Two days later, he teased Lika that she would again take a summer dacha with Levitan and Kuvshinnikova. His letter ended half flippant, half appealing, paraphrasing Lermontov: ‘Lika, it’s not you I ardently love! I love in you my former suffering and my lost youth.’ On 2 April Anton sent Masha an Easter shopping list, ending: ‘Bring Lika.’ Lika came, deserting her family’s Easter reunion.6 Hard on Lika’s heels came Levitan. The Chekhovs brought a priest from the monastery to take the Easter service in Melikhovo church (which had no clergy): the family and guests acted as choir and Pavel relived his Taganrog days as cantor. Anton kept Lika and Levitan apart: the two men went shooting for two days after Easter Sunday, until an incident that foreshadows The Seagull. Anton confessed to Suvorin:
Levitan fired at a snipe; the bird was winged and fell in a puddle … Levitan wrinkles his brow, shuts his eyes and asks in a trembling voice: ‘Dear boy, bang it on the head with the gunstock.’ I said I couldn’t. He keeps nervously twitching his shoulders, his head trembling, begging. And the snipe is still looking bewildered. I had to do as Levitan said and kill it. One fine lovelorn creature less, and two fools go home to supper.
When Levitan went home next day, he discovered that Anton had treated him less mercifully than the snipe. ‘The Grasshopper’, in The Performing Artist, set all Moscow tittering or seething. The ‘heroine’ of the ‘little’ story, ‘The Grasshopper’, is a married woman (with the features of Lika and the circumstances of Kuvshinnikova) who has an affair with a lecherous artist, very like Levitan; the ‘grasshopper’ heroine’s husband, a saintly doctor (who faintly recalls both Dr Kuvshinnikov and Dr Chekhov), is driven literally to self-destruction by the situation. Dr Kuvshinnikov was alive and well, but his loving tolerance (recognized by his wife in her diaries) imbues the fictional doctor. Sofia Kuvshinnikova, forty-two, swarthy, and a serious painter, saw herself in the heroine, despite Anton’s heroine being, like Lika, twenty, blonde and without artistic talent. Others also felt libelled. The actor Lensky, who frequented the Kuvshinnikova salon, and had told Chekhov not to write drama, recognized himself in a minor character.
Sofia Kuvshinnikova never spoke to Anton again; Lensky did not speak to a Chekhov for eight years. Levitan wanted to fight a duel and did not meet Anton for three years. (Levitan had other worries. The police were expelling Jews from Moscow, and he fled 150 miles east, until Dr Kuvshinnikov, a police surgeon, secured his return.) Levitan’s relationship with the Kuvshinnikovs broke down. Sofia marked the summer of 1892 as their last. Dr Kuvshinnikov kept a discreet silence, but he never spoke to Anton again.
Lika was as badly hurt as the Kuvshinnikovs and Levitan, but she was in love and, in this matter, was wiser than Anton:
What a savage you are, Anton … I know full well that if you say or do something hurtful it’s not out of any wish to do it on purpose, but because you really don’t care how people will take what you do …7
Neither Lika’s reproaches, nor the loss of Levitan, a friend of ten years, seemed to mean much to Anton. Nor did the visit of his ex-fiancée Dunia Efros (now married to Konovitser, a lawyer from Taganrog gimnazia). Anton wanted to see only Suvorin and Pavel Svobodin. Suvorin came on 22 April (a day after Dunia Efros left). Suvorin, who owned a palatial mansion in Petersburg and a fine villa in the Crimea, could not stand the ill-heated smoky rooms, with no W.C. and no sprung carriage to take him to the station. On the 24th he took Anton to Moscow to spend three days in luxury at the Slav Bazaar. While Suvorin slept, Anton wrote. Melikhovo was modernized over the next five years, but it was hard to persuade Suvorin to go there again: if he passed on his way south, he met Anton at Lopasnia station.
Anton returned to Melikhovo with Svobodin, just as Pavel was consecrating the sowing of thirty acres of oats. Apart from the Dauphin, Svobodin was the only guest at the end of April 1892. He returned in late June. The family planned to build him a cottage. Until the theatre season opened, Svobodin devoted himself to Anton, for whom he felt, both as actor and patient, admiration and affection.
Anton wrote his new work, ‘Ward No. 6’, for a Moscow journal, The Russian Review. The editors had paid a 500-rouble advance and would print whatever Chekhov sent, but they disliked the gloom and radicalism of the story. The obvious journal for such a work was the left-wing Russian Thought, but Anton had quarrelled with its editors, Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev, two years before. Svobodin’s tact now reconciled Anton to men who had called him ‘unprincipled’, but it took until 23 June to get Chekhov to transfer his story from The Russian Review, and to conjure an apology from Lavrov. Svobodin pitched Chekhov into the camp of Russian Thought, the bête noire of Suvorin’s New Times. Anton could do little in return. Svobodin’s heart had tired of pumping blood round tubercular lungs. On 25 June 1892, after Svobodin had left, Anton told Suvorin:
He has lost weight, gone grey, his bones are showing and when he’s asleep he looks like a dead man. Extraordinary meekness, a calm tone and a morbid revulsion for the theatre. Looking at him I conclude that a man preparing for death cannot love the theatre.
Dramaturgy too was stale. On 4 June 1892 Anton complained to Suvorin: ‘Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. The damned endings won’t come! The hero either gets married or shoots himself.’ All Chekhov could write was a story of illicit love and family conflict, called ‘Neighbours’, with a sidelong glance at the Varenikovs next door to Melikhovo.
‘Ward No. 6’ depleted Anton’s creative resources. Set in the psychiatric ward of a remote hospital, the story is a bleak allegory of the human condition. There is no love interest. The plot is a Greek tragedy in its violent reversal of fortunes. Like ‘The Duel’, it confronts activist with quietist. Now the activist is not a scientist, but a madman, Gromov, who has been incarcerated for proclaiming that truth and justice must triumph one day. The quietist, Dr Ragin, is drawn into dialogue and borrows every excuse devised by Marcus Aurelius or Schopenhauer for condoning evil. By consorting with a madman, Ragin alarms his superiors: he is trapped into his own ward, where, after a beating from the charge nurse, he dies of a stroke. Gromov has to go on living. Chekhov set his story among nettles and grey fences. Suvorin disliked it, but the elderly novelist Leskov recognized its genius, exclaiming ‘Ward No. 6 is Russia.’8
Work so harrowing left a void. The Island of Sakhalin lay untouched. A worried editor, Tikhonov, wrote in March 1892, ‘I hope that you won’t stop writing, like some Cincinnatus’. Fears were well-founded. Chekhov saw medicine and physical labour as salvation. Yet another young writer whom Anton knew, Bibikov, died destitute in Kiev. In Petersburg Barantsevich, Bilibin and Shcheglov moaned to Anton. Tilling the soil gave Anton only the illusion of health. When not planting trees, catching mice to release in the wood, or digging a pond, he slept exhausted. For Leikin he wrote a few trivia, to pay for the dachshunds that Leikin had promised. Anton toiled from five in the morning until after dark. He was as happy in Melikhovo as he ever would be. He ordered almost every freshwater fish of Russia: his pond was an ichthyological museum. He planted fifty cherry trees from Vladimir – the real cherry orchard preceded the fictional one. He summoned stove-makers from Moscow, bought a sprung carriage for the journey to the station and dreamed of building a house in the woods, where he would tend trees and keep chickens and bees. Small disasters brought him down to earth: bad weather and the deaths of a horse, of his only drake, and of the hedgehog that hunted the mice in the barn.
Leikin, himself a recent landowner, sent cucumber seeds and endless advice. Franz Schechtel, a man of many hobbies, sent eggs which hatched into fancy poultry. He also sent mare’s tail, a medicinal weed.9 Chekhov told him on 7 June: ‘The ground is covered with little penises in erecktirten Zustande. Some places now look as if they’d like to screw …’
Cousins from Taganrog and Kaluga expressed their amazement that a Chekhov had joined the landowning gentry. Women friends wondered at Anton’s empire. They crowned him ‘King of the Medes’, a title as apt as Cincinnatus. Ale
ksandr’s envy of ‘Cincinnatus’ bothered Anton. All spring his elder brother begged for land on which to build. Anton hedged, horrified lest Natalia come near. In early April Natalia’s year-old Misha nearly died of the convulsions that had killed Aleksandr’s first-born Mosia: ‘My wife is destroyed, and I walk about like a cat scalded with sulphuric acid,’ Aleksandr wrote. The doctor, Aleksandr hinted, advised a climate warmer than Finland and cooler than Taganrog – near Anton:
1) By the way I have absolutely given up drinking …
2) I can’t let a rootless, if good, person like my wife go where she wants, as I know from experience. Even less can I let her go to her sisters’ …
3) Therefore wouldn’t there be a hut, a house, or something similar, near your estate for the summer? … It would only be on the absolute condition that nobody of my family dares to get into your house. My wife herself insists on that. If granny wants to take the infants in, that is her business. The infants and my wife will not be coming to see you uninvited … Natalia says that … our mother is not fond of her.
In the last week in June Aleksandr brought his two elder boys, now aged eight and six, to Melikhovo. He took photographs, and neither argued nor drank. Natalia was not invited, though she had fed Pavel and Anton in Petersburg, and shopped with Masha in Moscow.
In summer the ‘Dairy’ school closed for the holidays and Misha’s tax office in Aleksin condoned his absences. Women friends of Vania and Misha visited. Countess Klara Mamuna, who had befriended Masha in the Crimea two years ago, came to play the piano. She flirted with both Misha and Anton, but seemed, before the summer ended, to be Misha’s fiancée. Aleksandra Liosova, a lively and beautiful local schoolteacher, ‘the fair daughter of Israel’, was to be engaged to Vania, but photographs and letters show that it was Anton who drew her. Natalia Lintvariova alone caused no tension: she avoided flirtation.
Olga Kundasova, as she watched Anton become more and more involved with Lika Mizinova, had begun to show symptoms of manic depression. After astronomy and mathematics, she now took up psychiatry – as therapy for herself, and as a career. In August 1892 Olga made her promised visit. She made friends with a local woman doctor, Pavlovskaia, and became both outpatient and assistant to Dr Iakovenko at Meshcherskoe psychiatric hospital ten miles away. Anton’s affection was rekindled. ‘Kundasova seemed cleverer in the country,’ he told Suvorin and in May declared: ‘I should be very, very glad to see Kundasova, as glad as seeing a heavenly angel, and would build a separate cottage for her here.’ Their intimacy, to judge by the fragments of evidence, remained troubled. Olga responded to a gift:
I implore you to treat me, if not gently (that’s not in you), then not exactingly and not roughly. I have become impossibly sensitive. In conclusion let me tell you that you have no grounds for fearing a long stay by such a psychopath as O. Kundasova.10
The piano teacher Aleksandra Pokhlebina, nicknamed ‘Vermicelli’ for her skinny figure, also visited. Her love for Anton rapidly became demented. Lika Mizinova was unperturbed by these rivals. She knew that Anton preferred her shy beauty, her contralto and her cantaloupe-yellow jacket to Kundasova’s intellect and severe black dresses. She was amused as Anton desperately evaded ‘Vermicelli’. Lika may have been helpless in love, unable to break free or to secure a response, but she had studied Anton: she guessed that by autumn he would be restless. By June, in fact, he was sounding out Suvorin about a journey to Constantinople; the Lintvariovs were calling him to Sumy. Disillusion creeps into Anton’s jokes to Natalia Lintvariova on 20 June 1892:
We’re finished, there will be no oats … Daria the cook, though quite sober, threw out all the goose eggs: only three of the enemy [the geese] hatched out. The piglet bites and eats the maize in the garden. The dear ponies ate the cauliflowers at night. We bought a calf for 6 roubles, it bellows in a deep baritone from morning til night … In a word, the King of the Medes can only utter a wild warrior cry and flee to the wilderness …
Lika acted. She dismissed her suitors, and asked her father for railway tickets to abduct Anton. She told him on 18 June 1892:
Throwing aside all pride, I’ll tell you I am very sad and want to see you very much. There will be tickets to the Caucasus, that is separate ones for you and me … From Moscow to Sevastopol, then from Batumi to Tiflis and finally from Vladikavkaz to Mineral Waters and back to Moscow. Be ready for the beginning of August, only for the time being please don’t tell any one at home about the tickets.
Anton beat a quick retreat:
Write and see that nothing is done about tickets until the cholera in the Caucasus is over. I don’t want to hang about in quarantine … Are the dragoons at Rzhev courting you? I permit you these attentions, but on condition that you, darling, come no later than the end of July. Do you hear? … Do you remember us walking across the fields? Until we meet, Likusia, darling little Cantaloupe. All yours, The King of the Medes.
To the non-committal King of the Medes, the cholera epidemic now creeping to Russia from the Caspian Sea was a convenient excuse not to depart. In his letter to Suvorin, however, Dr Chekhov played the cholera down as more sensation than danger.
Notes
1 Nikolai Ezhov teased Anton in a skit, Certified Authentic: a Mr Mongoose buys 600 acres, but the forest is not his and the piano is unplayable.
2 See OR, 331 96 37: Aleksandr Smagin’s letters to Masha, 1888–May 1892.
3 See OR, 331 96 38: Aleksandr Smagin’s 34 letters to Masha, June 1892–1929.
4 See O semie, 1970, 203.
5 Cockroaches were believed to leave a house only before a fire.
6 See MXaT, (Sanin) 5323/ 1933–1973: L. S. Mizinova’s letters to Sofia Ioganson, 1877–99.
7 See OR, 331 52 2a: Lika’s letters to Anton 1891–2; some in Perepiska, 1984, II, 16–59.
8 Leskov had written ‘The Unmercenary Engineers’: an officer resists corruption and is committed to a psychiatrist, who declares death the ultimate medicine. Leskov’s late ‘Hare Park’ pays homage to ‘Ward No. 6’: a secret policeman, nursed by the radical he persecuted, dies in a madhouse.
9 See OR, 331 63 25v: Franz Schechtel’s letters to Anton, 1891–3.
10 See OR, 331 48 79a: O. P. Kundasova’s letters to Anton, 1892–1904: 25 May 1892.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Cholera
July–September 1892
AFTER FAMINE, cholera struck Russia’s heartland. With unusual alacrity the authorities marshalled doctors. Anton did not wait to be asked. On 8 July 1892 he offered to man a village clinic. He forwent a salary: the Serpukhov health commission thanked him, but denied him even a nurse. Council funds had to be topped up by the rich: Anton begged the owners of the tannery and cloth mill, the archimandrite of the monastery and the aristocracy for funds to build quarantine barracks. The archimandrite refused, while Princess Orlova-Davydova – Anton never hit it off with the nobility – treated him like a hired hand.
Anton was soon on good terms, however, with Doctor Vitte in Serpukhov. One local doctor, Dr Kurkin, was an old acquaintance. Few supplies were available, but the Serpukhov authorities ordered the latest anticholera equipment: thermometers, large Cantani syringes for injecting fluids under the skin, tannin enemas to disinfect the gut, carbolic acid, castor oil, calomel, coffee and brandy. All summer Anton rode round twenty-five villages, over dusty or muddy tracks, checking sanitation, treating the dysentery, worms, syphilis and tuberculosis endemic among the peasantry, falling into bed exhausted every night, rising with the sun. Grateful patients gave him a pedigree pig, and three pairs of suede gloves for Masha. Anton’s Sakhalin experience served him well. With Dr Kurkin he inspected factories in nearby villages. Three times they inspected a tannery that was polluting the rivers and shamed the owners into action, if only cosmetic. In this fallow creative period, Chekhov saw environmental degradation, human misery, complacency and failed ideals – material for new fiction. The cholera never came to Melikhovo. A neighbouring district had sixteen cases, four fatal.1 Anton�
�s energy won commendation and he was sucked into the committees for improving the lot of the peasantry. From cholera officer he would become medical officer of health, and builder of schools, libraries, post offices, roads and bridges over 100 square miles.
Anton’s medical duties left him little energy for the harvest, but with the loan of machinery from Prince Shakhovskoi, and Masha toiling in the kitchen garden, a little of what they sowed was reaped, even though the geese and cows helped themselves to the cabbages. Anton found it odd to pick cherries and not be beaten for it. Visitors were few. Muscovites feared the cholera, and Anton’s friends knew that he came home only to sleep. He visited Moscow just once between 16 May and 15 October, although trains ran every three hours and reached the city centre in two to three hours. The devoted Gruzinsky and Ezhov, despite invitations, stayed away. Ivanenko the unemployed flautist came to live in Melikhovo until autumn 1893; he was enthusiastic but incompetent – Chekhov called him nedotiopa (‘ninny’), the sobriquet of Epikhodov, the manager in The Cherry Orchard. Prince Shakhovskoi gave Ivanenko a sinecure as secretary, and he would accompany, on piano or flute, any visitor who sang. One relative came for a week with his son: Piotr Petrov, the husband of Anton’s cousin Ekaterina Chokhova.2
Lika could not accept Anton’s excuses for not travelling. Anton deflected her again: he entrusted her with Sudermann’s play Sodom’s End to translate: he would edit it for the stage. Lika just passed the play to a German woman friend, which angered Anton. All summer they struggled by letter; he played her like a fish he was reluctant to land; she took the bait and could not tear out the hook. They swore devotion and indifference to each other. Anton blew hot and cold on 28 June:
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