Anton Chekhov. A life

The Russian public felt for Anton. He was deluged with letters, while the papers worried about his own imminent demise. Misha urged Anton on 20 October: Buy an estate, marry a good person, but definitely get married, have a baby - that is a happiness one can only dream about… Let your

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1898

future wife - somehow I'd like it to be Natasha Lintvariova or Aleksandra Khotiaintseva - arrange your life to be just happy.64 Misha wrote to Masha of Khotiaintseva: 'such a glorious person and so talented that I'd like Anton to marry her.'65 Anton thought of Lintvariova and Khotiaintseva as the salt of the earth, but not as potential wives. He was thinking instead of Knipper, annoyed that Petersburg's papers ignored her Irina. He shared Nemirovich-Danchenko's anger when Suvorin accused the Moscow Arts Theatre of plagiarizing others' productions. Nemirovich-Danchenko, recasting The Seagull, had told Anton: 'Suvorin, as you foretold, was Suvorin. He sold us in a week. To your face he was delighted with us, once in Petersburg he fired off a vile little article, I can't forgive myself for talking to him about joining his Company.'66

From Paris Anton received two photographs of a leaner Lika. One was inscribed: 'Don't think I really am such an old witch. Come soon. You see what just a year's separation from you does to a woman.' The other carried the words of a romantic song she used to sing to Anton: To dear Anton Pavlovich, in kindly memory of eight years' good relations, Lika. Whether my days are clear or mournful, Whether I perish, destroying my life, I know only this: to the grave Thoughts, feelings, songs, strength All for you!! (Tchaikovsky, Apukhtin) If this inscription compromises you, I'm glad. Paris 11/23 October 1898 I could have written this eight years ago and I write it now and I shall write it in ten years' time.

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Three Triumphs ô Actresses: The ruin of the son of the family. Of frightful lubriciousness, go in for orgies, get through millions of francs, end up in the workhouse. Though there are some who make good mothers of families. Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas ?

SIXTY-SEVEN

The Seagull Resurrected November-December 1898 IN YALTA ANTON MOVED from dacha to dacha, until Dr Isaak Altshuller took him in for a fortnight. Altshuller, though his surname suggested 'old card-sharp', inspired confidence, for he too had ÒÂ and would prescribe only what he took himself. Altshuller urged Anton to accept exile, and shun the fatal cold of Moscow. Then, until his own house was built, Anton settled in Au mur, a villa owned by Kapitolina Ilovaiskaia, a general's widow and ardent fan.1

Masha never forgot being taken to see Anton's building site at Autka: I was upset and annoyed that he had bought a site so far from the sea. When we reached it, what I saw was hard to credit. An old Tatar vineyard, fenced with wattle, not a tree, not a bush, absolutely no buildings… beyond the wattle fence was a Tatar cemetery and, naturally, a corpse was being buried while we were watching. It was the most grim impression. Only later did Masha appreciate the view of the Uchan-Su river tumbling down to the sea and of the steamboats far below arriving and departing. Her reaction upset Anton; back at Au mur, the villa where they were staying, she relented and sketched a plan of the house they would build.

At 4000 roubles, an acre of land was cheap. The promised railway was raising prices. Safe from casual visitors at Autka, Anton could receive 'subversives' and Jews, even though they were banned from Yalta. The Yalta Mutual Credit eagerly lent Chekhov money to build his house. Its director had the Autka mosque divert a pipe to give him the water for cement. Lev Shapovalov, hitherto an art teacher, only twenty-seven, made his name turning Masha's sketches into plans for a house with a half-Moorish, half-German facade. While the

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architect drew, Anton hired a Tatar contractor, Babakai Kalfa, to dig foundations and cart materials. Babakai had chosen a name for this idiosyncratic house, Buyurnuz, 'As you like it'. Friends - Tolstoy or Sergeenko - were perturbed at Anton's enormous financial commitments, for he was not sure whether 5000 roubles that Suvorin had given him was an advance or overdue payment. The Moscow Arts Theatre raised Anton's hopes of more money, and so did Suvorin with a proposal to publish all Chekhov in a uniform edition at a rouble a volume. Castles in Spain, however, did not pay for a castle in the Crimea; even at 30 kopecks a line, Chekhov, his strength waning, would now earn little from new work.

Yet Anton hung on to Melikhovo as a summer dacha. He reassured those who depended on Melikhovo: the postmaster, schoolteachers, district nurses, craftsmen, servants. He ran Melikhovo from afar: arbitrating between the female teachers at Talezh, who were feuding over firewood. He assured the bumbling Doctor Grigoriev, who had failed to save Pavel, that his reputation was unsullied. He defended the postmaster against anonymous accusations of abusing customers. Melikhovo, without either Pavel or Anton, nevertheless collapsed. While Masha was in Yalta, Evgenia, despite the company of a lady schoolteacher, trembled. 'Grief has overwhelmed me, I cannot live in Melikhovo,' she told Misha.2 When Masha got back she found her mother fraught: 'whether the samovar hums, or the stove whistles or a dog howls, it all produces fear and worry about the future,' she reported to Anton. Fire broke out nearby. Masha and Evgenia took servant girls to sleep in their rooms. The ground froze, but no snow fell, so that Melikhovo was virtually cut off from the railway.

On 13 November 1898 Anton gave his mother short shrift: 'After youth comes old age; after happiness, unhappiness, and vice versa; nobody can be healthy and cheerful all their lives… you have to be ready for anything. You just have to do your duty as best you can.' A week later snow fell. Masha locked up Melikhovo. Roman drove her by sledge, with linen and crockery, to the station. Evgenia and a servant, Masha Shakina, followed two days later. They stayed until spring in Masha's Moscow flat, in four small rooms, with borrowed furniture. Masha went back once a month, if blizzards allowed, to pay old Mariushka, Roman and the maid Pelageia. Melikhovo was doomed. The dachshunds were left to the servants and the yard dogs.

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Thieves dug up Varenikov's apple trees. Roman guarded Melikhovo, ringing bells through the night. Varenikov caught two lads and thrashed them.3 Varenikov then had the teacher Terentieva in tears by telling her he would now close Melikhovo school.

By December Masha wanted to join Anton in the Crimea, for she believed that she too was ill. 'I cough badly in the mornings, I have constant pain in the left chest.' The doctor prescribed quinine, codeine and stout. Anton told her that she had the family's bad lungs. Masha took a lively interest in the new house. Could Anton enlarge the rooms? Would Melikhovo have to go, to pay for this palazzo? 'No, and no,' replied Anton, but he prepared Masha and Evgenia for life in the Crimea. As governor of Yalta's girls' school and friend of its headmistress, Varvara Kharkeevich, Anton offered Masha a post as geography mistress there: the present geography teacher 'volunteered' his resignation. Anton told Evgenia that he was installing an American kitchen, a flushing lavatory, electric bells and a telephone; he was planting roses and cypresses; coffee and halva were cheap; stone houses did not catch fire; rheumatism would not trouble her; her Taganrog in-laws, Marfa and Liudmila, were a day's boat ride away; she could bring Mariushka to live with her; Autka church was a minute away. Anton then bought the Tatar house he had seen two months before at Kiichuk-Koy. Here Evgenia could keep a cow and a kitchen garden, while Masha, if she faced the rock climb, could bathe in the sea. Anton's boldness was astute. Soon he was offered four times the 2000 roubles he had paid.

Anton did not worry about Evgenia. Kundasova told him on 28 November: 'As for her mental condition, it is not gloomy, let alone depressed. In my view, Pavel's death has not affected her too much because she is a loving mother; her children are dearer than a husband to her.' Anton received more consolation for his own state of health than he could absorb. The provincial press alarmed everyone. All Simferopol was told: 'Ominous symptoms inspire serious concern for his life.' Anton sent angry telegrams; the papers retracted, but nobody was misled about his health. One school friend, Vladimir Sirotin, wrote of his own terminal condition. Another, Lev Volkenshtein, offered to do the conveyancing on Anton's property. Kleopatra Kara-tygina wrote in such distress that Anton telegraphed: 'Perfectly well safe sound respects thanks.' Aleksandra Pokhlebina, now a landowner

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at daggers drawn with her peasants, had seen lier old love with Masha in the Tretiakov gallery by his portrait, but had hung back. She broke four years' silence that November 1898: 'My heart is torn to pieces when I think what is happening to you. How happy I would be if I knew you were well… I feared the news of the loss of your father would finally undermine your health.'4 Dunia Konovitser sent chocolate. Natalia Lintvariova came to Yalta: she dithered and roared with laughter about the possibility of buying a plot of land herself.

Elena Shavrova was pregnant in Petersburg, while her ailing sister, Anna, kept Anton company in Yalta. He paid more attention, however, to the eighteen-year old Nadia Ternovskaia, a protegee of his landlady, Uovaiskaia. Nadia's father, a bullying archpriest, turned a blind eye to his daughter's excursions with Anton. Nadia was singled out, she later told her children, because she never talked of literature.5 She loved music passionately and played the piano for Anton, and she was very pretty. Yalta gossiped and Nadia's father made enquiries. Another Nadia - Suvorin's granddaughter, Nadia Kolomnina - flirted with Anton, but soon went back to Petersburg. She warned Anton that Ilovaiskaia's villa, which Nadia Ternovskaia frequented, 'is very damp, everyone knows that. Abandon it as quick as you can, take all your furniture and move to another palazzo.'6 Another woman tempted Anton: Olga Soloviova, a Valkyrian wealthy widow who owned the estate of Soguk-Su, next to Anton's Kuchuk-Koy.

Male company was all memento mori. Dr Vitte, from Serpukhov hospital, was in Yalta recuperating from a heart attack. He looked as if he had been 'run over by a train'. Anton himself was often too weak to walk uphill, sometimes even to leave his room, but Anton rejected radical measures. On 9 October the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaia had begged him: 'There is a Doctor Vasiliev in Rostov. You must go and let him treat you: he will cure you. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, I don't know how to ask you… It's awful if you won't, you'll just cause me pain. Do it. Yes?'7 Anton promised - if ever he was in Rostov - to contact this electrotherapist. His 'catarrh of the intestines' gave him constant diarrhoea. In late November a lung haemorrhage began. On the third day he summoned Altshuller: 'Je garde le lit. Young colleague, bring your stethoscope and laryngoscope.' Once the blood had been staunched, he asked Masha for his stethoscope, percussion hammer and ice-pack. He ordered comforts - a karakol hat, a cassoNOVEMHIH DI.CKMBER 1898 wary blanket, a samovar - from Muir and Mirrielees. Evgenia sewed him nightshirts. Vania sent him the pince-nez which he always forgot on his travels, and a new cork pad to stop it sliding off his nose. Anton wrote to Suvorin: 'Tell nobody, my blood frightens others more than me, so I try to spit it out furtively.'

His spiritual suffering in Yalta was greater - 'I'd like to talk to somebody about literature… but here [there is only] irritating swinishness'. Newspapers came late. 'Without papers one would fall into gloomy melancholy and even get married,' he told Sobolevsky on Christmas Eve. Anton befriended the editor of The Crimean Courier, but, unable to improve the paper, gave up. He loved his future house, but hated Yalta's wintry filth. All Yalta was ashamed when the newspapers printed Anton's telegram to Moscow, saying that he felt like Dreyfus on Devil's Island.

He missed Suvorin, despite the fact that New Times was 'splashing about in filth'. The paper had outraged even the government, which banned it for ten days. The poet Balmont declared New Times 'a brothel by appointment to the crown'. Pavlovsky, Suvorin's Paris correspondent, sought Anton's help to switch to a liberal Moscow newspaper. Potapenko abandoned Suvorin. Suvorin was like Zeus the Bolt-thrower and the Dauphin like an angry bull, Aleksandr reported. New Times was printing the specious Le Dessous de I'affaire Dreyfus by the real traitor Esterhazy. Anton told Suvorin that rehabilitating Dreyfus was the 'great cultural victory of the age'. Suvorin replied that pro-Germans were whitewashing Dreyfus.

The taciturn Vania gave Anton brotherly support; on 19 December he came for a fortnight with supplies. Misha was voluble, but unhelpful. He offered his mother asylum, but she suspected he really wanted her as a nurse to his baby daughter. He did not pay for burying Pavel, and held back Masha's allowance. In Petersburg Aleksandr was even less help. He was supporting his sister-in-law Anastasia: her husband Pushkariov had lost his last penny on a bingo machine he had invented. AJeksandr's eldest son Kolia, meanwhile, had been caught robbing passengers at the railway station. Natalia feared that he would corrupt his brothers, in particular her own son, the seven-year-old Misha, so Aleksandr enrolled the fourteen-year-old boy in the merchant navy. Little Anton, now twelve and ineducable, was working for Suvorin as a bookbinder's apprentice. As New Times sank, Aleksandr himself was

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Ill III I I Ê I ÈÌ I'll S searching for a new career. On 24 November he told Anton: 'I am thinking of opening a new sort of brothel, like a touring theatre. If my planned institution arrives in Yalta "to enliven the season" you of course will be the first free customer.' To this letter Potapenko added a greeting, and Emilie Bijon 'un gros baiser'.

Anton was now a citizen of Yalta, his movements monitored by the press. He sat on committees for schools, the Red Cross and famine relief. As Babakai's men dug foundations, Anton wrote: two months at Au mur produced four stories. Three - 'An Incident in Practice' for Russian Thought, 'The New Dacha' for Sobolevsky's The Russian Gazette, and 'On Official Business' for Menshikov's The Week - use Melikhovo material, a Satanic factory, or hostile, thieving peasants. 'On Official Business' is the most powerful of this trio: a magistrate and a doctor are called in a blizzard to a remote village to investigate a suicide, and the magistrate is haunted by nightmares of misery. The radical protest in 'Peasants' and 'My Life' strengthens: the oppressed now become threatening to their oppressors. In Yalta, as Anton told Masha, 'there are neither nobles nor commoners, all are equal before the bacilli.' In a brighter tone he wrote 'The Darling' for a weekly called The Family. It portrays a woman utterly absorbed by any man - impresario, timber merchant or schoolboy - on whom she dotes. 'The Darling' startled radicals. It enchanted Tolstoy who saw an ideal, not irony, and called it, to Anton's face, the 'work of virgin lace-makers'.

Anton was tense, as Altshuller realized, because of The Seagull. His lungs and intestines suffered. The Petersburg premiere had sickened him; another fiasco could kill him. The Seagull and Uncle Vania had been performed everywhere but the capital - the latter play had earned Anton 1000 roubles and held the provinces spellbound. In November 1898, from Nizhni Novgorod, Chekhov heard from Maxim Gorky, a thirty-year-old herald of revolution, Russia's first 'proletarian' writer. He said he had wept like a woman when he first saw Uncle Vania; it was 'a blunt saw through my heart,' Act 4 'a hammer on the audience's head': the effect was 'a childhood garden dug up by a giant pig'. Gorky's postscript ran: 'I am a very absurd and crude person, but I have an incurably sick soul.' Anton responded warmly. Gorky initiated an unlikely friendship, disarming in January 1899 all Anton's defences: 'I am as stupid as a locomotive… but I have no rails under me.'8

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Enough people had seen a Moscow rehearsal or provincial performance for The Seagull to acquire an awesome reputation. Masha was feted as Anton's plenipotentiary. She began to relish life. She dined with actors and actresses and became self-confident, an amusing guest. She made friends with Anton's school friend Vishnevsky, who played the part of Dr Dorn, and with Olga Knipper, who, though fifteen years too young, played Arkadina. Anton's friends clustered round Masha. Sasha Selivanova vaccinated her against smallpox; Dunia Konovitser (Efros), Anton's fiancee in 1886, was as close as twelve years ago; Elena Shavrova and Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik visited. Masha was invited to Mrs Shavrova's house and, though she disliked the Shavrova girls' monocled cavalieri, she found Elena Shavrova beautiful and interesting. Olga Shavrova even invited her to become an actress. Levitan, near death, was too ill to court her - 'I lie breathing heavily like a fish out of water,' he told Anton - yet Masha felt she might still find 'personal happiness'. She did not want to teach geography in Yalta. She meant to enjoy the Moscow season and study art.

On 17 December 1898, with carriages jamming the streets, The Seagull opened to a full house. Nemirovich-Danchenko telegraphed 'colossal success mad with happiness'. Anton wired back 'Your telegram has made me healthy and happy'. Nemirovich-Danchenko requested Uncle Vania exclusively for the Moscow Arts. Anton's school friend Vishnevsky telegraphed, 'Seagull will be our theatre's battleship.' The Seagull, Nina, was badly interpreted by Roksanova (soon to be ousted), and Stanislavsky acted Trigorin like 'an impotent recovering from typhoid', but the audience was ecstatic. Olga Knipper won special praise. Nemirovich-Danchenko told Anton: 'She is so involved in her part mat you can't tell her apart from [Arkadina's] elegant actress's get-up and vulgar charm, meanness and jealousy.' Masha encouraged her brother's instincts: 'A very, very nice actress, Knipper, was playing; she is amazingly talented, it was pure enjoyment to see and hear her.' Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik wrote to Anton: 'for the first time in three years I have had enjoyment in the theatre… Everything was new, unexpected, enthralling… Knipper was very good.'

Many old friends made contact. Levitan got off his sick bed, paid double for a ticket and said that he now understood the play; torn between older and younger women, he felt for Trigorin. Even the

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I ÏÊ I I l i. i (è i è?, actor Lensky, a sworn enemy since lie had been caricatured in 'The Grasshopper', was enchanted by The Seagull. By January 1899 Sergei Bychkov, the footman at the Great Moscow Hotel, had seen The Seagull four times: he reminded Chekhov 'how passionately Liudmila Ozerova wanted to act your Seagull'.9 Women clamoured to be Seagulls. Kundasova informed Anton that her sister Zoia was widowed and free: Nemirovich-Danchenko must give her the part.

Knipper fell ill and two performances of The Seagull were postponed, a loss for Anton, who was to receive 10 per cent of the gross takings. Yet he now equated his bond with the Moscow Arts theatre with marriage to an actress. To Elena Shavrova and to Dunia and Efim Konovitser he used the same image: 'I have no luck with the theatre, such awful luck that if I married an actress we would probably beget an orang utan or a porcupine.' Anton was paying for a Moscow flat, an estate and school at Melikhovo, buildings in Autka and a farmhouse at Kttchuk-Koy. He had indigent relatives and not long to live. Rather than beg, as Levitan advised, from rich patrons, he took decisive action.

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7 am a Marxist7 January-April 1899 I low ODD OF ANTON to send Piotr Sergeenko as agent to Petersburg to sell his complete works to Adolf Marx! Sergeenko, Anton's schoolmate, had become a comic writer under the pseudonym 'Navel',.uul he was one of many who had failed to follow Anton into serious literature. Chekhov derided Sergeenko's How Tolstoy Lives and Works and his novel, Daisy: he called him a 'hearse on legs'. A Tolstoyan, Sergeenko hid nothing from his family. Anton's lubricious talk embarrassed him, just as his po-faced tone irritated Anton. Only Sergeenko's pedantry qualified him as an agent.

For five years Anton had been impressed with Marx, who published m Russian and did business in German. Marx's The Cornfield was Russia's best family weekly, offering a literary supplement, and reference books as bonuses to subscribers. He produced standard writers beautifully, and paid well. Tolstoy had advised Marx to secure (Ihekhov. All Petersburg knew that Russia's greatest writer (after Tolstoy) was in financial straits. Sergeenko expected that, despite an opening bid of 50,000 roubles, Marx would pay 75,000 roubles for exclusive rights - enough to keep the Chekhovs secure. Anton offered Suvorin first refusal. Suvorin consulted his heirs: the Dauphin objected violently, and Suvorin wired Anton: '… can't see why hurry when property rights rising look before you leap is your health really bad.' Sergeenko reported Suvorin demurring: 'Chekhov is worth more. And why should he hurry.' 'So you'll give more?' There was a hiss, nothing more. 'I'm not a banker. Everyone thinks I'm rich. That's rubbish. I've a moral responsibility to my children, and I have one foot in the grave.'10 Suvorin offered Chekhov a 20,000 rouble advance: 'Write and tell me

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what made you do it think all the best dear Anton.' Anton wanted no auction. He was breaking not so much with Suvorin as with shoddy printing and accounting. It was a Biblical moment. 'I am being sold into Egypt,' he told Vania; he told Aleksandr that he was parting from Suvorin 'as Jacob parted from Laban'. At the end of 1899 he confessed to Khudekov:'… like Esau I sold my birthright for a mess of pottage'. Sergeenko negotiated for eight hours at a stretch, pushing Marx and his assistant Julius Grtinberg, until 75,000 was agreed as a fee for the right to publish all Chekhov's past and present works. By 31 January a contract was drafted. The contract was, everyone agreed, a coup for Marx and a disaster for Anton. Marx made 100,000 roubles in the first year - much of Chekhov's work had already been typeset by Suvorin. Sergeenko erred by not getting 75,000 as a lump sum. Too late, on 12 February, Suvorin wired: your deal for two years let alone ten is disadvantageous your reputation is just starting to soar to giddy heights and you throw your hand in… I warmly shake your hand Suvorin." Chekhov received 25,000 on signature of the contract and the rest at two eight-month intervals. Marx received the right to everything Chekhov had written and or would write. Anton's name day passed unmarked as telegrams flew, hammering out the contract. Sergeenko secured increments for new work: 250 roubles per printer's sheet (24 pages), rising by 200 roubles every five years. Anton wired an undertaking to die before he was 80. Marx and Grtinberg baulked loudly in German at the thought of what a Chekhov story would cost in 1949: the contract was then set to expire altogether in 1919. Sergeenko won few concessions: Anton could keep fees from periodicals or charitable publications, and, fortunately, his theatre takings. Marx inserted Draconian clauses: he could reject 'unfit' work, and Chekhov would pay a penalty of 5000 roubles per printer's sheet published elsewhere. Worst of all, Anton had to send by July 1899 a fair copy of all publications. 'That will force Mr Chekhov to make an effort,' Marx told Sergeenko.

The contract ruined 1899. Anton had destroyed most manuscripts and had few copies of his early work. He despatched all who loved him to the libraries to make copies. Lidia Avilova, as sister-in-law of the editor of The Petersburg Newspaper, found two copyists for dozens

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liiii llr -Pr ia iifPflaliBS 46, Anton with the Suvorin family at Feodosia, September 1896. He is sitting second from right with Emilie Bijon on his left; Suvorin is standing second from left, between \11nc and Nastia Suvorina 47. The schoolteachers at Talezh and Melikhovo, Aleksandr Mikhailov and Maria Terentieva #~ r ilir

48. Lidia Iavorskaia

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65. Evgenia, Masha, Olga and Anton at Yalta, February 1902 •w. 66. In the garden at Yalta with a tame crane, March 1904

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of stories from the iate 1880s. Nikolai Ezhov traced stories in The Alarm Clock and Amusements: with his usual incompetence he dropped whole paragraphs as he copied. Aleksandr in Petersburg wrote out the New Times stories personally: the Dauphin forbade him to bring in a copyist or to remove volumes from the office. During the winter, spring and summer of 1899, Chekhov revised this material. To Marx's annoyance, he reserved himself extra rights: to reject half of the 400 stories he had retrieved, and radically to rewrite, in proof, those he chose to preserve. From 1899 to 1901 rewriting took more of Anton's energy than new composition. Readers noticed with dismay that each new edition of Chekhov's stories threw out more early pearls. Marx made Suvorin pay 5000 roubles for the right to sell his stock - 16,000 volumes of Chekhov's work. Suvorin nobly offered Anton 70 per cent of the profit from the sales of these. Marx's monopoly made Chekhov's Plays, which included The Seagull and Uncle Vania, unavailable for three years.12

Masha, advised by the lawyer Konovitser, feared that Anton had been cheated: Marx was offering 125,000 roubles for the works of far more lowly writers. Masha consoled herself she could be a helpmate, like Countess Sofia to Tolstoy, and collect, copy and edit. Never had her role as sister given her so much fulfilment. Only Dr Obolonsky clouded her horizon: he hinted that she had ÒÂ. Anton's brothers, however, wanted their due. Aleksandr begged 1000 roubles for his new dacha, while Misha, who had put two years' work into Melikhovo, lamented to Masha in January 1899 in tones like Uncle Vania's: I lived in Melikhovo as you all saw, ate and drank at common cost, and where my 4400 roubles went I don't know; when I went to Uglich, I had, I'm ashamed to say, nothing but a pillow, a frock coat, a suit, three pairs of underpants, four calico shirts and half a dozen socks." Anton promised Aleksandr money, but ignored Misha's hints. He settled down to review his old work, recalling Pushkin's elegiac line: 'and with revulsion I survey my past'. Relief from debt made the Herculean task seem lighter: he told Nemirovich-Danchenko he 'had been given a divorce by the Holy Synod'. To the Tolstoyan Gorbu-nov-Posadov, who could no longer reprint Chekhov in his editions for the masses, he declared 'it has fallen on my head like a flower pot

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i II H I I I It I II M I' II S from a wiiulowsill'. He joked 'Any moment I'll become a Marxist."4 Sergeenko felt he had done his best: even if Suvorin had matched Adolf Marx's offer Anton would 'never have had accounts until the Third Coming'. Sergeenko pocketed 500 roubles for his trouble and wired 19,500 to Anton.

Anton had his first cheque book. He regretted planning his house so thriftily; now he splashed out on furnishings and the garden. He hired a Tatar gardener, Mustafa, who spoke little Russian but shared Anton's love of trees. He gave Evgenia ten roubles (a sum which made her quite content). His wealth, like his health, was public knowledge. Letters poured in. Gavriil Kharchenko, the sole survivor of the brothers who had worked in Pavel's shop, wrote from Kharkov, where he was now a prosperous shop assistant.15 Kharchenko gladly took up Anton's offer to pay his daughter's school fees. Consumptive writers got in touch. Epifanov, who like Chekhov had written for Amusement in the early 1880s, was dying of ÒÂ: through Ezhov, Anton paid him 25 roubles a month and considered moving him to Yalta. A Father Undolsky was lent the cost of rebuilding the church school in the Tatar village of Mukhalatka.16

Losing Chekhov at the height of his fame was a blow to the finances and morale of New Times, and there was more turbulence ahead. In February 1899 the police murderously attacked a student demonstration; even government ministers protested, but Suvorin's editorial supported the police. Public opinion raged against Suvorin. A 'cat's concert' was to be organized under his windows by students and journalists. Clubs and societies cancelled their subscriptions. In a bungling attempt to counter rumours, the Dauphin published circulation figures: New Times had, instead of the reputed 70,000, only 34,000 subscribers. Journalists broke away to form a rival newspaper. Contributors boycotted New Times. Finally the writer's union summoned Suvorin to a court of honour on charges of dishonourable conduct.17 Until the 'trial' Suvorin could not sleep.

Anton loathed kangaroo courts. In April 1899 he told Suvorin that to submit was to be in the 'pathetic situation of little wild animals which, when caged, bite off each others' tails'. Suvorin, Anton reported to Aleksandr, was writing letters 'like the liturgy of penitence. Clearly, he is miserable.' For a time Anton softened: on 9 March he told Ezhov (a Suvorin acolyte to the end) 'Of course I'm sorry for Suvorin. But

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I'm not at all sorry for those around him.' As over the Dreyfus affair, however, Suvorin's private recantation was belied by public intransigence. Anton despaired: he even told Sergeenko that Suvorin had 'all the marks of criminality.' In vain Anna Suvorina appealed to him on 21 March: 'If you were his friend or just loved him, you would not stand by the wayside at this time… I imagine if you were in his shoes what he'd have done!… Forgive me… I'm just hurt for him, that he has no friend."8 Anton felt deviousness in Anna's charm, but agreed, when spring set in, to talk to Suvorin in Moscow. In early April Anna pleaded again. Tychinkin, Suvorin's typesetter, complained in April: 'The atmosphere here is very oppressive, you feel you're in a nightmare."9 All literary Petersburg seemed distressed. Shcheglov was miserable. Barantsevich, on his infant son's death from meningitis, wept every day.

Lika Mizinova, who was taking her first faltering steps as a concert singer in Paris, got less response than Suvorin from Anton. He told her in the New Year that he was not writing because she wasn't answering. She was outraged: 'I love you far more than you are worth and treat you better than you treat me. If I were a great singer now I'd buy Melikhovo from you. I can't bear to think I shan't see it again.'20 Anton teased her: he announced he was marrying… Adolf Marx. He told her she was just like Aleksandra Pokhlebina who would try to kill herself with a corkscrew; he might see her in Paris in the spring. Lika responded 21 February 1899: 'I promise to be polite to your bride and will even try somehow not scratch her eyes out! Better leave her behind in Russia! No, never get married! It's bad! Better just live with Pokhlebina, but don't wed! She loves you so.' Lika was in touch with Masha: she guessed what kept Anton in Russia. Masha was quite sure. In February 1899 she was invited backstage to meet Nemirovich-Danchenko's cast: 'Knipper started jumping up and down, I gave her your regards. I advise you to woo Knipper. I think she is very interesting.' Anton responded immediately, 'Knipper is very nice and of course I'm stupid not to be living in Moscow.' Soon Olga Knipper was calling on Masha. Their friendship bound the Knip-pers to the Chekhovs and the Chekhovs to the Moscow Arts Theatre.

Anton longed for a break from exile. At Easter he would go to Moscow to meet his theatre company, Knipper, Lika, Masha, and his mother. Never, however, had Anton liked metropolitan Russia less.

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i è HI: i i ê i ñ Me us He loathed the authorities, and tin- radical students. Once students had graduated, he told a colleague, they forgot all ideals and became money-grubbing oppressors. He read the French newspaper he Temps for honest reporting. He did not miss the peasantry, swamped as he was by letters from Melikhovo complaining of deceit and hostility. Masha's school term ended on 12 April, the lease on the Moscow flat a week later, and they would have to live at Melikhovo: the prospect of Easter there was grim. On 10 March Masha told Anton: Sell Melikhovo as quickly as possible, mat's what I want. Crimea and Moscow! For Russian countryside any province and place will provide beauty, fishing and mushrooms. Melikhovo reminds me too much of father. Constant repairs, bother with servants and peasants. While Babakai mixed cement, Mustafa planted trees. Vukol Lavrov, an editor of Russian Thought, had given Anton Zolotariov's Flora for Gardeners and, this Bible in hand, Anton planted an Eden to replace Melikhovo. Odessa's nursery catalogues and the nearby Nikita Gardens inspired him. The Mediterranean flora he had seen in Nice did well in Yalta. Soon twelve cherries, two almonds and four white mulberry trees were planted; bamboos were also on their way. Here, not in Paris, Anton told Lika, they would meet.

Nadia Ternovskaia, the archpriest's pretty daughter, was in Odessa, where her brother taught, for the opera, which she loved fanatically. Anton had got her tickets and she sent violets and flirtatious letters. Tatiana Tolstaia, though she disliked The Seagull, was overwhelmed by her father's dramatic readings, interrupted by fits of weeping and laughter, of 'The Darling' to motley audiences of musicians and foreigners. She wrote: 'Father has read it four times in a row and says the piece made him wiser. And I recognize myself in "The Darling" so well that I am ashamed.'21 The infatuated teenager Olga Vasilieva, struggling to render Chekhov into English, sent notes asking the meaning of every unusual word. Suvorin's granddaughter, Nadia Kolomnina, coyly flirted by letter from Petersburg. She sent Anton waltzes for other women to play him on Ilovaiskaia's piano.22 Yalta laughed at Anton's followers. Women who patrolled the promenade or the road to Autka were named Antonovkas, after a Russian apple, a fruit he was not tempted to pluck. In chastity23 and isolation, Anton signed himself Antonius, Bishop of Melikhovo, Autka and KuchukJANUARY-APRIL l80Q Koy. By April isolation and the company of sick doctors were wearying Anton: he complained to Suvorin that he was 'like a priest with no parish'. It was still too early, however, to go to Moscow, where April was freezing cold, and Anton's friends were alarmed by his determination to leave. Miroliubov, the singer and editor, tried to cut off his escape by wiring Vania: 'Going north madness disease not cured must guard wants go Monday.'24

Gorky, dressed in rough peasant garb, came to Yalta and detained Chekhov. They argued politics and literature; Anton showed Gorky Kuchuk-Koy. That same April, two other writers appeared in Yalta, the dandified Ivan Bunin and the jovial journalist Aleksandr Kuprin. The next generation of Russian prose-writers was at Chekhov's feet. Bunin and Gorky hid the distrust that broke into warfare, once Bunin became the doyen of emigre literature, and Gorky the Bolsheviks' Minister for Literature. Kuprin, Bunin's friend, lacking Gorky's wild excesses and Bunin's fastidiousness, was the jester. These disciples were no jackals but, as Anton saw, three geniuses in the making. Gorky would prove the Judas, Bunin the Peter of the Chekhovian church. Suvorin was now morally and physically a thousand miles away: Anton directed his affection at Bunin, whom he and Masha called Bouqui-chon, after a foppish manager on Prince Orlov-Davydov's estate near Melikhovo.

Anton's share of the takings for a dozen performances of The Seagull was only 1400 roubles, for the Ermitage theatre had very few seats. The theatre's patron, the rich merchant Sawa Morozov, was promising a far larger theatre, to make them and Anton rich. Their repertoire, however, also needed expansion, and they wanted Uncle Vania, which Stanislavsky thought greater than The Seagull. Chekhov had to be induced to withdraw the play from the Maly theatre. This proved easy, when the professors of the Imperial Theatre Censor committee, who governed the Maly's repertoire, took umbrage at the play's aspersions on a professor and asked for changes. On 10 April, the day that the Committee met, Anton took the boat from Yalta to Sevastopol for the train to Moscow. A doctor met him at the station and took him to the warmth of Masha's flat.

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Last Season in Melikhovo April-August 1899 ON ARRIVAL IN Moscow Anton was summoned to the Theatrical Committee and insulted. He withdrew Uncle Vania from state theatres and passed the Moscow rights to the play to the Moscow Arts Theatre. Masha's flat was too cold, so they moved to warmer quarters. No sooner had Anton settled than he started on proofs for Adolf Marx. He grimly told visitors that, as he had not long to live, he had sold his work, to edit it definitively.25 Friends were dismayed by how much he rejected. In July 1899 a former editor, Menshikov, told Anton that he made Herod seem like an infant by comparison, and that others would disinter the work after his death, but Anton's response was that the public should be spared juvenilia. While Anton's cull disposed of his weaker humorous stories, and his revisions cut the purple passages from many stories, very often he reacted to some fine work with a distaste that is unaccountable, unless the work that he rejected had some private unhappy associations.

Lent ended on Sunday 18 April. Anton went, unannounced, to see the Knippers. Olga Knipper lived with her widowed mother and her mother's two brothers, Sasha Salza, an army officer, and Karl Salza, a doctor. The Knippers and Salzas were second-generation Russian, German-speaking Lutherans. They had not yet intermarried with Slavs. Anton had not known such people before. They were indefatig-ably robust - the Knippers had been ruined, and were fighting their way back to prosperity. They were also musical. Olga could sing as well as act, and her mother Anna, although nearing fifty, was a soloist as well as Professor of Singing at the Conservatoire. Uncle Sasha, an amateur singer, was a heavy-drinking, sometimes rowdy, ra"ke. The Knippers and the Chekhovs were struck by each other's strangeness. Olga enchanted Anton in life, just as Tsaritsa Irina had on stage. She lacked Lika Mizinova's classical beauty, or the intensity of

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Komissarzhevskaia: her eyes were small, her jowls heavy. Her character was spontaneous but organized: she worked and played hard. She could hike across fields, nurse the sick, behave genteelly, or prance uninhibitedly.

From 18 April 1899 on Anton became monogamous. He flirted perfunctorily with Masha's wealthy new friend, Maria Malkiel, but barely bothered with others, even the archpriest's daughter, Nadia Ternovskaia. (Nadia worried, 'the reason you don't want to stay in Yalta is that there won't be any Antonovkas?'26) Anton took Olga to see Levitan's exhibition and his renowned Haystacks in Moonlight. In May Melikhovo would be warm enough to be habitable, despite its neglected state. Anton invited Olga to spend a few days there with him. She agreed, as long as Nemirovich-Danchenko would release her from rehearsals.

Four days after Easter, Tolstoy called. The next day his daughter came and invited Anton and Masha to call. Tolstoy and Anton talked of many things: Tolstoy, who respected those he violently disagreed with, spoke up for Suvorin, who had wired Chekhov a draft of his trial defence. Anton replied that he should deny the union's right to try him. Suvorin wired a new draft. 'Beautifully written, but too many details,' Anton responded with exhortations, then he gave up, realizing that he was 'just a stone splashing into water'. Lidia Avilova was staying with her brother in Moscow, and Anton used her as a conduit to Petersburg's 'judges'. For a while Suvorin regained his equilibrium, bought a new estate, and tried to forget about his forthcoming 'trial'. Anton urged him to write a novel and give up journalism. On 1 May 1899 Anton invited Lidia Avilova to meet him, with her children, for coffee and buns at the station, before she departed for the country. It was a courtesy owed to her, as an attractive, talented woman and a keen researcher retrieving his stories.27

After seeing Avilova off, Anton went to see The Seagull. It was the first time that Anton had seen a play he had written performed to his specifications. The Seagull was put on specially, with no sets and few props, in a theatre so freezing that Anton gave Stanislavsky advice only on Trigorin's shoes and trousers, and the tempo of the final act. Although Stanislavsky had comic experience - he had been a fine Nanky Poo in The Mikado - he played his heroes as neurotics, and

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slowed (Chekhov's allegro to an adagio: Anion was unhappy with him as an actor, and dubious of him as a director.

'With no resident status', as Anton put it, he could write nothing new, although his mind seethed with new ideas, as his notebooks show. His new friend Gorky was banned by both police and doctors from visiting Moscow. They exchanged presents: Chekhov sent an engraved gold watch; Gorky promised a rifle. In mid July, after emerging from three weeks in prison, Gorky made Anton a very original present, too late for Anton to make any use of it: 'a fallen woman, Klavdia Gross, will bring you her life story, which she has written. She is decent, speaks languages, a proper miss - a fine woman even if a prostitute. I think she is more use to you than to me.'28

The family home, it was agreed, was in Yalta: on 2 May Anton asked Vania, who was off to the Crimea on holiday, to keep an eye on the builders, and take with him the family treasures, notably Pavel's icon of St John the Divine. Valuables went for safety to Yalta; Melikhovo was a fire risk, neglected and underinsured. Vania could live for free in Autka, attended by Mustafa: the roof was on, the kitchen nearly ready. Vania was grateful for Anton's lobbying to secure him pensionable rank, and was content to spend his school holidays as site manager in the Crimea.

On 5 May Anton gave Olga Knipper a signed photograph of the cottage at Melikhovo where he had written the play that brought them together. Three days later he joined his sister and mother there, after eight months' absence, to be met by two berserk, half-feral dachshunds. There, the next day, he greeted Olga; her short visit gave her a misleading, rosy impression of Melikhovo. Masha invited her to return: 'We long to see you, dear Olga; the horses will wait for you on Saturday'.29

After Olga had left, Melikhovo lapsed into chaos. A month passed in the search for stove-makers, and haggling to finish the third school. Melikhovo was like Arkadina's and Sorin's estate in The Seagull. 'I constantly shout loud abuse, I tear my vocal cords, but neither I nor the guests are given horses,' Anton complained. Made to feel unwelcome at Melikhovo, Misha told Masha on 16 May:, All the hints in my letters to Antosha have been left unanswered, worse, his letters to me are full of anxiety that I might bring my

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family down to Melikhovo… I am sad that circumstances prevent me meeting our mother and showing her our little Evgenia. In secret from you two (I was afraid you'd be offended) I got in touch with the Semenkoviches and asked them to put me up just for a month from 20 June… at the end of June Antosha will send you round his houses in Yalta to deal with building. Is that your job? Are you a builder, a manager? Don't you have enough to do in Moscow and Melikhovo? People go to me Crimea to rest. Anton did not feign any liking for Misha's company. On 21 May 1899, without the blessing he coveted from his mother, Misha took his wife and child to the Crimea: they stayed at Alupka, forty miles from Gurzuf and Vania's family. The house at Autka was not yet habitable and Kuchuk-Koy was too remote for either Vania or Misha, even had Anton consented. Vania moved in with Misha at Alupka.

June began warm. Anton returned to Melikhovo, to sell it. The whole district was in shambles. The bridge over the river had collapsed and the district head of schools had been charged with embezzlement. Masha no longer saw any prospect of staying there, as she told Maria Drozdova in mid June. I feel like a tram that's left the rails and can't get back on them and is jumping all over the place. I have no idea where we shall live… Anton is ripping everything off the walls, sending it to the Crimea, now the comfortable wicker armchair has vanished from the balcony.30 The estate was advertised for 25,000 roubles with a 5000-rouble mortgage. Brom, the dachshund dog, foamed at the mouth and was shot as a rabies suspect. Anton ordered ropes, matting, packing cases and stripped the house. He mobilized Sinani in Yalta to store his possessions in the outbuildings already nearing completion. Cousin Georgi in Taganrog counted Anton's railway wagons, as they rolled in from Melikhovo via Moscow, and oversaw the transfer of books, wardrobes, desks, divans and the 'archive' on to the boat to Yalta. Ironwork, plumbing, door fittings and wallpaper were ordered from Moscow for Shapovalov to install in Autka.

In Moscow Nemirovich-Danchenko made a start on Uncle Vania, to astound the 1899-1900 season. Anton asked his colleague Dr Kur-kin for a cartogram of Serpukhov district that Stanislavsky could use as Astrov. In a postscript to Masha's letter he began his correspon491 I II III I Mil U M I'll s dence with Olga, addressing her 'I Icllo, last page of my life' and, as he had Kleopatra Karatygina and Tama Shchepkina-Kupernik, 'Great artist of the Russian land'. Olga was off to Georgia, to stay with her brother Konstantin in the cathedral city of Mtskheta. She and Anton arranged to meet in late summer.

Anton took time away from Melikhovo to visit Petersburg. He arrived on the morning of 11 June, met Adolf Marx and asked him to print the plays with diagrams of Stanislavsky's staging.31 He had his photograph taken in two studios. He did not go to see Suvorin. The dank cold sent him back the same day to Moscow.

All summer Masha was stranded in Melikhovo, lighting cockroaches and showing buyers round. Anton lived in Moscow with Masha the servant, whose lover haunted the kitchen. He strolled the boulevards and chatted to 'fallen' women at the Aquarium. He visited Pavel's grave, which was overgrown with brambles, and found an estate agent. Now that he had built his last school, he wrote to Suvorin, he had no sentiment for the estate: it was 'mined out' as literary material. By July two potential buyers had appeared. The first, Ianov, was a burnt-cork manufacturer who strung the Chekhovs along week by week. By the time Ianov dropped out, the other buyer, the young Boris Zaitsev, eventually a fine emigre prose writer, had bought another estate. Anton descended on Melikhovo to dig up any shrub that could be replanted at Autka. On 5 July 1899 he abandoned for ever his dachshund bitch Quinine and the estate into which he had poured so much time and energy. Anton's mind was on Olga Knipper. He said he would meet her in the Caucasus, 'on condition you do not make me lose my head.' He told Masha to rely on the estate agent. She protested that there were no horses to fetch buyers from the station. She begged Anton to come to Melikhovo and 'rest' until autumn frosts drove him to the Crimea. Aghast at coping alone with the sale of an estate - 'To hell with buyers. I'm sad and lonely' - she would rather take the 21,000 roubles that Ianov seemed to be offering, than ruin her health, and Anton's, seeking better offers.

Anton had his way. On 8 July 1899 he wired Olga and arranged to meet her in the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. From there they would take the overnight boat to Yalta together. Four days later he

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took the train south to Taganrog. Misha, back from the Crimea, went to the station to intercept him before he left Moscow, but there were so many friends seeing Anton off that Misha could not get a word in. (He took his wife and child, in Anton's absence, to Melikhovo, and lived there, beset by bittersweet memories, for a week.) In Taganrog Anton stayed not with his cousins but at the Hotel Europe. He visited the brothel, which was now run by a Jew. He saw a body covered with flies in the market, and started an appeal for a mortuary. From a Tatar vendor he had his first (but not his last) taste of koumiss, fermented mares' milk. He told the town's councillors what trees to plant. He felt ill and he let an old school friend, Dr Shamkovich, examine him at the hotel. On 17 July he took a boat to Novorossiisk.

Misha and his family returned desolate to Iaroslavl. An escaped convict was prowling Melikhovo, so Masha spent the nights shaking in her bed. Meanwhile Anton led Olga Knipper off the boat at Yalta. To the dismay of the Antonovkas, their arrival together was noted in the Crimean Courier. Anton stayed in the Hotel Mariino, while Olga found lodgings with the ailing Dr Sredin. For twelve days they strolled Yalta, took a carriage up to the viewing point at Oreanda and watched Babakai build the house and Mustafa the garden at Autka. The trees that had been planted in spring were growing rapidly. Olga and Anton were not altogether happy, for travel and travails had shattered Anton's precarious summer health. Anton reported to Masha, 'she was having tea with me; she just sits and says nothing.' The next day he wrote, 'Knipper is here, very nice, but she is depressed.' He lost interest in everything else. He told Masha to sell Melikhovo for half price.

Sazonova, who had recorded Anton's moods in 1896, was in Yalta; her husband had inherited an estate nearby. Her diary from 24 to 31 July 1899 notes: Chekhov took to Massandra the Moscow actress who acted in his Seagull. We dined in the town park… We met Chekhov there, he came and sat at our table. He wears grey trousers and a desperately short blue jacket. He complains that in winter he is worn down by visitors in Yalta. He has settled out of town on purpose… Chekhov is not a conversational man… He either replies reluctantly or starts to pontificate like Suvorin, 'Ermolova is a bad actress… Gorky is a good writer…'

I saw Chekhov on the promenade. He sits all alone on a little bench.32

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I II Ê II I II I ÈÌ I'll S On 2 August 1899 ^-%a an«' Anton look.1 carriage across the mountain towards the ancient Tatar capital of Bakhchisarai. Through sultry heat they crossed the beautiful Kok-Koz [Blue Eye] valley, wondering who was waving frantically at them: it was a group of doctors who had recognized Chekhov. They took the train together to Moscow, and parted more than friends. For a fortnight Anton had written nothing.

The agent had found a new buyer for Melikhovo, a timber merchant called Mikhail Konshin, who would buy the estate in his wife's name, but was interested only in felling and selling Chekhov's forests. Konshin was to pay 23,000 roubles and 5000 for fittings. He had not sold his last estate, so the agreement was that he would pay 1000 roubles cash, give an IOU for 4000, and find the rest over the years. In their hurry, the Chekhovs ceded everything, but Konshin, like Marx, had fleeced Anton. The 10,000 roubles mat Anton promised Masha as her share melted away. Anton banked the 5000 that Konshin eventually put down and let her draw 25 roubles a month interest - no more than her salary from the 'Dairy' school, or the allowance that Misha secretly made her.

Konshin moved into Melikhovo on 14 August and Masha went to join Anton in Moscow. Evgenia lived with Konshin until 20 August. In Masha's absence, Quinine, the dachshund bitch, had her eye ripped out by a farm dog and ran into Varenikov's yard, where she died in agony. Masha had gone back to pack the crockery. Breaking the news of Quinine's end, she told Anton: 'Not a lot of fun, darling! God grant we get out of here quickly. It has been raining ever since we came. The road is sheer horror. We are wet to the bone… Give my regards to your Knipper woman.' When the sale was over, Masha made her feelings plain to Misha: On Monday 6 September I am taking mother and the old Mariushka to the Crimea on the mail train… We sold Melikhovo, but how!… I am so fed up with Melikhovo that I agreed to anything… Anton didn't want to accept these terms. Perhaps Konshin is a crook, what can we do!… I don't think I shall have any money for a long time, which is why I turn to you. Merci I received the cheque, Anton forbade me to stop teaching, hinting that I shall have no private life, but I don't care. I shall spend a winter in Moscow and then see what happens… Anton was very ill when he came back from the Crimea -he had bad bronchitis, a high temperature and even some bleeding.33

APRIL-AUG U ST 1899

On 25 August Anton finished the proofs of his collected Plays for Marx. He called his symptoms 'flu'. He was seen off from Moscow to Yalta by Olga Knipper, who was led away in tears and then comforted by Masha. Anton had gone to make the Yalta house habitable for his womenfolk.

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Uncle Vania Triumphant September-November 1899 ANTON SPENT THE NIGHT of 27 August 1899 at his new house. Only the servant's quarters and kitchen wing were ready: walled in by packing cases, attended by Mustafa, he camped with a paraffin stove and two candlesticks. He brewed tea with water from his own well. He dined at the girls' school. Mustafa lugged trunks and boxes from cellars all round Yalta. Anton checked linen, chose wallpaper, urged the builders to sand the floors and install the water closet. He planted out Olga's gift, a 'Queen of the Night' cactus, which he called the 'Green Reptile'. He joined a consumers' union for groceries and claimed a 20 per cent discount on baths for members of the writers' union. He ordered grass seed for Kuchuk-Koy and hundreds of flowerpots. All the Marx money was spent: no more was payable until December. Konshin had not paid up. Anton borrowed 5000 roubles from Efim Konovitser, his lawyer. Russian Thought advanced 3000. 'We Chekhovs,' Misha told Masha, 'are bad savers.'

Nadia, the loveliest Antonovka, did not visit. Nadia's father, the archpriest, had quarrelled with Varvara Kharkeevich, the headmistress who was providing Anton's dinners, and Anton, in sympathy, ostracized both father and daughter. Anton's social conscience cost him much. When he found a bed for a sick teacher, News of the Day printed 'Chekhov's Colony: in his new estate the writer is setting up a colony for village teachers of Serpukhov district, a cheap hotel for intellectual toilers.' Anton was flooded with appeals and, once the telephone was put in, he knew no peace. Although it linked him only to Yalta, telegrams often came just before dawn, when Moscow actors stopped celebrating. Anton ran, coughing, barefoot across unfinished floors, to answer the telephone.

On September 1899 Anton met the boat bringing Evgenia, Masha, Dr Kurkin and old Mariushka from Sevastopol, all prostrate with

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seasickness, Evgenia terrified of drowning. Mustafa climbed to the first-class deck to collect their luggage. A ship's officer, seeing a Tatar among the first-class passengers, struck him in the face. Mustafa bore the blow, then pointed to Anton, whose face was distorted with rage, and said: 'You haven't hit me, you've hit him.' The Crimean Courier reported the incident. Shortly afterwards Mustafa left Chekhov's service - either because of this outrage or because Evgenia did not want a Moslem in her house - and the Chekhovs hired Arseni Shcherbakov, who had worked in the Nikita Botanical Gardens and whose hobby was reading the Lives of the Saints. With Arseni, the house acquired its first pets, two tame cranes who danced after the gardener, and to whom old Mariushka became devoted.

The house was hardly fit to live in. Until October there were no internal doors: newspapers hung over the doorways. Visitors still gathered: the Chekhovs' old neighbour at Melikhovo, Prince Shakhovskoi, his marriage broken, clung to Anton, asking why families fell apart. Vania announced that he was coming for Christmas. Elena Shavrova, devastated by the death of her baby, sent her translation of Strind-berg's The Father and came to Yalta.34 In Moscow Ezhov insisted that Epifanov should die in Yalta, and that Chekhov should pay the sick man's fare.

Masha, on leave from teaching, toiled hard. She told Olga on 12 September: The house is charming, amazing views, but alas, far from finished. My room is not ready, nor is the lavatory, of course, there's dust, shavings, flies and a mass of workers banging away constantly. But the telephone works. Yalta ladies invite my brother to eat, but he is inexorable and prefers to dine at home. By evening people gather and carriages stand in a long line on our street, just like outside a theatre. We give visitors tea and jam, that's all. I'm quite good at being chambermaid. At 7 in the morning mother and I go to market for food. I don't get tired at all, the weather is enchanting, the air ravishing, my suitors delightful! Yesterday Prince Shakhovskoi sent me an enormous basket of fruit and roses. Shakhovskoi took back to Moscow a pair of cuff links depicting two birds, one melancholy, one coquettish, for Olga Knipper, and Anton's cassowary blanket, which had moulted: this he handed to Anton's in law Petrov at Muir and Mirrielees.

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In the country Stanislavsky devised the staging of Uncle Vania, while in Moscow Nemirovich-Danchenko struggled to interpret the text; privately, he expressed to friends the same reservations as the Imperial Theatre Committee. Nemirovich-Danchenko spent days drilling Olga Knipper, who dithered: was the Professor's wife Elena wanton or idle? As Nemirovich-Danchenko, fearless of Suvorin's critics, wanted to take Uncle Vania to Petersburg, too, into enemy territory, Anton withdrew the permission he had given for Uncle Vania to be staged by others there.

Just as Nemirovich-Danchenko wanted a monopoly of Anton's plays, so Olga was seeking a monopoly of Anton's love life. One by one, she got to know his women friends. She met Lika the day after parting with Anton. Kundasova could be ignored. On 21 September Olga Knipper told Anton: She [Kundasova] stood in the living room, saying she was paralysed, that she had forgotten where she was. Then she recovered; we chatted, had tea and lemon, and rye porridge. She was so elegant, sheer charm. But, you know, it was painful to look at her - she has been so knocked about by life she needs peace and affection so badly.35 On 29 September 1899 the Moscow Arts Theatre opened its new season with Uncle Vania, A. K. Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan the Terrible and Gerhart Hauptmann's Lonely People. Anton sent the company a telegram: 'we shall work mindfully, cheerfully, tirelessly, unanimously.' The theatre appointed him 'inspector of actresses'. Clouds were gathering, however, over Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky. Their patron Morozov was charged with fraud. Ivan the Terrible was coolly received. Olga wrote to Anton: 'Nobody is delighted by the Terrible's acting. You rightly distrusted Stanislavsky playing Ivan… What a night poor Stanislavsky is having today. The trouble is that audiences don't like him as an actor..,'36 Chekhov and Hauptmann, in his most Chekhovian play, Lonely People, were the last hope. Nemirovich-Danchenko and Olga both urged Anton to write them a third Ð1àÓAnton sent a jewel box instead. His mind plotted a garden, not a play, and his creativity was still dissipated revising early work for Adolf Marx. Never had he felt so detached from writing, or so absorbed in horticulture. He tore himself away from the garden only once in

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October, to show Evgenia Kiichiik-Koy. The mountain road shook her and Anton resolved that this summer residence would have to be sold. The Autka house was becoming habitable, Anton's study now had a desk and a door, and the Chekhovs had hired a maid, Marfa Motsnaia, for 8 roubles a month. Masha told Misha: Everyone now has their own room, we are sorting ourselves out, there is very little furniture. Anton's study and bedroom have turned out pretty well, we now have an upright piano. There is masses of cleaning - lime everywhere, impossible to wash off, everything covered in dust… I have to leave my Moscow flat and look for a little one, cheaper, of course - those are my orders. To move to Yalta for good, before I have a job in the Yalta school, is something Anton finds unsuitable for me, and that's it. Masha rebelliously dreamed 'of getting some money and living as freely as I can'. Konshin, however, still failed to pay what he owed for Melikhovo.

Anton's health succumbed to an exceptionally wet autumn. He talked again of surgery for haemorrhoids; his intestines lost in a day's diarrhoea a month's painstakingly gained weight. He feared loneliness, telling a colleague, Dr Rossolimo, 'without letters one could hang oneself, learn to drink bad Crimean wine and couple with an ugly, stupid woman'. Rumours that Anton was about to marry had fed Petersburg and Moscow gossip for years. Now the gossip became warmer. Aleksandr asked first, on n October 1899, 'Petersburg is persistently marrying you off to two actresses, what shall I tell them?' (The second, Olga Knipper's 'shadow', was the stunningly beautiful Maria Andreeva.) Rumours even reached Nizhni Novgorod. Gorky, still a happily married man, told Anton: 'It's said you are marrying an actress with a foreign surname… if it's true, I'm glad.'

After four dress rehearsals, Uncle Vania was performed for the first time in Moscow on 26 October 1899, two years after it had been published. Masha arrived in Moscow from Yalta too late for the triumph. Only Nemirovich-Danchenko and Olga were at first unhappy with the play: Nemirovich-Danchenko had removed forty of the fifty pauses Chekhov had specified; Olga blamed Stanislavsky for making her act Elena as highly sexed. Nemirovich-Danchenko had made Stanislavsky 'go through [his] part literally like a pupil in drama school'.

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Ill U I I I UIUM MIS (Having seen Stanislavsky act Trigorm, Anton could not believe he could be lecherous enough as Dr Astrov: 'Inject some testosterone into him,' he had advised Nemirovich-Danchenko.) The second performance on 29 October, at which Masha accepted the author's acclaim by proxy, was even more triumphant: the theatre and Chekhov's fame were safe. There were to be twenty-five performances of Uncle Vania this season, and The Seagull would be played once a fortnight: Anton's share of the earnings, with full houses, would be some 3000 roubles. The theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko announced, stood, like the world in Russian folk myth, on three whales: A. K. Tolstoy, Hauptmann and Chekhov.

The Knippers and Chekhovs drew closer. Masha reported on 5 November: 'Knipper and I meet very often, I've dined several times at her home and now know her Mama, i.e. your mother-in-law, and a drinking aunt.' Olga befriended Masha, as the gateway to intimacy with Anton. Masha praised her: 'What a fine person she is, I am more sure every day. A very hard worker and, I think, extremely talented.' Olga spent nights with Masha, who lived near the theatre, though the flat was in chaos. (The servant girl had given birth to a baby daughter.) In the same letter, Masha revelled in her new life, telling Anton: 'With the girls we have a servant, a French teacher, the German teacher often calls, the class assistants keep visiting, the headmistress, Masha and her baby which squeals and Olga Knipper's laughter - just imagine!'

Both Anton and Masha touched on an impediment to the Knipper-Chekhov alliance: Olga's relations with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko were more than professional. A charismatic teacher, he held her in thrall, despite her mother's opposition. In Russian theatres a leading actress tended to be the director's mistress. There was no break in the liaison between Knipper and Nemirovich-Danchenko, even when Olga and Anton behaved as if they were betrothed (not that Nemirovich-Danchenko showed any jealousy).37 Conversely, Anton and Nemirovich's wife 'Kitten', whom Olga detested, were old friends.38 On 5 November Masha offered to help Anton: 'Nemirovich… came to see me, stayed for a long time, we chatted a lot, and it occurred to me that I might lure him away from Knipper.'

Unlike Olga, Anton had no other irons in the fire. Although Lika Mizinova was back in Moscow and lonely, Anton did not write to her,

SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 189O

and Masha repelled Lika's attempts to join the theatrical throng. Anton thought only of Olga Knipper and he told Masha forlornly on 11 November, 'I envy Nemirovich, I have no doubt that he enjoys success with a certain person.' Anton felt, he said, like the piano: neither it nor he was played on. At Autka he planted cypresses, and put up barbed wire between himself and the Tatar cemetery. In the Indian summer, his self-esteem boosted, he felt well. He decided to sell Kuchuk-Koy and buy a cottage and a few acres of rocky coast at Gurzuf nearby, for swimming. Nemirovich-Danchenko talked of bringing the Moscow Arts Theatre to Yalta so that Anton might see Uncle Vania performed.

Anton had given Marx copies of his works: now only proofs would arrive to plague him. That autumn inspiration came back. For Russian Thought he wrote his archetypical Yalta work, 'The Lady with the Little Dog': a cynical adulterer, Gurov, on holiday in Yalta, seduces the unhappily married Anna, only to find her image so haunting that he travels to the provincial town where she is stifling and turns an affair into an intractable involvement. Just as the reader wonders how it can end, the author talks of new beginnings and ends the narrative. 'The Lady with the Little Dog' seems to defend adultery and to explode Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: of all Chekhov's works it upset Tolstoy most. Gurov is a very ambiguous hero: he is Don Juan in love. We first meet him classifying women as predators or victims or, with Nietzschean scorn, as a lower race: has he in the end fallen in love, or have his first grey hairs frightened him? The only unambiguous elements are the mountains and sea, against which what 'we do or think when we forget the higher purpose of existence' is ephemeral. The story's empathy with adulterers awoke Chekhov's readers. 'The Lady with the Little Dog' showed them that, despite the rumours of Chekhov's moribund state, he had something new to say.

On 24 November 1899 Anton finally confirmed to Nemirovich-Danchenko that he was mulling over a new play. 'I have a plot for Three Sisters' he wrote, but would not start it until he had finished 'The Lady with a Little Dog' and another story. Before winter set in, he planted a lemon tree from Sukhum, oleanders and camellias. A stray puppy slept under the olive tree and was adopted by the Chekhovs. Stray cats in search of a home, however, were mercilessly shot - even though Aleksandr in Petersburg now edited the Journal of the

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òí HI i i HI èì ãì s Society for the Protection of Animals. November's winds ripped the leaves off the magnolias and kept Anton indoors. He watched flames fan across the mountain scrub, towards his uninsured property. It was cold: he slept in a hat and slippers under two eiderdowns, with the shutters closed. He struggled with a new story, and made notes for Three Sisters, his most complex and subtle play to date. He wrote few letters; even Olga Knipper received none that November. Anton's brothers were resentful. Misha complained to Masha: Mother is somewhere at the edge of the world, way over the mountains, I am in the far norm, you are neither here nor there… Anton has become proud… This year he gave me just one minute of his time, in an express railway carriage… How has the money been spent this year: 25,000 from Marx, 5000 from Konshin, 3000 from The Seagull and Uncle Vania? If the house and estate cost 25,000, then, by my reckoning, 8000 has gone missing. Anton had over 9000 roubles in his Yalta Mutual Credit passbook.

His spirits fell when he left the house on 20 November. Epifanov, a colleague from his freelance days, was in a hospice in Yalta. Anton found him lying in filth on a straw mattress. Epifanov asked for apple fudge. Anton brought him a piece. The dying man's face lit up; he hissed, 'That's the real thing!' In a day or two Epifanov was dead. Anton's notebooks brood on mortality and Yalta: 'aristocrats, commoners, the same revolting death'. He told Gorky: 'I am overwhelmed by consumptive paupers… they upset my sated and warm peace. We've decided to build a sanatorium.' He began an appeal for the penniless incurable intellectuals who were flocking to Yalta. Undoubtedly the example set by Chekhov was as great a lure for the sick as the reputedly therapeutic climate of the Crimean coast.

SEVENTY-ONE Ô

'In the Ravine'' November 1899-February 1900

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IN NOVEMBER 1899 Anton was composing 'In the Ravine'. It opens with an anecdote that Bunin had told him, of a deacon who ate all the caviare at a funeral. It then moves to sombre memories of Meli-kovo, and especially the Tolokonnikovs, the ruthless peasant-manufacturers. A novel in miniature, giving the lie to any criticism that Chekhov's plots lack action, 'In the Ravine' maps the collapse of the Khriumin family: a woman scalds to death her sister-in-law's baby, and drives her father-in-law into beggary. The 'ravine' is both a moral and a physical abyss: only the hills overlooking the ravine, where the victims wander and keep their faith, rise above the gloom. (At this time Anton was himself literally in a ravine, for the engineers were raising the Autka road by fifteen feet, so that 'every Amazon riding past can see what is happening in our yard'.)

He was distressed by death all round. On 27 December he told Prince Shakhovskoi: 'I am terribly bored and lonely because of an involuntarily virtuous life. I just drink a bit of wine.' A damp cold winter worsened his health. The Dutch stoves that the architect had installed worked badly: he asked Masha to send paraffin stoves. Evgenia and Mariushka found cooking an invalid's diet beyond them. Anton's 'catarrh' grew so recalcitrant, meanwhile, that he gave himself strong enemas. He had pleurisy and wore a compress over his left collarbone. His exercise was catching the mice that plagued the house (for cats now avoided his territory) in a humane trap on a bookcase and carrying them by the tail for release in the Tatar cemetery. The stray dog now sheltered on shavings in a shed and was named Kashtanka.

Yalta speculated about the source of'The Lady with the Little Dog'. When the weather cleared, women, originals or copies, appeared on the promenade with Pomeranians on leads. In Moscow Anton was

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in êii i êièì Ãös talked of even more. Uncle Vania was seen by members of the Tsar's family and by the Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Savonarola of Tsarism. Tolstoy noted in his diary: 'outraged'. He told Nemirovich-Danchenko that Telegin's guitar and the cricket chirruping (which the actor Vishnevsky had spent a month learning from a cricket in the Sandunov public baths) were the only good things. He told the actors that Astrov and Vania should marry peasant girls and leave the Professor's wife alone.

Masha was again in a whirl, enjoying the success of Uncle Vania and studying three times a week at an art school set up by Khot-iaintseva. She treated the exhaustion and headaches of her new life with injections of arsenic in her back. She taught at school; she sued Konshin, the purchaser of Melikhovo. She dined with Olga Knipper, Prince Shakhovskoi and his new love. 'Alas, the poor Princess! I have learnt to chat a lot and therefore feel fine in society… something like a salon has come of it,' she told Anton. She was also friendly with Olga's rival, Maria Andreeva, whom Anton found attractive. Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, Lika Mizinova, Dunia Konovitser and Maria Drozdova all gathered around Masha and Olga. Their pretext was that they were collecting money, by raffles and subscriptions, for Anton's projected sanatorium; they hoped, in vain, to be invited to Yalta.

There were violent winter storms. Neither the telegraph nor the mail boat could reach Yalta, and Olga's letters petered out. Anton felt isolated. Some of the Antonovkas reappeared, including Nadia Ternovskaia, who had been previously out of favour: Evgenia approved of her as a bride for Anton, even if she had no dowry. News of Nadia reached Knipper: on 19 January 1900 she wrote: 'Masha tells me that you're marrying a priest's daughter. I could come and admire your conjugal happiness and, while I'm there, disturb it a bit. We had an agreement - remember the Kok-Koz valley.' A month later Knipper was still joking: 'Tell your priest's daughter that she can hold you in her embrace since "that nasty woman" won't be coming until early spring.'

Exhausted by her roles in the Hauptmann play and in Uncle Vania, Olga bore her separation from Anton calmly. Anton was less calm about her liaison with Nemirovich-Danchenko. Masha hinted on the eve of his fortieth birthday: 'I want you to marry quickly, to take a

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clever, sensible girl, even without a dowry… I saw Nemirovich… wearing a coat with moire silk lapels.' Anton's next letter to Olga asked: 'Have you been carried away by the moire silk lapels? It's all the fault of the moire silk coat lapels.' Nemirovich-Danchenko told Olga, when she urged him to show Anton the theatre in Yalta, 'To the director you are valuable, to the author invaluable.' Maria Drozdova, still Masha's closest friend, met Olga, and a fortnight later wrote to Anton: Olga Knipper loves Nemirovich very much and doesn't love me at all… the great actress to judge by these photographs has put on weight and is better looking. I envy Nemirovich… You are seriously in love wim Knipper and want to go abroad, I think that's what you mustn't do. Anton joked that Olga's photo made her look like 'a Jewess… secretly studying dentistry, with a fiance in Mogiliov' and talked of summer abroad on his own. Olga rose to the bait on 5 February: 'That's unbelievably cruel… we shall be together in summer. Yes, yes, won't we, won't we?' Masha saw through Anton's stratagem: 'You try to scare us with your departures… some people get desperate when they hear you mean to go away.'

The beauty and the ministrations of the Antonovkas left Anton unmoved. In February 1900 Masha took Lika to The Seagull. Masha told Anton: 'She wept in the theatre, I suppose [in Pushkin's words] "memories unrolled before her their long scroll".' At the Moscow Arts Theatre, Lika fell for Aleksandr Sanin-Schoenberg, an officer turned stage director. She and Anton never spoke or wrote to each other again, even though Lika continued to meet Masha, Vania and Misha.

Melikhovo would not fade away. Three quarrelsome women teachers used Anton as their arbiter; he implored Serpukhov to relieve him of all civic duties. When Misha wondered if Masha missed the estate, as Evgenia missed her chickens and calves, Masha responded: The buyer came, I handed the lot to him and we left for Moscow… To this day I have been carefree and cheerful because I haven't got Melikhovo and God grant I shouldn't have, nor any unpleasant worries. I live surrounded by respect - thanks to our brother. I have lots of friends.

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Masha reached Yalta on 20 December and ended Anton's isolation. She took a cab to the house, for Anton was too ill to meet her, and forbade Evgenia to wait in the rain. After Masha came Levitan. Anton remarked how he missed Russian countryside, so Levitan asked Masha for cardboard and painted haystacks in the moonlight for Anton's fireplace. Anton's New Year festivities were muted. That Christmas Grigorovich died. Although they had drifted apart, Grigorovich still seemed to Anton to be the most influential of the Grand Old Men to have recognized his genius. Khudekov of The Petersburg Newspaper reported to Anton: 'He talked a lot about you; how deeply he felt for the "involuntary exile" doomed to live far from friends in boring, boring Yalta.' Anton had also drifted away from the Petersburg circles to which Grigorovich's notice had first given him access. After signing his contract with Marx and receiving Suvorin's last payments, Anton barely wrote to the Suvorin household, even though Emilie Bijon reproached him,39 and Nastia Suvorina, on the verge of engagement, sent outrageously flirting letters.40 Suvorin had lost Anton, but was gaining Misha, who, bored in Iaroslavl, on bad terms with his superiors, dreamed of writing for New Times. Suvorin tried to use the younger brother to lure the elder back. Misha wrote to Anton on 22 January 1900: Both, he and she, greeted me like a relative, poured out their souls to me for two whole evenings… The old man with tears in his eyes, Anna with burning cheeks, assured me how upset they were that relations between you and them had broken down. They love you very much. 'Misha, dear boy, I know why it's happened. Antosha would not forgive my paper its policies, that's it…' They are deeply aggrieved that you sold your works to Marx, not Suvorin. Anna blames her husband entirely… 'Aliosha, you know Anton. He's a gifted, decisive, bold man. One day he's here, the next he's off to Sakhalin.'… Suvorin has asked me to persuade you to buy your works back from Marx… Suvorin went on, 'I loved Anton terribly much, and still do. You know, he made me younger. I have never been so frank to anyone in my life as I have with Anton… I'd gladly marry Nastia to him.'41 Anton refuted Suvorin's version. 'I write for your eyes alone,' he replied to Misha, 'since you've been bewitched.' Suvorin's efforts nevertheless won over Misha, who became, a year later, his employee.

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In the New Year Anton was awarded the Order of Stanislav 3rd grade 'for services to education'. (It was awarded to half the teachers in Taganrog gimnazia.) Anton was also elected to the writer's section of the Academy. Honorary academicians had no salary, but they were exempt from arrest, censorship and customs inspections (and also from Academy prizes). Chekhov nominated a man he disliked, the critic Mikhailovsky, and a man he pitied, Kazimir Barantsevich, to be fellow academicians. Becoming Academicus made him the butt of his friends and the object of begging letters. His maid's uncle called him 'your excellency'.

Levitan, close to death, was struck by Anton's gloom. 'Your fever is a fever of self-infatuation - your chronic disease… your Achilles heel,' he wrote on 7 February. When he saw Uncle Vania in December, he liked best the bit 'where the doctor kisses Knipper'. On 16 February he revived old amorous rivalries: 'I went to see Masha and saw my darling Knipper. I begin to fancy her more and more: I notice an inevitable cooling towards the honorary academician.'

'In the Ravine', published in Life, allied Chekhov with men whom Suvorin thought criminal: radical Marxists like Gorky and Posse, the editor of Life, who were often under arrest or police supervision. Karl Marx, as much as Adolf Marx, cut Anton off from Suvorin. Though their affection never died, Chekhov warned Misha, and others, against Suvorin as the owner of New Times. Posse had printed 'In the Ravine' 'in an orgy of misprints', but Anton joined the radicals nevertheless. The story's originals were, Anton asserted, even worse than his characters, but in his view: 'drunken syphilitic children are not material for art'.

Dr Altshuller examined Anton at the end of February 1900 and reported that his left lung was worse, though his right lung was clear. Spring came early in Yalta. Some mornings Anton did not cough. The old women, Evgenia and Mariushka, frightened of responsibility when Masha was away, forgot their giddiness and pains. Chekhov's new prose, ending a year of silence, was widely lauded. Anton rested. Three Sisters was still only an idea.

In mid February the camellias blossomed after ten degrees of frost. Anton proudly announced: 'I could have been a gardener'. He longed for the coming of the mountain to Mahomet, when Nemirovich-Danchenko, Olga and the theatre's elite would arrive to perform in

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Ill Ê I I I II I I'M I'IIS the Crimea. Ever since Christmas he had asked Masha to persuade Olga to spend the summer in Yalta. They had eaten pancakes together at Shrovetide, first at Masha's and then at Vania's, and were now on ty terms. Masha evidently felt equal to the sophisticated Olga and able to befriend and manage her, as she had done with Dunia Efros, Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizinova, on her brother's behalf. Masha and Olga declared themselves inseparable. Anton could be sure that if one came to Yalta, the other would too.

SEVENTY-TWO Ô

Olga in Yalta March-July 1900 FOR ANTON, Andrei Vishnevsky was the first herald of spring in Yalta. He arrived to check the ramshackle theatre and the electric lighting that would be its undoing. Vishnevsky maddened Anton by harking back to school days and by making him read the cues for his Dr Dorn and Uncle Vania. Chekhov's revenge was gentle: he created the good-natured fool in Three Sisters, Kulygin, not just for, but out of, Vishnevsky himself. All five performances (a Hauptmann play, as well as their Chekhov repertoire) planned by the Moscow Arts theatre for Yalta were sold out: even the Crimean Karaims (an indigenous Judaic sect) were coming. At Anton's request, there would be no cast list and no individual curtain calls. Rarely had he anticipated so intensely a public event, but all he had to do in practical terms was to meet the government electrician at the theatre and persuade the Yalta magistrate that Hauptmann's Lonely People had been passed by the censor.

The Chekhovs had money, for the Society of Dramatists and Composers sent royalties of 1159 roubles for the quarter. A migration to the Crimea began. Cousin Georgi was coming from Taganrog. Gorky bought thirty tickets for the Yalta performances. Masha was to come in the sixth week of Lent and bring Olga: she sent ahead pillows, crockery and bedsteads. Evgenia expected a flood of visitors. On 12 March Georgi arrived to stay with Anton; Gorky (followed by a police spy) came to Yalta on the 16th; on the 25th a party of Moscow doctors arrived to witness their colleague's apotheosis.

Anton put his foot down. He asked Olga not to bring Vishnevsky when she came: 'or he'll always be under our feet and won't let us say a word, and he'll give us no peace, since he'll be reciting Uncle Vania all the time.' Anton told Sergeenko that he could not have him to stay, and recommended a distant resort. At the end of March an

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I II 1(1 I I 1(1 KM I'll N express train reached Sevastopol with three wagons full of theatre sets. This cost 1300 roubles, to be defrayed, as Nemirovich-Danchenko reminded Anton, by putting on, with Anton's permission, Uncle Vania in Petersburg. On 2 April Masha and Knipper arrived.42 Olga had a room next to Masha's, downstairs. Anton slept upstairs. The stairs creaked loudly and Evgenia slept lightly, so night-time visits between Olga and Anton were difficult. Sheltering an actress, let alone one who visited her son's bedroom, was enough to stretch Evgenia's tolerance.

On 7 April the theatre company arrived in Sevastopol for the start of their Crimean tour. They brought a new Nina for The Seagull: Maria Andreeva. The next day Anton's haemorrhoids bled: he and Olga put off joining the actors until Easter Sunday, the 9th. In Sevastopol Anton, for the first time, saw Uncle Vania performed and endured the roar when the audience spotted the author. He walked next day over the ruins of ancient Chersonesus and then returned to see Olga as a high-minded seductress in Hauptmann's Lonely People. Not Olga's best role, it moved Lazarevsky, a young poet who had begun to pester Anton, to behave very tactlessly: 'I found the actress Knipper so loathsome that if I'd met her in real life she'd have been just as loathsome. I shared this opinion with Chekhov.'43

On 13 April, a day ahead of the theatre, Olga and Chekhov left Vitzel's hotel in Sevastopol for Yalta. When Stanislavsky arrived there, he found Anton warming himself in the sun, watching the sets being unloaded. For ten days the Chekhovs were besieged by actors and writers. Anton saw both his plays performed, a medley from his stories, and scenes from other productions. He withstood ovations. Gorky's Song of the Hawk also roused the audience. Anton bore fame politely, and gave Nemirovich-Danchenko a gold medallion shaped like a book. It was inscribed 'You gave my Seagull life'. On 24 April there was a farewell lunch, and the company, with Olga, sailed over rough seas back to Sevastopol, leaving behind in Anton's study three palm branches wrapped in red moire ribbon 'to A. P. Chekhov, the profound interpreter of Russian reality', and in Anton's garden the swing and the bench on which Olga had lounged as Elena in Act 1 of Uncle Vania. Despite her commitment at Mrs Rzhevskaia's school, Masha stayed on a week in Yalta. She went back to Moscow for the school examinations, but promised to return by mid May.» Olga also promised to return, if Anton did not run away to Paris.

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She smoothed her path with Evgenia: 'We brought such disorder into your home that we really are ashamed to think of it. You are probably resting now and getting back to normal after our invasion. Thank you for everything, everything.' Olga and Anton were open about their intimacy. In Iaroslavl Misha sounded out Masha: 'Here there are rumours are that Anton is getting married. I nearly believed them. Especially when there was talk of a young lady with a German surname. I remembered you once mentioning a Knipper.' Masha accepted Knipper as a friend and as Anton's mistress, but the prospect of a sister-in-law, of a power in the household, disturbed her profoundly. In her letters to Olga 'darling Olechka' alternates with 'vile German' and 'how piggish of you'. (Half jocular abuse was part of Masha's epistolary style - a tone which Lika also adopted but which Olga, either frankly angry or unequivocally intimate, could never catch or get used to.)

Despite Evgenia's horror of being alone, Anton left for Moscow four days after his sister. He would not stay in his sister's apartment, but chose the Hotel Dresden which had a lift and a room by a W.C. In that hotel room he and Olga met, unobserved by anyone who mattered. On arriving Anton wired Suvorin, who with the Dauphin took the night train to Moscow. On 13 May, Masha left Moscow to be with her mother. Chekhov told Suvorin how Stanislavsky bored him. Suvorin added: I talked about the sale of his works to Marx. He had only 25,000 roubles left. 'Isn't it bad for you to have sold your works?' - 'Of course it is. I don't feel like writing.' - 'You ought to buy them back,' I told him. 'I've got to wait two years or so,' he said, 'I don't care much about property.' We took a cab to the cemetery. We went to see his father's grave. We searched for a long time. In the end I found it… He saw me off to the train. He is better. He had just one bleed, a small one, in winter… I feel fine with Chekhov. I am 26 years older than him. We met in 1886. 'I was young then,' I said. 'But you were still 26 years older.' Anton called on the dying Levitan. Again, despite his affair with her daughters, Levitan was being nursed by Anna Turchaninova. His temperature climbed to 4i°C. Turchaninova wrote: 'Horror is creeping in. I can't believe I shan't get him through.'44 When Anton left for Yalta after just nine days in Moscow, Olga asked in her next letter:

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I m; I i I IIIUMI'IIS 'You left yesterday horribly upset, dear writer. Why?' Anton told her that he had been tormented by a headache and fever which had forced him to leave Moscow.

In his absence Evgenia had grumbled: her teeth needed attention; Anton had not left enough money; she was afraid. For Misha his abandoned mother was reason enough to come to Yalta. Within a week Anton, despite ill health, was travelling again. On 29 May Masha explained to Olga, with a touch of Schadenfreude towards the latter: Gather your things and come and see us and don't argue!… yesterday we saw Antosha off to the Caucasus. He went off in the company of Dr Sredin, Gorky, Dr Aleksin and Vasnetsov [an artist]. They devised this journey quickly and got moving quickly. Their route is: Novorossiisk, Vladikavkaz, the Georgian Military Highway, Tiflis, Batum and back to Yalta. The main reason Anton left was because relatives - Misha, his wife, the child and a nanny - descended, quite unexpectedly, without warning. Noisy and boring. Any day Vania is coming, also with family… The writer is back on 8 June. You probably won't meet. Gorky had got together this party: two doctors, three consumptives and a painter. Perhaps Anton and Olga nevertheless intended to meet on this tour of the Caucasus, for, as Anton's party set out, Olga and her mother were in Vladikavkaz and meant to cross the Caucasus over the Military Highway before they rested in the mountain resort of Borjomi. Rain washed the roads away and made a rendezvous at this point impossible. At Tiflis a newspaper reported that Chekhov, Gorky and Vasnetsov were staying a week in the Northern Furnished Rooms. Anton did not know that Olga was also in Tiflis, but Olga's sister-in-law read the papers and telephoned Anton, who at first snubbed her as an intrusive fan.45 Anton and Olga met when his party and hers left Tiflis across central Georgia by train, separating after a few hours; Olga and her mother took the branch line up to Borjomi.

Masha knew nothing of this: on 12 June she was writing to Knipper: 'If you don't come in four days then everything is finished between us and we don't know each other any more. Today we are seeing off Misha and his family. It was sad, I had got used to them.' Anton contrived to miss his brother and niece by one day. Gorky and his family left a few days later. Olga arrived on 23 June. Six happy weeks followed, though little is known of them. Chekhov

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did little but work slowly at Three Sisters. There were a few clouds: Maria Andreeva had arrived before Olga, and was staying in a Yalta hotel. Anton had not yet shaken off the poet Lazarevsky, who spotted Anton having tea with Masha and Olga: Chekhov sat behind Knipper and peered out from diere. He was dressed, unlike Gorky, very fastidiously. Gold cuff links, yellow shoes, a jacket, coat, all most elegant. I went over to Andreeva. Chekhov has a more than ordinary liking for her. Evgenia and Masha left Autka for the cottage by the sea at Gurzuf. Anton and Olga were alone in the house, recalling Chekhov's entry at that time in the notebooks which he sporadically kept, that to keep visitors away he should keep a French woman in his house and pretend she was his concubine. They no longer feared the creaking stairs that disturbed Evgenia or Masha, when Olga crept with pillow and candle to Anton's room, or when she visited him at dawn after a swim in the sea. (She called herself an 'otter'.)

Supplicants and visitors were ignored, except for the teenager, Olga Vasilieva, whom Anton had taken pity on in Nice and who had embarked on the translation of his works into English. Iurasov, the consul at Menton, begged Anton to humour her: 'Olga Vasilieva loves you very much and your word is law to her… She doesn't know what to do with her fortune - and she has nobody to lean on. She is an unhappy creature, pathetic and worthy of compassion.'46

Vasilieva sent Anton an Oriental rug and asked which English journals might print her translations.47 Anton replied 'I am of so little interest to the English public that I don't care in the least.'

On 22 July Levitan died. Everyone Levitan had known received a scrap of paper with the line: 'Burn all letters when you hear of my death.'48 Masha lovingly did as Levitan asked; Anton did not.

A different perturbation spoilt the end of Olga's stay. Early in August a letter arrived from the first Seagull, Vera Komissarzhevskaia: 'I've come to Yalta for a few days, I'm at Massandra and should be very sad not to see you, if only for a minute.'49 Olga felt that it was the author, not his new play, that Komissarzhevskaia sought. On 3 August Chekhov took his original Seagull to his coastal cottage at (mrzuf, but she won neither the right to stage the new play, nor the author's love - just a photograph inscribed 'on a stormy day when

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MI KM' i uuiMI1 lis the sea roared, from quiet Anion Chekhov.' Two days later, Anton sailed with Olga to Sevastopol, where they stayed at a hotel. We can only guess why Olga wept on the train about 'all that I went through in your house'. Was it Evgenia's disapproval or Komissarzhevskaia's arrival? Back in Yalta, Anton saw nobody. Komissarzhevskaia wired from Gurzuf: 'I've waited two days. Coming by boat to Yalta tomorrow. Upset by your lack of intuition.' They met. Komissarzhevskaia, after a rough sea voyage, complained a week later: I thought that when I saw you I'd flood you with questions and say something to you in exchange… You know it's awfully strange but I felt sorry for you for a time… sorry, sorry to the point of sadness. And mere was something elusive in you all the time, which I don't trust. Despite an affectionate letter from Anton, Olga still felt 'thrown overboard', but told Masha: 'We parted tenderly. He was very emotional; I was too, I howled.'50 Their future seemed uncertain. Vania assured Olga that Anton would winter in Moscow. Olga, however, told Masha: 'Odd of you to ask what your brother and I have decided? As if one could decide anything with him. I don't know myself and it makes me suffer.'

Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko hoped to see Olga and Anton more closely united. They wanted Anton Chekhov bound to their theatre. Stanislavsky wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko on 8 August: Yesterday I wrung it out of Chekhov: he's off tomorrow to Gurzuf to write, and a week later will come to Alupka to read what he has written… A play set among the military with four young female roles, top secret." Nemirovich-Danchenko knew something more binding, apparently before Olga, let alone Anton, told anybody else. He told Stanislavsky, 'The business of Knipper's marriage to Anton is settled.'52 As he worked on Three Sisters, Chekhov was unwittingly writing his marriage contract to both a theatre and an actress.

SKVKNTY-THREE

Ô

Three Sisters August-November 1900 IN FINE AUGUST sunshine Anton stayed behind in Yalta while Olga went to Moscow. Anton had to get Three Sisters onto paper, even though the play had already been worked out in his mind. The subject had deep personal reverberations for Anton: after the Golden, Mar-kova, Ianova, Lintvariova and Shavrova sisters, Chekhov must have felt 'three sisters' to be the fairy-tale motif of his life.

There was also an English inspiration. In 1896 Anton had sent to Taganrog library a biography of the Bronte sisters: three talented, unhappy girls, stranded in Yorkshire; a despotic father; a mother they do not recall; a brother, once their idol, now a drunken ne'er-do-well. Chekhov's Prozorova sisters have much in common with the Brontes. The Geisha, a Sidney Jones operetta popular in Moscow in 1899, in which three English officers woo three geishas, also underlies Three Sisters. Memories, too, shaped the play: the officers with whom Anton was friendly at Voskresensk in 1884; a wait in Perm in the Urals, on the way to Sakhalin. Like 'The Lady with the Little Dog', the play shows marriage as tyranny: the tensions between the real Olga and Masha are anticipated in the fate of the gentle sisters, forced by their sister-in-law's pregnancies, room by room, out of their house. In this cruellest of Chekhov plays the sisters do not deserve their fate: comedy is incidental. Only the Moscow Arts Theatre could realize the polyphony of Three Sisters, where two or three conversations are heard simultaneously, or where nonverbal effects - the clock and the camera, the fire, the trees in the garden and the songs and music - mark the progression of time as strongly as the words of the text.

It was hard to write a play. Vania's wife and son were staying. Varvara Kharkeevich brought two girls, and 'Kitten' Nemirovich-Danchenko, bored without her husband, called to talk nonsense. Anton fled to his bedroom, then moved out to Gurzuf, but it was all

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I II HI I I 1(1 UM I'IIS

in vain, for 'some snout crawls in', he complained to Olga. He compiled hate lists: 'a playful Jew, a learned Ukrainian and a drunken German'; ladies who asked for a summary of Herbert Spencer. The Stanislavskys came and would not go; Anton led them off to Varvara Kharkeevich to hear a Hungarian playing the harp.

Stanislavsky was, he admitted, 'raping creativity'. Anton had to be made to finish Three Sisters before the autumn. Anton procrastinated: would next year not be soon enough? Olga wanted the author as well as the play in Moscow. Could he not write it in the Hotel Dresden? It would be, Olga lamented, 'too cruel to separate all winter' and not spend the autumn together. Like Komissarzhevskaia, she wanted intimate discussion: 'we have talked so little and so vaguely', but Anton loathed 'a conversation with serious faces'. She cajoled him: 'Do you remember seeing me onto the stairs and the stairs squeaking so treacherously? I loved all that so awfully.' She fussed over him. Who was cleaning his study and ironing his shirts? 'You're not quarrelling with your mother? And you're being kind to Masha?' she wrote on 16 August. She sent him another 'Green Reptile'. She and other actors kept up pressure on their author: they were midwives to Three Sisters as much as Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, but the midwives could not make the birth of the play any less painful.

Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, meanwhile, held gruelling rehearsals for Ostrovsky's Snow Maiden. Moscow swallowed Olga's time. Lonely People opened on 25 September. Uncle Sasha confided in his niece: alcohol, debauchery and loneliness had brought him to the verge of suicide: he wanted her to consult Anton about him. On 19 August 1900 Masha left for Moscow, to sell Kuchiik-Koy for cash. (Konshin had defaulted altogether on Melikhovo and was secretly trying to sell the estate.) Olga was to help Masha find new quarters; they spent their spare time together and slept at each other's apartments, attended assiduously by Vishnevsky. Round them gathered Anton's friends: Lika, Kundasova ('turned into a shadow,' said Masha), Bunin, Gorky, and a new acolyte, the Tolstoyan sailor-turned-gardener Sulerzhitsky. Anton was the magnet that held these disparate people together.

As summer ended, one tame crane flew away and the other, now blind in one eye, hopped dejectedly after the gardener. The maid Marfa Motsnaia was recalled to Livadia by her uncle. Even so Anton

AUGUST-NOVEMBER I9OO

was not as isolated as he wanted to be. He asked Masha to have Evgenia with her in Moscow in the autumn. Masha resisted: If you only knew what a hard time I had getting her back to the Crimea \from Moscow]! The household I have in Moscow is in student style, there isn't a bed, there's too little crockery, I sent it all in spring to Yalta. The rains will pour down, her legs will start aching, it's cold, damp. Where was Anton off to, she asked, and for how long? Masha wanted to enjoy the theatre season: she would have Evgenia only from January until Easter 1901. Anton overruled her. On 23 September he put Evgenia on the boat for Sevastopol, where a friend of the Chekhovs offered her dinner (she declined because of her false teeth) and put her on the Moscow express.

'I am very grateful, thank you very much for giving me the pleasure,' Evgenia wrote to Anton.53 Masha was too angry to write. Olga took Evgenia to the theatre when A. K. Tolstoy's magnificent costume drama Tsar Fiodor opened on 3 October. Evgenia even asked to be taken to The Snow Maiden, but never to her son's plays. (She, like Pavel, seemed to be convinced that Anton's plays and stories were a source of income too shameful to be spoken of.) Olga told Anton 11 October: 'Poor woman, she keeps imagining I'll get my claws into her Antosha and make him unhappy.' Evgenia accepted Olga's hospitality but kept her guard up. Anton relished his solitude and resisted Olga's cajoling: 'Do you really not want to see your actress, to kiss her, to caress her, to fondle her? She is yours.'54 Three Sisters took shape, even though, Anton complained, one sister had 'gone lame'. Adolf Marx's editor, Julius Griinberg, wrote: they had heard that Chekhov was writing lTwo Sisters' and could hold up volume VII of The Complete Works to include it. (Anton replied that Marx would have Three Sisters only after it had been staged and after it had been published in a periodical.)

Visitors to Autka were kept at bay, except for the irrepressible Sergeenko55 and for Olga Vasilieva. Eighteen and independent, she came to Yalta from Nice, bringing with her a nanny and a little girl of three, Marusia, whom she had adopted, she said, from an orphanage in Smolensk. Anton took to the child. Aleksandr Kuprin was bemused to see Marusia clamber onto Anton's knee, and, babbling, run her

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in êì i êiè Mr us fingers through his hair. Anton had never been seen to fondle any creature except a dachshund in public. Gossip would have spread like wildfire, had others seen Anton's letters to Vasilieva, where he playfully called himself Marusia's 'daddy'.

On 9 September the Yalta theatre burnt down, not that Anton cared: 'It was quite superfluous here, by the way.'56 Life at Autka with old Mariushka as cook was rough. Anton wrote Three Sisters on a diet of soup and fish. He stopped work only to recover from bouts of'flu', catch mice or attend to Kashtanka's broken paw. He ignored his siblings. Vania and Masha sulked: 'I can't imagine why,' he told Olga. Olga begged Anton to come to Moscow, but he insisted that they lived apart not by choice, but because 'of the demon that put the bacilli into me and love of art into you'. Anton would not come until he had finished the play and could attend rehearsals: he would not, he said, leave four heroines to Stanislavsky's mercy. Olga, however, needed a shoulder to cry on. She was hurt by poor reviews of The Snow Maiden, by being out-performed by Stanislavsky's wife in Haupt-mann's Lonely People, and by anti-Semitic outbursts from spectators in Chekhov's Ivanov.

After many telegrams, Anton arrived in Moscow on 23 October 1900 with a manuscript of Three Sisters. The next day he read the whole play out to the assembled theatre. There was a dismayed silence afterwards - nobody expected anything so complex or sad. Then Anton went to watch Ibsen's Dr Stockmann. He returned to the Hotel Dresden, where a note from Olga was waiting to seduce him: 'Stay at the Dresden and copy [out the play], I'll come, I'll bring perfume and sweets. Do you want me? Answer yes or no.'

On 29 October Anton attended a reading of Three Sisters. Stanislavsky was thrown by Anton's diffidence. Those around him were becoming more and more excited. Misha wrote that he had been asked by a lady in a train when Anton was getting married, and that an actress saw Nemirovich-Danchenko raise his glass to the union of Knipper and Chekhov: '… it would be very nice if these rumours turned out true.'57 Yalta speculated: Lazarevsky's diary for 12 November reads: 'I've heard Chekhov has got married. I don't believe it.'

Masha and Anton had promised to keep an eye on Isaak Sinani's son, Abram, a student in Moscow. On 2 8 October Abram killed himself. Anton summoned Sinani to Moscow and took him to the funeral,

AUGUST-NOVEMBER I9OO

telling him his son had died of 'melancholy'. He warned Masha not to utter the word suicide in Yalta. That night he watched the hero in Hauptmann's Lonely People kill himself; the following week Anton's editor at Marx's, Julius Grtinberg, died. Anton revised Three Sisters in a very gloomy mood. Komissarzhevskaia was still asking for the play. Anton disabused her, yet appealed for her sympathy: 'I'm on the treadmill, i.e. I run round visiting and at night I sleep like the dead. I came here perfectly well, now I'm coughing again and am evil-tempered and, I'm told, jaundiced.' By day Anton lived with Olga and Masha; he slept at the hotel. It was high time he was away. November in Moscow would be fatal. News of the Day reported that he was off to Africa and America and that Three Sisters was postponed.

In fact Three Sisters detained him. So did Suvorin. Anton was taken aback that Nastia had married and that he had not been told. He reproached Suvorin: 'I am almost as fond of your family as of my own,' and asked Suvorin to Moscow. Suvorin, though busy with his theatre, came within days, with Burenin. He noted: Chekhov was leaving for the south, for Algiers, he asked me to come and see him. I wanted to be back on the 22nd for the dress rehearsal of Sons of Israel ox The Smugglers as we christened the play. Chekhov talked me out of it. I stayed. On Wednesday I could have met Tolstoy. I had a telegram from Petersburg that there had been a scandal in the Maly Theatre. I took the express at 12 a.m. The play that Suvorin was staging in Petersburg was a melodrama about smugglers, written by a farce-writer, Viktor Krylov, and a renegade Jew, Saveli Litvin. Its anti-Semitic ranting revolted even a Petersburg audience. Orchestrated by Lidia Iavorskaia, the auditorium threw binoculars, galoshes and apples at the cast. Suvorin's beloved son-in-law, Aleksei Kolomnin, backstage, died of a massive heart attack. In this bereavement too, Anton was unable to console Suvorin. In late November Anton saw Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and annoyed Stanislavsky and Olga by his 'subtle smile, making fun of what we respect'. (Chekhov always claimed to be unable to see any merit in Ibsen.) Two acts of Three Sisters were in rehearsal. Anton would revise acts 3 and 4 in France. He had withdrawn 2000 roubles from his account in Yalta; Adolf Marx sent 10,000 to Moscow (he owed a final 15,000). Anton had money to travel and Olga reluctantly

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in ê ii' i IIIUM i'ii s concurred that he had to leave for warmer climes. On n December Anton took the train to Vienna. In Nice Suvorin's granddaughter Nadia Kolomnina, as well as Olga Vasilieva with little Marusia, were waiting.

SEVENTY-FOUR Ô

Nice Revisited December 1900-February 1901 As THE VIENNA TRAIN steamed off, Olga Knipper walked to the end of the platform. Anton's new friend, the Tolstoyan Sulerzhitsky, escorted her home in distress, and Masha attended her until she recovered her buoyancy. Masha, too, was miserable, but would not say why. 'The poor thing didn't sleep all night: something has been happening all this time,' Olga wrote to Anton. Masha's distress may have had something to do with a new friendship. Ivan Bunin had taken upon himself to be, in Anton's absence, attentive to Masha and helpful to Olga.

Europe was now thirteen days ahead of Russia: Anton had forgotten that in Vienna shops would be shut and theatres full for Christmas Day. In his hotel room he looked 'with concupiscence at the two beds'. The next day he took a first-class train for Nice, and on 14/27 December 1900 was back in La Pension Russe, in two rooms with a wide soft bed. In four days Anton made fair copies of the last two acts of Three Sisters, expanding Act 4. He devised Chebutykin's ominous lines 'Balzac got married in Berdichev' and cut Andrei's speech in defence of die ghastly Natasha to 'A wife is a wife'. The play that had haunted Anton for two years was now off his hands. Anton was upset that Olga was apparently not writing to him, until he found that another Russian in Nice was being handed all the letters addressed to Chekhov.

On New Year's Day Anton made a pilgrimage to the Beau Rivage where he had first stayed in Nice with Suvorin nearly ten years ago, and only then sent Suvorin belated condolences on the death of Aleksei Kolomnin. To Suvorin Chekhov mused that 'life here is not like ours, it is rich, healtby, young, smiling'. Nice brought out francophilia in him. The Russians, he told Knipper, were all 'squashed-down, as if oppressed… outrageous idleness'. Despite an unseasonal frost, he

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i ï in i i HI itì 141.s told Dr Sredin in Yalta, Nice was paradise and Yalta was Siberia: people here were happy, with no magistrate and no 'puffy-faced Marxists'. A week later Anton saw Nemirovich-Danchenko's mortally ill sister Varvara in Menton, stopping on the way in Monte Carlo. Anton gambled with his friend Franz Schechtel for two weeks, won 500 francs and exclaimed to Olga 'How much Russian money is being lost here'.

The Nemirovich-Danchenkos joined Anton on the Cote d'Azur. To please Olga, perhaps, Anton belittled Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife 'Kitten', whom he had once liked: 'Nemirovich is under house arrest: Katichka won't let him a step from her side, so that I don't see him… she's just like a merchant's wife…' Nemirovich-Danchenko had been unwilling to talk about Three Sisters at first, but he came to love and understand it as the weeks went by. Stanislavsky did not write about it until mid January. He was puzzled about the death of Tuzenbakh: should the body not be carried across the stage, could Anton insert a crowd scene to explain the sisters' calm? These queries did not distress Anton so much as Stanislavsky's delusion that the play ends with 'the author's uplifting thought which will redeem the play's many depressing minutes'. Nemirovich-Danchenko was practical: he demanded cuts in the sisters' monologues. So did Olga, who found Masha - the one passionate sister, the challenging role Anton had written for her - difficult to act.

Olga was worked to exhaustion by Nemirovich-Danchenko. He wanted her to feel 'the tone' of her part in the new play. When Masha and Evgenia left for Yalta on 19 December, Olga collapsed with a bad cold. She went deaf, took morphine and went to bed. Performances were cancelled, but she did not mope. Had Anton met 'beaucoup de jolies femmes… Ecrivez-moi si vous ó trouvez de bien interess-antes'. She made him write to his mother - 'Why upset the old woman? She'll think I made you change towards her.' Obediently he sent Evgenia 10 roubles and a card every three days. Masha, however, angered Anton. She had delayed banking 15,000 roubles received from Marx: 'not careless, simply swinish'. Masha cried at the injustice of his fury. When he sent instructions to Yalta on repairing the stoves and digging round the fruit trees, she would not reply. He had to ask Dr Sredin if Autka and its inhabitants were safe. 'My family, darling, don't spoil me,' Anton commented to Olga.

DECEMBER I900-FEBRUARY I90I

Masha and Evgenia had caught the servants Arseni and Mariushka unawares: the house was unheated, moths had eaten a bedside rug and the divan had collapsed under the weight of old newspapers. Masha looked at the garden and told Anton it was bare. He replied tersely that everything was planted to plan and in five years' time she would see that he was right. The crane that had flown away came back, but it injured itself when it began to dance with the one-eyed crane that had stayed behind: it lay dying in the kitchen. Yalta was cold and Masha was lonely. Olga wrote to Anton: Bunin has been with me today, his nerves all shattered, he doesn't know what to do with himself; I am sending him to Yalta; he's angry at Masha for letting him down and keeping her departure quiet, but she was delayed here and did not know what to do, afraid of tying him down. He is talking about Nice. On Christmas Eve Bunin left for Yalta. He was a godsend. He lived downstairs next to Masha and worked in Anton's sunny study. She called him Bouquichon; he called her Amarantha. Masha's letters to Anton began to sparkle and, while Arseni dug the garden, Bunin appended verses in her name:

Snow falleth, blizzard bloweth:

I have fled down to the south.

Here the cold is not a joke,

Bunin and I look at the views.

All day widi wood the stoves we stoke

And go for walks like little ewes.'8

Masha did not want to teach any more, or cope with Anton's ungrateful finances. She told Olga on 3 January 1901:

Bunin escorts me… I have no time to visit [the sick]. I saw the New Year in at the Elpatievskys' with Bunin and yesterday I went to another fancy dress ball in the Kursaal - pretty good… In Yalta people are dying like flies, several friends died after the holidays -it's loathsome.'9

Ever a dutiful sister, however, Masha left the balls and returned to Moscow on 12 January. Thanks to Bunin, at least she could leave Evgenia behind in Autka. Evgenia was happy: Bunin showed her more affection than her children. She told Anton: 'I've stopped being afraid,

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I've calmed down, as if I've arrived in paradise.' Bunin explained to Anton that his country estate was as cold as the North Pole, whereas in Chekhov's sunny study, while the Tatars hammered paving stones into the driveway, he scribbled and read. For a whole month Bunin deputed for Anton and Masha. Anton approved and Masha wrote Bunin affectionate notes.

Misha had a different view of life at Autka and wrote to Vania: 'Mother has been left on her own in Yalta… It is a sin, a bad sin. If the old woman gets ill, there's nobody to give her water. Poor Mama!' Misha had a newborn son and wanted Evgenia in Iaroslavl to help, but she stayed in Yalta. On 15 February 1901, the day Anton was due back, she wrote: Misha, you write strange things about our life, especially to Masha, why she isn't staying in Yalta, but what would she do here, you ought to ask, and also you mention my going to Moscow and back to Yalta, even now I'm embarrassed at burdening Antosha with the expense, but what can you do, I was so unhappy, I couldn't live, Antosha saw that and he suggested it… Please tear up this letter. Why do you imagine Antosha has thousands? He never did, Meli-khovo was 23,000, 5 for the bank, 8 owed, we've got only 5 thousand. The Yalta land cost 5000 and the house, outsiders built it and ran up a big sum, Gurzuf, he's taken a lot of money from Marx too, there's not much left, he can't hold on to money. Once she had found a new place to live in Moscow Masha went to see Misha in Petersburg. He had sent four letters begging her to come: he was burning his boats, planning a new life working for Suvorin. When she got back to Moscow, Masha wrote firmly to Misha that Anton and she had no spare money.

Olga Vasilieva had busied herself in Nice searching the newspapers for news of deserving poor that she could help. She now wanted to sell a house she owned in Odessa and put the proceeds towards a clinic. In Moscow that summer Anton had been approached by Dr Chlenov, who, despite the puns (his name meant 'penis'), wanted to found a clinic for Moscow's syphilitics. Anton decided to direct Olga Vasilieva towards this venture and became embroiled in the sale of her property and the making of Dr Chlenov's clinic, a project which never came to fruition. In mid January Anton felt that he had exhausted the human material

DECEMBKR I9OO-FEBRUARY I9OI

in the pension. He told Kovalevsky that he had exhausted Yalta too, and that leaving Melikhovo, where he knew about life in forty villages, had been a creative disaster. Once again he wanted to go to Algiers. Kovalevsky prevaricated: he saw that Anton was even iller than three years ago. He told him the sea was too rough, and then refused outright. With Kovalevsky and Professor Korotniov, Anton took instead the coast road to Italy. Olga Vasilieva begged him not to forget her, and left for Geneva. Anton and his companions stopped in Pisa, then went to Florence. On 30 January 1901 they went to Rome. Anton's mood grew grim: he told Kovalevsky he was writing nothing long, because he would soon die. Anton stayed four more days in Rome and watched a penitential procession in St Peter's. Asked how he would describe it, he replied, 'A stupid procession dragged past.'60 Feeling deserted by his friends, Anton took trains from Rome to Odessa and, despite his status as an academician, was harassed by the Russian customs. In Odessa he had an estate agent value Vasilieva's house. On 15 February 1901, across terrible seas, he arrived in a freezing Yalta.

Anton had been travelling for three weeks. He had missed the furore surrounding Three Sisters. Olga had wired the news of the play's triumph to Nice: 'Grand succes, embrasse mon bien aime', but news took a long time to reach Anton. Rehearsals had been troubled: the ex-colonel the theatre had hired to make the military dress and behaviour authentic had dared to overrule Stanislavsky. Olga had argued against the heavy red wig that Stanislavsky wanted Masha to wear. The opening night of Three Sisters on 31 January 1901 confirmed Chekhov as Russia's greatest dramatist and Moscow Arts Theatre as its leading theatre. The public saw their lives enacted: the three sisters stood for all educated women marooned in the provinces. Olga as Masha had every unfaithful wife in the audience in tears. So moved was the audience that the curtain fell to total silence.

In the audience was Ezhov. He saw the cuckolded schoolteacher Kulygin as a caricature of himself, and reported to Suvorin on 1 February 1901: All the heroes whine, none is satisfied. There is a drunken old doctor who has read nothing… There is adultery (Chekhov's favourite theme)… The content: three sisters, daughters of a brigadier

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i IIRII: i id èì I'll s general, their brother studying to be a professor, all passionately desire to move to live in Moscow… The play is acted splendidly… I shall not be writing about this play in New Times.61 Suvorin thoroughly disliked the play when he saw it a year later in Moscow.

SEVENTY-FIVE Ô

The Secret Marriage February-May 1901 WHEN ANTON ARRIVED, Bunin moved out to sleep at the Hotel Yalta, where there was a corpse in the next room. Bunin's humour and tact endeared him to Anton, who pressed him to stay. Masha in Moscow was propitiated by a parcel of gifts from her brother: a tartan rug, lace handkerchiefs, scissors and a blotter.

Olga Knipper was still further away. In Moscow the theatres closed for Lent, so Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky took their company to Petersburg, where the theatres closed only for the first, fourth and last weeks of Lent. The public enthused in Petersburg as they had in Moscow. Unadvertised, all seats were sold; people queued for tickets until midnight. The press, however, was brutal. Burenin denounced a 'press claque puffing Chekhov'. New Times derided Olga in Lonely People. Kugel in The Petersburg Newspaper reviewed the first night of Uncle Vania on 19 February 1901: Knipper is 'a very phlegmatic lady… praise of this actress is for me an utter mystery.' Amfite-atrov's Courier declared: 'Knipper is a very bad actress.' Critics praised Maria Andreeva, whose Katchen, the dowdy wife in Hauptmann's play, was more beautiful than Olga's siren Anna Mahr. Olga and Andreeva became enemies. Three Sisters changed a few minds: Amfi-teatrov, for one, decided that Knipper was a great actress.

When the curtain fell the audiences called out the wording of congratulatory telegrams to Chekhov, but Suvorin's critics accused the Moscow Arts Theatre of destroying him. Nikolai Sazonov told his wife he would never have passed the play when he was censor. The Ministry of Education banned it from 'people's theatres'. Finally, on 20 March, Burenin published a vicious skit: Nine Sisters and Not a Single Groom. Burenin's sisters, Hysteria, Cretina and Idiota, utter Chekhovian gibberish, Tra-ta-tam and Tsip, tsip, tsip and his cast includes trained cockroaches. Nine Sisters ends with the sisters sucking

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Ill Ê I I i IM i \i i- il '. their blankets and the theatre collapsing to thunderous applause. Burenin's parody upset Chekhov - all the more so because it was published in Suvorin's paper.62

Olga was distraught about her bad reviews: she loved Petersburg and wanted her love reciprocated. Stanislavsky explained to the cast that every critic was the husband or lover of an actress whose nose had been put out of joint by their performance of Chekhov. Petersburg actors queued to apologize and Lidia Iavorskaia showed her support. She took a red carnation from between her breasts and threw it to Stanislavsky, then came backstage and invited the cast to stay as her guests for the fourth week of Lent. Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, to Olga's disgust, accepted. Iavorskaia, Anton's notorious old love, repelled her: 24 February… Iavorskaia crept into my dressing room again, she pushes in, flattering and keeps inviting me to see her. The brazen woman. 3 March… Iavorskaia has invited me on 5 March, but I certainly shan't go. I can't bear the sight of that coarse woman and have given orders for her not to be allowed in my dressing rooms in the interval.63 Another old flame of Anton's approached Olga. She wrote to him on 2 March to say: 'I just had a letter from L. Avilova, you seem to know her. She wishes… to get a ticket to the Sisters. I replied politely. I cannot get a ticket.' She was angry with 'Kitten', Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife, as well.64

Anton was upset by the ordeal the company had endured, but reproached Olga for quarrelling with Iavorskaia (who had sent him a telegram of praise). Anton even renounced writing plays in a country where actresses were abused. Suvorin was punished: for the twenty-fifth anniversary of New Times students organized a 'cat's concert' under the windows of his offices; police had to drive demonstrators away. Another student demonstration was attacked by Cossacks and police; news came that the Church's Holy Synod had excommunicated Tolstoy. In a tense and excited Petersburg theatre audiences became even more emotional. Sazonova took a friend, Evgenia, to see Three Sisters on 1 March 1901: 'She left the theatre in tears. Masha's affair with an artillery colonel is her own story.' One persona found Anton's

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drama and personal life amusing. Anna Suvorina wrote to Anton at Easter: 'We all went to see Uncle Vania, six times in a row… it makes me laugh since I can see and hear many of my kith and kin… I'd like to say hello to your "wife" [Olga Knipper], but how can I?'65

In the middle of all the turmoil Misha Chekhov turned up in Petersburg to take up Suvorin's offer of employment: Suvorin 'could not think what you're fit for', and forgot to assign Misha a salary. Masha supported her youngest brother: 'it's the fate of the boys in our family to be writers, not officials'. Misha declared that he was doing what Anton had advised him to do ten years ago. Now Anton reminded him that Suvorin published New Times and was 'an awful liar, especially in his so-called frank moments'; also that Anna Suvorina was petty. The only honest employment with Suvorin would be with Tychinkin in the print shop. Despondent at Suvorin's offhandedness and Anton's disapproval, Misha went back to Iaroslavl to rehabilitate himself. Suvorin wired him. Misha returned to Petersburg, apologizing to Suvorin on 17 March: 'I was always being terrified in my childhood that God would punish me and the Devil lead me astray… [My parents] made me a weak character.'66 Misha was employed with Suvorin first as an editor, then in his advertising agency, for 350 roubles a month. Suvorin had won another Chekhov.

Alone with his mother in the Crimea, Anton was reaching a decision. To Bunin he joked: 'marrying a German is better: they are tidier'. Gorky, keeping Olga company in Petersburg, wrote to Anton: 'Why have people everywhere been saying that you are married?' Meanwhile the almonds blossomed and Anton gardened. He was reading proofs for volume IV of The Complete Works, but not writing. He had promised another story to the journal Life: that journal was now banned. His old editor, Mikhail Menshikov, left The Week to work for Suvorin, and another outlet vanished. Anton grew iller. Nikolai Sazonov reported back to his wife that Chekhov would share the fate of the poet Nadson: 'he will be wiped out by consumption and Burenin's parodies'. Masha picked up the ominous adverb in a letter from Bunin: 'Anton is relatively well', and asked for his support in Yalta, when she came for Easter.67 Anton was expecting Olga to come for four whole months. On 5 March, she made him an ultimatum:

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I shan't come to Yalta; think and you'll realize why. It's impossible. You have such a sensitive soul and yet you invite me! Can you really not understand? Anton made a joke of her refusal: she had a lover in Petersburg; he did have a wife, but would divorce her; he had brought expensive perfume for her to fetch from Yalta. On 7 March, he gave in: 'Let me make you a proposal.' Olga held out: How can I come?… How long must we stay hidden? And what's the point? Because of people? People are more likely to shut up and leave us in peace once they see it's an accomplished fact. Although he loathed trains and hotels, Anton announced he would come to Moscow. To Bunin (who, himself seeking a divorce, had to repress his horror) he made his first unambiguous written declaration: 'By the way, I intend to marry.' He told Olga he was coming to Moscow, but stressed that she would 'get a grandfather, not a spouse.' He would let her act for five more years. A week after this letter Olga told members of the theatre that she had resolved: 'to unite my life to that of Anton Chekhov.' But she still did not have from Anton the firm offer on which she was insisting: We cannot live just as though we were good friends… to see your mother's suffering, ivlasha's puzzled face - it's awful! In your house I'm between two fires. Say something about this. You never say anything. I have to have a bit of peace now. I am terribly tired. She dared not drag Anton to Moscow's frozen air, but, faced with her conditions for coming down to Yalta, Anton was now backing off. He wrote to Bunin on 25 March: 'I've changed my mind about marrying, I don't want to but all the same… then if I must I shall.' Shortly after Masha had left for Yalta, it was Olga who gave in. She telegraphed: 'Leaving tomorrow Yalta' and got the reply, 'Expect arrival'. On Good Friday, 30 March 1901, she was there.

Bunin was also there for the two weeks that Masha and Olga stayed. They went to the seaside cottage at Gurzuf, where they picnicked, and Anton wrote Bunin a joke bill for his share. When Masha left for Moscow and Bunin for Odessa, Olga left with them. She cried bitterly all the way to Moscow - Masha believed it was from a tooth abscess. Olga's letter to Anton suggests otherwise:

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There was no need to separate… It was for decency, was it?… You stayed silent. I decided that you did not want me to be with you once Masha had left. Que dim ê monde? There is a sediment of things left unsaid. I was so looking forward to spring, and now I've just been on a visit… everyone in Moscow was amazed to see me… Come soon; let's get married and clear off, do you want to? The next day Olga wrote, 'You have already cooled towards me, you don't look at me as somebody close… you don't like all this woman's chatter.'

While Olga Knipper was in Yalta, Olga Vasilieva let Anton know that she had come to Gurzuf for two months with her foster-child Marusia: 'Will you curse me very much for my desire to have one more look at you? Your Marusia is a wonderful child, but I get very spiteful with her.' At the beginning of April she sent her photograph to Anton's mother and wrote that she was bequeathing Marusia to Anton, as thanks for all the happiness and joy you brought me with your visits in Nice - after Mama's death I was never so happy and shan't be. Marusia is a good, kind child - I am not worthy of her. I often envy her that I cannot, as she can, count on an affectionate word from you. A week later she wired: 'Voudrais venir Gourzouff etre plus pres vous, puis-je, ne vous fachez pas.' Anton replied that there was a hotel in Gurzuf and sent regards to 'our daughter Marusia', telling her to behave 'or else daddy will get angry and pick up the cane'. A week after Easter Anton arranged to see them. Vasilieva had moved to Autka, to the house next door. She sent Anton coins, ostensibly as a pledge for a loan to pay her landlady. The day that Bunin, Masha and Olga left, Anton wrote to Vasilieva. He told her that he did not mind her living next door with no chaperone.68

Anton's reply to Olga Knipper, however, was as intimate a letter as she would ever receive from him: I didn't keep you because I hate being in Yalta and I also had the idea that we would soon meet anyway in freedom… you had no reason to be angry… I had no secret thoughts. He appealed to her pity and theatrical ambitions:

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My cough takes all my energy and 1 think languidly about the future and am reluctant to write… Occasionally I have a very strong desire to write a 4-act farce or comedy for the Arts Theatre. And if I do, if nothing gets in the way, I shan't give it to the theatre before the end of 1903 They would marry and honeymoon anywhere, the Black Sea or the Arctic Ocean. Anton undertook to bring his passport to Moscow for the ceremony: she was now 'Olia', his 'little Lutheran', his 'dog', as henceforth she signed her letters to him. He would marry her the day he arrived 'so long as you promise nobody will know in Moscow': he loathed congratulations, champagne and having to maintain a fixed smile. Waiting for health and warm weather, he chatted every day with Kuprin, a fascinating companion who, as he later boasted, had done everything in life except get pregnant. Anton's notebooks reflect a darker mood: a feeling of non-love, a peaceful state, long, peaceful thoughts… love is either the remains of something degenerating or part of something that will develop in the future into something enormous, but in the present it doesn't satisfy, it gives far less than you expect. Olga's next letter to Anton contained an inauspicious joke: 'The revolting Vishnevsky swears by God and crosses his heart that in a year or two I'll be his wife - how about that!' A Grand Duchess, Olga said, had accosted her mother and asked, 'When is her marriage, and how is his health?' Thus Anna Knipper learnt of the betrothal.69 Anton said he would write a will forbidding Olga to remarry after his death. For a fortnight he pleaded illness: he was locked in his study, thinking and coughing. He worried about Vania, who was, although never complaining, barely communicating, in fact, overworked and losing weight; about Gorky and Posse, the editor of Life, in prison; about his sick dog; about Olga Vasilieva leaving for France. On 6 May he had a talk with Vasilieva. He deterred his Taganrog cousins from visiting Yalta: Evgenia might be in Petersburg, Masha in Moscow and he in the Arctic or on the Volga.

When Anton came to Moscow a week later, he had his first breakfast with Olga Vasilieva, not Olga Knipper, so that he could introduce Dr Chlenov the venereologist to Vasilieva the potential patron for his clinic. On 16 May Masha left for Yalta to care for Evgenia. On

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17 May Anton went, under duress, to see Dr Shchurovsky, who after a thorough examination and interrogation took a full history. Anton gave wild guesses when asked how long his relatives had lived. He admitted that coughing and diarrhoea had plagued him since infancy and haemorrhages for the past seventeen years. Shchurovsky noted70 that Anton drank moderately, had given up smoking, that he had not had syphilis, but had been treated for, and cured of, gonorrhoea. Shchurovsky suspected that Anton's childhood 'peritonitis' might be due to a hernia. He found Anton's mental state good and his nerves 'tolerable'. (Anton assured Shchurovsky that his depression was 'autointoxication' due to constipation and lifted after a dose of castor oil.) The lungs, however, were bad, with irreversible necrosis, and his gut was badly affected. Severe pulmonary damage and chronic colitis, Shchurovsky hoped, might respond to koumiss, a treatment Anton had not tried. Anton was referred to Dr Varavka at the Andreev sanatorium, in the wilds of Bashkiria, 1200 miles east of Moscow. Olga wrote to Masha the next day: There is not much comfort - the process has not stopped. He prescribed him a course of koumiss drinking and if he can't, then it's Switzerland. I am cooking up a medicine for Anton, I pound it in the mortar, I let it stand and I boil it, it's for the intestines. God grant that the koumiss does him good! As soon as I sort everything out, we are off. I am awfully sad. Masha, why did you go away! I am sad and afraid.7' Olga told Masha everything, except that she and Anton were about to marry. Anton wrote to Masha two days later to say that both lungs now had lesions, that he had the choice of fermented mares' milk in the Urals or Switzerland for two months. As for the wedding and the journey with Olga to the Urals, he even now denied it: 'It's boring to go on one's own, it's boring to be on the koumiss, but taking somebody with me would be selfish… I would get married but I don't have the papers on me, everything is in the desk in Yalta.' He asked for a few blank cheques. Masha wanted him back in Yalta.

On Thursday 24 May 1901 Anton took Vania on an errand, near the clinic where their father had died. He sent his last proofs to Marx and had his mail directed to Aksionovo, a village half way between the Volga and the Urals. He received a telegram from Dr Varavka:

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'Welcome. Have place.' Anton then wired Olga: 'I have everything ready. Need meet before i to talk. We definitely leave Friday.' That day Masha could contain her jealousy no more and, despite her close friendship with Olga, told Anton: Now let me express my opinion about your marriage. Personally I find the wedding procedure awful. And you don't need these extra worries, if you are loved you won't be abandoned and there is no sacrifice involved… It's never too late to get tied. Tell that to your [sweetheart erased] Knipper woman. The first thing to think about is getting you well. For God's sake don't think I'm guided by selfishness. You've always been the person closest and dearest to me… You yourself brought me up to be without prejudices. My God, how difficult it will be to live two whole months without you, what's more in Yalta… If you don't answer this letter quickly I shall be hurt. My regards to 'her'.72 The day of his marriage Anton left instructions for Vania and 50 roubles which he insisted Vania spend on a first-class boat journey down the Volga. He telegraphed his mother, 'Dear Mama, bless me, I am getting married. All will stay the same.731 am off to drink koumiss. Address Aksionovo. Health better.' Evgenia was, Masha later reported, mute with shock, but Anton received a telegram from her, 'I bless, be happy, healthy.' On the morning of 25 May Olga wrote to Masha: Today we are getting married and leaving for Aksionovo, Ufa province, on the koumiss. Anton feels well, is nice and gende. Only Volodia [her brother] and uncle Sasha (at Anton's request) and two student witnesses will be in the church. I had a tragedy and rows with mama yesterday because of all this I don't sleep at night, my head is splitting… I am awfully sad and hurt, Masha, that you are not here with me these days, I would feel different. I am utterly alone, I have nobody to speak to. Don't forget me, Mashechka, love me, we must, you and I must always be together… My regards to your mother. Tell her I shall be very hurt if she cries or is upset because of Anton's marriage. Three days later, waiting for a boat, Olga described to Masha Anton's best farce: At 8.30 I set off to the dentist to have my tooth finished… at 2 I had lunch, put on a white dress and went to Anton's. I had it all out

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with my mother… I myself did not know to the last day when we would get married. The wedding was very queer… There wasn't a soul in the church, there were guards at the gates. Towards 5 p.m. I arrived with Anton, the bride's men were sitting on a bench in the garden… I could hardly stand with my headache and at one moment I felt I should burst out either crying or laughing. You know, I felt awfully odd when the priest came up to me and Anton and led us away… We were married on the Pliushchikha by the same priest as buried your father. I was asked only for a certificate that I was a spinster, which I fetched from our church…741 was terribly upset that Vania wasn't there… Vania knew we were getting married, Anton had gone to see the priest with him… When I got back from the church our servants couldn't control themselves, they lined up to congratulate me and raised a howling and weeping, but I nobly controlled myself. They packed my things, and Natasha that pig let me down… she didn't bring the silk bra and the batiste embroidered blouse. At 8 p.m. we went to the station, only our family saw us off, quietly, modestly.75 Elsewhere in Moscow, at a reception which Anton had asked Vishnevsky to organize, a bemused crowd wondered what had happened to the newlyweds.

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Love and Death The best protection against dragons is to have one of your own. Evgeni Shvarts, The Dragon The bedroom smelt of fever, infusions, ether, tar, that indescribable heavy smell of an apartment where a consumptive is breathing. Maupassant, Bel'Ami

SEVENTY-SIX Ô

Honeymoon June-September 1901 ANNA KNIPPER offered the couple a quick meal before they caught the train to Nizhni Novgorod. Anton and Olga were met at Nizhni by Dr Dolgopolov, who had tickets for the thousand-mile river journey to Ufa, from where they would get a train to the village of Aksionovo and the sanatorium. Dr Dolgopolov had just certified Gorky as too consumptive for prison, and took Anton and Olga to see him. One policeman opened the door; another sat in the kitchen. Gorky's wife was in hospital giving birth. Gorky talked volubly and, when Anton and Olga finally blurted out that they had just got married, thumped Olga on the back.

Dolgopolov put Anton and Olga on a boat that took them down the Volga and up the river Kama towards the Urals, dropping them at a quay called Piany Bor, 'Drunken Grove'. Here they had a long wait for the connecting boat. They should have changed boats in Kazan. There was no hotel; they camped on the ground, in the rain, while a consumptive spat. 'I shall never forgive Dolgopolov. In "Drunken Grove" and sober. The setting is horrible,' Anton wrote. Olga found a hut and made a bed on the floor. They ate salted sturgeon and tried to sleep. At 5 a.m. a tiny, crowded boat for Ufa picked them up; they slept in separate cabins. Anton was lent a rug, but pestered by admirers. They chugged up the river Belaia through wooded hills; the sun tanned Anton's face and bleached the pink blouse Masha had sewn for Olga. After two nights on the Belaia, at dawn on 31 May 1901, they docked at Ufa. They rushed to catch the 6.00 a.m. train, but there had been a derailment and the train did not leave until two in the afternoon. The windows were jammed and the station carpenter could not budge them. They endured five hours of stifling heat. From Aksionovo wickerwork carts took them over a rough hilly track six miles to the sanatorium.

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It was dark when they arrived. They were met by dozens of telegrams and letters and by the news that an Anna Chokhova was there. She was the wife of Mikhail Chokhov, a vulgar cousin whom Anton had avoided for fifteen years.' Morning showed the beauty of Aksionovo - an outcrop of hilly forest in the dreary steppes between the Volga and the Urals, it could have been a resort in lower Austria. Olga regaled Masha with her first impressions: The air was saturated, the fragrance amazing, and it was remarkably warm. Here we were met by Dr Varavka (a great name [it sounds like vorovka, thieving woman D.R.])… Anton travels like a student; I had told him that he would have to bring everything with him. He assured me we could buy everything locally. It turns out there are no sheets or pillows here. The doctor sent over his own… The sanatorium has 40 little chalets… and a house with ten rooms, a dining room, a drawing room, billiard room, a library and a piano. From a distance the chalets look like big privies. Each has two rooms connected only by a narrow verandah, the rooms are middling, all white. You get a table, mree chairs, a rather hard bed and a cupboard, the washstand is on three legs with a jug instead of a sink. Spartan, you can see. They will send over some softer beds and I have been given a mirror. Our chalet is the end one, so mat we get an excellent view of the open country; there is a birch wood right by. We get morning coffee brought to us, at 1 we go to lunch, two hot courses, at 6 a three-course dinner, and at 9 tea, milk, bread and butter. Anton was weighed and he began to drink koumiss, so far he takes it well, eats very well and sleeps a lot.2 v. Dr Varavka fawned on his new patients: a famous colleague and a distinguished actress. Anton studied the twenty house rules and named the place 'a corrective labour camp'. There was no running water, no bathhouse; the 'park' was scrub, the flowerbeds full of weeds. The Bashkirs farmed horses and sheep, but no fruit or vegetables. Anton laughed hysterically and would have fled, but for a landowner who offered him his sauna, and for the river Dioma, where, with Dr Varavka and a young patient, Anton sat trout-fishing. Olga lazed with a book, bathed in the stream, made herself a silk bra, or gathered strawberries and flowers in the woods. Olga's only ordeal was a trip to buy bed-linen, which meant travelling to Ufa, which she cursed -a 'pit: hell, suffocation and dust!' For the first time since childhood, Anton put on weight. Four

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bottles of koumiss daily made him twelve pounds heavier by mid-June. Fermented mares' milk was easily digestible. It was also thought to raise the body's defences against tuberculosis, encouraging the growth of benign flora at the expense of tubercular bacilli in the gut. Olga, although she found her own ten stone excessive, tried it herself. Koumiss made them drowsy, drunk and lascivious.

Letters were Anton's lifeline, but they soon became disagreeable. After she had been informed of her brother's marriage Masha, feeling deceived and jealous, turned on Olga: You managed to trap my brother! Suppose you're like Natasha in Three Sistersl I'll strangle you with my own hands. I shan't bite your throat, just strangle you. You know I love you and must have got strongly attached to you in the last two years. How odd mat you're a Chekhov.3 The whole family was in turmoil. Vania went to Petersburg to tell Misha of the marriage, and Misha closed ranks with Masha against the intruder. By 8 June Vania was in Yalta, trying to reconcile Masha and Evgenia to what had happened. On 6 June Masha wrote bitterly to Bunin: Dear Ivan, My mood is suicidal, I sense the pointlessness of my existence. The reason is my brother's marriage… why did Olga need all this disturbance for a sick man… I'm afraid my relations with Knipschitz will change… dear Bouquichon, find me a rich generous groom.4 It took Olga a week to seek a reconciliation: she invited Masha to join their honeymoon. Masha dithered, then declined. She doubted if she and Olga could live together even in Moscow, as they planned: she would sell her flat and live with a family. 'Anton keeps writing everything will stay the same,' Masha wrote to Bunin, 'like hell it will, I want the reality, not a pretence.' Masha feared, as did Dr Altshuller, that Olga would lure Anton to live in Moscow and wreck his health. Evgenia, Masha told Misha, 'dislikes Antosha's spouse and Olga knows that.' On 20 June Olga wrote to Evgenia: 'I thought I'd explain everything… when we met… I know how you love Anton, so we've tried to make everything good and friendly at home [the Moscow fiat], so that Anton will feel good among his womenfolk.'5 Others were disturbed by

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Anton's marriage. Maria Drozdova wrote from Yalta to tell him of her feelings at the news: I was painting at die time and all my brushes and palette flew to hell. Right to the last minute I didn't lose hope of marrying you myself. I thought the others were just jokes, while God would give me happiness for my modesty. How I hate Olga, my jealousy is frantic, I can't bear to see you, I hate her and you too, always and for ever.6 Suvorin, hurt not to have been even informed of the marriage, wrote to Misha: Anton has astounded me. Where is he now? I mean, what is his address? His getting married was the last thing I thought would happen after last November when I met him… It's fine if he knows what he needs. But suppose he doesn't! It's a lottery.7 Others' congratulations were lukewarm: Professor Korotniov talked of the Rubicon; Sobolevsky of 'the other shore so rarely attainable to people like me and you'. Bunin expressed polite amazement.

Anton could not bear to remain at Aksionovo for the two months prescribed. After one month he was determined to leave. Worry about what was happening at Yalta and irritation with his tedious fellow patients drove him away. In vain Dr Varavka promised health and offered improvements; on i July 1901 Anton signed ôå towel that Dr Varavka kept for distinguished patients, to have the signatures embroidered later, and abandoned Aksionovo. He was in such a hurry that he left his passport behind. On 6 July the Chekhovs arrived back in Yalta. 'I'm now asking for a divorce,' Anton wrote to Bunin, inviting him to join them at Autka.

Masha felt depressed by the new status quo. She complained to Misha: I am a nothing. I'm neither an artist nor a teacher, but I think I am working hard to build someone else's nest… My relations with my sister-in-law are still pretty bad… Mother has turned out better, she is being handled well and has calmed down. My mood is nasty, I can't adapt to this new life at all, I pine, I cry a lot and I have to hide it all, and I don't always succeed… In Moscow there is a lot of gossip about me, everybody is sorry for me and there are rumours

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that I've run away… Anton is poorly, die koumiss didn't do him much good." Anton coughed, bled and fretted. Dr Varavka asked him to send a portrait of himself for the chalet where he had stayed. A student doctor at Aksionovo promised good cuisine, fountains, running water, a conservatory and fresh vegetables for next year,9 but Anton had finished with koumiss. On 3 August 1901, he drew up a will and had it witnessed. Addressed to Masha, it was entrusted to Olga: I leave you for your lifespan my Yalta house, the money and the income from my plays; my wife is to have the cottage in Gurzuf and 5000 roubles. You can sell the real estate if you wish. A few thousand roubles went to his brothers, the residue to Taganrog's schools. The will ended: 'Help the poor. Look after mother. All of you live in peace.'

Anton's inspiration had run dry; now his only income came from the theatres. His plight worried Gorky and his editor Piatnitsky, who asked to see Adolf Marx's contract. By suing or shaming Marx they thought tbey might be able to break the contract that offered Anton next to nothing for a life's work, but made Marx a fortune. Anton, horrified at the thought of reneging on his agreement, demurred, but sent copies of the contract for Gorky's lawyers. Gorky boasted: How I'd love to tear Sergeenko's famous block off for dragging you into this mess. And I'd bash Marx on his bald patch too… We'll pawn our wives and children, but we'll tear Chekhov out of Marx's thrall.10 Anton read the proofs for Marx's final volumes: revising later work was easier than the earlier work in which he found so many imperfections. He busied himself with the problems of others. His cousin Aleksei Dolzhenko asked for 800 roubles to build a cottage: Anton arranged for Olga to hand the money over in Moscow, warning her twice to be polite and gentle to her poor relation. In Taganrog Gavriil Selivanov, after twenty years' silence, was again causing trouble: he threatened to pull down Uncle Mitrofan's sheds unless the Chekhovs ceded terrain. Georgi sought Anton's advice. Olga Vasilieva still wanted help to convert her wealth into a clinic. A Jewish boy needed a letter of support to get into school at Yalta.

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Olga felt unwanted. On 20 August 1901, after just six weeks, she left Autka, alone, for Moscow and the theatre. Evgenia refused to bless her as she stepped into the carriage. Anton sailed with her to the railhead. Weeping in the train, Olga wrote to Masha. She posted the letter in Kharkov: Do you feel better now I'm gone? You know, I want to shake off all our misunderstandings in the summer months like a vile nightmare… We do love each other. Nobody met Olga in Moscow. She sought out a five-room apartment, a wooden house in a courtyard, for herself and - she hoped - Masha. Her unease persisted. She asked Anton: In your house nobody ever mentions me, do they? I shall always stand between you and her. And I fancy that she will never get used to me as your wife, and will thus turn you off me. I am avoided like a sore." Anton deplored her jealousy: 'What rubbish! Just be silent for a year… all life's comforts are to be found in nonresistance for the time being.' In Yalta Masha resigned herself to her new situation, telling Misha on 30 August: Recendy Antosha has been so gentle and kind that I wouldn't have the strengm to abandon him, anyway his health is no better. The sister-in-law has rented a flat in Moscow where I shall live and Antosha will come for a time… bad though I feel, I still want to stay with him. The young poet Lazarevsky, who had become a 'Person from Porlock' in the Autka house, recorded Masha as 'the first and last of old maids, more likeable than the most beautiful ladies… a charming, suffering face'. On 31 August 1901 Masha left for Moscow; she stayed first with the Knippers and then with the Konovitsers until the new quarters were ready. Sharing was bearable, for Masha spent days at school, Olga evenings at the theatre, and servants, notably Masha Shakina who became pregnant every year, ran the household. Olga's passport listed her as the wife of a Yalta doctor. She bore her colleagues' teasing that Chekhov's latest play was Two Sisters, as the author had taken one (Masha, played by Olga) away for himself. The day he was left alone with his mother, Anton took the draft

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of a new story, 'The Bishop', out of his suitcase and wrote. He would join Olga while Moscow was still warm, in mid September. Now that he was married, few Antonovkas bothered to call. Anton renounced old dalliances and gave Lazarevsky a rude message for Avilova.12 A Polish girl, another Masha, was hired to cook; Arseni the gardener resumed work; the tame crane trumpeted with delight. Finally Ivan Bunin arrived on 5 September. Finding Anton 'ill and lonely', he visited daily; his tact and wit restored Anton's spirits. Nearby, at Gaspra, Tolstoy was recuperating from a nearly fatal attack of pneumonia. Anton's concern at this time was for Tolstoy's health, not his own. (The government forbad bulletins, and stationed a priest outside the house in Gaspra, to announce his deathbed recantation of heresy.) If Tolstoy died, Anton believed, Russian literature would lose its moral bulwark. His attendants, when Anton visited, found Chekhov 'aged, coughing all the time, talking little', but apparently happy to be without his sister and his wife.

Anton still had Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko as a rival, but Anton's and Olga's marriage made it possible to ignore his role in Olga's life. Anna Knipper, Olga's mother, now lifted her ban on the Moscow Arts Theatre director's visits. 'Your mama has made up witb Nemirovich-Danchenko? So she no longer fears for her daughter?' Anton asked. Olga, for her part, dismissed Anton's former girlfriends as ruthlessly as she had once courted them.13 Lika Mizinova was a marked woman. On 25 August 1901 she presented herself at the Moscow Arts Theatre for public entrance tests. Lika was told to read Elena in Uncle Vania, a role which Olga had made her own. Unabashed, Olga told Anton how she and Nemirovich-Danchenko had humiliated Lika: Lika Mizinova tried to imitate me, a dirty trick, but everything she read was complete rubbish (just between ourselves) and I was sorry for her, frankly. We rejected her unanimously. Sanin suggested she open a hat shop. Tell Masha about Lika. Perhaps she can have a non-speaking part. After this rebuff Masha, Vania and Misha made a point of befriending Lika, while the theatre company found her a role as an unofficial, unpaid social secretary. When Olga wanted to install her cat Martin in the new flat, Anton

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forbade her: 'I am afraid of cats… (Jet a dog instead.' He was furious with Olga's refusal to give her new address when she moved apartments - she preferred to receive her letters at the theatre - and stopped replying to her, but he had met a woman with willpower to match his own. She remonstrated with telegrams. To build up his health for renewed conjugal life, he drank bottles of kefir (Tatar fermented milk); Dr Altshuller also made him massage himself with eucalyptus oil and turpentine.

On 17 September, after ignoring Olga's birthday on the 9th, Anton arrived in Moscow for the Arts Theatre's new season.

SEVENTY-SEVEN Ô

When Doctors Disagree October 1901-February 1902 FOR THREE SEASONS in a row the Moscow Arts Theatre had put on a Chekhov play that was new to the Moscow public. For October 1901 Anton had given them nothing. Three Sisters was still a magnet; it had played for only half of last season. They also had Gorky's first play, The Petty Bourgeois, which promised to cause a scandal. They opened with Ibsen's Wild Duck, but the public and critics agreed with Chekhov: 'tired, boring and weak'. Stanislavsky was shattered by a fire that had burnt down a family factory, and then he was struck down with tonsillitis: his performances let the theatre down. Then Nemirovich-Danchenko made the mistake of staging his own introspective play In Dreams. The reviewers slated the play, Olga had no confidence in her part in it, and she was worried by Nemirovich-Danchenko's depression.14 After three rehearsals, Stanislavsky cancelled a revised production of Ivanov. Anton was pressed for a new play. At rehearsals of Three Sisters, he hindered more than he helped, but the author's presence at performances of this play and of Uncle Vania filled the house: Anton earned some 8000 roubles that season (and another 1000 roubles from productions all over Russia).

Moscow was still warm enough for his lungs. Petersburg, where he planned to go, was not. Aleksandr came to Moscow to talk to Masha and Anton. Though he stayed the night, he never met Olga. He told Misha that Anton looked 'pretty bad'. Aleksandr, on his way to the Caucasus for New Times, was sober. He hid his drinking until he was far away. Suvorin sent Ezhov to Moscow. Ezhov twice met the man who had, he felt, libelled him in Three Sisters; 'a shadow of the old Chekhov,' he told Suvorin. The weather grew colder. Olga used friends as sitters while Anton was confined indoors. Anton left the house only to help Olga Vasilieva. At nineteen she was adopting a

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LOV1. AND l)i:AI II second orphan girl, and asked Anton to come to her solicitor's to witness her will.

Masha was rarely at home. She taught at a school for 40 roubles a month.15 She went with Aleksandr Khotiaintseva to an art studio, where they were painting Abram Sinani for his bereaved parents. She sold a painting. In the evenings she received girlfriends whom Anton no longer met, while Olga's relatives kept Anton company. Anton liked Olga's Uncle Sasha, another Aleksandr in name and character, with his womanizing, drinking, and public outrages. Uncle Karl the doctor and Olga's brothers, the lawyer Volodia and the engineer Konstantin, left Anton cold. Masha told Misha: 'The worst thing about Antosha's marriage is his wife's numerous bourgeois relatives who have to be taken into account."6

In Yalta, Evgenia moaned, begging to be fetched to Moscow. Anna told her she must wait until he got back, and Masha placated her by saying that the apartment Olga had chosen had a smelly lavatory, rats decomposing beneath the floorboards and walls too thin for privacy. If Evgenia agreed to stay, Masha would bring her to Moscow in the New Year. Anton guaranteed this journey and Evgenia calmed down.

It was cold, and by mid October Anton knew he had to leave Moscow. To Miroliubov, the editor of Everybody's Magazine, Anton confided: 'My wife is crying, and I forbid her to leave the theatre. In a word, commotion.' Vania told a friend that Anton would not let Olga quit, telling her that life 'without work was impossible.' In the end Olga let him go alone. She sent Evgenia a complicated and patronizing list of instructions which confused and insulted her, even though Olga's intention was to provide Anton with a diet that was easily digested as well as nourishing: Here he has been eating grouse, turkey, partridge, poussin; he eats salt beef, pork chops, but not often. He likes tongue, cook him kidney, liver, fry mushrooms in sour cream. Make fish soup, but give him rissoles very sparingly. And please give him a sweet or fruit pastille, or get chocolate from Vernet's. Find fresh eggs for his breakfast. On 28 October Anton travelled from the railhead to Yalta, frozen from the six-hour coach ride over the mountain. He brought with him an ox tongue that had gone off in the heat of the railway carriage

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o. I cm H IOOI-FEBRUARY I0O2 and yet another clock, broken on the journey. Intact were dried and salted mushrooms, slippers for Evgenia and felt boots for the ancient Mariushka. A passionate letter from Olga was following him: 'Antonka, how much I want to have a little half-German, to use your phrase "a half-German which would distract you and fill your life". There is confusion and struggle inside me.' Olga reproached Anton for not begetting a child as soon as they married; yet the longing for a child was his. A fortnight later she reported the arrival of her period: 'Once again we shan't have a little half-German… why do you think that this little half German will fill my life?' Masha and Olga moved again to a bright new flat, in the same building as Vishnevsky, close to the Sandunov baths, with central heating and electric lighting. (The servant girl's baby daughter, Anna, was sent to a baby farm in the country and was not heard of again.) Olga's letters regaled Chekhov with what she had eaten and drunk; Masha's with the absurdities of theatre life.

Until the New Year Anton led a monotonous life in Autka, working desultorily at 'The Bishop'. His health deteriorated. After Dr AltshuUer examined him on 8 December 1901 he suffered a haemorrhage and began to take creosote. Diarrhoea and haemorrhoids followed. AltshuUer decided to abandon his trip in the New Year to the Pirogov congress in Moscow. At Christmas Dr Shchurovsky came to the Crimea to Tolstoy's bedside. Dr AltshuUer and he compared notes. Shchurovsky found Anton's state 'serious'.17 AltshuUer used more drastic remedies: large compresses, some with cantharides (Spanish fly) to irritate the tissues and disperse pleurisy. There were few diversions. The pianist Samuelson came and played Chopin's C-major nocturne for Anton. Gorky, after illegally stopping in Moscow for an ovation at the Moscow Arts Theatre, kept Anton company. (When he visited, a gendarme patrolled outside.) A wild crane broke off its flight south to join the surviving tame crane in Anton's garden and kitchen. Visitors filled Anton's study with smoke and made him miss meals. Masha did not come until 18 December, followed by Bunin. Anton begged Olga to secure leave from the theatre for Christmas. How else could they conceive a child? She offered a few days, perhaps in Sevastopol to save travelling, but she did not come, blaming her director for keeping her in Moscow. Anton's colleagues, Dr Chlenov and Dr Korobov, she said, claimed that Moscow could do him no harm. On

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Christmas Day 1901 Olga begged Masha for affection; she felt 'very lonely and utterly abandoned'. The next day she had Masha's report that Anton was 'iller than we thought' and promised to rush to Yalta, with or without leave: 'I know I must give up my personal life… but it's hard to do it straight away.' Still she did not come. In Moscow, as winter deepened, Olga's thoughts turned to babies. On Anton's forty-second name-day, 17 January 1902, she told Anton: 'I began to squawk like a baby, I can. Everyone was alarmed and began telling people that a baby Chekhov has been born and congratulating me. God grant they are prophetic' A week later there was a wild party in the theatre from midnight until morning. The actors slid down waxed boards; the actor Kachalov fought a boxing match in drag - pink tricot and high heels; Chaliapin sent for beer and sang gypsy songs; Masha laughed hysterically; everyone exchanged joke presents. 'I had a baby in nappies: Dr Grinevsky broke its head off,' Olga reported. This was horribly prophetic.

Winter was cold in Yalta. Dr Altshuller confined Anton to the house for the whole of January 1902. Olga persisted in inviting Anton to Moscow; she reported a Dr Bobrov at the Pirogov medical congress of January 1902 saying that consumptive southerners, like Anton, were best treated by northern air. Dr Altshuller insisted that Yalta was the only haven in a Russian winter. The medical congress had Dr Chekhov in mind: on January 11 the Moscow Arts Theatre gave them a matinee performance of Uncle Vania and they responded with telegrams to the author and the gift of a large reproduction of the Braz portrait that Anton loathed.

Anton wrote to Olga of the weather, which, as she told him, she could find out from the newspapers. To Masha Anton spoke of finance: they had failed again to sell an estate. The purchaser of Kiichiik-Koy did not like what she had bought, and had to be repaid. (The Chekhovs had no prospect now of being paid for Melikhovo.) There were consolations in January 1902. Three Sisters was awarded the Griboedov prize; after injections of arsenic, Tolstoy recovered his health.

Evgenia and Mariushka were too set in their ways to heed diet sheets. They fed Anton the rich food they had always cooked and, unable to digest fat, he lost all the weight that koumiss had put on. By 9 January it was -io° in Yalta. Anton felt that he had been 'in Kamchatka for twenty-four years'. He had nowhere warm to wash.

OCTOBER I9OI-FEBRUARY I902

Masha left for Moscow on 12 January and broke her promise to take Evgenia: Anton could not be left on his own. He complained of boredom and loneliness, not breathlessness and emaciation. I It-despaired of writing the comedy he had half-promised the theatre. If he deserted literature for gardening, he wrote, he might live ten years longer, but he had to sit down after pruning one rose bush.'K

Misery worked its way into 'The Bishop', which was completed by 20 February 1902. In Bunin's opinion the finest Russian story, ë shoi 1 work which took fifteen years to pupate, 'The Bishop' is Chekhov's last analogy between the cleric and the artist. On Palm Sunday.1 provincial bishop, taken ill, wonders why he reduces the congregation to tears. By Easter he is dying, attended only by a grumbling old monk. His awed mother talks to him as a bishop, not a son. ()nly his niece shows no fear. Harassed by visitors and typhoid, he dies Willi ë vision of himself striding the fields: a phantom resurrection aftei thl crucifixion of disease. Years later not everyone believes that his mot lin had a bishop for a son. The bishop's life is eerily like Anton's, as are his intimations of early death and doubts about his renown; thr similarities would make painful reading for those who knew Anion and his mother. 'The Bishop' was Chekhov's swan song, and a pro genitor of modern prose about loneliness and death, such as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.

Anton had given up Misha to Suvorin's clutches. Aleksandr, meanwhile, felt lonely and cold, and broke the ice with a letter to Anton: New Times, he said, was to him 'a latrine', and hostility to Chekhov in Petersburg might lose him his job. He lived all year, sometimes alone, in a freezing dacha he had built, with fancy poultry in runs he had designed, writing pot-boiler novels during his sober spells. This year Anton's affection for his elder brother was rekindled as he himself deteriorated. In January 1902 Altshuller warned Olga: The process has taken a step further… he has been very badly nourished… his irresponsible excursions north are harmful and dangerous to his health… loneliness cannot fail to have a bad effect.19 In Moscow Dr Dolgopolov, Olga complained: 'simply swore at me for not giving up the theatre.' The Chekhovs' new friend, Sulerzhitsky, who was in Yalta, getting over pleurisy, reproached Olga:

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Anton is more depressed than anyone. Yesterday he had another small bleed, he is suffocating confined to the house. You must come, he is not just your husband but a great writer whose well-being is vital to everyone, to all Russian literature. The Arts Theatre must… despatch you here.20 In letters all that winter Olga bewailed her own egotism, but her flattery of Anton sounds like Arkadina's from The Seagull: 'You are the Russian Maupassant!' She made sentimental journeys, taking tea in Room No. 35 in the Hotel Dresden from which Anton had 'abducted' her. She promised erotic delights - 'I kiss you hard, tastily, long and penetratingly, so all your sinews feel it', 'I shall bite off your ear', 'I shall hug you till your ribs crack' - and demanded: 'be rough to me and I'll like it, then you'll kiss and caress me.'21 She talked of loneliness in letters that told with relish of excursions and parties until dawn. She asserted 'I must build you a life that is good, pleasant, peaceful,' and added the rider 'that's my dream for old age.'

The sisters-in-law got on harmoniously in Moscow until March 1902: living together, they could enjoy a private life without gossip. Olga had Nemirovich-Danchenko to lean on; Masha had Bunin. Masha's letters to Anton depict Olga on Anton's name day, carousing past dawn with a crowd of men. The Stanislavskys also hinted to Anton at her joie de vivre - Maria that she flirted with Konstantin, Stanislavsky that her neckline shocked even the roue Aumont, at whose theatre they were rehearsing.22

Now Antonovkas visited Olga in Moscow, not Anton in Yalta. Curiosity about Olga drove Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik and Nina Korsh to risk rebuff; Maria Drozdova shocked Olga by flirting with her brother and talking of her sexual adventures. Olga could not endure either Lika Mizinova or Maria Andreeva, both of whom Masha persisted in cultivating. At Christmas Olga told Anton: 'Lika was drunk and kept pestering me to drink with her, but I evaded her, I don't like it.' To Masha she portrayed Lika (whom many in the company now adored) as a man-crazed, drunken harridan. Ousting Olga's rival, the beautiful Maria Andreeva, from the theatre was harder. To Anton Olga accused Andreeva of acting so badly as to destroy Nemirovich-Danchenko's reputation as a playwright.'23 Olga saw him as one writer facing three merchants - Stanislavsky, Morozov and the actor Luzhsky; Nemirovich-Danchenko was a David among

OCTOBER I90I-FEBRUARY I902

Philistines, 'plucked and gnawed at on all sides'. If he left the Moscow Arts Theatre, she said, she would go too. Anton was aware that Olga was loyal to the director, not to the theatre.

Back in Moscow, Masha set out Olga's dilemma to Misha: 'I can't understand her - she's sorry for her husband and she is lonely, at the same time she cannot bear to be away from her roles, probably she's afraid someone might act them better.'24 Olga meanwhile signed a three-year contract. Sawa Morozov, the patron, made the theatre into a shareholders' company. The three 'merchants' invited twelve trusted actors to take 3000 rouble shares in the theatre. Morozov offered a subsidy of 30,000 and a building refurbished by Franz Schcehtcl sit a nominal lease. The shareholders' overall profit in the first year, Vishnevsky reckoned, would be 50,000 roubles. Olga Knippcr tooll.1 share. The talented actor-director Vsevolod Meyerhold and tin- pin ducer Sanin-Schoenberg were cut out. Within a year both left. "' ()\$A Knipper was as tied to the theatre as to Chekhov. Suvorin VIMI*.1 Moscow in early February 1902, to stage his play The Question I [| visited Olga and praised her, to her face and by letter to Anion Possibly this was Suvorin's ploy to win back Anton's friendship, bill Olga never forgave the vilification of Suvorin's reviewers.

In fact Anton prized Olga's independence. She earned more tluin 3000 roubles a year, and only once asked him to cover a mysterious debt. He would not ask her to break a contract. He would rather br with her in Moscow's political ferment, than drag her to the tedious tensions of 'this mangy Yalta'. 'You need not weep,' he told Olg.i, 'you live in Moscow not because you want, but because we both want that.' He complained nevertheless about her masters' ruthlessness in depriving him of her company. Stanislavsky assured him it was more fun to be married to an absent actress than an ever-present nonactress. Nemirovich-Danchenko, however, finally succumbed to Masha's appeals and Anton's hints. At the end of January 1902, returning from his sister's death bed in Nice, he promised 'I shall definitely let Olga come and see you for a short time… I am very frightened (as a director) by her extraordinary pining for you.' He then telegraphed, 'I guarantee Olga will be free 21 February to 2 March.'26 Anton called this 'a teaspoonful of milk after forty years' famine'.

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Conjugal Ills February-June 1902 0 N FRIDAY 22 FEBRUARY 1902, Olga and Anton embraced after four months apart. They spent five days in seclusion. 'The Bishop' was sent to Petersburg. No visitors came; correspondence stopped. Masha was in Moscow. Their week together was clouded twice. On Tuesday Olga bled: she presumed she would not conceive. Parting on Thursday was muted: Anton did not kiss her goodbye as she left for the dash over the mountains. 'You were coming outside,' she wrote to him, 'but the wind stopped you, and I… only realized what had happened when the driver had moved off.' Olga had a roast duck and a bottle of wine to fortify her until she reached Simferopol.

At the station there were no Pullman cars, so Olga took an ordinary train. She suddenly fell ill: 'I couldn't get to the door of the ladies', 1 collapsed and couldn't get up, my arms and legs wouldn't obey me, I broke out in a cold sweat. I thought I had food poisoning.' On the train Olga confided in a sympathetic fellow-traveller, who told her she must be pregnant. She doubted it. In Moscow she felt little better. She changed trains and proceeded straight to Petersburg, where the theatre performed in Lent. She had lost weight, her head ached and she dosed herself with quinine. Another actress gave her stimulants. She took painkillers and bandaged her head. By 9 March she was more her old self, eating grouse. Anton stopped worrying. He was cross with her: she would not give him an address.

During their reunion, Anton had received a telegram: Gorky, barely out of prison, had been elected to the Academy of Sciences, whose president was a cousin of the Tsar. In a final round he had won the necessary majority, nine white to three black balls. Gorky was unexpectedly pleased. Then the government and Tsar annulled the election. The radical Korolenko immediately announced his resignation, and pressed Chekhov to resign. Anton pondered. His sympaFEBRUARY-JUNE I9O2 thies were radical, but like Tolstoy he distrusted political gestures.27 Marital life left Anton with a coughing fit that went on for days and nights, but pleasant memories. The day that Olga left, four Antonovkas re-emerged - the headmistress Varvara Kharkeevich, her sister-in-law Manefa, Sophie Beaunier and Dr Sredin's wife, Sofia. Anton told ()lga: 'They all have an identical little smile: "we didn't want to disturb you!" As if we'd spent five days sitting naked and doing nothing but make love.'

In Petersburg that March Olga acted almost every night. New Times now praised her, but the reviewer was Misha Chekhov, her brother-in-law, and she was embarrassed. The Petersburg Newspaper attacked Nemirovich-Danchenko's play mercilessly as 'a waste of effort, dead meat'. The author leant on Olga for moral support, while she too needed comfort. Suvorin came to tempt Olga: iooo roubles a month to join his theatre. There were also painful encounters. Lika Mizinova was in Petersburg, following the director Sanin-Schoenberg who, driven out of the Moscow Arts Theatre, now worked for the Alek-sandrinsky theatre; Lika and he were betrothed. Their happiness upset ()lga. Anton calmed her down: Why so sour? I've known Lika for a long time and, whatever else, she's a good, clever and decent girl. She'll be unhappy with Sanin, she won't love him and above all won't get on with his sister and probably in a year will have a big fat baby and in eighteen months start being unfaithful. Anton's prophecy, wrong on all counts, did not reconcile Olga to her rival.

Olga also disliked Misha and his wife, her namesake - 'Where did he get a wife like that from?'28 She dined with them, but could not stop his fawning reviews. Anton washed his hands: 'He loves Suvorin and rates Burenin highly. Let him write what he likes.' Masha lied to ()lga. 'You made a good impression on him, he liked you.'29 In fact Misha had let his sister know of his true feelings: I saw In Dreams on the office ticket and our sister-in-law arranged Three Sisters… Every time we met, the sister-in-law asked if I'd seen one thing or another? I answer no. She knew full well that I had no ticket, but I simply can't ask her to get me one… One evening O. visited me! She brought the children sweets… as though

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l.OVI AND 1)1 Ë III she were duty-bound to visit us, because we are damned relatives who'll take offence if not… [Late one evening] I went to see Lika (for the fifth time) and of course she was out. I passed by O.'s lodgings, knocked. 'Come in!' I did. And, it seemed, at a bad time. Nemirovich-Danchenko was with her, they were having tea and jam. I had interrupted a conversation. I didn't know what to do with myself. O. apparently did not know what to do with me.30 On this occasion Nemirovich-Danchenko and Olga had attacked Misha as Suvorin's hack (even though they were off to see the old man themselves). Offended, Misha left.31

On 31 March 1902, Olga acted Gorky's Petty Bourgeois, a play in which she had to run up and down stairs. Back in the wings she collapsed in agony, and surgeons were sent for. Professor Jakobson and Dr Ott chloroformed their patient and operated at midnight. Olga woke in the morning, badly shocked; in pencil she scrawled a note to Anton, but did not post it for four days: I left Yalta hoping to present you with a little Pamfil, but I didn't realize, I kept thinking it was gut trouble, I didn't realize I was pregnant, much though I wanted to be… Ott and the other one decided on a curettage and confirmed that it was an embryo of 1Ó2 months. You can imagine how upset I was. I've never been in the hands of gynaecologists before.32 Nobody telegraphed Anton, for fear that the news would bring him to Petersburg in spite of the winter cold, but, because Olga's daily letters had stopped, Anton began to worry. Olga wrote on 2 April from the obstetrical clinic: she said she was sitting up and Stanislavsky was taking her back to her lodgings; the season was over, and she hoped to come to Yalta on Easter Saturday.

If this had been just an early miscarriage, Olga could have travelled. Anton, a good gynaecologist and obstetrician, must have been perplexed: how could Olga have been six weeks pregnant, when she had only spent seven nights with him, five weeks previously, at the end of her cycle? Why did two of Petersburg's most distinguished surgeons operate in the middle of the night for an early miscarriage? Nemirovich-Danchenko and his wife set off for Yalta on 6 April to put Anton's mind at rest. Stanislavsky's telegrams swore that there was no danger. Olga gave other clues: 'pains in the left side of my belly, bad pains

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from an inflamed ovary and maybe that's why I miscarried… I still have an inflamed left ovary. My poor belly is swollen and hurts all over.'33 She told Masha: 'Don't tell Anton! the pains are horrible and I am still suffering.'34 On Easter Sunday she sat up; she began daily enemas and was allowed to Yalta only with a midwife. She grudged the 3 roubles a day. She told Anton she would sleep in the drawing room, 'I do have various female instruments and need my own room. It's embarrassing to keep these vile things where a great writer can see them.' On 14 April, a week after Easter, Olga was carried on a stretcher from the boat and taken straight to bed in Autka. Nilus, who was painting Anton's portrait, packed up his equipment and fled. Anton and Masha became Olga's doctor and nurse.

Anton never talked of his doubts about the diagnosis and operation on Olga. His behaviour was caring, but distant. Three months later he wrote to Wilhelm Jakobson and received a telegram from the surgeon in reply: 'No suspicions, remains of egg removed, inflammation of lining.' Bleeding in February, illness throughout March, Olga's collapse and unspeakable ovarian pain, the midnight operation, the swollen belly, followed by peritonitis, indicated, however, not so much miscarriage and curettage as an ectopic pregnancy, laparotomy and infection.35 Only recently had Petersburg surgeons first dared remove an embryo in a fallopian tube: abdominal surgery was risky in 1902 and ectopic pregnancies were fatal. Anton would have known that an ectopic pregnancy erupts between eight and twelve weeks from conception. If this was what had happened to Olga, conception must have taken place when she and Anton had been 800 miles apart.

A season of illness followed, but Olga's physical vitality and Anton's discretion pulled them through. Their distress lay in suspecting that, despite Ott's airy assurance that Olga could conceive 'triplets right away', Olga's fertility must be lowered, if she now had a ruptured Fallopian tube and a damaged ovary. Anton had little time to beget a child.

Anton, depressed by Olga's and his own ills, grew restless and decided that Yalta was too far from Moscow and Autka was too hilly for walking. Two properties nearby had burnt down because the fire brigade had no water. He wanted Masha to inspect property in Sevastopol instead. By 24 April he was alone with Olga. Masha had returned to Moscow to examine her pupils, to have an abscess treated

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by a lady doctor, to flirt (openly) with Stanislavsky and (secretly) with Bnnin, and to celebrate Lika's wedding. From Moscow she boisterously berated Olga: 'Still full of fat, what are you raging about, you lay-about of a sister-in-law? Get up and earn some money for your husband and his crippled sister.' She did not joke with Misha: 'Olga behaves rather oddly towards me, so does Antosha and I am suffering.' By mid May Olga seemed stronger than her husband. They waited to hand over the household to Masha. On 24 May Anton and Olga left for Moscow, the second and last time they would take this journey together. In Moscow Dr Varnek, an obstetrician, found Olga's ovaries inflamed. He put her to bed for three weeks, prescribing summer at a Bohemian spa, Franzensbad, and rest for a year. Olga howled in distress. Anton would not go to Franzensbad.36 His diagnosis was peritonitis: she should convalesce for two years, and eat only cream. In Moscow Olga's abdominal pains grew worse. Anton was too ill to nurse her. Vishnevsky, a tireless cavaliere servente, came to the rescue. At midnight on 1 June 1902 he drove round Moscow to find a doctor who had not yet left for a weekend in the country. In the morning he found one. Olga was now skeletal; she was given morphine. When she could be moved, she would be taken to the gynaecologist Maxim Strauch's clinic. On 6 June 1902 Olga told Masha: All the Yalta suffering is nothing compared to one night in Moscow. I raved with pain, I tore my hair and if I could have, I'd have done myself in. I roared all night in an alien voice. The doctor says no man has any concept of this pain… Everyone is lighting a candle in church for me. Vishnevsky exhausted himself nursing both Chekhovs. Nemirovich-Danchenko came every day and stayed from noon till six in the evening. Stanislavsky, meanwhile, took practical action. He opened negotiations with Olga's rival, in love and in the theatre. After visiting Olga, he wrote to his wife: 'Komissarzhevskaia will lead the conversation around to transfer to our theatre. That wouldn't be bad! Especially now that there is little hope of Knipper for next season… I'm very sorry for her and Chekhov.'37

In Olga's absence, Lika and her new husband, staying in Yalta at a villa where Anton had once rented rooms, were visiting Masha. Fvgenia and the servants went on a three-day pilgrimage to a monasFEBRUARY-JUNE I902 tery. Anton hated the vigil in Moscow and dreamt of sailing down the Volga, as his brother Aleksandr was doing. Olga made a superhuman effort to rally. Maxim Strauch decided that she could go straight to Franzensbad, but she lapsed again with terrible nausea. Dr Strauch brought a Dr Taube to see her. He, like Anton, diagnosed peritonitis, an often fatal inflammation of the whole belly. Olga rallied again. Anton took to Taube; 'a popular and very sensible German,' he told Nemirovich-Danchenko. After four days Anton felt that Olga might be able to avoid a second operation, but he still refused to contact Olga's mother so as 'not to start a flood of tears'.

As she improved, Anton began to go out. He met Vera Komissarzhevskaia, with her lover and manager Karpov. He watched a boxing match. He left town to fish. One old flame - Olga Kundasova - was bold enough to sit for hours with Chekhov's wife (who asked her to leave). Feeling affection for both Anton and for Suvorin, Kundasova strove to keep their friendship alive. As Anton's physical health declined, her mental health improved. For all Kundasova's radicalism, she was beholden to Suvorin, as a man who supported her and was not afraid of sparring with her, and she reported to him on Anton's health. She appealed to Anton to heal the rift. Suvorin longed to see Anton. He had told Konstantin Nabokov, uncle to the future novelist, 'There are only two interesting younger men in the whole of Russia, Chekhov and Orlenev [an actor], and I have lost both of them." On 11 June 1902 Kundasova wrote to Anton from Petersburg: To me Aleksei looked none too good and very irritable psychologically. As you wished, there was no discussion of you except for the matter of your health. I beg you with all my heart, write him a few words, perhaps he has not long to live and, clearly, your silence weighs heavily on him. Remember how wretched it is to love somebody and have no response.39 Kundasova pumped Olga for information, and told Suvorin that Anton was in no state to go to Petersburg: Suvorin would have to come to the Crimea in August.

On 14 June Anton slipped the leash. He had decided, after Easter, 'to be a hermit' and mull over a play for their Theatre. Olga could sit up, take chicken soup, and even walk, though she was still too swollen to put on her corset. The selfless Vishnevsky would watch

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LOVI. AND Dl A I 11 over her and nurse her. Anton told Nemirovich-Danchenko: 'The main thing is that I may leave, ami tomorrow, the 17th, I set off with Sawa Morozov for Perm [in the Urals]. I'll be home by 5 July.' The day Anton left, Olga's mother came to take his place with the patient.

SEVENTY-NINE Ô

Liubimovka June-September 1902 ACCOMPANIED BY Sawa Morozov and two Germans, and equipped, despite the heat, with a new overcoat and Swedish padded jacket, Anton retraced his honeymoon route of a year before. This time, however, he sailed past 'Drunken Grove' in the dark and headed northeast up the Kama to Perm, to the country of Three Sisters. Boats and trains slowly took Anton and his party to the Urals where Morozov owned an estate and a chemical plant. Morozov may have been one of Russia's 'Rockefellers', subsidizing the arts and revolutionaries such as Gorky, but his workers lived in squalor with a drunken paramedic and an empty pharmacy to treat them. On discovering conditions at the plant, Anton made forcible protests, to which Morozov responded magnificently: the working day was cut from twelve to eight hours. Morozov then abandoned Anton and toured his lands. Anton wandered in the sultry heat 'tormented by having nothing to do, by isolation and his cough', noted a student engineer at the plant.40 It was all, Anton told Nemirovich-Danchenko, 'too grey and depressing to write a play about.' On 28 June 1902, seen off by the workers, whose school was now named after him, Anton took the train back to Moscow.

The object of Anton's trip had been not to discover new horizons so much as to escape from a tedious bedside. Nevertheless, he and Olga had exchanged telegrams and letters daily. 'I'm not worried about you, since I know my little dog is well,' Anton wrote on his first day away. He now called her 'stick' as well as 'dog'. She colluded with him, declaring herself in the hands of decent doctors. To others Olga revealed her nausea, boredom and despair. She was allowed only to read and play patience, forbidden to start guitar lessons. 'How foul, grey and boring everything is,' was her lament to Masha. Her hair was falling out and her intestines needed enemas of olive oil. She

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was 'indifferent to everything or morbidly irritable'. She told her mother-in-law: 'I sit like a sad widow, 1 mostly lie down… If Vishnevsky comes, we sit and read in silence… I am a complete cripple. I keep thinking I shall never get better. And what use am I without health?'41

On 2 July Anton returned to Moscow and the sun shone. The Stanislavskys were themselves off to Franzensbad and invited Anton and Olga to stay in their country house at Liubimovka during their absence. The house stood on the river Kliazma, northeast of Moscow, surrounded by forests and meadows. Here Stanislavsky's servants Egor and Duniasha attended them. Olga lay and later swam and rowed. Anton fished and handed each catch over to Egor to be cooked. Visitors were turned away, and church bells were muted. Olga lived downstairs, Anton and Vishnevsky upstairs, all 'sleeping like bishops'. Dr Strauch checked on his patient. The neighbours, the Smirnovs, were considerate. Their two teenage daughters courted Anton. So did their eccentric English governess, Lily Glassby, who spoke pigeon Russian. Olga was too taken aback to interfere as Lily fed Anton ice cream, addressed him in the intimate form, and wrote him affectionate notes: 'Christ be with you, brother Antony, I love you.'42

Anton wrote almost no letters, and did no work on the play which the theatre was waiting for: he was absorbing material. Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky invested their hope for the following season in Gorky's Lower Depths. Anton read the proofs and told Gorky he had 'almost hopped with pleasure' at the play. Confident that Gorky would fill the Moscow Arts Theatre for the autumn, he could take his time germinating his new comedy. Liubimovka's household and suburban trains imbue the setting for The Cherry Orchard. Anton encouraged Egor's ambition to be literate and independent, offering him Vania's services as a teacher. Egor's clumsiness and precious language were absorbed into the character of Epikhodov, while Lily Glassby's pathos infuses Charlotta. Duniasha gave her name to the fictional servant.

The river fish, mushrooms and fresh milk of Liubimovka delighted Anton. He told Masha that it was paradise after Yalta: he longed to own a dacha near Moscow. By August Olga was out of danger. Strauch said she could start rehearsals in two weeks. Even in paradise, however, Anton was restless. He had hidden two haemorrhages from Olga,

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wanted to escape scrutiny and decided to visit Yalta alone. The theatre and Dr Strauch, he knew, would forbid Olga to risk a rough railway ride. She felt deserted, though the Stanislavskys returned home just as Anton left, and Anton implied that he would soon be back. Although she put a brave face on Anton's departure from Liubimovka, Olga was very angry.

Left in Yalta to cope alone with a drought-stricken garden, Masha had not had a happy summer. Her letters to Olga also hint at an unhappy love affair with Bunin. Bunin, between leaving his first wife and finding his second, had a succession of affairs, abroad and in Russia. Masha wrote to him: 'Dear Bouquichon, I was very sad when you left… Of course it'd be nice to be one woman in ten, but nicer still to be the only one, to combine the Yakut girl, the Temir girl, the Sinhalese girl, etc…'43 Anton's arrival would have raised Masha's spirits, had it not coincided with a letter from Olga so hurtful that Masha destroyed it - too late, for Anton had casually read it. Olga sensed a plot: she accused Masha and Evgenia of luring Anton from her when they knew she was confined to bed. Masha replied in distress: For the first time in our lives mother and I have been called cruel for, as you put it, expecting Anton all the time. Even though we took such loving care of you when you were ill in Yalta and in Moscow!! What are we to do - I can't rub myself off the face of the earth. I'll tell you frankly that it is quite enough for me just to hear about my brother that he is happy and healthy and occasionally to see him.44 Olga could not bear brother and sister to be in concert. She told Masha: Why entangle Anton in our relationship?… I was hurt because your stubborn waiting seemed to imply that you didn't want Anton to be in the Moscow dust fussing around me, his sick wife… If you'd trusted me as you used to and tried to understand me just a bit, you'd never have shown that letter to Anton… You're chasing me out of your heart as hard as you can… This letter at least you won't show him, I beg you.4' To Anton she wrote on 28 August 1902: Why didn't you tell me straight out that you were going for good?… How it hurts me that you treat me like a stranger or a doll that

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mustn't be disturbed. You air going to bate my letters. But I cannot be silent. You and I have to face a long separation. I'd have understood if you'd spent September in Liubimovka. Our life just doesn't make sense any more. If only I knew you needed me, and not just as an enjoyable woman… How horrible, Anton, if everything I write should arouse no more than a smile, or perhaps you show this letter to Masha as she did [mine to you].*6 Olga attacked Anton for misleading her into expecting him back at Liubimovka. Anton's replies are a disconcerting mix of resentment, fair-mindedness and manipulation. I can't think why you're angry with me, I wouldn't have left but for business and haemhorrhages… I won't write a play this year, I don't feel like it… Masha did not show me your letter, I found it on mother's desk and realized why Masha was upset. It was a horrible rude letter, and above all, unfair… naturally I understood your mood. But you must not, must not do that, darling, you must fear unfairness… Don't tell Masha I have read your letter to her. Or, anyway, do as you like. Your letters chill me… Don't let's separate so early before we've had a proper life, before you give birth to a boy or girl for me. And when you do, then you can act as you wish. Only in September 1902 did Olga, Anton and Masha declare a truce. Anton forced himself to make extravagant protestations of affection to Olga: I take my litde dog by the tail, swing her round several times and then stroke and caress her… I do a salto mortale on your bed, stand on my head, grab you, turn over several times and throw you to the ceiling before catching you and kissing you. The Stanislavskys had returned, cursing Europe. Liubimovka came to life. They took Olga on expeditions to buy honey, to fish and to explore Moscow's dosshouses before starting work on Gorky's Lower Depths.

Moscow injected Olga with new spirit. Franz Schechtel's Art Nou-veau conversion gave the Moscow Arts Theatre a permanent home: a large theatre with fine dressing rooms and electricity. Olga could go to the baths. She enjoyed an uninhibited evening with her mother and uncles - 'Boheme in full swing… I love the spirit of our house… we all sincerely love each other.' After a vigil by his sister's deathbed,

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Nemirovich-Danchenko was back: Olga talked to him at length. She was, on Dr Strauch's advice, looking for a new apartment. She felt secure by September and wrote, in her sole response to Anton's chilling offer of her freedom: 'I shall present you with a good son for next year. You write that if we have a child I can do as I like.' Olga tried to put her conflicts with Masha in a good light: 'I am not a beast, and Masha is not an underdog. She is stronger than me. I just seem stronger because I talk loudly and boil over.' A long chat with Masha, Anton thought, got rid of festering 'little splinters', but relations between Anton and Olga were cool. Anton forgot her thirty-fourth birthday on 9 September, though he had asked for the date months before. She nagged him to answer his translators' queries. Olga's and Anton's letters exchange medical details: her enemas and his creosote.