Mamin was one new friend who put Anton at his ease. Anton’s impromptu quips in foyers and restaurants, however, sowed seeds of hostility towards him in the Petersburg theatrical world. Lidia Iavorskaia showed no resentment – she sent affectionate notes to Anton that January and met him for tea at Suvorin’s, and in private. She had left Korsh’s theatre and his bed. She now needed to please the Petersburg public, but was at loggerheads with Suvorin, who loathed her mendacity – she constantly demanded more money – although her notoriety was a crowd-puller no entrepreneur could dispense with. Matters came to a head on the night of 11 January. Iavorskaia missed the dress rehearsal of Sazonova’s play. Suvorin was dragged from his bed. Trembling with rage, he sat down to write to her but was lost for words. Anton then started to dictate a mild note: ‘You will hurt the author’s and your colleagues’ feelings if you don’t come.’ Sazonova took over: ‘The play must run tomorrow. Kindly learn the part and be at the rehearsal at 11.’ The next evening the play was performed. Sazonova forgave Anton for his lily-livered tone with Iavorskaia: ‘I went to the director’s room for a smoke. Chekhov praises my play. I am so touched I could throw my arms round his neck.’2
Anton had to leave for Melikhovo: on 22 January 1896 Misha was to many Olga Vladykina, and Anton’s absence would have been an insult. Natalia, said Aleksandr, ‘thinks you were running away from women or chasing after women.’ Certainly, Anton had taken pains to elude Lidia Avilova, in whom he had suddenly lost interest, but there was no woman waiting for him in Moscow.
Back in Melikhovo the only relative waiting for Anton was cousin Georgi from Taganrog, who had brought Santurini wine and pickled mussels to celebrate Anton’s thirty-sixth birthday. The surly Roman had shot a hare for dinner. Pavel reported the usual rows in his son’s absence. On 4 January Roman had ‘caused a scandal’ and on 6 January Ivan the workman had been dismissed for drunkenness. Pavel had hired an Aleksandr Kretov, who proceeded to seduce the maid. The good news was that the red cow had calved and that the post office at Lopasnia had been opened and consecrated: with God’s blessing, guests would now herald their arrival. Aunt Marfa’s good news was, however, her idea of a joke: ‘Darling Antosha, Congratulations on your new happiness and new bride. I’ve found you a bride, ninety thousand dowry …’3
Anton spent his birthday – it was minus25°C – helping the piebald cow to calve. The next day he used cousin Georgi’s departure to make a day trip to Moscow, and sent apologies to Lidia Avilova, promising to see her shortly in Petersburg. Petersburg missed Anton. Suvorin, wrote Aleksandr, was so moody after Anton’s departure that nobody dared come near: he had even rowed with his intimates, the venomous Burenin and the devious Syromiatnikov. Anton had hurt Natalia by eating too little, not taking her out and not giving her the puppy he had promised. Aleksandr was sending Natalia to Moscow to sell books, but, he reassured Anton, his pariah of a wife would not spoil her brother-in-law’s marriage to an officer’s sister. ‘She’s a coward and unlikely to dare to undertake the journey from Lopasnia solo.’ Potapenko would not attend the wedding either, writing from Moscow:
Dear Antonio, I had intended to come to Melikhovo, but the forthcoming marriage there sticks in my path. I’m sure that the solemn event will bring Misha the maximum happiness … As I do not personally have this maximum I try to avoid such spectacles. Come here, Antonio, because I want to see you. Suvorin sent a note to me at the station asking me to bring you to Petersburg. I’m definitely going on Thursday.4
Misha married Olga at Vaskino church: of the bride’s family only Olga’s brother came. After the wedding, which did nothing to dispel Anton’s boredom in the snow-bound wastes, he met Potapenko in Moscow, and fled to Petersburg for three weeks.
On this second visit Anton stayed in Suvorin’s house on Ertel Lane and was subjected to Suvorin’s gloom. On 27 January, a night or two after Anton’s arrival, the two men went for a long walk. Suvorin recalled the radical daring of his youthful Sketches and Tableaux. Anton asked, ‘Why not give me a copy of this book as a present?’ but Suvorin had decades ago given away the last copy. The two men went into the next second-hand bookshop they came to, where Suvorin spotted the copy he had given twenty years before to the lawyer who had defended him when the book had been prosecuted. Suvorin inscribed it, and gave it to Anton.
On 2 February Sazonova saw her daughter Liuba act: ‘dreary, boring … every mistake she makes is a knife in [Sazonova’s husband] Nikolai’s heart.’ Anton appeared with Suvorin. To her he seemed damaged and she thought the hero’s enslavement to the heroine in ‘Ariadna’ explained it. ‘Not much of a story,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Some cruel woman must have given him a hard time and he’s described her to vent his feelings.’ At a banquet for the ageing actress Zhuleva, Suvorin shocked the company by kissing his former contributor Syromiatnikov. To kiss a man who purloined journalists’ copy for the secret police was gross indecency in Russian intellectual circles. Anton was revolted and showed it. He refused Syromiatnikov’s hand. The battle for Suvorin’s soul intensified. Anton at first hung on: much of 1896 was to be spent together in conversation and communion before the breach between them widened.
Anton’s friendship with Potapenko, that had survived such strains, was weakening. Anton avoided seeing him alone. Potapenko was hurt not to be invited to the Zhuleva banquet: Anton did not get him a ticket. Potapenko proposed a journey to Finland; Anton refused. To avoid discussion, he said that he was leaving for Moscow on 10, not 13, February. Potapenko protested: ‘As for Finland, that would be really swinish on your part, so you must silence your conscience and come.’ Two days later, finding Anton still in Petersburg, Potapenko was indignant: ‘Let me tell you you are a swine … I shan’t see you off because I’m expecting a typewriter to be delivered at 8 this evening.’ Anton found Potapenko a bore. He neither sang nor fornicated. The typewriter had replaced his flowing pen and symbolized the domesticity that his second wife had wrought. Potapenko was ending his last fling, with Liudmila Ozerova, whose success in Hauptmann’s Hannele’s Ascension and equally spectacular failure in Schiller’s Intrigue and Love had awoken Anton’s interest. This winter Potapenko introduced the two; by the autumn, Potapenko would cede Ozerova to Anton.
Anton preferred the tedium of Leikin to Potapenko’s hen-pecked state. Loyalty to his first regular publisher took Anton not only to pancake night – the last feast before the Orthodox lent – but also to two other evenings, listening while Leikin priced each dish and related his dachshunds’ utterances. Apart from a late evening being vamped by Lidia Iavorskaia – who still hoped for a Chekhov play of her own – Anton shunned company. Of his relatives he entertained only his older nephews. He took them to a Punch-and-Judy show, stuffed them with food, and bought them clothes. Aleksandr was gruff: ‘Both are greedy, over-ate and we shall have to give them castor oil. The gauntlets will be lost in an hour, and the jackets will be outgrown in 1½ months … In their sloppiness they are their mother’s children.’
Elena Shavrova, with whom Anton had maintained a flirtatious tutorial relationship for six years, now lived in Petersburg as Mrs Iust, an official’s wife. The story she was writing was appropriately called ‘Caesar’s Wife’ – her virtue had to be above suspicion. Anton, when she met him, seemed ‘very unkind’. Kleopatra Karatygina begged Anton to put in a word for her with theatre managements or face ‘hellish revenges Nos. One to Five’. As he caught the Moscow train, Anton replied, equally unkindly: ‘As I am an absolute zero in the Maly Theatre, all five items of your hellish revenge acted on me more weakly than the bite of a paralysed mosquito.’ At Suvorin’s masked ball for Shrove-Tide, Lidia Avilova, dressed in a black domino costume, had, she claimed, more luck. She sought a response to the inscribed silver medallion she had anonymously sent Anton a year ago. Anton told her she would get her answer in autumn, on the day that The Seagull was performed on stage.5
Notes
1 See Kleopatra Karatygina’s memoirs, LN68, 575–86.
2 See Sazo
nova’s diary, LN87, 307–8.
3 See OR, 331 52 29: Marfa Ivanovna Loboda’s letters to Anton, 1881–1902; 4 Jan. 1896.
4 See OR, 331 56 36b: Potapenko’s letters to Anton 1896. See Perepiska II, 1984, 62–76.
5 A flirtatious conversation is reconstructed in unChekhovian detail in Avilova’s memoirs (V vospominaniiakh 121–208), but her account is partly corroborated by other records. She recalls being surprised by Anton’s visit to Petersburg, first catching sight of him that year in a theatre box: ‘How ridiculous and weird it was: papa Suvorin and maman Suvorin and Chekhov, their baby, in the middle.’
FIFTY-ONE
Lika Rediscovered
February–March 1896
ANTON AND SUVORIN took sleeping compartments with two actresses in the latter’s theatre, Aleksandra Nikitina and Zina Kholmskaia. When they arrived in Moscow on 14 February, the men took a room in the best hotel, the Slav Bazaar, and then went to a party, where Anton listened to a couple communicating ardently in code, a device he was to use five years later in Three Sisters. The actresses went home, but Anton was invited in two days’ time to discuss, as Aleksandra Nikitina put it, ‘this and this and this.’
The next day Suvorin and Chekhov joined the throng of pilgrims at Tolstoy’s Moscow house. Anton was all tact that Tolstoy began to discuss Resurrection. Tolstoy had already formed his opinion of Chekhov as a fine writer corrupted by medicine and free thinking. Chekhov noted in his diary:
Tolstoy was irritable, made cutting remarks about decadents … Tolstoy’s daughters Tatiana and Maria were … both telling fortunes and they asked me to pick cards, and I showed each of them an ace of spades, and that upset them … They are both extraordinarily likeable and their relationship with their father is touching.
Suvorin weighed up with the Tolstoys the pros and cons of sudden or slow death; he noted: ‘Death has been trying to get into their house. First the Countess was ill, now he is. He has kidney stones and he suffers terribly.’ Anton had a happier impression. For Tatiana Tolstaia, however, there were consequences Anton never knew about: his visit generated a passion she soon felt compelled to repress.
After a Saturday in Serpukhov discussing school-building, Anton got back to Melikhovo early on Sunday 18 February and slept. He awoke to find that his father had a new initiative: the Melikhovo schoolteacher had been employed to paper the living room. Life for Pavel, Evgenia and Masha had been snowbound and lonely. One parental letter to Misha and Olga was pathetic:
We were deeply touched by your letter. In it are expressed all the feelings of hearts that love from the soul. In the twilight of our years such a letter is a great consolation. We spent Shrove Tide just the three of us, with Masha. We expected visitors from Moscow, but nobody came.1
For five days Natasha Lintvariova brought from the Ukraine loud laughter. Masha, back teaching in Moscow, came only for the weekends. Cousin Georgi had left with a consignment of books for Taganrog library. February was severe: two peasants were frozen to death. March gave no respite. The estate was under six feet of snow: no school could be built until spring. The Seagull awaited an indulgent censor and a daring director. The great prose work that was to fill Chekhov’s mind that year was only germinating and he had not yet disinterred The Wood Demon for transformation into a viable play. In the evenings, trying to escape Pavel’s ranting, Anton picked through the books he had bought, or had been given, to despatch to Taganrog library and, although his eyes tired by candlelight he became absorbed in fortuitous reading of an extraordinary variety of literature.
His private life was empty. Kleopatra Karatygina gave her manuscript to Aleksandr to post on. Anton’s reaction was chilling; on 28 February she concluded: ‘We don’t need to use X-rays to see that the mysterious thread that bound us has broken …’2 Elena Shavrova was chastely silent until spring; Iavorskaia, too, broke off communication. Lika Mizinova, however, reappeared. For the last weekend of February, as of old, she came down with Masha. Her daughter Christina, of whom nobody spoke, stayed with Granny and the nurse. Although she still suffered from stage fright, Lika wanted to sing. Her love for Anton was rekindled, as if the past two years had never happened. Perhaps the imminent publication of ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ revived memories of the summer of 1891, of the younger Lika who infused the story. Anton foresaw the searchlight that The Seagull would fix on Lika, and felt a guilty affection.
When Anton went to Moscow on 29 February for five days, he left his father alone in the house with just the dachshunds, Brom and Quinine, for company. The new workman Aleksandr slept in the kitchen. Evgenia had gone to Iaroslavl to stay with Misha and Olga. Lika was in Moscow. Anton preserved a pencilled scrawl from her on lined paper. It reads: ‘Come, but in 10–15 minutes. I’m very heppy.’ The next few months were the most intense episode in their long love affair.3 Neither Potapenko nor Anton’s actresses were in evidence, and mutual compassion, shared loneliness and bitter experience seem to have brought Lika and Anton closer than at any time in the last six years.
Intimacy with the girl whom he had taken apart to create the heroine of The Seagull inspired Chekhov to revise his play. The author entrusted his own antihero to get the play past the Petersburg censor: Potapenko, sublimely unembarrassed, agreed. On 15 March 1896 the play was posted to Petersburg.
In mid March the pond filled with melted snow; work began on the new school at Talezh; the ewes were shorn. Vania in Moscow was asked to bring for Easter: paint for Easter eggs, ten small candles and two quarter-pound candles, an Easter prayer book in a vermilion leather binding and a wall calendar. Anton spent his energies helping supplicants – Aleksandr, cousin Volodia, Taganrog’s citizens, and total strangers.
Visitors ventured to Melikhovo, though melting snow made the roads almost impassable. Mud and ruts held Lika back: ‘Tell me about the state of the road, whether there is a chance of coming and going back without risking my life.’ All three brothers came on the same train, in separate carriages, Misha and Olga for ten days, Vania without Sonia (ill at ease with her in-laws) for two, Aleksandr with his eldest son, Kolia, for four. Spring brought headaches, pains in the right eye and more ominous symptoms for Anton. He never forgot what a peasant had said when he treated the man for TB: ‘It’s no use, I’ll go with the spring waters.’ In Pushkin’s words, ‘I don’t like spring./I find the thaw dreary … stench, mud – in Spring I’m sick/ My blood ferments; my feelings, mind are strained by anguish.’ ‘Spring Feelings of an Unbridled Ancient’, a poem by Count A. K. Tolstoy, caught Anton’s attention: ‘All my breast burns,/ And every splinter/ Tries to leap on every splinter.’ As he waited for the ice to break, Chekhov wrote, he saw the ice as the splinters of his soul.
The family, too, feared spring and Anton’s discreet wads of paper full of blood and phlegm. On 17 March Pavel changed the rooms around: Anton was moved to Masha’s, the warmest in the house, and Masha took his study. Easter, the climax of Pavel’s and Evgenia’s year, coincided with Pavel’s name day: ‘Vania gave me a white tie, Antosha bought me an Easter prayer book and a pound of wax candles.’4
Despite the schisms in Petersburg, Suvorin’s need for Anton’s company was even more urgent than Anton’s need for his. Suvorin’s thoughts were Chekhovian, and passionately necropolitan:
23 March 1896. Today is Easter Saturday. Gei [the journalist] and I went to the Alexander Nevsky monastery and, as is my custom, I went to the graves of my dead. How much that is tragic is buried in these graves, how much grief and horror … At Gorbunov’s grave we opened the lantern hanging from the cross, took the oil lamp out and lit it. I said, ‘Christ has arisen, Ivan …’ Soon you will lie in the grave where three already lie. All that’s easy to imagine – being carried into church, where and how the speeches will be, the coffin being lowered, the earth hitting the coffin lid. How often I have seen it, but never was it so bad for me as at Volodia’s funeral. I shall be laid next to him. That’s what I told Chekhov. The cemetery is very near the Neva. My soul will come out of
the coffin, go down underground into the Neva, meet a fish and enter it.5
Next to the graves of his first wife, shot dead in 1873, of his daughter, Aleksandra, who died in 1880, of Volodia who shot himself in 1887 and of Valerian, whom diphtheria took in 1888, Suvorin became morose and distressed: his son-in-law Kolomnin (soon to die) and Anton Chekhov were the two men whom he trusted and loved.
Notes
1 See OR 331 73 10: Pavel Chekhov’s letters to Misha, 1885–98: 5 Feb. 1896.
2 See OR, 331 47 13v: Kleopatra Karatygina’s letters to Anton, 1892–1904.
3 This view is Vl. Rynkevich’s, in Puteshestvie k domu s mezoninom, Rostov, 1990. See OR, 331 52 2v: Lika’s letters to Anton 1895–6; some printed in Perepiska II, 1984, 16–59.
4 See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova, Melikhovskii letopisets, 1995.
5 In the printed versions of Suvorin’s diary Gei is misread as Chekhov (Suvorin’s hand was appalling) and it was therefore thought that Chekhov had fled Melikhovo at Easter 1896 to be with Suvorin. A close reading of Suvorin’s manuscript confirms, however, that he strolled the cemetery with Gei, not Chekhov.
FIFTY-TWO
The Khodynka Spring
April–May 1896
THE FIRST STARLING returned to Melikhovo on 1 April. Two days later Anton invited Lika via Masha: ‘The week after Easter you can travel our roads without risk of death.’ That evening Pavel noted in the diary; ‘Antosha went without supper.’ For four days Anton coughed badly. Asking Potapenko to return The Seagull, he told him he was suffering from ‘the old boredom. I spat a bit of blood for 3 or 4 days, but I’m all right now, I could drag joists about or get married.’ He would not admit to TB. When Ezhov, desperate that his new wife was showing the same fatal symptoms as the first, asked for advice, Anton was bland, gulling himself as much as Ezhov:
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