Both Anton and Masha touched on an impediment to the Knipper-Chekhov alliance: Olga's relations with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko were more than professional. A charismatic teacher, he held her in thrall, despite her mother's opposition. In Russian theatres a leading actress tended to be the director's mistress. There was no break in the liaison between Knipper and Nemirovich-Danchenko, even when Olga and Anton behaved as if they were betrothed (not that Nemirovich-Danchenko showed any jealousy).37 Conversely, Anton and Nemirovich's wife 'Kitten', whom Olga detested, were old friends.38 On 5 November Masha offered to help Anton: 'Nemirovich… came to see me, stayed for a long time, we chatted a lot, and it occurred to me that I might lure him away from Knipper.'
Unlike Olga, Anton had no other irons in the fire. Although Lika Mizinova was back in Moscow and lonely, Anton did not write to her,
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and Masha repelled Lika's attempts to join the theatrical throng. Anton thought only of Olga Knipper and he told Masha forlornly on 11 November, 'I envy Nemirovich, I have no doubt that he enjoys success with a certain person.' Anton felt, he said, like the piano: neither it nor he was played on. At Autka he planted cypresses, and put up barbed wire between himself and the Tatar cemetery. In the Indian summer, his self-esteem boosted, he felt well. He decided to sell Kuchuk-Koy and buy a cottage and a few acres of rocky coast at Gurzuf nearby, for swimming. Nemirovich-Danchenko talked of bringing the Moscow Arts Theatre to Yalta so that Anton might see Uncle Vania performed.
Anton had given Marx copies of his works: now only proofs would arrive to plague him. That autumn inspiration came back. For Russian Thought he wrote his archetypical Yalta work, 'The Lady with the Little Dog': a cynical adulterer, Gurov, on holiday in Yalta, seduces the unhappily married Anna, only to find her image so haunting that he travels to the provincial town where she is stifling and turns an affair into an intractable involvement. Just as the reader wonders how it can end, the author talks of new beginnings and ends the narrative. 'The Lady with the Little Dog' seems to defend adultery and to explode Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: of all Chekhov's works it upset Tolstoy most. Gurov is a very ambiguous hero: he is Don Juan in love. We first meet him classifying women as predators or victims or, with Nietzschean scorn, as a lower race: has he in the end fallen in love, or have his first grey hairs frightened him? The only unambiguous elements are the mountains and sea, against which what 'we do or think when we forget the higher purpose of existence' is ephemeral. The story's empathy with adulterers awoke Chekhov's readers. 'The Lady with the Little Dog' showed them that, despite the rumours of Chekhov's moribund state, he had something new to say.
On 24 November 1899 Anton finally confirmed to Nemirovich-Danchenko that he was mulling over a new play. 'I have a plot for Three Sisters' he wrote, but would not start it until he had finished 'The Lady with a Little Dog' and another story. Before winter set in, he planted a lemon tree from Sukhum, oleanders and camellias. A stray puppy slept under the olive tree and was adopted by the Chekhovs. Stray cats in search of a home, however, were mercilessly shot - even though Aleksandr in Petersburg now edited the Journal of the
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oi HI i i HI ei ai s Society for the Protection of Animals. November's winds ripped the leaves off the magnolias and kept Anton indoors. He watched flames fan across the mountain scrub, towards his uninsured property. It was cold: he slept in a hat and slippers under two eiderdowns, with the shutters closed. He struggled with a new story, and made notes for Three Sisters, his most complex and subtle play to date. He wrote few letters; even Olga Knipper received none that November. Anton's brothers were resentful. Misha complained to Masha: Mother is somewhere at the edge of the world, way over the mountains, I am in the far norm, you are neither here nor there… Anton has become proud… This year he gave me just one minute of his time, in an express railway carriage… How has the money been spent this year: 25,000 from Marx, 5000 from Konshin, 3000 from The Seagull and Uncle Vania? If the house and estate cost 25,000, then, by my reckoning, 8000 has gone missing. Anton had over 9000 roubles in his Yalta Mutual Credit passbook.
His spirits fell when he left the house on 20 November. Epifanov, a colleague from his freelance days, was in a hospice in Yalta. Anton found him lying in filth on a straw mattress. Epifanov asked for apple fudge. Anton brought him a piece. The dying man's face lit up; he hissed, 'That's the real thing!' In a day or two Epifanov was dead. Anton's notebooks brood on mortality and Yalta: 'aristocrats, commoners, the same revolting death'. He told Gorky: 'I am overwhelmed by consumptive paupers… they upset my sated and warm peace. We've decided to build a sanatorium.' He began an appeal for the penniless incurable intellectuals who were flocking to Yalta. Undoubtedly the example set by Chekhov was as great a lure for the sick as the reputedly therapeutic climate of the Crimean coast.
SEVENTY-ONE O
'In the Ravine'' November 1899-February 1900
1
IN NOVEMBER 1899 Anton was composing 'In the Ravine'. It opens with an anecdote that Bunin had told him, of a deacon who ate all the caviare at a funeral. It then moves to sombre memories of Meli-kovo, and especially the Tolokonnikovs, the ruthless peasant-manufacturers. A novel in miniature, giving the lie to any criticism that Chekhov's plots lack action, 'In the Ravine' maps the collapse of the Khriumin family: a woman scalds to death her sister-in-law's baby, and drives her father-in-law into beggary. The 'ravine' is both a moral and a physical abyss: only the hills overlooking the ravine, where the victims wander and keep their faith, rise above the gloom. (At this time Anton was himself literally in a ravine, for the engineers were raising the Autka road by fifteen feet, so that 'every Amazon riding past can see what is happening in our yard'.)
He was distressed by death all round. On 27 December he told Prince Shakhovskoi: 'I am terribly bored and lonely because of an involuntarily virtuous life. I just drink a bit of wine.' A damp cold winter worsened his health. The Dutch stoves that the architect had installed worked badly: he asked Masha to send paraffin stoves. Evgenia and Mariushka found cooking an invalid's diet beyond them. Anton's 'catarrh' grew so recalcitrant, meanwhile, that he gave himself strong enemas. He had pleurisy and wore a compress over his left collarbone. His exercise was catching the mice that plagued the house (for cats now avoided his territory) in a humane trap on a bookcase and carrying them by the tail for release in the Tatar cemetery. The stray dog now sheltered on shavings in a shed and was named Kashtanka.
Yalta speculated about the source of'The Lady with the Little Dog'. When the weather cleared, women, originals or copies, appeared on the promenade with Pomeranians on leads. In Moscow Anton was
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in eii i eiei Aos talked of even more. Uncle Vania was seen by members of the Tsar's family and by the Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Savonarola of Tsarism. Tolstoy noted in his diary: 'outraged'. He told Nemirovich-Danchenko that Telegin's guitar and the cricket chirruping (which the actor Vishnevsky had spent a month learning from a cricket in the Sandunov public baths) were the only good things. He told the actors that Astrov and Vania should marry peasant girls and leave the Professor's wife alone.
Masha was again in a whirl, enjoying the success of Uncle Vania and studying three times a week at an art school set up by Khot-iaintseva. She treated the exhaustion and headaches of her new life with injections of arsenic in her back. She taught at school; she sued Konshin, the purchaser of Melikhovo. She dined with Olga Knipper, Prince Shakhovskoi and his new love. 'Alas, the poor Princess! I have learnt to chat a lot and therefore feel fine in society… something like a salon has come of it,' she told Anton. She was also friendly with Olga's rival, Maria Andreeva, whom Anton found attractive. Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, Lika Mizinova, Dunia Konovitser and Maria Drozdova all gathered around Masha and Olga. Their pretext was that they were collecting money, by raffles and subscriptions, for Anton's projected sanatorium; they hoped, in vain, to be invited to Yalta.
There were violent winter storms. Neither the telegraph nor the mail boat could reach Yalta, and Olga's letters petered out. Anton felt isolated. Some of the Antonovkas reappeared, including Nadia Ternovskaia, who had been previously out of favour: Evgenia approved of her as a bride for Anton, even if she had no dowry. News of Nadia reached Knipper: on 19 January 1900 she wrote: 'Masha tells me that you're marrying a priest's daughter. I could come and admire your conjugal happiness and, while I'm there, disturb it a bit. We had an agreement - remember the Kok-Koz valley.' A month later Knipper was still joking: 'Tell your priest's daughter that she can hold you in her embrace since 'that nasty woman' won't be coming until early spring.'
Exhausted by her roles in the Hauptmann play and in Uncle Vania, Olga bore her separation from Anton
