told Sergeenko that he could not have him to stay, and recommended a distant resort. At the end of March an
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I II 1(1 I I 1(1 KM I'll N express train reached Sevastopol with three wagons full of theatre sets. This cost 1300 roubles, to be defrayed, as Nemirovich-Danchenko reminded Anton, by putting on, with Anton's permission, Uncle Vania in Petersburg. On 2 April Masha and Knipper arrived.42 Olga had a room next to Masha's, downstairs. Anton slept upstairs. The stairs creaked loudly and Evgenia slept lightly, so night-time visits between Olga and Anton were difficult. Sheltering an actress, let alone one who visited her son's bedroom, was enough to stretch Evgenia's tolerance.
On 7 April the theatre company arrived in Sevastopol for the start of their Crimean tour. They brought a new Nina for The Seagull: Maria Andreeva. The next day Anton's haemorrhoids bled: he and Olga put off joining the actors until Easter Sunday, the 9th. In Sevastopol Anton, for the first time, saw Uncle Vania performed and endured the roar when the audience spotted the author. He walked next day over the ruins of ancient Chersonesus and then returned to see Olga as a high-minded seductress in Hauptmann's Lonely People. Not Olga's best role, it moved Lazarevsky, a young poet who had begun to pester Anton, to behave very tactlessly: 'I found the actress Knipper so loathsome that if I'd met her in real life she'd have been just as loathsome. I shared this opinion with Chekhov.'43
On 13 April, a day ahead of the theatre, Olga and Chekhov left Vitzel's hotel in Sevastopol for Yalta. When Stanislavsky arrived there, he found Anton warming himself in the sun, watching the sets being unloaded. For ten days the Chekhovs were besieged by actors and writers. Anton saw both his plays performed, a medley from his stories, and scenes from other productions. He withstood ovations. Gorky's Song of the Hawk also roused the audience. Anton bore fame politely, and gave Nemirovich-Danchenko a gold medallion shaped like a book. It was inscribed 'You gave my Seagull life'. On 24 April there was a farewell lunch, and the company, with Olga, sailed over rough seas back to Sevastopol, leaving behind in Anton's study three palm branches wrapped in red moire ribbon 'to A. P. Chekhov, the profound interpreter of Russian reality', and in Anton's garden the swing and the bench on which Olga had lounged as Elena in Act 1 of Uncle Vania. Despite her commitment at Mrs Rzhevskaia's school, Masha stayed on a week in Yalta. She went back to Moscow for the school examinations, but promised to return by mid May.» Olga also promised to return, if Anton did not run away to Paris.
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She smoothed her path with Evgenia: 'We brought such disorder into your home that we really are ashamed to think of it. You are probably resting now and getting back to normal after our invasion. Thank you for everything, everything.' Olga and Anton were open about their intimacy. In Iaroslavl Misha sounded out Masha: 'Here there are rumours are that Anton is getting married. I nearly believed them. Especially when there was talk of a young lady with a German surname. I remembered you once mentioning a Knipper.' Masha accepted Knipper as a friend and as Anton's mistress, but the prospect of a sister-in-law, of a power in the household, disturbed her profoundly. In her letters to Olga 'darling Olechka' alternates with 'vile German' and 'how piggish of you'. (Half jocular abuse was part of Masha's epistolary style - a tone which Lika also adopted but which Olga, either frankly angry or unequivocally intimate, could never catch or get used to.)
Despite Evgenia's horror of being alone, Anton left for Moscow four days after his sister. He would not stay in his sister's apartment, but chose the Hotel Dresden which had a lift and a room by a W.C. In that hotel room he and Olga met, unobserved by anyone who mattered. On arriving Anton wired Suvorin, who with the Dauphin took the night train to Moscow. On 13 May, Masha left Moscow to be with her mother. Chekhov told Suvorin how Stanislavsky bored him. Suvorin added: I talked about the sale of his works to Marx. He had only 25,000 roubles left. 'Isn't it bad for you to have sold your works?' - 'Of course it is. I don't feel like writing.' - 'You ought to buy them back,' I told him. 'I've got to wait two years or so,' he said, 'I don't care much about property.' We took a cab to the cemetery. We went to see his father's grave. We searched for a long time. In the end I found it… He saw me off to the train. He is better. He had just one bleed, a small one, in winter… I feel fine with Chekhov. I am 26 years older than him. We met in 1886. 'I was young then,' I said. 'But you were still 26 years older.' Anton called on the dying Levitan. Again, despite his affair with her daughters, Levitan was being nursed by Anna Turchaninova. His temperature climbed to 4i°C. Turchaninova wrote: 'Horror is creeping in. I can't believe I shan't get him through.'44 When Anton left for Yalta after just nine days in Moscow, Olga asked in her next letter:
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I m; I i I IIIUMI'IIS 'You left yesterday horribly upset, dear writer. Why?' Anton told her that he had been tormented by a headache and fever which had forced him to leave Moscow.
In his absence Evgenia had grumbled: her teeth needed attention; Anton had not left enough money; she was afraid. For Misha his abandoned mother was reason enough to come to Yalta. Within a week Anton, despite ill health, was travelling again. On 29 May Masha explained to Olga, with a touch of Schadenfreude towards the latter: Gather your things and come and see us and don't argue!… yesterday we saw Antosha off to the Caucasus. He went off in the company of Dr Sredin, Gorky, Dr Aleksin and Vasnetsov [an artist]. They devised this journey quickly and got moving quickly. Their route is: Novorossiisk, Vladikavkaz, the Georgian Military Highway, Tiflis, Batum and back to Yalta. The main reason Anton left was because relatives - Misha, his wife, the child and a nanny - descended, quite unexpectedly, without warning. Noisy and boring. Any day Vania is coming, also with family… The writer is back on 8 June. You probably won't meet. Gorky had got together this party: two doctors, three consumptives and a painter. Perhaps Anton and Olga nevertheless intended to meet on this tour of the Caucasus, for, as Anton's party set out, Olga and her mother were in Vladikavkaz and meant to cross the Caucasus over the Military Highway before they rested in the mountain resort of Borjomi. Rain washed the roads away and made a rendezvous at this point impossible. At Tiflis a newspaper reported that Chekhov, Gorky and Vasnetsov were staying a week in the Northern Furnished Rooms. Anton did not know that Olga was also in Tiflis, but Olga's sister- in-law read the papers and telephoned Anton, who at first snubbed her as an intrusive fan.45 Anton and Olga met when his party and hers left Tiflis across central Georgia by train, separating after a few hours; Olga and her mother took the branch line up to Borjomi.
Masha knew nothing of this: on 12 June she was writing to Knipper: 'If you don't come in four days then everything is finished between us and we don't know each other any more. Today we are seeing off Misha and his family. It was sad, I had got used to them.' Anton contrived to miss his brother and niece by one day. Gorky and his family left a few days later. Olga arrived on 23 June. Six happy weeks followed, though little is known of them. Chekhov
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did little but work slowly at Three Sisters. There were a few clouds: Maria Andreeva had arrived before Olga, and was staying in a Yalta hotel. Anton had not yet shaken off the poet Lazarevsky, who spotted Anton having tea with Masha and Olga: Chekhov sat behind Knipper and peered out from diere. He was dressed, unlike Gorky, very fastidiously. Gold cuff links, yellow shoes, a jacket, coat, all most elegant. I went over to Andreeva. Chekhov has a more than ordinary liking for her. Evgenia and Masha left Autka for the cottage by the sea at Gurzuf. Anton and Olga were alone in the house, recalling Chekhov's entry at that time in the notebooks which he sporadically kept, that to keep visitors away he should keep a French woman in his house and pretend she was his concubine. They no longer feared the creaking stairs that disturbed Evgenia or Masha, when Olga crept with pillow and candle to Anton's room, or when she visited him at dawn after a swim in the sea. (She called herself an 'otter'.)
Supplicants and visitors were ignored, except for the teenager, Olga Vasilieva, whom Anton had taken pity on in Nice and who had embarked on the translation of his works into English. Iurasov, the consul at Menton, begged Anton to humour her: 'Olga Vasilieva loves you very much and your word is law to her… She doesn't know what to do with her fortune - and she has nobody to lean on. She is an unhappy creature, pathetic and worthy of compassion.'46
Vasilieva sent Anton an Oriental rug and asked which English journals might print her translations.47 Anton replied 'I am of so little interest to the English public that I don't care in the least.'
On 22 July Levitan died. Everyone Levitan had known received a scrap of paper with the line: 'Burn all letters when you hear of my death.'48 Masha lovingly did as Levitan asked; Anton did not.
A different perturbation spoilt the end of Olga's stay. Early in August a letter arrived from the first Seagull, Vera Komissarzhevskaia: 'I've come to Yalta for a few days, I'm at Massandra and should be very sad not to see you, if only for a minute.'49 Olga felt that it was the author, not his new play, that Komissarzhevskaia sought. On 3
