his resignation. Anton told Evgenia that he was installing an American kitchen, a flushing lavatory, electric bells and a telephone; he was planting roses and cypresses; coffee and halva were cheap; stone houses did not catch fire; rheumatism would not trouble her; her Taganrog in-laws, Marfa and Liudmila, were a day's boat ride away; she could bring Mariushka to live with her; Autka church was a minute away. Anton then bought the Tatar house he had seen two months before at Kiichuk-Koy. Here Evgenia could keep a cow and a kitchen garden, while Masha, if she faced the rock climb, could bathe in the sea. Anton's boldness was astute. Soon he was offered four times the 2000 roubles he had paid.
Anton did not worry about Evgenia. Kundasova told him on 28 November: 'As for her mental condition, it is not gloomy, let alone depressed. In my view, Pavel's death has not affected her too much because she is a loving mother; her children are dearer than a husband to her.' Anton received more consolation for his own state of health than he could absorb. The provincial press alarmed everyone. All Simferopol was told: 'Ominous symptoms inspire serious concern for his life.' Anton sent angry telegrams; the papers retracted, but nobody was misled about his health. One school friend, Vladimir Sirotin, wrote of his own terminal condition. Another, Lev Volkenshtein, offered to do the conveyancing on Anton's property. Kleopatra Kara-tygina wrote in such distress that Anton telegraphed: 'Perfectly well safe sound respects thanks.' Aleksandra Pokhlebina, now a landowner
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at daggers drawn with her peasants, had seen lier old love with Masha in the Tretiakov gallery by his portrait, but had hung back. She broke four years' silence that November 1898: 'My heart is torn to pieces when I think what is happening to you. How happy I would be if I knew you were well… I feared the news of the loss of your father would finally undermine your health.'4 Dunia Konovitser sent chocolate. Natalia Lintvariova came to Yalta: she dithered and roared with laughter about the possibility of buying a plot of land herself.
Elena Shavrova was pregnant in Petersburg, while her ailing sister, Anna, kept Anton company in Yalta. He paid more attention, however, to the eighteen-year old Nadia Ternovskaia, a protegee of his landlady, Uovaiskaia. Nadia's father, a bullying archpriest, turned a blind eye to his daughter's excursions with Anton. Nadia was singled out, she later told her children, because she never talked of literature.5 She loved music passionately and played the piano for Anton, and she was very pretty. Yalta gossiped and Nadia's father made enquiries. Another Nadia - Suvorin's granddaughter, Nadia Kolomnina - flirted with Anton, but soon went back to Petersburg. She warned Anton that Ilovaiskaia's villa, which Nadia Ternovskaia frequented, 'is very damp, everyone knows that. Abandon it as quick as you can, take all your furniture and move to another palazzo.'6 Another woman tempted Anton: Olga Soloviova, a Valkyrian wealthy widow who owned the estate of Soguk-Su, next to Anton's Kuchuk-Koy.
Male company was all memento mori. Dr Vitte, from Serpukhov hospital, was in Yalta recuperating from a heart attack. He looked as if he had been 'run over by a train'. Anton himself was often too weak to walk uphill, sometimes even to leave his room, but Anton rejected radical measures. On 9 October the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaia had begged him: 'There is a Doctor Vasiliev in Rostov. You must go and let him treat you: he will cure you. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, I don't know how to ask you… It's awful if you won't, you'll just cause me pain. Do it. Yes?'7 Anton promised - if ever he was in Rostov - to contact this electrotherapist. His 'catarrh of the intestines' gave him constant diarrhoea. In late November a lung haemorrhage began. On the third day he summoned Altshuller: 'Je garde le lit. Young colleague, bring your stethoscope and laryngoscope.' Once the blood had been staunched, he asked Masha for his stethoscope, percussion hammer and ice-pack. He ordered comforts - a karakol hat, a cassoNOVEMHIH DI.CKMBER 1898 wary blanket, a samovar - from Muir and Mirrielees. Evgenia sewed him nightshirts. Vania sent him the pince-nez which he always forgot on his travels, and a new cork pad to stop it sliding off his nose. Anton wrote to Suvorin: 'Tell nobody, my blood frightens others more than me, so I try to spit it out furtively.'
His spiritual suffering in Yalta was greater - 'I'd like to talk to somebody about literature… but here [there is only] irritating swinishness'. Newspapers came late. 'Without papers one would fall into gloomy melancholy and even get married,' he told Sobolevsky on Christmas Eve. Anton befriended the editor of The Crimean Courier, but, unable to improve the paper, gave up. He loved his future house, but hated Yalta's wintry filth. All Yalta was ashamed when the newspapers printed Anton's telegram to Moscow, saying that he felt like Dreyfus on Devil's Island.
He missed Suvorin, despite the fact that New Times was 'splashing about in filth'. The paper had outraged even the government, which banned it for ten days. The poet Balmont declared New Times 'a brothel by appointment to the crown'. Pavlovsky, Suvorin's Paris correspondent, sought Anton's help to switch to a liberal Moscow newspaper. Potapenko abandoned Suvorin. Suvorin was like Zeus the Bolt-thrower and the Dauphin like an angry bull, Aleksandr reported. New Times was printing the specious Le Dessous de I'affaire Dreyfus by the real traitor Esterhazy. Anton told Suvorin that rehabilitating Dreyfus was the 'great cultural victory of the age'. Suvorin replied that pro-Germans were whitewashing Dreyfus.
The taciturn Vania gave Anton brotherly support; on 19 December he came for a fortnight with supplies. Misha was voluble, but unhelpful. He offered his mother asylum, but she suspected he really wanted her as a nurse to his baby daughter. He did not pay for burying Pavel, and held back Masha's allowance. In Petersburg Aleksandr was even less help. He was supporting his sister-in-law Anastasia: her husband Pushkariov had lost his last penny on a bingo machine he had invented. AJeksandr's eldest son Kolia, meanwhile, had been caught robbing passengers at the railway station. Natalia feared that he would corrupt his brothers, in particular her own son, the seven-year- old Misha, so Aleksandr enrolled the fourteen-year-old boy in the merchant navy. Little Anton, now twelve and ineducable, was working for Suvorin as a bookbinder's apprentice. As New Times sank, Aleksandr himself was
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Ill III I I E I EI I'll S searching for a new career. On 24 November he told Anton: 'I am thinking of opening a new sort of brothel, like a touring theatre. If my planned institution arrives in Yalta 'to enliven the season' you of course will be the first free customer.' To this letter Potapenko added a greeting, and Emilie Bijon 'un gros baiser'.
Anton was now a citizen of Yalta, his movements monitored by the press. He sat on committees for schools, the Red Cross and famine relief. As Babakai's men dug foundations, Anton wrote: two months at Au mur produced four stories. Three - 'An Incident in Practice' for Russian Thought, 'The New Dacha' for Sobolevsky's The Russian Gazette, and 'On Official Business' for Menshikov's The Week - use Melikhovo material, a Satanic factory, or hostile, thieving peasants. 'On Official Business' is the most powerful of this trio: a magistrate and a doctor are called in a blizzard to a remote village to investigate a suicide, and the magistrate is haunted by nightmares of misery. The radical protest in 'Peasants' and 'My Life' strengthens: the oppressed now become threatening to their oppressors. In Yalta, as Anton told Masha, 'there are neither nobles nor commoners, all are equal before the bacilli.' In a brighter tone he wrote 'The Darling' for a weekly called The Family. It portrays a woman utterly absorbed by any man - impresario, timber merchant or schoolboy - on whom she dotes. 'The Darling' startled radicals. It enchanted Tolstoy who saw an ideal, not irony, and called it, to Anton's face, the 'work of virgin lace-makers'.
Anton was tense, as Altshuller realized, because of The Seagull. His lungs and intestines suffered. The Petersburg premiere had sickened him; another fiasco could kill him. The Seagull and Uncle Vania had been performed everywhere but the capital - the latter play had earned Anton 1000 roubles and held the provinces spellbound. In November 1898, from Nizhni Novgorod, Chekhov heard from Maxim Gorky, a thirty-year-old herald of revolution, Russia's first 'proletarian' writer. He said he had wept like a woman when he first saw Uncle Vania; it was 'a blunt saw through my heart,' Act 4 'a hammer on the audience's head': the effect was 'a childhood garden dug up by a giant pig'. Gorky's postscript ran: 'I am a very absurd and crude person, but I have an incurably sick soul.' Anton responded warmly. Gorky initiated an unlikely friendship, disarming in January 1899 all Anton's defences: 'I am as stupid as a locomotive… but I have no rails under me.'8
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Enough people had seen a Moscow rehearsal or provincial performance for The Seagull to acquire an awesome reputation. Masha was feted as Anton's plenipotentiary. She began to relish life. She dined with actors and actresses and became self-confident, an amusing guest. She made friends with Anton's school friend Vishnevsky, who played the part of Dr Dorn, and with Olga Knipper, who, though fifteen years too young, played Arkadina. Anton's friends clustered round Masha. Sasha Selivanova vaccinated her against smallpox; Dunia
