stone when she asked for bread, pleaded for a rendezvous. Lidia Avilova could get out of Anton only a signature 'with a big tail underneath like a hanged rat's.' Lika was now in Paris training to be an opera singer, while Olga Kundasova was in the Crimea. Aleksandra Khot-, iaintseva was the only girlfriend to arrive in May.
Later, the women flocked. Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik announced her return 'flying to you on wings of love, with starch and olive oil'. Olga Kundasova beat her to it, but Tania arrived on 5 July for three days. After four years' exile she took over the household diary: 'Here
MAY-SEPTEMBER 1898
I found everything as before, people, flowers and animals. God grant it goes on. A clear day and fragrant air. [And in Pavel's hand] At supper we laughed loud.'
Anton now threatened to marry Tania off to Ezhov, and called her Tatiana Ezhova. Tania reappeared only once, six weeks later, that summer. A fragment of paper tbat Kundasova passed to Anton, probably while he stayed overnight in Serpukhov on 23 July, hints at an assignation: 'Si vous etes visible, sortez de votre chambre; je vous attends. Kundasova.'53 Anton's eighteen-year-old cousin from Taganrog, Elena, came and scandalized Melikhovo by staying up till midnight with the neighbours' French tutor. Two days later Tania reappeared together with Dunia Konovitser. A day later, Natalia Lintvariova left her water mills and came for a week.
From Nice Olga Vasilieva sent money for Anton's new school: she was to appear in Moscow in October to gaze on Braz's portrait of Chekhov in the Tretiakov gallery. Anton's first trip to Moscow was 18-20 June. He stayed with Vania, went to the operetta, where trained apes were performing, and discussed with Nemirovich-Danchenko the revival of The Seagull. Only on 1 August did Anton venture far from home, to see Sobolevsky and Varvara Morozova 200 miles away near Tver. By the 5th he was back. Autumn was in the air: he would have to leave Melikhovo. He had now resigned himself to spending the eight cold months of the year in the Crimea: even though it was no cheaper than living in Nice, he could at least feel he was still in his motherland, and medical opinion approved. Anton told almost nobody, so that in September Lika was meeting trains in Paris, assuming that he was returning to Nice. On 9 September Anton left Melikhovo to spend six days in Moscow before taking the train south.
Melikhovo was falling apart. The garden and woodland were neglected. Labour and enthusiasm were short. Vania and Misha came without their family, for only a few days at a time, Evgenia travelled to Taganrog, for the first time in fourteen years. Her two sisters-in-law, AuntMarfa and Aunt Liudmila, and Evgenia were, Cousin Georgi wrote to Anton, all three very glad to see each other, they chat until midnight. Today we are setting off together to the town park to listen to the music… Tomorrow we are off to the Greek monastery, where there is a
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FLOWKH1N»; N I'. Ml I FRIES bishop from Jerusalem, Auntie 1e»oi1e wants to have a look at him. In mid August Pavel went to Iaroslavl for a fortnight to see his granddaughter.
The men of Melikhovo also sensed that the village had lost its centre of gravity. The priest Father Nikolai stirred the peasantry up against the Talezh schoolteacher Mikhailov, and the battle ended, de spite Anton's conciliation attempts, in Father Nikolai being sent away. The household lost its best servant when Aniuta Chufarova, so expert with a horse, a mop or a whalebone corset, left to marry. Then Roman, the man of all work, took to drink again: Olimpiada, the wife he had banished a year before, had died. Anton persisted in his efforts, cajoling funds from neighbours and authorities to buy desks, slates and bricks and mortar for a new building, his third school, for the Melikhovo children, who were taught in a leased cottage.
Confined to home, his interest in the estate waning, cut off from close friends, Anton tried to write, even though the process felt, he told Lidia Avilova, like 'eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach has just been removed'. Advances from The Cornfield and from Russian Thought had to be paid off. In summer 1898 Anton developed ideas born in Nice. Despite his grim mood, the stories of that summer are among his finest work. He offered The Cornfield the longest, 'Ionych'. It concerns a provincial doctor who, from humble origins, becomes as proud, sterile and heartless as his bourgeois patients. The narrative has the familiar Chekhovian scene of a nonproposal in a garden. Particularly powerful is the evocation of Anton's boyhood world, Taganrog's moonlit cemetery and steppe landscape. Anton's other work was a trilogy of short stories, published in Russian Thought in July and August 1898. Friends roaming the countryside each narrate a life ruined by moral cowardice. 'Gooseberries' is about a man's ruthless determination to acquire an estate on which he can grow his own gooseberries, however sour. 'The Man in the Case' is about a. schoolteacher of Gogolian grotesquerie. The last story, 'About Love', is the most moving: a miller tells of his hopeless love for his best friend's wife. The first two stories became classics instantly, for their morality is unambiguous. 'Gooseberries' is against avarice, 'The Man in the Case' is against false witness. 'About Love', however, was probMAY-SEPTEMBER 1898 lematical to critics and the public, for it implies that moral sacrifice can be sloth or cowardice.54
Anton referred to this burst of creativity as visits to the 'muddy spring'. Pavel had heard a sermon which contrasted the 'muddy spring' of vice that foolish travellers prefer to the 'clear spring' of Christ, and irritated Anton at table by constantly harping on the two springs. The 'muddy spring' of inspiration, however, dried up, as the prospect of exile to the Crimea loomed. Anton had his first haemorrhage of the autumn.
Anton arrived in Moscow on 9 September 1898 for the first rehearsal of The Seagull. The rehearsal, although only of two acts, was a revelation. Weeks of hard work had gone into discussions with the cast, most of whom were unknown names. Stanislavsky had spent the summer on his brother's estate near Kharkov working on a mise-en- scene. Anton found himself a longed-for oracle, not a nuisance, and his interest in theatre revived once again.
Anton also watched a rehearsal of Tsar Fiodor by Aleksei Tolstoy and was bewitched by the actress, Olga Knipper, who played the Tsaritsa Irina. She had also noticed him, at the rehearsals of The Seagull a few days before: We were all taken by the unusually subde charm of his personality, of his simplicity, his inability to 'teach', 'show'… When Anton was asked a question, he replied in an odd way, as if at a tangent, as if in general, and we didn't know how to take his remarks - seriously or in jest.' Old friends also waited for Anton. They saw that he was no more Avelan leading his squadron into new revels. Even Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, who greeted him with enthusiastic doggerel, seems to have realized that things were different now.56
Suvorin came to Moscow. He and Anton dined at the Ermitage and then went to the circus, with the artist Aleksandra Khotiaintseva. Three weeks later, Anton wrote to Suvorin a propos of the latter's criticism of the Moscow Arts Theatre. He said nothing about The Seagull or Olga's interpretation of Arkadina, but he was overwhelmed by the rehearsal of Tsar Fiodor on the eve of his departure. In it he singled out, without naming her, Olga Knipper: 'Irina, I think, is splendid. The voice, the nobility, the depth of feeling is so good that
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II.OWI' HIN(. II Mil I nil.S I have a lump in my throat… II I had stayed in Moscow I should have fallen in love with this Irina.'
He took the train for the Crimea on 15 September, preoccupied by Nemirovich-Danchenko's and Stanislavsky's troupe and by their liveliest actress, Olga Knipper.
SIXTY-SIX The Broken Cog September-October 1898
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IN JULY NATALIA rejected Aleksandr. He complained to Anton: 'Veneri cupio, sed 'caput dolet', penis stat, nemo venit, nemo dat.'57 In August 1898, while Natalia was away, Aleksandr bought an exercise book, bound it himself in leather and made indelible blue-black ink out of oak galls. He entitled this diary The Rubbish Dump.5i It catalogues his domestic miseries. On his wife's return, Aleksandr became impotent. On 28 September 1898, he told Anton: 'I am schwach and even by the domestic hearth cannot produce enough material for coitus, let alone onanism.' Natalia demanded that he ask Anton for treatment. On 4 October Vania's wife, Sonia, wrote from Moscow: Dear Aleksandr, Kolia [Natalia's elder stepson] refuses to work, he behaves so badly that even our patience is exhausted. He won't obey anybody, even the most gentle treatment is useless. I even resorted to Masha's help, but he just turned his back on her and wouldn't even talk to her… How do I get him to you? On 5 October Aleksandr's Rubbish Dump expresses complete turmoil: 'I howled like a wolf… Natasha is trying to calm me, saying that Sonia wrote and sent the letter in the heat of her wrath.' Aleksandr wrote to Vania: 'Nikolai has written his own death sentence: now he won't be accepted anywhere… Put him on a train… there is no hope for his correction.' In Petersburg Suvorin was thinking about Anton. Aleksandr noted: There was a conversation between Suvorin and Tychinkin about buying all Anton's work at once, to give Anton the maximum amount of money at once, and then starting to publish 'The Complete Works'. To consider publishing his 'Complete Works' meant that Anton
