physically a thousand miles away: Anton directed his affection at Bunin, whom he and Masha called Bouqui-chon, after a foppish manager on Prince Orlov-Davydov's estate near Melikhovo.
Anton's share of the takings for a dozen performances of The Seagull was only 1400 roubles, for the Ermitage theatre had very few seats. The theatre's patron, the rich merchant Sawa Morozov, was promising a far larger theatre, to make them and Anton rich. Their repertoire, however, also needed expansion, and they wanted Uncle Vania, which Stanislavsky thought greater than The Seagull. Chekhov had to be induced to withdraw the play from the Maly theatre. This proved easy, when the professors of the Imperial Theatre Censor committee, who governed the Maly's repertoire, took umbrage at the play's aspersions on a professor and asked for changes. On 10 April, the day that the Committee met, Anton took the boat from Yalta to Sevastopol for the train to Moscow. A doctor met him at the station and took him to the warmth of Masha's flat.
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Last Season in Melikhovo April-August 1899 ON ARRIVAL IN Moscow Anton was summoned to the Theatrical Committee and insulted. He withdrew Uncle Vania from state theatres and passed the Moscow rights to the play to the Moscow Arts Theatre. Masha's flat was too cold, so they moved to warmer quarters. No sooner had Anton settled than he started on proofs for Adolf Marx. He grimly told visitors that, as he had not long to live, he had sold his work, to edit it definitively.25 Friends were dismayed by how much he rejected. In July 1899 a former editor, Menshikov, told Anton that he made Herod seem like an infant by comparison, and that others would disinter the work after his death, but Anton's response was that the public should be spared juvenilia. While Anton's cull disposed of his weaker humorous stories, and his revisions cut the purple passages from many stories, very often he reacted to some fine work with a distaste that is unaccountable, unless the work that he rejected had some private unhappy associations.
Lent ended on Sunday 18 April. Anton went, unannounced, to see the Knippers. Olga Knipper lived with her widowed mother and her mother's two brothers, Sasha Salza, an army officer, and Karl Salza, a doctor. The Knippers and Salzas were second-generation Russian, German-speaking Lutherans. They had not yet intermarried with Slavs. Anton had not known such people before. They were indefatig-ably robust - the Knippers had been ruined, and were fighting their way back to prosperity. They were also musical. Olga could sing as well as act, and her mother Anna, although nearing fifty, was a soloist as well as Professor of Singing at the Conservatoire. Uncle Sasha, an amateur singer, was a heavy-drinking, sometimes rowdy, ra'ke. The Knippers and the Chekhovs were struck by each other's strangeness. Olga enchanted Anton in life, just as Tsaritsa Irina had on stage. She lacked Lika Mizinova's classical beauty, or the intensity of
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Komissarzhevskaia: her eyes were small, her jowls heavy. Her character was spontaneous but organized: she worked and played hard. She could hike across fields, nurse the sick, behave genteelly, or prance uninhibitedly.
From 18 April 1899 on Anton became monogamous. He flirted perfunctorily with Masha's wealthy new friend, Maria Malkiel, but barely bothered with others, even the archpriest's daughter, Nadia Ternovskaia. (Nadia worried, 'the reason you don't want to stay in Yalta is that there won't be any Antonovkas?'26) Anton took Olga to see Levitan's exhibition and his renowned Haystacks in Moonlight. In May Melikhovo would be warm enough to be habitable, despite its neglected state. Anton invited Olga to spend a few days there with him. She agreed, as long as Nemirovich-Danchenko would release her from rehearsals.
Four days after Easter, Tolstoy called. The next day his daughter came and invited Anton and Masha to call. Tolstoy and Anton talked of many things: Tolstoy, who respected those he violently disagreed with, spoke up for Suvorin, who had wired Chekhov a draft of his trial defence. Anton replied that he should deny the union's right to try him. Suvorin wired a new draft. 'Beautifully written, but too many details,' Anton responded with exhortations, then he gave up, realizing that he was 'just a stone splashing into water'. Lidia Avilova was staying with her brother in Moscow, and Anton used her as a conduit to Petersburg's 'judges'. For a while Suvorin regained his equilibrium, bought a new estate, and tried to forget about his forthcoming 'trial'. Anton urged him to write a novel and give up journalism. On 1 May 1899 Anton invited Lidia Avilova to meet him, with her children, for coffee and buns at the station, before she departed for the country. It was a courtesy owed to her, as an attractive, talented woman and a keen researcher retrieving his stories.27
After seeing Avilova off, Anton went to see The Seagull. It was the first time that Anton had seen a play he had written performed to his specifications. The Seagull was put on specially, with no sets and few props, in a theatre so freezing that Anton gave Stanislavsky advice only on Trigorin's shoes and trousers, and the tempo of the final act. Although Stanislavsky had comic experience - he had been a fine Nanky Poo in The Mikado - he played his heroes as neurotics, and
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slowed (Chekhov's allegro to an adagio: Anion was unhappy with him as an actor, and dubious of him as a director.
'With no resident status', as Anton put it, he could write nothing new, although his mind seethed with new ideas, as his notebooks show. His new friend Gorky was banned by both police and doctors from visiting Moscow. They exchanged presents: Chekhov sent an engraved gold watch; Gorky promised a rifle. In mid July, after emerging from three weeks in prison, Gorky made Anton a very original present, too late for Anton to make any use of it: 'a fallen woman, Klavdia Gross, will bring you her life story, which she has written. She is decent, speaks languages, a proper miss - a fine woman even if a prostitute. I think she is more use to you than to me.'28
The family home, it was agreed, was in Yalta: on 2 May Anton asked Vania, who was off to the Crimea on holiday, to keep an eye on the builders, and take with him the family treasures, notably Pavel's icon of St John the Divine. Valuables went for safety to Yalta; Melikhovo was a fire risk, neglected and underinsured. Vania could live for free in Autka, attended by Mustafa: the roof was on, the kitchen nearly ready. Vania was grateful for Anton's lobbying to secure him pensionable rank, and was content to spend his school holidays as site manager in the Crimea.
On 5 May Anton gave Olga Knipper a signed photograph of the cottage at Melikhovo where he had written the play that brought them together. Three days later he joined his sister and mother there, after eight months' absence, to be met by two berserk, half-feral dachshunds. There, the next day, he greeted Olga; her short visit gave her a misleading, rosy impression of Melikhovo. Masha invited her to return: 'We long to see you, dear Olga; the horses will wait for you on Saturday'.29
After Olga had left, Melikhovo lapsed into chaos. A month passed in the search for stove-makers, and haggling to finish the third school. Melikhovo was like Arkadina's and Sorin's estate in The Seagull. 'I constantly shout loud abuse, I tear my vocal cords, but neither I nor the guests are given horses,' Anton complained. Made to feel unwelcome at Melikhovo, Misha told Masha on 16 May:, All the hints in my letters to Antosha have been left unanswered, worse, his letters to me are full of anxiety that I might bring my
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family down to Melikhovo… I am sad that circumstances prevent me meeting our mother and showing her our little Evgenia. In secret from you two (I was afraid you'd be offended) I got in touch with the Semenkoviches and asked them to put me up just for a month from 20 June… at the end of June Antosha will send you round his houses in Yalta to deal with building. Is that your job? Are you a builder, a manager? Don't you have enough to do in Moscow and Melikhovo? People go to me Crimea to rest. Anton did not feign any liking for Misha's company. On 21 May 1899, without the blessing he coveted from his mother, Misha took his wife and child to the Crimea: they stayed at Alupka, forty miles from Gurzuf and Vania's family. The house at Autka was not yet habitable and Kuchuk-Koy was too remote for either Vania or Misha, even had Anton consented. Vania moved in with Misha at Alupka.
June began warm. Anton returned to Melikhovo, to sell it. The whole district was in shambles. The bridge over the river had collapsed and the district head of schools had been charged with embezzlement. Masha no longer saw any prospect of staying there, as she told Maria Drozdova in mid June. I feel like a tram that's left the rails and can't get back on them and is jumping all over the place. I have no idea where we shall live… Anton is ripping everything off the walls, sending it to the Crimea, now the comfortable wicker armchair has vanished from the
