Anton Chekhov. A life

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The Khodynka Spring April-May 1896 THE FIRST STARLING returned to Melikhovo on 1 April. Two days later Anton invited Lika via Masha: 'The week after Easter you can travel our roads without risk of death.' That evening Pavel noted in the diary: 'Antosha went without supper.' For four days Anton coughed badly. Asking Potapenko to return The Seagull, he told him he was suffering from 'the old boredom. I spat a bit of blood for 3 or 4 days, but I'm all right now, I could drag joists about or get married.' He would not admit to ÒÂ. When Ezhov, desperate that his new wife was showing the same fatal symptoms as the first, asked for advice, Anton was bland, gulling himself as much as Ezhov: All that is clear from your letter so far is that your wife has been prescribed creosote and that she has had pleurisy… I've had a cough for a long time and coughed up blood, but I'm still fine, putting my faith in God and science, which is now curing the most serious lung diseases. So you have to have hope and try to avoid disaster. The best thing, of course, would be to go and take koumiss [fermented mares' milk]. Although Anton gave him letters of recommendation, as he had once given money, Ezhov never forgave Dr Chekhov the deaths of his wives.

In April Melikhovo came to life. Whitebrow, the young dog Pavel had given away to Semenkovich while Anton was away, came running back after six weeks' absence. He was caught up and banished again. The starlings flocked. Evgenia wrote to Misha and Olia: The starlings came on Friday 5 th and have nested in the two new boxes, one opposite the dining-room window, the other the one you built on to the house so that I could see them from the corridor window. Antosha and I are listening to them singing… Aniuta

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APRIL-MAY 1896 \Naryshkina, the maid] has got engaged to a man in Vaskino, therc've been two balls, but for us their wild parties are very disturbing and unpleasant.11 The late spring; the starlings; the coughing of blood; the rowdy peasants and the neighbouring gentry; endless troubles with labour and materials for the new school; a morning spent with Tolstoy: all was grist to Chekhov's narrative mill. After a winter's inactivity, he had got down to a long work - originally intended to be a novel for the popular monthly, The Cornfield. The fee, more than 1000 roubles, was the temptation, the censorship of popular magazines the stumbling block. Known as 'My Life', the work was first called 'My Marriage' as a companion piece to 'The House with the Mezzanine' (which was printed in Russian Thought that April and could have been called 'My Non-Marriage'). 'My Life' too is a first-person narrative, 'a provincial's story' instead of'an artist's story'. As Chekhov worked, its scope broadened.

'My Life* contains everything Chekhovian - a gruesome anonymous provincial town, inconclusive wrangling between activist and quictisl philosophers, lyrical landscapes, dialogue of the deaf between man and woman, the lure of the theatre, the peasantry's instinctive values The story tests intuition against ideas: how 'a little profit' (the hero's nickname) is gained from following instinct and enduring one trial after another. The narrator's loss of status, of wealth, of a wife is outweighed by inner peace, despite the melancholy ending, where we see the hero visiting with his little niece the cemetery where his sister is buried. Chekhov takes another look at Tolstoy's slogans -non-resistance to evil, simplification - and his hero becomes a test-bed on which Tolstoyan principles are tried to breaking point. Chekhov does not debunk Tolstoy, but strips his ideas of sanctimony. The Tolstoyan refrain uttered by one character, 'Lice eat grass, rust eats iron, lies eat the soul' is moral poetry, but not a blinding light. 'My Life' is both an existential story and a classic, using devices of Tolstoy (the railway as an instrument of destruction) and Turgenev (the living consoled at the graveside). The composition of 'My Life' took virtually the entire year; by the end of April less than half was drafted.

The fiction was fed by the events that summer (not least by Anton's many railway journeys); writing such freshly inspired prose reconciled

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him to the drudgery of revising The Seagull, and quarrying Uncle Vania out of the ruins of The Wood Demon. Confessional though it is, 'My Life' breaks with the parodic mode of The Seagull or 'The House with the Mezzanine'. The use of autobiographical material is freer from caricature and vindictiveness. The conflict between a violent father and an introverted son may have been autobiographical for Anton, but the son breaks out, not from the lower classes to the gentry, but downwards. The story has some cruelties: the hero's sister is a failed actress called Kleopatra, and the character's debut, dumbstruck and pregnant in an amateur production, was painful reading for both Kara-tygina and Lika Mizinova. Nevertheless, the reader of 'My Life' is moved to compassion, not mockery. The traits of Misail, hero and narrator of 'My Life', recall Aleksandr (also known as 'a little profit' for his trade in songbirds in Taganrog). Aleksandr's vegetarianism and weakness for alcohol are ascribed to Misail, but so are his open mind and versatility as a craftsman.

While 'My Life' was being written, Aleksandr gave Anton frequent cause for pity, anger or laughter. First Toska caught scarlet fever, and Aleksandr's colleagues shunned him for fear of infection. Then Aleksandr went to Kiev as a freelance reporter on the doctor's conference, only to be robbed, together with seven doctors, in his sleeping compartment. 'Disgracefully robbed in the carriage under anaesthetic,' he claimed. Aleksandr began drinking again in Kiev.

The grimness of country life in 'My Life' reflects reality. At the end of April, Pavel recorded, 'There is no food in the house for the cows. The horses get ãõ/ã measures of oats per day.' In early May life was still hard: 'Assumption. Because of the rain the clock in the dining room has stopped. The herd of horses got into the garden. We tried to stoke the stoves in the rooms, but there was no wood to be found.' Chekhov complained to Elena Shavrova: 'It's devilish cold. A savage northeast wind is blowing. And there's no wine, there's nothing to drink.' In spring a troika sent over half-thawed mud to meet the train from Moscow was a dangerous vehicle, so that Anton had to forgo Lika: 'If Lika comes, she'll squeal all the way.' It needed only a breakdown in communication for the affair to falter again, and although Anton, to judge by the circumstantial evidence, was close to committing himself to Lika, he again began a double game. His tone towards Elena Shavrova, who was staying with her mother and sisters in Mos376

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cow, became affectionate. On Iavorskaia's notepaper, he asked her why she wanted to flee: 'Actually, you ought to take a trip to Australia! With me!' - and apologized for seeming 'very unkind': This paper was brought on Rue de la Paix, so let it be the paper of peace!… Let this cutting, bright colour wring tears of forgiveness from your eyes… Now guess: who gave me this paper? The banter became mutual; Elena Shavrova pondered a liaison with her cher maitre. She sent him her 'Indian Summer' (literally: 'A Woman's Summer'), inscribed 'a sign of deep respect, gratitude and other warmer feelings'.

Unknown to Anton, a hundred miles south in Iasnaia Poliana, thistory led Tatiana, Tolstoy's daughter, to record in her diary for ê; April 1896: Today papa read Chekhov's new story 'The House with the /Vlcv/.i nine'. And I had an unpleasant feeling, because I sensed the irality in it and because the heroine was a 17-year-old girl. Now (!h*khov is a man to whom I could become wildly attached. Nobody h,r. penetrated my soul at the first encounter as he lias. On Sunday I walked to the Petrovskys and back to see his portrait. And I've only seen him twice in real life.12 Tatiana told her mother; the countess, forgetting that she was.1 dot tor's daughter and a leveller's wife, retorted that Chekhov was too poor and of too low a birth to be considered as a husband. Tatiana questioned common friends about Anton: 'Has he been spoilt by women?' she asked the editor Menshikov13, and she urged Anton to visit. Faced with her mother's hostility and Anton's unresponsiveness, she fell instead for a married man, Sukhotin, whose wife she eventually became.

Chekhov's lowly birth bothered only aristocrats. Poverty bothered Anton more. He was committed not only to an extended family and to friends fallen on hard times, but also to the peasantry. The council and richer peasants might contribute, but he was liable for 1000 roubles towards the new school at Talezh. Suvorin gave him an advance on his collected plays and stories, but Anton was now wary of debts to Suvorin. He put out feelers to his new publisher, Adolf Marx, the proprietor of The Cornfield, who published his authors superbly. Marx would not tell him what Fet had been paid for his Ml

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Collected Poems, but equally told Chekhov not to reveal his fee for 'My Life'. The idea of selling his collected works to Marx for a substantial sum was born. For the time being, Anton had a little leeway. The Talezh teacher, Mikhailov, became the foreman for the school building. Anton instructed the carpenters, who were putting on the roof timbers, not to take orders from his father and left for a few days in Moscow.

On his return the roads were still 'vile, mud, deep ruts filled with water', but visitors crowded the house and the annexe. Both younger brothers brought their wives. It became hot. The starlings' eggs hatched and they stopped singing; by 13 May it was over 300; mosquitoes plagued everyone. Finally Lika came. She had taken a cottage with her baby and the nanny near Podolsk, half way along the line from Moscow to Lopasnia. Meetings and journeys to and from Moscow could now seem casual. Once again a family friend, she came down with Vania, the flautist Ivanenko, or even the postmaster. Pavel occasionally mentioned her sourly in the diary as Mile Mizinova. Pavel was preoccupied with Moscow's churches. Tsar Nicolas II, three years after his accession, was to be crowned in Moscow, the old capital; the city had a week of pomp in mid May. Unknown to each other, Pavel and Suvorin (accompanied by Iavorskaia) watched the five-hour coronation in the Uspensky cathedral. Pavel returned to Melikhovo directly and was not among the crowd of some 700,000 people, for whom the authorities had erected on Khodynka field in western Moscow 150 stands, each barred by a narrow gate admitting only two at a time: these stands were to distribute half a million 'presents' - a tin mug and a coronation sausage - with the lure of a special prize, a silver watch, at each stand. On 18 May a stand collapsed in the stampede. The horror was worsened by the callous authorities: the honeymoon of Nicolas II and his people ended. Khodynka precipitated the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. (The dynasty sensed nothing: the ball at the French embassy, even after the ambassador had inspected the corpses, went ahead.) A journalist to the marrow of his bones, Suvorin went to Khodynka: Up to 2000 people were crushed to death. Corpses were being carted all day and the crowd went with them. It's a rutted place with pits. The police arrived only at 9, and people had started gathering at 2

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… There were a lot of children. They were lifted up and saved over people's heads and shoulders. 'I haven't seen any gentry. It's just workmen and artisans lying there,' said a man about the suffocated… What bastards these police officials are, every one of them, and these bureaucrats. Suvorin returned to Moscow three days later, obsessed by Khodynka, meeting more eye-witnesses and public servants. On 30 May he left a third time for Moscow and invited Anton to the Hotel Dresden. Anton spent all day examining the children at Talezh school and joined Suvorin late at night. The next day was one of the most horrible in Anton's life, even for a man who had seen the prisons of Sakhalin. In west Moscow he stood on the site of a massacre. His diary is laconic: 'On 1 June we were at the Vagankovo cemetery and saw the graves of those who perished at Khodynka.' Suvorin's diary gives a more graphic account: Chekhov and I were at the Vagankovo cemetery a week after the catastrophe. The graves still smelt. The crosses were in rows, like soldiers on parade, mostly six-cornered, pine. A long pit \\.\A been dug and the coffins were placed next to each other. A beggar told us that the coffins were put on top of each other in three layers. The crosses are about four feet apart. The inscriptions are in pencil, about who is buried, sometimes with a comment: 'His life was i «; years and 6 months.' Or 'His life was 55 years.' 'Lord, accept his spirit in peace.' 'Those that suffered at Khodynka field.'… 'Thy grievous path of agony came on thee unawares, The Lord has liberated thee from all thy grief and cares.' The next day Anton went home to Melikhovo, while Suvorin went north, to his villa on the Volga at Maksatikha. Suvorin had, a fortnight later, nightmares of corpses. Anton said little about it, but Vagankovo cemetery and Khodynka affected him profoundly. He stopped writing for a fortnight after hearing the news of the disaster and did not begin work on 'My Life' again until 6 June. After his walk among the mass graves with Suvorin he did not write a letter for five days.

Khodynka swept Lika from Chekhov's mind. She sent a furious note, outraged that he had passed Podolsk on 30 May and not taken her with him to the Hotel Dresden: 'Very nice of you, Anton, to send a postcard and let me know that you've steamed past! The fact that you stayed in Suvorin's hotel room is of absolutely no interest to

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me…' Anton alleged that he had never received her angry response, though it was neatly filed away in his archive at the end of the year, and pleaded with her 'to leave together for Moscow on the 15th or 16th and have dinner together.' This made Lika relent, and she agreed to meet him once again on the Moscow train. Again, Anton was not there, and she showered him with reproaches. She then received another invitation from Anton, who made it clear that a visit to the optician was the most pressing reason for him to travel to Moscow. Missed trains, like muddy roads, seemed sufficient cause for mutual affection to collapse again into reproaches and irony.

Lika replied angrily, and Chekhov put off his journey to Moscow by a day and arranged to meet Lika for lunch with Viktor Goltsev at Russian Thought. Now Viktor Goltsev was to play the same role in Anton's relations with Lika as Potapenko had, becoming a second string, just as Elena Shavrova was to Chekhov. Anton's next letter to Lika ended with a telling remark which applied to his relations with both women: 'I can't tie up and untie my affairs any more easily than I can tie a necktie.' The words 'tie up' and 'untie', zaviazyvat' and razviazyvat'connect Chekhov's love life to his writing: they also mean 'to devise a plot' and 'to devise the end of the plot'.

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The Consecration of the School June-August 1896 ANTON SAW LIKA IN Moscow and also commissioned a bell tower for Melikhovo church; building was to begin once Talezh school was finished. He saw an optician who cured his headaches: Anton's short-sighted right eye had been strained by the long-sighted left: a pince-nez put the finishing touch to Anton's image. Other prescriptions, electric shocks, arsenic and sea-bathing, were ignored.

In July Elena Shavrova departed south for the summer and autumn, hurling an affectionate letter to Anton out of the Moscow-Kharkov mail train as it steamed through Lopasnia: Anton found her arch catch phrases Chi lo sa? and Fatalite irritating. He and Lika were for the time being in harmony: she came for five days to Melikhovo. No rival was in sight or in touch.

Summer visitors to Melikhovo spent their time out of doors: Ezhov came on a bicycle; the Konovitsers brought Dunia's brother, Dmitri, another pioneer cyclist. Olga Kundasova, again patient and assistant in Iakovenko's clinic, disturbed the peace. Depression made her look, Chekhov told Suvorin, 'as if she'd been a year in solitary confinement'. At the end of June Masha returned from the Lintvariovs and Evgenia came back from Moscow: the household ran smoothly. Misha and Olga stayed in the annexe where The Seagull had been written. There were only routine distractions: a neighbour's cows in Chekhov's woods; dysentery in a nearby village.

To his editor, Lugovoi,14 Chekhov sent the first third of 'My Life': 'a rough-hewn wooden structure which I'll plaster and paint when I finish the building'. Lugovoi liked the manuscript and tucked it away in Adolf Marx's fireproof safe. As well as Marx's generous fee came more bounty: Suvorin sent Anton a three-month railway pass. Anton paid his mortgage interest and dreamed of journeys. In Petersburg, however, his affairs were going less smoothly. The censors were

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Mil I l ê. è I in I HE SEAGULL baulking at The Seagull. Sazonova noted (3 June): 'Chekhov is melancholic. Suvorin too. The former is upset because of the play, the other is complaining of weakness and old age.' Potapenko, however, was optimistic, for the censor Litvinov, a crony of Suvorin's, was well disposed towards Chekhov. Unfortunately, Potapenko was not on the spot: Hotel Fassman. Dear Antonio! As you can see, I've ended up in Karlsbad, my aim being to rid my liver of stones etc., etc. A little bit of a problem with your Seagull. Contrary to all expectation, it has got caught in the nets of the censorship, but not badly, so it can be rescued. The whole trouble is that your decadent has a lax attitude to his mother's love life, which the censor's rules don't allow. You'll have to insert a scene from Hamlet: 'A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother/As kill a king and marry with his brother.'… Actually, we'll get out of it more easily. Litvinov says the whole thing can be put right in 10 minutes. Potapenko wanted Anton to tour Germany with him and his friend - it would be cheap and, Potapenko swore by his liver, enjoyable -but Anton would never travel with Potapenko again. Potapenko did not get back to Petersburg and the censor until late July. By then Litvinov had returned the play to Chekhov with blue pencil marks where he wanted changes. Reluctantly, Chekhov made Treplev more indignant about his mother's liaison with Trigorin, and deleted a scene where Dr Dorn is revealed to be Masha Shamraeva's father. Potapenko belatedly took up the baton: I don't know what's happened to your Seagull. Have you done anything about it? Tomorrow I'll go and see Litvinov… There are rumours that literature is to be abolished; so we shan't need censors… Lavrov will have a stake put up him, Goltsev will have his tongue cut out. Anton was beginning to be cast down by the antagonism of Petersburg to his work. His mood was worsened by a letter from Isaak Levitan, in the throes of manic depression, staying in the appropriately named resort of Serdobol [Heartache] on the Gulf of Finland: The rocks here are smoothed by the ice age… Ages, the sense of the word is simply tragic… Billions of people have drowned and

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will drown. We are Don-Quixotes… tell me in all honesty, it's stupid, isn't it!! Yours - what a senseless word - no, just Levitan. Anton's reply, if any, is not extant, but his own depression is clear in a letter he wrote to Aleksei Kiseliov: I live out my years as a bachelor, 'We pluck a day of love like a flower.' I can't drink more than three glasses of vodka. I've stopped smoking. He became restless. On 20 July, for the fourth time in seven months, Anton left Melikhovo to see Suvorin. He gave no reason for such a hasty trek. Suvorin's country house in Maksatikha, where the Mologa and the Volchina rivers meet, was reached by train to Iaroslavl and then river boat. Did Anton go for the fishing, or for counselling on his personal, theatrical or financial affairs? Had he intended to travel further north, to console Levitan? Petersburg was uninviting, for Alek-sandr had become demented after his drunken binge in Kiev, although he was writing articles on the care of the insane. He complained to Anton: 'The old woman Gaga is wasting away… I have an abscess between my cheek and my gum. We've got a puppy named Saltpetre, it messes.' Natalia's postscript asked why Chekhov had 'forgotten his poor relatives'.

On Anton's return to Melikhovo he found that Lika's behaviour changed. Neither affectionate nor angry, she wrote in a scrawl that betokened emotional disarray, heralding her arrival, hinting that she had found a new lover: 'Viktor Goltsev and I will come on Saturday for the consecration of the school. I'm not yet fully infected; when I kiss you I shan't infect you.'

The consecration of the school galvanized everyone. Anton spent a whole day at council meetings in Serpukhov. He could stand the formalities only because he was leaving next month to see Suvorin in the Crimea. He was besieged by mad patients. One of the Tolokonni-kovs, whose factories polluted the village of Ugriumovo [Sullen], kept a female relative on a chain to stop her abusive shrieking: for weeks Anton searched for a hospital to take her.15 On the eve of the consecration, a peasant showed violent melancholia con delirio.

Aleksandr did not come to the consecration: Dr Iakovenko and Olga Kundasova represented the mentally unstable. The occasion was SO alcoholic that guests were immobilized for two days at Melikhovo

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with hangovers. The servants made merry, except for Roman, whose baby son had died. The consecration was so moving that Chekhov transmuted it into an episode of 'My Life'. Even Pavel's thirst for ceremony was satisfied: 'The village elders offered the school governor bread and salt, an icon of the Redeemer and speeches of thanks. Cherevin the manager offered Masha a bouquet. Girl choristers sang May you live many years' Chekhov himself made a rare diary entry: 4 August. The peasants from Talezh, Bershovo, Dubechnia and Shiolkovo offered me four loaves, an icon, two silver salt cellars. The peasant Postnov from Shiolkovo made a speech. Next came the consecration of the bell tower. (Anton had the church painted orange.)

'My Life' was sent to The Cornfield - Til put the sweetening in and polish it up in proof form,' he told Lugovoi. He sent the last draft of The Seagull for Potapenko to take over the next hurdle. The Moscow News of the Day was advertising the play - 'Chekhov's Seagull flies towards us,/ Fly, my darling, fly to us/ To our deserted shores!' wrote the poetaster Lolo Munshtein. Anton cringed. It was time to leave.

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Night on a Bare Mountain August-September 1896 ANTON WANTED to make the best use of the rail pass Suvorin had given him. He decided first to visit Taganrog, and end up in Feodosia with Suvorin, but was vague about the itinerary. He told only his sister that he would go to Kislovodsk, a spa in the north Caucasus. He teased Potapenko: 'I'll be in Feodosia, I'll make ë pass at your first wife' - for Potapenko, saddled with alimony, wanted a pretext for divorce. Potapenko could not, however, fathom Anton's motives; 'What mad idea to go to Feodosia? It's utter horror! Do you really want to write a novel about the life of cretins!… I hear you have some convict's travel warrant.' On 23 August 1896, a lew days after Anton left, Potapenko wrote to him about the The Seagull, literary adventures and liver stones. He began: 'And where you've vanished to, nobody knows. You gave me a Feodosia address, but I think you've gone to the Caucasus.' The frankest of men, Potapenko suspected from Anton's evasions that he had abducted Lika.

Three clues might point to a journey with Lika. Firstly, the route that Chekhov took was one that Lika had proposed for a journey four years ago. Secondly, Lika vanished at the same time as Chekhov. Thirdly, Lika's letters that autumn would suggest that Anton had promised her marriage exactly a year after his arrival in the spa of Kislovodsk. Yet would Anton, who valued privacy so much, have provoked gossip by taking a woman as attractive and alluring as Lika to his birthplace and then to a fashionable mountain spa? And does a promise of 'mutual bliss', as Anton had put it, have to be sealed with a preliminary honeymoon? In any case, would Lika have gone to Feodosia? She knew that Suvorin advised Anton not to marry her, and panicked at the thought of meeting him.

Where did Lika vanish to? On 19 August Chekhov left Melikhovo with Lika and her friend Varia Eberle for Moscow, where Anton

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would catch the express train south. Even Granny Ioganson was nonplussed. She had no news of Lika until 5 September, after which Lika reappeared in Podolsk, between Melikhovo and Moscow: 5 September: They've brought Christina and the nanny. 6 September: How could Lika send [the baby's] things off in such a rush? Now the child has no clean linen, it's terribly annoying. 16 September: Lika still hasn't moved from Podolsk, I am so disappointed, as I expected to see her in Pokrovskoe tomorrow.16 Nobody in Kislovodsk or Taganrog saw Lika; Anton spent his time in both places with male friends. If Lika disappeared with any man, it was probably not Anton, but Viktor Goltsev. Maybe the date, 1 September 1897, for 'mutual bliss' was set before Anton's departure south, or after his return.17

Anton spent a day or two in Taganrog, seeing cousins and the library, avoiding admirers. He wrote no letters from his birthplace, and almost nothing until his holiday ended. He sent instructions: Masha was to buy timber for a new school at Novosiolki, Potapenko was to act for The Seagull. His diary is terse: In Rostov I had supper with my old schoolmate, Lev Volkenshtein… At General Safonov's funeral in Kislovodsk I met A. I. Chuprov, then A. N. Veselovsky in the park.'8 On the 28th went hunting with Baron Steingel, spending the night on Mt Bermamyt; cold and a very strong wind… To cousin George in Taganrog Chekhov revealed only that he had met friends in Kislovodsk 'as idle as himself.' Kleopatra Karatygina recalls stumbling on Anton in Kislovodsk: hot and irritable, he was cajoled into posing for a photograph. Anton found relief from the heat by going on a boar hunt on Mount Bermamyt with a man who should have known better, his colleague Dr Obolonsky, who was next to appear in Anton's life when catastrophe struck. Mount Bermamyt is a remarkable place for climbers and hunters, but no careful doctor would let a tubercular patient spend a night there. The guide books of the time warned: 8559 ft above sea level, 20 miles from Kislovodsk… Bermamyt is a virtually bare rock usually swept by winds blowing off Mt Elbrus. There are ruins of a Tatar village, but no protection from rain and

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wind… People travel to Bermamyt to watch the sun rise… It is always cold on Bermamyt and snow falls even in August and the temperature falls well below zero… The northeast winds that prevail at this time often strengthen at Bermamyt to hurricane level… It is especially important not to chill the stomach: it should be wrapped in a woollen cummerbund.19 The trip to Mount Bermamyt undoubtedly shortened Anton's life.

A day or two later, Anton made for the warmth of the Black Sea. Reaching Novorossiisk, where his brother Alexandr had been so unhappy, Anton was only a night's sailing from Feodosia. Suvorin had waited for him for eleven days. The ten days that Chekhov spent with Suvorin, regardless of his 'cretinous' sons, he would call the 'one bright spell' in 1895 and 1896. The fact that he wrote no letters is evidence of his bliss, not distress. He and Suvorin were more relaxed than ever in each other's company, even though - or perhaps because - Suvorin now deferred more to Anton, than Anton to Suvorin, and Anton saw clearly the flaws in Suvorin's character. On 22 August,it dinner with Shcheglov, Suvorin conceded: 'Chekhov is a man of flint and a cruel talent with his harsh objectivity. He's spoilt, his antOUt propre is enormous.' The same summer Chekhov told Shcheglov: 'I'm very fond of Suvorin, very, but, you know, Jean, sometimes at grave moments in life those with no strength of character are worse than evildoers.'20

Iavorskaia's marriage to the young Prince Bariatinsky was the topic of the day. Both were already married, and needed the Tsar's consent. The prince's mother was horrified, but the Bariatinsky sons needed Iavorskaia's earnings. Moreover, Bariatinsky, a budding writer, wanted a mascot. lavorskaia broke with Tania. Suvorin's diary echoes what he told Anton, who still had an interest in both women: 5 August. Shchepkina-Kupernik… was having lunch with lavorskaia and her husband Bariatinsky, the conversation touched on these two ladies' past, which there was so much gossip about. 'No smoke without fire,' said Tania… After lunch Iavorskaia-Bariatinskaia flew at Tania in front of her maid, speaking in French, accused her of gossiping and so on…'My husband is in hysterics,' she said… 'He doesn't want to see you again, and you must leave right now.' - 'But I'm just wearing a blouse, let me change.' - 'You can change, but that's all.' Tania left without even changing. She borrowed 500

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roubles from me and is off to attend lectures in Lausanne. She is very upset. Suvorin noted Anton's sigh at the mention of Iavorskaia, but Anton was not seriously affected by her marriage. He was content to pass the warm Crimean days drinking, chatting in the sun, by the water. Suvorin's chief'cretin', as Potapenko called him, Aleksei the Dauphin, was elsewhere, usurping his father's power. Moscow and Melikhovo left Anton in peace: he merely read the proofs for the first third of 'My Life'. A few telegrams arrived from Petersburg. Potapenko had done Anton a final favour (in an act of ineffective benevolence or effective revenge), propelling The Seagull through the Imperial Theatre Committee. Unfortunately the play was given to the theatre least suited to Chekhov, the Aleksandrinsky theatre with its Sarah Bernhardt techniques, and its repertoire of French farce. The Seagull was to be directed by Evtikhi Karpov, who was inexperienced, unimaginative and cocksure. Worse, the first performance was set for Levkeeva's benefit night on 17 October. Levkeeva, a comedienne, would find in the heroine of The Seagull only a satire on her own career as an actress, and her followers would be outraged. The one good omen was that Potapenko and Karpov had cast some fine actors, notably Savina and Davydov, and the still unknown Vera Komissar-zhevskaia.

Suvorin, now sixty-two years old, was depressed as Anton left Feodosia: The earlier you are born the sooner you die. Today Chekhov said: 'Aleksei and I will die in the 20th century.' - 'You may, but for sure I'll die in the 19th,' I said. - 'How do you know?' - 'I'm utterly certain, in the 19th. It's not hard to see, when every year you get worse.' Unable to shake Suvorin's pessimism, Anton telegraphed Masha to have Roman meet the local train from Serpukhov with a coat and galoshes, and left the Crimea where the weather had turned as bitter as his host's mood. Suvorin accompanied him, and they stayed a day in Kharkov to watch a performance of Griboedov's Woe from Wit. On 17 September 1896 Anton stepped out in sunshine at Lopasnia. The burden of running Melikhovo had fallen on Masha and Pavel. She had bought four magnificent beams for the new school. Pavel had the

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1896

schoolteacher paper the annexe for Antosha's return, and then his own room. Four weeks in charge had restored Pavel's patriarchal confidence. He told Misha: We expected you for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, you had two government holidays, you could have come, but you refused to accept our hospitality and see us. Mother baked an excellent pie, sturgeon grisde with mustard oil, which you would have liked… For the cattle we made the same 40 tons of hay as last year, that's not enough. Mariushka only bothers Antosha with her ducklings and chickens, he will build a run in the cattle yard for the fowls, but she hatches them in her kitchen and feeds them there, they grow up and get into the garden. Our summer is still magnificent… All summer we have been eating mushrooms fried in sour cream. The clock goes well, on time and strikes every five minutes. The weathercock on the annexe spun nicely, but a storm has shaken it to bits. Chekhov had handed 'My Life' over to the censor, who baulked at the narrator's disrespect for a provincial governor and at the author having a general's widow take a drunken lover. The editors talked the censor round, and Anton was free of his story and of The Seagull; Suvorin had the script for the play and the Imperial Theatre Committee passed it for performance, albeit with condescension: the 'symbolism' or 'Ibsenism'… has an unpleasant effect… If that seagull weren't there the comedy would not change in the slightest… We cannot pass… quite unnecessary characterization, such as Masha taking snuff and drinking vodka… some scenes seem to be thrown onto paper haphazardly wim no proper connection to the whole, without dramatic consequentiality.21 The Imperial Theatre Committee represented Petersburg attitudes and made it clear how the city would receive the play. Chekhov nevertheless went ahead.

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Fiasco October 1896 THE GLOW of Feodosia faded slowly. 'I'm overwhelmed by laziness. I was terribly spoiled in Feodosia,' Anton told Suvorin. He bought tulip bulbs, inspected his schools, treated his patients, agitated for a paved road from the station to the river Liutorka and sent Dr Obolon-sky a book 'in memory of the boar we killed on Mount Bermamut'. Lika reappeared the following week. Whatever had happened that August, her attitude to Anton was cooler. Letters stopped, and she came with a male companion (this time, the flautist Ivanenko). The day she arrived death struck Melikhovo: the brightest girl in the village, Dunia, died of a twisted gut. She was buried in the churchyard. Lika always took flight when any tragedy or even tumult struck Anton's household: she left with Ivanenko the next day, not to return, until Anton begged her a month later.

While he was away, Anton had transferred decisions on casting The Seagull from Potapenko to Suvorin and Karpov. Now that Lopasnia telegraph office was open, he sent countless messages to Petersburg, booking tickets and lodging for friends and relatives. Chekhov composed the audience as carefully as Suvorin and Karpov did the cast: the drama in the auditorium was to be as tense as the one on stage.

All summer Anton had helped others by stealth and been found out by accident. He paid half the school fees for a Taganrog boy, Veniamin Evtushevsky, the nephew of Anton's aunt Liudmila, and lobbied publishers to subsidize Dr Diakonov's journal Surgery. The same systematic organization behind the wings is characteristic of his love life and his new writing. To the two last weeks of August 1896, or the two first weeks of September 1896, we can ascribe one of Chekhov's most furtive achievements: rewriting The Wood Demon as Uncle Vania. He cut the cast by half, removing confidants and confi390

OCTOBER 1896

dantes, merging a drunken Don Juan with the saintly conservationist doctor, 'The Wood Demon', to produce a flawed Doctor Astrov. He took out virtually all the music from Tchaikovsky and cut the melodrama; in the new play the lovesick uncle no longer kills himself. Uncle Vania, unlike Uncle Georges, cannot even hit a target at point-blank range. The last act of The Wood Demon with its sentimental reconciliations alfresco is thrown out altogether. Chekhov had finally found 'a new ending'. Idyllic comedy (despite the suicide) is trans formed into bitter 'scenes from country life': the city dwellers leave their country relatives devastated by their wrecked lives. Anton added just one new character, the nanny Marina, the one religious believer in the household, the keeper of its awful secrets. Why was Chekhov so secretive about his new play, a work of genius that he had created out of a work he had disowned? When publishers or actors appealed to Chekhov to let them have The Wood Demon, the very mention ol which was painful to him, Anton told nobody that he was revising it In late autumn he baldly announced to Suvorin the existence ol '/ hnlr Vania, which nobody knows about'.22

On 1 October Anton set off for Petersburg in an even more cynical frame of mind about the city's theatres after reading the August issue of The Theatregoer, where a certain S. T. pointed out that the dire tOI '?• mistress was always a lead actress in productions. 'From this contri bution, written frankly and in detail, I learnt that Karpov is living with Kholmskaia,' Chekhov told Suvorin.

First Anton had a week's work in Moscow. A new project, encouraged by Suvorin, preoccupied him. He wanted to take advantage of new press laws to become joint editor, with Viktor Goltsev, of a liberal newspaper. It says much for Goltsev that Anton took this, his last collaboration, so far. Anton's room at the Great Moscow was a rallying point for all his contacts. He had a loyal ally, the young corridor footman Semion Bychkov: I'd been a factory worker, a yard man, worked in a puppet theatre, in pantomime and done everything… Of all the people staying at the hotel only Anton Chekhov spoke to me simply, man-to-man, without pride, with none of that looking down on you. And he gave me his writings, I started reading and that minute a new light illuminated me… 'Why,' I said, 'Mr Chekhov, do you live alone? You ought to get married.' 'How could I, much as I'd like to, Wi

THE FLIGHT OF THE SEAGULL

Semion,' he laughed, 'I never get any time! My public wears me out.'… I loved him fervently with all my soul.23 Semion Bychkov had his work cut out as Anton's social secretary. A number of women - Tania, Lika, Shavrova, Kundasova - wanted to be sure of seeing Anton alone in his room. Anton begged Kundasova 'meet me on very urgent business' there. Tania, packing her bags for exile, asked to see Anton before she left. There is until mid October no record of Lika's whereabouts.

Arriving in Petersburg, on Wednesday 9 October, after two days, presumably full of discussions of which we know nothing, Anton fell into the arms of the Suvorins. He handed over the manuscript of his Plays, including Uncle Vania, for Suvorin's printers and, as in January, began a round of theatrical visits. To the cast's dismay, Anton missed their first reading of The Seagull, just nine days before the first performance. Neither did Savina, who was to play Nina the 'Seagull', turn up to that reading. The first night was just nine days off. Lev-keeva, whose benefit night it would be, came to listen, glad that she would not be acting in so glum a piece. For a while Levkeeva had thought she might play Masha. The cast was horrified and she withdrew. On the 9th Anton missed the first rehearsal (he had gone instead with Suvorin to watch Vera Komissarzhevskaia act).24 'Never had there been such a shambles in our ant hill,' recalled Maria Chitau, who now played Masha.25

Anton, anxious to prepare the audience, not the cast, contacted Potapenko: 'I need to see you. We have business [Chekhov's code for anything embarrassing]… Would you like to come and see me around midnight? We need to talk in confidence.' The business in hand is clear from Chekhov's note to Masha, due to arrive for the first performance: I've been to see Potapenko. He's in a new flat, which he pays 1900 roubles a year for. He has a fine photo of Maria [his second wife] on his desk. This person never leaves his side; she is happy, brazenly so. He has aged, he doesn't sing or drink and is boring. He will be at The Seagull with his whole family and he may happen to have a box next to our box, and then Lika will have a very bad time… The play will not be a sensation, it will be dismal. Generally my mood is bad. I'll send you the money for the journey today or

OCTOBER 1896

tomorrow, but I advise you not to come. If you decide to come alone without Lika, then telegraph Coming… Anton felt as diffident about the play as about Lika, but Lika came under her own steam, a day before Masha. Anton succeeded in keeping the Potapenkos away until the second performance, to lower the tension in the Chekhovs' and Suvorins' box, where Lika would have to endure sitting with Suvorin.

Anton was ill, and confessed to Suvorin that he had coughed blood again. Nevertheless, he went to examine Grigorovich, for whom he still felt reverence and gratitude. Grigorovich, the last survivor of the first 'realists', was mortally ill. Suvorin recorded: 'He is a dying man, no doubt. Chekhov talked to him about his illness and, to judge by the medicines he is taking, thinks he has cancer and that he will soon die… Actually, I have the same trouble in my mouth.'

As in 1889 after Kolia's death, Anton's sexual desire surged after contact with the grave. Intriguing fragments from Potapenko to Anion survive. The first runs: 'Thanks, but alas! I can't [àäà/ñ?)! hmoir, dictation from home.' The second includes the line: 'I stiririidn.1 certain actress to you in her entirety.' Potapenko was formally ï.UP. ferring to Anton Liudmila Ozerova; Anton showed interest not only in Liudmila Ozerova, but in the actress Daria Musina-Pushkina, with whom he had been close five years before: she responded eagerly. I lc attended the second rehearsal of The Seagull, distressed after seeing (Irigorovich, uneasy after a dream that he was being forcibly married to a woman he disliked, a dream natural enough after all the attempts friends in Petersburg had made over the years to marry him off.

Just six days before the first night, the forty-two-year-old Savina refused to act the eighteen-year-old 'Seagull'; the next day the role was given to Vera Komissarzhevskaia, at thirty-two a more plausible /eune naive. Actresses argued over whether Savina could now play Masha. Savina withdrew in a huff. Anton was unhappy with Karpov's staging, which was using sets meant for bourgeois farces and quite unsuited to Chekhov's scenes in a dilapidated country estate.

Bad omens did not spoil the rehearsal Anton attended with Potapenko on 14 October in the theatre. Anton began to trust the cast, and was impressed by Komissarzhevskaia. (Suvorin had thought her dreadful as Klarchen in Sodom's End and neither he nor Chekhov had

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at first shared Karpov's infatuation with her genius.) Komissarzhev-skaia hit on a solution to the play's most intractable monologue, Treplev's symbolist play-within-a-play which Karpov feared would make the audience laugh. Her fine voice hypnotized the listener, as she worked from her lowest alto to a climax and then lowered to inaudibility as 'all lives, completing their sad cycle, perish'. She decided (and Anton was won over by her musicality) to render Treplev's piece not as parody, but as poetry.

The next night, the dress rehearsal was dismal. Wrapped in a white sheet, Komissarzhevskaia looked absurd, and, clearly, Karpov had a bad eye for sets and costumes. Maria Chitau as Masha was lost in a dress meant for the ample Savina. Sazonova was indignant at the way her husband Nikolai was made up for Trigorin: Rehearsal without an author, sets and one actor missing… Nikolai protected Komissarzhevskaia from Karpov who is so inexperienced mat he is making her do her main final scene from the rear wings, blocking her with a table… when I told Karpov that the play was under-rehearsed, he left… Chekhov was invited [to dinner] but didn't come. The next day, 17 October 1896, Lika arrived, but did not join Anton, Suvorin and Potapenko at the full dress rehearsal. The cast were tired by ten days' work. Chekhov sensed that the play was doomed and told Suvorin he wanted to take it off. The morning of the performance Chekhov took Masha to Lika's room in the Angleterre. Forty years later, Masha recalled her reception: Sullen and stern, Anton met me at the Moscow station. Walking down the platform, coughing, he said: 'The actors don't know their parts. They understand nothing. Their acting is horrible. Only Komissarzhevskaia is good. The play will flop. You shouldn't have come.' Chekhov feared that Potapenko might not stay away and that his wife might attack Lika. He watched the dismal last rehearsal, had his hair cut, and steeled himself.

The first night caused a scandal in the auditorium, the worst that anyone could then recall in a Russian theatre. The play had been put on in the wrong city, in the wrong month, at the wrong theatre, with the wrong cast, and above all before the wrong audience. Many had come to applaud Levkeeva, who was performing two hours later in a

OCTOBER 1896

warhorse of a farce. Others came to vent their dislike of Chekhov and modern drama. Very few at all had any idea at all of what they were going to see. The actors, perturbed, tried to adapt to the audience's mood, but Komissarzhevskaia, the most sensitive of actresses, lost her spirit: her 'Seagull' was earthbound. After Act 1, shuddering, in tears, she ran to Karpov: 'I'm afraid to go on stage… I can't act… I'll run from the theatre.' Karpov forced her back, but the play was lost. All Anton's friends and all the performers in The Seagull that night were shocked in their own ways; all agreed that Petersburg's vindic-liveness had killed the play. Suvorin's and Chekhov's diaries have the same understatement: 'The play was not a success.'

Suvorin concluded that: 'The audience was inattentive, they didn't listen, they chatted, they were bored…' Masha recalled: From the very first minute I sensed the public's indifference and ironic attitude to what was happening on stage. When, later in the act, the curtain rose on the inner stage and Komissar/hevskai.i, who was acting very hesitantly that night, appeared wrapped in a sheet and began her monologue: 'People, lions, eagles, grouse', you could hear open laughter, loud conversations, sometimes hissing, in the audience. I felt cold inside… Finally a real scandal broke out. At the end of Act 1 thin applause was drowned by hissing, whr.il., offensive remarks about the author and the performers… I sat it out in my box to the end. Maria Chitau found Anton sitting in Levkeeva's dressing room. She wrote: [Levkeeva] was looking at him with her bulging eyes, half apologetically, half pityingly, her hands were still. Chekhov sat, his head a little bowed, a lock of hair falling over his brow, his pince-nez sitting crooked on the bridge of his nose… They said nothing. I stood with them in silence. A few seconds passed. Suddenly Chekhov leapt up and rushed out. Even Sazonova, who had found the play depressing and Anton rude, was appalled: The audience was somehow spiteful, they were saying 'The devil knows what this is, boredom, decadence, you wouldn't watch if it were free…' Someone in the stalls declared, 'C'est du Maeterlinck!' At dramatic points people laughed out loud, the rest of the time

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they coughed in a way that was quite indecent… That this piece flopped on a stage where any rubbish is a success speaks for the author. He is too talented and original to strive with mediocrities. Chekhov kept disappearing behind the wings, to Levkeeva's dressing room, and disappeared after the end. Suvorin looked for him but couldn't find him; he was trying to calm down Chekhov's sister who was in the box… Levkeeva's celebrations were as usual, with speeches, gifts, kisses, the audience clapped furiously a mediocre actress after booing our greatest writer after Tolstoy.

Like Suvorin, Leikin was dismayed. He recalled 'Reviewers walked the corridors and the buffet with Schadenfreude and exclaimed "The fall of a talent", "He's written himself out.'"26 As Suvorin, lost for words, left his box, Zinaida Gippius's husband, the novelist Dimitri Merezhkovsky, told him that The Seagull was not clever, because it lacked clarity. Suvorin retorted rudely, and from that moment Zinaida Gippius took charge of the anti-Chekhovian camp.

Karpov retreated to his office. Chekhov entered, his lips blue, his face frozen in a grimace, and said in a barely audible voice, 'The author has flopped.' Anton then vanished into the freezing streets of Petersburg.27

FIFTY-SIX

The Death of Christina

October-November 1896

WHILE THE reviewers scribbled to meet their deadlines, the author wandered the streets. Anton's disappearance caused a commotion. Seven weeks later, he gave vent to his disgust in his diary:

True, I ran out of the theatre, but not until the play was over. I sat out two or three acts in Levkeeva's dressing room… Fat actresses, in the dressing room, talked to officials in respectful buoyant tones, flattering them… serfs visited by their masters.

While Levkeeva reclined on her laurels, Chekhov walked to the Peripheral Canal; back in the centre of Petersburg, he found Romanov's restaurant still open and ordered supper. Perturbed, Aleksandr called (»n the Suvorins in search of his brother. Then Anton walked back to Suvorin's house, spoke to nobody, went to bed and pulled the blanket over his head. Masha waited for two hours in silence with Lika at the Angleterre; then Aleksandr rang. Neither he, Potapenko nor Suvorin had seen Anton since Act 2. At 1.00 a.m. Masha took a cab to the Suvorins:

It was dark and only miles away, after a whole enfilade of rooms did a light shine through the open doors. I went towards the light. There I saw Anna, Suvorin's wife, sitting alone with her hair down. The whole setting, darkness, an empty flat, depressed my mood still further. 'Anna, where can my brother be?' I asked her. Apparently trying to distract and calm me, she started chatting about trivia, about actors and writers. After a while Suvorin appeared and started to tell me about die changes and reworkings he thought were necessary to make the play a success in the future. But I was in no mood to listen to this and just asked him to find my brother. Then Suvorin went off and quickly came back in a cheerful mood. 'Well, you can calm down. Your brother is back, he's lying under a blanket, but he won't see anybody and refused to talk to me.'

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Through the blanket Suvorin and Anton exchanged words. Suvorin reached for the light switch. 'I beg you, don't turn the light on,' Anton shouted. 'I don't want to see anyone. I'll tell you just one thing: you can call me [a very coarse word, says Anna] if I ever write anything for the stage again.' 'Where have you been?' - 'Walking the streets, sitting. I couldn't just say to hell with that production. If I live another 700 years, I won't let the theatre have another play.'28 Anton said he would take the first train out of Petersburg: 'Please don't try and stop me.' Suvorin told Anton that the play did have faults: 'Chekhov is very proud, and when I let him know my impressions, he listened with impatience. He couldn't take this failure without deep upset. I very much regret that I didn't go to the rehearsals.'

Confident of the play's triumph, Suvorin had written his review in advance; now he had to compose new copy. Then he left a letter by Chekhov's bed.

While Anton slept, Lidia Avilova tossed and turned. Unlike Lika, she had had no inkling mat her life would be publicly enacted. She watched the Seagull hand Trigorin the same silver medal on a chain that she had inscribed and given to Anton, but the page and the line numbers no longer referred to Chekhov's lines 'If you need my life, come and take it.' At home, she picked up the Chekhov volume from which she had encrypted her message. The new message made no sense. Only in the early hours of the morning did she decide he might have encoded one of her own books of stories. She found the page and line: they now, she claims, gave the message 'Young ladies should not go to balls.'29 Rebuffed, she went back to bed.

Modest Tchaikovsky had been in the audience: 'It is many years since the stage last gave me such pleasure and the audience gave me such unhappiness as on Levkeeva's benefit night,' he wrote to Suvorin.30 Elena Shavrova, the youngest of Chekhov's admirers, had also been there; profoundly shaken both by the play and by its reception, she consoled her cher maitre: All I know is that it was amazement, ecstasy, intense interest and at times sweet and awesome suffering (the monologue of the World Soul) and pity and compassion for them, the characters in the play - the pity you feel only for real, live people. The Seagull is so good, so touching.31

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Shavrova would soon give her cher maitre a physical token of her compassion.

In mid morning Chekhov got up, not waking Suvorin or his wife, rang Potapenko, wrote a note for Masha, a letter to Suvorin and one to Misha in Iaroslavl and then left the house. Masha's note ran: I'm leaving for Melikhovo… I shall be there by two p.m. [tomorrow]. What happened yesterday has not stricken me or embittered me very much, because the rehearsals prepared me for it - and I don't feel all that bad. When you come to Melikhovo, bring Lika with you. The letter to Suvorin ended: 'Hold up the printing of the plays. I shan't ever forget last night, but I slept well and am leaving in a very tolerable mood. Write to me.' To Misha, Anton made fewer pretences: The play has flopped and failed sensationally. There was a heavy tension of misunderstanding and disgrace in the theatre. The acting was abominable, stupid. The moral is: don't write plays. Nevertheless I'm still alive, healthy and in perfect eupepsia. Your Daddy Chekhov. Before leaving the Suvorins, and without asking, Anton took from the library the last three issues of The European Herald, in which a long essay by Sokolov, 'At Home', presented a shattering picture of the miseries of the Russian peasant. 'At Home' was to be one of the progenitors of Chekhov's harsh post-Seagull prose.

Accompanied by Potapenko and Vasili, Suvorin's manservant, who was, like Emilie the governess, as much Anton's follower as his master's, Chekhov went to the station. He would not wait for the overnight sleeper. He showed his rail pass and took the first train to Moscow, the slow noon goods and passenger train. After wandering at night in an icy city, he sat for a day and a night in an ill-heated train. The effect on his lungs would soon be apparent. As the train trundled the 440 miles to Moscow, Chekhov took out Aleksandr's note. It was to be the only time that Aleksandr praised Anton's serious plays: the gesture brought them closer: I got to know your Seagull tonight in the theatre for the first time; it is a wonderful, excellent play, full of deep psychology, thoughtful and heart-rending. I shake your hand firmly and with delight.

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On the back of Aleksandr's note Anton drafted a placatory letter to Anna Suvorina: Dear Anna, I left without saying goodbye. Are you angry? The fact is that after the performance my friends were very upset; someone was looking for me in Potapenko's flat after i a.m., they searched the Moscow station for me… It's touching, but unendurable. In fact I'd decided mat I'd leave the next day regardless whether it was a success or a failure. The sound of glory overwhelms me: I left the next day even after Ivanov. So I felt an irresistible urge to run, and it would have been impossible to get downstairs and say goodbye to you without giving in to your charm and hospitality and staying on. I kiss your hand firmly, in the hope of forgiveness. Remember your motto! I've had my hair cut and now look like Apollo. Imagine, I think I'm in love. Though the motto on Anna Suvorina's writing paper was 'Com-prendre - pardonner', Anton was cautious when he wrote to her, and when he copied out his draft letter, he excised the phrases about being in love. This love was not Lika, but Liudmila Ozerova.

On the train Anton's mind was soon embroiled in the misery of peasants. The journals he had taken from Suvorin led him to write to the author for an offprint. He arrived in Moscow before dawn on 19 October 1896 and got into the last third-class non-smoking carriage of the first train to Melikbovo. At 8 a.m. he stepped out of the train, leaving behind his dressing gown and bed linen. (The station master retrieved them for him the same day.) Melikhovo provided opportunities to forget. On Sunday drunken peasants caroused in the Chekhov kitchen: Aniuta Naryshkina, betrothed by her father against her will in exchange for the vodka the Melikhovo men were drinking, was being married. Sick peasants had gathered in the three weeks that Anton was away. A three-day council meeting in Serpukhov, to thank Chekhov for his school building and to promise him a new road from Lopasnia, took up the end of October. Anton planned a reference library for Taganrog. 'Peasants', the first work for four years purged of personal material, began to obsess him: he tried (for his command of French was inadequate) to have Vignier d'Octon's Le Paysan dans la litterature franqaise published in Russian.

Meanwhile Suvorin was taking steps to salvage The Seagull. He and Karpov made cuts and changes so that the play would be less

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provocative. The next night a full house applauded wildly, although of the actors only Komissarzhevskaia was inspired. The intelligentsia, rather than high society, were watching, and The Seagull revived, although the older actors still felt half-hearted. In Suvorin's revision it was performed again on the 24th, 28th and on 5 November, to full houses. Then it was dropped from the repertoire.

Anton ignored reviews, but friends kept him informed. Sympathy was hard to endure, especially Suvorin's frank insistence that Anton had to take responsibility and that he lacked stage experience. Leikin (still smarting because Chekhov had not called on him on this visit to Petersburg) blew hot and cold about The Seagull in a sketch in Fragments, in a letter to Chekhov and in his diary, which runs: If Chekhov gave this play to any run-of-the-mill dramatist the latter would pump it full of effective banalities and cliches and make it a pleasing play… If the play really is a flop, that's no reason to knock Chekhov off his writer's pedestal. Look at Zola's plays. Zina Kholmskaia's consort, Kugel, reviewer for The Petersburg Newspaper (but two years later the most perceptive Chekhovian critic in the city), was not unbiased. He mocked Chekhov with questions: 'Why is the writer Trigorin living with an ageing actress? Why do they play lotto and drink beer on stage? How can a young girl take snuff and drink vodka?'32 Kugel (whom Chekhov compared as a writer to 'a pretty woman with bad breath') shrewdly compared Chekhov's use of recurrent images and phrases, Leitmotive, to Wagner's; unfortunately, Kugel loathed Wagner and misunderstood Chekhov. Kugel was undermined on his own paper. Avilova forgave Anton for flaunting her medallion and, as the editor's sister-in-law, was allowed to defend The Seagull and its author in the same paper: 'They say The Seagull is "no play". Then look at a "no play" on the stage. There are plenty of plays.'

Praise for the play grew louder. The second performance attracted Chekhov's admirers. Potapenko sent an exultant telegram and Komissarzhevskaia herself, not easily swayed by applause, wrote ecstatically to Anton: I'm just back from the theatre. Anton, darling, we've won! Sheer wholehearted success, as it should have been and had to be. How I

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want to see you right now, I want even more for you to be here, hearing the unanimous shout of 'Author!' Your Seagull, no, ours, for my soul has fused with her, lives, suffers and believes so ardently that it will make many others believe.33 Lavrov and Goltsev begged Anton to let Russian Thought publish the play. Chekhov was regaining faith in himself as a dramatist when Leikin, as snide as he was supportive, wrote that he had remonstrated with Kugel and his editor: 'You have a few true friends in Petersburg.' The difference between 'few' and 'a few' in Russian is just an inaudible gap between two words, ne mnogo or nemnogo.

Masha and Lika took the overnight express and arrived in Meli-khovo only a little later than Anton. Without a hint of resentment at what Anton had done to her, Lika stayed for three days and nursed him through what he called flu. She was rewarded by renewed affection. Then, reassured that Anton was not going to hang himself, Lika left with Masha, carrying her reward, a tan dachshund puppy. Anton took up the cudgels, angrily dismissing Suvorin's taunt that he had fled like a coward. To Leikin he complained that he had a cough and fever - but never mentioned The Seagull. Tatiana Tolstaia invited him to Iasnaia Poliana, but Lika's invitation of 25 October excited him more: Take the express to Moscow, it has a restaurant car and you can eat all the way… I've seen Goltsev, he has solemnly announced to me mat his illegitimate son, Boris, has been born. He is happy, apparently, that he can still father a baby. Though he puts it on a bit, saying he's too old and so on. So 'certain men' could take a lesson from him… I cross each day out in tiie calendar, and there are 310 days left before my bliss!

Chekhov read the warning. Goltsev's child by his secretary (as proud as the father) was the talk of Moscow; Anton even envied Goltsev: 'for at his age I shan't be capable', he told his friend, the dramatist Nemirovich-Danchenko. Lika's mention of Goltsev, as of Levitan five years and Potapenko three years before, was not casual. Nor was the reference to 'certain men'. And could 'bliss' be anything except a date for marriage, or at least commitment? The word provoked Anton to retract, in words as cruel as any of his panic responses to Lika's emotional demands:

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1896

Darling Lika, You write that the hour of our bliss will come in 310 days. Very glad, but couldn't this bliss be put off for another two or three years? I'm so afraid! I enclose a sketch for a medal which I mean to offer you. If you like it, write and tell me and I'll order it from Khlebnikov [the jeweller]. The design for the medal is inscribed: CATALOGUE OF PLAYS BY

MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY OF RUSSIAN DRAMATIC WRITERS

1 Hoo edition, Page 73, line 1. Lika decoded a title: Ignati the Idiot, HI Unexpected Madness. Ignati Potapenko, the father of her child, was I lie last name Lika wanted to recall. All hope of bliss crushed, she went to Granny and Christina and answered Anton: I low bliss frightened you! I so much suspect you think that Sofia [Kuvshinnikova] will prove right and I shan't have the patience to wait three years for you, which is why you offer three years. I am stuck for reasons beyond my control in Tver province and have no hope of being in Moscow before the middle of next week. Although it's real winter here, the Hundred Dachshunds haven't frozen and send their greetings.

I like the medal, but I think with your usual meanness you will never give it to me. I like it in all respects, even its edifying content, and above all, I am moved by your fondness and love of 'your friends'. That really is touching… You don't seem to know that I am collecting your letters to sell and keep me in my old age! And Sapper [Goltsev's nickname] is really a very good man! He is better than you and treats people better than you do!… You can stay with me without fear. I shan't allow myself any liberties, just because I'm afraid of proof that there will never be bliss… Goodbye. Your [Ariadna crossed out] twice rejected, etc. L. Mizinova… Yes, everyone here says that The Seagull is borrowed from my life as well [as Ariadna], and, what's more, that you did a good job on someone else [Potapenko] too! Anton was only a little abashed. He told Goltsev on 7 November that he would see him and Lika in Moscow. Elena Shavrova had also moved to Moscow. On the day he wrote to Lika, Anton, grateful 'for the healing balsam on authorial wounds', sent an affectionate letter to Elena: she had sent him a card with a picture of a masked girl. Elena wanted to stage The Seagull in Moscow and perform in farces in Serpukhov. Which was aim and which pretext - staging the play, or seducing the author - was hard even for Anton to decide. Anton's

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distraction affected all Melikhovo; the servants slacked, and the family bickered. 'Nobody fed the cattle this morning,' grumbled Pavel.

Fate had reserved its cruellest twist. The plot of The Seagull had reflected Lika's misfortunes: it now foreshadowed them. Lika had left Anton to be seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by Potapenko, just as Nina leaves Treplev to be seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by Trigorin. Chekhov darkened his play by adding one event: Nina's baby dies. 9 November was Christina's second birthday. Granny Ioganson's diary ends the story of an unlucky love-child: 9 November, Saturday: Little Christina is very poorly. Wheezing, chest full of phlegm. 10 November, Sunday: The doctor came, thank God, examined her, and there is hope he can help. 12 November, Tuesday: Lika took the evening train to Moscow… Little Christina still wheezing. 13 November, Wednesday: Lika has come back from Moscow, Christina is dangerously ill. She has croup. We telegraphed Lika's mother to come. Our doctor came, no hope of recovery. The Lord's Holy will be done. 14 November, Thursday: Our darling Christina passed away at 4 a.m. Poor Lika, what an angelic little girl she has lost, may the Lord console her and turn her mind to all that is good, to lead a sensible life.

FIFTY-SEVEN Ô

Cold Comfort November - December 1896 Niws OF Christina's death took days to reach Melikhovo. Anton had put Lika out of his mind, as he wrote a report on all fifty-nine schools of the district. Petersburg gave him no peace: the 8 November issue of The Theatregoer graphically recalled the audience's unruliness at the first performance of The Seagull, and though the reviewer sympathized, his list of abuse - 'an inflated entity, the creation of servile Iricnds' - was hurtful. Suvorin, like Anton, was sick of the theatre: 'lavorskaia tells all sorts of foul stories about me. And I have to die in this bog!… The theatre is tobacco, alcohol. It's just as hard In wean yourself off it.'

Aleksandr had again surmounted his own particular addiction, and had written Alcoholism and Possible Ways of Fighting It, a pain phlet which argued for a colony for alcoholics on a Baltic island, but he had quarrelled with the Dauphin; his children weir failing in school and the eldest, Kolia, was torturing the dog. From Peters burg Potapenko sent grim news of Anton's latest devotee: 'Dear Antonio,… I gave your regards to Komissarzhevskaia. She is in deep sorrow. Enemies, anonymous letters, undermining - in a nutshell, the usual story of any talent that turns up in the actors' milieu.'

While Misha was brewing beer for the Chekhov family on Saturday 16 November, Christina was being buried. Sofia Ioganson recorded: They're cleaning the whole house, afraid, as the heartless doctor puts it, of infecting other children… Lika is with the two nannies. I'm sorry, very sorry for Lika.' The news made Anton put off his journey tO Moscow by a day or two. Then he left Melikhovo before dawn and took a room in the Great Moscow.34 Evgenia was staying in Moscow with Vania's family. Anton sent her a note:

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I III I IK.II I ()!• THE SEAGULL

Dear Mama, I've arrived today, Sunday at n. I need to see you, but as I am up to my neck in business and am leaving tomorrow, I shan't get round to visiting you. Please come and see me on Monday morning at nine or ten. You can have coffee with me. I shall get up early. Lika stayed with Anton all day and he prescribed her a sedative. At 7.00 p.m., when Lika had left, Elena Shavrova arrived with a manuscript, leaving a chaperone in her carriage. She and Anton discussed life in Italy. After a Biblical seven years, the inevitable happened in the hotel room. The cber maitre became the intrigant (as she put it). When Elena came to her senses and asked the time, Anton's watch had stopped. Shavrova regained her carriage and frozen chaperone: it was midnight. All that year broken timepieces - a motif for Three Sisters - had put the Chekhovs' lives in disarray. Now an erotic whirlwind swept Anton off his feet. Shavrova's next letter to Chekhov was decorated with a hand-painted devil in a red coat. She wrote that she wanted fame even more than love, and she would be back with a watch that worked.

Evgenia never got her coffee. At dawn Chekhov sent a porter with a note, 'Dear Mama! Have to go home. Halva!! Buy and bring. Off to the station.' Early the same morning Misha had left Melikhovo to take Masha to the station; he brought back Anton, off the first train from Moscow. Like a returning prodigal son and grateful father rolled into one, Anton had the white calf slaughtered; Melikhovo's rhythm resumed. Chekhov wrote the briefest note to Lika: 'Dear Lika, I'm sending you the prescription you were talking about. I'm cold and sad and so there's nothing more to write about. I'll come on Saturday or on Monday with Masha.'

Lika came to Melikhovo instead, a week later with the painter Maria Drozdova and Masha. It is hard to say what distressed Lika more -to have lost Christina or to be superseded by others in Anton's affections. She spent four desolate days in Anton's study, silently playing patience on his desk, while he wrote letters in pencil on his lap. Drozdova painted Pavel's portrait; Evgenia's new crockery arrived from Muir and Mirrielees; old Mariushka moved out to live in the cattleyard, and a new cook took her place. Books were ordered, sorted, and sent to Taganrog library. On Monday, without Lika, Chekhov went to Moscow to settle his accounts: he had missed the small print

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lit MuiVs contract and only now discovered that he could not reprint 'My I.ifc** as a book for a year. He took the watch that had compro-MII? cl I'lena to Bouret, the watchmaker, who gently told Anton he Ii t.l lorgotten to wind it up.

When Anton got back, bearing felt slippers he had bought for Pavel,.1 liim onsolate Lika was still in his study. Chekhov read a letter from \ ledumr Nemirovich-Danchenko, who lamented, as did other friends, llbti they never talked properly because… you crush me with your giftedness, or whether because we all, even you, are unbalanced or lack conviction as writers… Urn I fear that so much diabolical pride - or, to be exact secretiveness lias accumulated in you, that you will just smile. (I know your Bnlle.)35 1 in if) November Anton gave Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was soon In br more his interpreter than his friend, the same defence of silence tii In- had to Lika. He sounded like his own fictional doctors in 'A Prcary Story' or Uncle Vania: What can we talk about? We have no politics, we have no life on a social, circle or even street level, our town existence is poor, monotonous, oppressive, boring… Talk about one's personal life? Yes dial can sometimes be interesting, and perhaps we might, but we straight away get embarrassed, we are secretive, insincere, held back by an instinct for self-preservation… I'm afraid of my friend Ser-f.ccnko… in every railway carriage and house loudly discussing why I am intimate with N when Z loves me. I am afraid of our moralizing, afraid of our ladies. Alter Anton had posted this letter one of the stoves began to smell id smoke and the whole family developed headaches. Then tongues of Ïèïå spurted out between the stove and the wall.36 As Pavel recorded: 'Tonight we caught fire, the wooden beams above the chimney in Minna's room. The Prince and the Priest took part in extinguishing it and put it out with a fire-hose in Vi an hour.' Even Anton was moved to open his diary: 'After the fire the Prince told us that once when he had a fire in the early hours he lifted a barrel of water weighing four hundredweight.' The Herculean Prince Shakhovskoi was a welcome guest; fortunately Melikhovo was surrounded by ponds and Anton, who had seen every year one house or another nearby

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burn to the ground, had prudently bought a fire engine - a stirrup-pump with a bell and a long hose mounted on a cart. Moreover, he and Masha had insured everything from the house to the cows.

Prince Shakhovskoi demolishing the stove and smashing the walls with an axe to get at the flames, stoked by the draught from a badly made chimney, was a sight that Chekhov recreated in 'Peasants'. Peasants doused flames in the attic and the corridor; November's mud and slush flooded the floors that Aniuta had scrubbed; the stench of soot was unendurable. Anton's water closet was out of action. Evgenia, her bedroom wrecked, took to another bed and did not get up for a fortnight. Pavel forgot the pose he had adopted for Drozdova's portrait and roared at all whom he held to blame. The bereaved Lika, brought up, however negligently, in a genteel household, could not bear the shambles into which the fire had thrown the Chekhovs and left the next afternoon.

Constables and the insurance agent came. Masha saw the insurers in Moscow and sought builders and a stove-maker. The temperature was dropping to minus20°C, so the need for a stove-maker was pressing, but the first one they found remembered working under Pavel and refused to come. Weeks passed before Melikhovo was habitable, but the insurers paid, and for a long time Aleksandr teased his brother as 'the arsonist'.

Chekhov wanted to see Suvorin again, but fire or Lika, or both, had stopped him inviting Suvorin to Melikhovo. Instead, he wrote: In the last 11/ã-ã years there have been so many different events (a few days ago we even had a fire in the house) that my only way out is to go to war like Vronsky [in Anna Karenina; war was feared in late i8y6\ - only not to fight, but to treat the wounded. The only bright spell in these i Vi-ã years has been staying with you in Feodosia. Small clouds passed between Anton and the Suvorins. Anna Suvorina had forgiven his flight, but had been hurt to find that The Seagull was not dedicated to her. Chekhov discovered that, instead of 10 per cent of the takings from five performances of The Seagull in the contract that Suvorin had arranged, he was receiving 8 per cent, on the basis that the play had only four acts.37 In any case, until they received the contract the Society of Dramatists would not pay him, and Anton had

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left it on Suvorin's desk from which it had vanished. Short though the play's run had been, it had had full houses and the author was owed 1000 roubles. To cap Suvorin's sins, his printers sent proofs of plays and stories haphazardly.

After the fire Lika stayed away. On i December Masha warned her brother: 'Viktor Goltsev was at Lika's this morning.' Despite his rival's presence, Anton invited Lika. Chicken pox had stopped classes at the 'Dairy' school so that Masha could bring Lika, but Lika did not come. She threatened not to come for New Year 'so as not to spoil your mood'. If he wrote her a pleasant letter by the 30th she might come. She had endured worse embarrassment, as more people identified her II the prototype of The Seagull: 'Today there was a reading of The Seagull… and people were raving about it. I even went upstairs… so as not to hear it.' Now Lika had for consolation a young landscape painter, Seriogin, whom she proposed to bring with her, as Masha's guest. She knew it would upset Anton: 'You can't bear young people more interesting than yourself.' Anton invited her, affectionately calling her Cantaloupe. He mentioned Seriogin only in his diary.

On 20 December Anton went to Moscow to prescribe not for Lika (whom he avoided, despite inviting her to Melikhovo), but for Levitan, whose heart was worn out and whose mind was ravaged by depression that twice brought him to the brink of death. Anton examined Levitan and noted: 'Levitan has widening of the aorta. He wears a patch of clay on his chest. Excellent sketches and a passionate thirst for life.' I le pressed Levitan to come to Melikhovo: the artist replied that he couldn't bear trains, and feared upsetting Masha. The approach of New Year enlivened Melikhovo. The stove-makers and carpenters left; a house painter papered the walls; mice were poisoned. Twenty flagons of beer were delivered. Misha and Olga came; Vania arrived alone. Pavel had the snow swept from the pond, so that the guests could skate. The widowed Sasha Selivanova, Anton's childhood sweetheart, partnered Vania on the pond. Gentry and officials gathered like rooks. Never had Melikhovo seen such a crowd. Those who could not come wrote. Usually they begged: Anton's cousin Evtushevsky wanted a job in Taganrog cemetery; Elena Shav-rova wanted a critique of her new story; a neighbour wanted a publisher for his article on roads. The strain told on Anton. Franz Schechtel had heard that he was

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ailing. 'You need to get married to a worldly, daredevil girl." Anton's reply was half serious: You obviously have a bride you want to get off your hands as fast as possible; but sorry, I can't marry just now, because, nrsdy, I have the bacilli in me, very dubious tenants; secondly, I haven't a penny, and thirdly; I still think I'm too young. When Shcheglov gave the same advice, Chekhov specified as a wife a 'blue-eyed actress singing Tara-ra-boom-de-ay'. As Lika drew back, Elena Shavrova came forward: 'I've been taking bromide and reading Charles Baudelaire… When will you be in Moscow? I'd like to see you. - You see, I'm being frank.' On New Year's Eve, she wished him 'love, lots of love: boundless, calm and tender.' Out of the blue, Emilie Bijon, governess to the Suvorins, whom Chekhov had known for ten years, was also emboldened: Vous trouvez peut-etre etrange de recevoir de mes nouvelles, je n'en disconviens pas, maintes fois je desirais vous ecrire mais au fond je sentais trop bien que je suis un rien et meme miserable en comparai-son de vous par consequent je n'osais risquer cette demande mais cette fois-ci j'ai pris le courage dans mes deux mains et me voici ecrivant quelques mots a mon cher et bon ami et docteur.39 Emilie was one of the most self-effacing of the women who pined for Anton. New Year approached. A sheep lambed. The Chekhov family dressed up as mummers and called on the Semenkoviches. Chekhov dressed his sister-in-law Olga as a beggar, and gave her a note: Your Excellency! Being persecuted in life by numerous enemies I have suffered for truth and lost my job and also my wife is ill with ventriloquy, and my children have rashes, therefore I humbly ask you to grant me of your bounty quelque chose for a decent person. Lika came with Seriogin and saw the New Year in. In the kitchen the servant girls, dropping wax onto cold saucers, looked into the future. Vania, in no hurry to get back to his family, took Sasha Selivanova to the Talezh school and put on a magic-lantern show. Whenever his guests let him, Chekhov would creep into his study to 'Peasants' and write, or cross out, a few lines.

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A Little Queen in Exile January-February 1897 PRETTY, SMALL, regal though forlorn, someone else had, like Emilie Bijon, brooded for months before sending Chekhov her New Year wishes for 1897: To my dear doctor, A. C. I have known ephemeral happiness And am plunged by you into an ocean of suffering. I am too weak to struggle - I am dying. The light of life is barely glimmering in my eyes… Liudinila «»/«-im.i "' Once Anton's guests had gone the family succumbed to (lulls, migraine and fever; the district nurse, Zinaida Chcsnokovt, wtl Of) constant call for codeine. Nursing his parents, writing 'Peasants,' plan ning his rest in the Great Moscow Hotel, Anton took another burden: the 1897 census. He agreed to supervise fifteen census-takers for tin-district and make returns for his village.41 It was a task as onerous as his survey of Sakhalin; the gain for 'Peasants' was not worth the drain on his strength. The house was besieged by officials and the piano buried in papers.

Kolomnin, Suvorin's son-in-law, sent them a new table clock to replace the clock that rain had stopped, but the post gave it such a hard ride that it arrived in fragments. Anton made another journey on 14 January to Bouret, who shook his head: the clock was beyond repair. It was a bad time for timepieces: that evening Anton invited Elena Shavrova to room No. 9 in the Great Moscow: he was there just that night, he told her, and could not leave the hotel. 'Despite Mrs Grundy, I shall come and see you,' she replied. Nevertheless, tbey went for a ride in a cab. In a journey around Moscow as eventful as Madame Bovary's with Leon around Rouen, Elena Shavrova lost

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THE FLIGHT OF THE SEAGULL

the hood of her coat, broke a brooch, and her watch, which, she promised, kept good time, went haywire. After Elena returned to stay with her mother that night, she had, she told Anton, nightmares 'of poisoned men and women, and I blame you for that.'42

Anton stayed another night at the hotel. He called on Viktor Goltsev, who held a party every 15 January, although Masha had warned him that he would find Lika there. He actually seemed to be relieved by Lika's liaison with Goltsev. He and Goltsev calmly discussed their plans jointly to edit a newspaper.

After Anton went home, he devoted his energy until mid February to the census, the school for Novosiolki, and to 'Peasants', which he was now finishing. He even joined the Moscow doctors' campaign against corporal punishment. Lika faded from his life, and Elena Shavrova's affection was deflected into useful work. The performances that she was to put on in late February in Serpukhov were to be in aid of the new school. Anton treated Shavrova as he had Lika: he teased her too about other suitors, real or imaginary, as a pretext for his neglect. It needed only a few weeks of intimacy for Anton to feel an irresistible urge to tease, deflect and even repulse a woman.

Winter at Melikhovo was dominated by food: the family gorged, the animals starved - there was abundant livestock and little fodder. Pavel's diary records: 'We ate a goose… We ate a roast piglet… Half the hay in the barn is gone, God grant it lasts to spring. There's no more wheat straw. We've burnt all the brushwood, we haven't bought wood yet.' A dog was mauled to death by Zalivai, a new hound; Roman shot a cat. This grim tally, like the tedium of the census, was magnified into the horror of 'Peasants'.

Chekhov's thirty-seventh name-day was dismal. None of his brothers came: only the priest and the cantor. The census cast a pall. Chekhov was disturbed by angry demands from a person in Rostov: someone calling himself Anton Chekhov had been borrowing money. Halfway through his expected life span, he began to think religiously. His diary affirms agnosticism as a valid faith: Between 'God exists' and 'There is no God' lies a whole enormous field which a true sage has great difficulty in crossing. But a Russian knows only one of these two extremes and the middle between them doesn't interest him, which is why he knows either nothing or very little… A good man's indifference is as good as any religion.

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1897

()n 6 February, the census over, after attending a peasant wedding rind helping Quinine give birth to a single puppy, Chekhov fled to Moscow for a very wild fortnight, some of it with Liudmila Ozerova, who had written again on 31 January: 'Dear, very, very good Anton, You've probably forgotten her and she understands that she has no 11»:liis, but she begs, begs you not to fail to visit her as soon as you I ÷èí- to Moscow, The very littlest Seagull.' Their first night was not huppy. Liudmila wrote on 9 February: 'Perhaps it wasn't my fault, lint you recalled some other woman whom you love and that's why V«PII found me so repellent and despicable… Your little Queen in? die. P.S. Don't fail to come tomorrow.'' When Anton left Moscow to watch Shavrova performing in Serpukhov, Liudmila took the train wit li him as far as the outskirts of Moscow. Anton's enchantment with her had faded as soon as she fell into his arms. He wrote to Suvorin two days later: (iuess who visits me? What would you think? Ozerova, the famous «V/.erova-Hannele. She comes, sits with her feet on the sofa and looks sideways; then, when she goes home, she puts on her little jacket and her worn out galoshes with the awkwardness of a little girl ashamed of being poor. She's a little queen in exile. In his diary, Chekhov now called her 'an actress who fancies she is great, an uneducated and slightly vulgar woman'. Her feelings were very different: Dear Anton, I'm back! Moscow is empty and bottomless. And I don't doubt that you despise me deeply. But, amidst the gloom that surrounds me, your kind, simple, tender words have penetrated very very deep into my soul, and for the past eighteen monms I couldn't help dreaming how I'd see you and surrender to you all my sick, hurt soul and you would understand everything, sort it out, console and calm it, and instead I met Kolomnin [Suvorin's son-in-law]… I he first night, after you left, I got a very bad chill, and I spent the last day of Shrove Tide so ill that I didn't peck at my corn, and I can't wait for my little white birdy to fly to me, I am burning with desire to caress it as soon as possible. F.Icna Shavrova saw more of Anton than did Ozerova. The author of '(laesar's Wife' had her writings and acting as a pretext. She asked her cher maitre or 'a certain intrigant' to meet her. Anton coyly

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answered: 'A certain young man (a civilian) will be at the Assembly of the Gentry at the Georgian evening.' Olga Kundasova also surfaced. No longer subsidized by Anton and Suvorin, she was rushing around Moscow, giving lessons, engaging distinguished minds in debate. Her relations with Anton relaxed: she agreed to come to Melikhovo. Rumours of Anton's frenetic love life spread. Masha, who had taken Maria Drozdova to Melikhovo, joked, 'Give my regards to all the ladies who are visiting you.' Aleksandr wrote on 24 February: 'I hear you spent a long time in Moscow and led a life of fornication, the buzz of which has even reached Petersburg.'

Chertkov, the grandson of the man who had owned Chekhov's grandfather, was just then being expelled from Russia for his activities on behalf of Tolstoy. (He went to England and began to preach non-resistance to evil there.) Tolstoy went to Petersburg for the first time in twenty years to see Chertkov off. The furore over Chekhov's deportation jolted Chekhov's liberalism to the left. On 19 February, a dinner at the Continental for Moscow's literati to celebrate the supposed emancipation of the peasantry thirty-five years before sickened Anton: To dine, drink champagne, roar, make speeches about the people's self-awareness, about the people's conscience and so on, when slaves, the same serfs, in frock coats scurry round the tables, and outside in the freezing cold the coachmen wait - mat's like lying to the Holy Ghost.

There were other dinners, just as alcoholic. At a gathering at Russian Thought, with the architect Schechtel on 16 February 1897, Anton and Stanislavsky met for the first time though eighteen months would pass before anything came of it. More upsetting were the consultations Levitan asked for: I've nearly kicked the bucket again. I'm thinking of arranging a council of physicians at my place, with Ostroumov in charge… Shouldn't you drop in on Levitan and just as an ordinary decent person offer some advice on how to arrange it all? Do you hear, you viper? Your Schmul. After Goltsev's Shrovetide pancake party (which Lika shunned), Anton visited Levitan's studio with an acquaintance and covertly studied the artist. In Levitan's wrecked body he saw his own future. Anton disJANUARY-FEBRUARY 1897 cussed Levitan's tuberculosis with his old teacher, Professor Ostroumov, who was one day to deliver Anton's sentence. Death, Ostroumov predicted, was imminent. Levitan, Anton noted, was 'sick and afraid'.

After some unhappy nights, Chekhov left with Ozerova to watch Shavrova and her company act in Serpukhov. The dresses came from Paris, the diamonds were real, and the actors were good, but they made only 101 roubles for the new school. After the show Anton reached Melikhovo at 2.00 a.m. on 23 February 1897 and slept all day. In his absence the family had celebrated Shrovetide with pancakes, toped with shortages of fuel, and dealt with veterinary emergencies, while Maria Drozdova painted a portrait of Pavel. On Anton's return Masha and Drozdova gladly fled to Moscow. Masha was too dutiful to protest at his long absence; Maria Drozdova too much in love with Anton, though he teased Maria as Udodova {Hoopoe), instead of Drozdova {Thrush). Pavel's dislike of Maria Drozdova, who ate more pancakes than he did, was tempered by her painting him. In Anton's absence Pavel had asserted himself as usual. He had the servants chop the ice on the pond and one poor woman load it into the cellar. The horses fared badly: Pavel's diary for 13 February shows his ruthless-ness: 'minus2 2°C in the morning… The horses were worn out, deep snow, God forbid we take such a cart load of wood again. Why doesn't the Society for the Protection of Animals do something about it?'

Anton rested. On 1 March he announced to Suvorin that he would hereafter 'lead a sober chaste life'. Aleksandr and Vania had been taken aback by Anton's philandering: Vania, seeing the array of potential sisters-in-law, begged him not to marry. Elena Shavrova planned one more performance in Serpukhov, to see her intrigant again, as she packed her bags to be a virtuous wife in Petersburg. Lmdmila Ozerova, however, was in Moscow; her passion all the stronger, for Anton giving reasons, such as the lack of a dowry, not to marry her. On 26 February she wrote: All my things, to wit: my pink jacket, my slippers, my handkerchief and so on and also Neglinny Passage, Tverskaia Street, the Moscow City Duma etc. send their regards, are impatient for your arrival and miss you very very much. I'll tell you in secret that they are very jealous not just of you and Petersburg, Serpukhov and Lopasnia but of the air, and I was indescribably saddened because you love and want money, but perhaps you need it for some good cause.

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Liudmila Ozerova had only seen The Seagull. The next day she read the play and was bowled over: she had found her role, and foolishly addressed Anton by Arkadina's extravagant phrase - 'My only one': Anton, my only one, to fall at your feet, meekly to caress and kiss your hands, to look endlessly into your eyes. To reincarnate in myself all your great soul!!! Words, looks, thoughts cannot convey the impression that our Seagull made on me. Almost by the same post a more interesting actress approached Anton. Chekhov had sent Vera Komissarzhevskaia his Plays. The actress still had Avilova's silver medallion which Anton gave her as a prop. (It interested its owner no more than the stuffed seagull in the play interested Trigorin.) Komissarzhevskaia felt she personified the Seagull and wrote to Anton as if he were Trigorin: 'You will visit me, won't you? Potapenko tells me that you're expected by i March. Are you? I doubt if I'll go away for Lent, although I've completely collapsed. Come, Anton, I terribly want to see you.'43

Chekhov found this invitation to Petersburg irresistible, and the forthcoming Congress of Theatre Workers in Moscow for the first three weeks of March was a pretext to leave Melikhovo. He wanted to deliver 'Peasants' to Goltsev and Lavrov in Moscow, even if no censor could pass the text as it was.

In 'Peasants' he had beaten the 'realists' at their own genre, drawing on his deep knowledge and understanding of the villages around Melikhovo and the peasants who worked in Moscow hotels as waiters. His plot was minimal: the narrator is a camera. A sick waiter, Nikolai, loses his job and goes back to his village with his wife Olga and their daughter Sasha. Shocked by the squalor of his relatives, he dies, while Olga and Sasha are forced to wander off and beg. (Chekhov intended to take tbe story further with the girl's entry into prostitution in the city but the censor made it clear that this would be too sensitive and sordid a theme.) Chekhov contrasts a beautiful valley with imagery of smashed crockery, beaten children, in a series of tableaux that cover autumn, a savage winter, and spring - six months which bring tax arrears, the rape of an errant wife, the beating of another wife by her drunken husband, fire, and the death of Nikolai. 'Peasants' shows the gentry as hateful creatures from an alien world. The good that is left is a strange residue of ideals, as the peasants listen to Olga reading

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the Bible, words unintelligible, but consolatory to them. From 'My Life' Chekhov takes the spectacle of the drunken thieving peasants who are more human than their masters, for they recognize the truth and justice that they have lost. This uncompromising picture was to anger Tolstoy and other self-appointed spokesmen of the peasantry. The school of protest writing welcomed Chekhov to its camp. r

4J7

FIFTY-NINE Ô

Cutting the Gordian Knot March 1897 LIUDMILA OZEROVA, Elena Shavrova, Vera Komissarzhevskaia and Lidia Avilova all called for Anton. So did Levitan. He wanted Anton to examine him, and to be painted for the Moscow's leading gallery-owner, Tretiakov, by the Petersburg artist Braz. Anton alerted Elena Shavrova, about to leave for Petersburg: Dear Colleague. The intrigant will arrive in Moscow 4 March at noon on train No. 14 - in all probability. If you haven't left yet, telegraph me just one word: 'home'… But if you also agree to have lunch with me at the Slav Bazaar (at 1 p.m.) then instead of 'home' write 'agree'. The telegraph operator may think that I've offered you my hand and heart, but what do we care what they think!! I shall come for one day, in a rush. Elena received the letter on 4 March - too late to respond. She searched the Great Moscow and Slav Bazaar, and left notes at Russian Thought, but he was 'as elusive as a meteor.' One note 'in deep despair' begged him to see her in Petersburg. But that evening Anton took his stethoscope to Levitan. He calmed the patient, but wrote to Schechtel: 'Things are bad. His heart doesn't beat, it gasps. Instead of a tick-tock you hear "fff-tock". In medicine we call that a systolic murmur.'

In the morning he was back in Melikhovo. Pavel had brought in the priest, to shrive the family and the servants in preparation for Easter. Dung was being tipped onto the greenhouse beds. Anton was short of money because the censor had held up 'Peasants' and Suvorin still had not found the contract for The Seagull. Aleksandr broached Suvorin on Anton's behalf and wrote up his adventures as a farce, celebrating a salmon that Natalia had just cooked. It began:

MARCH 1897

The Missing Contract or the Salmon Tail A Play in 5 Acts by Mr Goose Cast: Suvorins Porter; Suvorins footman, Vasili; A. S. Suvorin; Mr Goose; Mrs Goose Act 1. The spreader of enlightenment and builder of schools. Goose (entering Mr Suvorins hall, reading a letter). 'Put on your trousers and go and see Suvorin: ask where the contract and stamps are and why he persists in not answering my letters. I need the money desperately, since I'm building another school…' (aside) Bare-arsed educators! No money but building schools like water. Burdening me with things to do. Won't bother even to send me a pound of country butter or a piglet for the New Year… Governors, indeed, dog turds.44 Aleksandr came to stay for a few days with his two elder sons. (It was to be his last visit to Melikhovo.) They stayed in the cottage. Aleksandr was hoping for help: Kolia, expelled from grammar school, seemed doomed by the genes he had inherited, according to Aleksandr, from his mother's 'decaying landowner's family'. All evening the priest and Aleksandr drank beer. (Aleksandr had lapsed again.) In the cold morning sun, Aleksandr was sobered by a talk with Anton: My brother was hunched, warming himself in the sun looking mournfully at his surroundings. 'I don't feel like sowing or planting, or like looking into the future,' he broke the silence. - 'Stop, that's nonsense. You're just depressed,' I reassured him, aware I was being banal. - 'Now,' he said firmly, turning his face towards me. 'After my death I leave such-and-such to our sister and mother, and such-and-such for education.' On 9 March 1897 Aleksandr and his sons left. Kundasova came for two days. Nursing Brom, who had been mauled by a hound, and Quinine, whose puppy had died, Anton was withdrawn. The coming of spring, the ice breaking on the river and the prospect of a haemorrhage, Levitan's terminal illness, the commission for his portrait, all turned his thoughts to death. At tea his father sickened him: 'going on about the uneducated being better than the educated. I came in and he shut up.' Anton replied to neither Ozerova nor Shavrova. At last, the theatre contract for The Seagull had been replaced, and he had 582

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THE FLIGHT OF THE SEAGULL

roubles, enough to visit Suvorin and the actors in Moscow, and Komis-sarzhevskaia and Avilova in Petersburg.

On 19 March, as the first starlings flew into Lopasnia, Anton was spitting blood. The next day Suvorin came to Moscow and settled in the Slav Bazaar. On 22 March Anton took his room in the Great Moscow, and in the evening he went to dine with Suvorin at the Ermitage. Before they had begun to eat, Anton clutched his napkin to his mouth and pointed at the ice bucket. Blood was gushing up uncontrollably from a lung.

VIII

Flowering Cemeteries Oh this South! Oh this Nice! Oh, how their radiance disturbs me! Life, like a wounded bird, Tries to arise - and cannot… Fiodor Tiutcher

420

SIXTY Ô

The Doctor is Sick March-April 1897 STILL CLUTCHING ice to his blood-stained shirt, Anton Chekhov was taken by cab to Suvorin's suite, No. 40, at the Slav Bazaar. He fell on to a bed, telling Suvorin 'Blood's coming from my right lung; it did with my brother and my mother's sister.' They summoned Dr ()bolonsky, but he could not persuade Anton to go to hospital. Anton scrawled a note to Bychkov, his devoted footman at the Great Moscow, to send the proofs of 'Peasants' on his windowsill to the Slav Bazaar. The haemorrhage did not abate until morning. Anton was calm, though afraid, but his friends panicked. Lidia Avilova, invited to call, could not find him. Bychkov had been ordered to tell only Vania where Anton was.

/Ml day Chekhov and Suvorin stayed indoors. Anton asked Vania to call, as he was 'unwell'. Shcheglov came to see Suvorin. Thrilled to find his two idols together, he left without noticing Anton's perilous state.1 Anton too seemed to ignore it. Early next morning he told Suvorin that he had letters to answer and people to see back in the (ireat Moscow. Suvorin remonstrated, but Anton spent Monday there: he sent a touchy teenager a critique of her novel about fairies; he apologized to Avilova. He wrote, talked, and spat blood into the wash basin.

At daybreak on Tuesday 25 March Doctor Obolonsky was handed a note: 'Bleeding, Great Moscow No. 5, Chekhov'. Obolonsky took Anton straight to Professor Ostroumov's clinic by the Novodevichie cemetery, then went to the Slav Bazaar and woke up Suvorin. At 1.00 p.m. Suvorin saw Anton: Chekhov is in Ward No. 16, 10 above his 'Ward No, 6', as Obolonsky remarked. The patient is laughing and joking as usual, clearing his throat of blood in a big tumbler. But when I said I watched the

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FLOWERING CEMETERIES

ice moving on the Moscow river, his face changed and lie said, 'Has the river thawed?' Suvorin telegraphed Vania, revisited Anton and took the night train to Petersburg, where he tried to allay fears. Sazonova wrote in her diary: 'I'm told it's just haemorrhoidal blood, but they still put him in a clinic.'2 Aleksandr was alarmed by Suvorin's vagueness.

Professor Ostroumov, who had taught Chekhov, was at Sukhum on the Black Sea. His juniors mapped Chekhov's lungs, showing the top of both, particularly the left, badly damaged by tuberculosis. Wheezing exhalations came from both lungs. Ostroumov was no believer in the curative power of Robert Koch's 'tuberculin'. Treatment was conservative: ice packs, peace and nutrition, until the threat of a fatal haemorrhage had receded; convalescence with subcutaneous arsenic, exile to a dry climate and a diet of koumiss.3 Anton was carefully watched - doctors are unruly patients. Visitors were admitted by pass, in twos, and forbidden to ask questions.

Anton wanted his parents kept in the dark. When Masha arrived at the Kursk station on Tuesday morning to start teaching, Vania silently handed her a pass to the Ostroumov clinic. Only next day was she calm enough to visit. Lidia Avilova came twice, once bearing flowers.4 Dr Korobov, who had known Anton for sixteen years, was turned away. Anton was fed cold broth. He asked Masha for tea and some eau de Cologne; Viktor Goltsev for caviar, four ounces of black, eight of red; Shavrova for a roast turkey. She sent a grouse, which Anton washed down with fine red wine from Franz Schechtel and Dr Radzwicki, Anton's optician. Sablin of The Russian Gazette sent a roast chicken and, when this gave Anton erotic dreams, a woodcock. Flowers and letters also poured in, as did unsolicited manuscripts and solicited books. Anton wrote passes for the visitors he wanted. Goltsev and Liudmila Ozerova called. Elena Shavrova, confined in Petersburg with a chill, wired her sister Olia on 29 March for news: I found him up properly dressed as always, in a big white, very bright room with a white bed, a big white table, a little cupboard and some chairs. He seems to have lost a little weight and his bones are showing, but he was awfully nice, as always, and bantered cheerfully with me… What do you think I found him doing? He was choosing lenses for a pince-nez.'

MARCH-APRIL 1897

Ë more important visitor had come the previous day. On Wednesday J6 March Lidia Avilova left the clinic in distress and walked round ihr Novodevichie cemetery, where she met Tolstoy. Tolstoy needed no pass: on Friday he appeared at Chekhov's bedside. Weeks later Anton recalled the visit to Mikhail Menshikov: We talked about immortality. Tolstoy recognizes it in a Kantian sense; he supposes that we shall all (people and animals) live in a principle (reason, love), whose essence and aims are a mystery to us. Hut I see this principle or force as something like a shapeless mass of aspic; my ego - my individuality and mind - will merge with this mass. I don't want this immortality. At lour the next morning Anton suffered a severe haemorrhage. The doctors forbade all pleasure except letter-writing. Anton, wanting to I" discharged home, declared Melikhovo healthy, on a watershed and her of fevers, but the doctors exiled him south, to the Mediterranean HI the Black Sea, from September to May.

()n \ April the bleeding stopped. Visitors came again, except from 1.00 to 3.00 p.m. when, as Chekhov put it, 'the sick animals are fed ritid exercised'. A week later he was discharged. His health was a matter of public bulletins. On 7 April, appeasing the censor by hastily replacing page 193, which blamed the state for the peasants' misery, Hitnian Thought published 'Peasants'. Never was Chekhov so feted by the intelligentsia. A wave of sympathy forced even Burenin to acclaim him. I,ate in April Sazonova observed: 'It sounds like a funeral knell. I Ir must be very bad and they're holding a requiem. Really, they say that his days are numbered.' The literary world commiserated.

I.ika neither wrote nor visited. Elena Shavrova showered her cher mattre and intrigant with letters. She offered him the health of 'the.1 upid, indifferent and dim'; she promised to kiss Professor Ostroumov •ill over; she told him of a French play, Uevasion, about a married woman's happy adultery, a play where it was said 'doctors have no right to be ill'. He could still be her intrigant: 'What do we risk? As long as Tolstoy doesn't find out.' All she requested was that Anton ihould: 'Tear my letters into little pieces (jealous men are dangerous), I don't want someone else to do it';6 he never did. On 11 April, Shavrova shook off her husband and came, but Anton had been dis-, h.n-ged the nightbefore. Olga Kundasova was running round Moscow

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for Anton, returning to their owners all the books he had borrowed.

Vania ran messages, while Aleksandr worried. Misha and Olga went to Melikhovo on 6 April to make ready for Anton's return. Anton had left Masha penniless and the cupboards bare; Vania was to bring beer, best beef and to see that Anton brought money. Misha wrote to Vania: 'Desperate famine here, brother… we have thin gruel instead of soup. Be a pal and bring parsley (roots), carrots and celery. If you have the money, some onions too. We have to feed Anton up now.'7 Masha's sinking spirits were restored by Maria Drozdova. Pavel and Evgenia seemed not to know what was happening. They sheared the sheep, and mucked out the cattle. Only Misha's arrival on the 6th alerted them that something had happened to Anton.

On Good Friday, emaciated and weak, Anton was brought by Vania and laid on Masha's divan. Here he injected arsenic into his abdomen, read and wrote letters. The comfort was cold. Dr Sredin, who treated himself and others for ÒÂ in Yalta, urged Anton to go to Davos. The radical novelist Aleksandr Ertel revealed that 16 years ago he had been given a month to live, but wondered if Anton's will to live matched his own.8 Menshikov said that he had wept as he read 'Peasants' and that Petersburg was awash with rumours of Chekhov's illness; he wrote again, advocating a diet of oats and milk and a stay in Algiers, which had done wonders for Alphonse Daudet (who was to die in eight months).9

Emilie Bijon sent two touching messages in French.10 Cousin Georgi in Taganrog urged Chekhov: 'the south is warmer and the ladies are passionate'." Warm comfort came with Lika Mizinova on 12 April, the eve of Easter. She left on the i8th (Vania's birthday), with Sasha Selivanova, who had arrived three days before. Pavel was glad: 'At 9.45, glory to the All Highest, the two fat ladies left."2

On Sunday 13 April forty male and twenty-three female peasants lined up for Easter gifts of money from the Chekhovs. Pavel's diary sounds vigilant: 14 April:… Antosha liked the roast beef. Ants got into the house… 2 3 April:… The cherries are in leaf. Antosha is busy in the garden. Importunate visitors - 'the loud-mouth Semenkovich', Shcheglov and the vet - annoyed Pavel. Two students turned up, to be fed and housed. On 19 April, seeing his brothers off, Anton risked a three-mile

MARCH-APRIL I897

journey to survey the second school he was building. Dr Korobov, who had come to photograph Anton, not to heal him, then took Anton to Moscow for two days. (The other doctor to visit in April was Dr Kad/.wicki with a case of Bessarabian wine and lenses to correct Anton's astigmatism.)

Anton was glad to see his visitors go. Shcheglov had pestered him wnli a play, which, Anton told Suvorin, read as if it had been written by a cat whose tail the author had trodden on. Suvorin was the only man Anton longed to see. He telegraphed that he would be in Petersburg by the end of May. Anton joked Til marry a handsome rich widow. I take 400,000, two steamboats and an iron foundry.' Suvorin irplicd by wire, 'We consider dowry too small. Ask for bathhouse and (Wo shops more."3

Illness freed Anton's conscience, and he felt free to travel. No woman would, he told Suvorin, 'be stupid enough to marry a man who'd been in a clinic'. From Courmayeur, a tuberculosis resort, Levitan exhorted Anton on 5 May: Is this really a lung disease?! Do everything possible, go and drink koumiss, summer is fine in Russia, then let's go south for the winter, even as far as Nervi, together we shan't be bored. Do you need money? ,md then from Bad Nauheim, where he was having hydrotherapy, on 2 9 May: No more blood? Don't copulate so often. How good to teach yourself to do without women. Just dreaming of them is far more satisfying… If Lika is with you, kiss her sugar-sweet lips, but not I whit more.14 (iiven the public acclaim for 'Peasants' - which augured well for the ÷à1ñ of Chekhov's books - and the excuse of illness, Anton could at last live out an idea he had preached periodically, but never practised: that the prerequisite of personal happiness was idleness.

426

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SIXTY-ONE Ô

An Idle Summer May-August 1897 PHOTOGRAPHS THAT Dr Korobov took of Anton at the end of April 1897 show a man whose body and morale are wrecked. Anton's main symptom, apart from a morning cough, was an evil temper. A three year period of creativity, that had begun with Lika's departure in March 1894, was over. Between April and November 1897 he published nothing and wrote only letters. He pruned roses and supervised tree planting. He gave up medicine and council business and only kept an eye on the school at Novosiolki. While Masha saw to it that plans were drawn, materials bought and workers hired, Anton pondered his future. He could not stand milk diets, and ruled out the barren steppes of Samara where consumptives spent months drinking koumiss. Taganrog's winters and springs were as severe as Moscow's. Yalta and the Crimea had frozen and bored him in 1894. The Caucasian spas were vulgar - Kislovodsk in the north, Borjomi in the south - even if the dry mountain air had Alpine qualities. The idea of Switzerland repelled him. Anton's options were the French seaside, Biarritz on the Atlantic or Nice on the Mediterranean, both refuges for Russians, so he would not be lonely. He considered North Africa, whose climate had rallied so many, but could he afford to travel for eight months, after an idle summer?

Elena Shavrova proposed summer and autumn in Kislovodsk. Kun-dasova, to judge by her conspiratorial visits, was also willing to travel to the Caucasus. Lika was ready to return to Paris and accompany Anton; so was Masha's friend, the artist Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, who had discreetly fallen in love with Anton. Anton was, however, shedding women friends. A symptom he had hidden at the clinic, he told Suvorin on 1 April, was impotence. Elena Shavrova was put off. On 28 May Chekhov arranged to meet her in Moscow: the letter arrived too late. Anton had arrived with Lika. Elena sent telegrams

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MAY-AUGUST 1897

and spent an evening at the station in Moscow to catch him on his way back. 'Fate is unjust, the post incorrigible, and you elusive,' she lamented, before leaving for the Caucasus and Crimea where she hoped to meet him.

Anton asked Liudmila Ozerova to play her favourite part, little I Iannele in Hauptmann's Hannele's Ascension, at the annual play staged on 4 June by Dr Iakovenko in his asylum. (The church had Hannek's Ascension banned from Imperial theatres; it was now preformed only in private theatres.) Ozerova demanded her own music and props. Anton gave the part instead to Olia, Elena Shavrova's younger sister. The 'little Queen in exile' had lost her lover and her part. On 3 May she hinted that she would take an engagement in Warsaw if Anton did not protect her career. On 14 May she was so shattered by what must have been Anton's rejection of her as a woman and as an actress that she wrote: 'Anton, I don't know how I stayed alive after reading your letter. Now the last thread that held me in this world has been torn. Farewell."5

One old flame, DariaMusina-Pushkina, the 'cicada' whom (ihrklmv had squired five years ago, came to Melikhovo on 3 May. The next day she visited the monastery with the family. Her husband had been killed hunting, and she was now a rich Mrs Glebova. 'A vny mir interesting woman, she sang about thirty romances to nu- and thru left,' Chekhov told Suvorin.

On 25 May Anton stopped injecting arsenic. He masked the smell of medicine with Vera Violetta. Any exertion, however, laid him low. After taking examinations at Talezh school on 17 May, he was shattered. He tried quiet pursuits. He studied French. He fished with Ivanenko, catching fifty-seven carp in one session. June was peaceful: Masha, Misha and his wife Olga, and Vania, without his wife, left on a three-week trip to the Crimea. Anton moved out of Masha's room into the guest cottage, away from visitors and the rows between Pavel and the servants. 'Antosha has moved to the hermitage. To acquire sanctity by fasting and labour, as a hermit,' Pavel joked. After two weeks Anton left, via Moscow, to stay with Levitan on the estate of a rich Maecenas, Sawa Morozov. Morozov bored him, and Anton ran back to Melikhovo, with Lika, three days later. Lika told Masha in the Crimea:

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I-I.OWI KIN(. «I M I I FRIES

21 May 1897: This is the second lime in June that I have defiled your virgin bed with my sinful body. I low nice to sleep on your bed knowing that it is forbidden fruit to be tasted only by stealth. I didn't go to the Crimea only because 1 am stuck, penniless; Anton is all right… His mood is fine, he makes relatively little fuss at dinner. • • Have you started an affair with somebody?16 Since the birth of Christina, and despite all her travails, Lika had put on weight, and in her new role her tone towards Anton softened. Now that she had become more Anton's nurse than his mistress, Lika would even condone his affair with Elena Shavrova, though she could bring herself only to call her 'the lady writer'. She tacitly acknowledged Dr Astrov's dictum that a woman can be a man's friend only after being first an acquaintance and then a mistress. Lika felt bitter, however, that Masha now preferred her painter friends, Drozdova and Khotiaintseva, to her. She stayed with Anton at Melikhovo for seven periods of three to eight days from May to August. They also met when Anton ventured to Moscow. She became once again chief aspirant: 13 June 1897… I know that if my letter is to interest you it has to breathe civic grief or lament on the unwashed Russian peasant. What can I do if I'm not as intellectual as Mme Glebova? By the way, here is an indispensable novelty for you: there is a new face paint which neither water nor kisses can wash off! Pass it on to the appropriate person. 17 June. Do I have to keep looking for you? If you want I can come and see you this evening, at Levitan's [in Moscow]. 24 June. Divine Anton, you stop me sleeping. I couldn't get away from you all night. Keep calm, you were cold and proper as ever.17 Lika realized that Anton really would go into exile when summer ended. She had no money, and retreated to her family's estate. On 5 July she offered a meeting; a week later, from Moscow, she invited herself to Melikhovo: 'You see how I love you, why don't you stay?' When Anton finally risked a journey to see Suvorin in Petersburg at the end of July, Lika saw him off. The finality of the coming separation sank in. On 1 August Lika sent the longest letter she had written to him: You frightened me by telling me at the station that you would leave

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MAY-AUGUST 1897

soon. Is it true or not? I must see you before your departure. I must sate my eyes and ears on you for a whole year. What will become of me if you've gone before I get back?… It is as though the last lew years of my life had not existed and the old Reinheit \purity] you so prize in women, or rather in girls!, had come back… I'm hors 1 inn ours. If I had two or three thousands, I'd go abroad with you,md I'm sure I wouldn't get in your way at all… Really I deserve ÿ little more consideration from you than that joking-ironic attitude I get. If you knew how little I feel like joking sometimes. Well, goodbye. Tear this letter up and don't show it to Masha. 1 he letter was filed by Masha. Anton's tone, however, turned tactful And tender.

I In- Suvorins had gone on holiday to Franzensbad. From there they urged Anton to move abroad. Anna Suvorina opened Anton's li ttcr to her husband. 'But I didn't find out what I most wanted to know, when you're coming to see us."8 She wrote again, on paper with a picture of a man eyeing a streetwalker. 'I seem to have a pi 1 monition that you will come! and so you and I shall go wild once t month. Don't fear the doctors, they lie.' She proposed a journey to I Ac (iomo with her children: Boria would teach him to bicycle, and Ntistia would flirt. Suvorin was heading back to Petersburg: the only • tin he had in Franzensbad was talking to Potapenko's daughter. He wished Potapenko's articles were as interesting as the chatter of his «rvrn-year-old child 'who hates people and loves animals'. Anna hrgged Anton to lure Suvorin out of the city. On 12 July 1897 Sazo-nova's diary notes: 'Suvorin is stuck in town, waiting for Burenin and (In khov. Burenin is to take his place in the newspaper, and Chekhov In wants to go abroad with.'

Anton had business in Petersburg. The monopoly on 'My Life' expired in summer 1897; Suvorin could profitably reprint the story Willi 'Peasants' as one volume. The book, being over ten printer's «beets, was exempt from precensorship: cuts imposed on Russian I bought could be restored. 'Peasants' had received a burst of applause, end a backlash of condemnation. The right wing liked the idea that II è worst enemy of the Russian peasant was the Russian peasant himself; the Marxists agreed that capitalism had degraded the peasantry further. An evangelical anarchist like Tolstoy, however, thought this work 'a sin before the people', a view shared by adherents

431

H.OWI KIN(, (I Ml; I Ê Ê IKS of the underground revolutionary movement 'People's Will', for whom the peasantry was the standard hearer of revolt.

In Petersburg Chekhov was to have sat for a portrait by Iosif Braz. Braz now arrived, with luggage and two nieces, to paint Chekhov at Melikhovo. Braz used Masha's room, with its north-facing windows, and piled her furniture in Anton's study.

Braz's arrival signalled to others that they too could descend on Anton. Kundasova and Lika visited. When Masha came back, Misha and his wife settled for July. Volodia, the Taganrog cousin, also came. On 29 June, on his way to Kiev, Aleksandr dumped Kolia and Toska at Melikhovo, with no linen and no time limit. They ran wild. Pavel had them sent back to their stepmother in Petersburg on the 17th. Semenkovich dropped in from Vaskino to rant and chat, bringing with him holidaymakers and their French governess for Volodia's delectation. Local schoolteachers, doctors, postmaster and priest called on business or recreation: they all depended on Chekhov and Melikhovo for a living or for entertainment. Anton, when Braz was not asking him to pose, hid, reading Maeterlinck's The Blind. He wryly commented that he would not be surprised if some relative asked to board a menagerie at Melikhovo.

Braz worked slowly, exasperating himself and his sitter, and after seventeen days the portrait was still unfinished. Few liked Braz's harrowing picture, but Masha fell in love with the painter. When, on 22 July, Braz and his nieces left, Anton and Lika accompanied them as far as Moscow. After an unhappy farewell to Lika in Moscow, Anton went to Petersburg for two nights with Suvorin. They discussed Anton's accounts, which showed that Anton could afford eight months abroad. Before falling asleep. Suvorin wrote in his diary: On Saturday, 26 July 1897 I am leaving for Paris. I could not induce Chekhov to come. His excuse is that he will have to leave in autumn to spend the winter abroad; he wants to go to Corfu, Malta, but if he went now, he would have to return. He said he would translate Maupassant. He likes Maupassant a lot. He has learnt French fairly well.19 Petersburg, Anton found, 'expected a consumptive, emaciated man barely breathing.' (Doctors were aghast that he had gone there even for two days.) Anton avoided Aleksandr and Potapenko.20 Leikin wired

MAY-AUGUST 1897

an invitation to his country estate on the river Tosna and met the first steamboat on Sunday 27 July. He was amazed: 'Chekhov looks cheerful and his complexion is not bad. He has even put on weight.' Anton chose a pair of white Vogul laika puppies from Leikin's kennels, but stayed a mere three hours, sampling milk (which he detested) from Leikin's three cows. The laikas were to be fetched by Suvorin's valet, Vasili Iulov, and delivered by train to Vania in Moscow. In his hurry to get away - Anton claimed an appointment with a professor of medicine in Moscow - he lost the pince-nez with the expensive lenses which Dr Radzwicki had prescribed. In Moscow he spent all day looking round premises for Suvorin's new bookshop, and then had a satisfying night: 'after sinning I always have rising spirits and inspiration,' he told Suvorin. Anton hid from his public, but reporters claimed to have spotted him everywhere from Bad Nauheim to Odessa or Kislovodsk.

August was hot enough to ignite the forests around Melikhovo. It was 450, the leaves went yellow; there was no grazing. Anton was too exhausted to save forests. He told Tikhonov in Petersburg, 'I am completely out of sorts. I just want to lie down.' As he rested, Khot-iaintseva painted him. The new puppies, Nansen and Laika, arrived on 3 August, driving Brom the dachshund to fury. The last relatives left. Volodia was prised from Madeleine the governess and given the fare back to Taganrog. At the Feast of the Dormition, Pavel recorded: 'No guests staying, just the Semenkoviches, the French woman, the priest and the teacher from Talezh… doctor Sventsitsky from Moscow and Zinaida Chesnokova staying the night.' The latter two were treating Mariushka, who was sent to a Moscow clinic. Exhausted by the estate, everyone felt ill: Masha took bromide, Pavel drops. Tiresome guests stayed: the flautist Ivanenko had fallen for Maria Droz-dova. ('Ivanenko talks witiiout stopping… Ivanenko has come again,' Pavel's diary complains in June.) As Anton was too sick to maintain domestic harmony, Roman rebelled against Pavel, who recorded on 15 June: 'Began mowing hay 7.30 a.m. 24 peasants. Roman got 3 roubles. He spent them on vodka for the men and women. They didn't finish mowing.' After the death of their baby, Roman had quarrelled with his wife. All the servants seemed in turmoil. Masha the maid was pregnant by Aleksandr Kretov. Anton promised a dowry if the ex-soldier married her, but Kretov was evasive.

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FI.OWI:HIN(. 1:1 MI i i IIII s

Only Anton, had he been well, would have been sufficiently unflus-tered to run Melikhovo smoothly, and I'nvcl, Kvgenia and Masha would have to face autumn and winter without him. Evgenia's letters do not mention Anton's health or departure, though she fussed about everything else: buying cloth, harvesting potatoes, Mariushka's cataract. On 22 August Pavel wrote to Vania: 'Anton will go soon. His health is much better, he is more cheerful, he has stopped coughing… It is lonely for us to be on our own, I and your mother, to live in the country. Masha will go to Moscow each week.'21 Nobody detained Anton. Aleksandr was absorbed in two new-found missions, bicycling and temperance. He and his doctor, the psychiatrist Olderogge, had chosen an island in the Alands as a colony for alcoholics. Anton had talked to Suvorin, who spoke to the Finance Minister, Sergei Vitte: a 100,000 rouble grant was in the offing. In Iaroslavl Misha and Olga, expecting their first child, asked little of Anton beyond a loan. Only Masha was unhappy. With Braz's and Maria Drozdova's encouragement, she had decided to train professionally as an artist, but, despite Levitan's protection, she was rejected by the Moscow College of Art. Iosif Braz had left Melikhovo, and Masha, at thirty-four, faced spin-sterhood with all the duties and few of the benefits of a wife.

Lika thought of following Anton to France; the painter Aleksandra Khotiaintseva actually arranged to do so. Friends urged him to depart. Levitan kept up a barrage. Loathing all Germans, Levitan still took Bad Nauheim's baths and gymnastics: 'I occasionally copulate (with the muse, of course),' he wrote. For Levitan the Riviera scenery was 'cloying'. He himself was drawn, despite the fatal damp, to the woodlands north and west of Moscow which inspired his paintings, but advised Anton: 'Everyone agrees that the climate of Algiers does wonders for lung diseases. Go there and don't let anything bother you. Stay until summer and if you like it, longer. Very probably I shall come and join you.' To Masha Levitan confided: 'My dear, glorious girl. I terribly want to see you, but am so bad that I am just afraid of the journey, and in this heat as well. I recovered a bit abroad, but I am still horribly weak… I must have sung my song.'22

Anton had pleaded poverty. Levitan and Kundasova believed him. Levitan spoke to Morozov, Kundasova to Barskov, editor of Children's Leisure. They told the tycoons their duty: each to advance Chekhov 2000 roubles. Accepting only Suvorin's money, Anton left Melikhovo

MAY-AUGUST 1897

at 8.00 a.m. on Sunday 31 August. Olga Kundasova saw him off. Masha followed him to Moscow, where Lika intercepted him with a note: 'I'll fetch you by cab between 9 and 9.30 - not too late for supper, I think. I badly want and need to see you. Where are you going? Abroad?' The next day Anton left Moscow for Biarritz, after a last meeting with Lika, to which neither of them ever later referred.

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ô Promenades September-October 1897 Two OLD Taganrog boys met Anton at the Paris Gare du Nord on 4/16 September 1897: Ivan Pavlovsky, a former revolutionary, now Paris correspondent of New Times, and an engineer, Professor Belel-iubsky. They took Anton to Suvorin's hotel, the Vendome. Suvorin was now in Biarritz, but his son Mikhail, Anna Suvorina and Emilie Bijon lingered in Paris. After sixty hours in a carriage, choked by the cigars of his German companions, Anton took the air. He had a haemorrhage: Anna Suvorina found out and wrote to Aleksandr. After four days, Anton followed Suvorin's tracks to Biarritz, but Suvorin had already left for his theatre in Petersburg. He promised to see Anton in France in October.

In Biarritz, too, Chekhov was met by friends (and wind and rain). Vasili Sobolevsky, editor of The Russian Gazette, his partner, Varvara Morozova, their three children and a governess, were on holiday there. Chekhov liked their menage. They offered him a room, but he stayed in the Hotel Victoria. Biarritz, Russians complained, was crowded with Russians. Anton told Suvorin on 11/23 September: The plage is interesting; the crowd is good when they are doing nothing on the sands. I stroll, listen to blind musicians; yesterday I went to Bayonne and saw La belle He'lene at the Casino… For 14 francs I have a room on the first floor, service and everything… Poliakov [the railway magnate] and his family are here. Help! There are very many Russians. The women are just about tolerable, but the old and young Russian men have little faces like ferrets and are all shorter than average. The old Russian men are pale, obviously exhausted at night by the cocottes; for anyone with impotence can only end up exhausted. The cocottes here are vile, greedy, all out in the open - and it is hard for a respectable family man who has come here to rest from his labours to restrain himself and not be naughty. Poliakov is pale.

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The Atlantic gales limited Anton's stay to a fortnight. He too fell for I Biarritz cocotte: Margot, aged nineteen, promised to follow when he moved.

Anton had advances from Suvorin, from Adolf Marx of The Cornfield, from Goltsev of Russian Thought and from Sobolevsky. Fiodor Batiushkov, the Russian editor of a new international magazine, (j)smopolis, had commissioned a story, but Anton did not feel like writing. The President of France had visited Russia in August 1897: a clause in the new Franco-Russian alliance forbade the French post to accept packages printed in Cyrillic, to protect Russia from seditious literature. Anything that Chekhov wrote or proof-read had to be a letter on thin paper. For months his creative outlet was a notebook in which fragments of dialogue, characterization and plot were mingled with addresses and lists of plants for the garden. On its blank pages Tania Shchepkina Kupernik had written 'Darling Antosha, the Great Moscow Hotel is a haven of bliss' and 'Mio caro, io t'amo'.

Letters to Biarritz encouraged Chekhov to idle and rest. Masha wrote: 'Just remember why you went to warm regions and don't let town life tempt you too much, my girlfriends and yours have asked me to tell you. Levitan is, he says, very ill again, tomorrow I mean to see him.' The Suvorins were returning to Russia. Emilie Bijon had gone to Brumath in Alsace to see her son Jean. She wrote to Anton after receiving his letter in French: 'Votre photographie est sur ma table, tout en vous ecrivant il me semble vous parler et que vous m'ecoutiez attentivement, et parfois un petit sourire. Un mot de vous fera mon bonheur.' Lika first wrote on 12 September: I have been thinking recently about your affair with the lady writer and here is what I have come up with: a man has been eating and eating delicious refined dishes and he was fed up with everything and longed for a radish… I as usual am thinking about you, so everything is in the old rut. But there is some news: Tania Shchep-kina-Kupernik has come back to Moscow, looking more beautiful and her face has even more of the Reinheit which you prize in women and which Mme lust has so much of… Anyway I'm not envious of her, she's very nice and interesting. Anton offered to go to Paris to meet Lika's train if she came. As for insisting on Reinheit in women, he protested that he also valued

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FLOWERING CI Ml I FRIES kindness, her virtue. Anton told her that Margot in Biarritz was providing him with French lessons. Lika was seeking money to 'throw herself on Anton's neck' by mortgaging her share of the family land. Olga Kundasova and Lika now strolled the streets of Moscow together. As Olga counted the men who turned to look at them, she, with her six years' extra experience, helped Lika to reach a conclusion on 5 October: I hope Margot stirs you up properly and wakes up the qualities which have been dormant so long. Suppose you came back to Russia not a sour-puss but a live human being, a man! What will happen then! Masha's poor girlfriends!… you know nothing about cheese and even when you're hungry you like just to look at it from a safe distance, not to eat it… If you keep on like this with Margot, then I am very sorry for her, then tell her that her colleague in misfortune sends her regards! I once stupidly played the part of tiie cheese which you refused to eat. Once again, Anton was without his pince-nez in Europe. He asked Masha to send Dr Radzwicki's prescription on his desk; she sent the first Latin writing she saw, a chemist's prescription. Anton strolled the beaches, formally dressed, charming Sobolevsky's little girls, while their father, looking like Petronius, bathed. Myopia made it hard to avoid encounters. On Anton's last three days in Biarritz he bumped into Leikin, whose diary for 20 September/2 October notes: 'I see Chekhov coming up to me… he is not bathing here, just enjoying the sea air. I think he is completely recovered. He climbed up the steep cliff from the sea with us and there was no sign of his being out of breath.'

On 22 September/4 October Anton and Sobolevsky left together for Nice via Toulouse. On the Cote d'Azur they settled into a hotel Leikin had recommended, La Pension Russe on the Rue Gounod, then a stinking alley that ran from the station to the Promenade des Anglais. Its attraction, apart from cheapness, was its Russian owner (a Mme Vera Kruglopoleva). The Russian cook was a former serf who had stayed in France thirty years ago when her owners returned to Russia, and now occasionally made the borshch or shchi her guests pined for. She lent the pension mystery: she was married to a negro sailor and had a mulatto daughter, Sonia, who was seen at night as she plied her trade on Nice's streets. Anton had told his family that

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1897

he would spend only October in Nice, but the autumn weather was too fine to leave. The Russian company was much to his liking: the dead as well as the living. At Caucade, in the west of Nice, lay the cemeteries, the Orthodox graveyard being at the very top of the hill, closest to heaven, with the best view of the sea. Here lay exiled revolutionaries, wounded officers, consumptive aristocrats, doctors and priests who had ministered to expatriate Russians, surrounded by hibiscus, palms and bougainvillaea. For the living, there were two churches, a reading room, and Russian lawyers and doctors.

By October, when Sobolevsky left, Anton had been befriended by two men. One was Professor Maxim Kovalevsky, biologist and revolutionary, who lectured at the Sorbonne, but whose base was the marine biology station at Villefranche. Kovalevsky was the widower of the mathematician and dramatist Sofia Kovalevskaia, who had perished of ÒÂ six years earlier. Kovalevsky, a life-enhancing companion, was very afraid of further endangering Anton's health. Anton was also looked after by Nikolai Iurasov, the Russian vice-consul at Menton, who lived in Nice: his son worked at the Credit Lyonnais. (This eased Anton's transfers of money from Moscow to Nice and back.) Iurasov, a man 'of exemplary kindness and inexhaustible energy', so bald that the seams of his skull were visible, offered teas, suppers, New Year and Easter parties to his countrymen. Iurasov, Kovalevsky and Anton were often joined by a decrepit professor of art, Valerian Iakobi, and by Doctor Aleksei Liubimov, dying of lung cancer.

Warmed by male companionship, Anton got over Margot's desertion. She had followed him but vanished, perhaps to a healthier protector. Margot's replacement, to judge by Anton's letters to Masha, was, apart from her physique, a good teacher of French, adept at correcting the mistakes that Russians make in the language. Thanks to her, he read and spoke French far better. She did not visit La Pension Russe, however, and Anton found climbing her stairs too tiring.

Reading Maupassant had prepared Anton for the Riviera: Maupassant's travel book Sur I'eau, written when the writer was cruising the Cote d'Azur on his yacht Bel-Ami, had provided quotations for The Seagull and an appreciation of this 'flowering cemetery of Europe' where so many hoped to elude death. The flowers and trees left Chekhov unmoved, but he valued the politeness and the cleanliness of the French. He played safe: as autumn approached he forbade

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FLOW ÑÈ I N«. i I M I II 1(11. S himself excursions after sunset, so that,I fellow guest, N. Maksheev, tempted him in vain to gamble at the casino: 'Dear Doctor! Being of sound mind, I assert that I possess a method of turning 2000 francs into a large sum of money at roulette. If you still have a desire to take part, then we must come to terms and act…'23 Vasili Nemirovich-Danchenko (the elder brother of Vladimir) spent his time in Monte Carlo; Anton merely watched him gamble. Ignati Potapenko was, however, more Mephistophelean: 'Antonio!… I'll soon find a reliable system of winning in Monte Carlo and then I'll come and enrich you and myself.'24

The inmates of La Pension Russe interested Anton little: they used him as a doctor. One Russian resident in Nice prompted Anton to take his first political stand: Rozanov, a Jew who rented apartments, sold Russian journals and published he Messager franco-russe, fervently stood up for Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer convicted of treason. Anton knew Rozanov not through buying newspapers, but by treating Rozanov's wife. Rozanov's 'enchanting smile' and 'very delicate and sensitive soul' began to turn Anton into a Dreyfusard. Despite this radical transformation, Anton still hoped to see Suvorin. Suvorin recorded that his doctor advised him to go to Nice: 'Chekhov is also calling me. I want to go but I fear the theatre will be even worse in my absence.' Then Aleksandr told Anton that he had seen Suvorin and his servant Vasili on a tram, off to buy a ticket abroad. On 15 October, with his son Mikhail, Suvorin set off for Paris again.

One hundred roubles a month went a long way. Anton bought all the newspapers,25 had his shirts laundered and drank all the wine and coffee he wanted. He enjoyed piquet with Kovalevsky and going to concerts, when not confined indoors. The Maecenas Morozov tactfully offered 2000 roubles; Barskov, the children's magazine editor, at Kun-dasova's prompting, proffered 500 roubles a month. Anton spurned the money and berated Levitan and Kundasova for embarrassing him. Levitan cursed the touchy Anton as 'a striped hyena, pagan crocodile, spineless wood-demon'. Anton had published nothing for six months: his money came from Suvorin's editions and from stagings of Ivanov in Petersburg, and from The Seagull and Uncle Vania which were being staged only in the provinces.

Only news of Melikhovo distressed Anton. Masha's letters showed that she detested the irksome responsibility. She forgot how to collect

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the monthly payments from Petersburg that Anton had arranged for her. Anton belittled her worries: 'If it's hard, put up with it - what can you do? I shall be sending you rewards for your labours,' he wrote on 6 October. An estate made no sense if the owner was away eight months of the year. Pavel became unbridled, as he told Misha: 'Mama and I will sit alone like recluses in the house, worried, and then arguing to exhaustion about trifles, and we each stick to our opinion.'26 In the same letter Evgenia complained: 'The authorities [Pavel] are pretty unkind to me… Masha is pestered for money, she hasn't got any, she is vexed, I have nothing but woe.'

The servants suffered. Aniuta Naryshkina, married off by her relatives in exchange for vodka, and Masha Tsyplakova, pregnant by Aleksandr Kretov, were in hospital. Infected by the midwives, Aniuta died of puerperal fever. When Masha Tsyplakova gave birth, Pavel made her leave the baby in an orphanage. Anton insisted that the baby be taken into the household, ordered the mother to receive seven roubles I month, and paid for her foundling foster-brother, who had no fingers on one hand, to go to school. Until Tsyplakova was back at work, Pavel, Evgenia and Masha were left with the elderly Mariushka and the indefatigable Aniuta Chufarova. Worse nearly happened: Mariushka and Tsyplakova, overcome by fumes in the bathhouse, had to be revived by Masha. Roman still ran the stables, but his wife Olimpiada, in Pavel's view, infected the estate with genteel idleness. The village elder retired. The peasants and authorities could not find I new elder, to settle disputes and govern the village. One had his linger bitten off by a horse, and was barred by the authorities. Another had, like many Melikhovo peasants, typhoid.

The family tried to refurbish the guest cottage so that Anton could live in it all year: again, stove-makers were called to Melikhovo, but, Evgenia reported, 'The stove in the cottage is still unfinished. The stove-maker fell and smashed himself in the stable.' Masha complained: 'All the Melikhovo inhabitants complain of your absence… build up your health, if not for yourself, then for others, for very many of these others need you. Forgive me for moralizing, but it's true.' After the stove was finished, the Talezh schoolteacher Mikhailov papered the cottage (as well as the drawing room); Semenkovich, who was an engineer, supervised the insulation of the walls with Swedish board and of the doors with double felt and heavy curtains. Now

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FLOW I Ff INI, i I ì I | | It ll'S the temperature was much higher inside the cottage than out, which presented a predicament, as Pavel explained to Misha on 5 December 1897: God alone knows how much his health has improved,… to come here when it is cold is to endanger himself. The cottage is his favourite summer residence, he likes solitude and quiet, but things are not suited for winter, firstly to leave +18 for minus2 5 degrees and reach our house, you have to wrap up against the cold, breathe and swallow whatever God sends. Secondly: he has to come in the morning for coffee, at 11 for lunch, at 3 for tea, at 7 for supper and above all to go and sit on the throne. Constant war raged between the farm dogs, the laikas and the dachshunds: the human inhabitants of Melikhovo were kept awake, robbed of food, even bitten, and the flower beds were ravaged. As Pavel put it, the dogs behaved like mongooses. Anna Petrovna, the old mare the Chekhovs had bought with the estate, died ten weeks after she had her last foal. Pavel was pitiless - 'the highest authority was strict today', Evgenia lamented to Misha.27 He searched high and low for someone to flay the horse and buy the skin for 3 roubles.

Anton's brothers were content. Misha told Masha that Olga had 'arranged his life so that every desire was anticipated'. In September, for 50 roubles a month, Aleksandr persuaded Vania and Sonia to take his son Kolia. Kolia spent a few days' holiday in Melikhovo and then took to Moscow a note from his father: The bearer of this letter is the swine that you, Vania and kind Sofia, are so generously taking under your wing… If annoyed or angered he begins to whisper something unintelligible (probably threats)… He detests books… he likes hammering nails, washing up… he loves money and getting sweets… He can't tell the time… he gets into fights. Anton did not ask after his dachshunds or his nephews. He had settled into La Pension Russe so well that, on the dank evenings which kept him to his room, he began to write again.

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Dreaming of Algiers November-December 1897 THE PROSPECT of losing his self-respect and his Reinheit by living on Morozov's charity, made Anton write. His works that autumn are small scale: they recall boyhood landscapes: stories like 'The I'ccheneg' and 'Home' evoke the horror of a visitor stumbling onto ë barbarous estate on the Don steppes. Chekhov's block was broken: that autumn 'On the Cart', a picture of a village schoolteacher's despair, owes much to the complaints relayed from Melikhovo. He began 'A Visit to Friends', a story for Cosmopolis: the plot anticipates bis final play The Cherry Orchard. He asked Masha to send the draft of an early story to work on: Masha worked with scissors to make the papers look like a letter rather than a contraband manuscript.

Chekhov's fame was now international. At the end of September, in the Wiener Rundschau, Rudolf Strauss proclaimed:

… we have before us a mighty, mysterious miracle of Strindberg content in Maupassant form; we see exalted union which seemed almost impossible, which nobody has managed before: we love Strindberg, we love Maupassant, therefore we must love Chekhov and love him twice as much. His fame will soon fill the whole world. Masha and Potapenko sent Anton cuttings. Translators (some inept, all enthusiastic) pestered Anton to let them put his works into French, (Izech, Swedish, German and English. One, Denis Roche, stood out: he paid Chekhov 111 francs, half the fee he received for the French version of 'Peasants.'28 Anton was learning a daily quota of French phrases, sending hundreds of French classics for Taganrog library, and even confidently correcting Masha's French. He asked for a journalist's card from Sobolevsky to get the best seats to listen to Patti and Sarah Bernhardt and to attend the Algiers festival. He now frequented Monte Carlo, and won, cautiously betting on low numbers and on

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FLOW in INC. i i MI i i íè s red and black. Anton was now able to focus on the roulette wheel: the pioneer of Russian ophthalmology, I)r Leonard-Leopold Girsh-man, lived in Nice with his tubercular son. Anton treated the son; the father prescribed a new pince-nez for Anton. In November Chekhov weighed himself (with his hat, autumn coat and stick) and found 72 kilos adequate for a man of his height, six foot one.

On 18/30 October La Pension Russe said goodbye to Maxim Kovalevsky, who went to lecture at the Sorbonne. Kovalevsky had promised to take Anton to Algiers, and Anton waited anxiously for his return. Meanwhile he expected Suvorin, but although caviar and smoked sturgeon arrived, Suvorin did not. On 7/19 November Suvorin turned back to Russia, to his wife's surprise, for she thought that Anton would dispel his gloom. Professor Iakobi, although even iller than Anton, was wintering in Russia. Anton confessed to Dr Korobov that he was bleeding again: he took potassium bromate and chloral hydrate every two hours. He told Anna Suvorina on 10/22 November:

… the last haemorrhage which is still going on today, began three weeks ago… I walk slowly, I go nowhere except the street, I don't live, I vegetate. And this irritates me, I am out of spirits… Only for the Lord's sake, don't tell anyone about the bleeding, that is between us… if they find out at home that I am still losing blood, they will shriek. The women in Anton's circle wanted him back in Russia: Evgenia suggested that he come back for Christmas and then leave again. Anna Suvorina lauded Russia's powdery snow and called his illness 'treachery': she blamed it on exertions with Margot and, earlier, with Lidia Iavorskaia. She told him to come to Petersburg. The Suvorins' daughter Nastia was to star in Viktor Krylov's farce Let's Divorce on 20 December. Apart from her acting, her fiances (once the Suvorins gave up the idea of marrying her to Chekhov, Nastia went through several engagements) were the talk of Petersburg.29 Emilie Bijon, however, reminded Anton of the reality of a Russian winter: 'je n'ai pas vu le soleil depuis mon retour…'

In La Pension Russe Anton moved downstairs and saved himself the effort of climbing two flights of stairs. Kovalevsky still promised to accompany Anton to Algiers, but by December he was wavering, telling Sobolevsky:

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Chekhov was showing blood even before I left Beaulieu. I hear it still happens to him at times. I think he has no idea of the danger of his state, although to my mind he is a typical consumptive. I am frightened of the idea of taking him to Algiers. Suppose he gets even iller? Advise me.30 Anton told Kovalevsky that he 'dreamed of Algiers all day and all night'.

Anton was content in Nice. Russia excelled, he decided, only in matches, sugar, cigarettes, footwear and chemists' shops. Had he been tempted to return early, a letter that Sobolevsky wrote on 12 November would have deterred him: Crossing the Russian frontier after a quiet life abroad is the return of a patient who has been discharged from fresh air into his unventilated room smelling of sickness and medicines… Starting with our governess detained on the border for a passport irregularity and ending with the revolting stench and filth of Moscow in autumn, crowded with cursing drunks, etc., all this put me into a state you could call demoralization.31 Anton appeased Melikhovo with a stream of presents which returning Russians delivered - ties, purses, scissors, corkscrews, gloves, perfume, coin-holders, playing cards, needles. Pavel and Masha were placated; in return they sent all the newspapers. Masha ran two local schools, mediating between a radical schoolteacher and conservative priest; she taught in Moscow; she helped ewes lamb, caught runaway dogs, nursed sick servants, paid off importunate monks. She moaned loudest to Misha (who summoned Evgenia to help his pregnant wife Olga): 'Papa is rebellious… I am not going to let mother go to you soon. There is nobody to do the house work… I am utterly worn out, my head never stops aching. Come for Christmas yourself.'32

Pavel wanted full cupboards for an influx of guests: he stocked up on kvas and begged Misha for ham. Misha sent frozen river fish and fresh grouse from the Volga, so tempting that Pavel induced Evgenia to break their strict fast and eat Arctic herring on a Wednesday. Pavel ordered entertainments from Vania: Mama asks you to bring your Magic Lantern with you with pictures, gifts will be given to the Boys and Girls in the Talezh school on the 2nd day of Christmas and it is good to show, for greater solem

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nity, the village schoolchildren piciuies ihey have not yet seen, which will bring them in particular indescribable joy… Antosha will pay for everything." Misha and Olga sent a goose, but did not come. Pavel had promised to teach his grandson Volodia to ride, but Vania came alone. The only guest, to Pavel's disgust, was Maria Drozdova. On Christmas Day the family treated the three local midwives to sausages and vodka. New Year's Eve was little merrier, Pavel wrote: 'Vania and the Schoolteacher came. We had supper at 10. Mile Drozdova got the lucky coin. Then we started playing cards.'

In Petersburg, Aleksandr reported, at the Suvorins' New Year party, Anna drank to the absent Anton, while Suvorin moodily lurked in his study, telling Aleksandr he would not go to Nice, as Anton was off with Kovalevsky to Algiers. In January 1898, however, Kovalevsky plucked up courage and told Anton that rheumatism and flu prevented him sailing for Africa. This, Anton replied dejectedly, 'depressed me very much for I have been delirious about Algiers.'

Lika Mizinova had mortgaged her land, but the bank withheld funds and she could not come to France. Instead she would open a milliner's shop; physical work would heal her dejected spirits. Masha was scornful: Lika was too disorganized to compete with professionals. On 13 January Lika told Anton she had her old looks and her former self, 'the self that loved you hopelessly for so many years.'34 Anton told Lika he approved, and would flirt with the prettier milliners, but privately agreed with Masha: 'Lika will hiss at her milliners, she has a terrible temper. And what's more she is very fond of green and yellow ribbons and enormous hats.'

In France Anton celebrated Russian New Year's Eve on 12 January 1898, watching the roulette wheel with a new companion, Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, who had moved to the pension on Russian Christmas Day. Khotiaintseva feigned a polite interest in roulette, but proved good company. They did not stay long at the tables: Anton was moni-. tored by a Russian doctor, Dr Valter (another Taganrogian staving at the pension) and had to be in his room by 4.00 p.m. Khotiaintseva and Anton liked shocking the guests: Aleksandra would stay in his room until the signal for her departure, a donkey that brayed at ten. She painted cutting watercolour caricatures of the women guests. She

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and Anton called them Fish, the Doll, Red Ribbons, the Clothes Moth and the Slum. She observed Anton with loving sharpness, telling Masha, whose close friend she had become: I lere it is thought indecent to enter a man's room, and I spend all my time in Anton's. He has a wonderful room, a corner room, two big windows (here the windows always reach the floor), with white curtains. 11/23 January 1898… we have to listen to the stupid talk of the most repulsive ladies here. I tease Anton that he is not recognized here - these fools really have no idea about him… Anton and I are great friends with Marie the maid and join her cursing the other clients in French.35 Brewing tea in his room, Anton spoke with passion on one topic: Alfred Dreyfus.

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Chekhov Dreyfusard January-April 1898 I N 1894, AT a travesty of a trial the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island for betraying French military secrets to Austro-Hungarian intelligence. In autumn 1897 a colonel of the security services and a senator forced the French government to re-open the Dreyfus case. Dreyfus's brother Matthieu named the real traitor, Major Esterhazy, in Le Figaro. French and Russian public opinion polarized: anti-Semites and nationalists faced democrats and internationalists. Major Esterhazy was, however, 'cleared'. Anton wondered if 'someone had carried out an evil joke'. Two weeks' study convinced him of Dreyfus's innocence.36 On 1/13 January Emile Zola's polemical article J'accuse came out in 300,000 copies of L'Aurore: the storm led to Zola's prosecution. Nothing that Zola had written won such vindictive fury from the French establishment, or such admiration from Chekhov, as his J'accuse. Chekhov made his first political stand. He now praised Korolenko, who had gone mad after undergoing the same ordeal as Zola when he stood up for Udmurt villagers accused of human sacrifices. Anton read the Voltaire he had bought for Taganrog library - Voltaire's defence of Calas, the judicially murdered Protestant, was a precedent for Zola's defence of Dreyfus. Chekhov's fondness for Jews was rather like his fondness for women: even though, to his mind, no Jew could ever fully enter into Russian life, and no woman ever equal a male genius, he vigorously defended their rights to equal opportunities.

Aleksandra Khotiaintseva had gone, leaving Anton a portrait of, himself. To Kovalevsky (29 January/10 February 1898), Anton denied he would marry her: Alas, I am incapable of such a complex, tangled business as marriage. And the role of husband frightens me, it has something stern, like

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a regimental commander's. With my idleness I prefer a less demanding job. A new girl had entered his life: on Russian New Year's Day a bouquet of flowers came from Cannes, followed by a letter from an Olga Vasilieva. Khotiaintseva was amused. She told Masha around 9/21 January: Two litde girls came from Cannes to see Anton, one of them asked permission to translate his works into foreign languages… Little, fat, bright pink cheeks. She lugged a camera along to photograph Anton, ran round him saying, 'No, he's not posing right.' The first time she came with daddy and noticed Anton cursing French matches, which are very bad. Today she brought two boxes of Swedish matches. Touching?37 I -ike Elena Shavrova, Olga Vasilieva was just fifteen years old when she came under Anton's spell. Unlike Shavrova, she was a sickly, self-sacrificing orphan. Now an heiress, she and her sister had been adopted by a landowner. She spoke English - which, like many Russian girls brought up by an English governess, she knew better than Russian and set about translating Chekhov. To her he was a god who would dispose of her fortune and her person. She would follow Anton from france to Russia, seeking affection and advice, offering everything. In Nice she found him newspaper cuttings, looked up quotations, sent him photographs she had taken, and asked him the meaning of the most basic Russian words. He treated her with a gentleness rare even for him, and tongues were soon wagging.

Anton was growing to like the women folk of the pension. The Fish, the Doll, Red Ribbons, the Clothes Moth and the Slum were more good-natured than he or Aleksandra had allowed. The Fish, Baroness Dershau, became a fanatical Dreyfusarde under Anton's influence, as did many Russians in Nice. When Suvorin's granddaughter, Nadia Kolomnina, came to Nice, Anton used flirtatious banter to convert her too. Only Anton's brothers sat on the fence: Aleksandr and Misha, dependent on Suvorin's patronage, could not afford their own opinion.

Anton now found New Times repulsive, and ordered instead the liberal World Echoes, which exposed the bias of Suvorin's paper.38 Suvo-rin saw Dreyfus as the villain in a war between Christendom and Jewry, on which hung the future of civilization: the question of

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F L î w v. ê i N (; ñ i ì i i i; í i ê s whether Dreyfus was innocent or guilty was a technicality. Anton argued so vehemently with Suvorin that the latter conceded: 'You've convinced me'. Nevertheless, attacks on Dreyfus and then on Zola -even while New Times was pirating Zola's novel Paris - were even more virulent in the weeks following Anton's remonstrations. Pavlovsky, the Paris correspondent of New Times, and himself a supporter of Dreyfus, found his copy either binned or distorted. The Russian correspondent on the Riviera, Michel Deline (Mikhail Ashkenazi), sent Suvorin a protest: It's not my attitude to the Dreyfus case, but yours which is disgraceful. I refer you to someone whom you love and respect, if you are capable of loving and respecting anybody: A. P. Chekhov. Ask him what he thinks of your attitude to this case and to the Jewish question as a whole. Neither you nor New Times will be unscathed by his opinion.39 Deline's rebuke upset Chekhov more than Suvorin: he hated his name being cited in a public airing of what he still considered private differences, and he ostracized Deline. Anton was bewildered because Suvorin would not retrieve New Times's honour from the Dauphin and Burenin. Anton told Kovalevsky that Suvorin was the most weak-willed man he knew when it came to reining in his own family.40 Anton's tone to Suvorin cooled: he joked that a Jewish syndicate had bought him for ioo francs. He told Aleksandr that 'he no longer wanted letters from Suvorin, in which he uses love of the military to justify his paper's lack of tact': he was disgusted by Suvorin's pirating of Zola, while pouring filth on the man. Yet the two friends still wanted to meet in March.

Dreyfus helped Anton forget Algiers, if not illness. He added guai-acol, an exotic creosote, to his medication. He was downcast at the death of Dr Liubimov on 14/26 January and his burial. Nuisances in La Pension Russe, such as Maksheev the gambler, tempted him to move to a French-run hotel. The Fish, the Doll and the Slum joined forces to dissuade Anton from moving. Maksheev was leaving; the newly converted Chekhovians and Dreyfusardes demanded that the manageress let them and Anton dine separately in the drawing room. Baroness Dershau ('Fish', signing herself Neighbour) showered Anton with notes. She borrowed glue to mend her fan, and brewed him tea.

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Nevertheless Anton was tired of Nice. On 17 January his name day was celebrated very quietly with a visit from Iurasov, the consul. Anton wrote to Suvorin on 2 7 January: The Russian cemetery is splendid. Cosy, green and you can see the sea. I do nothing, I only sleep, eat, and make offerings to the Goddess of Love. My present French woman is a very nice creature, 22, with an amazing figure, but I'm now a bit bored with all this and want to go home. Chekhov's notebooks spawned ideas, but 'A Visit to Friends', the last story that he wrote in Nice, reworked the woes of the Kiseliovs in Babkino into ironic fiction. It was written very slowly. A dissolute husband and self-deceiving wife are faced with the bankruptcy of their estate: they invite the narrator, an old friend, to advise them. He realizes that his hostess is inveigling him into marrying her sister, and thus bailing them out. Too strong to succumb, too weak to protest, he flees, pleading an appointment. The scenes of false merriment and the evocation of a derelict garden are among Chekhov's finest creations, but the story must have had unhappy associations. 'A Visit to Friends', published in February 1898, went unnoticed by the critics and was never republished, although it would be recycled into The (Cherry Orchard. Anton's inspiration lapsed into a prolonged hibernation.

In winter Melikhovo was even quieter; Pavel even put up with Roman's idle wife Olimpiada. The livestock lambed and calved, giving milk for Evgenia and delight to old Mariushka who, Pavel reported, 'is beside herself with joy at lambs gambolling and bleating, and kisses them'.41 Only the dogs gave cause for distress. Village boys fed them broken glass wrapped in bread and killed both the laikas that Leikin had given Anton. (Leikin was later told that the laikas had died of distemper.) The dachshunds, Pavel complained, were attacking everybody, the family, visitors, children. Brom bit Pavel so severely on the hand that all the medical workers of the district were mobilized. Presents, delivered by the Fish, Doll, Slum and Clothes Moth, consoled Pavel. At Shrovetide Pavel watched his guests carefully: 'Everyone ate pancakes… Drozdova 10, Kolia 6, Masha 4.'

On 5 February Evgenia had a telegram from Iaroslavl, which gave her an escape. She left to see her newborn granddaughter, whom

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FLOWb KIN(j CI'MI 1 I HIKS Misha and Olga had named Kvgeni.i alter her. Misha announced to Masha: 'We've registered An tosh a as the godfather… I'll ask you to deduct II roubles from Antosha's money that you keep… Mother wonders if Antosha will be offended that I've arranged such a cheap christening.42

Aleksandr had written a farce for Suvorin's theatre. It was taken off after one night because it had no part for the director's mistress. He fulminated to Anton: 'My play is off because of cunt;… expect an offprint of my play which depends so disgracefully on the vagina of Mme Domasheva and the penis of Kholeva… Our theatre, led by Iavorskaia, is a very mangy cloaca.'43 Aleksandr took to drink. Family gave him no pleasure. Natalia loved only Misha, shielding him from his delinquent step-brothers, and found her husband repellent. Little Kolia was rebelling at Vania and Sonia's tutelage, spending, while Uncle Anton was in Nice, his holidays at Melikhovo.

At the end of February toothache struck: the dentistry was brutal. Anton needed a powerful distraction. His fervent admirer, the dramatist Sumbatov-Iuzhin, had come to the Cote d'Azur to win 100,000 roubles to build a theatre. Anton went with him to Monte Carlo. Potapenko was heralding his arrival for the same reason: (26 December 1897)… I've found a way or two of gambling with chances of winning, true, not a lot, but still it's more honourable than writing for God's World… when I win, I'll build a theatre in Petersburg and give Suvorin a run for his money. (5 February 1898) Dear Antonio, Don't joke with me. I really am coming to Nice… You're wrong to say one can't win at roulette. I'll prove it to you. I'll prove amazing things. Wait for me with bated breath. On 2/14 March, Potapenko arrived. The next day, Sumbatovlost 7000 francs and Anton 30. Potapenko was winning. Later, he confessed: Monte Carlo had a depressing effect on Anton, but it would be wrong to say that he was immune to its toxins. Perhaps I did in part infect him with my confidence… that there was in gambling a simple secret which just has to be divined and then… Well, then, of course, the writer's greatest dream emerged: to work freely… So he, sober, calculating, cautious, gave in to temptation. We bought a whole pile of form books, even a miniature roulette wheel and for

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hours sat, pencil in hand, covering paper, with figures. We were working out a system, looking for the secret. ()n the back of an old letter Anton scrawled five columns of figures. Five days later, Sumbatov, Potapenko and Chekhov were spotted in Monte Carlo. Sumbatov, 10,000 francs down, went back to Russia. Potapenko, dishevelled, with black bags under his eyes, was 400 up; a week later he won another no francs. As Queen Victoria arrived from England, Potapenko left Nice for Russia. Shortly afterwards, Griinberg, the accountant at The Cornfield, wrote to Anton saying that Potapenko had informed him that Chekhov needed an advance: he was therefore sending 2000 francs to Anton, assuming that a manuscript was imminent. Anton was tight-lipped; he had lent half this sum to Potapenko. At the end of April, Potapenko, unabashed, wrote: 'I shall send you 1000 francs. About this money, by the way, I've told nobody here. To avoid unwanted exclamations and head-nodding, I innocently lied to everyone and said that you and I had each won 700.'

Nice offered Anton no escape from penury and disease. The unfinished official portrait also caught up with him. Masha had returned to Braz the portrait he had begun at Melikhovo. Anton refused to risk his lungs by going to Paris to pose. Braz was promised by the Tretiakov gallery his expenses to go to Nice and start the portrait anew. On 14/26 March Braz started work in a studio in Nice. Anton was resigned, but severe: he would sit mornings only, and for only ten days. (He loathed the Jeremiah-like expression which Braz had captured so well, but for the time being managed to keep his dislike of the portrait to himself.)

In mid April Anton began his return home. Escorted by Maxim Kovalevsky, with a large bag of sweets, he took the train to Paris to linger there until warm weather set in at Melikhovo, where even now it was freezing. The rooks and starlings had flown back. The frogs croaked. On 24 April a cuckoo called. Pavel pronounced it time for Anton to return.

Anton had reasons to stay in Paris. Suvorin's diary reads: 'I meant to go to Paris, where Chekhov has arrived from Nice, but I fell ill and am staying at home.' A week later, however, Suvorin raced to France on the Nord Express. Anton was giving Bernard Lazare, author

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F LO W Ê Ê I N (i CI M I II Ê I Ê S of L'affaire Dreyfus, a two-hour interview in French.44 Anton met Matthieu Dreyfus (who was studying Russian), and Jacques Merpert, friend of Dreyfus, employee of Louis Dreyfus, the corn trader. (Merpert taught Russian: Anton was to send him one-act Russian plays for his pupils.)

Anton moved from the dingy Hotel Dijon to the splendid Vendome, to live a floor beneath Suvorin. Dreyfus tainted the air. Suvorin's diary for 27 April/9 May 1898 brands all radicals as a mob: Chekhov is here. All the time with me. He told me that Korolenko had persuaded him to stand for election to die Union of Writers… these swine become judges of a remarkable writer! There it is, the mob from which contemptible mediocrities jump out and run things. 'I was almost blackballed,' Chekhov said… I asked [de Roberti, a philosopher] if he'd seen Zola? 'Well, did he say anything about Dreyfus?' 'He said mat he's convinced of his innocence.' 'Well, the proof?' 'He hasn't any.'45 Nevertheless, Anton recalled the three weeks in Paris as his happiest abroad. Suvorin, a month ago too melancholy to speak, was animated. He and Anton bargained for exhibits for Taganrog museum. Anton and Pavlovsky spoke up for Dreyfus, and believed they had won Suvorin round. 'What a guilty back he has,' thought Anton as Suvorin turned away from them.

Taganrog, relatives reminded Anton, needed his help. Anton was anxious to support the museum, hotels and sanatoria, to counteract the new foundries which choked the city and crippled its workmen. Scouring Paris for trophies for his native city, Anton enlisted sculptors, Antokolsky and Bernshtam, to carve a twenty-foot statue of Peter the Great for Taganrog's 200th anniversary. Anton bought a boater for Pavel, an umbrella for Evgenia, nightshirts for himself, and strolled the streets in a top hat. He thought of seeing Zola, but did not trust his French: Russia's and France's Dreyfusards exchanged just salutations.

May promised to be hot and dry at Melikhovo. The trees were in leaf; Pavel opened all the windows and doors. Laden with gifts, Anton boarded the Nord Express for Petersburg. Suvorin, believing Anton's health had recovered in Paris, saw him off. He had given Anton 1000 francs, a cushion and a pair of gold cuff links. (Anton left the money

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with Pavlovsky to give back.) Anton wanted to return unnoticed. He wired Aleksandr in Petersburg: 'Meet me no fuss'. Masha was to come to the station in Moscow the next day. Only she and Potapenko were to know of his arrival.

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The Birth of a Theatre May-September 1898 SUVORIN HAD warned his wife to send out the carriage for Anton.46 Anna brought Anton to the Suvorin house. Nastia reported to her father that she found Anton 'awfully unimproved, and his voice struck me as somehow weakened.'47 Anton's desk was piled with letters when he reached Melikhovo on the evening of 5 May 1898. Nobody congratulated him on his recovery: Evgenia wrote to Misha that he had lost even more weight.48

The important letter was from Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose elder brother, the novelist Vasili, Anton had kept company at the roulette tables. Since 1890 Anton had trusted Vladimir and respected him for having abandoned a career as a playwright in order to teach and direct actors properly. Nemirovich-Danchenko now dominated the Moscow Philharmonic School, a respected music and drama college. In 1898 Nemirovich had merged his best six actors -one being Olga Knipper49 - with Konstantin Stanislavsky and his best four actors from the Society for Art and Literature into the Moscow Arts Theatre. This was to be the first private theatre able to rival Russia's officially subsidized state theatres in its repertoire and its acting; it had the advantage of rich patrons and of freedom from the restrictions that the Imperial Theatre Committee placed on the repertoire of the state theatres. Nemirovich-Danchenko's enthusiasm and Stanislavsky's genius - two bears in one den, they admitted - was a heady brew. With the wealth of Stanislavsky (director of a cotton mill) and of Levitan's patron, Sawa Morozov, a militant theatre was formed, needing only a new repertoire. The stimulus to relaunch The Seagull had come from Vasili Nemirovich-Danchenko. In November 1896 he had written to his brother Vladimir, disparaging The Seagull. The brothers' rivalry was such that Vladimir was bound to defend

MAY-SEPTEMBER 1898

whatever Vasili attacked. Moscow's theatre was born of Petersburg's spite: Dear Volodia! You ask about Chekhov's play. I love Anton with all my heart and value him. I don't consider him in the least great or even of major importance… This is a boring, drawn-out thing that embitters the listener. Where have you seen a 40-year-old woman renouncing a lover of her own free will. This isn't a play. There is nothing theatrical in it. I think Chekhov is dead for the stage. The first performance was so horrible that when Suvorin told me about it tears welled in my eyes. The audience was right, too. The auditorium expected something great and got a bad, boring piece… You have to be infatuated with yourself to stage such a thing. I'll say more, Chekhov is no playwright. The sooner he forgets the stage, the better… I nearly left before the end.30 Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko's letter to Chekhov on 25 April 1898 changed Anton's life: Of contemporary Russian authors I have decided to cultivate only the most talented and still poorly understood… The Seagull… enthrals me and I will stake anything you like that these hidden dramas and tragedies in every character of the play, given a skilful, extremely conscientious production without banalities, can enthral the auditorium too. Perhaps the play won't arouse explosions of applause, but a real production with fresh talents, free of routine, will be a triumph of art, I vouch for that. All we need is your decision… I guarantee you will never find greater reverence in a director or worshippers in the cast.

I am too poor to pay you a lot. But believe me, I'll do everything to see you are satisfied in this respect. Our theatre is beginning to arouse the strong indignation of the Imperial theatres. They understand we are making war on routine, cliches, recognized geniuses and so on.51 Anton had sworn he was finished with the theatre. He merely sent word through Masha that he had read this letter. Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote again on 12 May: I need to know right now whether you are letting us have The Seagull… If you don't, you cut my throat, since The Seagull is the only contemporary play that enthrals me as a director, and you are the only modern writer of great interest to a theatre with a model reper

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II.OWI HINC. (I Ml I I HII S toire… 1 shall come down lo sec you.mil discuss The Seagull and my stage plan. After Nemirovich-Danchenko posted this letter, he received Anton's refusal. He wrote again: But The Seagull is on everywhere. Why not put it on in Moscow?… There were unprecedented reviews in the Kharkov and Odessa papers. What's worrying you? Stay away from first performances, that's all. Can you forbid the play ever to be put on in Moscow, when it can be acted anywhere without your permission? Even in Petersburg… Send me a note to say you have no objection to my staging The Seagull… unless you are hiding the simplest one, that you don't believe I can stage the play well. Anton answered evasively, and warned Nemirovich-Danchenko he would have to hire his own horses from the station. Vladimir did not go to Melikhovo that summer, but assumed, rightly, that Anton had given in to his logic. On 18 June Anton went to see him in Moscow: the new Moscow Arts Theatre had the play for its first season in autumn 1898.

Anton did not foresee how close he would become to the Moscow Arts Theatre. He enjoyed the warm summer and the rich blossom and fruits it brought, but his spirits were low. Tychinkin, Suvorin's typesetter, reported to his master that Chekhov was 'as sad' as ever.52 Now that Anton was back, Masha could rest after eight months' slavery. She went first to the Crimea and then with Maria Drozdova to Zvenigorod to paint. Anton lay low, going to Moscow only once. Old guests, 'the Siamese twins of mediocrity', Gruzinsky and Ezhov, visited. Ivanenko again settled into Melikhovo. Anton was more resolute in staving off women guests. Elena Shavrova, denied even a stone when she asked for bread, pleaded for a rendezvous. Lidia Avilova could get out of Anton only a signature 'with a big tail underneath like a hanged rat's.' Lika was now in Paris training to be an opera singer, while Olga Kundasova was in the Crimea. Aleksandra Khot-, iaintseva was the only girlfriend to arrive in May.

Later, the women flocked. Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik announced her return 'flying to you on wings of love, with starch and olive oil'. Olga Kundasova beat her to it, but Tania arrived on 5 July for three days. After four years' exile she took over the household diary: 'Here

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I found everything as before, people, flowers and animals. God grant it goes on. A clear day and fragrant air. [And in Pavel's hand] At supper we laughed loud.'

Anton now threatened to marry Tania off to Ezhov, and called her Tatiana Ezhova. Tania reappeared only once, six weeks later, that summer. A fragment of paper tbat Kundasova passed to Anton, probably while he stayed overnight in Serpukhov on 23 July, hints at an assignation: 'Si vous etes visible, sortez de votre chambre; je vous attends. Kundasova.'53 Anton's eighteen-year-old cousin from Taganrog, Elena, came and scandalized Melikhovo by staying up till midnight with the neighbours' French tutor. Two days later Tania reappeared together with Dunia Konovitser. A day later, Natalia Lintvariova left her water mills and came for a week.

From Nice Olga Vasilieva sent money for Anton's new school: she was to appear in Moscow in October to gaze on Braz's portrait of Chekhov in the Tretiakov gallery. Anton's first trip to Moscow was 18-20 June. He stayed with Vania, went to the operetta, where trained apes were performing, and discussed with Nemirovich-Danchenko the revival of The Seagull. Only on 1 August did Anton venture far from home, to see Sobolevsky and Varvara Morozova 200 miles away near Tver. By the 5th he was back. Autumn was in the air: he would have to leave Melikhovo. He had now resigned himself to spending the eight cold months of the year in the Crimea: even though it was no cheaper than living in Nice, he could at least feel he was still in his motherland, and medical opinion approved. Anton told almost nobody, so that in September Lika was meeting trains in Paris, assuming that he was returning to Nice. On 9 September Anton left Melikhovo to spend six days in Moscow before taking the train south.

Melikhovo was falling apart. The garden and woodland were neglected. Labour and enthusiasm were short. Vania and Misha came without their family, for only a few days at a time, Evgenia travelled to Taganrog, for the first time in fourteen years. Her two sisters-in-law, AuntMarfa and Aunt Liudmila, and Evgenia were, Cousin Georgi wrote to Anton, all three very glad to see each other, they chat until midnight. Today we are setting off together to the town park to listen to the music… Tomorrow we are off to the Greek monastery, where there is a

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FLOWKH1N»; Ñ I'. Ml I FRIES bishop from Jerusalem, Auntie \1é»öì1è\ wants to have a look at him. In mid August Pavel went to Iaroslavl for a fortnight to see his granddaughter.

The men of Melikhovo also sensed that the village had lost its centre of gravity. The priest Father Nikolai stirred the peasantry up against the Talezh schoolteacher Mikhailov, and the battle ended, de spite Anton's conciliation attempts, in Father Nikolai being sent away. The household lost its best servant when Aniuta Chufarova, so expert with a horse, a mop or a whalebone corset, left to marry. Then Roman, the man of all work, took to drink again: Olimpiada, the wife he had banished a year before, had died. Anton persisted in his efforts, cajoling funds from neighbours and authorities to buy desks, slates and bricks and mortar for a new building, his third school, for the Melikhovo children, who were taught in a leased cottage.

Confined to home, his interest in the estate waning, cut off from close friends, Anton tried to write, even though the process felt, he told Lidia Avilova, like 'eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach has just been removed'. Advances from The Cornfield and from Russian Thought had to be paid off. In summer 1898 Anton developed ideas born in Nice. Despite his grim mood, the stories of that summer are among his finest work. He offered The Cornfield the longest, 'Ionych'. It concerns a provincial doctor who, from humble origins, becomes as proud, sterile and heartless as his bourgeois patients. The narrative has the familiar Chekhovian scene of a nonproposal in a garden. Particularly powerful is the evocation of Anton's boyhood world, Taganrog's moonlit cemetery and steppe landscape. Anton's other work was a trilogy of short stories, published in Russian Thought in July and August 1898. Friends roaming the countryside each narrate a life ruined by moral cowardice. 'Gooseberries' is about a man's ruthless determination to acquire an estate on which he can grow his own gooseberries, however sour. 'The Man in the Case' is about a. schoolteacher of Gogolian grotesquerie. The last story, 'About Love', is the most moving: a miller tells of his hopeless love for his best friend's wife. The first two stories became classics instantly, for their morality is unambiguous. 'Gooseberries' is against avarice, 'The Man in the Case' is against false witness. 'About Love', however, was probMAY-SEPTEMBER 1898 lematical to critics and the public, for it implies that moral sacrifice can be sloth or cowardice.54

Anton referred to this burst of creativity as visits to the 'muddy spring'. Pavel had heard a sermon which contrasted the 'muddy spring' of vice that foolish travellers prefer to the 'clear spring' of Christ, and irritated Anton at table by constantly harping on the two springs. The 'muddy spring' of inspiration, however, dried up, as the prospect of exile to the Crimea loomed. Anton had his first haemorrhage of the autumn.

Anton arrived in Moscow on 9 September 1898 for the first rehearsal of The Seagull. The rehearsal, although only of two acts, was a revelation. Weeks of hard work had gone into discussions with the cast, most of whom were unknown names. Stanislavsky had spent the summer on his brother's estate near Kharkov working on a mise-en-scene. Anton found himself a longed-for oracle, not a nuisance, and his interest in theatre revived once again.

Anton also watched a rehearsal of Tsar Fiodor by Aleksei Tolstoy and was bewitched by the actress, Olga Knipper, who played the Tsaritsa Irina. She had also noticed him, at the rehearsals of The Seagull a few days before: We were all taken by the unusually subde charm of his personality, of his simplicity, his inability to 'teach', 'show'… When Anton was asked a question, he replied in an odd way, as if at a tangent, as if in general, and we didn't know how to take his remarks - seriously or in jest." Old friends also waited for Anton. They saw that he was no more Avelan leading his squadron into new revels. Even Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, who greeted him with enthusiastic doggerel, seems to have realized that things were different now.56

Suvorin came to Moscow. He and Anton dined at the Ermitage and then went to the circus, with the artist Aleksandra Khotiaintseva. Three weeks later, Anton wrote to Suvorin a propos of the latter's criticism of the Moscow Arts Theatre. He said nothing about The Seagull or Olga's interpretation of Arkadina, but he was overwhelmed by the rehearsal of Tsar Fiodor on the eve of his departure. In it he singled out, without naming her, Olga Knipper: 'Irina, I think, is splendid. The voice, the nobility, the depth of feeling is so good that

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II.OWI' HIN(. II Mil I nil.S I have a lump in my throat… II I had stayed in Moscow I should have fallen in love with this Irina.'

He took the train for the Crimea on 15 September, preoccupied by Nemirovich-Danchenko's and Stanislavsky's troupe and by their liveliest actress, Olga Knipper.

SIXTY-SIX The Broken Cog September-October 1898

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IN JULY NATALIA rejected Aleksandr. He complained to Anton: 'Veneri cupio, sed "caput dolet", penis stat, nemo venit, nemo dat.'57 In August 1898, while Natalia was away, Aleksandr bought an exercise book, bound it himself in leather and made indelible blue-black ink out of oak galls. He entitled this diary The Rubbish Dump.5i It catalogues his domestic miseries. On his wife's return, Aleksandr became impotent. On 28 September 1898, he told Anton: 'I am schwach and even by the domestic hearth cannot produce enough material for coitus, let alone onanism.' Natalia demanded that he ask Anton for treatment. On 4 October Vania's wife, Sonia, wrote from Moscow: Dear Aleksandr, Kolia [Natalia's elder stepson] refuses to work, he behaves so badly that even our patience is exhausted. He won't obey anybody, even the most gentle treatment is useless. I even resorted to Masha's help, but he just turned his back on her and wouldn't even talk to her… How do I get him to you? On 5 October Aleksandr's Rubbish Dump expresses complete turmoil: 'I howled like a wolf… Natasha is trying to calm me, saying that Sonia wrote and sent the letter in the heat of her wrath.' Aleksandr wrote to Vania: 'Nikolai has written his own death sentence: now he won't be accepted anywhere… Put him on a train… there is no hope for his correction.' In Petersburg Suvorin was thinking about Anton. Aleksandr noted: There was a conversation between Suvorin and Tychinkin about buying all Anton's work at once, to give Anton the maximum amount of money at once, and then starting to publish 'The Complete Works'. To consider publishing his 'Complete Works' meant that Anton now feared that he would soon die. He was seeking a capital sum to see

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FLOWER I N(i i I Ml I I'.RIES him through terminal illness and (;ikc care of bis family after his death. Most Russian writers towards the end of their creative lives hoped to publish their 'Complete Works'. Tolstoy bad advised Chekhov to do his editing now, and not to entrust the work to his heirs. Suvorin's publishing, however, was sloppy: he generously corrected accounting mistakes as soon as Chekhov mentioned them, but could not offer good proof-reading, production or distribution. As the sons took over, their father's empire crumbled; Suvorin could not bring the Dauphin to heel. Tychinkin, the head printer, advised Chekhov against 'Complete Works', arguing that Anton would make more money by reprinting individual volumes. The typesetter, Neupokoev, had mislaid Anton's manuscripts - and begged him not to tell Suvorin. Anton's affection for Suvorin was not enough to stop him leaving. Sytin, the publisher in Moscow, to whom Anton had thought of selling the rights to his works, now angered him by breaking a promise to print a medical journal, Surgery.59 Anton was at a loss. Fellow writers, upset at his plight, took it upon themselves to market Chekhov's 'Complete Works'. They knew that his departure for the Crimea marked the final phase of his life. The novelist Ertel, himself tubercular, wrote to a friend on 26 September 1898: What is Chekhov? One of the prides of our literature… Now once this major young writer is seriously ill - and I believe he has consumption… money has to be sought, because the works of a writer whom all Russia reads won't cover the costs of rest, nor a journey south, nor the necessary surroundings for a sick man, especially one with a large family on his hands. Judge for yourself, isn't this disgraceful?60 Anton showed less distress than his sister. Masha had bad headaches. Anton told her on 19 September to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, fish, to take aspirin, then subcutaneous arsenic, potassium iodate and electric shocks: 'and if that doesn't help, then wait for old age, when all this will pass and new diseases will start.' Masha had endless messages to pass to Moscow and Petersburg, items to be sent on to the Crimea - ties, cuff links, a balaclava to be bought from Muir and Mirrielees, a waistcoat to be repaired. She had to send Anton all his postage stamps from Lopasnia. Anton didn't want the local postmaster, Blagoveshchensky, to lose his job now that his main customer

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was 800 miles away. She was equipping the third school, for which Anton had donated his iooo roubles from the Moscow Arts Theatre. Melikhovo had become a millstone. Pavel and Masha had to cope with the autumn work that Anton instructed them to carry out on the estate: fencing the hayrick against the horses, planting an avenue of birches, ploughing the park. Masha had the moral support of Alek-sandra Khotiaintseva who frequently came to stay, and they hired a new workman. Masha found relief only in art: she and Aleksandra Khotiaintseva began to paint Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik.

Winter came early: three inches of snow fell on 2 7 September; the horse and cows went on winter fodder. Four sheep and two calves were slaughtered. On 8 October Pavel made a diary entry: 'The windows are iced up as in winter. A bright sunrise. It is cold in all the rooms. They still haven't brought wood.'

The Crimea, at first bathed in warm sunshine, was not as dreary as Anton had feared. He was in a romantic mood. Stopping at Sevastopol, awaiting the boat to Yalta, he was befriended by a military doctor who took him to the moonlit cemetery. Here Anton overheard a woman telling a monk: 'Go away if you love me.' In Yalta his Romantic mood persisted. Olga Knipper was on his mind. He told Lika that, despite the bacilli, he might flee to Moscow for a few days: 'Or I'll hang myself. Nemirovich and Stanislavsky have a very interesting theatre. Pretty actresses. If I'd stayed a bit longer, I'd have lost my head.'

In Yalta he found women eager to befriend him. Mrs Shavrova was staying there with her third daughter, the frail Anna. So were Suvorin's granddaughters Vera and the flirtatious Nadia Kolomnina. The headmistress of the Yalta girls' school, Varvara Kharkeevich, took Anton under her wing and made him a school governor. Anton had distinguished male company in Yalta: the opera singer Fiodor Chaliapin, the poet Balmont, and a cluster of tubercular doctors around Dr Sredin, but the man who was most useful to him was Isaak Sinani, who ran Yalta's book and tobacco shop. Through Sinani newspapers, telegrams, letters and visitors all found Anton.

For the first weeks Anton migrated from one rented apartment to another in the hilly suburbs of Yalta. Soon he was so resigned to this 'flowering cemetery' that he decided both to buy a country cottage and to build a town house. On 26 September Sinani took Anton

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FLO WIH I N(. Ñ I Ml II Ê I i:s seventeen miles west along the precipitous coast road to Kiichiik-Koy, to look at an estate a Tatar farmer was selling for 2000 roubles. Anton sketched it for Masha: a stone, red-roofed Tatar house with a cottage, cattle shed, a kitchen, pomegranates, a walnut tree and five acres, hospitable Tatar neighb ours - the drawback being a terrifying access road. Soon, however, access would be easier, for the government had that year decided to build a coastal railway, and next year there would be a fast coastal boat service. Masha replied that stone was safer than the flammable rotten wood of Melikhovo, and that no road was worse than Melikhovo's tracks (Serpukhov council procrastinated over building an all-weather road from Lopasnia.) Vania, who liked the prospect of holidays in a family dacha, also approved. It was too cheap to miss. A week later Anton decided also on a house in Yalta: a site at Autka, 200 feet above and twenty minutes from the centre, was for sale at 5000 roubles. He would build on it for the whole family.

During this flurry of decisions, on 12 October 1898, Sinani had a telegram: 'Kindly communicate how Anton received news of death of his father.' Sinani did not tell Anton until next day. Bewildered, Anton wired to Masha: 'Kingdom heaven eternal peace father deeply sorry write details healthy completely don't worry look after mother Anton.' Nobody had warned him during the three days that led to Pavel's death.

On the morning of Friday 9 October, when Masha was still in Moscow, Pavel dressed without putting on the truss for his hernia. He went to the stores and lifted a twenty-pound bag of sugar. As he straightened up, a loop of gut was pinched by his abdominal muscles. In agony he crawled back to bed. Evgenia panicked; it was some time before she sent to Ugriumovo for the doctor. After 'fussing around him for four hours' he insisted Pavel be taken to Moscow. Evgenia sent a servant to Lopasnia with a telegram for Masha.61

Jolted over frozen ruts, Pavel was driven to Lopasnia. It was dark. The doctor put him on a train for Moscow. Three hours later he delivered Pavel to Professor Liovshin's clinic and vanished. Liovshin administered chloroform to the patient immediately.

Masha was with Vania that evening and still knew nothing. At 10.30 they received a second telegram, and she rushed to the clinic. Next Sunday she wrote to Anton:

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After 3 a.m. Professor Liovshin came down and started shouting at me for abandoning an old man - there was nobody with him. He said the operation had been difficult, that he was worn out, that he had cut out two feet of gut, and only a healthy old man could stand such a long operation… he took pity on me and started saying mat the operation was successful, that I could even hear my father's voice. He took me upstairs, I was surrounded by bloodstained house surgeons and I heard our father's voice, fairly cheerful. Again the professor addressed me and said that so far all was fine but anything could happen and told me to come back at 8 a.m. and to pray. Masha and Vania returned next morning and waited until i.oo p.m., when Pavel awoke, his pulse and temperature normal: In the evening I found father far better, cheerful, amazingly well cared for! He asked me to bring mother, started talking about the doctors, saying that he liked it here, he was worried only by slight pain in his belly and black and red matter he was bringing up. Vania telegraphed Aleksandr, who caught the overnight Moscow express, bringing with him his camera and glass plates. On the morning of Monday 12 October he went straight to Vania's school house. His Rubbish Dump records: He was alone in the ward, all yellow from the bile… but fully conscious. Our appearance gave him much joy. 'Ah, Misha too has come, and Aleksandr is here!'… Two or three times in the conversation he said, 'Pray!' Pavel then began to show symptoms of gangrene, but Misha and Aleksandr repressed their mutual dislike, and the three brothers dined together at one of Moscow's best restaurants, Testov's. A second operation was performed. After dinner Aleksandr called at the clinic. The porter called out, 'It's all over.' Pavel had died on the operating table. Aleksandr wired an obituary to make New Times the next day.

Evgenia complained that four days of suffering was too little. Aleksandr felt that she believed 'the longer a man takes to die, the closer lie is to the Kingdom of Heaven: he has time to repent his sins.' Aleksandr wanted to photograph the body: The porter told me that father's body was still in the basement and for 20 kopecks took me there. On a sort of catafalque I saw my

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FLOW I HIN«. CI Ml I Ê Ê IES father's body, completely naked, wit li ëè enormous bloody plaster covering the whole belly, but the light made it impossible to photograph. The clinic refused to wash the body until Misha brought a new shroud. Misha, furious that Aleksandr had brought his camera, took charge, as the only civil servant. Aleksandr felt 'completely out of place and unwanted' and was taken to the station by Vania. (Misha and Aleksandr barely spoke to each other again.) Pavel was buried in the absence of his two eldest sons, Aleksandr and Anton. The funeral was a shambles. Masha took 300 roubles from her savings bank and borrowed another hundred. Sergei Bychkov, Anton's faithful servant in the Great Moscow hotel, followed the coffin to the cemetery. Misha wrote to Anton that the funeral was 'such a profanation, such a cynical event that the only thing I am pleased about is that you did not come.' Anton confessed that he felt all the more guilty: had he been in Melikhovo, the mishap might not have been fatal.62

Pavel, even if more resented than obeyed, had been a pivot on which life at Melikhovo revolved. Anton saw Pavel's death as the end of an era. Ignoring his mother and sister's wishes that they should stay on at Melikhovo, he told Menshikov: 'The main cog has jumped out of the Melikhovo machine, and I think that life in Melikhovo for my mother and sister has now lost all its charm and that I shall now have to make a new nest for them.' Anton found a young architect, Shapovalov, to design a house at Autka: he hoped it would be completed by April 1899. A week later Masha left Evgenia in the care of the lady teacher at Melikhovo, and took the train south for a fortnight. (Evgenia refused Misha's invitation to Iaroslavl: perhaps she loathed his letters addressing her as 'greatly weeping widow'.63) On 27 October Masha was greeted by Anton in Yalta: 'I've bought a building plot, tomorrow we'll go and look at it, amazing views.'