speaking and breathing: his life was ended. V. S. Pritchett, in Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (1988): They were going to send for oxygen, but Chekhov said he would be dead before it came, so a bottle of champagne was brought. He sipped it and soon began to ramble and he evidently had one of those odd visions that he had evoked in Ward 6. 'Has the sailor gone?' he asked. What sailor? Perhaps his sailor in Gusev? Then he said in Russian, 'I am dying,' then in German, 'Ich sterbe,' and died at once. Donald Rayfield, in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997): He raved of a sailor in danger: his nephew Kolia. Olga sent one of the Russian students to fetch the doctor and ordered ice from the porter. She chopped up a block of ice and placed it on Anton's heart. Dr. Schworer came and sent the two students for oxygen. Anton protested that an empty heart needed no ice and that he would die before the oxygen came. Schworer gave him an injection of camphor.
And, finally, here is Philip Callow, writing in Chekhov: The Hidden Ground (1998): Chekhov was hallucinating, his eyes glittery, talking gibberish about a sailor, about some Japanese. She tried to put an ice-bag on his chest and he was suddenly lucid, fully conscious. 'You don't put ice on an empty stomach,' he told her, like a doctor supervising a nurse…
Then the doctor, one of those Germans who according to Chekhov followed every rule to the letter, did something astonishing. He went to the telephone in the alcove and ordered a bottle of the hotel's best champagne. He was asked how many glasses. 'Three,' he shouted, 'and hurry, d'you hear?'
In a final effort of courtesy Chekhov sat up, said 'Ich sterbe,' and fell back against the pillows. The champagne arrived, brought to the door by a young porter who looked as if he'd been sleeping. His fair hair stood up, his uniform was creased, his jacket half-buttoned. He entered the room with a silver tray and three cut-crystal glasses and carried in a silver ice bucket containing the champagne.
Everything was now in slow motion. The young man, ignorant of the occasion, could hear someone laboring dreadfully for breath in the other room. He found a place for the tray and glasses and tried discreetly to find somewhere to put the ice-bucket. The doctor, a big ponderous man with a dense moustache, gave him a tip and he went through the door as if dazed.
Schwohrer, not given to displays of emotion, opened the champagne bottle with his usual quiet efficiency. And perhaps because he thought it unseemly he eased the cork out so as to minimize the loud pop. He poured three glasses and replaced the cork. Olga freed her fingers for a moment from Chekhov's burning hand. She rearranged his pillow and put the cool glass of champagne against his palm.
As I read these paragraphs, I marveled at the specificity of the new details-the telephone in the alcove, the doctor's 'quiet efficiency,' the cut-crystal glasses, the sleepy young porter with the half-buttoned jacket. Could Callow have stumbled upon a cache of new primary material in a Moscow attic? I looked for notes at the back of his book and found none. Then something stirred in my memory. I began to feel that I had met the sleepy young porter before. I went to the bookcase and got out a collection of Raymond Carver's stories, Where I'm Calling From (1989). In a story entitled 'Errand' I read: CheidlOV was hallucinating, talking about sailors, and there were snatches of something about the Japanese. 'You don't put ice on an empty stomach,' he said when she tried to place an ice pack on his chest…
[Dr. Schwohrer] went over to an alcove where there was a telephone on the wall. He read the instructions for using the device He picked up the receiver, held it to his ear, and did as the instructions told him. When someone finally answered, Dr. Schwohrer ordered a bottle of the hotel's best champagne. 'How many glasses?' he was asked. 'Three glasses!' the doctor shouted into the mouthpiece. 'And hurry, do you hear?'…
The champagne was brought to the door by a tired-looking young man whose blond hair was standing up. The trousers of his uniform were wrinkled, the creases gone, and in his haste he'd missed a loop while buttoning his jacket…
The young man entered the room carrying a silver ice bucket with the champagne in it and a silver tray with three cut-crystal glasses. He found a place on the table for the bucket and glasses, all the while craning his neck, trying to see into the other room, where someone panted ferociously for breath. It was a dreadful, harrowing sound…
Methodically, the way he did everything, the doctor went about the business of working the cork out of the bottle. He did it in such a way as to minimize, as much as possible, the festive explosion. He poured three glasses and, out of habit, pushed the cork back into the neck of the bottle… Olga momentarily released her grip on Chekhov's hand-a hand, she said later, that burned her fingers. She arranged another pillow behind his head. Then she put the cool glass of champagne against Chekhov's palm…
'Errand' is one of those hybrid works in which real historical figures and events are combined with invented ones, so that the nonspecialist reader has no way of knowing which is which. In this case, the expert on Chekhov's death that the reader of these pages has become will be able to sort out what Carver invented and what he took from the primary and secondary sources. And he may well conclude that Carver has sinned as greatly against the spirit of fiction as Callow has sinned against the spirit of fact. As Callow does not inform us of what he lifted from Carver, so Carver does not inform us of what he lifted from Olga and the biographers. The young porter is his invention, but Schwohrer, Rabeneck, Olga, and Anton are not. Nor is he the author of the 'plot' of the death scene. The author is Olga. Her powerful narrative is the skeleton on which all the subsequent death scenes hang, Carver's included. Callow's appropriations of Carver's fictionalizations-which are only a degree more imaginative than those of Magar-shack, Toumanova, Gilles, et al.-provide a Gogolian twist to the chronicle of the writing of Chekhov's death scene. It is all so dizzyingly mixed up that the moral is a little hard to make out. 'Don't put ice on an empty stomach!' may be the one we will have to settle for. Harvey Pitcher's characterization of Chekhov before his marriage to Olga as 'Russia's most elusive literary bachelor' is a given of Chekhov biography. Evidence of Chekhov's many liaisons-from which he always nimbly disengaged himself-was never lacking; the opening of the Soviet archives merely gives this part of his known life a more explicitly sexual shimmer. But one woman involved with Chekhov-Lidia Avilova, a pretty young St. Petersburg wife and mother with literary pretensions-stands out from the rest. Her distinction rests on two facts. One is that she wrote a memoir called Chekhov in My Life, chronicling her unhappy love affair with the writer; the other is that the affair was all in her head. Chekhov in My Life (published in Russia in 1947 and in America in 1950, in a translation by David Magarshack) is, by all accounts (except David Mag-arshack's), an exercise in stupendous self-deception, if not a deliberate fraud. Simmons demonstrates in his biography that there was nothing between Avilova and Chekhov beyond bovarysm on her side and embarrassed elusiveness on his. With a thoroughness that sometimes borders on sadism, Simmons tears apart the Avilova memoir, holding up documentary proof of the pathetic untenability of its claim; his savage rout of Avilova runs like a red thread through his otherwise calm biography. (Every time she appears, he can't resist giving her another whack.) Since Simmons, no biographer has been able to be anything but derisive about Avilova's claims. But the memoir alone-it is written in the dialogue-choked style of a girls' romance-gives the show away. 'Remember our first meeting?' Chekhov says to her, and incredibly continues, 'And do you know-do you know that I was deeply in love with you? Seriously in love with you? Yes, I loved you. It seemed to me that there was not another woman in the world I could love like that. You were beautiful and sweet and there was such freshness in your youth, such dazzling charm. I loved you and I thought only of you.' Describing this first meeting-which actually did take place, in 1889, at a dinner party given by Avilova's brother-in-law Sergei Khudekov, the owner and editor of the Petersburg Gazette (in which Chekhov had published)- Avilova writes: Chekhov turned to me and smiled.
'A writer ought to write about what he sees and feels,' he said. 'Sincerely. Truthfully. I'm often asked what I meant to express by a story. I never answer such questions. My business is to write. And,' he added with a smile, 'I can write about anything you like. Ask me to write a story about this bottle, and I will write you a story under the title of 'A Bottle.' Living images create thought, but thought does not create images… If I live, think, fight, and suffer, then all this is reflected in whatever I happen to write…'
That Chekhov never spoke these complacent, self-vaunting words will be clear to even the most casual student of Chekhov's life, while the more advanced student will hear in them echoes of things Chekhov actually wrote, or, according to contemporaries, did say. Avilova wrote her memoir around 1940, and she surely could not have remembered what Chekhov said to her fifty years earlier-so she pilfered the published letters and the memoir literature. The comment about 'A Bottle,' for example, was apparently taken from a passage in Vladimir Korolenko's memoir of Chekhov: ' 'Do you know how I write my little stories? Here!…' He glanced at the table, took the first object his hand happened to come across-it was an ashtray-put it in front of me, and said: 'Tomorrow, if you like, I'll have a story entitled 'The Ashtray.' ' '
The letters Chekhov wrote to Avilova herself are even less helpful to her narrative. All but one or two were written in dutiful response to letters of her own (Chekhov made a point of leaving no letter unanswered) and none
