova girl. He wanted to marry her but it couldn't have been a strong desire because Suvorin talked him out of it [possibly in 1891 D.R.] Then Potapenko seduced the girl and abandoned her. Aleksandr and Natalia now lived soberly; Anton willingly went to dine with them. Natalia, domesticated by motherhood and by cooking courses, was overjoyed when Anton divined his nephew Misha's talented, highly strung nature. In 1895 Lidia Avilova, the sister-in-law of the editor of The Petersburg Newspaper, a woman whose address Chekhov had taken such pains to find, became Anton's most deluded admirer. She asked Chekhov for a critique of her story - which he gave with unusual candour. She then ordered a medallion inscribed with the title of one of Chekhov's books, a page and a line number. This she sent anonymously to Chekhov, who duly found the reference to his story 'Neighbours': 'If you ever need my life, come and take it.' Avilova did not know, as Anton left for Moscow on 16 February 1895, that this medallion would be used as a final touch to Chekhov's new play, the cruellest of modern comedies.

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A Misogynisfs Spring February-May 1895 THE MEDALLION that Lidia Avilova gave Chekhov in February 1895 was an eloquent love token. Anton responded more guardedly than her 'memoirs' imply; he did less for her career than he did for Shav-rova's. Anton did not protest at Burenin's verdict that Avilova was better unpublished. When Avilova in turn tracked him down, Anton had erected a defence against Persons from Porlock. Leikin knew Avilova: in Moscow on his way to Melikhovo, he noted in his diary 9 March 1895: Went to the Strakhov [Avilova's maiden name] library on the Pliush-chikha where L. A. Avilova is staying, and had tea with her. She is grieving, ten days ago she wrote a letter to Chekhov from Moscow inviting him there, but he did not appear or reply, she asked in the offices of Russian Thought if he was now at his estate, and she was told he had left for Taganrog. I informed her tliat I was told in Russian Thought that he was at his estate, expecting me and I was off to see him tomorrow.39 Anton also took care, while in Petersburg, to avoid Shavrova, whose manuscripts he had mislaid. She received not the meeting she craved, but a roasting for maligning doctors in a story about syphilis and the family. The story was in any case unprintable - only medical journals could discuss syphilis. Anton told Shavrova to leave disease to professionals, and write about picnics instead.

In February 1895 Anton sent to a Moscow anthology 'The Spouse', yet another piece about a long-suffering doctor whose life is wrecked by a spendthrift, unfaithful wife.40 Chekhov's recurrent topic in 1895, an idealist thwarted by an amoral woman, stems from private disillusion and from a more general misogynistic undercurrent in Russian literature at that time. Repeatedly toying with, and then rejecting, the

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affections of one woman after another, Anton was not so much searching for his Dulcinea, as reiterating a bitter experience: each liaison seemed an obstacle to creative and personal freedom. Like Tolstoy, Anton felt at heart that Schopenhauer was right to assert that 'only a male intellect befuddled by sexual drive' could worship woman. Schopenhauer was widely known in Russia and the heroine of 'The Spouse' is a Schopenhauerian Weib, as are Chekhov's next heroines, in The Seagull and in the stories 'Ariadna' and 'Anna Round the Neck'. When Anton returned to Melikhovo, he avoided the sirens. Tania had to seek him out at the end of March. Iavorskaia was by March on tour 300 miles away to the east, in Nizhni. The Moscow critics, Anton warned Suvorin, 'had hunted her down like a hare' for her 'parody of a countess' in Giacosa's La dame de Challant. Anton no longer wished to share Iavorskaia with Korsh and Tania, while she could not understand why he was so unresponsive. Feverish with flu and desire, she pleaded in bad free verse: Î Charudatta, worthy of envy!… You don't know how the lively Vasantasena Your southern flower, 'little sun', Suffers here in the theatre galleries Which take 4 roubles a day off her And a hotel room so unlike Alas mat room in me Great Moscow hotel In which you and she Tasted true bliss. My darling… I am in no state at all to write to you in prose about our feelings, so send Tania to me… At Easter Iavorskaia would make her Petersburg debut. She reverted to the formal vy and pleaded the state of the roads as her reason for not coming to Melikhovo. She still begged Anton to come and join her in her Petersburg hotel. By 5 April 1895 Anton had not responded; Iavorskaia cajoled him from Petersburg: Put in a word to defend the unhappy one, Your beautiful Vasantasena, Or Suvorin and the reviewers In savage fury will destroy thy lotus And tear to pieces thy Vasantasena And hurl her wondrous body for the hungry Muscovite

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FEBRUARY-MAY 1895 Reviewers to devour. Î save me, Charudatta!! My darling, Happy Easter, I wish you every bliss, bodily and spiritual! I met Burenin, a venomous man in a mask of amiability. We spoke about you. He asked me if I was in love with Anton Chekhov (you see, darling, it's obvious to everyone? Yes… yes… yes…)… I want to meet Suvorin only through you. Put in a word for me with him. Your word works on him just like the word of a much-loved woman (!) Anton did not respond or put in a word, but gossiped instead, telling Suvorin that Korsh was Iavorskaia's chief lover, but did not forbid her to have affairs. Suvorin saw Madame Sans-Gene and damned Iavorskaia with faint praise. (Both Suvorin's theatre and Chekhov's drama would take up arms against her histrionics.) Offering Iavorskaia up to Suvorin, Anton was angling for a protegee of Suvorin's, the Jewish Liudmila Ozerova, who had had a sensational debut in Hauptmann's mystical and sentimental Hannele's Ascension. In early May Chekhov asked Suvorin where Ozerova would spend the summer: 'Why not invite me to be her doctor?' Only two years later would Ozerova respond to Anton's hints.

None of the Chekhovs had put Lika out of their thoughts. Misha complained to Masha in January that he missed 'educated' girls: 'At least there used to be Lika, but now she is no more.'41 Anton wrote to her for the first time in three months and, apparently, the last for fifteen. He expected her soon and would come to talk; although he was aware of her baby, there was 'nothing to write about, since everything is as it was and there is nothing new'. He asked her to bring gloves and perfume for Masha. Lika now wrote not to Anton, but to Masha, to Granny and to her mother. For Granny she kept up the fiction that she was busy studying singing; she assured her mother 'you are my only and my best friend.' To Masha, in letters of 23 January and 2 February, Lika admitted she was thin - her waist was nineteen inches - she had a French admirer, but could neither sleep nor drink: her one consolation was that she would die soon. She was proud only of her baby, who, the wet nurse said, was the spitting image of Potapenko. She asked if Masha would marry Levitan, now that Kuvshinnikova had left him. She defended her lover: I have had one friend and I hope he will remain a friend for both of us - that is Ignati… I had the idiotic illusion mat I also had a

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friend in Anton, but this turned out to be a stupid fantasy… I regret nothing, I am glad that I have a little creature who is beginning to give me joy… I believe Ignati loves me more than anything in the world, but he is the most wretched man! He has no will power, no character and what's more he has the bad luck to possess a spouse who will stop at nothing. Masha was moved by Lika's sufferings, but she envied her the experience of love and childbirth.

In spring 1895 Lika made a flying visit to Russia, leaving Christina with the wet nurse in France. Granny Ioganson yearned for Lika: her diary for 8 and 14 May exults: Today is my dear dove Lidiushka's birthday. The Lord send her health, happiness and wellbeing for the 26th year of her life… I'm expecting Lidiusha! She has come, I'm godlessly glad to see her - now I shall die easier.42 On 12 May Lika went straight from Moscow to Melikhovo. Only after twenty-four hours, did she go to see Granny in Tver province. On 25 May Anton went to Moscow and stayed with Vania, who reported to his wife: 'Anton spends the night with me but vanishes the whole day on business.' Anton came back to Melikhovo on Sunday 28 May, bringing Lika. She stayed another twenty-four hours, then vanished until September, to the relief of Vania's wife who was jealous of the young bohemian women who frequented Melikhovo.43

That spring only males flocked to Melikhovo. Dunia Efros, Anton's fiancee nine years before, married to a lawyer, Efim Konovitser, was again one of Masha's intimates. They met in Moscow. A year passed before Dunia and her family were invited to Melikhovo. At Easter Tania, beloved by Pavel and Evgenia for attending communion, all-night vigils, and christenings of workmen's children, was the only female guest at Melikhovo. As family, she was sent lists of produce -cheese, salami and halva, wine and olive oil - to bring from Moscow.

The only man banned from Melikhovo was Potapenko. He was hurt that Anton, 'the object of my undying envy', now communicated with him only on scraps of yellow paper. Potapenko was, however, busy: he was writing 'an uncountable number of stories and novels' to pay for his two wives, and Lika, Christina and the wet nurse, quite apart from paying off his debts to Anton and Suvorin. On 10 March

FEBRUARY-MAY 1895

Leikin, Gruzinsky and Ezhov arrived. Leikin approved Anton's attempts to be, like him, farmer, gardener and dog-breeder. He and Chekhov grew to like each other better. Leikin recorded: From Lopasnia station to Melikhovo, where Chekhov's estate is, we drove through a terrible blizzard. You could hardly make out the road markers… We drove in two sledges. Me in front, Ezhov and Gruzinsky behind. A pair of horses was harnessed in single file to my sledge. The road was literally swept away… when we got to Chekhov's we were buried in snow, icicles in the beard and on our temples… Chekhov gave us a full welcome, even came out onto the porch with the servants. Two very young chamber maids, round as dumplings, girls with full-moon faces, grabbed our bags and rugs… Chekhov's house is fine, bright rooms, all repainted and re-papered, spacious, with a nook for every member of the family and comfort you won't find even in some Moscow apartments. It is pleasant to see that a fellow writer (I mean a gifted one) has finally escaped penury and become well off. Inside we were greeted by his mother and his brother Misha, the tax inspector, come from Uglich, where he works, to stay a few days. Two dachshunds got under our feet, and I nearly shouted 'Pip! Dinka!', they were so like my own. After dinner Chekhov took me around the farmyard and outbuildings. The latter are decrepit but he has new hewn-wood stables, cow-shed and stores. A bath house is being built. A two-room cottage for visitors has been built and furnished and there were three beds and bedding. A really charming cottage. This is where Ezhov and Gruzinsky spent the night, while I slept on the divan in Chekhov's study. Ezhov left the next morning, unimpressed. On 31 March he wrote to Leikin: I don't like Chekhov's estate: first of all it's in the middle of the peasant village; if there's a fire there the manor won't escape. Secondly, there's no water. The pond Anton showed us is fit only for piglets to bathe in.44 Chekhov did not think much of Gruzinsky and Ezhov. He told Suvorin that they were 'two young wet blankets who said not a word and spread raging boredom over the whole estate', although Leikin 'has coarsened, become kinder, more jovial - he must be going to die soon.' Leikin was so touched by his reception that he sent Chekhov's dachshunds a picture of their parents and Masha seeds of Siberian

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buckwheat, which became yet another weed at Melikhovo. The cycle of presents ended with Chekhov commissioning an artist to paint Leikin in oils for only 200 roubles. Overjoyed, Leikin sent seed of his prize beet and cucumbers.

When Gruzinsky and Ezhov were invited back to a green, warm Melikhovo in early June, Ezhov changed his mind: 'I liked it. The bathhouse we saw is finished and, thanks to Anton's kindness, is a resort for all the Melikhovo peasants.' Perhaps Ezhov felt more gracious because he was about to marry again, this time 'a girl of no means'.45 It took all summer, however, to lure Suvorin, used to greater comforts, to Melikhovo. When he came at the end of August he stayed just one night.

At Easter Ivanenko came. He annoyed Pavel by oversleeping and not kissing the priest. Giliarovsky, the superman-reporter of Anton's student days, visited, Anton received for three days Doctor Korobov, who had boarded with the Chekhovs when he and Anton were first-year students. Nikolai Korobov was now besotted with Nietzsche. Chekhov had once commented: 'I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche in a railway carriage or on a boat and talk the whole night.' Korobov's visit was the next best thing. Nietzschean views and phrases seep into the conversation of Anton's fictional protagonists.46 His correspondence with Suvorin was also enlivened by sympathy with the latter's pro-German and Nietzschean views, often eccentric: Suvorin advocated compulsory cricket in Russian universities, for example, to defect students from idle radicalism.

Anton and Suvorin longed for each other. Suvorin wanted to sit and walk with Anton, 'silently and idly exchanging the odd phrase'. Anton begged Suvorin to come to Moscow in May: 'we could travel round the cemeteries, the monasteries, the woods at the edge of the city.' But Suvorin's newspaper and, above all, his the tre libre, held him captive, and Anton lacked a pretext to abandon Melikhovo. An estate could only be run if every member 'regardless of rank or sex, worked like a peasant'. Mice were stopped from stripping the bark off the cherry trees; a pig was slaughtered and hams smoked; timber was hauled for a new workman's shed. The summer of 1895 brought a drought as bad as the rains of 1894; the birch leaves were stripped by larvae. Fruit blossom was spoilt by frosts; sudden heat generated mosquitoes 'which bite like dogs'. Anton could not leave Masha with

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such drudgery again. In vain Suvorin tempted him with the Volga and Dnepr, or Leikin with the lakes and monasteries of the North. He himself longed for the sea, the Baltic or the Azov, but had to stay at Melikhovo.

Anton's youngest and eldest brothers stayed away in spring 1895. Misha was even in April snowbound in Uglich. He was bound in other respects: the death of Sablin, his protector (the brother of the editor 'granddad' Sablin), had blocked hopes of a transfer to the livelier city of Iaroslavl. Anton lobbied for him, first with Bilibin, who told him that Misha was unqualified to be a postmaster, and then with Suvorin. In Petersburg Natalia angled for an invitation: 'You describe your garden and its inhabitants, so that I salivate'. Aleksandr felt put upon: Natalia ('my whore') was showing signs of increasing eccentricity -hoarding food and clothes; his mother-in-law was dying of emaciation (it took four more years); he was up all night indexing New Times for a paltry 100 roubles a year; he had stopped drinking again, and his 'loins hurt like an onanist's'.

All Anton's irritation of the previous year, his tangle with Lika and Potapenko and his reading of the German misogynists went into a story called 'Ariadna'. The heroine Ariadna Grigorievna is named after the girl who ruined the life of his Latin teacher, Starov. Her flamboyance was Iavorskaia's; her predicament was Lika's. Like Lika, Ariadna fails to ensnare the introverted narrator, Shamokhin, and takes up instead with a frivolous married man, Lubkov, who abandons her in Europe. Unlike Anton, however, Shamokhin rescues Ariadna and brings her back to Russia, and unlike Lika, Ariadna only seems pregnant. Like Potapenko, Lubkov has the gall to sponge money from his rival. Shamokhin paraphrases Schopenhauer when he describes Ariadna's need to charm and to lie as being an innate as spurting ink is to a cuttlefish. Shamokhin tells the story to Chekhov - for once Chekhov appears in his own story - as they sail from Odessa to Yalta. Shamokhin is after all the ship's bore, and this distances Chekhov from his protagonist. 'Ariadna' explores a conflict - between misogyny and common sense - in Chekhov's own mind.

'Ariadna' had been commissioned for The Performing Artist. Its editor, Kumanin, had since incurred Chekhov's disfavour and, as he neared death, his journal folded, Kumanin sold his subscribers and contracts, including Chekhov's 620-rouble advance, to Russian

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Thought, and Lavrov and Goltscv found themselves, at the end of 1895, printing a work offensive to their egalitarianism. Chekhov was able, however, to offset 'Ariadna' with 'Murder', a brooding story of fanatical violence, inspired by what he had seen on Sakhalin and by Misha's stories of Uglich. In May 1895 The Island of Sakhalin passed, as Lavrov put it, 'from tiie belly of the whale' and came out as a book (published by Russian Thought) which proved Chekhov's radical credentials. Chekhov had, however, now finished with the penal island. His hope that the work would win him the right to lecture in Moscow university was thwarted; the University was ill-disposed to a man who 'had it in for professors'.

Misogyny permeated another story conceived that summer, printed in The Russian Gazette in October - 'Anna Round the Neck'. The phrase is Aleksandr's: he called his dying first wife 'Anna round the neck' - a pun on the civil service award of St Anna. Chekhov's Anna is a girl married off to an elderly civil servant to save her destitute family. Realizing she is sexually attractive, she turns the tables and tyrannizes her husband. Anton was, understandably, in no mood for marriage, die cure that Suvorin proposed for his melancholy. On 2 3 March 1895 he retorted: All right, I'll get married if you want me to. But my conditions are: everything must be as it was before, that is she must live in Moscow, and I in the country, and I shall visit her. I couldn't stand a happiness mat went on morning noon and night… I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not rise every night in my sky. NB. Marrying won't make me write any better.

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Incubating The Seagull June-September 1895 IN SUMMER 1895 Anton began to mention his archive. Like his father, Anton scrupulously kept letters and documents. The family always asked Anton if they were looking for a certificate. Anton alarmed Suvorin, who did not want his private thoughts to be widely known, by saying that he had put all his letters in order. This became an annual ritual, which Anton and Masha carried out: letters were sorted into two categories, family and literary, then into boxes, by author, Anton marking the date if the writer had not. Afraid of compromising themselves, people now wrote less spontaneously to Anton, or wrote mainly to provoke a saleable answer. Anton joked at their fears and hopes: he headed a letter to Anna Suvorina 'not for Russian Antiquity', but his own tone, as time went on, became more guarded.

The archive shows Chekhov's growing self-esteem. He could see himself as Russia's greatest living writer of fiction. On 21 February Leskov, who had anointed him as 'Samuel anointed David', had died. Nobody mourned the most cantankerous of Russian novelists. Even Anton expressed only indignation that Leskov in his will demanded an autopsy to prove his doctors wrong. A diary entry two years later, however, shows how deeply he felt Leskov's importance: 'Writers like Leskov… cannot please our critics, because our critics are almost all Jews who do not know the core of Russian life and are alien to it, its spirit, its forms, its humour…' Leskov's idiom - 'you stepped on my favourite corn' - found its way into The Seagull.

Melikhovo became all Anton's. After dinner, on 3 June, Misha, Masha and Vania left Melikhovo for the south. They stayed for two days with Georgi in Taganrog. This was Masha's first visit since she was a child: she bathed in the Sea of Azov. From Taganrog Vania returned to Melikhovo three weeks later, but Misha and Masha took Anton's route of 1888, by sea to Batum and then overland to

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Kislovodsk. They returned late on zH June 'thin, tired, exhausted, yet full of the joys of life,' Vania reported to his wife. While Anton enjoyed three weeks' solitude, Pavel ploughed the parched earth, sold the hay, called out the vet47 to a sick cow, and bought new striking clocks - the elder Chekhovs' main extravagance.

Olga Kundasova began to frequent the house: Pavel recorded her as 'living with us'. To Suvorin Anton complained: 'This person in big doses, no thanks! It's easier hauling water from a deep well.' Olga left to spend the rest of the year with her sister, 1500 miles away in Batum. Anton managed her better, as she acknowledged next April: I am struck by many things in your attitude to me that have come to the surface recently, I am struck because I myself am now stony ground, and there was a time when I was good soil. (I ask you when reading this part of my letter not to indulge in the pornographic ideas so typical of you.) Anton had learnt to say no with yet more determination. He refused to help Olga assemble a library for the psychiatric hospital. He did however defend the peasant arsonist, Epifan Volkov, and after a year, the investigating magistrate, an admirer of Anton's plays, released Volkov. Mitrofan's younger son, Volodia, was expelled from a seminary, and Anton interceded to save him from conscription.

Peace ended on 20 June, when Mitrofan's widow Liudmila came to stay for forty days with her two teenage daughters, Aleksandra and Elena. Anton delighted in their domesticity, and the two girls were exceptionally pretty. Only Pavel counted the days to their departure, despite Liudmila's enthusiasm for Matins and Vespers at Vaskino and the Monastery. Three weeks after these relatives left, Aunt Marfa Loboda, the widow of Ivan Morozov (Evgenia's brother), came for a week. Of all her in-laws Evgenia liked Marfa best: together they prayed at the monastery church.

The gestation of Chekhov's new play, The Seagull, was interrupted by a suicidal incident that Anton was to use as the play's crowning touch. Levitan was at Gorki, a remote estate, halfway between Moscow and Petersburg, which belonged to his mistress, Anna Turchani-nova. Like Sofia Kuvshinnikova, she was married and ten years older than Levitan. She had three daughters, of whom Levitan seduced at least one. He had a row with Anna Turchaninova, and on 21 June he

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pulled out a revolver and shot himself in the head. The wound was slight, but Levi tan's mood was not. On 23 June he wrote to Anton: Dear Anton, if at all possible, come to see me, just for a few days. I am horribly unhappy, worse than ever. I would come to see you but I have no strength left. Don't refuse. A big room is at your disposal in a house where I live alone, in the woods, on the shore of a lake. Neither compassion nor the fishing moved Anton, so Anna Turchaninova wrote: I don't know you, Mr Chekhov, but I have an urgent request at the insistence of the doctor treating Isaak. Levitan is suffering very severe depression which is pulling him into the most terrible state. On 21 June, in a minute of despair, he tried to kill himself. Fortunately we managed to save him. The wound is no longer dangerous, but Levitan needs meticulous, loving and friendly care. Knowing from what he has said that you are a close friend, I decided to write and ask you to come and see the patient immediately. A man's life depends on your coming. You, only you, can save him and bring him out of complete indifference to life, and at times a furious determination to kill himself.48 On 5 July, telling nobody where he was going, Anton made his way to Gorki and saw Levitan. From Gorki he wrote to Leikin to say he 'was on the shores of a lake 50 miles from Bologoe' for ten days. He told Suvorin that he was with a patient on the Turchaninova estate, 'a marshy place, smelling of Polovtsians and Pechenegs'.

Anton stayed only five days and, instead of turning home, travelled just as secretively from Bologoe to Petersburg. Leikin learnt that Anton was at Suvorin's. He drove straight round to see Anton there 'thin and jaundiced'; Anton claimed Suvorin had telegraphed for him. Leikin's were not the only prying eyes; Kleopatra Karatygina hoped to join Suvorin's new theatre and, like many actresses Anton had known, she named him as a referee.

Anton was back in Melikhovo by 18 July. Tania and Sasha Seli-vanova, whom he now called the 'enchanting little widow', joined him. Four days later, Anton went back to Moscow to see Suvorin: they spent two days walking and talking. Suvorin came down to Melikhovo to meet Tania and talk about the theatre. On 24 July Pavel's

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diary records: 'Full moon. The guests went for a walk in the woods.' The walk shaped Tania's future. She charmed Suvorin, who would prepare the way for her in Petersburg. Tania was translating Edmond Rostand's La Princesse lointaine - a source for the cult of the 'Beautiful Lady' in Russian symbolist drama. (Tania's enthusiasm for modern French drama made Anton spend several weeks studying French grammar.) In The Seagull, the little play that Treplev stages to annoy his mother parodies Russian plays yet unwritten: the Symbolist drama which Tania was adapting and Hannele's Assumption, in which the pretty Liudmila Ozerova had made her debut, helped Chekhov imagine what such drama might sound like in Russian.

The Seagull is full of cruel parody. The shot bird symbolizing youth destroyed was aimed at Ibsen's Wild Duck; the young writer Treplev, jealous of his mother's lover, parodies Hamlet and Gertrude. The middle-aged actress, Arkadina, who holds all the men - her brother Sorin, her son Treplev and her lover Trigorin - in thrall, caricatures every actress that Anton had ever disliked, and echoes Iavorskaia's mannerisms, such as kneeling before Anton, like Vasantasena before Charudatta, calling him 'my only one!' The boring schoolteacher Medvedenko mimics Mikhailov, the teacher in the village of Talezh, near Melikhovo. The medallion that Nina gives Trigorin with the coded reference to his lines 'If you need my life, come and take it', mocks Avilova and her medallion. The lakeside setting of The Seagull, the pointless killing of the seagull, and Treplev's first attempt to shoot himself, all commemorate Levitan. The unhappy fate of Nina, adored by Treplev and seduced by Trigorin, reflects - and, as we shall see, anticipates - the story of Lika, Anton and Potapenko.

Chekhov was most cruel to himself. Trigorin, the traditional writer, and Treplev, the innovator, standing for old and new movements, both ineffectual and mediocre, really personify two aspects of Chekhov, one the analytical follower of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the other the visionary prose-poet. Much of Trigorin is Anton - with his fishing rods, his dislike of scented flowers, his self-disparagement. Lines from Chekhov's prose (a description of a broken bottle on a weir) and from his letters (to Lika about obsessive writing) are given to Trigorin in the play. Like Potapenko, however, Trigorin seduces and abandons Nina; like Anton, Treplev is the man to whom she briefly returns, undeterred in her desire for a career on stage. The Seagull is neverthe352

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less not primarily a confessional work: Trigorin is only part Potapenko and Anton only part Treplev. The authorial Chekhov is there as Doctor Dorn who looks on with amused compassion, and deflects possessive women.

The Seagull develops to a surreal degree the pattern of Turgenev's A Month in the Country of 1849: a country estate, an ironical doctor, a dominant heroine and an absurdly long chain of unrequited love -nobody loves the schoolteacher Medvedenko, who loves Masha, the manager's daughter, who loves Treplev, the young writer, who loves Nina, the neighbour's stepdaughter, who loves Trigorin, the older writer, who is in thrall to Arkadina, the actress. The structure is innovative: four acts flow, not broken into scenes. Act 4 reiterates, like a musical piece, the motifs of Act 1. Never did Chekhov write such a literary play: the text alludes to Maupassant, whom Chekhov admired as much as his heroes do. The opening lines 'Why do you always wear black?' - 'I'm in mourning for my life.' are out of Bel-Ami, while the passage Dr Dorn reads in Act 2, on the dangers of writers to society and of women to writers, is from Maupassant's travel book Sur Veau. Shakespeare too, in particular Hamlet, is grafted into the play. Traditions are reversed. All the material of comedy - couples in love, youth against age, servants outwitting their masters - is there, but the action resolves uncomically. There are no happy reunions; age is unscathed, youth perishes, and the servants sabotage the household.

On 21 October 1895 Chekhov told Suvorin that his comedy, satirizing his intimates, attacking the theatre and its actresses, was unstage-able: 'I am writing it not without pleasure, though I offend stage rules terribly. A comedy, three female parts, six male, four acts, landscape (view of a lake); a lot of talk about literature, not much action, 13 stone of love.' Anton did all he could, from conception in May 1895 until its first performance in October 1896, to stir up the hostility of those who had to watch and act his play. It is as if the author against his own will propelled The Seagull into reality.

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The Fugitive Returns September-December 1895 ON 6 AUGUST 1895 Lika Mizinova brought her baby to Moscow. She made her peace with her mother and looked for work. Then she went to Tver province with chocolate for Granny Ioganson's name day. Christina was put, as Lika had been, in Granny Ioganson's care: a nurse was found. On 23 September Masha brought Lika to Meli-khovo. In November Lika wrote to Granny: Masha Chekhova often stays with me and I with her. She lives with her brother Vania and still works in the Rzhevskaia boarding school. When I'm home, I read, play the piano and sing, and time passes quickly… I've been twice to the Chekhovs' estate, once when I arrived, before term started, and spent two weeks there and I've also been going down for Saturday and Sunday with Masha, I am loved there as I used to be… Lika's mother, Lidia Iurgeneva, doggedly independent, could not afford wood to heat her quarters. Physically and emotionally, the Chekhovs gave Lika warmth that autumn. Potapenko was still banned from Melikhovo, but, in December 1895, back in Tver, Lika stood up for him against Masha: 'I have and shall have only one thing - my little girl!… never blame Ignati for anything! Believe me he is the man you and I thought he was.' Ignati Potapenko by November had made an act of contrition, at least to Anton, for he felt the lack of sympathetic company in Petersburg: Dear Antonio,… I did think that our true spiritual bond must not be broken by any external circumstances. And if I were to let myself doubt your friendship, I still should say 'That will pass, that is temporary.' So - everything is bright between us, as before, and I am terribly glad. Anton devised a suitable penance. Potapenko accepted without demur.

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He, the man most ridiculed in The Seagull, was to oversee the play's realization. Potapenko was easily supervised: he was one of Suvorin's dependants, and he dined regularly with Aleksandr at the Petersburg monthly writers' dinners. Potapenko found Chekhov a typist in Moscow, a Miss Gobiato, who at snail's pace, for a few kopecks a page, made two copies for transmission to Petersburg. Potapenko had one last laugh: Aleksandr sent Anton a newspaper cutting from Zhitomir (in the Ukraine) which showed that library users preferred Potapenko to Chekhov.

Miss Gobiato was too slow: Anton finally sent a manuscript to Suvorin, who was told to expect it from the hands of 'a tall handsome widow' - Sasha Selivanova. Anton told Suvorin to let Potapenko, and nobody else, read it. Suvorin (who admired Potapenko's wife Maria) was shocked by the play; he told Anton that Trigorin, torn between Nina and Arkadina, was too obviously Potapenko, torn between Lika and his wife. Anton disingenuously replied that if this were so, the play would be unstageable. Suvorin, as Chekhov might have suspected, showed The Seagull to his confidante, Sazonova. She was already worried by Suvorin's fondness for decadent drama. On 21 December her diary anticipated public opinion: I read The Seagull. A thoroughly depressing impression. In literature only Chekhov, in music Chopin make that impression on me, like a stone on your soul, you can't breathe. It is unrelieved gloom. Iavorskaia still hoped that Chekhov would provide her with a triumphal chariot of a play, that The Seagull would be in the same neoroman-tic vein as Rostand's La Princesse lointaine, which she and Tania were taking to Petersburg for the new season. In Moscow, in early December, Chekhov read The Seagull to a large company in the blue drawing room at Iavorskaia's hotel. Tania recalls: Korsh… considered Chekhov his author, since he had put on the first production of Ivanov… I remember the impression the play made. It was like Arkadina's reaction to Treplev's play: 'Decadence!' 'New forms?'… I remember the argument, the noise, Iavorskaia feigning delight, Korsh's amazement: 'Dear boy, that's bad theatre: you have a man shoot himself off-stage and don't even let him speak before he dies!' etc. I remember Chekhov's face, half embarrassed, half stern.

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Iavorskaia and Chekhov had no more to say to each other. Anton then took his manuscript to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose suggestions he respected and adopted.

Anton now treated Lika as lightly as his old sweetheart Sasha Seli-vanova. He was celibate, he told Suvorin on 10 November: I am afraid of a wife and family life which will restrict me and as I imagine them won't fit in with my disorderliness, but it is still better than tossing about in the sea of life and going through storms in the frail boat of dissipation. Anyway I don't love my mistresses any more, and with them I gradually become impotent. Anton visited Sasha Selivanova in Moscow to drink beer and vodka, and invited Lika to sing and walk in the woods. Only the faraway aroused desire. Liudmila Ozerova, the Petersburg actress, intrigued Anton even more after a fiasco in Schiller's Intrigue of Love. He wrote to Suvorin on 21 October: 'Reading The Petersburg Newspaper, where her acting was called simply absurd, I can imagine the little Jew-girl crying and going cold.'

After searching the attic in Melikhovo, Anton found Elena Shav-rova, now Mrs lust's manuscripts, which he had mislaid. He offered to make up to her for his delinquency and confided that he was writing a story ('My Fiancee', the future 'House with the Mezzanine'), as well as a play, about lost love: 'I used to have a fiancee'. Inviting each other to rendezvous in the Great Moscow hotel, she and Anton began a cautious game. Shavrova's letters become flirtatious. On 11 November she hinted at the relationship - of a young actress with a distinguished older man - that she sought: 'You know, I often recall Katia from "A Dreary Story" and I understand her.' On 3 December she wrote: 'It's nice to know that cher maitre has loved, which means he could have and understand this earthly feeling… I think somehow that you analyse everything and everyone too finely to fall in love…'49 For the New Year Shavrova praised 'Ariadna' as a vraie femme aux hommes, and wished Chekhov 'as few boring days, hours and minutes as possible'.

Autumn left Anton no time for love or boredom. The creative impulse that had started in spring 1894 intensified. As soon as The Seagull was despatched, he sat down to work on his most nostalgic story, 'The House with the Mezzanine'. The scenery and the second356

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ary characters (an idle landowner and his domineering, weeping mistress) stem from 1891, the summer of the mongoose at Bogimovo. The narrator (an artist, never seen to paint a picture) stumbles on a decaying estate where a mother and her two daughters live, argues with the elder daughter and falls in love with the younger, only to have her snatched away when she responds. The sense of loss lies in the decaying pine needles and lime trees, the half-abandoned house and the narrator's passivity. The secondary theme of the story was to run through Chekhov's later plays and stories: the narrator argues the pointlessness of social activism in the face of the misery of the peasantry's condition. The elder sister is an activist and denounces art and idleness. The puzzle for the critics is that neither the active sister nor the artist is approved. In Chekhov's work the conflict is often between two sides of himself, the active landowner and contemplative artist, or the egalitarian and the misogynist.

As an activist, Chekhov now proposed a new school for the villagers, pooling his resources with the peasants' and whatever Serpukhov council granted towards the 3000 roubles needed. His neighbours were unhelpful. The Chekhovs and Semenkoviches, the new owners of Vaskino, visited each other, but Anton barely spoke to the seedy Varenikovs who lived to the east of Melikhovo. Varenikov offered to exchange a large amount of forest for a small amount of hayfield, but Masha would not agree. Varenikov had behaved badly in August: when the Chekhov cows strayed, he demanded a rouble per head to release them. Anton told him to keep the cattle. Varenikov surrendered: 'Have your cows collected; please forbid your servants to let them into your hayfields.'50

Anton in Moscow drank with Sasha Selivanova and chased up Miss Gobiato the typist. Masha taught from Monday to Friday. Pavel managed the estate tyrannically and the servants got drunk, quarrelsome and disobedient. After opening the kitchen windows to freeze the cockroaches to death, Pavel complained to Masha: Roman has quarrelled with his wife, and she has turned nasty, she wouldn't milk the cows, I had to ask and beg Aniuta to go and do the milking, and Mashutka to feed the hens and ducks, the old woman [Mariushka] with tears in her eyes put the bread in the oven… What is happening, can we allow the servants and workmen such freedom that they don't obey those that live in the house? Whom

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do they serve?… Roman used to be considerate when he wasn't allowed so much freedom and rope, now he has got above himself, he has become hypocritical, he has found out Antosha's weak point… All week two strapping lads have failed to get the manure out of the stables, we've had to hire a daily woman. We are sitting with no firewood, it's cold in the rooms.'1 Pavel's despotism irritated Anton. He complained to Aleksandr of Pavel 'nagging at mother over dinner and lecturing us at length about medals and awards.'

When Anton was in Melikhovo, harmony reigned, but he restricted his commands to the garden. He would prune raspberries, manure asparagus, minister to sick dachshunds, but would not reprimand the men-of-all-work, Ivan, Roman and his brother Egor. Anton would wander off to the woods: Pavel's diary, in Anton's hand, for 8 November reads: 'Clear morning: went hunting with the dachshunds, but didn't find the badger in his den.'

Levitan, still prey to depression, came on a few of these walks -this time without a gun. He was touchingly grateful for Anton's visit after his attempted suicide. Anton gave him The Island of Sakhalin, inscribed 'in case he should commit murder in a fit of jealousy' and end up a prisoner there. At the end of July Levitan wrote: I constantly observe myself and see clearly that I am completely going to pieces. And I am fed up with myself, and how fed up.

I don't know why, but the few days you spent with me were the most peaceful days this summer. In October Levitan came back to Melikhovo for two days.

Others needed Anton's support. Misha, downcast at being denied a tax inspectorate at Iaroslavl, asked Suvorin for help. Suvorin thought his letter muddled and tactless; Anton had to explain what Misha wanted. Suvorin went to the Finance Ministry and fixed Misha's posting, sending Chekhov a telegram: 'Say merri, my angel.' Misha would not be leaving Uglich alone. After Mamuna's betrayal, he fell in love with Olga Vladykina, a governess to Uglich's richest manufacturer. He drove her home from a party across the dangerous ice of the Volga. She agreed to marry Misha, but was hurt that Misha would not announce the engagement until he had received Anton's approval. Masha had a measure of independence in the form of a monthly

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allowance of 30 roubles from Misha and 'granddad' Sablin. Misha gave her the 1600 roubles due from the publication of his smallholder's encyclopaedia. Only Aleksandr still grumbled: he could not get his elder sons into school; little Kolia threw a cat from a third-floor window and expressed no remorse. Aleksandr turned to Vania and Sonia, as pedagogues: Would you take over the training of my piglets?… As soon as I leave the house they dash off God knows where, grab their hats and clear off… better that you should have the money than a stranger. Kolia… is useful, he can fetch vodka from the pub.52 Vania was willing, but it took two years to weaken Sonia's opposition. By autumn 1895 Chekhov had regained his hold over old acolytes, although Bilibin objected to being exploited for his Post Office connections. When Shcheglov asked after eighteen months' silence why Chekhov could not drop him a few friendly lines, he was won over by the response and opened to Chekhov 'both my heart and my hotel room'. He recorded in his diary (10 October 1895): 'There remain three persons, meeting whom makes my heart race: A. P. Chekhov, A. S. Suvorin and V. P. Gorlenko [a Kiev critic].' A planned reunion never happened, however, and Shcheglov left, disappointed, for the provinces.

For years Anton had put off meeting Tolstoy, but in August 1895 he stayed with Tolstoy at Iasnaia Poliana for thirty-six hours, even though a private talk with Tolstoy was now no more feasible than with the Pope. Anton had avoided being brought in, like a trophy, by Sergeenko and other Tolstoyans. Access to Tolstoy, even for intimates, was controlled by his disciple, Chertkov. Anton's visit was arranged by the journalist Mikhail Menshikov.53 Anton had an audience, not a conversation, with Tolstoy. The following morning, Chertkov and Gorbunov-Posadov, in the master's presence, read extracts from his unpublished novel Resurrection. Anton let Tolstoy's vegetarianism and anarchism pass, merely pointing out the heroine's implausibly light sentence for conspiracy to murder.

Tolstoy, compiling readers for the masses, had read Chekhov's prose and praised many of his stories, though not for what Anton liked in them. He deplored Chekhov's lack of a guiding idea: his most perceptive remark was that Chekhov merged with Garshin would

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make a great writer. Anton's person, however, charmed Tolstoy, in particular his 'young lady's gait'. (.'lukliov did not return like a Muslim from the haj, but he did feel admiration for the man, largely because he saw how much Tolstoy's daughters loved their father, and believed, as he later told Suvorin, that a mistress, wife or mother could be deceived, but a daughter could not.

Anton did not become a Tolstoyan: on i December he told Suvorin that he would enter any monastery that took unbelievers. He was, however, inspired to Tolstoyan activity. He pestered Aleksandr, who briefly edited a journal for the blind, until a blind old soldier who was begging at Iasnaia Poliana was housed. That autumn and winter Anton sent hay for the schoolteacher's cow, built a new school for the peasants, found cousins Volodia and Aleksandra places in a seminary and a dressmaking school, nagged Sytin, the Moscow publisher, to honour his agreement to publish The Surgical Chronicle run by Professor Diakonov. Innumerable writers - such as a Jew, Gutmakher, from Taganrog, and a derelict bookseller, Sveshnikov - owed publication of their work to Anton.

Anton spent the first two weeks of December in Moscow in the Great Moscow Hotel, working on 'The House with the Mezzanine'. Ivan Bunin, then an unknown writer, later to be a kindred spirit, and his companion, Balmont, the drunken decadent poet, were in the hotel. Balmont reached for an overcoat and was stopped by a porter: 'That is Anton Chekhov's overcoat.' Balmont and Bunin were overjoyed at a pretext for meeting Chekhov, and entered his room in the morning. Anton was out, but Bunin sat down and furtively read the manuscript of 'A Woman's Kingdom'. Years passed before he met Anton and confessed.

After an all-night party at Russian Thought, Anton arrived in Meli-khovo at 6.00 a.m. on 17 December to what he feared would be 'hellish boredom'. The family gathered. Masha arrived, followed by Vania, accompanied not by his wife, but by Sasha Selivanova. Misha came on Christmas Eve for a parental blessing on his marriage to Olga. Pavel was happy because the samovar had been repaired and he had bought a new washstand: Matins at 7 a.m. Mass at 10. We dined without the priest [but with] the schoolteacher, visitors and family. We spent the day well, the

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Boys came then Peasants with Felicitations. The servants received good presents. Dr Saveliev, fellow Taganrogian and medical student, also came. Anton wanted to write, not to celebrate, but he revealed his resentment only to Suvorin on 29 December: 'All day eating and talking, eating and talking'.

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The Flight of the Seagull To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you. Shakespeare, Hamlet II, ii

FIFTY Ô

Two Diversions in Petersburg January-February 1896 WHEN NEW YEAR'S DAY 1896 DAWNED, it was nearly minus çî°Ñ at Melikhovo. Guests dispersed to Moscow while Anton packed his bags for Petersburg. The peasant women and children gathered for New Year gifts from Pavel. The Chekhovs' reactionary neighbour Semenkovich rode over from Vaskino: one of his anecdotes struck a chord in Anton's heart - his uncle, the poet Fet, so loathed the University of Moscow that whenever his carriage passed the building, he stopped his driver, opened the window and spat.

Peasant beggary and sociable gentry were soon out of mind. Anton took the morning train to Moscow with Vania. From Moscow he took the overnight express to Petersburg and the Hotel Angleterre. Ignati Potapenko was less in evidence: his second wife had reined him in. On one quiet evening in a frantic fortnight, with Aleksandr's encouragement Chekhov took the insortable Natalia to the theatre. Every other evening Anton moved like a comet through a galaxy of actresses. He took Kleopatra Karatygina to see Ostrovsky's Poverty is no Vice at Suvorin's Literary-Artistic Circle. She recalled: Chekhov grabbed me behind the wings and dragged me off… Suvorin in his overcoat and hat, holding a stick, was sitting in the front box. He was banging the stick and growling, I felt a savage outburst coming and pleaded with Chekhov to let me out, but he assured me it would be fun and persuaded me to sit down… We could hear Suvorin [cursing one of the actresses]: 'You bitch, you bitch!…' Chekhov managed to seize him by his coat sleeve… I took fright, rushed out of the box and then Chekhov and I laughed so loud that he said his spleen would burst.1 Kleopatra, like Natalia, was abandoned for more fashionable company. Schadenfreude and curiosity drove Chekhov to Lidia Iavorskaia's benefit night on 4 January. She starred in Rostand's La Princesse

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lointaine, in Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik's version. This magnificent translation was the last service that Tania performed for Lidia. Now that Iavorskaia was betrothed to Prince Bariatinsky, she was turning her back on her lesbian past. After an all-male dinner with the cadaverous Grigorovich, Anton went to the theatre with Suvorin. The next evening Anton scandalized Sazonova by calling Iavorskaia, as the 'distant princess', a washerwoman covering herself in garlands. On the subject of Tania's verse he was milder - she had a vocabulary of only twenty-five words, ecstasy, prayer, aquiver, murmur, tears, dreams, but could write entrancing verse. After this sally, Chekhov went off to dine with Potapenko, the critic Amfiteatrov and the novelist Mamin-Sibiriak. Suvorin could not come. 'A pity,' said Anton cruelly, 'You're an excellent companion. You pay for everyone.' Suvorin felt an outsider: some blamed Anton's liberalism for Suvorin's disagreements with his rabid colleagues. The journalist Gei yelled at Chekhov on the steps of the Maly Theatre, accusing him of alienating the magnate from his acolytes. On 8 January, to escape these tensions, Chekhov went to Tsarskoe Selo to drink and dine with a fellow-provincial, the Zola of the Urals, Mamin-Sibiriak.

Mamin was one new friend who put Anton at his ease. Anton's impromptu quips in foyers and restaurants, however, sowed seeds of hostility towards him in the Petersburg theatrical world. Lidia Iavorskaia showed no resentment - she sent affectionate notes to Anton that January and met him for tea at Suvorin's, and in private. She had left Korsh's theatre and his bed. She now needed to please the Petersburg public, but was at loggerheads with Suvorin, who loathed her mendacity - she constantly demanded more money - although her notoriety was a crowd-puller no entrepreneur could dispense with. Matters came to a head on the night of 11 January. Iavorskaia missed the dress rehearsal of Sazonova's play. Suvorin was dragged from his bed. Trembling with rage, he sat down to write to her but was lost for words. Anton then started to dictate a mild note: 'You will hurt the author's and your colleagues' feelings if you don't come.' Sazonova took over: 'The play must run tomorrow. Kindly learn the part and be at the rehearsal at n.' The next evening the play was performed. Sazonova forgave Anton for his lily-livered tone with Iavorskaia: 'I went to the director's room for a smoke. Chekhov praises my play. I am so touched I could throw my arms round his neck.'2

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Anton had to leave for Melikhovo: on 22 January 1896 Misha was to marry Olga Vladykina, and Anton's absence would have been an insult. Natalia, said Aleksandr, 'thinks you were running away from women or chasing after women.' Certainly, Anton had taken pains to elude Lidia Avilova, in whom he had suddenly lost interest, but there was no woman waiting for him in Moscow.

Back in Melikhovo the only relative waiting for Anton was cousin Georgi from Taganrog, who had brought Santurini wine and pickled mussels to celebrate Anton's thirty-sixth birthday. The surly Roman had shot a hare for dinner. Pavel reported the usual rows in his son's absence. On 4 January Roman had 'caused a scandal' and on 6 January Ivan the workman had been dismissed for drunkenness. Pavel had hired an Aleksandr Kretov, who proceeded to seduce the maid. The good news was that the red cow had calved and that the post office at Lopasnia had been opened and consecrated: with God's blessing, guests would now herald their arrival. Aunt Marfa's good news was, however, her idea of a joke: 'Darling Antosha, Congratulations on your new happiness and new bride. I've found you a bride, ninety thousand dowry…'3

Anton spent his birthday - it was minus2 5°C - helping the piebald cow to calve. The next day he used cousin Georgi's departure to make a day trip to Moscow, and sent apologies to Lidia Avilova, promising to see her shortly in Petersburg. Petersburg missed Anton. Suvorin, wrote Aleksandr, was so moody after Anton's departure that nobody dared come near: he had even rowed with his intimates, the venomous Burenin and the devious Syromiatnikov. Anton had hurt Natalia by eating too little, not taking her out and not giving her the puppy he had promised. Aleksandr was sending Natalia to Moscow to sell books, but, he reassured Anton, his pariah of a wife would not spoil her brother-in-law's marriage to an officer's sister. 'She's a coward and unlikely to dare to undertake the journey from Lopasnia solo.' Potapenko would not attend the wedding either, writing from Moscow: Dear Antonio, I had intended to come to Melikhovo, but the forthcoming marriage there sticks in my path. I'm sure that the solemn event will bring Misha the maximum happiness… As I do not personally have this maximum I try to avoid such spectacles. Come here, Antonio, because I want to see you. Suvorin sent a note to me

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THE Ã 1.1 Ñ, è I in ÃÍÊ SEAGULL at the station asking me to brinf» you to Petersburg. I'm definitely going on Thursday.4 Misha married Olga at Vaskino church: of the bride's family only Olga's brother came. After the wedding, which did nothing to dispel Anton's boredom in the snow-bound wastes, he met Potapenko in Moscow, and fled to Petersburg for three weeks.

On this second visit Anton stayed in Suvorin's house on Ertel Lane and was subjected to Suvorin's gloom. On 27 January, a night or two after Anton's arrival, the two men went for a long walk. Suvorin recalled the radical daring of his youthful Sketches and Tableaux. Anton asked, 'Why not give me a copy of this book as a present?' but Suvorin had decades ago given away the last copy. The two men went into the next second-hand bookshop they came to, where Suvorin spotted the copy he had given twenty years before to the lawyer who had defended him when the book had been prosecuted. Suvorin inscribed it, and gave it to Anton.

On 2 February Sazonova saw her daughter Liuba act: 'dreary, boring… every mistake she makes is a knife in [Sazonova's husband] Nikolai's heart.' Anton appeared with Suvorin. To her he seemed damaged and she thought the hero's enslavement to the heroine in 'Ariadna' explained it. 'Not much of a story,' she wrote in her diary. 'Some cruel woman must have given him a hard time and he's described her to vent his feelings.' At a banquet for the ageing actress Zhuleva, Suvorin shocked the company by kissing his former contributor Syro-miatnikov. To kiss a man who purloined journalists' copy for the secret police was gross indecency in Russian intellectual circles. Anton was revolted and showed it. He refused Syromiatnikov's hand. The battle for Suvorin's soul intensified. Anton at first hung on: much of 1896 was to be spent together in conversation and communion before the breach between them widened.

Anton's friendship with Potapenko, that had survived such strains, was weakening. Anton avoided seeing him alone. Potapenko was hurt not to be invited to the Zhuleva banquet: Anton did not get him a ticket. Potapenko proposed a journey to Finland; Anton refused. To avoid discussion, he said that he was leaving for Moscow on 10, not 13, February, Potapenko protested: 'As for Finland, that would be really swinish on your part, so you must silence your conscience and

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come.' Two days later, finding Anton still in Petersburg, Potapenko was indignant: 'Let me tell you you are a swine… I shan't see you off because I'm expecting a typewriter to be delivered at 8 this evening.' Anton found Potapenko a bore. He neither sang nor fornicated. The typewriter had replaced his flowing pen and symbolized the domesticity that his second wife had wrought. Potapenko was ending his last fling, with Liudmila Ozerova, whose success in Haupt-mann's Hannele's Ascension and equally spectacular failure in Schiller's Intrigue and Love had awoken Anton's interest. This winter Potapenko introduced the two; by the autumn, Potapenko would cede Ozerova to Anton.

Anton preferred the tedium of Leikin to Potapenko's hen-pecked state. Loyalty to his first regular publisher took Anton not only to pancake night - the last feast before the Orthodox lent - but also to two other evenings, listening while Leikin priced each dish and related his dachshunds' utterances. Apart from a late evening being vamped by Lidia Iavorskaia - who still hoped for a Chekhov play of her own - Anton shunned company. Of his relatives he entertained only his older nephews. He took them to a Punch-and-Judy show, stuffed them with food, and bought them clothes. Aleksandr was gruff: 'Both are greedy, over-ate and we shall have to give them castor oil. The gauntlets will be lost in an hour, and the jackets will be outgrown in 1V2 months… In their sloppiness they are their mother's children.'

Elena Shavrova, with whom Anton had maintained a flirtatious tutorial relationship for six years, now lived in Petersburg as Mrs lust, an official's wife. The story she was writing was appropriately called 'Caesar's Wife' - her virtue had to be above suspicion. Anton, when she met him, seemed 'very unkind'. Kleopatra Karatygina begged Anton to put in a word for her with theatre managements or face 'hellish revenges Nos. One to Five'. As he caught the Moscow train, Anton replied, equally unkindly: 'As I am an absolute zero in the Maly Theatre, all five items of your hellish revenge acted on me more weakly than the bite of a paralysed mosquito.' At Suvorin's masked ball for Shrove-Tide, Lidia Avilova, dressed in a black domino costume, had, she claimed, more luck. She sought a response to the inscribed silver medallion she had anonymously sent Anton a year ago. Anton told her she would get her answer in autumn, on the day that The Seagull was performed on stage.5

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Lika Rediscovered February-March 1896 ANTON AND SUVORIN took sleeping compartments with two actresses in the latter's theatre, Aleksandra Nikitina and Zina Kholmskaia. When they arrived in Moscow on 14 February, the men took a room in the best hotel, the Slav Bazaar, and then went to a party, where Anton listened to a couple communicating ardently in code, a device he was to use five years later in Three Sisters. The actresses went home, but Anton was invited in two days' time to discuss, as Aleksandra Nikitina put it, 'this and this and this.'

The next day Suvorin and Chekhov joined the throng of pilgrims at Tolstoy's Moscow house. Anton was all tact when Tolstoy began to discuss Resurrection. Tolstoy had already formed his opinion of Chekhov as a fine writer corrupted by medicine and free thinking. Chekhov noted in his diary: Tolstoy was irritable, made cutting remarks about decadents… Tolstoy's daughters Tatiana and Maria were… both telling fortunes and they asked me to pick cards, and I showed each of them an ace of spades, and that upset them… They are both extraordinarily likeable and their relationship with their father is touching. Suvorin weighed up with the Tolstoys the pros and cons of sudden or slow death; he noted: 'Death has been trying to get into their house. First the Countess was ill, now he is. He has kidney stones and he suffers terribly.' Anton had a happier impression. For Tatiana Tolstaia, however, there were consequences Anton never knew about: his visit generated a passion she soon felt compelled to repress.

After a Saturday in Serpukhov discussing school-building, Anton got back to Melikhovo early on Sunday 18 February and slept. He awoke to find that his father had a new initiative: the Melikhovo schoolteacher had been employed to paper the living room. Life for FEBRUARY-MARCH l8o6 Pavel, Evgenia and Masha had been snowbound and lonely. One parental letter to Misha and Olga was pathetic: We were deeply touched by your letter. In it are expressed all the feelings of hearts that love from the soul. In the twilight of our years such a letter is a great consolation. We spent Shrove Tide just the three of us, with Masha. We expected visitors from Moscow, but nobody came.6 For five days Natasha Lintvariova brought from the Ukraine loud laughter. Masha, back teaching in Moscow, came only for the weekends. Cousin Georgi had left with a consignment of books for Taganrog library. February was severe: two peasants were frozen to death. March gave no respite. The estate was under six feet of snow: no school could be built until spring. The Seagull awaited an indulgent censor and a daring director. The great prose work that was to fill Chekhov's mind that year was only germinating and he had not yet disinterred The Wood Demon for transformation into a viable play. In the evenings, trying to escape Pavel's ranting, Anton picked through the books he had bought, or had been given, to despatch to Taganrog library and, although his eyes tired by candlelight he became absorbed in fortuitous reading of an extraordinary variety of literature.

His private life was empty. Kleopatra Karatygina gave her manuscript to Aleksandr to post on. Anton's reaction was chilling; on 28 February she concluded: 'We don't need to use X-rays to see that the mysterious thread that bound us has broken…'7 Elena Shavrova was chastely silent until spring; Iavorskaia, too, broke off communication. Lika Mizinova, however, reappeared. For the last weekend of February, as of old, she came down with Masha. Her daughter Christina, of whom nobody spoke, stayed with Granny and the nurse. Although she still suffered from stage fright, Lika wanted to sing. Her love for Anton was rekindled, as if the past two years had never happened. Perhaps the imminent publication of'The House with the Mezzanine' revived memories of the summer of 1891, of the younger Lika who infused the story. Anton foresaw the searchlight that The Seagull would fix on Lika, and felt a guilty affection.

When Anton went to Moscow on 29 February for five days, he left his father alone in the house with just the dachshunds, Brom and Quinine, for company. The new workman Aleksandr slept in the

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THE Flir.lll ()!• THE SEAGULL kitchen. Evgenia had gone to laroslavl to stay with Misha and Olga. Lika was in Moscow. Anton preserved a pencilled scrawl from her on lined paper. It reads: 'Come, but in 10-15 minutes. I'm very heppy.' The next few months were the most intense episode in their long love affair.8 Neither Potapenko nor Anton's actresses were in evidence, and mutual compassion, shared loneliness and bitter experience seem to have brought Lika and Anton closer than at any time in the last six years.

Intimacy with the girl whom he had taken apart to create the heroine of The Seagull inspired Chekhov to revise his play. The author entrusted his own antihero to get the play past the Petersburg censor: Potapenko, sublimely unembarrassed, agreed. On 15 March 1896 the play was posted to Petersburg.

In mid March the pond filled with melted snow; work began on the new school at Talezh; the ewes were shorn. Vania in Moscow was asked to bring for Easter: paint for Easter eggs, ten small candles and two quarter-pound candles, an Easter prayer book in a vermilion leather binding and a wall calendar. Anton spent his energies helping supplicants - Aleksandr, cousin Volodia, Taganrog's citizens, and total strangers. Visitors ventured to Melikhovo, though melting snow made the roads almost impassable. Mud and ruts held Lika back: 'Tell me about the state of the road, whether there is a chance of coming and going back without risking my life.' All three brothers came on the same train, in separate carriages, Misha and Olga for ten days, Vania without Sonia (ill at ease with her in-laws) for two, Aleksandr with his eldest son, Kolia, for four. Spring brought headaches, pains in the right eye and more ominous symptoms for Anton. He never forgot what a peasant had said when he treated the man for ÒÂ: 'It's no use, I'll go with the spring waters.' In Pushkin's words, 'I don't like spring./I find the thaw dreary… stench, mud - in Spring I'm sick/ My blood ferments; my feelings, mind are strained by anguish.' 'Spring Feelings of an Unbridled Ancient', a poem by Count A. K. Tolstoy, caught Anton's attention: 'All my breast burns/ And every splinter/ Tries to leap on every splinter.' As he waited for the ice to break, Chekhov wrote, he saw the ice as the splinters of his soul.

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The family, too, feared spring and Anton's discreet wads of paper full of blood and phlegm. On 17 March Pavel changed the rooms

FEBRUARY-MARCH 1896

around: Anton was moved to Masha's, the warmest in the house, and Masha took his study. Easter, the climax of Pavel's and Evgenia's year, coincided with Pavel's name day: 'Vania gave me a white tie, Antosha bought me an Easter prayer book and a pound of wax candles.'9

Despite the schisms in Petersburg, Suvorin's need for Anton's company was even more urgent than Anton's need for his. Suvorin's thoughts were Chekhovian, and passionately necropolitan: 23 March 1896. Today is Easter Saturday. Gei [the journalist] and I went to the Alexander Nevsky monastery and, as is my custom, I went to the graves of my dead. How much that is tragic is buried in these graves, how much grief and horror… At Gorbunov's grave we opened the lantern hanging from the cross, took me oil lamp out and lit it. I said, 'Christ has arisen, Ivan…' Soon you will lie in the grave where three already lie. All that's easy to imagine -being carried into church, where and how the speeches will be, the coffin being lowered, the earth hitting the coffin lid. How often I have seen it, but never was it so bad for me as at Volodia's funeral. I shall be laid next to him. That's what I told Chekhov. The cemetery is very near the Neva. My soul will come out of the coffin, go down underground into the Neva, meet a fish and enter it.10 Next to the graves of his first wife, shot dead in 1873, of his daughter, Aleksandra, who died in 1880, of Volodia who shot himself in 1887 and of Valerian, whom diphtheria took in 1888, Suvorin became morose and distressed: his son-in-law Kolomnin (soon to die) and Anton Chekhov were the two men whom he trusted and loved.