calmly. Anton was less calm about her liaison with Nemirovich-Danchenko. Masha hinted on the eve of his fortieth birthday: 'I want you to marry quickly, to take a
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clever, sensible girl, even without a dowry… I saw Nemirovich… wearing a coat with moire silk lapels.' Anton's next letter to Olga asked: 'Have you been carried away by the moire silk lapels? It's all the fault of the moire silk coat lapels.' Nemirovich-Danchenko told Olga, when she urged him to show Anton the theatre in Yalta, 'To the director you are valuable, to the author invaluable.' Maria Drozdova, still Masha's closest friend, met Olga, and a fortnight later wrote to Anton: Olga Knipper loves Nemirovich very much and doesn't love me at all… the great actress to judge by these photographs has put on weight and is better looking. I envy Nemirovich… You are seriously in love wim Knipper and want to go abroad, I think that's what you mustn't do. Anton joked that Olga's photo made her look like 'a Jewess… secretly studying dentistry, with a fiance in Mogiliov' and talked of summer abroad on his own. Olga rose to the bait on 5 February: 'That's unbelievably cruel… we shall be together in summer. Yes, yes, won't we, won't we?' Masha saw through Anton's stratagem: 'You try to scare us with your departures… some people get desperate when they hear you mean to go away.'
The beauty and the ministrations of the Antonovkas left Anton unmoved. In February 1900 Masha took Lika to The Seagull. Masha told Anton: 'She wept in the theatre, I suppose [in Pushkin's words] 'memories unrolled before her their long scroll'.' At the Moscow Arts Theatre, Lika fell for Aleksandr Sanin-Schoenberg, an officer turned stage director. She and Anton never spoke or wrote to each other again, even though Lika continued to meet Masha, Vania and Misha.
Melikhovo would not fade away. Three quarrelsome women teachers used Anton as their arbiter; he implored Serpukhov to relieve him of all civic duties. When Misha wondered if Masha missed the estate, as Evgenia missed her chickens and calves, Masha responded: The buyer came, I handed the lot to him and we left for Moscow… To this day I have been carefree and cheerful because I haven't got Melikhovo and God grant I shouldn't have, nor any unpleasant worries. I live surrounded by respect - thanks to our brother. I have lots of friends.
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Masha reached Yalta on 20 December and ended Anton's isolation. She took a cab to the house, for Anton was too ill to meet her, and forbade Evgenia to wait in the rain. After Masha came Levitan. Anton remarked how he missed Russian countryside, so Levitan asked Masha for cardboard and painted haystacks in the moonlight for Anton's fireplace. Anton's New Year festivities were muted. That Christmas Grigorovich died. Although they had drifted apart, Grigorovich still seemed to Anton to be the most influential of the Grand Old Men to have recognized his genius. Khudekov of The Petersburg Newspaper reported to Anton: 'He talked a lot about you; how deeply he felt for the 'involuntary exile' doomed to live far from friends in boring, boring Yalta.' Anton had also drifted away from the Petersburg circles to which Grigorovich's notice had first given him access. After signing his contract with Marx and receiving Suvorin's last payments, Anton barely wrote to the Suvorin household, even though Emilie Bijon reproached him,39 and Nastia Suvorina, on the verge of engagement, sent outrageously flirting letters.40 Suvorin had lost Anton, but was gaining Misha, who, bored in Iaroslavl, on bad terms with his superiors, dreamed of writing for New Times. Suvorin tried to use the younger brother to lure the elder back. Misha wrote to Anton on 22 January 1900: Both, he and she, greeted me like a relative, poured out their souls to me for two whole evenings… The old man with tears in his eyes, Anna with burning cheeks, assured me how upset they were that relations between you and them had broken down. They love you very much. 'Misha, dear boy, I know why it's happened. Antosha would not forgive my paper its policies, that's it…' They are deeply aggrieved that you sold your works to Marx, not Suvorin. Anna blames her husband entirely… 'Aliosha, you know Anton. He's a gifted, decisive, bold man. One day he's here, the next he's off to Sakhalin.'… Suvorin has asked me to persuade you to buy your works back from Marx… Suvorin went on, 'I loved Anton terribly much, and still do. You know, he made me younger. I have never been so frank to anyone in my life as I have with Anton… I'd gladly marry Nastia to him.'41 Anton refuted Suvorin's version. 'I write for your eyes alone,' he replied to Misha, 'since you've been bewitched.' Suvorin's efforts nevertheless won over Misha, who became, a year later, his employee.
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In the New Year Anton was awarded the Order of Stanislav 3rd grade 'for services to education'. (It was awarded to half the teachers in Taganrog gimnazia.) Anton was also elected to the writer's section of the Academy. Honorary academicians had no salary, but they were exempt from arrest, censorship and customs inspections (and also from Academy prizes). Chekhov nominated a man he disliked, the critic Mikhailovsky, and a man he pitied, Kazimir Barantsevich, to be fellow academicians. Becoming Academicus made him the butt of his friends and the object of begging letters. His maid's uncle called him 'your excellency'.
Levitan, close to death, was struck by Anton's gloom. 'Your fever is a fever of self-infatuation - your chronic disease… your Achilles heel,' he wrote on 7 February. When he saw Uncle Vania in December, he liked best the bit 'where the doctor kisses Knipper'. On 16 February he revived old amorous rivalries: 'I went to see Masha and saw my darling Knipper. I begin to fancy her more and more: I notice an inevitable cooling towards the honorary academician.'
'In the Ravine', published in Life, allied Chekhov with men whom Suvorin thought criminal: radical Marxists like Gorky and Posse, the editor of Life, who were often under arrest or police supervision. Karl Marx, as much as Adolf Marx, cut Anton off from Suvorin. Though their affection never died, Chekhov warned Misha, and others, against Suvorin as the owner of New Times. Posse had printed 'In the Ravine' 'in an orgy of misprints', but Anton joined the radicals nevertheless. The story's originals were, Anton asserted, even worse than his characters, but in his view: 'drunken syphilitic children are not material for art'.
Dr Altshuller examined Anton at the end of February 1900 and reported that his left lung was worse, though his right lung was clear. Spring came early in Yalta. Some mornings Anton did not cough. The old women, Evgenia and Mariushka, frightened of responsibility when Masha was away, forgot their giddiness and pains. Chekhov's new prose, ending a year of silence, was widely lauded. Anton rested. Three Sisters was still only an idea.
In mid February the camellias blossomed after ten degrees of frost. Anton proudly announced: 'I could have been a gardener'. He longed for the coming of the mountain to Mahomet, when Nemirovich-Danchenko, Olga and the theatre's elite would arrive to perform in
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Ill E I I I II I I'M I'IIS the Crimea. Ever since Christmas he had asked Masha to persuade Olga to spend the summer in Yalta. They had eaten pancakes together at Shrovetide, first at Masha's and then at Vania's, and were now on ty terms. Masha evidently felt equal to the sophisticated Olga and able to befriend and manage her, as she had done with Dunia Efros, Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizinova, on her brother's behalf. Masha and Olga declared themselves inseparable. Anton could be sure that if one came to Yalta, the other would too.
SEVENTY-TWO O
Olga in Yalta March-July 1900 FOR ANTON, Andrei Vishnevsky was the first herald of spring in Yalta. He arrived to check the ramshackle theatre and the electric lighting that would be its undoing. Vishnevsky maddened Anton by harking back to school days and by making him read the cues for his Dr Dorn and Uncle Vania. Chekhov's revenge was gentle: he created the good-natured fool in Three Sisters, Kulygin, not just for, but out of, Vishnevsky himself. All five performances (a Hauptmann play, as well as their Chekhov repertoire) planned by the Moscow Arts theatre for Yalta were sold out: even the Crimean Karaims (an indigenous Judaic sect) were coming. At Anton's request, there would be no cast list and no individual curtain calls. Rarely had he anticipated so intensely a public event, but all he had to do in practical terms was to meet the government electrician at the theatre and persuade the Yalta magistrate that Hauptmann's Lonely People had been passed by the censor.
The Chekhovs had money, for the Society of Dramatists and Composers sent royalties of 1159 roubles for the quarter. A migration to the Crimea began. Cousin Georgi was coming from Taganrog. Gorky bought thirty tickets for the Yalta performances. Masha was to come in the sixth week of Lent and bring Olga: she sent ahead pillows, crockery and bedsteads. Evgenia expected a flood of visitors. On 12 March Georgi arrived to stay with Anton; Gorky (followed by a police spy) came to Yalta on the 16th; on the 25th a party of Moscow doctors arrived to witness their colleague's apotheosis.
Anton put his foot down. He asked Olga not to bring Vishnevsky when she came: 'or he'll always be under our feet and won't let us say a word, and he'll give us no peace, since he'll be reciting Uncle Vania all the time.' Anton
