Letters of Anton Chekhov

In 1938, during the witch hunt on "formalism" and the imposition of ever-greater standardization in the arts, Meyerhold's theater was closed after a brief, government-inspired campaign of vilification in the press. Only one man in the whole of the Soviet Union dared come to Meyerhold's defense: Stanislavsky, who gave him a minor appointment on his staff. In 1939, at a congress of stage directors in Moscow, Meyerhold got up and instead of repenting for his past mistakes, as everyone had expected, accused the authorities of murdering the Russian theater by their forced standardization and their total ban on all creativity and originality. He was arrested as he was leaving the auditorium and sent to a labor camp, where he died a year later under still unexplained circumstances. His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was brutally murdered in their apartment. A legend of his retirement to the provinces was concocted for dissemination abroad, and one can still read in American and British theater journals of the 1940s that Meyerhold's theater lost its one-time popularity and that he was transferred at his own request to some remote town, where he was alive and working happily.

There followed one of the most amazing exercises in revising history that was ever undertaken. In 1937, Soviet papers wrote that Meyerhold was a bourgeois formalist; from 1939 on, the line was that he had never existed. Not only was his name no longer mentionable anywhere, it also had to be removed from works written before he was purged. For the next fifteen years, his name was systematically deleted from all publications devoted to three of the most popular and highly honored figures in the entire field of the Russian arts, who were all intimately connected with Meyerhold: Chekhov, Stanislavsky and Mayakovsky. The entire voluminous documentation on the origins of the Moscow Art Theater that was published in the forties is full of holes and deletions due to the frequent appearance of Meyerhold's name in the original documents. Key passages had to be removed from the new editions of Stanslavsky's ever-popular My Life in Art. The 1944-51 edition of Che­khov's letters omitted the present letter to Meyerhold and deleted his name from most of the letters to other persons where it occurred, but through either oversight (which is unlikely) or deliberate sabotage, a few references to him in Chekhov's letters to his wife were allowed to remain. To avoid trouble, the editors have not listed Meyerhold's name in the detailed alphabetical indexes with which each volume of that edition is provided—the only such instance of a non-indexed name in the entire twenty volumes.

Meyerhold has been rehabilitated in the post-Stalinist period. Collections of his articles have appeared in the late sixties and a fine, detailed biography (which, however, totally avoids discussing the last three years of Meyerhold's life) by Konstantin Rudnitsky was published in Moscow in 1969. A set of letters from Meyerhold to Chekhov was included in the Chekhov volume of Literary Heritage. The present letter from Chekhov to Meyerhold is the only one that survived from about a dozen letters Chekhov is known to have written him. It was originally published in the Imperial Theater Yearbook for 1909 and reprinted in the 1963-64 edition of Chekhov's letters.

On September 29, 1889, Meyerhold wrote to Chekhov: "I am addressing to you a small request, apologizing in advance if you think it insolent. Here is what it is. I have been given the role of Johannes in Lonely Lives by Hauptmann. Please help me in my work on preparing for this role. Write me what you would expect from a performer of Johannes. How do you see him? Write me, even if only in very general terms, if doing this will not fatigue you. Rehearsals begin next week."

Stanislavsky.

After receiving this letter, Meyerhold wrote back on October 23: "Thank you for your characterization of Johannes. Although you touched upon it only very generally, you did it so masterfully that the personality of Johannes was quite clearly outlined. [. . .] And anyway, everything you sketched out about Johannes in your letter, even in its generality, suggests of itself a whole series of details which thoroughly harmonize with the image of a lonely intellectual, who is elegant, healthy and nevertheless profoundly melancholy."

Meyerhold's admiration for Chekhov kept growing, as his subsequent letters reveal; it found a culmination of sorts when Meyerhold sent Chekhov his photograph, inscribed: "From the pale-faced Meyerhold to his God."

Olga Knipper and the Moscow Art Theater actors Alexander Vishnevsky, Georgy Burdzhalov and Vasily Luzhsky.

132. To Vladimir Posse¹

Yalta,

November 19, 1899

Dear Vladimir Alexandrovich,

Your letter is still lying on my desk waiting for an answer. It has been like a severe reproach all this time, but now that I've sent you an answer to your telegram, I have finally taken up my pen to write. You see, I've been writing a short novel for Life, and it will be ready soon, by the second half of December, most likely. It is only about fifty pages long, but it has a multitude of characters milling about, and things are very crowded; it takes quite a bit of fuss and bother to keep the milling about from getting too noticeable. At any rate, it will have taken shape completely around the 10th of December and will be ready then to be typeset. But here's the problem: I'm haunted by the fear that the censors are going to pluck it bare. I won't be able to endure the censors' cuts, at least I don't think I will. The reason why I couldn't make up my mind to write you anything definite or give you a final answer is that the censors might not like the way certain passages have turned out. Now, of course, I am giving you a definite answer, provided that you return my story to me if you too find that certain passages will be unacceptable to the censors, that is, if you too foresee the danger of its being cut here and there by the censors.²

And now a favor: please don't print my name in such tall characters in your advertisements. Really, that's not the way to do things. Print it in the same line as the rest, in alphabetical order. Where is Maxim Gorky?

Keep well, now. I wish you many subscribers and as many readers as possible—a hundred thousand or so. I clasp your hand.

Devotedly, A. Chekhov

The publisher of the "legal" Marxist journal Life.

"In the Ravine," which was published in the January 1900 issue of Life and which had no difficulty with the censorship whatsoever.

133. To Grigory Rossolimo

Yalta,

January 21, 1900

Dear Grigory Ivanovich,

You may add the appropriate P.S. to my autobiography, but it would be best to wait for the general meeting of the Academy when the election results will be made final.¹

I am sending you by registered mail the pieces I have written that would seem most suitable for children, my two dog stories.² I don't think I've done anything else along those lines. I lack the ability to write for children; I write for them once every ten years. I don't like what is known as children's literature; I don't recognize its validity. Children should be given only what is suitable for adults as well. Children enjoy reading Andersen, The Frigate Pallada, and Gogol, and so do adults. One shouldn't write for children; one should learn to choose works suitable for children from among those already written for adults—in other words, from genuine works of art. It is better and more to the point to learn to choose the correct medicine and to prescribe the correct dosage than to try to dream up some special medicine just because the patient is a child. Forgive me for this medical comparison, but it happens to be quite timely; I've been practicing medicine for four days now, treating myself and my mother. It looks like influenza: headaches and temperature.

If I write anything, I'll let you know in time, but one man and one man only may publish what I write—Marx! For everything pub­lished by someone other than Marx, I have to pay a five-thousand-ruble fine for every sixteen pages of print.

My brother Ivan Pavlovich is a teacher and has been involved with small children for over twenty years. He has an excellent knowl­edge of what does and does not appeal to children. He would be of no help to you in putting the collection together because he's a poor editor, but if you ever take it into your head to put out a bibliography of fiction and nonfiction suitable for children my brother could give you quite a lot of good advice. He teaches in Moscow. His address is: Novaya Bas- mannaya, Moscow. He has a good nose for practical matters.

Your letter made me very happy and mixed a bit of soda into my acid mood. Thank you for thinking of me. My story will be coming out soon in Life; it's the latest one dealing with the peasant life.³ I firmly clasp your hand.

Yours, A. Chekhov

In commemoration of the Pushkin centennial, the Imperial Academy of Sciences instituted a literary section. Nominated as honorary members of the new section of the Academy were Tolstoy, Chekhov, Korolenko, Koni, the very important and influential philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov, the playwright Alexei Potekhin, minor poets Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov and Alexei Zhemchuzhnikov, literary historian Konstantin Arsenyev and the Grand Duke Konstantin, who published verse under the initials K.R. (for Romanov). Rossolimo wanted to add the election to the Academy to the autobiography Chekhov had sent him for the class album.

Rossolimo was active in the Family Section of the Russian Pedagogical Society and was preparing an anthology of literary works suitable for children. Chekhov's two dog stories are "Kashtanka" of 1887 and "Whitebrow" of 1895.

"In the Ravine."

134. To Mikhail Menshikov¹

Yalta,

January 28, 1900

Dear Mikhail Osipovich,

Tolstoy's illness is beyond me.² Cherinov³ hasn't answered my letter, and it's impossible to draw any conclusions from what the news­papers say or from what you have now written. Intestinal or stomach ulcers would involve different symptoms. So he doesn't have any, or he may have had several bleeding lacerations caused by gallstones which passed and wounded the intestinal wall. Nor does he have cancer, be­cause cancer would have shown itself in a loss of appetite and in his general condition, but above all, his face would have betrayed it, if he had cancer. No, Lev Nikolayevich is most probably well (except for the gallstones) and has another twenty years ahead of him. His illness frightened me and made me very tense. I fear Tolstoy's death. His death would leave a large empty space in my life. First, I have loved no man the way I have loved him. I am not a believer, but of all beliefs I consider his the closest to mine and most suitable for me. Second, when literature has a Tolstoy, it is easy and gratifying to be a writer. Even if you are aware that you have never accomplished anything and are still not ac­complishing anything, you don't feel so bad, because Tolstoy accomplishes enough for everyone. His activities provide justification for the hopes and aspirations that are usually placed on literature. Third, Tolstoy stands firm, his authority is enormous, and as long as he is alive bad taste in literature, all vulgarity in its brazen-faced or lachrymose vari­eties, all bristly or resentful vanity will remain far in the background. His moral authority alone is enough to maintain what we think of as literary trends and schools at a certain minimal level. If not for him, literature would be a flock without a shepherd or an unfathomable jumble.

To finish with Tolstoy, let me say a word about Resurrection, which I read in one sitting, and not in bits and snatches. It is a re­markable work of art. The least interesting aspect is everything pertain­ing to Nekhlyudov's relationship with Maslova;⁴ the most interesting— the princes, generals, Nekhlyudov's aunts, the peasants, prisoners and prison wardens. I could barely breathe as I read the scenes with the general who is both the commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress and a spiritualist—it was so good! And Madame Korchagina carried around in her chair and Fedosya's peasant husband! The peasant says his wife can handle anything.⁵ That's just what Tolstoy's pen is like—it can handle anything. The novel has no ending; what it does have can't be called an ending. To write so much and then suddenly make a Gospel text responsible for it all smacks a bit too much of the seminary. Resolving everything by a Gospel text is as arbitrary as dividing pris­oners into five categories. Why five and not ten? Why a Gospel text and not a text from the Koran? First he has to force his readers to believe in the Gospel, to believe that it alone is the truth, and only then can he resolve everything by the text.

Have I bored you? When you come to the Crimea, I'm going to do an interview with you and print it in News of the Day. What reporters write about Tolstoy is like what old women say about holy idiots— unctuous nonsense. He shouldn't waste his time talking with those Yids.⁶

I was unwell for about two weeks, but I managed to get along. Now I have a plaster under my left clavicle, which makes me feel quite well. Actually it's not even the plaster that makes me feel well; it's the red spot left over from it.

I'll be sure to send you my photograph. I am happy to be elected a member of the Academy because it's gratifying to know that Sigma⁷ is envious of me now. I'll be even happier, though, when I lose the title after some misunderstanding. And there is sure to be a misunderstand­ing, because the scholars of the Academy are always afraid we're going to shock them.⁸ They elected Tolstoy only grudgingly. In their eyes he's a nihilist. At least that's what a certain lady—the wife of a privy coun­cilor—has called him, which I think is cause for giving him my heartfelt congratulations.

I haven't been receiving The Week. Why not? The editorial offi­ces have in their possession a manuscript I sent them called "Ivan Ivan- ovich Makes a Fool of Himself" by S. Voskresensky.⁹ If it isn't accepted, send it back to me.

Stay well. I firmly clasp your hand. Greetings to Yasha and to Lydia Ivanovna.¹⁰

Yours, A. Chekhov

Write!

i. Mikhail Menshikov was a well-known journalist and magazine editor. i. Chekhov was alarmed by press reports about Tolstoy's recovery from an "attack of colic." Actually, Tolstoy was reasonably well at the time and leading an active life in Moscow. While Chekhov was worrying about the state of Tolstoy's health, Tolstoy was becoming alarmed at the moral turn he thought Chekhov's work was taking. Early in January of 1900, he read "The Lady with the Dog" and commented: "All that comes from Nietzsche. People who had never formed a clear-cut world view to help them distinguish good from evil." On January 24, Tolstoy suddenly appeared at the Moscow Art Theater during a performance of Uncle Vanya. Numerous memoirs have recorded that historical evening and all of them agree that Tolstoy found the play inept dramatically and repellent morally. It was in connection with Uncle Vanya that Tolstoy was to remark to Chekhov subsequently: "You know I can't stand Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse than his."

Professor Mikhail Cherinov of the Medical School of Moscow University.

What Chekhov finds least interesting is the central relationship of the entire novel: a nobleman's moral resurrection after he recognizes in a prostitute being tried for murder an innocent young girl he had once seduced and abandoned.

In Tolstoy's Resurrection, Fedosya is a teen-aged peasant girl, married against her will into a family where she at first feels so lost and terrified that she tries to poison her young husband. Arrested by the police, Fedosya is then released on bail to her husband's family and after a few days realizes that she likes all of them very much once she has gotten to know them. To show her repentance, she works very hard during the gathering of the harvest, eliciting by her dexterity her husband's admiring adjective ukhvatistaya, translated here contextually as "can handle anything." Constance Garnett, a great expert in Russian literature, does not seem to have read Resurrection, for she translated that last sentence as: "The peasant calls his grandmother 'an artful one.'" (The poor Fedosya is only sixteen years old.) In Lillian Hellman's collection the passage appears as "This peasant calls his old lady a crafty character. So it is with Tolstoy; he has a crafty pen."

A possible reference to Michel Deline, to whom Chekhov took a strong dislike after his open letter to Suvorin and whose unctuous manner of writing about Tolstoy irritated Chekhov.

Sigma was the pen name of a New Times reporter whose real name was Sergei Syromyatnikov.

In view of Chekhov's subsequent resignation from the Academy, this turned out to be a prophetic statement.

This was a story written by Father Sergius Shchukin, the Yalta priest whose literary ambitions Chekhov encouraged. See also Letter 183.

10. Lydia Veselitskaya (V. Mikulich), who, judging from Chekhov's other letters, was living with Menshikov at the time and taking care of his little son Yasha.

135. To Ivan Leontyev (Shcheglov)

Yalta,

February 2, 1900

Dear Jean,

Here is my answer to your last letter.¹ Stanislavsky's full name is Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev, The Alexeyev House near Red Gate, Moscow. Plays are also read by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (The Art Theater, Carriage Row). To date they don't seem to have put on any one-act plays. If they like the play, they'll put it on. "Liking it" in their language means it suits them and is interesting from the director's point of view and generally theatrical. For such an out-of-the-ordinary theater you'd do best to write a play in four acts that is authentically Shcheglo- vian and artistic, something like The Gordian Knot, without any re­porters or noble old writers. Dear Jean, you aren't suited for exposes, bile, anger or what you call "independence," i.e., criticism directed against liberals and the new generation. The Lord gave you a kind and tender heart, so why not put it to good use? Write with a gentle pen and a carefree spirit. Don't think about the wrongs that have been done you. You say you're my admirer. Well, I'm your admirer too, and a very steadfast one, because I know you and I know the stuff your talent is made of, and no one can shake me loose from my firm conviction that you possess a genuine divine spark. But because of the way things have turned out you're irritated, you're knee deep in trivialities, you're worn out by trivialities, you always expect the worst, you lack faith in your­self. That's what makes you think constantly of illnesses and poverty, of a pension and of Weinberg.² You're too young to think about a pen­sion, and if Weinberg has begun to treat you coldly, he has a basis or a right for doing so. You published a protest exposing the Literary and Theatrical Committee which at the time made a painful impression on everyone, probably because that sort of thing is not normally done. Be objective, take a look at everything with the eye of a good, kind man, with your own eye, I mean, and sit down and write a story or play about life in Russia—not a criticism of Russian life, simply a joyous song, the song of the Goldfinch,³ about Russian life and life in general. Our life comes only once, and there is no point, honestly there isn't, in wasting it on exposing Yids, venomous wives and the Committee. Dear Jean, be fair for once to yourself and your talent. Set your ship upon the open seas; don't confine it to the Fontanka.⁴ Forgive everyone who has offended you, forget about them, and, I repeat, sit down and write.

Forgive me for lapsing into the singsong tones of a prayerful woman. But my feelings for you are sincere and comradely, and this is not the time to try to get by with a brief, businesslike answer.

I would be very glad should fate bring us together this spring. I haven't seen Laur⁵ for a long time, nor have I heard any gossip from him.

I have not entirely regained my health, but I'm getting along. I'm doing better this year than last. Mother sends many thanks for your regards and asks me to send you hers.

Give my best to your wife and keep well, dear Jean. I firmly clasp your hand.

Yours, A. Chekhov

i. Ivan Shcheglov's literary and playwriting career had been steadily going to seed throughout the 1890s. He had apparently written Chekhov asking him if he could offer a play to the Moscow Art Theater.

Pyotr Weinberg, a satirical poet, popular in the 1860s and a translator of Heine into Russian. He was the chairman of the Literary and Theatrical Committee.

The name Shcheglov is derived from the Russian word for goldfinch.

A small river in St. Petersburg.

Dr. Alexander Laur, a now-forgotten physician-playwright.

136. To Alexei Suvorin

Yalta,

February 12, 1900

I've been racking my brains over the fourth act, and the only thing I've come up with is that you can't end with the nihilists. It's too stormy and strident. What your play needs is a quiet, lyrical, touching ending. If your heroine grows old without getting anywhere or coming to terms with herself and sees that everyone has abandoned her and that she is uninteresting and useless, if she comes to realize that the people around her are idle, useless and wicked people (her own father in­cluded) and that she's let life pass her by—isn't that more frightening than nihilists?¹

Your columns about Korsh and "The Water Nymph" were very good.² The tone is brilliant, and they're marvelously written. But in my opinion you shouldn't have written about Konovalova and the jurors, no matter how tempting a topic it may have been.³ Let A-t⁴ write as much as he pleases, not you; it's not your specialty. Only a narrow person can treat issues like those with boldness and self-assurance; but you, halfway through the column you are sure to stumble, the way you did when you suddenly began going on about how everyone wishes to commit a murder at one time or other and everyone wishes the death of his neighbor. When a daughter-in-law is fed up with a cranky, ailing old mother-in-law, she may breathe easier at the thought that the old woman will soon be dead, but that doesn't mean she wishes her to die. It is merely exhaustion, spiritual infirmity, irritation and a yearning for peace and quiet. If the daughter-in-law were ordered to murder the old woman, she would rather kill herself, no matter what desires had stirred within her.

Yes, of course jurors are only human and can make mistakes, but what does that prove? It sometimes happens that alms are mis­takenly given to the well fed rather than the hungry, but no matter how much you write about it you won't get anywhere, and if anything you'll harm the hungry. Whether, from our vantage point, jurors make mistakes or not, we must admit that they judge each individual case conscientiously and follow to the utmost the dictates of their con­sciences. If a ship's captain navigates his ship conscientiously, keeping a constant eye on the map and compass, and if there is a shipwreck nonetheless, isn't it more correct to seek the cause for the shipwreck in something other than the captain, an out-of-date map, perhaps, or a change in the ocean floor? After all, jurors have to take three things into account: (i) Besides official law, besides codes and juridical de­cisions, there is moral law, which always precedes official law and deter­mines our actions whenever we wish to act in accordance with our conscience. Thus, according to law your daughter is entitled to one- seventh of your estate, but you, prompted by demands of a purely moral nature, go beyond the law and in spite of it leave her as much as you leave your sons because you know that, had you acted in any other way, you'd have been acting contrary to your conscience. Jurors also some­times find themselves in the position of knowing and feeling that official law does not satisfy their conscience, that the case they are deciding contains nuances and niceties not encompassed by the Penal Code, that to arrive at the correct decision something else is needed, and that the lack of that "something else" will lead them to deliver a sentence in which, whether they like it or not, something will be lacking. (2) Jurors are aware that acquittal is not the same as absolution and that acquittal does not free the defendant from the Day of Judgment in the other world, from the court of his own conscience or the court of public opinion. They resolve an issue only in its legal aspects and leave it up to A-t to decide whether murdering children is good or bad. (3) The de­fendant comes to court already exhausted by prison and inquest and remains in a state of torment during the trial, so that even if acquitted he does not leave the court unpunished.

But whether I'm right or wrong, it looks as if my letter is almost finished, and I have written essentially nothing.

It is spring here in Yalta. There's nothing new or interesting. I bought the last volume of Tolstoy's collected works in the local book­shop, the volume that includes Resurrection, but it turned out to be a clear and simple forgery of Tolstoy's edition—Klyukin's fine handiwork.⁵ When I asked where they had ordered it, they told me it was from Suvorin's outlet in Odessa.

Who is the Doubting Thomas?⁶ Greetings and humble regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya. Won't you come to the Crimea in the spring? We could take a carriage from Yalta to Feodosia and the monastery. Keep well. I send you my regards.

Yours,

A. Chekhov

Resurrection is a remarkable novel. I enjoyed it very much, but it has to be read all at once, in one sitting. The ending is uninteresting and false, false in a technical sense.

When Suvorin was undergoing his ordeal during the student strike, Maria Savina performed his melodrama Tatyana Repina during her guest ap­pearance in Berlin, where the play enjoyed a considerable success. This gave Suvorin the encouragement to write a new play in a similar manner. He decided to base it in part on his earlier novel Fin de siecle. In January of 1900, he sent Chekhov the draft of the first three acts of the new play, asking for his suggestions. Chekhov's conception of drama had undergone a considerable evolution since 1888, when he had thought highly of Tatyana Repina and had helped arrange its Moscow production. On January 23, Chekhov wrote Suvorin, offering him a detailed critique of his new play, which he thought in many ways old-fashioned and conventional.

The first paragraph of the present letter represents Chekhov's reaction to the fourth act of Suvorin's new play, which was sent to him separately. Chekhov is here advising Suvorin to abandon the traditional melodramatic denouement, so typical of Suvorin's other plays, and to end the play with a quiet, lyrical scene—the sort of ending that Chekhov himself had devised for Uncle Vanya and was to use again in Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The solution was patently alien to the school of dramatic writing that Suvorin represented, as he himself demonstrated by the derogatory comments we find in his journal about the supposedly ineffectual ending of Three Sisters.

The play, called The Question, was eventually finished by Suvorin in 1902. It was presented at the end of that year in Maria Savina's benefit performance, and during the next two years or so it was played by such leading actresses as Vera Kommissarzhevskaya throughout Russia.

After having to disagree violently with the contents of Suvorin's column for such a long time, it must have been a relief for Chekhov to find a group of columns he could approve. This set of six columns contained Suvorin's point by point refutation of a supposedly scholarly study by the philologist Fyodor Korsh (not to be confused with the theatrical impresario of the same name), in which Korsh had tried to prove that a patently spurious and forged ending of Pushkin's unfinished play The Water Nymph (also known in English as Rusalka) published by the journal Russian Archive in 1897 was in fact Pushkin's own work.

The publication and success of Tolstoy's Resurrection in 1899 had an unexpected and rather unfortunate side effect. The early chapters of the novel, which depict a miscarriage of justice during a trial by jury, served to revive the criticism of the whole jury system in the more conservative segment of the press. The jury system had been a repeated target of Russian con­servatives ever since its introduction in the 1860s and especially after the trial of Vera Zasulich, who was accused of shooting the mayor of St. Petersburg and acquitted at a trial by jury presided over by Anatoly Koni in 1879. Never one to miss a conservative trend, Suvorin published a column on February 3, 1900, in which he attacked the jury's acquittal of a woman who was on trial on charges of infanticide. Her acquittal led Suvorin to express doubts about the efficacy of the jury system in general. Chekhov, drawing on his own experience as a jury member in his Melikhovo days, is here gently reminding Suvorin of the human dimensions of that institution.

A-t was the pen name of New Tinies's court reporter, Vladimir Peterson, who in his article about the same trial to which Suvorin had devoted his column openly demanded the conviction of the defendant.

The publisher Maxim Klyukin came out in 1900 with an unauthorized edition of Resurrection, which was disfigured by a large number of arbitrary cuts and abridgments.

"Doubting Thomas" was the pen name used by the historian Grigory Nemirov to sign an article about a Mardi Gras celebration in Moscow, which he published in New Times.

137. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Yalta,

February 15, 1900

Dear Alexei Maximovich,

Your article in the Nizhny Novgorod Press was balsam to my soul.¹ How talented you are! All I can write is fiction, while you have full command of the journalist's pen as well. At first I thought I liked the article merely because you were praising me, but then it turned out that Sredin and his family and Yartsev² are all delighted with it. Well, go ahead and take your chances with journalism too, and the Lord will bless you.

Why hasn't anyone sent me Foma Gordeyev? I've only read it in bits and snatches, and I ought to read it all the way through in one sit­ting, as I recently read Resurrection. Everything in that novel—except for the rather vague and contrived relationship of Nekhlyudov to Mas- lova—everything contributed to my amazement at the power and wealth and breadth and insincerity of a man who fears death, but refuses to admit it, and therefore grasps at texts from the Scriptures. Write and tell them to send me Foma.

"Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" is a good story, the best of anything yet published in that dilettante journal Life. It very strongly evokes its setting. You can smell the rolls.³

Life printed my story with some blatant misprints despite the fact that I had read proof.⁴ There are other things I find irritating about Life: Chirikov's provincial vignettes, that "Happy New Year" picture, and Gurevich's story.⁵

Your letter has just been brought to me. So you don't want to go to India? Too bad. Once you've got an India and a long ocean voyage in your past, you're never at a loss for something to think back on when you have insomnia. A trip abroad doesn't take that much time, and it won't stop you from taking that walking tour around Russia.⁶

I'm bored, but not in the Weltschmerz sense, not in the sense of metaphysical yearning;⁷ I am merely bored because I miss company, I miss music—which I love, and I miss women—of which Yalta has none. I also miss caviar and sauerkraut.

I'm very sorry that you seem to have changed your mind about coming to Yalta. The Art Theater will be here from Moscow in May. It will give five performances and then stay on to rehearse. Why don't you come? You can study staging methods and possibilities during the re­hearsals, and then you'll be able to write a play within five to eight days, which I would welcome gladly, from the bottom of my heart.

Yes, I now have the right to stress that I'm forty and no longer a young man. I used to be our youngest writer, but then you came along— and all at once I grew sedate, and now no one calls me the youngest any more.⁸ I clasp your hand. Be well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

I've just received Zhukovsky's article.⁹

On January 30, 1900, Gorky published in that provincial newspaper a remarkably bland little essay on Chekhov's story "In the Ravine," in which he praised the story but said almost nothing concrete about it. The annotators of this letter in the 1944-51 edition of Chekhov call that article "a profound characterization of Chekhov's oeuvre" but are at a loss to quote or paraphrase anything to support this statement.

The painter Grigory Yartsev, who was a friend of Dr. Sredin's family in Yalta.

The kind of roll that Chekhov mentions is the hard one with the hole in the middle which is now called "bagel" in the United States. But a translation of bubliki as bagels" would have moved the setting of Gorky's story from a bakery in Russia to a New York Jewish delicatessen for most American readers.

The publication of "In the Ravine" in Posse's Life caused Chekhov considerable worry because of the unprecedented number of typographical errors the proofs contained and the printers' failure to correct them in the second set of proofs that was sent to Chekhov at his request.

In addition to Chekhov's story and Gorky's "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl," the January 1900 edition of Life contained Yevgeny Chirikov's "Pro­vincial Vignettes," a front-page photograph of an unidentified hobo with the inscription "Happy New Year!" and a story by the woman writer, critic and editor Lyubov Gurevich called "The Fare."

In his letter of ca. February 11, Gorky thanked Chekhov for "writing me sermons like an archpriest" and informed him that he had given up his plans to travel to India and had decided to go on a walking tour of Russia instead.

In the same letter, Gorky wrote: "You know, it's very unpleasant to read in your letters that you are bored. It is utterly unbecoming to you, you see, and entirely unnecessary."

Gorky had written, in the letter cited in the last two notes: "You write: I am already forty. You are still only forty! And in the meantime, what a lot you've written and how you've written it! That's the whole point. It is tragic that all Russians value themselves for less than they are worth and you seem to be guilty of it too."

An article on Chekhov by the journalist D. E. Zhukovsky. It bore a title that was typical of Chekhov criticism at the turn of the century: "The Poet of Decadence." For some reason, Gorky thought the article quite wonderful.

138. To Vladimir Posse

Yalta,

February 29, 1900

Dear Vladimir Alexandrovich,

Gorky has informed me that you two are planning a trip to Yalta. When will you be coming? There's never any telling what Gorky will do; he keeps constantly changing his mind.¹ Could you please write and tell me if you're actually coming and when, etc., etc. I won't set foot out of Yalta until Easter. At Eastertime I may take a short trip to Kharkov, but then I'll hole up in Yalta.

Rumor has it that the Moscow Art Theater is going to perform in Sevastopol and Yalta at Eastertime. If it does, you won't be bored.

Foma Gordeyev is written as monotonously as a dissertation. All the characters speak the same way; they all have the same way of think­ing. They never speak plainly; they are always so deliberate. They all have something in the back of their minds; they always leave something unsaid, as if they knew something special. But in point of fact they don't know a thing. Talking and leaving something unsaid is simply their fagon de parler.²

Foma does have some excellent passages.³ Gorky will make a tremendous whopper of a writer, provided he doesn't weary of it all, lose interest, and grow lazy.

Keep well and happy now. I am looking forward to hearing when you plan to arrive.

Devotedly, A. Chekhov

For all Chekhov's doubts, Gorky did keep his promise. On March 16, he and Posse came to Yalta for a visit.

Fagon de parler, which usually means "a figure of speech," is not, contextually, appropriate for what Chekhov is trying so say. Fagon de s'exprimer would probably be closer. Chekhov puts his finger here on a constant manner­ism of Gorky's which became a basic device in his work written after ca. 1905. Anyone who witnessed a performance of a Gorky play of the middle period in one of the East European capitals in the years after World War II, when Gorky plays became the basic theater fare in the people's democracies, will instantly recognize what Chekhov means. The speeches of ideologically correct char­acters, e.g., the girl revolutionary Rachel in Vassa Zheleznova, have an oblique, elliptic quality that implies not only the condemnation of social in­equities or the inevitability of proletarian revolution (which is the overt message of these speeches) but also something profound and mysterious that the other characters in the play or perhaps even the audience cannot hope to understand. This manner of writing bred a corresponding manner of acting. Thus, the young actress who played Rachel in the East Berlin Kammerspiele ^J949 production of Vassa Zheleznova that starred the excellent Therese Giehse conveyed her revolutionary awareness by speaking to other characters in a tone of pitying condescension that would have sounded haughty and aristocratic in any other context.

When Gorky visited Tolstoy's home on January 13, 1900, Tolstoy ex­pressed his criticism of Foma Gordeyev in the following terms: "It is all con­cocted. Nothing like it ever happened nor could have happened." For Chekhov's opinion of this novel two years later, see Letter 168.

"THREE SISTERS." MARRIAGE

In april of 1900 the Moscow Art Theater was giving guest perform­ances in the Crimean cities of Sevastopol and Yalta. Crowds of people streamed from Moscow to the Crimea and the occasion was dubbed by the participants "The Migration of the Peoples." Everyone connected with the company seemed to bring along his family, children or friends. The pres­ence of both the company and of Chekhov in the Crimea attracted a large number of younger writers, artists and musicians, among them Bunin, Gorky, Kuprin and Rachmaninov. It was all meant as a combina­tion of spring vacation and a huge homage to Chekhov.

Chekhov was suffering at the time from a bad case of hemorrhoids that caused a great loss of blood. He had a racking cough and his tempera­ture was high most of the time. He went to Sevastopol, saw the company's productions of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Hauptmann's Fuhrmann Hen- schel, but cut his visit short and returned to Yalta in a state of near-collapse before he could see a performance of The Seagull. The Moscow Art Theater followed him to Yalta. By the time of their arrival he had recovered enough to entertain the members of the company and a large group of younger writers at his home. Two weeks later he wrote to Mayor Pavel Iordanov of Taganrog: 'The week before Easter I had a hemorrhoidal hemorrhage from which I don't seem to be able to recover. During Easter week, the Art Theater was in Yalta and I can't recover from that either. After a long, quiet and boring winter, I had to stay up every night until three or four in the morning and have a large group in for dinner every day. I am now resting from it all" (Letter of April 27, 1900).

Doctors from all over Russia took to referring their tubercular patients to Chekhov. People would arrive with letters of introduction from total strangers, requesting help with housing or hospitalization. Friends of friends made a point of stopping by for a visit if they happened to be in the Crimea. To get away from some of this Chekho^ joined Gorky, Dr. Sredin and a few other friends to take a tour of Georgia in June. At the end of the summer, he was back in Yalta reading proofs for Adolf Marx and writing a new play. It had seemed to Chekhov at first that he could com­plete Three Sisters in about a month, but he had not reckoned with his dwindling strength and with the endless stream of callers. With no other work was his lack of privacy such a handicap. "I am being constantly inter­rupted—cruelly, nastily, meanly," Chekhov wrote to Olga Knipper on August 18. "I have the play in my mind, it has taken shape and form, it begs to be put on paper, but the moment I touch the paper, the door opens and some swine comes crawling in." To her admonitions not to let his visitors in, he replied: "I cannot turn people away, it is beyond me."

Despite the interruptions, despite bouts of influenza and a severe throat infection he suffered early in October, Chekhov kept working on Three Sisters. At the end of October he went to Moscow and read the new play to the Moscow Art Theater company. They found it rather perplexing, more like an outline for a play than a finished work. He himself felt that it needed additional revisions, so he stayed in Moscow for a while, hoping to rework the play to his satisfaction. But the social demands were more than he could cope with. "I am hardly ever at home," wrote Chekhov in a note to a masseur with whom he was arranging an appointment, "as I am usually out by eight or nine in the morning and then I am all over town until three in the morning." Chekhov suggested that the masseur might catch him at his sister's at five in the afternoon (Letter to Pavel Stefanov- sky of November 17, 1900). Partly in order to get a modicum of privacy (there is, incidentally, no word in Russian to convey the concept of pri­vacy) necessary to finish Three Sisters, Chekhov went to Nice in December and settled again at the Pension Russe. Within less than a week he finished the revisions.

Three Sisters seems such an organic whole, so perfect in its conception and construction, that it is hard to believe it was written with so many interruptions. And yet Chekhov kept sending additional bits of dialogue to Moscow even after it went into rehearsals in the middle of December. The play is Chekhov's dramatic masterpiece and it is one of the three con­ceivable contenders for the title of the greatest play ever written in Russian. It is more accessible than its two principal rivals, Griboyedov's The Mis­fortune of Being Clever (which is practically untranslatable) and Gogol's The Inspector General, and it travels better. There is no polemical or typological superstructure in this play. What we have instead is a miracu- "three sisters." marriage / 387

lous unity between the plot line, the developing characterizations and the overall time structure. The special art of Chekhovian dialogue reaches its summit in this play, with its varied and subtle rhythms, unmatched any­where in prose drama.

One of the most difficult feats that Chekhov had brought off in Three Sisters was to individualize each of the three heroines so thoroughly, and yet to show that the fate of each of the three is just another aspect of the same predicament. Olga is forced to accept the career she does not want, Masha is caught up in her loveless marriage, and Irina can find no outlet for her idealism and desire to serve others because they are all trapped in a provincial environment where the options available to cultivated and intelligent young women are so wretchedly few. This aspect of the play is the culmination of the long line of portrayals of sensitive young women in Chekhov's stories (Kisochka in "Lights," Vera in "The Homecoming" and at least half a dozen others) and plays (Masha in The Seagull and Sonya in Uncle Vanya) who are caught in drab provincial existences and either seek solace in productive work or drift into loveless marriages.

Tom Prideaux once called the story of Chekhov's three sisters a great three-voiced fugue; to develop his musical imagery further, one might add that the downward progression of the three principal voices in this fugue is opposed in contrary motion by an implacable cantus firmus in the person of their sister-in-law Natasha. Natasha's selfishness and vulgarity enable her to thrive in the environment that stifles the three heroines and to take over first their brother, then their father's home and finally their way of life. The Andrei-Natasha marriage, based in part on Chekhov's earlier story "The Teacher of Literature," can also be read as Chekhov's commentary on the two earlier sweet and innocent Natashas of Russian literary tradition, who underwent metamorphoses after exposure to matri­mony: Tolstoy's heroine in War and Peace, who lost her charm but found fulfillment through marriage, and Griboyedov's Natalia Dmitrievna (in The Misfortune of Being Clever), who reduced her young husband to total subjugation and, vampirelike, became beautiful and happy in the process. The figure of Captain Solyony is the final unmasking of the brawling and dueling hero of Russian Romantic fiction (Pushkin's Silvio from "The Shot," the heroes of Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky's high-society tales, Lermontov's Pechorin), who had already been partially unmasked by Tolstoy in his Dolokhov from War and Peace. In Solyony, Chekhov strips away the veneer of idealization that accompanied this type in the Romantic age and shows the pathologically painful insecurity that underlies his hostility to other men and his disregard for the feelings of the woman he professes to love.

The setting and the milieu of Three Sisters had been treated by Chekhov in his earlier stories (this is his only full-length play that is not set in a landed estate). We have met provincial schoolteachers who could have been colleagues of Olga and of Kulygin in "The Man in a Shell" and "The Tcacher of Literature." The cultivated army officers, such as Yevgraf Yegorov, whom Chekhov had known in his Voskresensk days in 1883-84, provided him with material for "The Kiss" (1887), but they really come into their own in this play. The situation of the provincial doctor, Chebuty- kin, is not unlike that of Dr. Ragin in "Ward Number Six." All these seemingly disparate elements have been woven together by Chekhov into an apparently seamless dramatic fabric of matchless transparency and awe­some strength. It is to Three Sisters, more than to any other work by Chekhov, that we can apply the observation of Charles Du Bos that Chekhov shows us life's depths at the very moment when he seems to rcflcct its shimmering surface.

Olga Knipper visited Chekhov in Yalta in July of 1900 and the two of them spent some time together at Chekhov's Kuchukoy cottage in Gurzuf. It is after that visit that the affectionate tone of their previous "Dear Writer—Dear Actress" letters gives way to the utter intimacy of two lovers. From that point on they write each other daily, often passionately. The nature of their relationship was generally known to others (as early as January of 1900 Gorky wrote to Chekhov from Nizhny Novgorod: "Every­one says you are marrying some woman who is an actress and has a foreign name. I don't believe it. But if it's true, I'm glad. It's a good thing to be married provided the woman is not made of wood and is not a radical"). Chekhov was quite willing to continue things as they were, but the con­ventions of the day were making things uncomfortable for Olga, as she made pointedly clear to him in several of her letters of March and April, 1901. On April 26, Chekhov wrote to Olga: "If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it happens I will be willing to marry you on the very day of my arrival, if you like. For some reason I'm terrified of the wedding ceremony, the congratu­lations and the champagne which you have to hold in your hand with a vague smile." They were married very quietly in a suburban church in Moscow on May 25, 1901, in the presence of four witnesses required by law. These were Olga's uncle, one of her brothers and two of this brother's fellow students. The only announcement sent out was Chekhov's telegram to his mother: "Dear Mama, give me your blessings, I'm getting married. Everything will remain as before. I'm off to the koumiss cure." Their strange honeymoon took them first to Nizhny Novgorod, where they visited Gorky and then to a remote koumiss resort in the province of Ufa, where tubercular patients drank the calorie-rich beverage made from fermented mare's milk.

Chekhov got exactly the kind of wife and marriage he wanted, the kind he described in advance in his letter to Suvorin about the wife who appears and disappears like the moon (Letter 93). A number of people ranging from Ivan Bunin to some uninformed Western commentators have written unkindly about Olga Knipper-Chekhova because she did not abandon her stage career to settle down as a nurse to her sick husband. The censure is clearly based on the assumption that every marriage should be like every other one and that Chekhov had the same set of standards and expectations as the commentator. The marriage of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper was a partnership of equals and they arranged it to provide themselves with the independence they both wanted to be a part of that marriage. In the short time they had together, with all the occasional mis­understandings, with his deteriorating physical condition and her severe illnesses, with all the separations, they managed to give each other more real happiness than many other couples achieve in a long lifetime together.

Two of the more significant events in Chekhov's life of this period were his quiet resignation from the Imperial Academy over the annulment of Gorky's election (see Letters 153, 154 and 158) and his trip to a mining complex in the Ural Mountains in June of 1902 at the invitation of the millionaire Savva Morozov (Morozov was a financial backer of the Moscow Art Theater, who later donated large sums of money to the revolutionary movement and committed suicide after the debacle of the 1905 revolution). During his visit to Morozov's mines and foundries, Chekhov prevailed on him to cut the working day of his miners and workers from twelve to eight hours. An additional dividend of that visit was Chekhov's encounter with the hventy-two-year-old student of mining engineering named Alexander Tikhonov, who took excellent notes of his conversations with Chekhov and many years later, after he had become the Soviet writer Alexander Serebrov, described Chekhov's visit to the Urals in a chapter of his book Time and People (Moscow, 1955), which is probably the single most vivid, appealing and believable literary portrait that we have of Chekhov at the end of his life.

139. To Leonid Sredin¹

Nice,

December 26, 1900²

Dear Leonid Valentinovich,

My best wishes for a healthy, happy and prosperous new year. This is the second week I've been in and around Nice, and—what can I say? Living all winter in Yalta is useful, very useful, because after

Yalta this area seems like heaven! Yalta is Siberia. The first two days after my arrival, when I was out strolling in my summer coat or in my room, sitting in front of the door that opens onto the balcony, I was so unaccustomed to it that it all looked funny. And the people on the streets are cheerful and boisterous; they are always laughing. There's not a police officer in sight, nor any Marxists with their self-important faces.³ But suddenly and unexpectedly two days ago the temperature dropped below freezing, and everything wilted. They never have freezing weather here, and where it came from is perfectly incomprehensible. Do you happen to know where my mother and sister are presently stay­ing? If they're in Yalta, write and tell me whether they are well and how they are feeling. I've written them, but haven t received any answer.⁴

Give my regards and respects to Sofya Petrovna, Nadezhda Ivan- ovna⁵ and the children. Write and tell me how Nadezhda Ivanovna is doing in Yalta and whether she misses the theater. Write in detail about everything if you can. No matter how wonderful the Riviera is, it is a bore not getting any letters. My house hasn't caved in, has it?

I clasp your hand firmly and embrace you. Keep well and happy.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Regards to the Yartsevs.⁶

On Sredin, see Letter 126, note 4.

Although his doctors forbade Chekhov to remain in Central Russia in winter, he tarried in Moscow until December 11 and left for Nice mainly because he found it impossible to complete Three Sisters in the midst of his busy Moscow social life. Isaak Altschuller, Chekhov's friend and personal physician, wrote in his memoir that he considered Chekhov's involvement with Olga Knipper and the Moscow Art Theater to have been his death warrant. According to Dr. Altschuller, the frequent trips to Moscow and the activities they entailed shortened Chekhov's life more than any other factor.

The 1944-51 edition printed this passage with the cautionary comment that Chekhov had met only "legal" Marxists. The implication of the comment is that Chekhov must have been fed up with his non-Leninist Marxist friends and that therefore this remark could not possibly apply to anyone connected with the founding of the Soviet state or have any current relevance. The 1963-64 edition played things safe by omitting the entire letter.

The continuous fear of the Soviet annotators that the reader might apply any statement of Chekhov's to present rather than to pre-revolutionary times is most amusingly manifested in their comment to his letter to Suvorin of February 6, 1899. In it, Chekhov informed Suvorin that he had been reading The Book of My Life by Bishop Porfiry Uspensky, a Russian nineteenth-century churchman-archeologist, and quoted an anti-militaristic passage that struck him: "Standing armies in peacetime are locusts who devour people's bread

"three sisters." marriage / 3qi

and leave a stench in society, while in wartime they are artificial military machines and if they are allowed to develop—then it's good-bye to freedom, safety and the national reputation! They are the lawless defenders of unjust and unfair laws, of privilege and of tyranny." The note appended to this passage in the 1944-51 edition points out that Bishop Porfiry wrote this in 1848 and that he meant the statement to apply only to the armies of capitalist countries.

Engaging in a bit of whimsical censorship of her own, Maria Chekhova deleted the preceding three sentences in her edition of the letters.

Dr. Sredin's wife and mother, respectively.

On Yartsev, see Letter 137, note 2.

140. To Konstantin Alexeyev (Stanislavsky)¹

Nice,

January 2, 1901

Dear Konstantin Sergeyevich,

Not until yesterday did I receive the letter you sent me before December 23rd. There was no address on the envelope, and according to the postmark the letter left Moscow December 25th, so there must have been reasons for it to take so long.

Happy New Year, and, I hope, happy new theater, the theater you will soon be starting to build.² And here's wishing you five wonderful new plays. As for that old play Three Sisters, it is not to be read at the countess's soiree under any circumstances or in any form.³ If you do, you will cause me great chagrin.

I sent off Act Four long ago, before Christmas. I addressed it to Vladimir Ivanovich.⁴ I've introduced many changes. You write that when Natasha is making the rounds of the house at night in Act Three she puts out the lights and looks under the furniture for burglars. It seems to me, though, that it would be better to have her walk across the stage in a straight line without a glance at anyone or anything a la Lady Mac­beth, with a candle—that way it would be much briefer and more frightening.

Happy New Year to Maria Petrovna.⁵1 send her my cordial greet­ings and sincere wishes for all the best, especially good health.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your letter; it has made me very happy.⁶ I clasp your hand.

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. That Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) should have gone down in history as the definitive director of Chekhov's plays is only one of the ironies and paradoxes in which the career and the popular image of this remarkable reformer of Russian theater abound. Bearer of the very ordinary Russian name Alexeyev, he is known to the world by the Polish surname (properly spelled Stanislawski) which he assumed by sheer accident and kept for good. Son of a millionaire manufacturer of merchant-class origin, he created a theater that was to become the only acceptable model for all theaters in a state supposedly founded for the benefit of workers and peasants. An eclectic director, who scored some of his most memorable successes in historical costume drama reconstructed with archeological precision (Alexei Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor loannovich), grimly naturalistic productions complete with real peasants on the stage and costumes bought from a flophouse (Tolstoy's Power of Darkness, Gorky's Lower Depths), fairy tales (the fantasy plays of Hauptmann, Maeterlinck's Bluebird), and such stylized fancies as the produc­tion of Hamlet done entirely in gold and of Andreyev's The Life of Man with only black sets—Stanislavsky is honored in his country as the originator of Socialist Realism in the theater. If Stanislavsky is assigned an exalted place in the official pantheon of the Soviet arts that is second only to that of Gorky among twentieth-century figures, it is not for his genuinely innovative reforms of ca. 1898-1905 (if that were the case, there would have been parallel cults of Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov), but, on the contrary, be­cause of the increasingly conservative artistic position that the Moscow Art Theater began assuming in the first decade of our century, which eventually led to its congealing into the inert theatrical museum it has remained throughout most of the Soviet period.

After 1906, the younger disciples and followers of Stanislavsky (such men as Meyerhold, Fyodor Kommissarzhevsky, Nikolai Yevreinov and Alexander Tairov) were staging the masterpieces of Russian poetic drama of the twentieth century that were then being written by Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Innokenty Annensky and Alexei Remizov, plays of tremendous verbal beauty and genuine metaphysical depth. Stanislavsky, however, lent the prestige of his company and his name to popularizing the facile, shallow, pseudo-Symbolist plays of Leonid Andreyev, helping this superficial playwright to acquire a national and international fame that is out of all proportion to his true significance. While enthusiastically staging plays by Andreyev and such third-rate imitators of Chekhov and Gorky as Yevgeny Chirikov and Ilya Surguchov, Stanislavsky could not bring himself to produce the beautiful and poetic play The Rose and the Cross written especially for him by the great poet Alexander Blok. Having turned it down in 1913 as supposedly in­comprehensible, Stanislavsky yielded two years later to the entreaties of Nemirovich-Danchenko and Leonid Andreyev, both of whom recognized the unique value of this play, and The Rose and the Cross went into rehearsals in March of 1916. By 1918, after some two hundred rehearsals, Stanislavsky decided to abandon the production, having lost faith in both the play and his ability to convey its meaning to the audience (two earlier, less perfect, but even more complex plays by Blok were successfully staged by Meyerhold in 1906 and 1913 and were received with acclaim). This entire episode is a vivid illustration of Stanislavsky's built-in aversion to genuine literary quality and originality. It helps explain why, for all of his genius as a director, Stanislavsky so frequently missed the meaning of the Chekhov plays he directed, causing Chekhov so much irritation, anger and despair, in spite of the outward success of these productions.

Stanislavsky's book of theatrical reminiscences My Life in Art is a highly important account of the origins and results of the reform which he and Nemirovich-Danchenko effected in Russian theater at the turn of the century. It also happens to be the source of more distortions, misconceptions and historical inaccuracies about Chekhov's person and his plays than any other work ever published. Some of the more glaring errors were corrected by Stanislavsky after the first edition of his book, but numerous others were allowed to stand. Having been quoted uncritically in numerous subsequent works on Chekhov, Stanislavsky's mistakes and fantasies have by now at­tained the status of indisputable fact. The whole melodramatic story of the revival of The Seagull, supposedly brought out of total obscurity by the Moscow Art Theater and staged by it at the cost of endangering Chekhov's life and health, is entirely disproved by the published correspondence be­tween Chekhov and Nemirovich-Danchenko, yet such is the prestige of Stanislavsky's name that the story goes on being cited even by people who have read the pertinent letters. The statement that Chekhov was angered after he read the first version of Three Sisters to Stanislavsky's actors and they failed to understand that the play was a merry comedy or even a farce has found its way into almost every English-language work on Chekhov and has given rise to a great deal of perplexity in Western scholarship about the meaning of the play. None of the authors who quote this statement ever tell their readers that it appears only in My Life in Art (written several decades after the events in question) and that its interpretation of the play is flatly contradicted by Chekhov's own letters at the time he was writing Three Sisters and by all the other contemporary documentation we have, in which Three Sisters is invariably referred to as a drama.

The same Chekhov who could explain dramatic characters eloquently and in detail (cf. Letters 14 and 131) suddenly loses this ability and can only mumble "He whistles" or "He wears white pants" when pressed by Stanislavsky to explain a character in The Seagull or Uncle Vanya. Or else he prefers to shrug the whole thing off by saying "It's all in the text." Since Chekhov went on to analyze his characters effectively in his letters to his wife and even to a stranger (cf. Letter 167) during the same period, the inescapable conclusion is that he simply did not believe Stanislavsky capable of under­standing any subtleties. Meyerhold's essay "Naturalistic Theater and Theater of Mood," originally written in 1906, and his letters to Chekhov, as well as Alexander Blok's diaries for 1913, all contain devastating examples of Stanislavsky's inability to deal with literary complexity or to perceive the value of literary novelty and originality; Stanislavsky's own brief and out-of-focus account of Uncle Vanya's meaning in My Life in Art, especially when com­pared to his lengthy eulogies of such simple-minded plays as Ostrovsky's The 394 / letters of anton chekhov

Snow Maiden and Hauptmann's The Sunken Bell, should drive this point home for anyone. A great deal of what is puzzling, paradoxical and non­sensical in the entire body of Chekhovian studies becomes clear and under­standable the moment My Life in Art is removed from the scene as a basic source.

Another regrettable legacy with which Stanislavsky's book and his separate memoirs on Chekhov have saddled the Russian tradition is the peculiar dialect which he invented and ascribed to Chekhov in his writings about him. Stani­slavsky's Chekhov speaks in stammering phrases, punctuated with endless Poslushaite ("See here, now") and saturated with the reinforcing particle zhe which turns him into an owlish crackpot. None of the numerous diaries or personal journals that have recorded Chekhov's speech for us contains any­thing remotely like it. Writers who knew Chekhov personally, such as Ivan Bunin and Alexander Serebrov, have protested that they never heard Chekhov speak the way Stanislavsky quotes him for pages and pages. The real Chekhov probably didn't; but the imaginary melancholy bard of the Russian critics— yes, this would be the right diction for him. This was the Chekhov Stanislavsky remembered.

Construction of the permanent building for the Moscow Art Theater, which was designed by Chekhov's friend Franz Schechtel, was not begun until 1902.

In a letter he wrote to Chekhov in December of 1900, Stanislavsky informed him that Countess Sofya Tolstaya, the wife of Lev Tolstoy, was planning a charity soiree at which she wanted the actors of Stanislavsky's company to perform selections from Three Sisters, then being rehearsed by the company. Stanislavsky expressed the hope that Chekhov might veto such a reading. Chekhov complied all the more willingly because he did not con­sider the play completed at the time.

Nemirovich-Danchenko.

The actress Maria Lilina, Stanislavsky's wife, who gave memorable performances at the Moscow Art Theater as Masha in The Seagull, Sonya in Uncle Vanya and Natasha in Three Sisters.

Stanislavsky's letter, mentioned in note 3 above, gave Chekhov a de­tailed progress report about the forthcoming production of Three Sisters.

141. To Mikhail Chekhov

Yalta,

February 22, 1901

Dear Michel,

I'm back from my trip abroad and can now answer your letter.¹ Your plan to live in Petersburg is of course all very fine and good for your soul, but as for taking a job with Suvorin, I can't tell you anything definite though I've thought long and hard about it.² Of course, if I were

"three sisters." marriage / 395

you, I'd prefer to work at the printing plant; I'd stay away from the newspaper. New Times has a very bad reputation these days. The staff is made up entirely of smug, well-fed people (not counting Alexander, who is blind to it all).³ Suvorin is deceitful, terribly deceitful, especially in his so-called moments of frankness. What I mean is he may talk sincerely enough, but there's no guarantee that half an hour later he won't turn around and do just the opposite. Any way you look at it, it's a tough decision to make. Heaven help you; I don't see how my advice can be of much help to you. If you do go to work for Suvorin, keep in mind every day that he is very easy to cross, so you'd better have a government job or a law practice ready.⁴

Suvorin does have one good man, at least he used to be a good man—Tychinkin.⁵ Suvorin's sons are nonentities in every sense of the word⁶ and even Anna Ivanovna has started acting petty. Nastya and Borya, however, seem to be decent people. Kolomnin was a good man, but he died recently.

Keep well and happy. Write me how things turn out. Olga Ger- manovna⁷ and the children will be better off in Petersburg than in Yaroslavl.

Write me all the details as soon as there are any. Mother is well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Chekhov had returned to Russia in the middle of February, after completing Three Sisters in Nice and then going on an extended tour of Italy with Maxim Kovalevsky.

Mikhail was bored with his low-paid civil service job in the provincial town of Yaroslavl. He received a job offer from Suvorin and wrote to his brother asking if he should accept it. The attractive aspect of the offer was that it would enable Mikhail and his family to move to St. Petersburg. But by then, anyone working for Suvorin was treated with open contempt by the majority of educated Russians. This made Mikhail's choice a hard one.

As Alexander Chekhov's letters of that period to Anton show, he was keenly aware of the general disrepute into which New Times had fallen after the student-strike affair. On January 17, 1902, Alexander wrote to Anton: "Once we had a newspaper, but there's no newspaper now. It used to be a hole in the ground, now it's an outhouse. This is how the public sees us. Only state councilors on active service would shake the hand of a New Times man; anyone younger or lower in rank recoils from us as if we were carrion."

In April, Alexander wrote to Anton that their brother Mikhail had begun to work for Suvorin.

Konstantin Tychinkin worked evenings managing the New Times printing plant, while holding a morning job as a schoolteacher.

Suvorin's older sons Alexei and Mikhail used their father's generosity to start a rival newspaper, even more reactionary than New Times, with which they tried to lure away their father's subscribers and advertisers. They were not successful.

Mikhail Chekhov's wife.

142. To Nikodim Kondakov

Yalta, March 1, 1901

Dear Nikodim Pavlovich,

I thank you cordially for the book.¹ I found it very interesting and enjoyable. You see, my mother is a native of the Shuya District, and fifty years ago she used to visit her icon-painter relatives in Palekh and Sergeyevo (which is three versts from Palekh), who at the time were very prosperous. The ones in Sergeyevo lived in a two-story house with a mansard, an enormous house. When I told Mother about the contents of your book, she became very excited and started telling me about Palekh and Sergeyevo and that house, which even then was very old. According to the impressions that have remained with her, they had a good, prosperous life. While she was there, they received orders for big churches in Moscow and Petersburg.

Yes, the peasants have infinitely great and varied strength, but this strength cannot resurrect what is no more. You call icon painting a craft, and like any craft it gives rise to cottage industry. Then it is gradually taken over by the Jacquot and Bonacoeur factory,² and if you close down the latter, new manufacturers will spring up. They'll make icons on boards the way they're supposed to be made, but Kholuy and Palekh will not rise again.³ Icon painting lived and thrived as long as it was an art, not a craft, as long as talented people were in charge. But when easel painting appeared in Russia and artists started taking les­sons and being made into noblemen, painters like Vasnetsov and Ivanov⁴ began to appear. The only painters left in Kholuy and Palekh were craftsmen, and icon painting became a craft.

By the way, there are almost no icons left in peasant huts. The ancient ones have all been lost in fires, and the new ones are entirely makeshift, some are on paper, others on tinfoil.⁵

I haven't seen or read Henschel, so I have no idea what it's like. But I like Hauptmann, and I consider him a major playwright. And, in any case, it's impossible to judge it on the strength of seeing only one act, particularly if Roxanova was doing the acting.⁶

I haven t been well these days. I had a coughing attack the likes of which I haven't had in a long time.

Your book on icon painting is written with fervor, in places with passion. That is why it is so lively and interesting to read. There is no doubt that icon painting (Palekh and Kholuy) is dying or becoming ex­tinct. If only someone could be found to write the history of Russian icon painting! It's the sort of work to which a man could devote his entire life.⁷

But my heart tells me I've begun to bore you. The public has greeted Tolstoy's excommunication with laughter. The Church Slavic text which the bishops stuck in the middle of their proclamation did not help a bit. It's either very insincere or has the ring of insincerity.⁸

Keep well and under God's protection, and try not to forget your sincerely devoted and respectful

A. Chekhov

Nikodim Kondakov's book The Present Situation of Russian Folk Icon Painting, St. Petersburg, 1901. The book was an account of the expedition which Kondakov undertook together with the art historian Sergei Sheremetyev to the three traditional centers of old Russian icon painting, the villages of Mstera, Kholuy and Palekh in the Vladimir Province. Although illustrious foreigners ranging from Goethe to Henri Matisse have repeatedly expressed great admiration for traditional Russian icons, the educated class of nineteenth-century Russia, with its taste for academic realism in painting and its frequently anticlerical orientation, regarded icon painting as something backward, superstitious and devoid of artistic merit. Until the 1890s, the icon-painting centers survived through the patronage of the peasants and the merchants, but the advent of industrialization (see next note) posed a serious threat to their further existence. Kondakov's book, which outlined the economic background of icon painting and asserted its artistic importance, was the first step in the series of developments that led to the reassessment of folk icon painting in the Russian art journals of the early twentieth century, such as Sergei Diaghilev's The World of Art, and resulted in universal appreciation of this native Russian art form.

Jacquot and Bonacoeur was a French-owned firm that manufactured tin boxes for shoe polish and floor wax. In 1900, the Holy Synod, the govern­ing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, awarded this firm a monopoly on manufacturing cheap, mass-produced icons printed on tin plates. This decision threatened to wipe out economically the traditional peasant icon painters. Kondakov's book argued eloquently against this sabotage of a native art form by the ecclesiastical authorities.

The day before Chekhov wrote this letter, Kondakov was received by Nicholas II

at the Winter Palace. He talked to the tsar for forty-five minutes about the plight of the Mstera, Kholuy and Palekh artists. "He stated that he will take them under his personal protection/' Kondakov wrote Chekhov on March i, "and requested me to draft a full report. There is no telling what will happen next, but we have hopes of squashing that reptile Pobedonostsev" (the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, who was responsible for the Jacquot and Bonacoeur decision).

What happened next to the icon-painting villages showed what a poor prophet Chekhov was. Special funds were allocated by the tsar, Kondakov organized a Committee for the Encouragement of Russian Icon Painting, and schools were started in the three villages to ensure the continuation of their tradition. With the new interest in icon painting promoted by the periodical press of the Symbolist period, there came a demand for icons not only as religious objects but as artistic ones as well.

During the anti-religious and anti-icon campaigns of the first post-revolu­tionary decade it looked at first as if the days of Russian icon painting were over. The market dwindled and most of the peasant artists had to take up farming. However, owing largely to the intercession of Maxim Gorky with the Soviet authorities, the village of Palekh has retained its role as a center of folk art to this day. Christian and hagiographic subjects, traditional in icon painting, were banned by the government, but there seemed to be no objection to subjects taken from earlier Russian pagan mythology, folk tales and classical Russian literature. A new Soviet myth that might be termed "The Great Writer Is the Voice of the People" is basic to Palekh painting of recent decades: Pushkin is shown surrounded by the creatures of traditional Russian mythology, who dictate his Ruslan and Lyudmila to him (in actual fact, that verse tale owed far more to Voltaire's La Pucelle d'Orleans, Evariste Parny's erotic poems and The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole than to any native Russian goblin or mermaid); a Ukrainian beekeeper dictates to Gogol Gogol's own stories; and the young Maxim Gorky is told his revolu­tionary poem about the falcon and the snake by a wise old peasant. Produc­tion of iconlike portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Gorky and various Red Army generals was another price that Palekh artists had to pay for the survival of their art form under Soviet conditions. Today, their black-lacquered wooden boxes and plaques, depicting the traditional tale of Prince Ivan, his faithful gray wolf and his capture of the Firebird are great favorites with the Ameri­can tourists who visit Moscow souvenir shops. A typical Palekh plaque even made the cover of a Jefferson Airplane rock album in recent years.

The painter Viktor Vasnetsov was a contemporary and acquaintance of Chekhov; some of his illustrations of folk tales influenced the more recent work of the peasant painters of Palekh. Alexander Ivanov (1806-58) was a Russian painter of the Romantic Age, who lived in Rome and was a close friend of Gogol.

Chekhov was quite wrong about the absence of wooden icons in the Russian villages. During the anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s, large numbers of icons were confiscated from the peasants and either destroyed or sold abroad for hard currency. Vladimir Soloukhin's two recent books, Letters from a Russian Museum and The Blackened Boards (Moscow, 1968 and 1969, respectively), tell of the careful and systematic work that was begun in the Soviet Union in the 1960s to salvage, clean and restore wooden icons that were used as construction materials or dumped in barns and cellars in the twenties and rediscovered in post-Stalinist years when liking icons and having them around again became permitted and even fashionable.

Kondakov had written to Chekhov that he left the theater after seeing only one act of the Moscow Art Theater's production of Fuhrmann Henschel by Gerhart Hauptmann. Chekhov had taken a strong dislike to the actress Maria Roxanova after her lachrymose performance as Nina in The Seagull.

Chekhov did not live long enough to see the many excellent histories of Russian icon painting that came to be written in the early decades of the twentieth century. A recent beautifully illustrated history of the Palekh school of painting by one of the oldest practicing painters of that tradition (Nikolai Zinovyev, The Art of Palekh, Leningrad, 1968) gives Gorky the entire credit for saving Palekh. It mentions Kondakov's role only obliquely and in passing, without explaining what he actually did. As could be expected, the book omits all mention of the benevolent intercession of Nicholas II.

By the decision of the Holy Synod of February 22, 1901, Lev Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. His excommunica­tion caused a great number of public demonstrations of sympathy and solidarity throughout Russia and much indignation abroad. After it was announced in the newspapers, the Minister of the Interior Dmitry Sipyagin imposed a ban on all editorial discussion of this event in the Russian press. When even more petty restrictions were imposed in the following months, such as prohibiting the mention of Tolstoy's name in private telegrams and the ban on public display of his portraits, Alexei Suvorin wrote in his private journal:

Apparently these fellows think they are immortal! And indeed, they will survive as immortal idiots, since it is hard to imagine even worse idiots in the future. When Gogol died fifty years ago, Turgenev was placed under arrest for publishing an article in which he called Gogol a writer of genius. Now Gogol is being taught in all the schools and his monuments are everywhere. Tolstoy will not have to wait fifty years for his monument, nor will Sipyagin to be branded with disgrace on his idiotic forehead.

Within two years, Sipyagin was assassinated by revolutionary terrorists.

143. To Boris Zaitsev¹

Yalta, March 9, 1901.

Cold, dry, long, not youthful, though talented.

Chekhov

i. The writer Boris Zaitsev (1881-1972) sent Chekhov the manuscript of his story "An Uninteresting Story" with a request for an urgent evaluation. This is the telegram Chekhov sent him in reply. As a very young man, Zaitsev met Chekhov briefly in June of 1899 when he was sent by his father to inspect Melikhovo, which Chekhov had put up for sale, and was invited to stay for lunch.

In post-revolutionary years, Boris Zaitsev became one of the leading writers of the Russian emigration. In addition to novels and stories he also wrote literary biographies. His books on Turgenev and on the poet Vasily Zhukovsky are quite attractive in many ways. His biography of Chekhov (New York, 1954), however, is probably the least satisfactory book on Chekhov ever written. Zaitsev's book has the same basic thesis as the other emigre biography of Chekhov (M. Kurdyumov, A Heart in Alarm, Paris, 1934) — namely, that Chekhov, whether he knew it or not, was a believing member of the Russian Orthodox Church—not metaphysically or in terms of his ethics (for which a good case has been made in the unpublished diaries of Boris Poplavsky), or even through his undeniable empathy for everything Russian Orthodox, but as a matter of plain fact. This led Zaitsev into constant arguments with statements from Chekhov's own letters (as an Orthodox Christian, Chekhov could not possibly have liked reading Darwin or have been a friend of Maxim Gorky, even if he says he did and was). Where Soviet commentators stress "The Bride" as Chekhov's ultimate statement on life and politics, Zaitsev dismisses it as pallid and insignificant and instead writes a whole chapter on "The Bishop," in which he sees proof of Chekhov's continuous journey toward God ("The Steppe," the trip to Sakhalin and the famine fighting were sup­posedly earlier stages of that journey). Combined with an overall image of sweet, saintly and ethereal Chekhov, seemingly made of equal parts of treacle, holy water and cotton candy, the book adds up to a literary portrait of Chekhov that is as badly distorted as the worst of Stalinist falsifications.

144. To Maria Chekhova¹

Axyonovo,² June 4, 1901

Dear Masha,

The letter in which you advise me not to get married was for­warded to me from Moscow, and I received it here yesterday.³ I don't know if I've made a mistake or not, but I got married mainly because, first, I'm over forty; second, Olga comes from a highly moral family; and, third, if we have to separate, I'll do so without the least hesitation, as if I had never gotten married. After all, she is an independent person and self-supporting. Another important consideration is that my marriage has not in the least changed either my way of life or the way of life of those who lived and are living around me. Everything, absolutely every­thing will remain just as it was, and I'll go on living alone in Yalta as before.

Your desire to come here to Ufa Province has made me very happy.⁴ It would be wonderful if you do in fact make up your mind to come. Come in early July and we'll stay here a while and have some koumiss, and then we'll all follow the Volga as far as Novorossiysk and from there return to Yalta. The best route here goes through Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara. It may look farther, but in the long run it takes two or even three days less. When I told Knippschiitz⁵ you were coming, it made her very happy. She went to Ufa today to do some shopping. It's rather boring here, but the koumiss is delicious, the weather is hot and the food not bad at all. In a day or two we'll go off fishing.

I'm sending you a check for five hundred rubles. If it seems like too much and you don't feel like keeping it all at home, deposit some of it in the state bank in your own name. Sinani will show you how to do it. Take along about a hundred rubles plus ticket money when you come. I have money; I'll pay your way back.

The telegraph address is Chekhov, Axyonovo. If you decide to come, wire one word only: Coming.

A seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of the late Liza, is living with Anna Chekhova⁶ here. She seems to be a fine girl.

When you send a telegram to "Chekhov, Axyonovo," draw a line at the bottom of the blank and write Samaro-Zlatoustovskoy under­neath it like this:

Samaro-Zlatoustovskoy

Put it at the bottom of the page.

The koumiss doesn't upset my stomach. It looks as if I'll be able to tolerate it.

My humble respects and greetings to Mama. Tell Varvara Konstantinovna⁷ that I thank her for her telegram. Keep well and don't worry. And please write more often.

Yours,

Anton

1. To avoid hurting the feelings of Olga Knipper, with whom she was close friends before Chekhov's marriage, and to whom she became very attached again after his death, Maria excluded this letter from her edition of her brother's letters and vetoed its publication in the 1944-51 edition. The letter was finally published in the Chekhov volume of Literary Heritage in i960 after the death of both Maria and Olga.

Axyonovo was a resort in Ufa Province where tubercular patients were sent for the koumiss cure. This is where Chekhov and Olga Knipper went for their honeymoon.

Although Maria was very fond of Olga and regarded Chekhov's intimacy with her with favor, their marriage came to her as a great shock. Chekhov is replying here to her letter of May 24, 1901 (first published in the volume of her letters to her brother in 1954), in which she wrote:

I will now permit myself to state my opinion about your marriage. For me personally, a wedding ceremony is odious! And you would be much better off without all this additional excitement. If a certain person loves you, she would not leave you and there is no sacrifice entailed on her part. Nor were you being selfish. How could you ever think such a thing? Where is there selfishness? There's always time to get hitched. Tell this to your Knippschiitz from me. [. . .] I want you to be healthy and happy—that's all I want. In any case, do what you think right; it might well be that I am being partial in this par­ticular case. You yourself have brought me up not to have any pre­judices.

In the same letter Maria also wrote: "My God, to be parted from you for two entire months and to live in Yalta to boot! If only you would permit me to come see you at that koumiss place even for only one week!"

An affectionate and humorous nickname Chekhov and Maria used for Olga. Throughout their relationship Chekhov was given to ribbing Olga good-naturedly about her German origins. The nickname is patterned on the Russian transcription of the names of such German operas as Karl Maria von Weber's Der Freischiitz and Albert Lortzing's Der Wildschiitz.

Anna Chekhova, who happened to be at Axyonovo at the same time as Chekhov and Knipper, was the wife of Chekhov's cousin Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov (see Letter 1), to whom Chekhov wrote affectionate letters in his youth, but from whom he was totally estranged by this time. The young girl staying with Anna Chekhova was the daughter of cousin Mikhail's sister Yelizaveta, who died of tuberculosis in the early nineties.

Varvara Kharkeyevich, the headmistress of the girls' school in Yalta where Chekhov was active as honorary superintendent.

145. To Olga Vasilyeva¹

Axyonovo, June 12, 1901

Dear Olga Rodionovna,

Don't sell for a hundred twenty-five thousand rubles; after all, there's no hurry. If something is evaluated at five rubles at first sight, that means it can be sold for seven and a half. Wait a while, for at least a year, or even six months, and in the meantime have someone reliable go to Odessa and see how much your house is actually worth and whether you can't sell it at a higher price. Since the proceeds of the house will be used for a hospital, have a doctor go to Odessa, a man with a vested interest and consequently all the more reliable. I recommend Mikhail Alexandrovich Chlenov, M.D. You couldn't find a more honest man. If you write me that you have nothing against his taking the trip, I'll write him, he'll go, and then write you.

Building a hospital is an excellent project. But here's a piece of advice: don't build it without getting the zemstvo involved, in other words, make it a zemstvo hospital. The zemstvo will provide the blue­prints for the hospital, it will provide you with a doctor, and you will end up spending considerably less if the zemstvo takes a hand in the project. A contribution of ten to fifteen thousand, in my opinion, should more than suffice for the early stages; it's better to increase the amount later when the project is firmly on its feet and under way and when you can see everything clearly. Write to Doctor Dmitry Nikolaevich Zhbankov (a zemstvo doctor) in Smolensk. Ask him what you ought to do and whom you ought to see, and describe how great the need for medical facilities is, and he will write you back immediately and refer you to the right place; but don't write how much you want to contribute. You yourself won't know until later.

Then be sure to write me all the details of how things shape up. The main thing is not to hurry.

My health is better; my coughing has abated. Keep well and under God's protection for many long years. My humble regards to charming Masha.²

Yours,

A. Chekhov

1. Olga Vasilyeva was one of the earliest translators of Chekhov's stories into English. She was an orphan, adopted by a wealthy lady from Odessa, who had her educated in France and England. She wrote to Chekhov from Cannes while he was staying in Nice in 1898 and asked for permission to translate some of his work into English. Chekhov was rather skeptical that his stories could be of interest to anyone in England, but he gave his consent and helped her with some passages she had found difficult. Chekhov met the young woman personally and found her quite charming and Westernized to the point where she was forgetting her Russian. In 1900, Olga Vasilyeva's benefactress died and left her considerable real-estate holdings in Odessa. With Chekhov's encouragement, Vasilyeva returned to Russia in order to sell some of this property and use the proceeds for endowing a hospital. Chekhov put his medical connections and his zemstvo experience at her disposal and conducted an extensive correspondence with her about this project.

2. Masha was a five-year-old girl whom Olga Vasilyeva was raising as her foster child. A rather touching friendship developed between Chekhov and Masha, and Chekhov's correspondence with Olga Vasilyeva contains a number of adult-sounding messages between Chekhov and Masha. Alexander Kuprin's memoir of Chekhov contains a description of an encounter between Chekhov and the little girl.

146. To Vasily Sobolevsky¹

Axyonovo, June 23, 1901

Dear Vasily Mikhailovich,

Many, many thanks for your letter and telegram, your friendly attitude toward me, and the joyful news.² I will definitely become a contributor to Russian Bulletin. As far as I'm concerned, it is the best newspaper around, and if I haven't contributed to it for some time, it is because I've been failing to keep up with things in general and doing nothing because of my illness. I've been forbidden to work, and I've obeyed and written practically nothing.

During my koumiss cure here I've gained ten pounds and my cough has grown much weaker, but all the same I'll be returning home with exactly what I brought here: dull sound beneath the clavicle.³ Be that as it may, I'll settle down in the Crimea, and if it isn't too hot there, I may get something done.

Your degeneration of the arteries, or what is known as athero­matosis, is as natural at your age as hair turning gray. The reason you're taking it so badly is probably that you have always been very healthy and are unaccustomed to being ill. You should do a lot of walking but not exhaust yourself; avoid beef and eat fowl, veal, fish and ham; don't drink any alcohol, not even a drop; if you must, drink only beer, but make sure it's a high-quality beer (Imperial beer, for instance, the kind in the white cone-shaped bottles); avoid hot meals; take baths and have rubdowns, but stay away from showers; avoid constipation, and if you take enemas, don't use more than five glasses at thirty degrees centigrade. And, if I were treating you, I'd prescribe only one medicine: potassium iodide. It's a harmless but wonderful medicine. It has an excellent effect on the vascular system. There now, you see? I couldn't refrain from giving you a medical lecture without your even asking for it.

I've been drinking koumiss, but I haven't been able to drink more than four bottles a day; otherwise I get sick at my stomach. I'm terribly tired of the place. My life is like life in a military stockade. I'm so enormously bored I feel like breaking out. I most likely will break out of here and I'm already writing everyone to send all letters to my Yalta address starting the first of July. Г11 probably leave here on the first of July. Incidentally, nature here is marvelous; there are large quantities of wildflowers, a hilly landscape, and many streams. But the people here are uninteresting, sluggish, homely, and devoid of song. They are mostly Bashkir.⁴ You can feel the grasses growing quickly and avidly, because their summer is over in August and they still want to live and grow. There are no orchards. The hunting is apparently ex­cellent, and you can catch grayling and trout in the stream.

I've received a letter from Korotnev.⁵ He is on Lake Baikal. Baikal is one of the most picturesque places I've ever seen. Korotnev will prob­ably write something semifictional; that's the sort of mood he's in now.

In all probability I'll be in Moscow by late August. My wife and my sister will rent an apartment in Moscow which will have a room for me. I'll live in that room until the first snow, and then it's back to Yalta without my wife.

I clasp your hand firmly and embrace you. I wish you good health and all the best.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Chekhov first got to know Vasily Sobolevsky, lawyer, journalist and editor of Russian Bulletin, and Sobolevsky's wife Varvara Morozova during his famine relief work in 1891 (see Letter 64). In 1897, Chekhov stayed with Sobolevsky and Morozova in Biarritz (see Letter 108, note 2). In the decade after Chekhov's death Morozova became the hostess of a literary salon that played a significant role in the Russian Symbolist movement.

Sobolevsky's liberal newspaper had been in trouble with the govern­ment censors for the past three years. The letter and telegram he sent Chek­hov contained the news that all earlier charges against Russian Bulletin had been dropped and that the newspaper would be henceforth free from pre­liminary censorship.

Before the discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen the standard method of examining tubercular patients was by percussion. The quality of sound obtained and its location informed the doctor of the extent of damage to the lung.

Axyonovo was located in what is now the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Alexei Korotnev was a professor of zoology, whom Chekhov had en­countered in Nice and whose indignant letters about the cancellation of Gorky's election to the Imperial Academy were instrumental in influencing Chekhov to tender his resignation (see Letter 153, note 1).

147. To Maria Chekhova¹

Yalta, August 3, 1901

Dear Masha,

I bequeath to you my house in Yalta for as long as you live, my money and the income from my dramatic works; and to my wife, Olga Leonardovna, my house in Gurzuf and five thousand rubles. You may sell my house if you so desire.² Give my brother Alexander three thousand, Ivan five thousand, and Mikhail three thousand, Alexei Dolzhenko one thousand and Yelena Chekhova (Lyolya)—when she marries—one thousand rubles.³ After you and Mother die, all that remains except the income from the plays is to be put at the disposal of the Taganrog municipal administration for the purpose of aiding public education, while the income from the plays is to go to my brother Ivan and after his—Ivan's—death to the Taganrog municipal administration for the same educational purpose. I have promised one hundred rubles to the peasants of the village of Melikhovo to help pay for the highway. I have also promised Gavriil Alexeyevich Kharchenko⁴ (The Kharchenko House, Moskalevka, Kharkov) that I would pay for his older daughters gymna­sium education until she is released from tuition. Help the poor. Take care of Mother. Live in peace among yourselves.

Anton Chekhov

This letter is Chekhov's last will and testament. After writing it, he simply gave it to his wife for safekeeping and after his death Olga handed it over to Maria. Because the document was not notarized, its legality was not recognized by the authorities. On February 11, 1905, a probate court in Moscow ruled that Chekhov's estate was to be divided among his surviving brothers, Alexander, Ivan and Mikhail, and his widow. The four designated heirs accepted the court's decision, but one month later they made a legal deed of gift of everything awarded to them by the court to Maria and em­powered her to carry out the provisions of the present letter at her discretion.

Far from selling the house in Yalta, Maria made it into a Chekhov Museum and devoted the remainder of her long life to maintaining it. With single-minded determination, she defended it from looters during the civil war that followed the October Revolution, saved it from nationalization by getting it assigned to the Lenin Library in Moscow in the mid-ig2os, rebuilt it after it was damaged by an earthquake in 1927 and stayed in it during the German occupation of the Crimea in 1941.

In 1921, during a visit to Moscow to arrange for the safekeeping of the

"three sisters." marriage / 407

Chekhov archives and to try to place the Chekhov Museum under the pro­tection of the Soviet authorities, Maria Chekhova had a memorable encounter with Tolstoy's youngest daughter, Alexandra, who was trying to do the same thing for her father's house at Yasnaya Polyana (the encounter is recorded in the memoir of Maria's long-time assistant Sergei Bragin, included in the collection of her correspondence and of testimonials by people who knew her, published in Simferopol, Crimea, in 1969). Tolstoy's daughter was handi­capped in her role as a museum keeper by her lack of patience with the distortion of her father's ideas and principles by Soviet ideologues, by her inability to overlook the curtailment of civil liberties and by her refusal to remain silent about the persecution of Russian writers by the Soviet govern­ment. This brought her first to a labor camp and then led to her emigration to America.

Chekhov's sister could not understand that kind of involvement. She saw as her task in life the preservation of her brother's house for future gener­ations and the encouragement of those future generations to read his writ­ings. To achieve these basic objectives, she was prepared to make considerable concessions and adjustments: to remove all evidence of Chekhov's one-time friendship with Bunin, when Bunin angered the Soviet authorities by be­coming an emigre and denouncing their literary policies in foreign publica­tions; to place collected works of Lenin on Chekhov's bookshelf, so that the visitors might think Lenin was among his favorite authors; to plaster the house with numerous portraits of Gorky when Gorky became the central phenomenon of Soviet culture in the thirties and to exaggerate Chekhov's admiration for him beyond all plausibility; and to remove all these Gorky portraits during the German occupation and replace them with a portrait of Gerhart Hauptmann in order to impress the invaders. In Maria Chekhova's published correspondence we find equally gracious letters addressed to genu­ine literary scholars and to party-lining hacks, who were distorting every view Chekhov ever held in their tendentious Stalinist studies and turning him into a narrow and intolerant fanatic in their own image. It must be admitted that, within the limited scope of her aims, Maria Chekhova succeeded admir­ably in accomplishing the task she had set for herself.

Alexei Dolzhenko was the son of Chekhov's maternal aunt FedOsya; Yelena Chekhova was the daughter of his Taganrog uncle Mitrofan and the sister of Georgy Chekhov.

As a very small boy, Gavriil Kharchenko worked in Pavel Chekhov's grocery store in Taganrog, where he was mistreated and unfairly accused of theft. Although Kharchenko did quite well for himself in later years, Chekhov harbored a kind of guilt toward this man whom his father had once mis­treated. This provision in his will seems a way of making partial amends. Kharchenko resumed contact with Chekhov by writing him in 1899 and re­minding him of their childhood experiences.

148. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Moscow,¹ September 24, 1901

Dear Alexei Maximovich,

I am in Moscow and I received your letter here in Moscow. My address is: The Boitsov House, Spiridonovka Street. Before I left Yalta I went to see Lev Nikolayevich.² He is extremely fond of the Crimea; it makes him as joyous as a child, but I'm not happy with the state of his health. He's aged a lot; his main illness is age, and it has completely taken hold of him. I'll be living in Yalta again in October, and if they give you permission to go, it would be wonderful.³ There are very few people in Yalta during the winter, so no one pesters you or keeps you from working—that's number one, and number two, Lev Nikolayevich clearly misses having people around, and we could go and visit him.

Do finish your play.⁴ You may feel it's not turning out as you'd planned, but don't put any faith in that feeling; it's deceptive. It is usual not to like a play while you are writing it, and it is usual not to like it afterward either; let other people judge and decide. But make sure you don't give it to anybody to read. Send it straight to Moscow—to Nemirovich or to me so I can pass it on to the Art Theater. Then, if something isn't right, it can be changed during rehearsals or even the day before the premiere.

Do you have the ending of "The Three"?⁵

I'm forwarding you an entirely useless letter. I received one too.⁶ Well, may the good Lord keep you. Stay well and, if such a thing be possible in your condition as Arzamas resident, happy.⁷ My regards and greetings to Yekaterina Pavlovna and the children.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Please write.

Chekhov came to Moscow from Yalta on September 17 and stayed until the end of October. He attended rehearsals and performances of Three Sisters at the Moscow Art Theater and was allowed by Stanislavsky to revise and change some of the mise en scene, which according to some of the press reports improved the already successful production. He also spent some time helping Olga Vasilyeva with the legal formalities connected with her recent inheritance.

Tolstoy was staying at Gaspra, the estate of Countess Panina, situated not far from Yalta. Chekhov spent a day with him there on September 12. He was most graciously received, but Tolstoy strongly advised him to stop writing plays, and to dedicate himself instead to "writing what he writes best," citing "In the Ravine" as an example of what he meant.

Police authorities barred Gorky from residence in his home town of Nizhny Novgorod, and he was wavering between moving to some small town in the Nizhny Novgorod Province and petitioning the authorities to allow him to settle in Yalta.

Throughout the summer, Gorky was working on his first play, The Philistines, commissioned by Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky. Be­cause of his enormous popularity, the progress of his writing was widely reported in the press.

Gorky's short novel The Three was serialized in Vladimir Posse's jour­nal Life. In May of 1901, the journal was closed by the police, so that the ending of The Three did not have a chance to appear in it. The work was published in its entirety as a separate book in the latter part of 1901.

The letter was from a translator in Germany who wanted exclusive rights for translating the work of Chekhov and Gorky.

Pending the decision of the authorities about Gorky's new place of residence, he was officially registered as a resident of the provincial town of Arzamas.

149. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Moscow, October 22, 1901

Dear Alexei Maximovich,

About five days have passed since I read your play,¹ and the reason I haven't written you all this time is that I never received the fourth act. I was waiting for it, but it did not arrive. So I read only three acts, but that should be enough, I think, for me to be able to form a judgment about the play. As I expected, it is very good. It is written in an authentically Gorkian manner; it is original, very interesting, and to start off by talking about its faults, I have so far found only one, a fault as irreparable as red hair on a redhead—its conservatism of form. You have new, original people singing new songs from a score that has a second-hand appearance. You have four acts, your characters deliver moral sermons; your fear of long speeches shows through, and so on and so forth. But all this is unimportant, for it all dissolves, as it were, in the play's merits. How alive Perchikhin is! His daughter is charming, and so are Tatyana and Pyotr.² Their mother is a magnificent old woman. Nil, the play's central figure, is powerfully done and extremely interest­ing!³ In short, the play is sure to be gripping right from the first act.

But, for heaven's sake, make sure that no one but Artyom⁴ plays Per- chikhin and that no one else but Alexeyev-Stanislavsky plays Nil. These two will do exactly what needs to be done. Have Meyerhold play Pyotr. Only make Nil's part—it's a wonderful part—two or three times longer. It should end the play and be made into the leading role. Only don't try to pit him against Pyotr and Tatyana; let him stand on his own and let them stand on their own, and then show that they are all wonderful, excellent people independently of one another.⁵ When Nil tries to appear superior to Pyotr and Tatyana and keeps patting himself on the back, he loses an element that is so characteristic of our decent workingman, the element of modesty. He boasts and argues, but even without all that it is plain enough what kind of a man he is. Let him be cheerful, let him clown his way through all four acts, let him eat a lot after work, and that is quite enough to captivate the audience. Pyotr, I repeat, is well done. You probably have no idea how well done he is. Tatyana is also a well-rounded character except (i) she ought to be a real teacher, she ought to be teaching children and coming home from school and fussing with textbooks and homework, and (2) a hint to the effect that she has already tried to poison herself should come out in the first or second act; then the poisoning in the third act won't seem so un­expected and will be appropriate. Teterev talks too much; people like him should be presented a little at a time, almost in passing, because no matter how you look at it, they are only episodic both in life and on the stage.⁶ Have Yelena eat dinner in the first act with all the rest, have her sit there and make jokes, because otherwise there is so little of her that she seems unclear. Her love scene with Pyotr is somewhat abrupt; it will stand out too much on stage. Make her a passionate woman—if not loving, then amorous.

There's still plenty of time before the play goes on stage, and you'll have time to revise it ten times over. What a shame I'm leaving! I'd sit in on the rehearsals of the play and write you everything that had to be done.

I'm leaving for Yalta on Friday. Keep well and under God's protection. My most humble respects and greetings to Yekaterina Pavlovna and the children. I firmly clasp your hand and embrace you.

Yours,

A. Chekhov

1. The Philistines, also known in English as The Petty Bourgeois and as Smug Citizens, may lack the stagecraft and the exotic appeal of his more famous Lower Depths, but it is arguably the single most interesting play by Gorky. It is, as Alexander Blok once pointed out, his most carefully and thoughtfully written play. Its individualized, full-blooded characters are strik­ingly unlike the flattened stereotypes we encounter in the plays of Gorky's middle period. The play is a vivid examination of generational and intellec­tual conflicts within a family of the Russian urban bourgeoisie. An elderly middle-class couple named Bessemenov have struggled all their lives to give good educations to their two children, Pyotr and Tatyana, and their adopted son Nil. The exposure to university life and to the social and cultural currents of turn-of-the-century Russia have turned Pyotr and Tatyana into intellec­tuals, incomprehensible to their parents. Nil has become a railroad mechanic, active in the labor movement and alienated from both his adopted parents and their university-educated children. There is thus a three-way communi­cation gap within the family, which leads to a number of dramatic explosions. The Philistines is full of situations and emotional attitudes which American university students of ca. 1970 find startlingly familiar and recognizable. This play has also been rediscovered in the Soviet Union in recent years, where its picture of intellectual and generational polarization has given it an unexpected new relevance.

By finding the kitchen maid Poly a Perchikhina, the play's most at­tractive female character from Gorky's point of view, as charming as Pyotr and Tatyana, Chekhov betrays his basic misconception of Gorky's intentions in writing The Philistines. As the letter Gorky wrote to Stanislavsky during the rehearsals of The Philistines in January 1902 confirms, the characters of Pyotr and Tatyana were meant to be an indictment of spineless liberal intellectuals, who might be better educated than their semiliterate parents, but who are equally philistine and equally supportive of the existing social structure.

Nil is the earliest of Gorky's single-minded revolutionary heroes. He is described as follows in the already-cited letter to Stanislavsky: "Nil is a man who is serenely confident of his own strength and of his right to trans­form life and all of its institutions in accordance with his own understanding. And his understanding is based on his wholesome, optimistic love of life, whose shortcomings arouse in him only one feeling: the passionate desire to destroy them. He is a workingman and he knows that life is hard and tragic; but it is the best thing that exists and it must and can be improved and rebuilt by his will and in accordance with his wishes." The name of Nil, incidentally, is derived from Latin Nilus and is identical in form with the Russian name of the river Nile. American commentators on Gorky are quite wrong to derive it from the Latin nil, "nothing," and to assign to the name a corresponding symbolism. Because the Russian transcription of Latin nil would require a palatalized I, neither Gorky nor any other speaker of Russian could possibly connect that word with Nil's name, with its hard 1.

Alexander Artyom, the actor who was the first performer of Chebutykin in Three Sisters and of Firs in The Cherry Orchard.

R. It was possible and normal for Chekhov to see the self-assured, strong- willed Nil and the wavering, high-strung intellectuals Tatyana and Pyotr as equally valuable human beings. But this idea was quite foreign to Gorky, as his letter to Stanislavsky eloquently shows. Discussing the play's dramatic climax, Tatyana's suicide attempt because of her unrequited love for Nil, Gorky wrote that her unhappiness must not arouse pity or sympathy, but "something else, much less attractive." Gorky's anti-intellectualism became more pronounced in subsequent years. One of its ugliest manifestations is described in Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope, in which we find Gorky using his august position in the post-revolutionary literary life to deprive the freezing and starving poet Osip Mandelstam of the pair of trousers he needed to survive through the winter. "The trousers themselves were a small matter," wrote Mandelstam's widow, "but they spoke eloquently of Gorky's hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him. Here too was a question of 'spineless intellectuals' who were worth preserving only if they were well equipped with solid learning. Like many people of similar back­ground, Gorky prized learning, but had a quantitative view of it: the more the better."

6. Stanislavsky's My Life in Art contains a rather sentimental account of how the role of the church chorister Teterev ruined the life of the man who played it in the original production of The Philistines. In their striving for authenticity, Nemirovich and Stanislavsky decided to cast a real chor­ister in this role. The man gave a highly acclaimed, believable performance, but he identified with the character in the play to such an extent that it affected his mind, causing him to become an alcoholic and to end his days on skid row.

150. To Olga Knipper

Yalta,

November 17, 1901

My dearest helpmate,

The rumors you have heard about Tolstoy's illness and even death are completely unfounded.¹ There neither are nor have been any par­ticular changes in his health, and his death is still apparently a long way off. It's true that he's weak and looks frail, but he doesn't have a single threatening symptom, not a one, except old age. . . . Don't believe any of it. If, God forbid, something should happen, I'll let you know by telegram. I'll call him "grandpa" in the telegram, or else it may never reach you.²

Alexei Maximovich is here and in good health. He is staying at my place and is officially registered here. A policeman came by today.³ I am writing and working, but it's impossible to work in Yalta, darling, totally impossible. It's far from the world, uninteresting, and worst of all—cold. I've received a letter from Vishnevsky.⁴ Tell him I will write a play, but not before spring.

The desk lamp is burning in my study now. As long as it doesn't stink of kerosene it works fine.

Alexei Maximovich hasn't changed; he's the same decent, culti­vated, kind man. There's only one thing about him—or rather on him— I find incongruous: his peasant shirt. It's as hard for me to get used to as the uniform of the Gentleman of the Chamber.⁵

We're having autumn weather; it's not very pleasant.

Stay alive and well now, light of my eyes. Thank you for the letters. Don't fall ill, and be a good girl. Give my best to your family. I kiss you hard and embrace you.

Your husband,

Antonio

I am well. Moscow had an amazingly good effect on me. I don't know if it's you or Moscow that's to blame, but I've been coughing very little.

If you see Kundasova or anyone who will be seeing her soon, let her know that Dr. Vasilyev⁶ the psychiatrist is in Yalta and is very seriously ill.

Tolstoy's stay in the Crimea gave rise to persistent rumors about his imminent death. Because of the news blackout that had been imposed at the time of his excommunication, the newspapers could not inform the public of his condition and there was considerable anxiety about the state of his health.

The ban on mentioning Tolstoy's name in telegrams was also still in force.

Gorky had been permitted to travel to the Crimea, but was barred from residing in any of its larger cities. The village of Autka, where Chekhov's home was located, had not yet been officially incorporated into the Yalta municipality as one of its suburbs at the time this letter was written. Because of this technicality, Gorky was able to stay with Chekhov as his house guest. A further technical requirement was that while Gorky could visit the city of Yalta freely he was not allowed to stay in it overnight.

Alexander Vishnevsky, the Moscow Art Theater actor, and a native of Taganrog, whom Chekhov had known since his childhood.

There had been other Russian writers before Gorky who had affected a peasant costume for one reason or another (e.g., Tolstoy, who wore bast shoes and peasant clothes to show his sympathy for the peasants and his protest against their oppression), but Gorky was the first to make it a part of a consciously projected public image. His costume contributed in a very tangible way to the image of "the man of the people" on which Gorky's instant popularity at home and abroad was largely based. Chekhov is making a subtle and striking comparison between Gorky's peasant shirt and the uniform of the Gentleman of the Chamber which Nicholas I had forced Alexander Push­kin to wear in the last years of his life, much to the poet's resentment. Both Pushkin's forced masquerade and Gorky's voluntary one were equally wrong from Chekhov's point of view because they both represented the writer to the public as something he was not.

6. Dr. Vasily Vasilyev, whom Chekhov had known since his Melikhovo days.

151. To Viktor Mirolyubov

Yalta,

December 17, 1901

Dear Viktor Sergeyevich,

I am unwell or not entirely well—that's more accurate—and can't write. I've been spitting blood and now feel weak and cross. I've got a hot compress on my side, and I'm taking creosote and all sorts of nonsense. Be that as it may, I won't let you down: you'll get "The Bishop" sooner or later.¹

I read the article of that cop Rozanov² in the New Times. It informed me, among other things, of your new activities.³ If you only knew, dear Viktor Sergeyevich, how saddened I was! It seems to me you definitely ought to leave Petersburg immediately. Go to Nervi or come to Yalta, but leave. What do you—a fine, direct person—have in common with Rozanov or that most lofty and cunning Sergius, or supersmug Merezhkovsky?⁴ I feel like writing much, much more, but I had better restrain myself, especially since letters are these days read mostly by people to whom they are not addressed. I will say, though, that for the problems that interest you, it's not forgotten words or idealism that matters; it is a consciousness of your own purity, that is, the perfect freedom of your soul from all forgotten and unforgotten words, idealisms and all the rest of those incomprehensible words. One should either believe in God, or if faith is lacking, one should do something other than fill the void with sensationalism, one must seek, seek on one's own, all alone with one's conscience. . . .

Anyway, keep well! If you intend to come, drop me a line. Tolstoy is here and Gorky is here, so you won't be bored, I hope. There's no news. I firmly clasp your hand.

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. "The Bishop" had been promised by Chekhov for the journal Mirolyu­bov was editing.

Chekhov's attitude toward Vasily Rozanov, who replaced him as Su­vorin's principal protege and whose highly popular articles and essays saved the New Times from total intellectual eclipse (Igor Stravinsky recalled once that as a young man he subscribed to that newspaper only because of Rozanov), was somewhat ambiguous. Like everyone in Russia, Chekhov ad­mired the brilliance of his style, but like most of the Russian intelligentsia, he deplored Rozanov's reactionary political views. Chekhov seems not to have noticed that Rozanov, almost single-handedly, made the sphere of sexuality again a respectable intellectual subject for the first time since the 1820s. Following his example, the poets and novelists of the Symbolist period could deal with sexual topics, which were previously regarded with equal horror by the official censors and by the Russian radical tradition. While berating Rozanov in this and several other letters of this period, Chekhov wrote to Mirolyubov on December 30, 1902, urging him to read Rozanov's essay on the poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov. About that essay Chekhov wrote: "It has been a long, long time since I've read anything like it, anything as talented, sweep­ing, affirmative and intelligent."

The article by Rozanov mentioned above informed the Russian public of the existence of the Religious-Philosophical Society, organized by Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Archbishop Sergius and Mirolyubov for the purpose of establishing a dialogue between the Orthodox Church and Russian intellectuals. The estrangement between the two had become almost total by the end of the nineteenth century. Apart from compulsory instruction in catechism, no subject remotely connected with religion was taught at any Russian university (when Vladimir Solovyov needed to learn the history of Russian Orthodoxy for his master's thesis at Moscow Uni­versity, he shocked the university community by enrolling for a course at the religious seminary, the only place where this subject was taught). Most Russian intellectuals considered the Church to be a servant of the tsarist government, ready to carry out whatever policies it decreed. Per­secutions of dissidents and minority sects, a missionary branch that effected conversions by force and intimidation, and the recent excommunication of Tolstoy all combined to bring the prestige of the ecclesiastic authorities down to a very low point. Under these circumstances an attempt at a rapprochement with them was regarded by much of the liberal intelligentsia as a sellout. This was how Gorky saw Mirolyubov's participation (see next note). Che­khov's objections, however, were not politically motivated. He simply did not agree that a search for religious or mystical experience should be a public occasion.

As can now be seen in retrospect, the encounters between the intellectuals and the clergy at the Religious-Philosophical Society constituted a significant step forward in the temporary liberation of Russian culture from the strait- jacket of dogmatic and doctrinaire utilitarianism. The religious revival in Russian culture, triggered by the newly found appreciation of Dostoyevsky and by the influence of Vladimir Solovyov, was as important an aspect of this many-sided liberation as the philosophy of Nietzsche, the Symbolist, Cubist and Futurist forms in the arts and Sergei Diaghilev's path-breaking journal. It gave Russia a constellation of important religious thinkers, such as Nikolai Berdyayev and Lev Shestov, and informed the poetry of Alexander Blok, Andrei Belyi and Boris Pasternak with its essential mystical strain; its in­fluence is still felt in such important Russian novels of recent decades as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Solzhenitsyn's August 1914.

4. After Maxim Gorky found out about Mirolyubov's participation in the Religious-Philosophical Society encounters with the clergy, he wrote him a furious letter that heaped abuse on Merezhkovsky and asserted that the entire undertaking could only serve the cause of oppression. As Zinaida Gippius described it in the chapter on Rozanov in her book of memoirs, Living Por­traits, the immediate effect of the encounters was to broaden the outlook of some of the younger participating priests, with the result that some of them either left the Church or joined various dissident sects. The alarmed ecclesiastic authorities banned the encounters after the first year.

152. To Ivan Bunin¹

Yalta,

January 15, 1902

Dear Ivan Alexeyevich,

Greetings and Happy New Year! May you become world famous, start a liaison with the prettiest of all women, and win twenty thousand rubles in each of the three state lotteries.² I was ill for a month and a half, but I now consider myself well, though I still cough off and on, do almost nothing, and keep waiting for something—spring, apparently.

Have I written you anything about your "Pines"? First, many thanks for the offprint. Second, "The Pines" is very innovative, very fresh and very good, but it is a little too compact, something like bouillon concentrate.³

Well then, we'll be expecting you!! Come as soon as you can. I'll be happy to see you. I clasp your hand very, very firmly and wish you good health.

Yours, A. Chekhov

My reply to the Southern Review's invitation was that I had no objections, but that I wasn't writing anything at present. I begged to be excused and told them I would send them something once I got some­thing written.⁴ That's how I answer them all.

1. After corresponding with Chekhov for a number of years, Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) became a good friend of the entire Chekhov family in 1899.

Because of their personal closeness, which lasted until Chekhov's death, some short-sighted critics decided that Bunin was a literary disciple of Che­khov. But, apart from a few technical devices he may have learned from Che­khov, it would be hard to imagine two writers who are more disparate in their outlook, themes and range of interest. Although younger, Bunin was stylisti­cally a far more conservative writer than Chekhov. With the exception of Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov, whose work he came to value very highly, Bunin was unable to appreciate or even to understand any literary forms or trends that came into existence later than the 1890s (he shared this inability with Sergei Rachmaninov and Fyodor Chaliapin, his close friends and, later, fellow emigres). This explains why Bunin thought that the last play of any consequence that Chekhov wrote was The Seagull. Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard were steps into the kind of twentieth-century sensibility where Bunin could no longer follow Chekhov. Thematically, Bunin's ever-growing fascination with the triad of sex, pain and death, and his conviction that these three elements are inseparable in any human life, could not be further from everything that attracted and interested Chekhov.

After Chekhov's death, Maria Chekhova, who became close friends with Bunin, repeatedly urged him to write her brother's biography, considering him the most suited of all Russian writers for this task. In 1904, Bunin wrote a brief memoir about his encounters with Chekhov but he kept postponing his planned longer work. He finally got around to it shortly before his death and did not live to finish it. His fragmentary sketches for the book were published by his widow in New York in 1955. At the end of his life, Bunin's view of Chekhov and his recollections of their association were strongly colored by his enthusiasm for two of the least reliable texts on Chekhov ever published: Lydia Avilova's spurious memoir and Lev Shestov's essay "Creation Out of the Void" (Shestov's view of Chekhov as the cruel destroyer of all hope and optimism actually fits some of Bunin's own later work far better than it does anything by Chekhov). Because of this, despite its many interesting and believable glimpses of Chekhov, Bunin's fragmentary study lacks the depth and immediacy it might have had if it had been written shortly after Che­khov's death.

Three decades later, Chekhov's good wishes were realized in wa:ys he could not have imagined. By 1933, Bunin had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and was living in a magnificent villa on the French Riviera with a devoted and understanding wife and a beautiful young mistress.

Chekhov's "bouillon concentrate" simile refers to the same aspect of Bunin's style that Vladimir Nabokov was to describe later as his "brocaded prose." In Bunin's magnum opus, his autobiographical novel The Life of Arsenyev, written during his emigration, his Russian attains a density and a perfection that should drive to total despair any translator who attempts to convey it in another language.

Southern Review was an Odessa newspaper which took Chekhov's polite and noncommittal answer at face value and displayed posters all over town, announcing that Chekhov had become a contributor.

153. To Vladimir Korolenko

Yalta, April 19, 1902

Dear Vladimir Galaktionovich,

My wife arrived from Petersburg with a high fever. She is ex­tremely weak and in terrible pain. She cannot walk and had to be carried here from the steamer. . . . She seems to be a little better now. . . .

I will not pass the protest letter on to Tolstoy.¹ In a conversation we had about Gorky and the Academy he came out with the following statement: "I do not consider myself a member of the Academy" and stuck his nose in a book. I gave Gorky a copy and read him your letter. I somehow have a feeling that there won't be any Academy meeting on May 25th, because by early May all the members will have left for the summer. I also have the feeling that they won't elect Gorky the second time round and that he'll be blackballed.² I'd so much like to see you and have a talk with you. Is there any chance of your coming to Yalta? I'll be here until the fifteenth of May. I'd go and visit you in Poltava, but my wife has fallen ill and will probably be in bed for another three weeks. Or will we get together after May 15th in Moscow, on the Volga, or abroad? Write.

I firmly clasp your hand and wish you all the best. Keep well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

My wife sends her regards.

1. This is a reply to Korolenko's letter of April 10, 1902. At the end of February Gorky was elected an honorary member of the literary section of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The election occurred at the height of a new wave of student disturbances, which led to temporary closing of the St. Petersburg and Kiev universities and to deportation of a number of student strike leaders to Siberia. Chekhov was fully informed of the university situa­tion and of the circumstances of Gorky's election by a series of detailed letters he received from Nikodim Kondakov in March and April of 1902. Early in March, the Minister of the Interior submitted to Nicholas II a report about Gorky's election accompanied by a copy of Gorky's police record. On March 9, the president of the Academy was informed of the tsar's "profound cha­grin" occasioned by the election of a person who was under police surveillance. The next day, the government ordered the Academy to announce the annul­ment of its election of Gorky. The Academy was also ordered to revise its

election rules to make sure that no undesirables were elected in the future.

Korolenko sent a carefully argued protest against the annulment to the head of the literary section of the Academy and forwarded a copy to Che­khov, urging him to join him in the protest. (This letter renewed their contact for the first time since the late 1880s.) Korolenko also enclosed an additional copy of his protest, which he requested Chekhov to pass on to Tolstoy, who was still at Gaspra.

In his capacity as an honorary member of the Academy, Chekhov received a number of other letters asking him what action he proposed to take. The zoologist Alexei Korotnev's letter described the government-imposed annul­ment as a slap in the face of the Russian people and concluded: "I can't believe that the other honorary members will not resign. A tacit acquiescence on their part can only be taken for approval of this revolting act that has been perpetrated."

2. Korolenko's letter proposed that the Academy request the government to free Gorky from police surveillance and then re-elect him again. But from Kondakov's letters of March 10 and April 8, Chekhov knew something that neither the government nor the general public realized. Gorky's election was an extremely close one and many members voted for him only to break a tie between him and several other candidates (among them Mikhailovsky and Lydia Veselitskaya). Kondakov's letter also makes clear that neither he nor any other member expected any governmental objections when they voted for Gorky. It is because of this inside information that Chekhov expressed a doubt that Gorky would be elected for the second time.

154. To Vladimir Korolenko

Yalta, April 20, 1902

Dear Vladimir Galaktionovich,

My wife is still ill, and I can't seem to collect my thoughts enough to write a decent letter. In the letter I wrote you yesterday I asked whether we would be getting together in April or early May. I think we would do best to take joint action, so well have to settle on a plan. I share completely the opinion you state in your letter to Veselovsky,¹ and I wish you would say a few words on my behalf as well at the May 15th meeting—if it takes place. If we don't get together before the fifteenth, we'll have to settle things by mail.

My wife has a high temperature and is flat on her back. She's lost weight. What did you talk to her about in Petersburg? She's com­plaining bitterly that she can't remember.²

I firmly clasp your hand. Be well and happy.

Yours, A. Chekhov

The literary historian Alexander Veselovsky headed the literary section of the Academy.

In his capacity as the defender of civil liberties, Korolenko left his home in the Ukraine and traveled to St. Petersburg for a few days early in March to observe the events at the university. Olga Knipper was there with the Moscow Art Theater and Korolenko informed her of his findings, which he wanted conveyed to Chekhov.

155. To Konstantin Balmont¹

Yalta, May 7, 1902

Dear Konstantin Dmitrievich,

May the heavens bless you for your charming letter! I am alive and almost well, but Im still stuck in Yalta and will be staying on here for quite some time because my wife is ill. I received the Buildings on Fire and the second volume of Calderon, and thank you infinitely.² You know that your talent is precious to me and that every one of your books affords me great pleasure and excitement. Maybe it's because I'm a conservative.³

I also received the play your wife translated—I received it long ago—and forwarded it to the Art Theater. I liked the play; it's modern, but unnecessarily, forcedly grim. And there's a good chance the censors won't pass it.⁴

I envy you. Stay as long as you can in lovely Oxford.⁵ Work, enjoy one another, and every once in a while think of us living out our gray, sluggish, dreary lives.

Keep well and under the protection of the cherubim and seraphim. Write me again, if only a line or two.

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942) was one of the leading figures in the revival of Russian poetry that began at the very end of the nineteenth century. Although Chekhov showed little interest in or understanding of the poetry of other early Symbolists, such as Fyodor Sologub and Zinaida Gippius (primarily because of their mysticism and their Dostoyevskian orientation), he was captivated by Balmont's festive and life-affirming poems. They met in 1898 and after that Balmont and his wife were frequent visitors of Chekhov's in Yalta.

Balmont's poetry enjoyed a considerable popularity in Russia in the first two decades of our century. His poems were set to music by both Stravinsky (the cantata "Zvezdoliki," also known as "Le Roi des etoiles" for chorus and orchestra and "Two Poems of Balmont" for voice and piano) and Prokofiev (the cantata "They Are Seven," a set of Balmont songs and the cycle of piano pieces usually called "Visions fugitives," which was inspired by a Balmont poem). After the Revolution, Balmont emigrated and his name was deleted from literary history in the Soviet Union. After Stalin's death, Ilya Ehrenburg and other surviving admirers of Balmont repeatedly attempted to use this letter of Chekhov's as a testimonial in their efforts to convince the Soviet literary authorities to authorize a new publication of Balmont's poetry. But Balmont's modernism, something that the Soviet literary establishment toler­ates only in certifiably revolutionary writers, such as Mayakovsky or Brecht, proved a stumbling block. A carefully selected volume of Balmont's lyrics was finally published in 1969.

In addition to being a gifted poet, Balmont was a prolific translator (but not a very good one), especially from the English and the Spanish. Buildings on Fire was the title of one of his finest and most successful verse collections.

The vividly colorful, imaginative and joyous poetry of Balmont was seen by many critics of his time as a betrayal of the mournful, civic-minded traditions of Nekrasov and Nadson (present-day American university students have been known to describe Balmont's poems as "psychedelic"). Chekhov ironically calls himself a conservative for daring to like Balmont's poetry despite the absence in it of the social themes that utilitarian critics required Russian poets to treat.

Actually, Balmont was genuinely radical in his personal politics. His volume Songs of the Avenger (1905), which explicitly called for the over­throw of the Romanov family, was seized by the authorities and Balmont had to emigrate for a few years. He was amnestied in 1913 and allowed to return to Russia. In the 1920s, after the October Revolution forced him to emigrate for the second time, Balmont published an article in a French journal in which he documented the suppression of all literary freedom in the Soviet Union. His disclosures were answered by Romain Rolland, who chided Balmont in print for being a tsarist reactionary trying to block human­ity's progress toward freedom and equality.

Balmont's wife Yekaterina had translated an unpublished play by an obscure German playwright.

Balmont was frequently invited to Oxford, where he lectured on modern Russian literature. His numerous translations from the English included the complete poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Edgar Allan Рое (His version of "The Bells" was set to music by Sergei Rachmaninov) and the first Russian translation of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

156. To Olga Solovyova¹

Yalta, May 24, 1902

Dear Olga Mikhailovna,

I am leaving for Moscow tomorrow. Enclosed you will find a draft of the letter. If you accept it, make a copy and send it to me at the following address: The Gonetskaya House, Neglinny Lane, Moscow, and I'll pass it on to Umov. I'll let you know immediately what the president tells me.

Keep well and cheerful. I wish you a wonderful summer, health and a good disposition.

Devotedly,

A. Chekhov

I am coming back in July.

To His Excellency the President of the Moscow Imperial Society of Earth Sciences, Nikolai Alexeyevich Umov.² Your Excellency:

I hereby address to you the following proposal, which I wish to submit to the Moscow Imperial Society of Earth Sciences. Desiring to commemorate the name of the engineer and State Councilor Vladimir Ilyich Berezin with an institution which will serve the cause of science, I have settled upon the idea of establishing a biological research center on my estate near Gurzuf on the Black Sea. This center would offer living space and research facilities for from twenty to thirty university graduates who have chosen a career in science.

I would like the Berezin Biological Research Center to be open to all those who have devoted their lives to science. I would like the Center's fellows not only to dispose of all the necessary scientific equip­ment, but to have their own private apartments at the Center as well.

It is to this end that I intend to build the Center and adjoining living quarters for fellows and to provide the Center with all necessary equipment and propose to the Moscow Imperial Society of Earth Sciences, the oldest Russian naturalist society, that they draw up a plan for the construction of the Center, draft its constitution, intercede with the government for permission to open the Center and name it after V. I. Berezin, and then undertake complete administration of the Center's activities.

In addition to the money necessary for constructing and equip­ping the Center, I will set aside three hundred thousand rubles for its maintenance.

Olga Solovyova

My address is: Gurzuf, Crimea.

i. Olga Solovyova was an extremely wealthy lady who owned a magni­ficent estate near Chekhov's cottage at Kuchukoy (Gurzuf). After the death of her common-law husband Vladimir Berezin, she was casting about for a

way to commemorate his name. Chekhov suggested that she endow a marine- biology research center on the Black Sea and have it named after Berezin.

2. Nikolai Umov, in addition to being the president of the Imperial Society of Earth Sciences, was a professor of physics at Moscow University. The poet and novelist Andrei Belyi studied physics with Professor Umov in 1900 and in his later narrative poem "The First Rendez-Vous," written in 1921, placed Professor Umov in the center of a dazzling verbal fantasy about atomic phy­sics, which not only described a nuclear holocaust, but mentioned the atomic bomb by name several decades before it was actually invented.

157. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Lyubimovka,¹ July 29, 1902

Dear Alexei Maximovich,

I've read your play.² It is original and undoubtedly good. The second act is very good, it's the best and most powerful, and when I read it, and in particular its ending, I almost jumped for joy. The mood is grim and oppressive; the public isn't used to this, and some people may walk out before the end, and at any rate you can say good-bye to your reputation of being an optimist. My wife will play Vasilisa, the dissolute, ill-tempered female. Vishnevsky is walking around the house impersonating the Tatar; he is certain that that is his role. Artyom, alas, cannot be entrusted with the role of Luka; he'll merely repeat what he has done before and tire himself out. On the other hand he'll make a perfect policeman, and Samarova can be his mistress. The Actor, whom you've brought off so successfully, is a magnificent role; it must be entrusted to an experienced actor, Stanislavsky, for instance. Kachalov can play the Baron.³

You've excluded the most interesting characters (except for the Actor) from Act Four, so you'd better watch out. This act may sound boring and unnecessary, especially if only mediocre actors are left on stage after the more powerful and interesting actors have made their exits. The Actor's death is terrible. It's like giving the spectator a box on the ear and it happens for no reason at all, with no preparation. What brought the Baron to the flophouse and why he has to be a Baron are also insufficiently clear.

I'm leaving for Yalta around the tenth of August (my wife will remain in Moscow). Then, before the end of August, I'll go back to Moscow and live here, unless something out of the ordinary happens, until December. I'll see your Philistines and attend the rehearsals of your new play. Is there any chance of your escaping from Arzamas and coming to Moscow even if for no more than a week? I've heard that you're going to be permitted to take a trip to Moscow, that there are people interceding for you. The Lianozov Theater in Moscow is being turned into the Art Theater. Work is in full swing, and they have been promised that it will be ready by October 15th. But there is little prospect of holding performances there before the end of November or even December. The rains, the violent rains we've been having, seem to me to be holding up construction.

I'm living in Lyubimovka in Alexeyev's cottage, and I fish all day from morning till night. The river here is wonderful; it is deep and filled with fish. And I've grown so lazy it's disgusting.

Olga's health appears to be improving. She sends her cordial regards. Give my regards to Yekaterina Pavlovna, Maximka and your daughter.

Leonid Andreyev's Thought is a pretentious kind of thing, hard to understand and—as far as I can tell—unnecessary, but it is brought off with talent. Andreyev lacks simplicity, and his talent resembles the song of an artificial nightingale.⁴ Now Skitalets is a sparrow, but a sparrow that is at least alive and real.⁵

We'll get together somehow or other at the end of August.

Keep well and happy, and don't be bored. Alexin⁶ came to see me and had nice things to say about you.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Drop me a line to tell me you've gotten the play back. My address is: The Gonetskaya House, Neglinny Lane.

Don't rush with the title. There's time enough to think one up.

After returning from a trip to the Ural Mountains, where he inspected Savva Morozov's mines, Chekhov joined his wife in Moscow, and they went to the summer cottage in the village of Lyubimovka which Stanislavsky lent them for the month of July.

The Lower Depths, which Gorky began writing even before he had finished The Philistines.

Alexander Vishnevsky, Alexander Artyom, Maria Samarova and Vasily Kachalov were all leading actors with the Moscow Art Theater.

If the enormous prestige of Maxim Gorky at the beginning of the twentieth century can be explained in terms of the social and political pres­sures of that age, the almost equally spectacular ascent to fame of Gorky's friend and literary associate Leonid Andreyev seems in retrospect an in­explicable case of mistaken literary identity. A minor writer of respectable but not overwhelming talent in his more realistic pieces, such as his short novel The Seven That Were Hanged and the play Savva, Andreyev became tremendously celebrated both in Russia and abroad for his murky, preten­tious, pseudo-Symbolist productions, such as Anathema, The Life of Man and He Who Gets Slapped.

Not only were the critics and the public won over by Andreyev, but he was taken very seriously by almost all the leading figures of Russian Sym­bolism as well. In all of Russia, only Tolstoy and Chekhov seemed to be able to resist the Andreyev craze. Tolstoy's comment was: "He's doing his best to frighten me, but I'm not a bit scared." Chekhov's other most pointed comment on Andreyev (with whom he was to exchange a few polite letters) is found in Alexander Serebrov's Time and People: "What makes you think Leonid Andreyev is a writer? He is simply a lawyer's clerk, the kind that loves talking prettily."

Stepan Petrov, who published his writings under the quasi-poetic pen name Skitalets ("The Wanderer") was another member of the Gorky- Andre ye v-Bunin circle of younger realists.

Yalta physician Dr. Alexander Alexin, who personally delivered the manuscript of Gorky's Lower Depths to Chekhov in Lyubimovka.

158. To Vladimir Korolenko

Yalta, August 25, 1902

Dear Vladimir Galaktionovich,

Where are you? At home? In any case, I'm sending this letter to you in Poltava. Here is what I wrote to the Academy.¹

Your Imperial Highness.²

In December of last year I received notification of the election of A. M. Peshkov to the rank of honorary member of the Academy. I was quick to visit Peshkov, who was then in the Crimea; I was the first to notify him of his election and the first to congratulate him on it. Shortly thereafter the newspapers reported that in view of the charges brought against Peshkov under Paragraph 1035 his election had been declared null and void. Furthermore, it was made very clear that this new notifi­cation proceeded from the Academy of Sciences, and since I am an hon­orary member, the notification proceeded in part from my person as well. I offered Peshkov my heartfelt congratulations, and yet I declared his election null and void—I could not reconcile myself to this contradiction, my conscience refused to accept it. Looking up Paragraph 1035 explained nothing to me.³ After long deliberation I could come to but one decision, a painful, regrettable decision, namely respectfully to request that Your Imperial Highness divest me of my membership in the Academy.⁴

Well, there it is. It took me a long time to write it; the weather was very hot, and I was unable to write anything better. I probably wouldn't have been able to in any case.

I couldn't come. I wanted to take a trip along the Volga and Don with my wife, but in Moscow she fell seriously ill again, and we were both so exhausted that we no longer felt up to the trip. But it doesn't matter; if we're still alive next year, perhaps I'll make the trip to Gelendzhik, about which, incidentally, I read an article in the Historical Herald the other day.

I wish you all the best and firmly clasp your hand. Keep well and cheerful.

Yours, A. Chekhov

After it became clear that no re-election of Gorky to the Academy would be possible, Korolenko tendered his formal resignation. Because of Chekhov's natural aversion to any demonstrative action, he could not at first bring him­self to follow Korolenko's example. However, there was considerable pressure from a number of his friends and correspondents, including Olga Kundasova, who saw him in Moscow early in July and strongly urged him to resign. On August 4, Korolenko sent Chekhov a copy of his own letter of resignation, in which he outlined the parallels between the forced cancellation of Gorky's elec­tion and the harassments of famous Russian writers by the government in earlier, supposedly less enlightened periods. This letter finally tipped Che­khov's decision in favor of resigning.

Chekhov addressed this letter to the Grand Duke Konstantin, erro­neously believing him to be the head of the literary section of the Academy. The next day he was informed of his mistake by Nikodim Kondakov and re- addressed his letter of resignation to Professor Alexander Veselovsky. The Grand Duke was simply another honorary member, like Chekhov and Koro­lenko.

Under Paragraph 1035 of the existing penal code, Gorky had been charged with writing and distributing appeals urging factory workers to en­gage in disturbances against the government. However, since the authorities did not have sufficient evidence to bring him to trial, they allowed the charges to stand, expelled him from Nizhny Novgorod and placed him under con­stant surveillance.

Chekhov received no response from the Academy to his letter of resig­nation. No reprisal of any kind was taken by the government. He meant the resignation to be a purely private gesture, as can be seen from the letter to his wife, instructing her to inform Gorky of his action, but otherwise keep the matter a secret. But Chekhov's and Korolenko's letters of resignation were published in an underground Russian newspaper in Berlin and in this manner became known in literary circles.

159. To Olga Knipper

Yalta, August 27, 1902

My darling, my river perch,

After a long wait I've finally received a letter from you. I'm leading a quiet life; I don't go into town, I chat with my visitors, and every once in a while do a bit of writing. I won't be writing a play this year; my heart isn't in it. But if I do write something playlike, it will be a one-act farce.

Masha didn't give me your letter. I found it in Mother's room, on the table. When I picked it up mechanically and read it, I realized why Masha had been so upset.¹ The letter is terribly rude and, what is more important, unfair. Of course I can sense the mood you were in when you wrote it, and I understand. But your last letter is rather strange, and I don't know what the matter is or what's going on in your head, my darling. You write: "Isn't it odd of them to expect you in the south when they knew I was sick in bed. Someone evidently resented your staying with me while I was sick."² Who resented it? When was I ex­pected in the south? Didn't I give you my word of honor in my letter that no one had ever asked me to go south alone, without you? You mustn't be so unfair, darling, you really mustn't. One must be pure, perfectly pure, in matters of fairness and unfairness, particularly so because you are kind, very kind and understanding. Forgive me for sermonizing, darling, I won't do it again. That sort of thing frightens me.

When Yegor³ submits the bill, you pay for me and I'll pay you back in September. Here are my plans: I'll be staying in Moscow until the beginning of December and then go to Nervi. I'll stay there and in Pisa until Lent, and then I'll come back. I've been coughing more in Yalta than I did in dear Lyubimovka. It's not a bad cough, but it's still there. I haven't been drinking. Today Orlenev⁴ came to see me. So did Nazimova.⁵ Doroshevich has arrived.⁶1 saw Karabchevsky⁷ the other day.

Have I written you about The Seagull? I sent Gnedich in Peters­burg a tearful letter begging him not to produce The Seagull. Today I got a letter from him saying they had to go through with it because new sets had been painted, and so on and so forth. So I'm in for some more abuse.⁸

Don't tell Masha I read your letter to her. Oh well, do what you

like.

Even though your letters have been cool, I keep pestering you with my affections and think about you endlessly. I kiss you a billion times, I hug you. Darling, write me more often than once every five days. I am after all your husband. Don't leave me so soon, before we've had a chance to live together the way we should and before you've borne me a little boy or girl. Once you do give me a child, you can do what you like. I kiss you again.

Yours,

A.

Chekhov's marriage to Olga Knipper occasioned an emotional crisis in the life of his sister. The correspondence of Olga Knipper and Maria Che- khova, published in 1969 in the collection of Maria Chekhova memorabilia en­titled The Hostess of the Chekhov House, shows that before the wedding cere­mony there was a gushingly affectionate friendship between the two women; after Chekhov's death there were many years of long, uninterrupted intimacy and many happy reunions in Moscow and in Yalta, reflected in letters that extend to 1957 and include discussions of Sviatoslav Richter recitals and plays by Lillian Hellman. But in the first year after Chekhov's marriage Maria often felt that her role in his life had been unfairly usurped and her resent­ment brought about reciprocal resentment on the part of Olga.

This is a quotation from Knipper's letter to Chekhov of August 22. She felt that the time they had spent together at Stanislavsky's cottage in Lyubi­movka in July was among the happiest and most memorable in their marriage and she believed that Chekhov had cut his stay at Lyubimovka short because of the urgent pleas of his sister and mother that he return to Yalta.

Yegor was Stanislavsky's manservant. The expected bill was for the meals the Chekhovs were served at the cottage in Lyubimovka. However, Stanislavsky's wife later refused all payment and insisted that the Chekhovs were her guests.

Pavel Orlenev was a celebrated actor of the period, noted for his por­trayals of tortured, neurasthenic characters in the plays of Ibsen and in dramatizations of Dostoyevsky's novels.

Alia Nazimova (1879—1945) did a brief stint in minor roles at the Moscow Art Theater before she was discovered by Pavel Orlenev, whose part­ner she became both on the stage and in private life. She eventually made her way to Western Europe and to the United States, where she was to appear in the silent film classic Salome, to play Christine in the world premiere of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra and to make a string of Holly­wood films. In the summer of 1902, she and Orlenev frequently visited Chekhov.

Vlas Doroshevich was a well-known muckraking journalist.

Nikolai Karabchevsky was a Yalta lawyer.

Pyotor Gnedich, journalist and playwright, was in charge of the reper­tory at the Empress Alexandra Theater. Chekhov did not wish to have The Seagull played in the same theater where it had suffered its initial failure.

"three sisters." marriage / 429

In a subsequent letter, Gnedich assured Chekhov that every possible care would be taken with the production of this by now widely popular play. And, in fact, the new production was highly successful, making the actors and the press forget the resounding opening-night failure of only six years earlier.

160. To Olga Knipper

Yalta,

September i, 1902

My dear one, my own,

Once again I have had an odd letter from you.¹ Once again you blame my poor head for anything and everything. Who told you that I don't want to return to Moscow, that I've left for good and won't be going back this fall? Didn't I write you in plain and simple language that I would definitely be coming in September and would live with you until December? Well, didn't I? You accuse me of not being frank, yet you forget everything I write or say to you. I am at a loss as to what I should do with my wife or how I should write her. You write that you tremble when you read my letters, that it's time for us to part, that there's something you fail to understand in all this. ... It seems to me, darling, the guilty party in all this mess is neither you nor I, but someone else, someone you've had a talk with. Someone has instilled in you a mistrust of my words and feelings; everything seems suspicious to you—and there's nothing I can do about it, nothing at all. I won't try to dissuade you or convince you I'm right, for that's useless. You write that I am capable of living with you in complete silence, that I need only the amiable woman in you and that as a human being you are alien to me and isolated. Dearest darUng, you are my wife, when are you finally going to understand that? You are the person who is closest and dearest to me; I loved you infinitely, I still love you, and you describe yourself as an "amiable" woman who is alien and isolated. . . . Well then, have it your way, if you must.

My health is better, but I've been coughing violently. There hasn't been any rain, and it's hot. Masha is leaving on the fourth and will be in Moscow on the sixth. You write that I will show Masha your letter. Thanks for the confidence. By the way, Masha is in no way to blame. You'll see that for yourself sooner or later.

I've begun reading Naidenov's play.² I don't like it. I have no desire to read it through to the end. Send me a wire when you move to Moscow. I'm tired of writing to other people's addresses. Don't forget my fishing rod; wrap it up in paper. Be cheerful and don't mope, or at least try to look cheerful. Sofya Sredina came to see me; she had a lot of things to say, none of which were interesting. She knew all about your illness and about who stayed by your side and who didn't. The elder Madame Sredina is already in Moscow.

If you plan on drinking wine, let me know and I'll bring you some. Write and tell me if you have any money or if you can make do until my arrival. Chaleyeva³ is living in Alupka; she's doing very poorly.

We've been catching mice.

Write and tell me what you're doing, which roles you're playing again and which new ones you're rehearsing. You're not as lazy as your husband, are you?

Darling, be my wife, be my friend, write good letters, stop spreading melancholera, don't torture me. Be a kind, gentle wife, the kind you really are anyway. I love you more strongly than ever before, and as a husband I am blameless. Why can't you finally understand that, my joy, my little scribble?

Good-bye. Keep well and cheerful. Be sure to write me every day. I kiss you, kewpie, I hug you.

Yours,

A.

During the last week of August, in a state of depression and in obvious need of reassurance, Olga wrote Chekhov several despondent letters, asking whether he truly needed her and was not perhaps tired of being married to her.

Sergei Naidenov was a playwright of the Gorky circle. His first play, Vanyushin's Children, similar in theme and treatment to Gorky's The Phili­stines, but not devoid of interest in its own right, was widely played all over Russia in the first decade of the century and is still occasionally revived in the Soviet Union.

Varvara Chaleyeva was an actress of the Moscow Art Theater who had to leave the stage and settle in the Crimea because of her tuberculosis.

161. To Lev Bertenson¹

Yalta,

October 10, 1902

Dear Lev Berngardovich,

I have seen Angelophyllum ursinum only on Sakhalin. None of the local residents could tell me what the plant was called, and the agricultural inspector, a botanist and agronomist, said it was a local plant and had no Russian name. I had to wait until I came back from Sakhalin to find out even its Latin name. I learned it from a professor who studied the eastern coast during the sixties. "Bear root" is in fact a very fitting name. Sakhalin has many bears. They are shy and don't attack Mammalia; instead, they feed on fish and probably plants of the Angelophyllum type, which, it may be assumed, have a sweet-tasting root. Please accept my profound gratitude. I will definitely make use of your information (provided there is a second edition, of course) and make reference to Annenkov's dictionary. I will also ask you to accept from me a copy of The Island of Sakhalin.

It is through no fault of my own that I have taken so long to answer your letter. The letter was addressed to Feodosia, and I live in Yalta. I have stayed with the Suvorins in Feodosia, but that was twelve or fourteen years ago.

Allow me to thank you once again from the bottom of my heart and wish you all the best. I remain your sincerely devoted and respect­ful

A. Chekhov

1. Dr. Bertenson, a prominent St. Petersburg physician, was Alexei Suv­orin's personal doctor. While reading The Island of Sakhalin, he was struck with Chekhov's description of a beautiful plant that grew on the island. Che­khov cited only its Latin name, adding that there was no popular Russian name for it. Dr. Bertenson looked the plant up in a botanical dictionary and discovered that it did, after all, have a Russian name. He wrote Chekhov to inform him of this discovery. Angelophyllum ursinum is the largest mem­ber of the angelica family, and the closest thing it has to a popular name in English is "giant angelica."

162. To Ivan Bunin

Moscow, October 26, 1902

Dear Jean,

Put something over your pale legs!¹

1. This one-line letter to Bunin is a parody of the one-line poem by the Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov. At the beginning of his literary career, Bryusov deliberately sought notoriety by shocking the reading public. Neither the erotic content of some of his early poetry nor his startlingly surrealistic imagery brought him the celebrity he finally achieved with the one-line "narrative poem" that went: "O cover up your pale legs." Wittily parodied by Vladimir Solovyov and ridiculed in an article by Vasily Rozanov, this one line made Bryusov's name famous throughout Russia. Once fame was achieved, Bryusov was able to settle down and develop into the important and influential poet he subsequently became.

Chekhov's amusement over this poem can also be seen in the statement recorded by Alexander Serebrov in which Chekhov expressed his disapproval of the so-called "decadent" writers (at that time in Russia this meant pri­marily Sologub, Bryusov and Zinaida Gippius): "They are swindlers, not decadents! They try to sell rotten goods—religion, mysticism and all sorts of devilry. Russian peasants were never religious, and as for the devil, the peasants hid him under the steam-bath shelf a long time ago. They've thought it all up to delude the public. Don't you believe them! And their legs are not pale at all, but hairy like everyone else's."

163. To Alexander Kuprin¹

Moscow, November i, 1902

Dear Alexander Ivanovich,

I've received and read your "In Retirement," and I thank you very much for it. It's a good story; I read it, like "At the Circus," in one sitting, and truly enjoyed it. You want me to talk about its shortcomings only and that puts me in an awkward position.² The story has no short­comings, and if there's anything I disagree with, it is several of its own special traits. Your treatment of your heroes, for instance, the actors, is old-fashioned. You write about them the way everyone has been writing about them for the past hundred years; you add nothing new. In the second place, your first chapter is taken up with descriptions of people's appearances—again an old-fashioned device; you could easily do without those descriptions. Describing in detail how five people look overburdens the reader's span of attention, and ultimately loses all value. Clean-shaven actors resemble one another like Catholic priests, and they'll go on resembling one another no matter how much effort you put into describing them. In the third place, your general tone is crude and you overdo your descriptions of drunks.

That's all I can say in response to your question about short­comings; I can't come up with anything else.

Tell your wife not to worry; everything will turn out all right.³ Delivery will take about twenty hours and will be followed by a most blissful state when she will smile and you'll be so moved you'll feel like weeping. Twenty hours is the usual maximum for the first baby.

Keep well, now. I firmly clasp your hand. I have so many visitors it makes my head spin and keeps me from writing. The new Art Theater building really is good. It isn't particularly luxurious, but it is com­fortable.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Alexander Kuprin (1870-1938) was another important younger writer of the traditionalist realistic school to form a close association with Chekhov in the last years of his life. Unlike Bunin and Gorky, on both of whom Chekhov's influence was minimal, Kuprin was a writer who learned a great deal from Chekhov not only in his literary manner but in his general outlook. Many of his stories and novels develop Chekhovian themes and the ethical points that Kuprin likes to make are also frequently Chekhovian. With all that, Kuprin was not a mere imitator, but a writer who built a manner and a personality of his own on what he took from Chekhov. Kuprin's memoir about his association with Chekhov is not only warm and affectionate, but also remarkably objective. Kuprin does not attempt to transpose Chekhov to some other level where he could deal with him more comfortably (as was the case, for example, with everything Stanislavsky wrote about Chekhov), but simply tells what struck him and what he remembered, allowing the reader to decide what kind of person Chekhov was—an eminently Chekhovian approach.

In the middle of October Kuprin had sent Chekhov a copy of the printer's proof of his story "In Retirement" and asked for some negative criticism. The basic criticism Chekhov had to offer here is quite similar to the one he voiced repeatedly about Gorky's plays and Bunin's short stories. He could not understand why these three writers, so much younger than him­self, continued to restrict themselves to the traditional forms and conventions of nineteenth-century realism, from which he himself had moved away long since.

Kuprin and his wife were expecting their first child. In his letter to Chekhov, Kuprin had described some of his wife's anxieties.

164. To Olga Knipper

Yalta,

December 17, 1902

Greetings, my actressicle,

Your last two letters were cheerless: one of them had a bad case of melancholera, the other was about a headache. You shouldn't have gone to Ignatov's lecture. After all, Ignatov is an untalented, con­servative man even though he fancies himself a critic and a liberal. So the theater encourages passivity, does it? Well, what about painting? And poetry? After all, a spectator looking at a picture or reading a novel is also deprived of the opportunity to express sympathy or lack of sympathy with whatever happens to be in the picture or book. "Long live enlightenment and down with darkness" is the sanctimonious hypocrisy of everyone who is backward, tin-eared, and impotent. Bazhenov is a charlatan; I've known him for a long time. Boborykin has grown old and bitter.¹

If you don't feel like going to the club or to the Teleshovs', then don't, darling. Teleshov is a nice person, but down deep he's a merchant and a conservative; he'll bore you, for all people tangential to literature are boring, with very few exceptions.² You'll come to see how old- fashioned and backward all our Moscow literature is—both old and new —when in two or three years you begin to understand more clearly the attitude these gentlemen take to the Art Theater's heresies.

There's a frenzied wind blowing. I can't work. The weather has worn me out. I'm ready to lie down and bite my pillow.

Some pipes in the water main have broken, and there's no water. They're being fixed. It's raining. It's cold. It's not even warm inside. I miss you violently. I've turned into an old man; I can't sleep alone, I keep waking up.³ I read a review of Uncle Vanya in Perm Territory that says that Astrov is extremely drunk; he must have swayed his way through all four acts.⁴ Tell Nemirovich I haven't answered his wire because I still haven't decided what plays should be put on next year. There will be plays enough, I think. It wouldn't hurt to put on three Maeterlinck plays with music, as I told him.⁵ Nemirovich promised to write me every Wednesday, and he even noted down his promise, but to date he hasn't written me a single letter, not a thing.

If you see Leonid Andreyev, tell him to have The Courier sent to me in 1903. Please! And tell fifros⁶ about News of the Day.

Good girl, my love, my joy and my dog, keep well and cheerful. May God bless you and keep you. Don't worry about me. I am in good health and well fed. I hug and kiss you.

Yours,

A.

I'll be receiving The Citizen. I received a book of poetry from Alexander Fyodorov.⁷ The poems are all bad (or so they seem to me), shallow, but there is one I Uked very much. Here it is.

[An eight-line sentimental poem by Alexander Fyodorov about a man yearning for his distant beloved is appended to the original.]

1. On December 11, Olga Knipper wrote to Chekhov that she had attended a public lecture by the literary critic Ilya Ignatov on "The Stage and the Spectator" at which the prominent psychiatrist Nikolai Bazhenov and the writer Pyotr Boborykin appeared as commentators. All three berated the lack of social involvement and ideological commitment of the more recent school of drama. The conclusion of Ignatov's lecture was that new drama generates a sense of passivity in the spectator. The main speaker and the two com­mentators all ended their statements by exclaiming: "Long live enlighten­ment and down with darkness Г Olga wrote that she had found the entire experience extremely depressing.

Nikolai Teleshov (1867-1957) was a writer who belonged to Gorky's "Knowledge" group. By the 1940s, he was an orthodox Soviet writer laden with medals and honors for the conservative, traditionalist form of his writings and for his loyal support of Stalinist policies. In the 1944-51 edition of Chekhov, the first phrase of this sentence reads: "Teleshov is a nice per­son [. . .]." The prominent position of Teleshov in the official Soviet literary hierarchy of that time made calling him a conservative and mentioning his merchant-class origin highly awkward. The censored passage was restored in the 1963-64 edition, which appeared after Teleshov's death.

This sentence was deleted by the puritanical censors of the 1944-51 edition and restored in 1963-64.

This was a review of the production of Uncle Vanya at the Municipal Theater of Perm.

It was Chekhov who originally urged the Moscow Art Theater to in­clude the Symbolist plays of Maurice Maeterlinck in its repertoire. His sug­gestion was heeded a year after his death, when Stanislavsky staged a triple bill of one-act plays by Maeterlinck (Les aveugles, LTntruse and Interieur). The success of this production led Maeterlinck to give Stanislavsky the rights to the first production of his popular Bluebird, which became the company's single biggest success and its biggest moneymaker.

On Nikolai Efros, see Letter 175.

Chekhov himself considered the plays of Alexander Fyodorov (1868­1949) inept, his stories dull and his poems, as we see here, shallow. Never­theless, he sent this mediocre writer long and detailed critiques of his work, offering numerous suggestions in the vain hope that he might help Fyodorov improve his art.

165. To Sergei Diaghilev¹

December 30, 1902

Dear Sergei Pavlovich,

I have received The World of Art with the Seagull article and read the article.² Thank you very much. When I finished the article, I felt like writing a play, and I probably will after January.

You write that we spoke about a serious religious movement in Russia. We were speaking about a movement in the intelligentsia, not in Russia. I can t say anything about Russia as a whole, but as for the intelligentsia it is so far only playing at religion, mostly because it has nothing better to do.³ It is safe to say that the educated segment of our society has moved away from religion and is moving farther and farther away from it, whatever people may say or whatever philosophical and religious societies may be formed. I won't venture to say whether this is good or bad, but I will say that the religious movement you write about is one thing and all contemporary culture something quite dif­ferent, and there's no point in trying to derive the latter from the former. Present-day culture is the beginning of work in the name of a great future, work which will perhaps continue for tens of thousands of years with the result that finally, if only in the distant future, mankind will perceive the truth of the real God, that is, not make conjectures or search for Him in Dostoyevsky, but perceive Him as clearly as they perceive that two times two is four. Present-day culture is the beginning of work, while the religious movement we talked about is a vestige, the end or nearly the end of something that has had its day or is on its way out. But it's a long story, something that can't be put in a letter. When you see Mr. Filosofov, please convey to him my deep gratitude. Happy New Year, and all the best.

Your devoted,

A. Chekhov

i. The accepted Western view of the significance of Sergei Diaghilev was well expressed in 1951 by a young essayist named Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in her prize-winning Vogue essay:

Sergei Diaghilev dealt not with the interaction of the senses but with an interaction of the arts, an interaction of the cultures of East and West. Though not an artist himself, he possessed what is rarer than artistic genius in any one field, the sensitivity to take the best of each man and incorporate it into a masterpiece all the more precious because it lives only in the minds of those who have seen it and disintegrates as soon as he [sic] is gone. What he did with the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, the settings of a Bakst or a Benois, the choreo­graphy of a Fokine, the dancing of a Nijinsky, makes him for me an alchemist unique in art history.

The view, which its author was to repeat in a somewhat modified form to Igor Stravinsky when she and her first husband entertained him at the White House some years later, is not erroneous. It is, however, incomplete, for it states only one part of Diaghilev's accomplishment. Ten years before he ever took his ballet company to Western Europe—and, in the process, completely changed the art of the ballet, brought the finest twentieth-century painters to the attention of the general public by commissioning them to do sets and caused some of the towering musical masterpieces of the century to be composed—Diaghilev spearheaded the greatest liberation that Russian art and literature had known in modern times. The artistic group he organized in 1898 and its journal, both bearing the name The World of Art, came right out and stated publicly and in print the very things that Chekhov had asserted so passionately in his private letters of the late 1880s: that the simplistic utilitarian theories of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Stasov were not a foolproof, eternally valid aesthetic gospel, obligatory for all literature and art; that there were aspects of human existence other than sociological which the arts could legitimately explore; and that photographic realism was not neces­sarily the only possible and desirable artistic method. Chekhov's revolt against this code fifteen years earlier was a private and isolated phenomenon; Diaghilev's open defiance was an act of public sacrilege, met with ridicule by the reactionary pro-government press and with outrage by the majority of entrenched literary and art critics. But The World of Art served as a catalyst and a rallying point for the forces of the nascent Russian Symbolism and other modernist trends. With the liberation of Russian literature and art from the narrow and stifling aesthetic which might have been revolutionary forty years earlier but by then had become provincial and oppressive, all the miracles of the Russian artistic revival of the next quarter century came pouring out as if from a cornucopia: the greatest age Russian painting ever saw, ranging from Vrubel to Russian Cubists and Suprematists; the un­believably rich period in Russian poetry, called the Silver Age today, although its total brilliance, ranging from Balmont and Bryusov to Mandelstam and Pasternak, can easily outshine anything that went on in any other age; the great experimental novels of Andrei Belyi and Alexei Remizov, which were the basis for the later accomplishments of Isaak Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko and Andrei Platonov; the music of Skriabin, Stravinsky and Prokofiev; the path-breaking theatrical directors who continued Stanislavsky's reform along modernist lines; and the ballets with which Diaghilev so dazzled the Western world ten years after he founded The World of Art.

Above all, there were the literary and artistic journals that followed and developed the format of Diaghilev's journal in the next decade—Balance, Apollo, Golden Fleece and a few others—which are among the finest, freest and culturally richest journals ever published anywhere. It is to them that we owe our appreciation of traditional Russian church architecture and icon painting and our present-day views of earlier literary figures distorted or underestimated by utilitarian criticism, especially Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoy­evsky. Lesser poets and writers, expelled from Russian literature by the utilitarians—Baratynsky, Leskov, Fet, Apollon Grigoryev, Karolina Pavlova, among a number of others—were brought back from obscurity, re-examined and made a permanent part of Russian literature. The debt that present-day Soviet culture owes to The World of Art and everything it started is incalcu­lable. But, because of its aversion to all modern art, its commitment to Cherny- shevskian aesthetics and its general desire to depict the time that preceded the Revolution as one of unrelieved oppression and drabness, the Soviet cultural establishment did everything in its power to minimize the significance of the cultural revival that Diaghilev helped initiate, to slander it and even to suppress the evidence of its existence.

The reasons for this suppression and its frightening success are vividly outlined in the crucial Chapter 55 of Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, where a young Soviet diplomat goes through his late mother's papers and discovers the newspapers and the journals of her youth (The World of Art, Balance and Apollo are specifically named). The realization of the full range and scope of pre-revolutionary art and literature and the intellectual freedom that had been possible in the decades just before the Revolution, which Soviet policies had concealed from succeeding generations, triggers a subtle ethical evolution in Solzhenitsyn's hero, leads him to form a moral code that differs from the prevailing one, and eventually delivers him into the hands of the secret police.

"Historically speaking, there is something immensely tragic in this recoil of art from its social matrix," wrote critic Hilton Kramer in his otherwise handsome tribute to The World of Art (New York Times, May 3, 1970), ob­viously not realizing that within the Russian cultural context of the time Diaghilev's emphasis on the supremacy of aesthetics and craftsmanship was the only way to liberate the arts from the insistence of the utilitarian critical tradition that all art be topical and political at all times and that its other di­mensions were irrelevant if not actually harmful. "Indifferent," "aristocratic/' "anti-social," "apolitical"—the very charges that had been leveled against Che­khov some two decades earlier, were also made against Diaghilev's group and his journal. It was therefore only fitting that Diaghilev believed Chekhov to be his natural ally in his deliberate campaign to free Russian art from its ideological captivity.

Diaghilev's letters to Chekhov were published in the collection of materials bearing the title From A. P. Chekhov s Archive, Moscow, i960. Annotations to these letters inform the Soviet reader that Diaghilev was an important propagandizer of Russian ballet abroad and that he edited a decadent journal called The World of Art, which "insistently opposed the realistic traditions of Russian painting and the foundations of the materialistic aesthetics that had been developed by Russian revolutionary democrats."

An article on the revival of The Seagull at the Empress Alexandra Theater, written by the literary critic Dmitry Filosofov, appeared in The World of Art, No. 11, 1902. Filosofov was Diaghilev's closest friend at the time this letter was written. He later deserted Diaghilev to become a partner in a (mostly mystical) menage a trois with Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky. It was under the impact of losing Filosofov's friendship that Diaghilev shifted his interests from literature and painting to music and ballet.

Diaghilev had written: "At the art exhibit we were interrupted at the most interesting point: whether a serious religious movement is possible in Russia today. The question is, in other words, a 'to be or not to be' of the whole of contemporary culture. I hope to see you again and continue where we left off" (Diaghilev's letter to Chekhov of December 23, 1902). Diaghilev participated in the encounters of the Religious-Philosophical Society and followed the religious revival among the intelligentsia with interest, seeing in it one of the possible ways out of the cultural impasse of dogmatic utilitarianism. However, as his letters to Chekhov of 1903 show, he quickly became alarmed at the possibility of a religious dogmatism superseding the utilitarian one. During the next two years, Diaghilev tried to steer The World of Art away from any kind of sectarian ideological commitment, in­cluding the religious kind.

"THE CHERRY ORCHARD"

Vladimir nemirovich-danchenko's book of memoirs Out of the Past begins with three portraits of Chekhov drawn from the eighteen-year period during which Nemirovich knew him. The first portrait is from the mid-i88os. Chekhov is known as the prolific author of innumerable humor­ous stories. "He is very sociable and prefers listening to talking. Not even a touch of self-importance. Everyone considers him talented, but no one could have ever imagined that his name would one day be among the classics of Russian literature."

The second portrait is of Chekhov in the early 1890s. His book of stories has been awarded an academic prize, he is courted by editors, Tolstoy and Grigorovich speak of him in glowing terms, and every new story he writes is a literary event. "But the oracle of all the young people, Mikhailovsky, never tires of pointing out that Chekhov is a non- ideological writer and this has its influence, putting the brakes on the possibility of open and unanimous acclaim." "During this period Chekhov is to be found at the very center of the social whirl of both capitals. He belongs to writers', actors' and artists' circles. He's now in Moscow, now in St. Petersburg. He loves large gatherings and spirited conversation, loves being invited backstage. He travels a great deal, both in Russia and abroad; he's as modest as ever and as fond of listening and observing. His fame is steadily growing."

The final portrait in Nemirovich's triptych is the Chekhov of Yalta and of the Moscow Art Theater. There is little talk now about his lack of ideology. The two or three stories he publishes every year are eagerly awaited by everyone. He is now known principally as "Chekhov the playwright,

"the cherry orchard" / 441

Chekhov the creator of the new form of drama." The reading public is aware that his days are numbered, and every new work is received ''with a sort of tender gratitude, with the realization that it was written with the remainder of his dwindling strength."

Not only his personal, social and philanthropic involvements interfered with Chekhov's writing in the last two years of his life. The very act of writing became an uphill physical climb. There was a time when he could turn out a long story or a one-act play in one day. By the end of 1902, he had to take to his bed after writing half a page. But he still had three major works to give the world. His last two important stories are something of a final testament. "The Bride/' which shows its young heroine's escape from traps of family structure, class limitations, provincial backwardness and doctrinaire rigidity, comes as a startling reversal of a long series of stories and plays in which similarly bright and appealing young women were hopelessly caught in a dull world they had never made. "The Bishop" is an entirely plotless and scrupulously realistic account of the last few days in the life of a high-ranking Orthodox Church dignitary of humble social origins. But, for all his matter-of-fact tone, Chekhov's Russian prose in this story reaches such lyrical power, throbs with such resignation before life's inevitabilities and glows with so much love for this world's radiant beauty that literary comparisons seem for once inadequate. Only in the slow move­ment of Mozart's Piano Concerto in A major, K. 488, do we find the same kind of transfigured resignation, and it is conveyed by Mozart in equally simple terms, with the same total control of craftsmanship which makes the technique invisible and which only the highest mastery can achieve.

Chekhov's last full-length play, The Cherry Orchard, is, even more than Three Sisters, a focal point for many of the themes and characters he had treated in his earlier work. The loss of a family's homestead is a theme that appeared in Chekhov's very first play, the unwieldy Platonov of 1881, one of whose four heroines is a recognizable prototype for Lyubov Ranevskava of The Cherry Orchard. To point out that one of the strongest impressions of Chekhov's own childhood was the usurpation of his parents' home by a stranger as a result of his father's poor management of the family resources is to belabor the obvious. Be that as it may, the situation of a family about to be evicted from its home reappears in a number of Chekhov's stories from "The Late-Blooming Flowers" of 1882 and "Other People's Mis­fortune" of 1886 to "A Visit with Friends" of 1898. The character of Yermolai Lopakhin continues the line of socially dislocated wealthy mer­chants and manufacturers of peasant origin whom we have already met in "Three Years" and "A Woman's Kingdom." The smug and insolent butler Yasha is the culmination of Chekhov's long line of semi-educated hicks whose contact with Western ways has added nothing to their culture but taught them instead to treat their native traditions with contempt and to despise any woman who loves them as immoral and inferior.

We know that after completing The Cherry Orchard Chekhov con­ceived an idea for still another play, which was to deal with arctic explorers and was to show the ghost of the hero's beloved and a ship crushed by the polar ice onstage. Even the fragmentary information we possess about this unwritten play shows that at the end of his life Chekhov was drifting toward the Symbolist conception of drama, which had become the domin­ant dramatic mode by that time. If this is the case, The Cherry Orchard can be seen as the very beginning of that drift away from the combination of theatrical realism and impressionism brought by Chekhov to such per­fection in Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters. The open-ended structure that worked so effectively in the last two plays is abandoned for a more sym­metrical and formal arrangement of events. The use of symbols (present, of course, in both The Seagull and Three Sisters) is more subtle and more integrated. Where Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters ended in nonrealistic lyrical soliloquies, The Cherry Orchard ends in the poignant and deeply symbolic silent scene of the forgotten old family retainer, locked in the house while the orchard is being chopped down. Chekhov had come a long way since the time when he complained while writing The Wood Demon that the only two effective ways he knew of ending a play were to get the hero married or to kill him at the final curtain.

The characters of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters all belong in the same Chekhovian world, the literary allusions evoked by Natasha and Solyony notwithstanding. But the dramatis personae of The Cherry Orchard is in­vaded by three non-Chekhovian interlopers: the landowner Simeonov- Pishchik, who, as Ivan Bunin correctly pointed out, really belongs in a play by Gogol, and the two time travelers from the future, the clerk Yepikhodov, straight out of Mikhail Zoshchenko's stories of the 1920s, and the governess Charlotte, a Nabokovian artist-in-disguise. All these features indicate that The Cherry Orchard represents some new departure in Chekhov's evolution as a playwright which his death prevented him from developing. They also deprive this play of the organic unity and overall perfection that mark Three Sisters—which does not mean for a moment that The Cherry Orchard is not an important and fascinating play.

While depicting the characters of this play in his own Chekhovian way, Chekhov came close in three of them to a deliberate debunking of the stereotypes of the conventional Russian drama of his time. The female character of a Decadent Aristocratic Hedonist and the male one of a Greedy Capitalist On-the-Make were standard fare in melodramas by Nemirovich-Danchenko, Suvorin and Sumbatov; an Idealistic, Revolution­ary-Minded Student had also been present on the Russian stage ever since