Letters of Anton Chekhov

Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Many critics and writers saw Ranev­skaya, Lopakhin and Petya Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard as a kind of turning upside down of these three cherished stereotypes and they resented it. Some of the earliest reviews of this play accused Chekhov of slandering young activists, of justifying capitalist exploitation and of idealizing the decadent aristocrats. This is more or less how Vladimir Korolenko under­stood the play and he said so in a critical article he published under a pen name in 1903. A year later he wrote to Fyodor Batyushkov: "To my mind, the main defect of the play is its lack of a clear-cut artistic design or per­haps of a keynote. You are quite wrong about it: Ranevskaya is an aristo­cratic slut, of no use to anyone, who departs with impunity to join her Parisian gigolo. And yet Chekhov has whitewashed her and surrounded her with a sort of sentimental halo. Similarly, that moldy 'better future' [i.e., Petya Trofimov] is something incomprehensible and unnatural" (Letter of September 2, 1904).

Korolenko's disagreement with Chekhov's play is at least honest. Maxim Gorky, however, who could neither imagine disliking anything by Chekhov nor accept the play as it was actually written, fell back upon the time- honored device of the Belinsky-Chernyshevsky tradition in Russian criti­cism : he simply read The Cherry Orchard as the kind of play he would have liked it to be. In Gorky's memoir of Chekhov, first published in 1905, we read: "There's that weepy Ranevskaya and the other former masters of The Cherry Orchard, as egotistical as children and as flabby as senile old men. They missed their chance to die in time and now they are moaning, seeing and understanding nothing,—parasites who lack the strength to latch onto life again. The miserable student Trofimov talks prettily about the need to work and spends his time in idleness, entertaining himself with stupid ribbing of Varya, who works tirelessly for the benefit of these drones." One would have thought that Chekhov had written a brutal social satire, a powerful indictment of an entire class, with Varya (whom Chekhov himself saw as a "kind-hearted idiot") as its sole attractive, sympathetically depicted character. Elsewhere in the same memoir, Gorky indicated that he considered Ivanov, Treplyov from The Seagull and almost the entire cast of Three Sisters equally useless survivals of an earlier epoch whom one would do best to exterminate, and he praised Chekhov for exposing them in all of their revolting weakness and inefficiency. As the mistrust which had accompanied the first decade of Chekhov's rise to fame gave way to awe and admiration, it became clear that many of his new admirers, among them some people personally close to him, were as little prepared to under­stand what he was trying, with wisdom and compassion, to tell his fellow countrymen as were his earlier disparagers.

Chekhov finished "The Bride" at the end of February of 1903. The greater part of the rest of that year he spent writing The Cherry Orchard. He worked on it longer than on any other play. While Three Sisters was designated by Chekhov as a drama, The Cherry Orchard was styled by him a comedy, as had been the case with The Seagull earlier. This term has caused considerable perplexity and confusion in non-Russian works on Chekhov. What Chekhov clearly had in mind was a high, serious comedy— in the same sense that Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Moliere's The Misanthrope and Turgenev's A Month in the Country were all designated comedies, which did not prevent their authors from treating serious themes and tragic situations in them. The tragic element of the The Cherry Orchard is its inalienable and self-evident component, but its comedic aspect has to be brought out in any stage production if the play is to have the rhythm and balance that Chekhov intended. This was admirably conveyed in the Eva Le Gallienne Broadway production of the mid- 1940s, which puzzled the critics accustomed to Stanislavskian traditions, but delighted and pleased the unprejudiced audiences. Chekhov had strong misgivings about what Stanislavsky would do to this play—he feared that Lopakhin would be turned into a standard kulak, that the revolution­ary background of Trofimov would be toned down and, above all, he feared the slow and mournful tempo he knew Stanislavsky would try to achieve.

His anxiety about this and his ever-worsening physical condition led to the uncharacteristic angry peevishness of his letters to Olga Knipper and to Nemirovich when the advance press notices distorted the subject and the setting of the new play. On January 17, 1904, Chekhov was in Moscow for the opening of The Cherry Orchard. After the third act, a huge public ceremony was held on the stage, commemorating the twenty-fifth anni­versary of Chekhov's literary debut. Chekhov had not been warned. Sur­prised and abashed, he heard himself eulogized by important scholars, journalists and actors (among them the fabled Glykeria Fedotova) and hailed as a great and beloved writer, the living successor of Pushkin, Gogol and Turgenev. It was an overwhelming, almost frightening experience.

By now one of Chekhov's lungs was almost gone, his digestive tract was ruined and he had emphysema. He gradually succumbed to that euphoria which frequently affects people in advanced stages of tuberculosis, and we read in his letters of his last few months that he believed himself to be on the road to complete recovery. In June of 1904, he and his wife left for Germany, where he hoped to have his emphysema treated. Olga Kundasova came to see him on the eve of his departure. "I saw Anton just before his departure," she wrote to Alexei Suvorin a few months later in one of her rare letters that have been preserved in the archives. "It was one of the most depressing encounters that any mortal ever had, but I can­not bear to write about it."

"the cherry orchard" / 445

166. To Vera Kommissarzhevskaya

Yalta,

January 27, 1903

Dear Vera Fyodorovna,

Many thanks for your letter.¹ Not many thanks, multitudinous thanks—there you are. I'm very glad you're getting on so well. Let me tell you the following about the play: (1) It's true I've got an idea for a play and a title for it (The Cherry Orchard,² but that's still a secret), and I'll most likely settle down to writing no later than the end of February, provided of course I'm well; (2) the central role in the play is that of an old woman, to the author's great regret; and (3) if I let the Art Theater have it, then in accordance with the theater's rules and regula­tions the Art Theater gains exclusive production rights of the play for Petersburg as well as Moscow, and there's nothing that can be done about it.³ If the Art Theater doesn't go to Petersburg in 1904 (which is highly possible—it isn't going this year, is it?), then there is no problem at all, and if the play seems suitable for your theater I will be only too glad to let you have it. Or what about this: why don't I write a play for you. Not for this or that theater, but simply for you. It's an old dream of mine. Well, it's all in God's hands. If my health were what it used to be, I wouldn't waste time talking; I'd sit right down and start writing the play on the spot. I've had pleurisy since December—can you imagine? —and I'm leaving the house tomorrow for the first time since being confined for so long.

Anyway, I've written to Moscow asking for exact information whether the Art Theater is going to Petersburg. I'll have an answer in eight to ten days and will write you then.

You've seen my wife, and I won't see her until spring. First she's sick, then I have to leave, so that nothing ever turns out the way it should for us.

You write, "I am proceeding on the strength of my faith which, if it breaks, will kill within me . . ."⁴ That's entirely as it should be. You're quite right, but for heaven's sake, don't stake it all on the new theater. After all, you're an actress, and being an actress is like being a good sailor: no matter what ship he sails, be it government- or private- owned, in all places, under all conditions he always remains a good sailor.

Once more let me thank you for your letter. I send you my humble respects and firmly clasp and kiss your hand.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Early in January, Kommissarzhevskaya wrote to Chekhov that she had resigned from the government-owned Imperial Theaters and was starting a private theatrical company of her own. In her letter, she wrote: "The point is that you must help me, Anton Pavlovich. Yes, you, and yes, you must. Promise to let me have your new play for my Petersburg company. Surely you can understand how badly I need it and what you will be doing for me."

Stanislavsky's My Life in Art contains a detailed account of Chekhov's long search for a title for The Cherry Orchard after he wrote the play and his consulting Stanislavsky about the two possible versions of the title after he decided what he wanted to call it.

As we know from Chekhov's letter to Olga Knipper written one day before this letter, he was highly dubious about the success of Kommis- sarzhevskaya's private company and expected her to lose all interest in the venture after one month. It actually turned out to be an important and innovative company which continued to exist until Kommissarzhevskaya's untimely death in 1910.

The complete sentence in Kommissarzhevskaya's letter reads: "I am proceeding on the strength of my faith, which, if it breaks, will kill within me everything that gives my life meaning."

167. To Marianna Pobedimskaya¹

Yalta,

February 5, 1903

Dear Madam :

Your opinion of Yelena Andreyevna is completely justified. But I'm afraid you won't receive this letter until after the ninth of February. I didn't receive your letter, which was mailed January 30th, until today. Yelena Andreyevna may produce the impression of being incapable of thinking or even loving, but while I was writing Uncle Vanya I had something completely different in mind.

I wish you all the best.

Respectfully yours,

A. Chekhov

1. The addressee was the wife of a provincial doctor and the letter is a reply to an inquiry she sent Chekhov about the character of Yelena in Uncle Vanya, which she was to play in an amateur production. In her letter, Pobedimskaya wrote: "Is Yelena Andreyevna, the professor's wife, an average intelligent woman, who is a thinking and decent person, or is she an apathetic, idle woman, incapable of thinking or even loving? I cannot reconcile myself to this second interpretation and I dare to hope that my understanding of her as a reasoning, thinking person who is made unhappy by her dissatisfac­tion with her present life is the correct one."

168. To Prince Alexander Sumbatov (Alexander Yuzhin)¹

Yalta,

February 26, 1903

Dear Alexander Ivanovich,

Many thanks for your letter.² I agree with you that it's hard to form an opinion of Gorky: one has to wade through the mass of things written and said about him. I haven't seen his play Lower Depths and I don't know it all that well, but stories like "My Traveling Companion" or "Chelkash" are enough for me to class him as a far from minor writer. Foma Gordeyev and The Three are unreadable; they're very bad. And The Philistines is, in my opinion, the work of a schoolboy. But Gorky's importance does not lie in the fact that he's popular; he is im­portant because he is the first in Russia and the world at large to write about philistinism with contempt and disgust and at the very time when society is ready for this protest. From the Christian point of view, from the economic point of view, from any point of view you choose, philis­tinism is a great evil. Like a dam in a river it has always led only to stagnation. And though Gorky's tramps may be drunk and far from elegant, they are still an effective means—or at least they've turned out that way—if not of completely breaking down the dam, then at least of springing a powerful and dangerous leak in it. I don't know if I'm making myself clear. In my opinion there will come a time when Gorky's works will be forgotten, but he himself is not likely to be forgotten even a thousand years from now. That's what I think or that's the way it seems to me, but then again I may be wrong.³

Are you in Moscow? Or have you gone off to Nice and Monte Carlo? I often think back on the years of our youth when we sat next to one another playing roulette. Potapenko too.⁴ Speaking of Potapenko, I got a letter from him today. The clown is thinking of publishing a journal.

I firmly clasp your hand. Keep well and prosperous.

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. Alexander Sumbatov (1857-1927), who wrote and acted on the stage as Alexander Yuzhin, was an authentic Georgian prince who made a considerable name for himself in Russian theater of the turn of the century as playwright, actor and stage director. As an actor, he was a typical nine­teenth-century matinee idol, given to a great deal of melodramatic excess that was much appreciated by his audiences. As a playwright, he wrote enormously successful social melodramas with evil capitalist villains, decadent aristocrats, innocent wives and startling, showy denouements. One of the best ways of understanding what Chekhov tried to accomplish in his plays is to read a play or two by Sumbatov, for they were the plays considered in Chekhov's time to be the very model of soundly constructed, socially involved drama. Every important Russian actor and actress of the period appeared in Sumbatov's plays; Sarah Bernhardt herself performed in one of them in Paris. Although Chekhov did not think much of Sumbatov's plays and in fact wrote Ivanov partly as a rejoinder to one of them (see Letter 14, note 12), he and Sumbatov were quite friendly personally. Sumbatov, for his part, had enough theatrical sense and taste to appreciate Chekhov's last plays and to realize their importance.

Sumbatov had written to Chekhov expressing his liking for Gorky's Lower Depths and his disapproval of The Philistines. He asked Chekhov for his opinion of Gorky.

Chekhov's idea that Gorky's work might soon be forgotten is also reflected in Suvorin's journal, where in the entry for September 4, 1902, we read:

I've spent two days with Chekhov, at his home; we were together al­most continuously. We conversed in a friendly way all the time, mostly about literature. He is astounded that abroad they consider Gorky a socialist leader. "Not socialist, but revolutionary," I pointed out. Chekhov could not understand this. I, on the contrary, do. His stories are filled with protest and optimism. His tramps seem to say: "We feel within ourselves a tremendous strength and we will prevail." Gorky's popularity bothers Chekhov's self-esteem. "Earlier they used to say Chekhov and Potapenko and I survived it. Now it's Chekhov and Gorky." What he meant to say was that he will survive this also. Ac­cording to him, Gorky will lose his significance in two or three years, because there will be nothing for him to write about. I don't agree.

Sumbatov and Potapenko both spent some time with Chekhov in Nice in 1898. All three of them, occasionally joined by Nemirovich-Danchenko, paid frequent visits to the gambling casinos at Monte Carlo.

169. To Olga Knipper

Yalta, March 23, 1903

Dearest Gramsie,

You're angry at me because of the address, you keep assuring me you've written several more times. Wait, I'll bring you your letters and you'll be able to see for yourself, and until then let's forget about it and talk no more about the address. I've already calmed down. Then you write that I'm asking you about Turgenev's plays all over again and that you've already told me about them and that I forget the contents of your letters. I don't forget them at all, darling, I read them all several times over; the trouble is that no less than ten days pass each time between my letter and your answer. I've read almost all Turgenev's plays. A Month in the Country, as I've already written you, was not at all to my taste, but The Sponger, which you will be performing, isn't all that bad or all that badly put together, and if Artyom doesn't drag things out and sound monotonous, the play won't come off too badly. The Provincial Lady needs to be shortened, don't you think? The roles are good.¹

I haven't had hemorrhoids all summer, and today I feel like a regular titular councilor. The weather is magnificent. Everything is in bloom, and it's warm and quiet, but there has been no rain, and I fear for the plants. You write you'll hold me in your arms for exactly three days and nights. But what about dinner or tea?

I've received a letter from Nemirovich. Give him my thanks. I won't write him now because I sent him a letter not long ago.

Keep well now, mongrel pup. I've already written you about Gorky: he visited me and I visited him. His health is all right. I can't send you my story "The Bride," because I don't have a copy. You'll be able to read it soon in Everyone's Magazine. I've written many stories like it before, so you won't get anything new out of it.

May I turn you upside down, then give you a shake or two, then hug you, and bite your ear? May I, darling? Write, or I'll call you a tramp.

Yours,

A.

i. Casting about for suitable plays for their company, Nemirovich- Danchenko and Olga Knipper both hit upon the idea of reviving some-play by Ivan Turgenev. Turgenev's plays were pronounced undramatic and un- suited for the stage by the critics of his time, all of whom considered Ostrovsky's well-structured and socially critical plays superior to those of Turgenev. Turgenev bowed to their superior judgment and wrote no more works for the Russian stage after 1852. His plays had some performances in Germany and Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, but in Russia, despite his tremendous prestige as a novelist, there were only two or three scattered revivals of A Month in the Country, put on by Maria Savina for her benefit performances. Otherwise his plays were generally believed to be unplayable.

Chekhov's mature plays are of course a vindication of Turgenev's dramatic method, a proof that drama which internalizes the outward events and con­centrates on conveying the finer psychological nuances can be convincing and theatrically effective. Nothing would be easier than to postulate Chekhov's derivation of his dramatic method from Turgenev, especially because we know Turgenev was his favorite writer at the beginning of his literary career. But this letter and two others, which Chekhov wrote after he read Turgenev's plays at his wife's request, demonstrate beyond any doubt that he simply did not know Turgenev as a dramatist until this point. Particularly unexpected is his preference for the conventionally structured The Sponger and his dislike for the Chekhovian A Month in the Country. About Turgenev's subtle masterpiece of delicate psychological characterization, It Breaks Where It Is Thinnest, Chekhov wrote to Olga Knipper on March 24, 1903: "It was written at the time when the best writers were still under the influence of Byron and of Lermontov with his Pechorin. Gorsky is after all the same as Pechorin. A bit watery and a bit trite, but Pechorin nonetheless. This play may turn out to lack all interest when performed; it's a little too long and its main interest is as a document of earlier times. But I might be mistaken, which is entirely possible. Look at how pessimistic I was last summer about Lower Depths and look at the success it's having! So I'm no judge."

But, if Chekhov failed to perceive the similarity of Turgenev's plays to his own, others saw it soon enough. In 1909, Stanislavsky produced a memorable revival of A Month in the Country with Olga Knipper in the lead­ing role, and three years later his company presented an evening of Turgenev's one-act plays. These two revivals demonstrated how effective the acting methods devised for Chekhov's plays were for performing the plays of his illustrious predecessor. Paradoxical though it may seem, it was the success of Chekhov the playwright that had made possible a true appreciation of Turgenev's important contribution to Russian drama, which his contempo­raries underestimated so short-sightedly. Only after Chekhov had made his mark was it possible for Turgenev's plays to enter permanently the repertoire of Russian and foreign theaters.

170. To Alexei Suvorin

Naro-Fominskoy e,¹ June 17, 1903

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!² A letter addressed twenty times over and speckled with twenty postmarks arrived for me yesterday. It looked as if it had come from Australia. What did I find when I opened it? It turned out to be a letter you had sent to New Jerusalem on May 23rd! I haven't even gone to New Jerusalem. I went to Zvenigorod District to spend a day with Maklakov and told Vasya and Misha too, I think, that I was going to New Jerusalem because New Jerusalem is generally considered the closest address to Maklakov's.³ So if youve had to wait a long time for an answer, don't blame me.

I spent only a few hours in Petersburg. I saw Marx. We didn't

have anything special to say to one another. He offered me in German five thousand for medical expenses, and I declined. Then he made me a gift of two or three poods of his editions, which I took, and we parted with the firm resolve to meet and talk things over in August and to think them over until then.⁴

I haven't told Misha anything about Marx, and the things he's told you are nothing more than his own conjectures. There's been a sort of turnabout in my personal life again. I went to see Professor Ostrou- mov, and after a thorough examination he gave me a bad scolding, told me my health was in very bad shape, that I had emphysema, pleurisy, and so on and so forth, and ordered me to spend the winter in the north, near Moscow, and not in the Crimea. I'm happy, of course, but what a chore it's going to be to find a cottage for the winter. Where in the Moscow area will I find a place whose cold and lack of comfort won't send me to my grave? At any rate, I'm looking, and when I find something, I'll let you know.

Send me the next issues of the newspaper. I've sealed up the previous issues in a package and given it to Vasya to hand over to you.⁵ My address is: Naro-Fominskoye, Moscow Province. Should there be any change in address, I'll let you know in plenty of time.

We have a fine river here at the cottage, but there's no one to go fishing with.

Lavrov, the publisher of Russian Thought, is very ill (nephritis, angina pectoris) and is anxious to arrange it so that his journal doesn't fall into the hands of his heirs. Apparently the affair has already been settled; the journal has been sold and is now safe. Goltsev has remained at the helm, and they've even invited me to be fiction editor.⁶

And so I'll be staying in the Moscow area for the winter; Ostrou- mov won't let me go abroad. ("You're an invalid," he says.) I've grown so unused to the cold I'll be freezing all the time. Keep well and happy. I wish you and yours all the best. If I receive the next issues of the newspaper from you, I'll return them just as you sent them, in a package delivered by Vasya.

Yours, A. Chekhov

The abolition of lashing and head shaving is a major reform.⁷

1. This was a country estate not far from Moscow where Chekhov settled for a part of the summer, after traveling extensively throughout Russia in May and early June, in violation of the orders of his personal physician, Dr. Isaak Altschuller.

Quoted in Nikolai Polevoy's somewhat distorted translation.

Chekhov was in St. Petersburg from May 13 to May 15, at which time he informed his brother Mikhail (Misha) and Suvorin's valet Vasily (Vasya) of his future travel plans. At that time he considered renting a cottage on the estate of the lawyer Vasily Maklakov (Maklakov became an important parliamentary leader when the Duma was established after the 1905 Revolu­tion; after the October Revolution, he was one of the principal leaders of the anti-Soviet Russian emigres in Paris). However, Chekhov changed his plans and chose to settle at Naro-Fominskoye, which occasioned a mixup in his correspondence with Suvorin.

Like all of Chekhov's friends, Suvorin kept urging him to do something about the unfair contract with Adolf Marx. But Chekhov insisted that any change in the contract had to be suggested by Marx himself.

With the abolition of censorship restrictions after 1905, Maria Chekhova felt free to admit in the note to her edition of her brother's letters that the newspaper mentioned here was the underground anti-government biweekly Liberation, published in Stuttgart by Russian 6migres, which was illegal in Russia. This was one of several such publications with which Suvorin regularly supplied Chekhov.

Actually, Vukol Lavrov recovered and the journal did not have to be sold.

The government administrative order of June 15, 1903, abolished the following penalties in all hard-labor compounds and Siberian and Sakhalin penal colonies: shaving of the head, lashing and being manacled to wheel­barrows. The last-named penalty, which existed only on Sakhalin and which was vividly described by Chekhov in his book, suggests that the reform was carried out under the impact of The Island of Sakhalin.

171. To Solomon Rabinovich (Sholom Aleichem)¹

Naro-Fominskoye, June 19, 1903

Dear Solomon Naumovich,

Im writing nothing or very little these days, so I can make you only a conditional promise: I'll be glad to write the story if my illness doesn't prevent it. As for stories of mine that have already been pub­lished, they are entirely at your disposal, and I will be nothing if not deeply gratified to see them translated into Yiddish and printed in a miscellany for the benefit of the Jewish victims in Kishinyov.

With my sincere respect and devotion,

A. Chekhov

I received your letter yesterday, June 18th.²

i. The great Yiddish storyteller wrote to Chekhov asking him to contribute a story to a collection he was editing and which was to be published in Warsaw for the benefit of the victims of the recent atrocious pogrom in Kishinyov. Since Chekhov was not able to supply a new story, Sholom Aleichem selected his earlier piece, "Difficult People," which was translated into Yiddish and included in the collection.

i. On August 6, 1903, Chekhov wrote to Sholom Aleichem again, offering to help place a Russian translation of one of Sholom Aleichem's stories in any journal of his choice.

172. To Sergei Diaghilev

Yalta, July 12, 1903

Dear Sergei Pavlovich,

I've been a little slow in answering your letter because I received it not-in Naro-Fominskoye, but in Yalta, where I have recently arrived and where I will probably stay until fall. I've given your letter much thought, and even though your proposal or invitation is very tempting, I'm afraid that in the last analysis I won't be able to respond the way you and I would have liked.¹

I cannot be an editor of The World of Art because it is impossible for me to live in Petersburg; the journal won't move to Moscow for my sake, editing by mail and wire is impossible, and the journal will gain nothing by having me as a nominal editor only. That's point number one. Point number two is that just as only one artist can paint a picture and only one orator can make a speech, so only one person can edit a journal. I'm no critic, of course, and would probably do a poor job of editing the criticism section. What is more, how could I work under the same roof as Dmitry Merezhkovsky? He is a resolute believer, a prosely­tizing believer, whereas I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer. I respect Merezhkovsky and value him as a person and writer, but if we ever do get the cart moving, we will end up pulling it in opposite directions.² Be that as it may, whether my attitude is mistaken or not, I've always thought and am certain that there should be only one editor, and that The World of Art in particular should be edited by you alone. That is my opinion, and I don't expect to change it.

Don't be angry with me, dear Sergei Pavlovich, but it seems to me that if you continue editing the journal for another five years you'll come to agree with me. A journal, like a painting or a poem, must have a single personality and represent a single will. That is the way The

World of Art has been until now, and it has worked well. And that is the way it should continue.³

I wish you all the best and firmly clasp your hand. The weather in Yalta is cool, or at least not hot, and I am flourishing. I send you my humble regards.

Yours, A. Chekhov

While Diaghilev initially welcomed the new religious interests of his closest literary associates, by the summer of 1903 the new ascendancy of religion over art and aesthetics began to alarm him. Some of the leading contributors to The World of Art—the Merezhkovskys, Vasily Rozanov and even Diaghilev's handsome personal friend Filosofov—were all deeply involved in a new religious journal, The New Way, which was an outgrowth of the meetings of the Religious-Philosophical Society. It now seemed to Diaghilev that the influence of The New Way was invading The World of Art and that the literary section of his journal was becoming too theological to suit his taste. He consulted Chekhov personally about his misgivings at the end of June and on July 3 sent him a plan for an editorial reform of his journal. What Diaghilev proposed to do was divide the editorial chores among four principal editors, putting Chekhov in charge of poetry and fiction, Merezhkovsky in charge of literary criticism, and entrusting the theater section and the visual-arts section to Dmitry Filosofov and Alexander Benois, respectively. The entire plan was contingent on Chekhov's consent.

Reference to Krylov's fable "The Swan, the Pike and the Crayfish," in which these three creatures are harnessed to a cart and end up pulling it in three different directions. In his letter of July 26, Diaghilev replied to Chekhov's objections with an offer to put him in charge of all the editorial decisions and to retain Merezhkovsky only as a regular contributor.

Despite Chekhov's firm refusal, Diaghilev continued coaxing him to agree in two more letters, assuring him that he saw no way of continuing his journal without Chekhov's help.

173. To Konstantin Balmont

Yalta, August 5, 1903

Dear Konstantin Dmitrievich,

I am leading the life of an idle, well-fed, world-weary tramp. I am now in Yalta, which is why your "Hymn to the Sun" took exactly ten days to reach me. I find it one of your most beautiful poems, but it still has to pass through the hands of Viktor Alexandrovich.¹ For the time being I'm an editor in spe only. I'm not reading manuscripts and probably won't be reading them and determining their fate before next

year. I've heard you're coming to Yalta in late August. If so, we'll soon be getting together for a chat, and I'll explain it all to you.

"Hymn to the Sun" is presently in Moscow. I sent it there with a covering letter.

I have received your Let Us Be Like the Sun.² I have read it and passed it on for others to read. I didn't thank you when I should have because first I didn't know your address, and second, I assumed that it was one of my friends who had sent it to me (it doesn't have your usual autograph).

Well, never mind, it's never too late to say thank you. Please accept my three low bows.

You ask whether I'm going to be in Moscow in September. My answer is I will.

I clasp your hand.

Your Autka burgher,

A. Chekhov

While Chekhov rejected Diaghilev's offer to edit The World of Art, he accepted a similar request from his friends Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev to help edit the literary section of Russian Thought during the difficult period the journal was undergoing because of Lavrov's illness. In actual fact, Chekhov was probably in no condition by now to handle any editorial chores for anyone. But his editorship was announced by Russian Thought, and Balmont saw in this announcement an opportunity to get his poetry on the pages of a traditional liberal journal, which would normally be leery of publishing anything as modernistic as his work. He accordingly sent Chekhov his "Hymn to the Sun," a long set of variations on the poem of the same name by St. Francis of Assisi. Chekhov forwarded the poem to Goltsev, who found it too long and too pretentious (one is tempted to agree with him in this case—as Balmont's poems go, "Hymn to the Sun" is astoundingly long and even more astoundingly dull). The following year the poem was published in Balmont's usual outlet, The World of Art, and he also included it as the opening poem in his collection Love Alone.

Let Us Be Like the Sun, subtitled "Tetraphony of the Elements," was Balmont's single most successful collection of verse. It was published at the end of 1902.

174. To Olga Knipper

Yalta,

October 19, 1903

Greetings, sweet horsy, my darling,

I didn't write you yesterday because I was waiting with trepida­tion for a telegram all day. Late last night your telegram came, and early this morning I got a hundred-eighty-word telegram from Vladimir Ivanovich.¹ Many thanks. I was so worried, so afraid. The things that worried me most of all were the second act's lack of movement and a certain sketchy quality in the role of Trofimov, the student. After all, Trofimov is constantly being sent into exile, he is constantly being ex­pelled from the university. How can you put all those things across?

Tell them to send me a copy of the repertoire, darling, I haven't received it. If somebody's coming this way, don't bother about sending my cap; send me a package of high-quality paper, some tooth powder, and a package of stationery (the cheapest) and some other exciting things. I am living well. The kitchen is functioning satisfactorily, though last night they did serve sturgeon and roast beef again, neither of which are on Masha's list.² Speaking of Masha, tell her that my digestion is improving daily and that Mother is feeling fine. The weather is excel­lent, even better than it was.

Is my play going to be performed? If so, when? I have received a very nice letter from Konstantin Sergeyevich;³ it was cordial and sincere. Will The Pillars of Society⁴ be performed this season? I still haven't seen it, you know. I'll be arriving in early Novem­ber. I'll probably publish the play in Gorky's miscellany, only I don't know how I'm going to get around that German, Marx.⁵

The Odessa newspapers have reported the plot of my play. It doesn't resemble it a bit.⁶

Darling horsy, a thousand rubles for a steam bath! I long for a steam bath. Mushrooms and ferns are sprouting all over my body.

Meanwhile, be on the lookout for a very good tailor to make me a winter coat. And be on the lookout for some lightweight fur. Make me a detailed list on a separate sheet of paper of the things I should take to Moscow with me. And write me who is going to play Charlotte. It it really Rayevskaya? If so, instead of Charlotte you'll have an un­funny, pretentious Eudoxia.⁷

I've just finished reading an article by Rossov the actor on Julius Caesar.⁸ It's in New Times (Wednesday). His warm praise for Kachalov and Vishnevsky is odd, because last year Rossov wrote about the Art Theater with hatred and majestic revulsion.

Mikhailovsky and Kostya are here.⁹ They've just dropped by.

Yours,

A.

i. Chekhov had sent the completed manuscript of The Cherry Orchard to the Moscow Art Theater. His wife's telegram informed him that the manu­script had been received and the long, enthusiastic telegram from Nemirovich- Danchenko told Chekhov that the play was the finest thing he'd ever written

and went on to compare its characters to those of Chekhov's earlier plays.

In view of Chekhov's digestive difficulties, his sister had prepared a de­tailed list for the family cook of the things Chekhov was and was not allowed to eat.

Stanislavsky.

The Pillars of Society by Ibsen and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar were among the successful new productions of the Moscow Art Theater.

Chekhov had planned to publish the text of The Cherry Orchard in Knowledge, a miscellany which was being prepared by Gorky's literary group. But his contract with Adolf Marx permitted him to publish his new works only in periodicals or in nonprofit publications "issued for purposes of charity." To get around this restriction, Knowledge agreed to donate a per­centage of its profits to endow a medical school for women and for other worthy causes.

An article in Odessa News outlined the plot of The Cherry Orchard on the basis of some third-hand account of the play. According to the article, the first act showed a cherry orchard in full bloom and a group of young people in it, who then gradually age as the play progresses. This was one of the several garbled accounts of the play's content that appeared in the Russian press prior to its opening. Chekhov reacted to these distortions with an untypical angry irritability, which testified to his deteriorating physical condition.

In several of his letters Chekhov expressed anxiety lest the actress Yevgenia Rayevskaya might be allowed to play Charlotte. The reference to Eudoxia (the Byzantine-Greek version of the name is cited rather than its standard Russian form) is not clear.

Nikolai Rossov was one of the Moscow correspondents of New Times.

This Mikhailovsky is not the powerful literary critic but the novelist Nikolai Garin, the author of the Russian juvenile classic Tyomas Childhood. His real name happened to be Nikolai Mikhailovsky, and he took the pen name of Garin in order not to be confused with the critic. Kostya is Olga's brother Konstantin Knipper, who was a friend of Garin's. Both Garin and Konstantin Knipper were railroad engineers by profession and they were in the Crimea looking over prospective sites for a projected railroad branch.

175. To Olga Knipper

Yalta,

October 23, 1903

You write that fifros can't do anyone any damage with his lies, horsy. But all the newspapers—literally all the provincial newspapers— are reprinting him, and today I saw it in the Moscow Courier. What a harmful animal he is!¹

You write that Vishnevsky can't play Gayev. Well, who then?

Stanislavsky? Then who'll play Lopakhin? Lopakhin is not to be given to Luzhsky under any circumstances. He'll either make him very pallid or clown his way through the part. His job is to play Yepikhodov. No, please don't deprive Vishnevsky of his role.

It's getting colder; there's winter in the air. That tall Olga Mik­hailovna² came to see us yesterday. She discussed love and promised to send some herring.

There's absolutely nothing new. I get up in the morning, muddle through the day in one way or another, lie down in the evening and fall quickly asleep, and that's all. Almost no one comes to see me.

Nemirovich writes that my play has a lot of tears and a certain amount of coarseness. Write and tell me what you think is wrong, darling, and what they say, and I'll correct it. It's not too late, you know; I could still rework an entire act.

So the actors like Pishchik? Fm glad to hear it. I think Gribunin will do a splendid job playing him.³

I bow very low before you, darling. I kiss you and hug you. Be cheerful and content. So far everything's going fine in the kitchen, that is, they've been cooking me the things on the list Masha left. I can't wait to get to Moscow and dig into some corned beef and veal cutlets. Especially the corned beef. And I want to pet my horsy too.

Yours,

A.

i. Chekhov's mounting irritation with mistakes and distortions in the advance publicity for The Cherry Orchard reached an explosive climax with the publication of an unsigned announcement of the play's production in the newspaper News of the Day on October 19. Chekhov happened to know that the announcement was written by the drama critic Nikolai fefros, one of Moscow Art Theater's most enthusiastic boosters, later on its historian and, until this incident, an acquaintance and a correspondent of Chekhov's. The seemingly insignificant errors about the play's setting and the more serious ones about its characters (see next letter) first enraged Chekhov and then put him into a state of prolonged depression that seems out of all proportion to the provocation. There were bitter complaints in letters to his wife, an ex­change of angry telegrams with Nemirovich-Danchenko and a request to the local Yalta newspaper to print a retraction of Efros's announcement. Even less characteristically, Chekhov conceived a hatred for fefros and in sub­sequent months forbade his correspondents to mention the man's name in their letters.

The depth of Chekhov's emotional reaction to this trivial incident can be seen in his letter to Olga Knipper of October 25: "My dearest horsy, today The Crimean Courier and Odessa News have reprinted that thing from News of the Day. It is sure to be reprinted in all the newspapers. Had I known that this stunt of Efros's would have such a bad effect on me, I would never have let the Art Theater have my play. I feel as if I had been splashed with slops which I am now forced to drink."

Olga Solovyova. The ironic tone might have been occasioned by her backing out of financing the marine-biology laboratory which Chekhov had helped her plan (cf. Letter 156).

After several changes in casting plans, it was indeed Vladimir Gribunin who played Pishchik in the first performance of The Cherry Orchard.

176. To Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

Yalta,

October 23, 1903

Dear Vladimir Ivanovich,

When I let your theater have Three Sisters and an announcement about it appeared in News of the Day, both you and I were indignant. I talked with Efros, and he gave me his word it would never happen again.¹ Now I suddenly read that Ranevskaya is living abroad with Anya, that she is living with a Frenchman, that Act Three takes place some­where in a hotel,² that Lopakhin is a kulak, a son of a bitch, and so on and so forth. What could I think? How could I suspect you had a hand in it? In my telegram I had only Efros in mind, I accused only Ёйгоб, and I felt so strange, I couldn't believe my eyes as I read the telegram in which you tried to shift all the blame onto yourself.³ It makes me sad that that's how you understood me and even sadder that it resulted in this misunderstanding. But let's forget the whole affair as quickly as possible. Tell Ёйгов I never want to have anything to do with him again, and then forgive me if I overdid things in my telegram. And bastal

Today I had a letter from my wife, the first one dealing with the play. I will so much be looking forward to your letters. It takes four to five days for a letter to get here—how awful!

I've had an upset stomach and a cough for a long time now. My bowels seem to be on the mend, but that cough keeps on as before, and I don't know what to do, whether to go to Moscow or not. I'd very much like to sit in on some rehearsals and have a look at things. I'm afraid Anya will speak in a tearful tone of voice (for some reason you find her similar to Irina), I'm afraid she won't be played by a young actress. Anya never once cries in the play and nowhere does she even have tears in her voice. She may have tears in her eyes during the second act, but her tone of voice is gay and lively. Why do you say in your telegram that there are many weepy people in my play? Where are they? Varya's the only one, and that's because she's a crybaby by nature. Her tears are not meant to make the spectator feel despondent. I often use "through her tears" in my stage directions, but that indicates only a character's mood, not actual tears.⁴ There's no cemetery in the second act.

I lead a lonely life, keeping to a diet, coughing, and losing my temper from time to time. I'm tired of reading. There you have my life.

I haven't seen The Pillars of Society yet, I haven't seen Lower Depths or Julius Caesar. If I could go to Moscow now, I'd be in a state of bliss for a whole week.

It's growing cold here too. Keep well and calm, now. Don't be angry. I'm looking forward to your letters. Not letter, letters.

Yours, A. Chekhov

In all probability the play will be published in Gorky's miscellany.

At the time of the first performance of Three Sisters, Ёйгоэ published an announcement that Three Sisters was only the working title of the play and that Chekhov intended to change it to another, more suitable one.

This misunderstanding arose from the close similarity of the Russian words for hotel and living room. In his extreme irritation, Chekhov seems to have actually feared that Stanislavsky might move the setting of Act Three to a hotel, merely because of the mistake in the Efros announcement.

In an effort to placate Chekhov, Nemirovich sent him a telegram in which he tried to take the blame for the mixup, explaining that he had told Efros the content of The Cherry Orchard orally, instead of showing him the text and therefore was partly responsible for the garbled announcement.

This remark is an extremely important guide for any production of Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. All too often, Chekhov's frequent stage direction "through her tears" is taken all too literally by directors and actresses.

177. To Konstantin Alexeyev (Stanislavsky)

Yalta,

October 30, 1903

Dear Konstantin Sergeyevich,

Many thanks for the letter and thank you for the telegram too.¹ Letters are very precious to me because in the first place I'm all alone here and in the second I sent the play off three weeks ago and didn't receive your letter until yesterday, and if it hadn't been for my wife I'd have known nothing and could have imagined any number of things. As I worked on Lopakhin, I thought of him as your role. If for any reason he doesn't appeal to you, take Gayev. Lopakhin may be a mer­chant, but he is a decent person in every sense; his behavior must be entirely proper, cultivated and free of pettiness or clowning. I had the feeling you could do a brilliant job of this role, the central role in the play. If you take Gayev, give Lopakhin to Vishnevsky. He won't be an artistic Lopakhin, but he won't be a petty one either. Luzhsky would make an unfeeling foreigner of the role, Leonidov would turn it into a cute little kulak.² When you're selecting an actor for the role, don't forget that Varya, a serious and religious young lady, is in love with Lopakhin; she could never have loved a cute little kulak.

I very much want to go to Moscow, but I don't see how I can break away from here. Its growing cold, and I almost never leave the house, I'm not used to being out of doors and keep coughing. It's not Moscow or the trip I'm afraid of; it's the layover in Sevastopol that lasts from two o'clock until eight—and in the most boring company imagin­able.

Write and tell me what role you take. My wife has written that Moskvin wants to play Yepikhodov. Well, that's fine; the play will only gain from it.

My most humble regards and greetings to Maria Petrovna.³ I wish you and her all the very best. Keep well and cheerful.

I haven't yet seen Lower Depths, The Pillars of Society or Julius Caesar and am very anxious to see them.

Yours, A. Chekhov

The reason I'm sending this to the theater is that I don't know where you live.

1. While Stanislavsky had originally disliked The Seagull and had strong doubts about the possible success of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, he fell in love with The Cherry Orchard at first sight. On October 20, he sent Chekhov a telegram and a letter expressing his wildly enthusiastic reaction. In his letter he wrote: "I hereby proclaim this play to be outside of all competition and not subject to any criticism whatsoever. Anyone who does not understand it is an idiot. This is my sincere conviction. I will play in it with delight, and if such a thing were possible, I would like to try playing all of the roles, not excluding the charming Charlotte." In his letter, Stanislavsky also informed Chekhov that he was wrong to have called his play a comedy, for it was a tragedy "regardless of what escape into a better life you might indicate in the last act."

For the final distribution of the roles, see the commentary to the next letter.

Stanislavsky's wife, the actress Maria Lilina, was by now also carrying on an active correspondence with Chekhov.

178. To Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

Yalta,

November 2, 1903

Dear Vladimir Ivanovich,

Two letters from you in one day! Thank you very much. I'm not drinking any beer; the last time I had any was in July. And I'm not allowed to eat honey; it gives people stomach aches.¹ And now to the play.

Anya can be played by anyone at all, even a complete un­known, as long as she is young and looks like a little girl and speaks in a youthful, vibrant voice. It's not a particularly important role.²

Varya is a much more important role. What about having Maria Petrovna play her? Without Maria Petrovna the role will seem flat and crude, and I'll have to rework it, tone it down. Maria Petrovna doesn't have to worry about being typecast, because in the first place she is a talented person, and in the second, Varya isn't at all like Sony a or Natasha; she wears black, she's a nun, she's slightly simple-minded, a crybaby, and so on and so forth.³

Gayev and Lopakhin are roles for Konstantin Sergeyevich to try out and choose from. If he were to take Lopakhin and do well in the role, the play would be a success. Because if Lopakhin is pallid, por­trayed by a pallid actor, then both the role and the play are ruined.⁴

Pishchik is for Gribunin. For heaven's sake, don't give the role to Vishnevsky.

Charlotte is an important role. You can't give it to Pomyalova, of course. Muratova might be good, but she's not funny. This is Miss Knipper's role.⁵

Yepikhodov—if Moskvin wants it, so be it. He'll make an excellent Yepikhodov. I had assumed that Luzhsky would play him.⁰

Firs is for Artyom.

Dunyasha is for Khalyutina.⁷

Yasha. If the Alexandrov you wrote me about is the one who is your assistant director, then let him have Yasha. Moskvin would make a wonderful Yasha. Nor do I have anything against Leonidov.

"the cherry orchard" / 463

The Passerby is for Gromov.

The stationmaster who recites "The Peccatrix"⁸ in the third act is for an actor with a bass voice.

Charlotte speaks correct, not broken Russian, but every once in a while she hardens a final soft consonant and uses a masculine adjective with a feminine noun or vice versa.⁹ Pishchik is a true Russian, an old man afflicted by the gout, old age and too much to eat; he is stout and wears a long coat (a la Simov)¹⁰ and boots without heels. Lopakhin wears a white vest and yellow shoes; he takes big steps and waves his arms as he walks. He thinks while he walks and walks in a straight line. Since his hair is rather long, he often tosses his head back. When lost in thought, he strokes his beard from back to front, that is, from neck to mouth. Trofimov is clear, I think. Varya wears a black dress with a wide belt.

For three years I've been planning to write The Cherry Orchard, and for three years I've been telling you to engage an actress to play the role of Lyubov Andreyevna. And now you're stuck with a game of soli­taire that is not working out.¹¹

I'm in the most idiotic situation imaginable: I'm trapped here all alone with no idea why. And you are wrong to say that, despite all your work, it is "Stanislavsky's theater." It is only you they talk about, only you they write about, while Stanislavsky is being criticized for his Bru­tus.¹² If you leave, I leave. Gorky is younger than we are, and he has his own life to live. ... As for the theater in Nizhny Novgorod, that's a passing fancy; Gorky will give it a try, have a taste of it and drop it. By the way, both theaters for the people and literature for the people are ridiculous; they're all merely lollipops for the people. What needs to be done is not lower Gogol to the people's level, but raise the people to Gogol's level.¹³

I'd so very much like to go to the Hermitage¹⁴ and have some sterlet and a bottle of wine there. There was a time when I could drink a bottle of champagne solo without its affecting me and then have some cognac and still not be affected by it.

I'll be writing you again, and until then I send you my humble regards and thanks. Is it true that Luzhsky's father has died? I read about it today in the papers.

Why is Maria Petrovna so determined to play Anya? And why does Maria Fyodorovna think she's too aristocratic for Varya?¹⁵ After all, she plays in Lower Depths, doesn't she? Oh, let them do what they want. I embrace you. Keep well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Although everything was more or less available in Yalta, Chekhov's friends and admirers kept sending him foods and potables from Moscow.

Despite Chekhov's insistence on a very young actress for the role of Anya, it was finally given to Maria Petrovna Lilina, who was thirty-seven at the time. Chekhov missed a good bet when he turned down Nemirovich's suggestion that Anya be played by a young drama student named Natalia Lisenko, who later became one of the most glamorous stars of the early Russian cinema and was a prominent film actress in Germany and France during the 1920s.

We know from Maria Lilina's published letters to Chekhov that al­though she knew she would be more suitable for the role of Varya, she saw in Anya an opportunity to prove that she could still get away with playing a teen-aged girl, the kind of role she had been specializing in throughout her career. Varya was eventually played by Maria Andreyeva (see note 15 to this letter).

Chekhov repeatedly urged Stanislavsky to take the role of Lopakhin, which he wrote especially for him. But Stanislavsky did not like to remind the public of his own merchant-class origins. He chose to play the aristocratic Gayev, pleading a lack of empathy with the character of Lopakhin. This role, which Chekhov considered central to the proper balance of the play, was given to Leonid Leonidov, the very actor Chekhov thought least suitable of all the possible candidates.

During his work on The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov had thought of either Varya or Charlotte as possible roles for his wife, but she did not play either of them. The role of Charlotte went to Yelena Muratova, an actress who otherwise specialized in the roles of peasant nurses and elderly women.

Chekhov was surprised that Ivan Moskvin, the young actor who became famous for his interpretation of the title role in Tsar Fyodor loannovich, wished to play Yepikhodov. However, it became one of Moskvin's most cele­brated roles, and he kept playing Yepikhodov for decades to come.

Sofya Khalyutina did play the maid Dunyasha in the early per­formances of The Cherry Orchard, as Chekhov had wished. Later on she took over the role of Charlotte and scored a memorable success in it.

"The Peccatrix" (the title is also translated as "The Sinner") is a narrative poem by Alexei Tolstoy, which as Margaret Dalton tells us in her recent study of this writer (A. K. Tolstoy, New York, 1972) "is not outstand­ing among Tolstoy's poems." Chekhov's clever touch of having the station- master recite a few lines of this undistinguished account of a courtesan's conversion to Christianity in the midst of Ranevskaya's Act Three party is unfortunately lost on non-Russian audiences.

Because Stanislavsky had Shakespeare's Shylock speak with a strong Yiddish accent and the urban family in Gorky's The Philistines in a provincial okanie dialect, Chekhov was understandably worried that Stanislavsky might force Charlotte to have a broadly comic German accent.

Viktor Simov was the principal set designer of the Moscow Art Theater.

Chekhov had originally intended the role of Lyubov Ranevskaya to be played by an elderly actress. There was no one like that in the company and the role went to Olga Knipper, who made it her own for many decades to come (she kept appearing in it well into the 1930s). Because of this, it has become traditional to have this character played by a much younger actress than Chekhov had imagined when he was writing the play.

Over the years, Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky had many disagreements and spats, some of them rather public. Their feuds were immortalized in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Black Snow (The Theatrical Novel was the original Russian title). But they remained working partners in the theater they had created until the end of their lives.

Despite the outward success of the company's production of Julius Caesar, Stanislavsky admitted in his letters to Chekhov that he was displeased with his own performance as Brutus. Much of the press agreed with his verdict.

This view is diametrically opposed to the central thesis of Tolstoy's What is Art? and to one of the basic principles of Soviet post-Stalinist aesthetics. For both, a work of art or literature that is incomprehensible to the "average reader" or "average audience" is unsuccessful.

A restaurant in Moscow, which is not to be confused with the art gallery in St. Petersburg.

The reasons for Maria (Petrovna) Lilina's determination to play Anya are outlined in note 3 above. The idea that Maria (Fyodorovna) Andreyeva felt herself too aristocratic to play Varya is amusing in view of the lady's subsequent career. She joined the Communist party in 1904, be­came Maxim Gorky's mistress and traveled with him to America. Because of Andreyeva's presence, Gorky was thrown out of a New York hotel during his American visit and conceived a murderous hatred for New York as a result. In the years 1919-21, Andreyeva was Deputy Commissar for Education and the Arts in Petrograd. In that capacity, she did everything in her power to stop Meyerhold's production of Vladimir Mayakovsky's revolutionary extravaganza Mystery-Bouffe. The reason for Andreyeva's opposition was that, in her opinion, what the proletariat needed and wanted was not Mayakovsky's Futuristic poetry, but a good new production of Othello with Maria Andreyeva as Desdemona.

179. To Vera Kommissarzhevskaya

Moscow, January 6, 1904

Dear Vera Fyodorovna,

Where are you? In Baku, Tiflis, Kharkov? I didn't receive your December 29th letter until today, January 6th, and the telegram you sent to Yalta arrived yesterday with the mail.¹

I haven't seen Savina nor been in correspondence with her, and

it never occurred to me to give Cherry Orchard to the Empress Alex­andra Theater. The play belongs to the Art Theater. I let Nemirovich- Danchenko have it for both Moscow and Petersburg. This year it doesn't seem as if the Art Theater is going to Petersburg, but even so there would be no use in talking to the management about the play.

The reason I can tell you this so light-heartedly is that I am firmly convinced that my Cherry Orchard is not at all suitable for you. The central female role in the play is an old woman who lives entirely in the past and has nothing in the present. The other parts, at least the other female parts, are more or less minor and lacking in subtlety, and are of no interest to you. My play will soon be published in the miscel­lany Knowledge, and if you read it you'll see for yourself that there is nothing in it to interest you, no matter how indulgent you feel toward it.

How is your health? Did traveling from Baku to Tiflis tire you out? Happy New Year. I wish you health, strength, success, and—at least one day a week—complete and utter happiness. I kiss and clasp your hand.

Devotedly, A. Chekhov

i. Kommissarzhevskaya's telegram, sent on December 21, 1903, from Rostov-on-the-Don, read: "Insistently beg you not to give Orchard to anyone in Petersburg prior to my letter. Writing, mailing it at once. Kommis- sarzhevskaya."

In her letter, she wrote:

Dear Anton Pavlovich,

I am opening my own theater in St. Petersburg. I want its in­auguration to be connected with your name and am therefore asking you to let me have The Cherry Orchard for my opening. I know that you would like to give it to the Empress Alexandra Theater and to have Savina play it. Judging by the few bits of informa­tion I have about this play, the role is just right for her and she would play it very well. But you, of all people, cannot possibly refuse to help me with my insanely difficult undertaking. Need I tell you how many enemies I have? But there are also, I believe, people who will help me realize what the best that is in me wants to do. I want you to be the first among them, I must have it this way. I will not say another thing. You can't fail to sense how anxious I am, how I need your word and your consent. Send me a telegram to the Orient in Tiflis. Happy New Year. Write me something—anything.

V. Kommissarzhevskaya

"the cherry orchard" / 467

180. To Olga Knipper

Yalta,

February 27, 1904

My fine spouse,

Even though you have no faith in me as a doctor, let me tell you that Korsakov has a marked tendency toward pessimism; he always assumes the very worst. Once, when I had been treating a little girl for some two or three months, I called him in for a consultation. He sen­tenced her to death, yet she's alive to this day and has long since married. If tuberculosis is in a vertebra, it still has a long way to go before reaching the brain or the spinal chord. Just make sure the boy isn't dragged from place to place on visits or allowed to jump around too much.¹ And may I ask you once again why they chose Yevpatoria?²

The sun hasn't come out once the whole time I've been in Yalta, i.e., since February 17th. It's terribly damp, the sky is gray, and I've been keeping to my room.

My luggage has arrived, but it looks rather despondent. First, there are fewer pieces than I had thought, and second, both of the ancient trunks developed cracks en route. My life here is boring, unin­teresting. The people around me are annoyingly uninteresting; they have no interests, they are indifferent to everything.

Meanwhile, The Cherry Orchard is having three or four perform­ances in every city; it's a success, can you imagine? I've just been reading about Rostov-on-the-Don, where it is having its third perform­ance.³ Oh, if it were only not Muratova and Leonidov⁴ and Artyom play­ing in it in Moscow! I've been keeping it to myself, but that Artyom is giving an abominable performance.⁵

You write you haven't received any letters from me, but I've been writing every day. Yesterday was the first day I didn't write. Even though there isn't anything to write about, I still write. Schnapp,⁶ that son of a bitch, has made himself at home, he has already taken to lying in my study with his hind legs stretched out. He sleeps in Mother's room. He plays outside with other dogs, so he's always dirty.

You have an awful lot of uncles, and you're constantly seeing them off. Watch out you don't catch cold. Stay at home, at least during the fourth week of Lent when the theater has no performances.

Have you come up with anything for the summer? Where are we going to live? I'd like it to be near Moscow, near a railroad station, so we could do without a carriage and without benefactors and ad­mirers. Think about a place to live, darling, think hard and maybe you'll come up with something. After all, you're so clever, so judicious, so reliable—when you're not angry, that is. I remember with such pleasure our trip to Tsaritsyno and back.

Well, God be with you, darling, my kind, affable little puppy. I miss you, I have no choice but to miss you; you've become a part of me. I kiss my wife, I embrace her.

Yours,

A.

Olga was worried about the health of her little nephew Lev Knipper (b. 1898), the son of her brother Konstantin. The boy had been examined by the renowned pediatrician Dr. Nikolai Korsakov, who found tuberculosis in a vertebra. Lev Knipper recovered and lived on to become a much-honored Soviet composer, who in addition to large quantities of derivative, academic music also wrote the lilting song "Meadowland," known in English as "The Red Cavalry Song," which enjoyed a great international popularity during World War II and has remained a perennial favorite ever since.

A resort in the Crimea.

A Rostov newspaper, which Chekhov received, announced that an additional performance of The Cherry Orchard had been scheduled at the local municipal theater "by tumultuous popular demand."

Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had cast Yelena Muratova as Charlotte and Leonid Leonidov as Lopakhin against Chekhov's wishes and he was extremely unhappy with their performances.

Artyom had been Chekhov's own choice for the role of Firs.

A new dog.

181. To Olga Knipper

Yalta, March 6, 1904

You ought to be ashamed of yourself writing with such awful ink, my little baby cachalot, my darling. You may not believe it, but I give you my word, I had to peel the envelope away from the letter, as if they'd been glued together on purpose. Masha has sent me the same sort of sticky letter. It's downright revolting. Not only are the letters sticky, but you use them to frighten me with your premonitions: "There's some­thing horrible hanging over my head," etc. Our vile cold weather makes me feel bad enough as it is. There's snow in the mountains and a thin layer of snow on the roofs, and the air is colder than in Moscow.

Go ahead and take the apartment on Leontyev Lane, it's a good location, close to everything. I'll come two or three days before your arrival from Petersburg. Got it? I received a letter from Vishnevsky. He writes about the splendid full houses you've been having in Petersburg, praises the apartment on Leontyev Lane, and so on. Mikhailovsky¹ came to see me. He's going to the Far East and says that your brother Kostya is also planning to go—for an enormous salary, of course. And you can't deny that when a woman never stops talking about ovaries, kid­neys and bladders, and when she talks of nothing else, it makes you want to throw yourself out the window. Lyova² will recover, barring any unforeseen developments, of course.

What a revolting dream I had! I dreamed I was sleeping in bed with someone other than you; with some lady, very repulsive, a brag­ging brunette, and the dream went on for more than an hour. Now what do you make of that!

I want to see you, my darling. I want to talk with my wife, with my only woman. There's nothing new. All anyone talks about is the Japanese.³

Well, may the Lord bless you and keep you; don't mope, don't overwork, and be cheerful. Where did you get the idea that I had caught cold on the way from Tsaritsyno to Moscow? Please excuse my crudity, but what utter nonsense! It's only in Yalta that people catch colds. What I have is the most abominable case of sniffles.

I embrace my little cockroach and send her a million kisses.

A.

The novelist Nikolai Garin (see Letter 174, note 9). He wrote a memorial piece describing his last encounter with Chekhov before his de­parture for the Far East, which was published on July 22, 1904, in the army newspaper The Manchurian Army Herald and reprinted in the collection of memoirs about Chekhov (Chekhov as Remembered by His Contemporaries, Moscow, i960).

Lev Knipper. The woman mentioned in the previous sentence is his mother.

The Russo-Japanese War had just begun.

182. To Boris Lazarevsky¹

Yalta, April 13, 1904

Dear Boris Alexandrovich,

Your long, sad letter reached me yesterday.² After reading it, I sympathized with you with all my heart. I can only suppose you are no longer in need of my sympathy because spring has come, the weather is warm, and the famous harbor has been cleared of ice. When I was in Vladivostok, the weather was wonderfully warm even though it was October and there was a real live whale crossing the harbor and splash­ing with its huge tail. In short, my impression was a glorious one— perhaps because I was on my way back home. When the war is over (and it soon will be), you'll begin to take trips to surrounding areas; you'll go to Khabarovsk, to the Amur, to Sakhalin, and up and down the coast, you'll see a host of things that you've never before experienced and that youH remember to the end of your days, you'll meet with so much joy and suffering that you won't even notice that the three years which now so frighten you have flashed by. In peacetime, at least, life in Vladivostok is not all that boring; it's quite European in fact, and I don't think your wife will be making a mistake if she joins you after the war. If you're a hunter, I've heard endless stories about hunting and tigers!³ And what delicious fish! There are enormous, delicious oysters all along the coast. The state of my health permitting, I am going to go to the Far East as a doctor in July or August.⁴ I may even spend some time in Vladivostok. I'll soon be off to Moscow, but keep writing to Yalta nonetheless; my letters are always punctually forwarded from here no matter where I am.

I firmly clasp your hand and wish you good health and an ex­cellent frame of mind. You write there isn't anything to read in Vladi­vostok. What about the libraries? What about journals?

If there's a bombardment or something of the sort, write a description of it and send it as quickly as possible either to a newspaper or to Russian Thozight, depending on how long it is.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Boris Lazarevsky was a lawyer attached to the legal branch of the Imperial Russian Navy, who was stationed in Sevastopol when Chekhov met him. Lazarevsky was also a very minor writer who openly imitated Chekhov in his work. The two of them carried on an extensive correspondence in the last four years of Chekhov's life, dealing mostly with Lazarevsky's literary output and Chekhov's help in getting his writings placed with various publications.

In connection with the Russo-Japanese War, Lazarevsky was trans­ferred to Vladivostok. He wrote a bitterly complaining letter to Chekhov in which he expressed his dismay at the prospect of staying in Siberia for an­other three years.

The Siberian tiger was still being widely hunted in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria as late as the 1930s.

Believing himself to be on the way to recovery, Chekhov expressed his intention of volunteering as a military doctor with the Far Eastern army in several letters written in the last months of his life.

"the cherry orchard" / 471

183. To Father Sergius Shchukin¹

Moscow, May 27th, 1904

Dear Father Sergius,

Yesterday I discussed the case you are interested in with a well- known lawyer, and now let me tell you his opinion.² Have Mr. N. and his fiancee put together all the necessary documents and go to another province, Kherson, for instance, and get married there. Once they've been married, tell them to return home and go on living as if nothing had happened. It's no crime (it is not incest, after all); it is merely the violation of a long-established custom. If in two or three years someone denounces them or finds out or starts meddling and the case is taken to court, the children will still be recognized as legitimate, no matter what. Even if someone bothers to initiate a case against them (and it will be a flimsy case), they can petition the Emperor. Imperial authority will not condone what is forbidden by law (which is why there is no use petitioning for permission to get married), but it does have a wide latitude for granting pardon and will usually pardon what is inevitable.

I can't tell if I'm making myself clear. Forgive me, I'm in bed, I'm ill. I've been ill since May 2nd, and I haven't gotten dressed once since then. I can't carry out your other requests.

I'm going abroad on the third. You can find out my foreign address from my sister. Write me what you decide to do and how Mr. N. decides to act.

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

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. Father Shchukin was a Yalta priest who taught religion at the local girls' school (his first name is rendered as Sergius to convey the Church Slavic form Sergy, which clergymen used in preference to the standard Rus­sian form Sergei). He was another literary protege of Chekhov's. In ig¹¹» Father Shchukin published a memoir in Russian Thought in which he re­produced some of his literary discussions with Chekhov and told the little- known story of Chekhov's intercession on behalf of the Greek community at Autka. After Autka was incorporated into the city of Yalta, the local Greek population found itself evicted from the Autka Orthodox Church when the ecclesiastical authorities decided to have its Greek rite replaced with the Slavic one. At the request of the local Greeks, Chekhov appealed to the local authorities to allow the Greeks to keep their native rite. Some of the members of the municipal administration, irritated at what they thought was Chekhov's meddling in administrative affairs, tried to discredit him by spreading the rumor that he was actually a Greek.

2. Father Shchukin had written to Chekhov asking for advice about the plight of Grigory Neklyukov, a teacher at the Yalta Municipal School. Neklyukov, a widower, desired to marry his late wife's sister. It turned out that there was a law prohibiting such marriages as supposedly incestuous.

184. To Maria Chekhova

Berlin, June 6, 1904

Dear Masha,

I am writing you from Berlin. I've been here a whole day now. It turned very cold in Moscow and even snowed after you left; the bad weather must have given me a cold, I began having rheumatic pains in my arms and legs, I couldn't sleep at night, lost a great deal of weight, had morphine injections, took thousands of different kinds of medicine, and recall with gratitude only the heroin Altschuller once prescribed for me.¹ Nonetheless, toward departure time I began to recover my strength. My appetite returned, I began giving myself arsenic injections, and so on and so forth, and finally on Thursday I left the country very thin, with very thin, emaciated legs. I had a fine, pleasant trip. Here in Berlin we've taken a comfortable room in the best hotel, I am very much enjoying the life here and haven't eaten so well and with such an appetite in a long time. The bread here is amazing, I've been stuffing myself with it, the coffee is excellent, and the dinners are beyond words. People who have never been abroad don't know how good bread can be. There's no decent tea (we have our own kind) and none of our hors d'oeuvres, but everything else is superb, even though it's cheaper here than in Russia.² I've already put on weight, and today, despite the chill in the air, I even took the long ride to the Tiergarten. And so you can tell Mother and anyone else who's interested that I'm on my way to recovery or even that I've already recovered.³ My legs no longer ache, I don't have diar­rhea, I'm beginning to fill out, and I now spend the entire day on my feet, out of bed. Tomorrow I will be visited by a local celebrity, Professor Ewald, an intestinal specialist. Dr. Taube wrote him about me.

Yesterday I drank some marvelous beer.

Is Vanya⁴ in Yalta? Two days before I left he came to see me in Moscow, but then he disappeared; I saw no more of him. And I must confess that the thought of him, where he is and why he suddenly dis­appeared, troubled me throughout my trip. Please write and tell me what is happening.

The day after tomorrow we're leaving for Badenweiler. I'll send you the address. Write me whether you need money and when to send a check. I like Berlin very much, even though it is cool here today. I am reading German newspapers. The rumors about Russians coming in for a lot of abuse in the German press are exaggerated.

Keep well and cheerful now, and may the heavenly hosts protect you. Give my regards to Mother, and tell her that everything is coming along fine.

I'll arrive in Yalta in August. Regards to Grandma, Arseny and Nastya.⁵ To Varvara Konstantinovna too.⁶ I kiss you.

Yours, A. Chekhov

We forgot to take along the dressing gown.

Both morphine and heroin were available on prescription at the time as sedatives.

Apparently because of the four preceding sentences, this letter was omitted from the 1963-64 edition, which otherwise included almost all the other letters from Chekhov's last weeks.

Most of the letters to family and friends that Chekhov wrote from Berlin and Badenweiler assert that his tuberculosis had been miraculously cured and that he was recovering by leaps and bounds.

Ivan Chekhov.

The cook, the handyman and the maid at Chekhov's home in Yalta, respectively.

The headmistress of the girls' school in Yalta.

185. To Maria Chekhova¹

Badenweiler, June 28, 1904

Dear Masha,

We're having a fierce heat wave. It caught me unawares, and since all I have with me is winter clothes, I'm suffocating and dream of getting out of here. But where can I go? I thought of going to Italy, to Como, but everyone there has left because of the heat. All southern Europe is hot. I thought of taking a boat from Trieste to Odessa, but I don't know how feasible it is now in June-July. Can Georges² find out what sort of boats are available, whether they're comfortable, whether they make long and drawn-out stops, whether the food is good, and so on and so forth? It would be an irreplaceable excursion for me, provided the boat is good and not bad. Georges would be doing me a great favor were he to wire me collect. The wire should read as follows: "Badenweiler Tschechow. Bien. 16. Vendredi." This would mean: bien—the boat is good, 16—the number of days the voyage takes, vendredi—the day the boat leaves Trieste. Of course, all I'm giving is the form the wire is to take, and if the boat leaves on Thursday, it would be unbecoming to write vendredi.

It won't matter if the weather is a bit hot; I'll have my flannel suit. And to tell the truth, I'm afraid to take the train. I'd suffocate in one of those cars, especially now that I'm so short-winded and become even more so at the slightest provocation. Besides, there are no sleeping cars available all the way from Vienna to Odessa so it would be uncomfortable. And anyway the train would get me home earlier than required, and I still haven't had my fill of vacationing.

It's so hot that you feel like taking all your clothes off. I don't know what to do. Olga has gone to Freiburg to order a flannel suit for me. Here in Badenweiler there are no tailors or shoemakers. As a model she took along the suit Duchard made for me.

The food here is very tasty, but it does not do me much good. My stomach keeps getting upset. I can't eat the kind of butter they have here. Apparently my stomach is ruined beyond all hope. About the only remedy for it is to fast, in other words, to refrain entirely from eating, and that's that. And the only medicine for being short-winded is to keep per­fectly still.

There's not a single well-dressed German woman; their lack of taste is depressing.³

Keep well and cheerful now. My regards to Mother, Vanya, Georges, Grandma and all the rest. Write. I kiss you, I clasp your hand.

Yours,

A.

This is the last letter Chekhov ever wrote.

Chekhov's cousin Georgy.

Alexander Blok thought it both highly appropriate and utterly heart­breaking that this was the last comment we have from Chekhov on any subject.

EPILOGUE

Chekhov died in badenweiler in the early-morning hours of July 2, 1904. His last moments were described by his wife. He awoke her shortly after midnight and asked that she send for a doctor. His pulse was extremely weak. The doctor gave him camphor injections, had an oxygen pillow brought in and, to ease Chekhov's breathing, ordered a bottle of champagne. "Chekhov sat up/' Olga Knipper wrote, "and in a loud, emphatic voice said to the doctor in German (of which he knew very little): Tch sterbe . . / Then he picked up the glass, turned to me, smiled his wonderful smile and said: It's been such a long time since I've had champagne.' He drank it all to the last drop, quietly lay on his left side and was soon silent for­ever. The awful stillness of the night was broken only by a huge nocturnal moth which kept crashing painfully into the light bulbs and darting about the room. The doctor left and in the stillness and heat of the night the cork flew out of the half-empty champagne bottle with a tremendous noise." Even if Olga Knipper had invented all this (and she would have to be a literary artist of considerable imagination to have done so), there could hardly be a more appropriate death scene for Chekhov, with its apt symbols for life, affirmation and stoic acceptance of the inevitable.

Chekhov was brought back to Russia in a refrigerated railroad car bear­ing the inscription "For Oysters" and buried at the New Virgin Cemetery in Moscow, between the grave of his father and that of a Cossack widow named Olga Kukaretkina. Maxim Gorky and his friend Fyodor Chaliapin attended the funeral, along with thousands of other admirers. Gorky de­scribed the funeral in a hysterical letter he wrote to his wife on the same day and again, in more subdued tones, in his Chekhov memoir. He hated

the crowd, which instead of mourning for Chekhov kept ogling him and Chaliapin. lie qualified the funeral as "a thick, greasy cloud of triumphant vulgarity." The car for oysters and the name of Kukaretkina (something like "Cock-a-Doodle-Carriage") were for Gorky the final revenge that Russian vulgarity (poshlost') had wreaked against Chekhov. But this was Gorky's way—to hate the human herd, and to indict for the sake of thundering indictment. Chekhov, one can safely assume, would have been only wryly amused by the incongruous details that so pained Gorky.

Chekhov's impact on the literatures of the world began while he was still alive, even though he himself could not imagine that anyone in England would ever want to read one of his stories or that it would be possible to play The Cherry Orchard in Paris. That influence surges and ebbs periodically, and it has not yet reached anything resembling a stable level. Too many people see too many things in him. Could Katherine Mansfield, who once compared "The Steppe" to The Iliad, have seen the same things in Chekhov as did Mayakovsky? Could Frangois Mauriac have loved the same Chekhov as does Vladimir Nabokov, whose view of Russian literary history in his novel The Gift so startlingly resembles that of Chekhov's letters and who recently confessed that "it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet"? Did the Living Theater activists who, as Robert Brustein told us in "A Night at the Symposium," shouted obscenities at the mention of Chekhov's name truly hate him? Did they even know who he was? Could the judge who presided over the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966 and who admitted as evidence of Sinyav- skv's anti-Soviet attitude a disrespectful mention of Chekhov in one of his essays really have read and understood Chekhov?

The multiplicity of views and reactions is to be expected. One of the most startling responses to Chekhov comes from a writer who was Che­khov's diametrical opposite on almost any artistic, emotional and human level. After seeing the Moscow Art Theater perform Three Sisters, Alexander Blok wrote an ecstatic and penitent letter to his mother in which he swore that the play made him revise many of his views and attitudes: "We are all unfortunate that our native land pre­pared for us this soil, fertile in anger and mutual quarrels. All of us live behind Chinese walls, half despising each other, while our sole mutual enemy—Russian state institutions, church institutions, gin mills, fiscal and government officials—do. not show their face but sic us on each other.

"I shall strive with all mv strength to forget all Russian politics, all Russian amateurishness, all this morass, in order to become a human being and not a machine for manufacturing anger and hatred."

No, Blok was not promising to become apolitical and uninvolved. He was merely reminding himself, under the impact of seeing Chekhov's play,

epilogue / 477

of the essence of his own humanity, which the political passions of a polar­ized society tend to obscure and obliterate. This reaction to Three Sisters would have pleased Chekhov; but until about ten years ago it would have seemed incomprehensible to any Western reader or admirer of Chekhov. Now, however, those who have lived through these past ten years in the West should have no trouble understanding what Blok was talking about. This is significant. With his unbelievably sensitive antennae Blok caught the very gist of Chekhov's message. Most of his countrymen, of whatever persuasion, did not. It is now our turn. We are aware of Chekhov's miracu­lous art. It would be a tragedy if we too failed to become attuned to the lucid humanity and reasoned compassion which this art embodies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRINCIPAL SOURCES USED IN THE COMMENTARY

i. letters to chekhov

Alexander Chekhov. Letters to A. P. Chekhov from His Brother Alexander Chekhov. I. K. Luppol, ed. Moscow, 1939.

Maria Chekhova. Letters to My Brother A. P. Chekhov. Moscow, 1954.

The Correspondence of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper. 2 volumes pub­lished out of projected 3. A. B. Derman, ed. Moscow, 1936.

The correspondence of Maria Chekhova and Olga Knipper in The Hostess of the Chekhov House. S. N. Bragin, ed. Simferopol, 1969.

Sergei Diaghilev. Letters to Chekhov in From A. P. Chekhov's Archive. Moscow, i960.

Maxim Gorky. Letters to Chekhov in Volume 28 of his Collected Works. Moscow, 1954.

Vera Kommissarzhevskaya. Letters to Chekhov in Vera Kommissarzhevskaya. Letters, Memoirs About Her, Biographical Materials. A. Altschiiller and Yu. Rybakova, eds. Leningrad and Moscow, 1964.

Nikodim Kondakov. Letters to Chekhov in Bulletin of the Language and Literature Section of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences Publications, Volume 19, Number 1, Moscow, i960.

Vladimir Korolenko. Letters to Chekhov in Volume 10 of his Collected Works. Moscow, 1956.

Literary Heritage. Volume 68. Moscow, i960. This contains letters to Chekhov from Alexei Pleshcheyev, Alexander Kuprin, Ivan Bunin, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, and the articles "Letters to Chekhov About the Student Movement of 1899-1902" by A. N. Dubovnikov and "Chekhov in the Letters of His Brother Mikhail" by E. Z. Balabanovich.

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Maria Lilina.

Letters to Chekhov in Moscow Art Theater Yearbook, 1944 (published in 1946), Volume 1.

personal journals and diaries

Literary Heritage, Volume 68, which contains excerpts from the journals and diaries of Ivan Shcheglov, Vladimir Tikhonov, Nikolai Leykin, Vladimir Telyakovsky, Viktor Mirolyubov and Vladimir Korolenko.

Alexei Suvorin. Journals. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923.

memoirs

Mikhail Chekhov. Around Chekhov. Encounters and Impressions. Moscow, i960.

Maria Chekhova. Out of the Distant Past (in collaboration with N. A. Sysoyev). Moscow, i960.

Chekhov as Remembered by His Contemporaries. Moscow, i960, which con­tains the memoirs of Alexander Chekhov, Mikhail Chekhov, Viktor Simov, Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Vladimir Korolenko, Ilya Repin, Alexander Lazarev-Gruzinsky, Vyacheslav Fausek, Lydia Avilova, Vladimir Lady- zhensky, Ignaty Potapenko, Sergei Semyonov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasily Luzhsky, Vasily Kachalov, Maxim Kovalevskv, Father Sergius Shchukin, Lev Shapovalov, Nikolai Teleshov, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, Alexander Kuprin, Sergei Yelpaty- evsky, Ivan Novikov, Isaak Altschuller, Mikhail Pervukhin, Mikhail Chlenov, Alexander Serebrov, Nikolai Garin, Grigorv Rossolimo, Vikenty Veresayev, Nikolai Panov and Olga Knipper.

Zinaida Gippius. Living Portraits. Munich, 1971 (reprint of Prague, 1925, edition).

Olga Knipper. "Memoirs," in Moscow Art Theater Yearbook, 1949-50 (pub­lished in 1952).

Anatoly Koni. Memoirs About Writers. Leningrad, 1954.

Literary Heritage, Volume 68, which contains a number of additional memoirs, among them those of Nikolai Chekhov, Konstantin Korovin, Maria Zankovetskaya, Alexandra Khotyaintseva, Yekaterina Peshkova (Gorky's first wife), Alexei Sergeyenko (Pyotr Sergeyenko's son), Lydia Fvodorova (Alexander Fyodorov's wife), Ivan Bunin and Isaak Altschuller.

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Out of the Past, [n.p.], 1936.

Alexander Serebrov. Time and People. Moscow, i960.

Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik. "About Chekhov," in Selected Works. Moscow, 1954.

Konstantin Stanislavsky. My Life in Art. Moscow, 1962.

biographical sources

Mikhail Chekhov. The six biographical essays in Maria Chekhova's six-volume edition of Chekhov's letters. Moscow, 1912-16.

bibliography / 481

A Chronicle of Maxim Gorky's Life and Work, Volume 1 (1868-1907).

Klavdia Muratova, ed. Moscow, 1958. Nina Gitovich. A Chronicle of Chekhov's Life and Work (a compilation of biographical materials arranged chronologically, day by day). Moscow,

¹955-

Nikolai Gusev. A Chronicle of Lev Tolstoy's Life and Work, 1891-1910. Moscow, i960.

INDEX

(Page numbers in italics indicate detailed identification or discussion in the text or the commentary)

Abarinova, Antonina, 261-262

Abramova, Maria, 131

Agramov, Mikhail, 130-131

Aivazovsky, Ivan, 309, 310-311, 352

Akhmatova, Anna, 11

Albov, Mikhail, 164, 187, 207, 208

Alexander II, 4

Alexander III, 157, 181

Alexandrov, Nikolai, 462

Alexeyev, Konstantin, see Stanislavsky,

Konstantin Alexin, Alexander, 424-425 Altschuller, Isaak, 154, 341, 343, 348,

349, 367, 390, 451, 472 Amfiteatrov, Alexander, 244-247, 353 Andersen, Hans Christian, 372 Andreyev, Leonid, 12, 343, 369, 392,

424-425, 434 Andreyeva, Maria, 463-465 Andreyevsky, Sergei, 265, 268 Andronikova Toumanova, Princess Nina, 2, 201

Annensky, Innokenty, 392

Antokolsky, Mark, 250, 252-3, 321

Apelles, 120

Apukhtin, Alexei, 125

Apuleius, 258

Archimedes, 121

Argutinsky-Dolgorukov, Prince Vladimir,

303-304 Arkhangelsky, Pavel, 367 Arsenyev, Konstantin, 373 Artyom, Alexander, 410, 411, 423, 424,

449, 462, 467, 468 Ashinov, N. I., 133, 135 Astyryov, Nikolai, 238 A-t, see Peterson, Vladimir

Augier, fimile, 109

Avelan, Admiral F. K., 258, 259 Averkiev, Dmitry, 217-218 Avilova, Lydia, 64, 250, 266, 267, 289, 302, 343, 361, 417

Babel, Isaak, 437

Bakst, Leon (Leonid), 436

Balmont, Konstantin, 304, 347, 420-421,

437> 454-455 Balmont, Yekaterina, 304, 420, 421

Balzac, Honore de, 314

Baranov, Nikolai, 210, 215, 217, 235

Barantsevich, Kazimir, 131-132, 149, 163,

164, 176, 187, 208

Baratynsky, Yevgeny, 227, 268, 437

Baryatinsky, Prince Vladimir, 267

Batyushkov, Fyodor, 313-314, 443

Baudelaire, Charles, 303

Bazhenov, Nikolai, 433, 434

Beauvoir, Simone de, 18

Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 36-37

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 18

Begichev, Vladimir, 64, 66

Beilis, Mendel, 319

Belinsky, Vissarion, 4-5, 6, 7, 9, 53, 60,

220, 268, 331, 359, 437, 443 Belyi, Andrei, 336, 416, 423, 437 Benois, Alexander, 436, 454 Berberova, Nina, 335 Berdyayev, Nikolai, 416 Berezin, Vladimir, 422, 423 Bernhardt, Sarah, 186, 448 Bernis, Comte de, 318 Bertenson, Lev, 78, 83, 430, 431 Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Alexander, 387 Bezhetsky, A., see Maslov, Alexei Bilderling, General, 354-355 Bilibin, Viktor, 45-48, 60, 286

Bismarck, Otto von, 136 Bizet, Georges, 282, 285 Bj0rnson, Bj0rnstjerne, 281, 289, 317, 319-320

Blok, Alexander, 57, 98, 116, 337, 369,

392, 393, 410, 474, 476-477 Boborykin, Pyotr ("Pierre Bobo"), 61, 65,

121, 433, 434 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 122 Bondarchuk, Sergei, 244 Borodulin, Vasily, 329, 330 Bortnyansky, Dmitry, 196-197 Botticelli, Sandro, 276 Boure, Pavel, 293

Bourget, Paul, 143-147, 149, 255, 275 Bouvier, Jacqueline Lee (Kennedy

Onassis), 436 Bragin, Sergei, 407 Braz, Iosif, 1, 299 Brecht, Bertolt, 421 Brodsky, Iosif, 221 Brustein, Robert, 476 Bryusov, Valery, 98, 347, 431, 432, 437 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 207 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 416, 465 Bunin, Ivan, 3, 186, 207, 266, 267, 281,

33b 335> 343, 3⁸5> 3⁸9> 394> 4°7> 416-417, 425, 431, 433, 442

Burdzhalov, Georgy, 369, 371

Burenin, Viktor, 73, 96-98, 175, 176,

183, 217, 220-221, 240, 243, 245,

250, 266

Burns, Robert, 94

Bykov, Pyotr, 222-223

Byron, Lord, 244-245, 450

Cahan, Abraham, 362-363 Canova, Antonio, 190 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 420 Catherine II (Catherine the Great), 15,

127, 242, 266, 272, 275 Cervantes, Miguel de, 36 Chaleyeva, Varvara, 430 Chaliapin, Fyodor, 335, 417, 475-476 Chekhov, Alexander (Chekov's oldest brother), x, 13, 33, 38, 39, 41, 42,

45> 5²> 53, 63, 65, 72-75, 87, 113, 116, 123, 12j-i^o_y 141-143, 158, 182, 188, 227-229, 253, 288, 298, 320, 346, 349, 353, 395, 406 Chekhov, Anton, works of: "About Love/' 306 "Across Siberia/' x, 153 ;;Agafya," 16, 55, 98 "Anna on the Neck/' 21, 249 "Anonymous Story, An/' see

"Unknown Man's Story, An" "Anyuta," 10, 16-17, 18 "Ariadne/' 17, 20, 249, 267, 278 "Attack of Nerves, An," 88, 114 "Attack on Husbands/' see "For the

Information of Husbands" Bear, The, 117, 120, 124, 125, 195, 240 "Beggar, The," 263 "Betrothed, The," see "Bride, The" "Big Volodya and Little Volodya,"

18-19, 249^ "Bishop, The," 2, 13, 400, 414, 441 "Black Monk, The," 248-249 "Bride, The," 21-22, 25, 400, 441,

443^ 449 "Calamity, A,' 16-17, 55

Calchas, see Swan Song, The

"Case From a Doctor's Practice, A,"

²3

"Champagne," 151, 179

Cherry Orchard, The, 2, 17, 22, 25, 67,

Ч9> 33⁶> 3^8o> 4¹¹* 4^X7> 44°> 441-444, 445-446, 456, 457, 458,

459-465, 466-468, 476

"Chorus Girl, The," 14, 16-17, 55

"Cossack, The," 263

"Darling, The," 21

"Difficult People," 453

"Dreary Story, A," 2, 13, 14, 87-88,

149-151

"Duel, The," 2, 14, 17, 18, 96, 126-127, 132, 184, 201, 202, 204, 288, 330 "Encounter, An," 263 "Enigmatic Character, An," 331 "Event, An," 260 "First-Class Passenger," 126 "For Little Apples/' 40 "Forced Declaration, A," 139 "For the Information of Husbands," 46-48

"Fragments of Moscow Life," 42 "Good People," 63, 65 "Gooseberries," 306 "Grasshopper, The," 18, 125, 202, 244,

267-268 "Grisha," 87

"Gusev," 75, 172, 175, 177, 179, 183 "Happiness," 116 "Heartache," 10, 55 "History of Medicine in Russia, The," 4b 154

"Homecoming, The" (V rodnom uglu),

306, 387 "Horsy Name, A," 40, 283 "House with a Mansard, The/' 24-25

Chekhov, Anton (cont'd) "Huntsman, The," 58, 288 "In Autumn," 68 "Incident, An," see "Event, An" "In Exile," 127, 172, 202, 223 "Intercession" (Protektsiya), 41-42 "In the Cart," 306 "In the Landau," 10 "In the Ravine," 13, 29, 201, 323,

37¹~37²" 373" З⁸²" 4°9 "Ionych," 306

Island of Sakhalin, The, 152, 172, 179-181, 202, 258-259, 271-272, 288, 294, 358, 367, 431, 452 "It Was Not Fated" (Ne sudba/), 13 Ivanov, 2, 10, 22, 24, 30, 48, 55, 67, 68-70, 71-85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 109, 114, 131, 133, 140-142, 186, 275, 281, 448 "Kashtanka," 215-216, 260, 373 "Kiss, The," 212, 388 "Lady of the Manor, The" (Barynya), 40

"Lady with the Dog, The," 40, 323, 375

"Late-Blooming Flowers, The," 441 "Letter, The," 147 "Letter to a Learned Neighbor," 39 "Lights," 20, 98, 100, 103-104, 106,

118, 387 "Malefactor, The," 40, 283 "Man in a Shell, The," 24, 306, 388 "Mire" (Tina), 10, 55-56, 61-63, 64-65

"Moscow Hypocrites," 119, 120 "Murder, The," 14, 25, 278 "My Life," 21, 201, 263, 290-292 "Name-Day Party, The," 23, 88,

109-113, 117-118, 263 "Neighbors, The," 218 "New Villa, The," 323 "Nightmare, A," 13 "On Easter Eve," 13, 124 On the High Road, 7, 68-69 "On the Road" (Na puti), 60, 63, 64 "Other People's Misfortune," 441 "Peasants, The," 14, 23, 290-292,

298-299 "Peasant Wives," see "Peasant

Women" "Peasant Women," 14, 25, 202 "Phonies, The" (Svistuny), 23 Play Without a Title (Platonov), 68,

44¹

"Princess, The," 135, 136 Proposal, The, 117, 120

"Przhevalsky" ("N. M. Przhevalsky"), 119, 120

"Reed Flute, The" (SvireV), 28 "Requiem, The," 14, 55, 56-57 "Saintly Simplicity," 13 "St. Peter's Day," 257 "Salon de Varietcs," 52 "Sarah Bernhardt," 186 Seagull, The, 2, 17, 40, 167, 188, 220, 260, 262, 267, 277, 279, 280-289, 290, 296, 297, 320, 323­326, 328, 330, 343, 356, 357-359, 360, 365, 369, 385, 387, 393, 394, 399, 417, 427, 428, 435, 438, 442­444, 461 "Sergeant Prishibeyev," 24, 40 Shooting Party, The, 40, 201 "Sister, The," see "Good People" "Steppe, The," 2, 10, 28, 55, 87, 88,

89-92, 93-98, 113, 400, 476 Stories from the Lives of My Friends (Tales from the Lives of My Friends), 88, 92, 94, 115-116, 132-133, 135, 140

"Student, The," 13

"Surgery," 40

Swan Song, The, 64, 66

Tatyana Repina, 82

"Teacher of Literature, The," 108,

212, 387, 388 "Things Most Frequently Encountered in Novels, Stories and Other Such Things," 136 Three Sisters, 17, 18, 20, 22, 212, 252, 280, 323, 326, 344, 369, 380, 385, 386-388, 390, 391, 393-395, 408, 411, 417, 441-444, 459~4^6l> 47⁶> 477

"Three Years," 8, 13, 23, 35, 198,

231, 249, 268, 441 Tragedian in Spite of Himself, A, 140,

142

Uncle Vanya, 10, 13, 17, 28, 29, 151, 280, 287, 290, 310, ^2^-^26, 329,

33²> 33⁶> 337^ 34°' 343, 355" З⁶²"

3⁶5> 375" З⁸⁰" 3⁸7" 393, 394> 434" 435, 442, 446, 461

"Unknown Man's Story, An," 17, 25,

207-208, 231, 251, 253 "Unpleasantness, An," 100, 103, 106 Useless Victory, 39, 201 "Vacation Hygiene," see "Vacation

Rules and Regulations" "Vacation Rules and Regulations"

(Dachnye pravila), 44 "Village Elder, The," 23

Chekhov, Anton (cont'd)

"Visit with Friends, A" (U znakomykh),

19-20, 314, 315, 441 "Ward Number Six," 202, 222, 231,

242, 244, 301, 388 Wedding, The, 161 "Whitebrow," 323, 373 "Who Is to Blame?/' 260 "Wife, The," 202, 217 "Witch, The," 55, 56—57, 59 "Woman's Kingdom, A," 20, 23, 231, 249, 441

Wood Demon, I he, 28-29, 30, 89, 96, 131, 138, 140, 148-151, 280, 281,

33°, 337, 44² "Zinaida Lintvaryova," 235

Chekhov, Georgy ("Georges," Chekhov's

Taganrog cousin), 36, 350, 351,

407, 473-474

Chekhov, Grigory (Grisha, cousin

Mikhail's brother), 35

Chekhov, Ivan (Vanya, Chekhov's

younger brother), 38, 42, 189, 190,

191, 193, 199, 212, 221, 363, 373,

406, 472, 473-474

Chekhov, Mikhail Mikhailovich (Misha,

Chekhov's Moscow cousin), 34, 35,

129-130, 268, 402

Chekhov, Mikhail Pavlovich (Misha,

Michel; Chekhov's youngest brother),

34> 35. 3⁶> 3⁸> 4⁸> 5²> 54> 129, 130, 148, 156-158, 175, 177, 178,

195, 199, 202, 206, 212, 218, 226,

230, 255, 276, 298, 314, 320, 321,

328-330, 394-396, 406, 450-452

Chekhov, Mikhail Yegorovich (Chekhov's

uncle), 4, 35

Chekhov, Mitrofan (Chekhov's uncle),

4, 35, 37, 106, 407

Chekhov, Nikolai (Chekhov's second

oldest brother), 33, 38, 39, 45, 48-52,

65, 74, 89, 123, 125, 137-138, 212

Chekhov, Pavel (Chekhov's father), 4,

33"35> 3⁸> 4b 5²> 129-130, 177, 187-188, 195, 251, 265, 268, 321, 328-329, 407, 475 Chekhov, Vladimir (Volodya, Chekhov's

Taganrog cousin), 351 Chekhova, Alexandra (Sanya, Chekhov's

Taganrog cousin), 351 Chekhova, Anna (cousin Mikhail's wife), 401, 402

Chekhova, Maria (Masha, Chekhov's sister), x-xiii, 36, 38, 43, 48, 52, 54, 61, 65, 74, 81, 108, 126, 130, 158, 169, 170, 178, 183, 185, 186, 188, 191-194, 197-200, 202, 212-214, 216, 225, 228, 233-236, 251, 252, 256, 260, 264, 274, 288, 297, 300, 306, 308, 310, 311, 313, 320, 321, 324, 325, 329, 330, 342, 343, 347, 352, 361, 386, 390, 391, 400-402, 405, 406-40У, 417, 427-429, 452, 456-458, 468, 471, 472-474 Chekhova, Olga Germanovna (brother

Mikhail's wife), 314, 329, 395, 396 Chekhova, Yelena (Lyolya, Chekhov's Taganrog cousin), 351, 406, 407 Chekhova Yelizaveta (Liza, cousin

Mikhail's sister), 35, 401, 402 Chekhova, Yevgenia (Chekhov's mother), 34-38, 41, 49, 52, 129, 177, 221, 228, 270-271, 321, 328-329, 342,

3^6l> 373> 377> 388, 390, 395. 396, 401, 406, 427, 428, 456, 467, 472-474

Chekhova, Yevgenia (Zhenya, brother

Mikhail's daughter), 329 Cherinov, Mikhail, 373, 375 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 5, 6, 11, 39, 57, 93, 94, 106, 167, 220, 245, 252, 256, 346, 437, 443 Chertkov, Vladimir, 238, 296, 297 Chirikov, Yevgeny, 338, 339, 381, 382, 392 Chlenov, Mikhail, 403 Chormny, Apollon, 255-256 Christie, Agatha, 40 Chukovsky, Kornei, 24-26, 110, 222 Corregio, Antonio da, 255, 275 Craig, Edward Gordon, 359

Dahl, Vladimir, 178 Dalmatov, Vasily, 81, 83, 287-288 Dalton, Margaret, 464 Dante, 191

Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 18 Dargomyzhsky, Alexander, 105 Darwin, Charles, 27, 400 Daudet, Alphonse, 57, 80, 83, 100 Davydov, Denis, 243-245 Davydov, Vladimir, 64, 71-73, 75, 81,

'83-85, 92, 95, 298, 365 Davydov (the explorer), 160-162 Davydova, Sofya, 217 Defoe, Daniel, 153 Degas, Edgar, 200

Deline, Michel (Mikhail Ashkenazi),

345> 37⁶

Demakov, Vasily, 133-134

Demange, Charles, 315, 316

Deroulede, Paul, 345, 348

Deschanel, Paul, 354-355.

Diaghilev, Sergei, 39, 200, 369, 397, 416,

435> 436-439> 453-454* 455 Diogenes, 203 Dmitry of the Don, 263 Dobrolyubov, Nikolai, 5-6, 7, 17, 106, 256 Dolgov, Niktopoleon, 49, 52 Dolzhenko, Alexei (Alyosha), 194, 197, 406, 407

Dolzhenko, Fedosya, 194, 197, 212, 407 Domasheva, Maria, 277, 279 Doroshevich, Vlas, 427-428 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 5, 7, 9, 13-17, 31, 32, 37, 57, 60, 94, 95, 106, 124, 139, 178, 184, 208, 248, 268, 286, 292, 330-332, 346, 415, 428, 436,

437

Dreyfus, Alfred, 54, 55, 253, 305, 306­307, 311-319, 343, 347, 356 Dreyfus, Mathieu, 307 Drumont, Edouard, 316-318 Du Bos, Charles, 30, 32, 388 Dubovnikov, Alexei (A. N.), 349 Dumas, Alexandre, 227 du Paty de Clam, Mercier, 315, 317 Durnovo, Ivan, 209, 212 Duse, Eleonora, 185-186, 317 Dyakonov, Pyotr, 278, 287 Dyakov, Alexander ("The Resident"), 150-151, 175, 176, 240, 250, 252-253 Dyukovsky, Mikhail, 74-75

Echegaray, Jose, 127

Efros, Nikolai, 434, 435, 457-460

Efros, Yevdokia (Dunya), 46-48, 55,

189, 197 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 184, 318, 421 Eichenbaum, Boris, 27 Ellison, Ralph, 152 Empedocles, 277 Engelhardt, Nikolai, 210, 213 Engels, Friedrich, 11 Ertel, Alexander, 263-264, 302-303, 333 Esterhazy, Marie-Charles, 306, 312, 316,

3*7> 347 Ewald, Karl Anton, 472

Faure, Felix, 355

Fedotov, Alexander, 121, 124, 360 Fedotova, Glykeria, 124, 186, 355, 444 Ferdinand, Prince of Coburg, 83 Fet, Afanasy, 7, 437 Filosofov, Dmitry, 436, 438, 454 Fofanov, Konstantin, 93, 94, 163, 164, 255

Fokine, Mikhail, 436

Fonvizin, Denis, 184

Francis of Assisi, Saint, 455

Freud, Sigmund, 124

Friedland, Louis S., ix, 67

Fyodorov, Alexander, 434, 435

Fyodorov, Fyodor (Yurkovsky), 80, 83-84

Fyodorov, Vasily, 329, 330

Fyodorova, Maria, 133-134

Gaboriau, Јmile, 61, 65 Galanin, Modest, 230 Galich, Alexander, 85 Galkin-Vrasky, Mikhail, 154-156, 158,

160, 170, 175, 241, 272 Garin, Nikolai (Nikolai Mikhailovsky),

456-457, 469 Gamett, Constance, ix, 25, 37, 60, 164,

220, 320, 376 Garshin, Vsevolod, 100, 112-114,

163, 244 Gavrilov, Ivan, 35, 129-130 Genet, Jean, 18, 24 Gey, see Heymann, Bogdan Giehse, Therese, 384 Gielgud, Sir John, 70 Gilles, Daniel, 48, 142 Gilyarovsky, Vladimir, 75, 133, 134, 214, 222

Gippius, Zinaida, 133, 145, 172, 190-191, 259, 274, 279, 369, 415, 416, 420, 432, 438 Gitovich, Nina, 202, 280, 337 Glama-Meshcherskaya, Alexandra, 72, 73,

123, 125 Glebova, Maria, 123, 125 Glinka, Mikhail, 147, 227, 245, 286, 311 Gnedich, Pyotr, 427, 428-429 Godefroy, Maria, 108 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8, 49,

75, 100, 140, 145, 245, 397 Gogol, Nikolai, x, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 32, 60, 70, 71, 93, 94, 111, 124, 137­138, 142, 158, 178, 204-205, 214, 248, 332, 370, 372, 386, 398, 399, 437, 442, 444, 463 Golden, Natalia, 127-130 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Arseny, 373 Golicke, Roman, 47-48 Golokhvastova, Olga, 61, 65 Goltsev, Viktor, 119, 120, 135, 136, 250,

253, 290, 302, 451, 454-455 Goncharov, Ivan, 6, 36-37, 69, 91, 98,

137-138, 140 Gorbunov-Posadov, Ivan, 256, 286 Goremykin, Ivan, 296, 297

Gorev, Fyodor, 75, 82, 308, 309 Goreva, Yelizaveta, 148, 150 Gorky, Maxim (Alexei Peshkov), 12, 26, 27, 34, 67, 68, 184, 260, 281, 282, 319, 322, 332-339, 343, 345, 347, 348, 355-363, 369, 372, 381-384, 385, 386, 388, 389, 392, 398-400, 405, 407, 408-414, 415, 416, 418, 419, 423-426, 430, 433, 443, 447-448, 449, 456, 457, 460, 463-465, 475-476 Govallo, Anastasy, 363 Gradovsky, Grigory, 109-110 Gradov-Sokolov, Leonid, 75 Grebenka, Yevgeny, 177-178 Griboyedov, Alexander, x, 57, 97-98,

120, 125, 263, 370, 386, 387 Gribunin, Vladimir, 458, 459, 462 Grigorenko, General Pyotr, 364 Grigorovich, Dmitry, 10, 53-54, 58-59, 60, 85, 87, 89-91, 93, 94, 113-116, 135, 148-151, 170, 230, 243, 244,

²73> 3°9> 44° Grigoryev, Apollon, 437

Grimm, Paul, 188

Gromov, Mikhail, 463

Grossman, Leonid, 27

Gruzinsky, A., see Lazarev, Alexander

Gurevich, Lyubov, 381-382

Ilaas, Fyodor, 294-295, 316, 319 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 281, 296, 297, 371, 385, 392, 394, 396, 399, 407

Ileimbruck, Baroness Olga, 171-172 Heine, Heinrich, 378 Ilellman, Lillian, ix, x, 60, 106, 141, 152, 155, 164, 204, 254, 320, 343, 356, 376, 428 Herzen, Alexander, 5 Ileymann, Bogdan (Gey), 161, 162, 177 Hirschmann, Leonard, 312 Hitler, Adolf, 201 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 9 Homer, 61 Howe, Irving, 152 Humboldt, F. H. A. von, 161 Huxley, Aldous, 12

Ibsen, Henrik, 281, 290, 385, 428, 457

Ignatov, Ilya, 433-434

Iordanov, Pavel, 351, 385

Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), 216, 364,

365

Ivanenko, Alexander, 48, 52, 188, 233-235, 271

Ivanov, Alexander, 396, 398

Jackson, Robert Louis, 27 Jaures, Jean, 318 Jokai, Мог, 39

Just, Yelena, see Shavrova, Yelena

Kachalov, Vasily, 423, 424, 456 Kaiser von Nilckheim, 7, 68 Kalfa, Babakai, 363 Karabchevsky, Nikolai, 427-428 Karpov, Yevtikhy, 282-283 Katkov, Mikhail, 77, 83, 341, 344 Kazansky, Ivan, 169-170 Kennan, George, 161, 210, 213 Khalyutina, Sofya, 462, 464 Kharchenko, Gavriil, 406-407 Khavkin, Vladimir, 293 Khilkov, Prince Dmitry, 296-297 Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor), 335 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 172 Khotyaintseva, Alexandra, 197, 306,

307-308, 313, 314, 347 Khvostov (the explorer), 160-162 Kicheyev, Pyotr, 73-74 Kiselevsky, Ivan, 72-73, 75, 81 Kiselyov, Alexei ("His Excellency"), 64, 66, 74, 192, 209-210, 212, 223­225

Kiselyov, Sergei (Seryozha, "Bosko"), 64, 224

Kiselyova, Alexandra (Sasha, "Vasilisa"),

64, 66, 192, 224 Kiselyova, Maria, 10, 56, 60-64, 65, 66,

75, 191, 192, 224-225 Kistyakovsky, A. F., 294, 295 Klyuchevsky, Vasily, 296-297 Klyukin, Maxim, 379, 381 Knipper, Konstantin, 456, 457, 468, 469 Knipper, Lev, 467-469 Knipper, Olga, ix, 2, 260, 326, 359, 364, 365, 369-371, 386, 388-389, 390, 393, 400-402, 405, 406, 412, 418-420, 423, 424, 426,

427-430, 433-435, 444-446, 44^s" 450, 455-459, 461, 462, 464, 465, 467-469, 474, 475 Koch, Robert, 176, 178 Kolomnin, Alexei, 203-205, 238-240,

²93> 3²7> 395 Koltsov, Alexei, 57, 93-94

Koltsov, A. I. (the Yalta physician), 341,

344, 348, 349

Kolyosov, Fyodor, 326-327

Kommissarzhevskaya, Vera, 282-285,

302, 369, 380, 445-446, 465-466

Kommissarzhevsky, Fyodor, 392 Kondakov, Nikodim, 340, 343, 344, 345,

396, 397-399, 418, 419, 426 Koni, Anatoly, 179, 181, 282, 284, 285, 287, 294, 295, 312, 336, 373, 380 Kononovich, Vladimir, 155, 171-172 Konovitser, Efim, 48 Konstantin, Grand Duke ("K. R "),

373" 4²⁶

Koreysha, Ivan Yakovlevich, 99-100 Korf, Baron Andrei, 155, 181 Korobov, Nikolai, 271 Korolenko, Vladimir, 17, 47, 55, 63, 65, 66, 67, 89-91, 93, 95, 98, 100, 113, 114, 131, 132, 154, 177, 208, 210, 243, 260, 264, 314, 316, 318-319,

333-335" 344" 35²" 3⁶4" 373" 418-420, 425-426, 443

Korotnev, Alexei, 405, 419

Korovin, Konstantin, 39

Korsakov, Nikolai, 467-468

Korsh, Fyodor (the impresario), 64, 67,

69, 72, 73, 75, 117, 119, 123, 125,

127, 130, 131, 162, 266, 276,

Korsh, Fyodor (the philologist), 378,

380

Kosheva, Bronislava, 75

Kosterin, Alexei, 364

Koteliansky, S. S., ix, 37, 60, 274, 330

Kovalevsky, Maxim, 306, 309-310, 313,

З¹⁶" 395

Kovreyn, Ivan, 329, 330, 341, 344 Kramer, Hilton, 438 Krasheninnikov, Stepan, 160, 162 Krutovsky, Vsevolod, 340-341 Krylov, Ivan, x, 51, 64, 103, 106, 120,

164, 172, 337, 454 Krylov, Viktor, 105-106, 186, 246 Kukaretkina, Olga, 475, 476 Kundasova, Olga ("the Astronomer"), 189, 197-198, 222, 237-238, 241, 258-260, 265, 268, 271, 279, 296, 297, 361, 413, 426, 444 Kuprin, Alexander, 385, 404, 432, 433 Kurdyumov, M. (Maria Kallash), 400 Kurepin, Alexander, 74, 203-204 Kurovsky, Governor of Voronezh, 216-217 Kushchevsky, Nikolai, 67

Laffitte, Sophie, 200 La Fontaine, Jean de, 64 Lakshin, Vladimir, 263 Landsberg, Karl, 171-172 Laur, Alexander, 377-378 Lavrov, Mikhail, 11, 166, 349-350 Lavrov, Peter (Pyotr), 8

Lavrov, Vukol, 10, 55, 88, 165-167, 208, 231, 250, 252, 253, 264, 276, 290, 291, 349, 451, 452, 455 Lazare, Bernard, 307 Lazarev, Alexander (A. Gruzinsky), 117,

120, 266, 270 Lazarevsky, Boris, 469-470 Lederer, Sidonie, ix, x, 60, 106, 164, 254,

З²⁰" 343 Le Gallienne, Eva, 444

Lehman, Anatoly, 99, 100

Lenin, Vladimir, 5, 6, 11, 54, 110, 167,

3*9" 335, ЗЗ⁶" 39⁸" 4°7 Lenskaya, Lydia (Lika), 195

Lensky, Alexander, 112, 114, 121, 123,

ЧЬ 195

Leo XIII, Pope, 275

Leonidov, Leonid, 461, 462, 464, 467, 468 Leontyev, Ivan, see Shcheglov, Ivan Lermontov, Mikhail, 31, 69, 127, 148,

164, 216, 387, 450 Leskov, Nikolai, 3, 7, 14, 42, 53, 54, 219,

257, 273, 286, 437 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 252 Levine, David, 1 Levinsky, Vladimir, 123, 125 Levitan, Isaak, 39, 61, 62, 65, 74, 148, 188, 189, 193, 197, 199, 200, 221, 222, 2c;7, 267, 268, 298, 299, 360 Levkeyeva Yelizaveta, 283 Leykin, Fyodor, 71

Leykin, Nikolai, 40, 41, 42, 45-48, 70, 71, 87, 105, 123, 126, 227-229, 231-232, 270-271, 282, 287-289,

3°5

Leykina, Praskovya, 71 Lieven, Hermann, 357 Likhachov, Vladimir, 140, 142 Lilina, Maria, 391, 394, 461-465 Lintvaryov, Georgy (Georges, "the second

son"), 103, 157 Lintvaryov, Pavel ("the elder son"),

103, 111, 113 Lintvaryova, Alexandra ("the mother"),

98, 101-102, 105 Lintvaryova, Natalia (Natasha, "the third

daughter"), 103, 108, 226, 233-236 Lintvaryova, Yelena ("the second

daughter"), 102, 233-236 Lintvaryova, Zinaida ("the eldest

daughter"), 102, 235 Lisenko, Natalia, 464 Livingstone, David, 120 London, Jack, 36 Long, R.E.C., 363

Lope de Vega, 61

Lortzing, Albert, 402

Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 319

Luzhsky, Vasily, 369, 371, 458, 461-463

Machtet, Grigory, 165, 167 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 281, 392, 434, 435 Magarshack, David, 267 Maklakov, Vasily, 450, 452 Makovsky, Konstantin, 307-308 Maltsev, Father Alexei, 264-265 Mamai, 262-263

Mamin-Sibiryak (Dmitry Mamin),

²73~²74> 333 Mamuna, Countess Klara ("Little

Countess"), 226, 234-235, 255-256

Mamyshev, Vasily, 119, 120

Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 412

Mandelstam, Osip, 412, 437

Mann, Thomas, 54

Mansfield, Katherine, 476

Manucharov, David, 181, 182

Maria Fyodorovna, Empress, 181, 349

Markova, Yelena (Nelly), 48, 52

Marlitt (Eugenie John), 61, 65

Martens, Fyodor, 250, 253

Marx, Adolf, 274, 322, 340, 342-343,

373, 386, 450-451, 452, 456-457

Marx, Karl, 11, 103, 207

Maslov, Alexei (Bezhetsky), 74-75,

123-124, 125, 126-127, 131, 161,

162, 175, 183, 352

Matisse, Henri, 397

Maupassant, Guy de, 27, 282, 305

Mauriac, Francois, 476

Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 30-32, 139, 199,

²74> 3^o8> 335, 3⁶9> 37°> 4²¹> 465, 476

McGrew, Roderick E., 239

McLean, Hugh, 6

Meline, Jules, 318

Mendeleyev, Dmitry, 144

Menshikov, Mikhail, 217-218, 301,

326-329, 373, 375, 376

Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 97, 98, 109, 110,

121-122, 124, 189, 190, 414-416,

43⁸> 453, 454 Merpert, Jacques (Yakov), 330-332

Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 190, 279, 359, 368,

369-371, 392, 393, 410, 465

Michelangelo, 255

Mikhailov, Mikhail, 287-288

Mikhailovsky, Nikolai (the critic), 11-12,

25, 39, 69, 78, 90, 110, 113, 123,

124, 133, 221, 291, 334, 337, 349,

419, 440, 457

Mikhailovsky, Nikolai (the novelist), see

Garin, Nikolai Mikulich, V., see Veselitskaya, Lydia Milan, Prince of Serbia, 57, 133-134 Mill, John Stuart, 207 Millett, Kate, 18

Mirolyubov, Viktor, 348, 349, 414-416 Mirsky, D. S. (Prince D. Sviatopolk-

Mirsky), x, 208 Mizinova, Lydia (Lika), 188-189, 193, 195, 197, 260, 266-268, 308, 361 Moliere, 444 Monet, Claude, 200 Morozov, Savva, 389, 424 Morozova, Varvara, 211-213, 264-265,

308, 309, 405 Moser, Charles, 256 Moskvin, Ivan, 461, 462, 464 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 18, 441 Muratova, Yelena, 462, 464, 467, 468 Musina-Pushkina, Darya, 197

Nabokov, Vladimir, 1, 28, 127, 151, 176,

191, 308, 311, 329, 417, 476 Nadson, Semyon, 94, 113, 243, 421 Naidenov, Sergei, 429-430 Naryshkina, Yelizaveta, 179, 181 Nasr-ed-Din, Shah of Persia, 128, 150-151 Nazimova, Alia, 427-428 Neklyukov, Grigory, 471-472 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 57, 60, 95, 106, 205,

207, 331, 415, 421 Nemirov, Grigory, 379, 381 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 311, 312, 324-325, 327, 328, 343, 358-360, 365, 369, 376, 391-394, 408, 409, 412, 434, 440-442, 444, 448, 449, 456, 458-460, 462-465, 466, 468 Nevelskoy, Gennady, 27, 162 Nevezhin, Pyotr, 142 Newton, Isaac, 49 Nicholas I, 331, 414 Nicholas II, 274, 297, 346, 349, 355,

397, 399, 418 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 271, 275, 375, 415 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 436 Nikulina, Nadezhda, 75-76, 82 Nordau, Max, 262-263 Notovich, Osip, 109-110 Nureyev, Rudolf, 96

Obolensky, Leonid, 63, 65 Obolonsky, Nikolai, 137, 138, 292 Odoyevsky, Vladimir, 9, 248-249 Okreyts, Stanislav, 63, 65

O'Neill, Eugene, 69, 428 Orlenev, Pavel, 427-428 Orlov, Ivan, 340-341, 344, 348, 350 Orlov-Davydov, Count S. V., 241-242 Orlova-Davydova, Countess, 242 Ostroumov, Alexei, 292, 299, 301, 302, 451

Ostrovskaya, Nadezhda, 148, 150, 162 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 9, 17, 71, 97, 150,

280, 283, 370, 393, 449 Ostrovsky, Pyotr, 96-97, 148, 150, 161, 162

Ozerova, Lyudmila, 277, 279, 295-297, 302

Paisy, Father, 105-106

Palm, Alexander, 83

Palmin, Iliodor, 43, 45, 46, 85

Panina, Countess Sofya, 408

Parny, Evariste, 398

Pasternak, Boris, 11, 31-32, 100, 148,

416, 437 Pasteur, Louis, 293 Pastukhov, Nikolai, 340 Pavlova, Anna, 39 Pavlova, Karolina, 437 Pavlovsky, Ivan (Yakovlev-Pavlovsky),

*99> 3°7> ЗЗЬ 33² Peshko, Alexei, see Gorky, Maxim

Peshkov, Maxim (Gorky's son), 356, 357* 4²4

Peshkova, Yekaterina (Gorky's wife),

408, 410, 424, 475 Peterson, Vladimir (A-t), 378, 379, 381 Petipa, Marius (the choreographer), 125 Petipa, Marius (Petipa Jr., the actor),

123, 125 Petronius Arbiter, 308 Petrov, Father Grigory, 357, 359 Picquart,Georges, 315, 317 Pilnyak, Boris, 184 Pisarev, Dmitry, 5, 6, 7, 146, 147,

219-221 Pisarev, Modest, 285 Pisemsky, Alexei, 249, 254-256 Pissarro, Camille, 200 Platonov, Andrei, 437 Pleshcheyev, Alexei, 18, 23, 90, 94,

95-96, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105-106, 108-110, 112, 113, 133-134, 147, 149-151, 155, 157, 160, 174, 176, 199-200, 208, 257, 259, 322 Plevako, Fyodor, 50, 52, 257 Pobedimskaya, Marianna, 393, 446 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 296, 297, 341, 344, 398

Рое, Edgar Allan, 421 Polevoy, Nikolai, x, 139, 452 Polonsky, Yakov, 115, 116 Poltavtsev, Yevgeny, 130-131 Pomyalova, Alexandra, 462 Poplavsky, Boris, 31-32, 400 Popov, Lazar ("Elpe"), 139, 142 Possart, Ernst, 245

Posse, Vladimir, 339, 371, 382-384, 409 Potapenko, Ignaty, 177, 189, 259, 260, 266-268, 272, 275, 279, 282, 306,

333. 334> 337' 353' 447' 44⁸ Potapenko, Maria, 266, 268

Potekhin, Alexei, 80, 83, 373

Potyomkin, Grigory (Potemkin), 126,

¹²7' 49 Prevost, Abbe, 153

Prideaux, Tom, 387

Prokofiev, Sergei, 420, 437

Protopopov, Mikhail, 250, 252, 253

Proust, Marcel, 417

Przhevalsky, Nikolai, 27, 120

Pushkin, Alexander, x, 7, 15, 16, 32, 94,

105, 120, 127, 147, 191, 199, 204,

219-221, 245, 248, 268, 279, 311,

323, 331, 332, 336, 345, 351, 361,

380, 387, 398, 414, 437, 444

Putyata, Nikolai, 49, 52, 94, 96

Rabinovich, Solomon, see Sholom

Aleichem Rachinsky, Sergei, 217-219 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 335, 385, 417, 421 Raikh, Zinaida, 370 Raltsevich, A. A., 365, 367 Rasputin, Grigory, 106 Rayevskaya, Yevgenia, 456, 457 Reinhardt, Max, 334 Remizov, Alexei, 336, 369, 392, 437 Renan, Ernest, 187-188 Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 200 Repin, Ilya, 243-244 Resident, see Dyakov, Alexander Richter, Sviatoslav, 428 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 436 Roentgen, Wilhelm, 405 Rolland, Romain, 421 Rossetti, Alexandra (Smirnova-Rosset), 204-205

Rossolimo, Grigory, 154, 272, 322, 365,

367, 372, 373 Rossov, Nikolai, 456, 457 Rostand, Edmond, 267 Roxanova, Maria, 358, 359, 396, 399 Rozanov, Vasily, 145, 320, 414, 415, 416,

43¹' 454

Rubens, Peter Paul, 275 Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 371 Rybchinskaya, Natalia, 123-125

Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 7, 93, 94,

141, 143, 305-306 Salvini, Tommaso, 185-186 Samarova, Maria, 423, 424 Sandherr, Jean-Conrad, 315, 317 Savina, Maria, 80, 82, 84, 186, 190, 230, 285, 302, 355, 380, 449, 465, 466 Sazonov, Nikolai, 81, 83, 285 Sazonova (Sofya Smirnova), 245-247 Scanlan, James P., 9 Schechtel, Franz, 39, 47, 48, 74, 298, 394 Sheurer-Kestner, Auguste, 316, 318 Schiller, Friedrich, 75, 279 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 101 Scmanova, Maria, 110 Semashko, Marian, 188, 194, 197 Serafim of Sarov, Saint, 224-225 Serebrov, Alexander (Alexander Tikhonov),

337> 3^S9> 394> 4²5> 43² Sergeyenko, Pyotr, 273, 274, 322, 327,

34²

Sergius, Archbishop, 414-415 Shablenko, A., 334

Shakespeare, William, x, 8, 9, 36, 61, 75, 163, 185, 255-257, 281, 303, 375, 444, 457, 464 Shakh-Azizova, Tatyana, 281 Shakhovskaya, Princess, 235 Shakhovskov, Prince Sergei, 231-232,

²34> ²35 Shapiro, Konstantin, 221

Shavrova, Olga, 298-299 Shavrova, Yelena (Yelena Just), 64, 205-207, 268-270, 286, 298-299, 357, 358

Shcheglov, Ivan (Ivan Leontyev), xiii, 93-96, 98, 99-100, 104, 106, 126, 127, 131, 156, 158, 162-164, 166, 170, 175-176, 183, 217, 222, 238, 268, 279, 302, 320, 376-378 Shchepkina-Kupernik, Tatyana, 265, 266, 267

Shcherbak, Alexei, 174-176 Shchukin, Father Sergius, 375, 376, 471-472

Sheller-Mikhailov, Alexander, 79, 83 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 421 Sheremetyev, Sergei, 397 *

Shestov, Lev, 12, 145, 151, 416, 417 Shevchenko, Taras, 103, 105 Shishkin, Ivan, 243-244 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 221

Sholom Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovich),

45²"453 Shpazhinsky, Ippolit, 70, 71

Shubinsky, Nikolai, 275

Shubinsky, Sergei, 273, 275

Shuvalov, Ivan, 65

Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 166, 249, 275-277 Sigma, see Syromyatnikov, Sergei Simmons, Ernest J., ix, 1, 130 Simov, Viktor, 463-464 Sinani, Isaak, 328-330, 349, 360, 401 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 221, 476 Sipyagin, Dmitry, 399 Sirotinin, Vladimir, 232 Skabichevsky, Alexander, 11, 250, 254, 256

Skitalets (Stepan Petrov), 424-425 Sklifosovsky, Nikolai, 278 Skriabin, Alexander, 437 Sluchevsky, Konstantin, 345, 346-347 Smagin, Alexander, 213-214 Smirnova, Sofya, see Sazonova Snegiryov, Vladimir, 205 Sobolevsky, Vasily, 212, 213, 308, 311,

404-405 Socrates, 104

Soldatenkov, Kuzma, 278, 279 Sologub, Fyodor, 336, 369, 392, 420, 432 Soloukhin, Vladimir, 330, 398 Solovtsov, Nikolai, 123, 125, 130, 131,

185, 186, 290 Solovyov, Vladimir, x, 373, 415, 431 Solovyova, Olga, 421, 422, 458-459 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 11 ,22, 28, 100,

116, 182, 183, 334, 336, 416, 438 Spencer, Herbert, 41 Sredin, Leonid, 360, 361, 381, 382, 386, 389-391

Sredina, Nadezhda ("the elder Madame

Sredina"), 390, 391, 430 Sredina, Sofya, 361, 390, 391, 429-430 Stalin, Joseph, 185, 335-336, 364, 398, 421

Stanislavsky, Konstantin (Konstantin Alexeyev), 3, 282, 283, 297, 324,

3²5> 334, 357-359, З^б4-З^б5> 3⁶⁸"

37b 37⁶> 39^1_394> 4^o8~4¹²> 4²3> 424, 428, 433, 435, 437, 444, 446,

450, 456-458, 460-465, 468

Stasov, Vladimir, 243, 245, 250, 253,

3°9> 437 Stefanovsky, Pavel, 386

Stendhal, 18

Stravinsky, Igor, 282, 415, 420, 436, 437 Strindber^, August, 281, 357, 358 Struve, Gleb, xiii

Sukhovo-Kobylin, Alexander, 370 Sumbatov, Prince Alexander (Alexander Yuzhin), 83, ii2, 114, 214, 306,

442, 447-448 Surguchov, Ilya, 392

Suvorin, Alexei, x, 33, 54-57, 59, 60, 63, 69, 71, 75, 79, 82-85, 87, 88, 90, 101, 103-108, 110, 113-116, 120, 121, 124-126, 134-151, 153-155, 157-162, 167-179, 183, 184, 190, 193, 197, 198, 200, 203-205, 207, 208, 210, 214-216, 218-222, 225-230, 234, 236-248, 250-255, 257-259, 261-268, 270-279, 287­293, 295-298, 300-302, 306, 308­312, 315, 318, 320, 322, 324, 326, 327, 331, 342-348, 351-357, 359, 360, 376, 378-381, 389, 390, 394­396, 399, 415, 431, 442, 444, 448, 450-452

Suvorin, Alexei (Suvorin-fils, Suvorin's eldest son), 107-108, 117, 119, 120, 156, 177, 179, 196-197, 204, 215, 220, 250-253, 396 Suvorin, Boris (Borya), 105, 108, 124, 138, 147, 168, 175, 264, 266, 298, 309, 317, 345, 352, 379, 395 Suvorin, Mikhail, 138, 227, 229, 273, 396

Suvorina, Anastasia (Nastya), 105, 119, 124, 138, 147, 168, 175, 264, 266, 298, 301, 302, 309, 317, 345, 352,

379" 395

Suvorina, Anna, 75, 81, 105, 106, 119, 124, 125, 138, 141, 147, 151, 169, 172, 175, 204, 252, 262, 264, 266, 298, 301, 308, 309, 317, 345,

35*-35²> 3.79" 395 Svetlov, Nikolai, 72-73, 109, 112

Svobodin, Pavel, 149, 151, 176, 241-242

Swinburne, Algernon, 346

Syromyatnikov, Sergei (Sigma), 375, 376

Sytin, Ivan, 188, 265, 287, 293, 296,

327

Tairov, Alexander, 392 Tarnovskaya, Praskovya, 311 Tatishchev, Sergei, 199, 241-242 Taube, Yuly, 472 Tausch, Major, 315, 317 Taylor, H. Rattray, 12 Tchaikovsky, Modest, 147, 148, 157, 158, 176

Tchaikovsky, Peter (Pyotr), 57, 64, 103,

116, 125, 147-148, 214 Teleshov, Nikolai, 434-435

Thoreau, Henry David, x, 66-67 Tikhomirov, Lev, 78, 83 Tikhonov, Alexander, see Serebrov, Alexander

Tikhonov, Vladimir, 105, 106, 130-131 Titian, 190, 255

Tolstaya, Alexandra (Alexandra Tolstoy), 407

Tolstaya, Sofya (Countess Tolstoy),

^x57" 39b 394 Tolstaya, Tatyana, 355

Tolstoy, Alexei, 214, 360, 365, 392, 464

Tolstoy, Dmitry, 141, 143

Tolstoy, Lev, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16-18,

21, 23, 26, 27, 31, 32, 37, 53, 54,

57" ^6l" ⁶3" 93" 94" 9⁸" ¹⁰5" ^llx" ^1г3> 124, 131, 135, 136, 138, 148,

¹55~¹57> ^l67" ^г7²" 203-205, 209, 213, 220, 237, 245, 249, 251, 253, 256, 257,260-262, 263, 264, 274, 275, 277-278, 279, 281, 282, 286, 290­292, 296, 297, 301-303, 312, 313, 322, 323, 326-328, 331, 333, 334, 336, 337, 342-344, 347, 352, 355, 356, 364, 373-376, 379, 380, 381, 384, 387, 392, 394, 397, 399, 407­409, 412-415, 418, 419, 425, 440, 465

Tolstoy, Lev Lvovich (the writers son), 256

Tomlinson, Philip, ix, 274 Tourel, Jennie, 227 Tur, Yevgenia, x, 67

Turgenev, Ivan, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 36, 37, 51, 53, 61, 69, 76, 82, 93, 94, 116, 131, 134, 167, 231, 249, 251, 253, 292, 316, 346, 399, 400, 443, 444, 449-450 Tvchinkin, Konstantin, 395

Umov, Nikolai, 422-423 Urusov, Prince Alexander, 329, 330 Uspensky, Gleb, 7, 93, 94, 113, 164, 177, 210

Uspensky, Bishop Porfiry, 390-391 Uxkiill, Baroness Varvara, 170, 172, 175­177, 179

Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 359 Valency, Maurice, 324 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 340 Varlamov, Konstantin, 140, 142 Vashchuk, Rimma, 299-300 Vasilyev, Vasily, 294, 413, 414 Vasilyeva, Olga, 402, 403, 404, 408 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 344, 346, 396, 398

Verdi, Giuseppe, 282

Veresayev (Smidovich), Vikenty, 338,

339

Veselitskaya, Lydia (V. Mikulich), 286,

375-37⁶, 4^X9 Veselovsky, Alexander, 419, 420, 426

Vinci, Leonardo da, 124

Vinogradov, Konstantin (Kostya),

175-176

Virchovv, Rudolf, 241, 242

Vishnevsky, Alexander, 369, 371, 412,

413, 423, 424, 456-458, 461,

462, 469

Voltaire, 104, 224, 316, 318, 398 Volynsky, Akim, 362-363 Voutsina, Nicholas, 49, 52 Vrubel, Mikhail, 437 Vsevolozhsky, Ivan, 230 Vyshnegradsky, Ivan, 341, 344

Wagner, Nikolai, 131-132 Wagner, Richard, 18, 220, 303 Wagner, Vladimir, 132 Walpole, Horace, 398 Weber, Karl Maria von, 402 Weinberg, Pyotr, 377-378 Werder, General, 273, 275 Whitman, Walt, 421 Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, 273,

²75> З¹⁶ Wilson, Edmund, 30

Winner, Thomas G., 281

Witte, Ivan, 329, 330, 341, 344

Woolf, Virginia, 30

Yadrintsev, N. M., 294-295 Yakobi, Valerian, 309-310 Yakovenko, Nadezhda, 294-295 Yakovenko, Vladimir, 294-295 Yakovlev-Pavlovsky, Ivan, see Pavlovsky, Ivan

Yanov, Alexander, 65

Yanova, Maria ('Yashenka"), 63, 65

Yanova, Nadezhda ("Yashenka"), 63, 65

Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, x

Yartsev, Grigory, 381, 382, 391

Yasinsky, Ieronim, 165, 167, 222-223,

259, 287, 289 Yavorskaya, Lydia, 189, 249, 265,

266-267, 276, 361 Yegorov, Yevgraf, 202, 209-211, 212,

214, 216-217, 225, 232, 388 Yelpatyevsky, Sergei, 342, 349, 350 Yermilov, Vladimir, 3 Yermolova, Maria, 68, 82, 156, 186,

²75> 355 Yevreinov. Nikolai, 392

Yevreinova, Anna, 109, 110, 124,

ф-ЧЬ 44

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 334 Yezhov, Nikolai, 116, 117, 119-120,

244-246, 255, 270 Yuzefovich, A. A., 134, 136

Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 221 Zaitsev, Boris, 399, 400 Zakrevsky, Ignaty, 317, 320 Zankovetskaya, Maria, 103, 105 Zasulich, Vera, 380 Zdekauer, Nikolai, 230-231 Zhbankov, Dmitry, 403 Zhemchuzhnikov, Alexei, 373 Zhukovsky, D. E., 382-383 Zhukovsky, Vasily, 400 Zinovyev, Nikolai, 399 Zlatovratsky, Nikolai, 7, 163, 164

Zola, fimile, 27, 57, 249, 258, 259, 306,

311-320, 322, 347, 356 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 437, 442 Zucchi, Virginia, 78, 83

Simon Karlinsky has taught courses on Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Russian poetry and Russian drama at Berkeley and Harvard. He is the author of a critical bi­ography of the poet Marina Cvetaeva (or Tsvetaeva); his essays, articles and reviews have appeared in, among others, California Slavic Studies, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Review, TriQuarterly, Slavic Review, Studies in Romanticism, and The New York Times Book Review. He is currently preparing a new course on Tolstoy, completing the first volume of a history of Rus­sian drama as literature and gathering materials for a study of the Russian emigre poet Boris Poplavsky.

Michael Henry Heim has lectured on Russian drama, Russian intellectual history, and eighteenth- century Russian literature at the University of Wiscon­sin in Madison, and has recently begun teaching Czech language and literature at UCLA. He is at present trans­lating a collection of stories by Bohumil Hrabal, one of the foremost contemporary Czech writers, and working on a study of an important mid-nineteenth-century Czech poet and thinker, Karel Havlicek Borovsky.

Around Chekhov. Encounters and Impressions (first published in 1933) are

1. Bilibin was the editorial secretary of Fragments, a prolific contributor to humor magazines and a mediocre playwright.

1. Maria Kiselyova, a writer of stories for children, was the daughter of the director of the Imperial Theaters in Moscow. She and her husband, Alexei, owned an elegant estate called Babkino, situated near the city of Voskresensk. The Chekhov and Kiselyov families formed a close friendship during his Voskresensk period, and it was at Babkino that Chekhov made the acquaint­ance of some prominent writers and musicians of the time. Mikhail Chekhov's Around Chekhov contains an obviously improbable and spurious statement that Maria Kiselyova was the great love of the composer Tchaikovsky, who supposedly lost her by proposing too late, after she was already engaged to Kiselyov.

A story she wrote for a children's magazine and submitted to Chekhov for criticism. Maria Kiselyova was the first in a long string of literary ladies, later to include Yelena Shavrova and Lydia Avilova, for whom Chekhov acted as a literary doctor-cum-agent.

At the end of December, 1886, Maria Kiselyova sent Chekhov a letter in which she praised his story "On the Road" and severely criticized "Mire." In it she wrote, "I am personally chagrined that a writer of your caliber, i.e., not short-changed by God, shows me nothing but a 'manure pile.' The world is teeming with villains and villainesses and the impression they produce is not new; therefore, one is all the more grateful to a writer who, having led you through all the stench of a manure pile, will suddenly extract a pearl from it [this imagery and vocabulary refer to Ivan Krylov's translation of La Fontaine's fable "Le coq et la perle," in which a rooster finds a pearl in a manure pile and wishes it were edible]. You are not myopic, you are perfectly

1. Alexei Pleshcheyev (1825-93) belonged in his youth, together with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to the Petrashevsky political club and like Dostoyevsky he was sent to Siberia because of this, and spent ten years there. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Pleshcheyev built for himself a reputation as a lyric and civic-protest poet. One of his songs, "Forward Without Fear or Doubt!", became something of an anthem of Russian anti-government dissent (Chekhov's comment on this song was: "If you call people to march forward, the least you can do is to indicate the goal, the path and the means"). Like the more famous civic poet Nekrasov, Pleshcheyev possessed considerable literary taste and was a discerning editor. His opening of the pages of Northern Herald to Chekhov was an important event in Chekhov's literary

1. Sumy is a town in the Ukraine situated on the river Psyol. Chekhov and his family rented a summer cottage there on the estate called Luka, be­longing to Alexandra Lintvaryova, with whose entire family the Chekhovs became close friends. Chekhov spent the summers of 1888 and 1889 at Luka. The family described in this letter is, of course, the Lintvaryovs.

Alexander Pushkin's unfinished play The Water Nymph is evoked in this sentence (or, possibly, Alexander Dargomyzhsky's popular opera based on this play).

Russian commentators disagree as to which of the three academic painters of that name had stayed at Luka.

A collection of Chekhov's short stories, actually called In the Twilight.

Government-owned Russian universities were not open to women in the nineteenth century (admission of women was a recurrent demand of the male students during the periodic student disturbances). However, some of the major universities offered special courses for women, taught by their regular professors. The authorities did not object, provided that these women's colleges were called "courses" and not "universities." The Bestuzhev "courses" were the women's branch of the St. Petersburg University.

Taras Shevchenko (1814-61) is the national poet of the Ukraine.

Maria Zankovetskaya (1860-1934) was the most famous Ukrainian actress of all time. Chekhov corresponded with her and intended to write a play that would contain a role for her to be spoken entirely in Ukrainian. The

1. Chekhov's spectacular ascent as a serious writer after he began publish­ing in Northern Herald occasionally brought forth the envy and resentment of his erstwhile associates from his humor-magazine days. Nikolai Yezhov

6. The combination of the names of Tolstoy and the liberal editor and journalist Viktor Goltsev (Chekhov's future friend) on the one hand with

1. Written at the Lintvaryov estate, where Chekhov had returned for his second summer in the Ukraine, this letter lacks a date in the original. It could be dated approximately, because of the mention of Nikolai Chekhov's illness.

2. Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, a mutual acquaintance of Chekhov and Suvorin, had on his estate some rowboats belonging to Suvorin, who had asked that they be sent to Luka for the use of the Chekhov family. Chekhov had nick­named Dr. Obolonsky "Stiva Oblonsky," after the brother of the heroine of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

3. Nikolai Chekhov, who was gravely ill with tuberculosis. He died one month later.

4. Ilya Ilyich is the first name and patronymic of the hero of Goncharov's Oblomov. Stoltz and Olga, mentioned later, are the two other principal char­acters of the novel.

1. In the translation of this passage that appears in the Lillian Hellman

1. The dramatic tradition that Chekhov revolted against and overthrew in his last great plays was that of the well-made social drama of Alexander Ostrovsky. It is ironic, therefore, that Chekhov, who had never met his famous predecessor, was frequently involved in the affairs of Ostrovsky's surviving siblings. The Ostrovsky mentioned here is the unpublished critic of whom Chekhov wrote to Pleshcheyev in Letter 19. Chekhov acted as an intermediary between Pyotr Ostrovsky and Suvorin, helping to arrange the publication of some stories for children written by Ostrovsky's sister Nadezhda.

The provincial actress Yelizaveta Goreva organized her own company and brought it to Moscow for one season. The critical reception given her company by the press was disastrous.

Early in October, an "unofficial theatrical committee" met in St. Petersburg to consider the suitability of The Wood Demon for presentation at Imperial Theaters. Under the chairmanship of Grigorovich, the committee ruled that the work was a "beautiful dramatized novel, unsuitable for the stage." Furthermore, Grigorovich hastened to inform Suvorin that the figures of Professor Serebryakov and his young wife, Yelena (these characters are

1. The Feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebastia was celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox (March 9 on the Julian calendar corresponded to March 21 on the Gregorian one in the nineteenth century). The day was traditionally marked in Russia by eating sweet rolls shaped to resemble birds, with cloves for eyes, which were called "larks" (zhavoronki).

The German scientist Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt explored the Far Eastern areas of the Russian Empire at the invitation of the Russian government in 1829. The American traveler and journalist George Kennan visited the Siberian prisons in 1886 and described his impressions of them in a series of articles which appeared in a magazine, the title of which is cited in the 1944-51 edition of Chekhov's letters as The contrari Monthey Magasine (i.e., The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine). Kennan's exposes of the conditions in Siberia were banned in Russia, but they were printed abroad in Russian-language editions, which were clandestinely im­ported into Russia. After the abolition of preliminary censorship in 1905, collections of Kennan's articles appeared in Russia in several simultaneous editions.

2. The address by first name and patronymic alone, not preceded by any adjective, is deliberately abrupt to the point of rudeness. This letter and the preceding one to Shcheglov represent Chekhov's cumulative reaction to four years of critical baiting and endless accusations of "indifference," "lack of involvement" and "absence of principles." This psychologically significant flareup on the eve of his departure for Sakhalin was to remain the only one of its kind and was not repeated in Chekhov's later life.

3. This censored version is from Maria Chekhova's pre-revolutionary

1. Chronologically and textually, it would seem that Chekhov is answering Suvorin's letter that contained an appraisal of the just published "Ward Number Six." But, since the mind boggles at the idea that either Suvorin or Chekhov could refer to that grim work as "sweet lemonade," Chekhov could also be responding to some other point raised in the now lost Suvorin letter.

1. The poor Pleshcheyev was allowed to enjoy his huge inheritance for only two years. An heiress turned up with apparently more valid claims than he and he was forced to relinquish to her most of his new fortune. He died a few months afterward, but as Zinaida Gippius tells us in her memoirs, his last two years were marvelously elegant and happy.

1. The private theatrical company organized by Suvorin was temporarily housed in the Panayev Theater in St. Petersburg. Suvorin had apparently asked Chekhov's advice as to whether he should build his own theater.

[1] Mikhail Pavlovich Chekhov (1865-1936) was Anton Chekhov's young­

est brother. He grew up to be a writer, magazine publisher and literary

translator (of Jack London's work, among others). His most durable contri­bution, however, was as his brother's biographer. His biographical essays that

were appended to his sister Maria's edition of Chekhov's letters and his book

basic and indispensable sources for all students of Chekhov.

[6] An idea: consistory secretaries probably don't envy editorial secretaries [Chekhov's own footnote].

[7] Bilibin's letter, to which this is the reply, described a fire that was going on next door to Bilibin's house.

[8] According to the very plausible guess of the editors of Volume 68 of Literary Heritage, who first published this letter in i960, Chekhov's Jewish fiancee must have been Yevdokia (Dunya) Efros, a school friend of his

[9] Ippolit Shpazhinsky was a popular and widely performed playwright of the period. His plays combined the well-made-play kind of craftsmanship typical of Ostrovsky with certain unmistakable Dostoyevskian overtones. The play Chekhov mentions is his historical drama Princess Kurakina, which ended up being one of the biggest successes of the season.

[10] Reference to Gogol's detailed criticism of the first production of The Inspector General, which displeased him in many respects. Gogol appended his critique to the second edition of the play, published five years after the premiere.

[11] The title of a collection of Chekhov's stories.

[12] The famous actor Vladimir Davydov created the role of Ivanov. He and Chekhov became good personal friends after that production. In the midst of the rehearsals, the pathologically suspicious Leykin wrote Chekhov, warning him against Davydov: "He is the most perfidious man I've ever known."

[13] Leykin's wife and son.

[14] One of the best-known restaurants in Moscow.

[15] Chekhov is recruiting Suvorin for membership in the Society of Russian Playwrights and Opera Composers, in which he was active.

[16] After Chekhov became aware how widely misunderstood his play was, he rewrote it in an effort to clarify the characterizations. The second version, which he sent to Suvorin, was the one that was produced in St. Petersburg, despite the objections of Vladimir Davydov that he found the role of Ivanov harder to understand after the revision. The second version is the one that is usually performed today.

[17] The director of the St. Petersburg production of Ivanov, referred to as Yurkovsky in the previous letter.

[18] The Soviet songwriter and underground poet Alexander Galich, who was expelled early in 1972 from the Soviet Writers' Union for writing and

[19] Ivanov. Korolenko had visited Chekhov's home in the fall of 1887 while the play was being written and Chekhov had promised to show him a draft of it.

[20] Both Korolenko and Grigorovich had urged Chekhov not to devote him­self entirely to short stories and to try writing a book-length work of fiction.

[21] This was one of the most prestigious literary journals of the time. Its fiction editor was the poet Alexei Pleshcheyev; Nikolai Mikhailovsky himself was in charge of its literary-criticism section. Korolenko was a member of the journal's editorial board and it was on his recommendation that Pleshcheyev, disregarding Mikhailovsky's hostility to Chekhov's work and the objections of some other contributors who considered Chekhov politically compromised because he was a regular contributor to Suvorin's New Times, invited Chekhov to submit a story to Northern Herald. The result was "The Steppe," which Chekhov wrote slowly, carefully and with great deliberation, because he had never before written for a publication of comparable stature. He considered the occasion his debut in a major literary journal.

[22] Somewhat garbled partial citation of verse 3 from Psalm 146 ("Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help").

[23] On February 4, 1888, Korolenko wrote to Chekhov from St. Petersburg

that the government censors had not only abridged his story "Going the Same Way" (Po puti), but scrambled the sequence of its sections, so that when he

[25] Both Grigorovich and Korolenko considered Chekhov's talent too im­portant to be wasted on ephemeral humor magazines and the daily news­papers, where all his work had until then appeared. They urged him to write

[26] On Burenin, see Letter 12, note 6. Burenin's review of "The Steppe" was quite favorable.

[27] Pyotr Ostrovsky, the younger brother of the famous playwright Alexan­der Ostrovsky. His abilities as a critic were admired in literary circles, but he preferred to couch his criticism in the form of private letters to various writers and was averse to having them published. The letter he sent to Che­khov concerning "The Steppe" was highly critical and pointed out a number of supposed deficiencies in the story.

[28] A verse from Alexander Griboyedov's The Misfortune of Being Clever (also known in English as Woe front Wit), a brilliant and totally untrans-

[29] Captain Ivan Leontyev (1856—1911) was an army officer who in the early 1880s embarked on a promising career as a playwright and novelist,

[30] In his previous letter to Suvorin (August 29, 1888), Chekhov com­plained of financial worries and expressed the fear that his financial de­pendence on New Times might cast a shadow over their friendship.

[31] Suvorin's oldest son by his first marriage. He was a co-editor of New Times and a well-known journalist in his own right.

[32] Suvorin's sons Alexei and Boris (Borya) were enthusiastic fans of the bareback rider Maria Godefroy. Chekhov later used her name as the nickname of the hero's bride in his story "The Teacher of Literature."

[33] Natalia Lintvaryova, the third daughter of the Lintvaryov family, described in Letter 21 as the bony and raucous Ukrainophile. The Lintvar- yovs, who were overjoyed about Pleshcheyev's visit to Luka, boycotted the Chekhovs when Suvorin came to stay with them a little later during the same summer and they refused to meet him because of his widespread reputation as a reactionary (not realizing, apparently, that Pleshcheyev and Suvorin were on friendly terms personally and carried on a correspondence). Natalia Lintvaryova was trying to dissuade Chekhov from visiting Suvorin and his wife in the Crimea where he went in July of 1888.

[34] This paragraph was deleted by Maria Chekhova in her edition of the letters in order to spare the feelings of Natalia Lintvaryova, who remained a friend and correspondent of Chekhov for the rest of his life. The entire letter is omitted from the 1963-64 edition.

[35] Pleshcheyev had translated Emile Augier's play Les Effroutes, and the Moscow actor Nikolai Svetlov, who the previous year had presented Che­khov's Ivanov on the occasion of his benefit performance, used Chekhov as an intermediary in order to secure the rights to this translation for his 1888 benefit. But Augier's play was already promised elsewhere and Pleshcheyev offered Svetlov A Bad Man, a comedy he had translated from the German, as a replacement. It was after apprising Pleshcheyev of the state of negotiations (and possibly in order to prepare him for the startling content of "The Name- Day Party" which he had just sent to Northern Herald) that Chekhov added, almost as a postscript, the great credo that forms the bulk of this letter,

[36] Alexander Chekhov (1855-1913), Chekhov's oldest brother, was the first of the family to hit on the idea of writing and publishing for money. However, for all of Alexander's activities as a fiction writer, journalist and trade-journal editor, he was rapidly overtaken in literary ability not only by Anton but by their younger brother Mikhail as well. He spent most of his

[37] Anna Yevreinova (1844—1919), the publisher of Northern Herald, was the first Russian woman to be awarded an LL.D. (from the University of Leipzig). Zinaida Gippius described her as follows: "Inseparable from her pugdog, her gray hair closely cropped, a maroon velvet jacket thrown over her shoulders, she was constantly in three simultaneous but different kinds of excitement." Chekhov carried on an affectionately humorous correspond­ence with Yevreinova and occasionally tried to advise her on editorial matters. Thus, on November 7, 1889, after Nikolai Mikhailovsky's demonstrative resig­nation from Northern Herald (according to Pleshcheyev's letter to Chekhov about this incident, Mikhailovsky left because the government censors failed to delete anything from several of his reviews, which made Mikhailovsky feel he was losing his touch by writing for Northern Herald), Chekhov sent Yevreinova a list of medical, agricultural and other natural-science experts, recommending them as literate men who could contribute interesting articles to her journal. "Go ahead and invite genuine scholars and genuine practical men and stop regretting the departure of fake philosophers addicted to sociologizing," Chekhov wrote.

[38] For the right to publish Ivanov.

[39] This is the closest we can ever come to learning what Stories from the Lives of My Friends was like.

[40] In Russian, there is an untranslatable pun on the meanings of the word roman, which means both "novel" and "love affair."

[41] Suvorin was apparently so charmed by the Lintvaryov estate, where he had visited Chekhov the previous summer, that he began to consider buy­ing an estate for himself in the Ukraine.

[42] A Ukrainian newspaper editor.

[43] Our rendition of the last sentence replaces the untranslatable Russian folk saying Chekhov quotes in the original but conveys its meaning very closely.

[44] One of the earliest pieces of prose Chekhov ever published was called "Things Most Frequently Encountered in Novels, Stories and Other Such Things" (1880). It consisted of a one-page list of stock characters and situa­tions found in the popular fiction of his time.

[45] "The Princess" is one of Chekhov's few stories that unequivocally indict the Russian aristocracy and the ruling classes. He himself described this story as written "in a tone of protest." As if to stump Chekhov's future com­mentators, the story was written at Suvorin's request and it was first pub­lished in New Times.

[46] This is either a slip of the pen or a particularly elaborate compliment to Gogol's second play. The Marriage has only two acts.

[47] Suvorin's second-eldest son, who was in charge of the family's railroad bookstand operations.

[48] The Wood Demon began as a joint writing project of Chekhov and

Suvorin. After sketching one scene, Suvorin lost interest in the collaboration

edition of his letters, Chekhov is sent to catch crabs, rather than crayfish, in

[51] Tchaikovsky became a fervent admirer of Chekhov after reading his story "The Letter" in 1887. After that time, Chekhov and his stories are frequently mentioned in the composer's correspondence. For his part, Chekhov

As clear a statement of Chekhov's true motive for going to Sakhalin as one could wish—in addition to the humanitarian ones expressed in this

[53] Lavrov was a member of a wealthy Moscow merchant family, whose fortune he inherited. He invested a part of it in the left-liberal literary journal Russian Thought, of which he was owner, publisher and editor. He trans­lated Polish writers (especially Henryk Sienkiewicz) into Russian and was noted for giving large and lavish literary dinner parties. Lavrov's son Mikhail was one of the leaders of the 1899 student strike at St. Petersburg University and was responsible for getting Chekhov interested in the students' side of the strike (see Letter 12,0).

[54] A city in Eastern Siberia, where Chekhov had arrived by river boat the day before, after traveling continuously since April 21 by railroad, horse-drawn carriage and boat (and occasionally a few miles on foot), experiencing spring floods, carriage collision and shipwreck along the way.

[55] The last two sentences were deleted by censors in both Soviet editions.

[56] Olga Kundasova.

[57] Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy's principal disciple and apostle.

[58] Reference to a recently published story by Ivan Shcheglov.

[59] The ethnographer Nikolai Astyryov. He published an expose of in­human conditions in the mining industry in the Transbaikalia region, for which it was rumored he might be put on trial.

[60] The annotators of both Soviet editions of Chekov's letters become what

can only be described as hysterical at this point, insisting that there were never any such things as cholera rebellions in nineteenth-century Russia, that peasant uprisings caused by political and economic conditions were

[62] Ilya Repin and Ivan Shishkin were two highly admired academic painters of Chekhov's time. Their reputations dwindled during the artistic renaissance of the early twentieth century, but the aesthetics of socialist realism has reinstated them in more recent decades as giants of nineteenth- century painting, at least in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet film based on Chekhov's "The Grasshopper," the screen play emphasized the moral contrast between the virtuous doctor-husband (played by Sergei Bondarchuk) and the irresponsible painter-lover by making the husband (he was pointedly indiffer­ent to the arts in Chekhov's original story) an admirer of Repin and the lover (an academic painter in Chekhov) a decadent, modernist denigrator of Repin.

[63] Admiral Avelan was in command of the Russian fleet that visited France when an alliance was concluded between the two countries. Russian newspapers published detailed reports of receptions and dinners given in France in Avelan's honor. Chekhov was nicknamed after him because of his own almost equally strenuous social life during this period.

[64] The novel Doctor Pascal by Emile Zola.

[65] This cat is a mere figure of speech. With all of Chekhov's tremendous

[66] In February of 1894 Chekhov's coughing became unbearable. He re­fused to recognize it as a symptom of tuberculosis, assuming that it was a bad case of bronchitis. Being a physician himself he did not seek outside medical help; instead he decided to spend a month in the warmer climate of the Crimea as a cure for his cough.

[67] Antonina Abarinova, a well-known operatic contralto of the 1860s and '70s, who became a dramatic actress when her operatic career was finished. She later played the role of Polina in the original production of The Seagull.

[68] The high point of the impact of Tolstoy's moral philosophy on Chekhov

[69] Dr. Nikolai Korobov.

[70] Chekhov worked on The Island of Sakhalin from 1890 to 1894. He was dissatisfied with an early draft, which he showed to Suvorin, and started

a new version early in 1893. "Forget what I've shown you, for it is all false," he wrote to Suvorin on July 28, 1893. "I kept writing and kept feeling I was on the wrong track, until I finally discovered where the false note was. It was in my trying to teach something to someone with my Sakhalin and at the same time trying to conceal something and to hold myself back. But as soon

as I started to admit what an oddball I felt like while I was on Sakhalin and what swine live there, things became easy and my work surged ahead, even though it is ending up a bit on the humorous side."

[73] Would it be possible to get an advance out of ShubinskyS for the articles? [Chekhov's own footnote].

[74] Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) is remembered today primarily as a writer of historical romances dealing with either ancient Rome (Quo Vadis?) or the history of his native Poland (With Fire and Sword, The Del­uge, etc.). In Chekhov's time he was also admired for his two novels of contemporary Polish life, The Polaniecki Family (translated into English as The Irony of Life and also as The Children of the Soil) and Without Dogma. Vukol Lavrov, the publisher of Russian Thought, was Sienkiewicz's principal translator and popularizer in Russia.

[75] Chekhov was somewhat kinder to Sienkiewicz's other contemporary

novel, Without Dogma, of which he wrote to Vukol Lavrov on November 13,

[77] Lydia Veselitskaya (1857-1936) was a popular writer of books for juveniles, which she published under the pen name V. Mikulich. Her best- known nonjuvenile work was a trilogy of satirical novels about a giddy society girl named Mimochka. In the course of her life she had interesting encounters with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Leskov and she wrote valuable memoirs about each of them. She and Chekhov were not acquainted person­ally. Chekhov's letter to her is one of about half a dozen similar ones he wrote to various literary figures (Viktor Bilibin and Yelena Shavrova were two of them) who had gotten in touch with him to tell him they considered The Seagull a remarkable achievement and to urge him to disregard the un­just verdict of the opening-night audience and the St. Petersburg press.

[78] Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov.

[79] Chekhov was deeply involved in census taking at the time.

[80] Dr. Vladimir Khavkin was a Russian bacteriologist and a disciple of Louis Pasteur. In 1897, he was testing a vaccine against the bubonic plague in Bombay.

[81] Alexei Kolomnin had sent Chekhov an elegant clock in a leather case, and it had arrived smashed. Pavel Boure was the best-known watchmaker in Moscow.

[82] Dr. Vladimir Yakovenko (1857-1923) was a noted Russian psychi­atrist. At the Sixth Congress of the Russian Medical Association he was elected to head a committee charged with collecting evidence in support of a petition to the government to abolish corporal punishment in prisons. Accord­ingly, Yakovenko and a colleague published a letter to the editor in the January issue of The Physician asking the readers of that journal to supply