table in his house on the eve of the duel. A storm rages outside, and he remembers how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without a hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with blue eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with the rain; they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal of thunder, the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly, while he crossed himself and made haste to repeat: 'Holy, holy, holy…' Oh, where had they vanished to! In what sea were they drowned, those dawning days of pure, fair life? He had no fear of the storm, no love of nature now; he had no God. All the confiding girls he had ever known had by now been ruined by him and those like him. All his life he had not planted one tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass; and living among the living, he had not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and lie, lie… After the storm is over, a scene takes place between Nadezhda and Laevsky that catches the reader unawares and almost too violently tugs at his heart: 'How miserable I am!' she said. 'If only you knew how miserable I am! I expected,' she went on, half closing her eyes, 'that you would kill me or turn me out of the house into the rain and storm, but you delay… delay…'
Warmly and impulsively he put his arms around her and covered her knees and hands with kisses… he stroked her hair and looking into her face, realized that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near and dear to him, whom no one could replace. The duel takes place among the craggy mountains and steep gorges-the landscape where Lermontov's Pechorin fought his deadly duel with Grushnitskii. Lest the reader fail to hear the Lermontovean echo, and to grasp its irony, Chekhov inserts a farcical moment, when no one at the duel knows exactly what to do. ' 'Gentlemen, who remembers the description in Lermontov?' asked von Koren, laughing.' Laevsky escapes with his life. (He had fired in the air, and von Koren, on the point of going through with his intended execution of the useless, is distracted by a cry from a deacon who has seen the murderous look on his face.) Then, as a prelude to a new life of ordinary kindness and responsibility, Laevsky and Nadezhda sit in a garden- where else?-'huddled close together, saying nothing, or dreaming aloud of their happy life in the future, in brief, broken sentences, while it seemed to him that he had never spoken at such length or so eloquently.' The story ends with a glimpse of their new life, and with no assurance that they will be able to sustam the rigors of an existence stripped of illusion and devoted to prosaic work. Characteristically, Chekhov does not allow them the comfort of Tolstoyan pastoral-he does not let them fulfill the fantasy that brought them to the Caucasus. («We would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so on.') The work Laevsky does to pay his debts is not horticulture but the tedious, ill-paid work of copying. (How Nadezhda spends her days is left to the reader's imagination. When we last see her, she is a recessive, diminished figure.) Chekhov's gardens at Me-likhovo and Autka were his hobby; the gardens in his stories and plays, like Marianne Moore's imaginary gardens with real toads in them, are something more serious. (This may be why Chekhov never entrusted them to amateurs; his imaginary gardens are always in the care of professionals.) The garden in which Laevsky and Nadezhda huddle-like the garden of his youth, like every garden in Chekhov-is a symbolic place of grace. The garden at Autka is merely a real garden. Four fy-t I ^hey say that Olga refused to sleep with Chekhov JL because she was afraid of catching his OA,' Nina says as we walk back to the car along the footpath above the sea in Oreanda.
'I've never heard that,' I say. 'From their correspondence it seems clear that they did sleep together.'
'Don't you remember at Gurzuv, when you asked about the narrow bed in Chekhov's room?'
I do remember. The day before, we had visited the seaside cottage, twelve miles outside of Yalta, that Chekhov bought soon after building his villa. One could understand why he was unable to resist it. The three-room wooden house, with a porch, sits directly on the shore of a rocky coastline rimmed by cliffs; a few stone steps to the right of the door lead straight into the water. It was now a state-run museum-like the houses in Autka and Melikhovo and the town house in Moscow where the Chekhov family lived- and two agreeable women were in charge of it. One, named Lydia, was young and very well dressed-she wore a fashionable white suit and high heels. The other, Eva, an older woman, who turned out to have been at the university with Nina, was more plainly dressed. When we arrived they were sitting on the porch, at a table with a pitcher of wildflowers on it, looking out at the water. Lydia was designated as our guide and she took us into a room that served as an entry hall (pausing to sell us admission tickets) and exhibition space for photographs and memorabilia pertaining to Three Sisters, much of which Chekhov wrote in the cottage. The second, and final, room on view (the kitchen was not open for inspection) was Chekhov's reconstituted bedroom. The bed, covered with a chaste white spread, was extremely narrow, and when I wondered how he and Olga had managed to sleep in it, Lydia explained that what was now the entry hall had been Olga's bedroom. Nina, having grown up in a society where five families lived in a single room, was perhaps unaware that it was customary for pre-Revolution bourgeois married couples to sleep in separate bedrooms. But her dark comment reflected a larger negative feeling about Olga. Russians have not taken Olga to their hearts as they have Chekhov. Harvey Pitcher, the author of a sympathetic book about Olga called Chekhov's Leading Lady (1979), writes that the marriage of Chekhov and Olga 'was the subject of a controversy that has never died down. Olga Knipper might be recognized as the Moscow Art Theater's leading actress and interpreter of Chekhov's heroines… but how had she succeeded in marrying Russia's most elusive literary bachelor when he was already past forty? Could she be anything but one of those predatory females often described by Chekhov himself in his fiction? And what sort of wife was it who for more than half the year continued to pursue her acting career in Moscow while her husband was confined for health reasons to the Crimean resort of Yalta, more than two days' journey from Moscow by train?'
But the enforced separation may have been crucial to the marriage's success-perhaps even to its very being. In 1895 (three years before he met Olga) Chekhov wrote to Suvorin: Very well then, I shall marry if you so desire. But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before; in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I'll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next. Whenever someone talks to me day after day about the same thing in the same tone of voice, it brings out the ferocity in me… I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky every day. [In 'A Dreary Story' (1889) Chekhov writes mordantly of a wife who says exactly the same thing to her husband every morning.]
The separation had another benefit-the correspondence it generated. Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other's side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion. The letters between Olga and Anton-available in an English translation by Jean Benedetti in a volume entitled Dear Writer, Dear Actress (1996)-make wonderful reading. One marvels at the almost uncanny similarity of style between writer and actress, until one stops to remember that actors are mimics. Olga performs on paper as she performed on the stage and in life. What she does, of course-what the actors among our friends do-is only an exaggerated version of the unconscious mimicry of the other wr all engage in when we are making ourselves agreeable. The correspondence permits us to trace the relationship from its beginning, as a flirtatious friendship, to the period when the two became lovers, to the marriage itself, which probably would not have occurred if Chekhov had been left to his own devices. The letters record Olga's pressings, his dodgings, and his eventual capitulation, on the condition that 'you give your word that no one in Moscow will know about our marriage until it has actually happened… Because I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around glass in hand with an endless grin on your face…'
The Russians' perception of Olga as an ambitious, cold, ruthless, unkind woman, not worthy of the gentle, delicate Anton Pavlovich, is not borne out by her letters, which are consistently gentle and delicate. But Olga's German background-she came from an assimilated German family, like that of Anna Sergeyevna von Diderits's husband-may have some bearing on the dislike and resentment she has attracted, as may her post-Revolution career as a leading People's Artist. (She lived until the 1950s and never stopped acting.) In an article entitled 'The Heart of Chekhov' (1959), Leo Rabeneck-who by chance had been present when Chekhov died in Badenweiler, and who stayed in touch with Olga until the Revolution, when he emigrated to Paris-gives us a chilling glimpse of her life under the Soviets: The last time I saw Olga Leonardovna was in 1937, when the [Moscow] Art Theatre had come to Paris. After the performance I went to a small bistro where the actors usually dined. As I came in I saw Olga Leonardovna sitting at a table with two men I didn't know. When she saw me, she quickly looked down at her plate until I had passed by. I understood she couldn't speak to me. The next morning, I was walking along the Champs- Elysees, when I happened to meet Kachalov [the leading male actor of the Moscow Art Theater]. We kissed and embraced. I told him how Olga Leonardovna had pretended not to know me.
Kachalov replied: Lev L'vovich, she was sitting with two archangels [secret agents], how could she speak to you? They watch us here. They don't allow us to fraternize with emigres. The anecdote raises a question: What if Chekhov had lived into the Soviet period? Would he have passed the test that no man or woman should be forced to
