August Chekhov took his original Seagull to his coastal cottage at (mrzuf, but she won neither the right to stage the new play, nor the author's love - just a photograph inscribed 'on a stormy day when
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MI KM' i uuiMI1 lis the sea roared, from quiet Anion Chekhov.' Two days later, Anton sailed with Olga to Sevastopol, where they stayed at a hotel. We can only guess why Olga wept on the train about 'all that I went through in your house'. Was it Evgenia's disapproval or Komissarzhevskaia's arrival? Back in Yalta, Anton saw nobody. Komissarzhevskaia wired from Gurzuf: 'I've waited two days. Coming by boat to Yalta tomorrow. Upset by your lack of intuition.' They met. Komissarzhevskaia, after a rough sea voyage, complained a week later: I thought that when I saw you I'd flood you with questions and say something to you in exchange… You know it's awfully strange but I felt sorry for you for a time… sorry, sorry to the point of sadness. And mere was something elusive in you all the time, which I don't trust. Despite an affectionate letter from Anton, Olga still felt 'thrown overboard', but told Masha: 'We parted tenderly. He was very emotional; I was too, I howled.'50 Their future seemed uncertain. Vania assured Olga that Anton would winter in Moscow. Olga, however, told Masha: 'Odd of you to ask what your brother and I have decided? As if one could decide anything with him. I don't know myself and it makes me suffer.'
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko hoped to see Olga and Anton more closely united. They wanted Anton Chekhov bound to their theatre. Stanislavsky wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko on 8 August: Yesterday I wrung it out of Chekhov: he's off tomorrow to Gurzuf to write, and a week later will come to Alupka to read what he has written… A play set among the military with four young female roles, top secret.' Nemirovich-Danchenko knew something more binding, apparently before Olga, let alone Anton, told anybody else. He told Stanislavsky, 'The business of Knipper's marriage to Anton is settled.'52 As he worked on Three Sisters, Chekhov was unwittingly writing his marriage contract to both a theatre and an actress.
SKVKNTY-THREE
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Three Sisters August-November 1900 IN FINE AUGUST sunshine Anton stayed behind in Yalta while Olga went to Moscow. Anton had to get Three Sisters onto paper, even though the play had already been worked out in his mind. The subject had deep personal reverberations for Anton: after the Golden, Mar-kova, Ianova, Lintvariova and Shavrova sisters, Chekhov must have felt 'three sisters' to be the fairy-tale motif of his life.
There was also an English inspiration. In 1896 Anton had sent to Taganrog library a biography of the Bronte sisters: three talented, unhappy girls, stranded in Yorkshire; a despotic father; a mother they do not recall; a brother, once their idol, now a drunken ne'er-do-well. Chekhov's Prozorova sisters have much in common with the Brontes. The Geisha, a Sidney Jones operetta popular in Moscow in 1899, in which three English officers woo three geishas, also underlies Three Sisters. Memories, too, shaped the play: the officers with whom Anton was friendly at Voskresensk in 1884; a wait in Perm in the Urals, on the way to Sakhalin. Like 'The Lady with the Little Dog', the play shows marriage as tyranny: the tensions between the real Olga and Masha are anticipated in the fate of the gentle sisters, forced by their sister-in-law's pregnancies, room by room, out of their house. In this cruellest of Chekhov plays the sisters do not deserve their fate: comedy is incidental. Only the Moscow Arts Theatre could realize the polyphony of Three Sisters, where two or three conversations are heard simultaneously, or where nonverbal effects - the clock and the camera, the fire, the trees in the garden and the songs and music - mark the progression of time as strongly as the words of the text.
It was hard to write a play. Vania's wife and son were staying. Varvara Kharkeevich brought two girls, and 'Kitten' Nemirovich-Danchenko, bored without her husband, called to talk nonsense. Anton fled to his bedroom, then moved out to Gurzuf, but it was all
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in vain, for 'some snout crawls in', he complained to Olga. He compiled hate lists: 'a playful Jew, a learned Ukrainian and a drunken German'; ladies who asked for a summary of Herbert Spencer. The Stanislavskys came and would not go; Anton led them off to Varvara Kharkeevich to hear a Hungarian playing the harp.
Stanislavsky was, he admitted, 'raping creativity'. Anton had to be made to finish Three Sisters before the autumn. Anton procrastinated: would next year not be soon enough? Olga wanted the author as well as the play in Moscow. Could he not write it in the Hotel Dresden? It would be, Olga lamented, 'too cruel to separate all winter' and not spend the autumn together. Like Komissarzhevskaia, she wanted intimate discussion: 'we have talked so little and so vaguely', but Anton loathed 'a conversation with serious faces'. She cajoled him: 'Do you remember seeing me onto the stairs and the stairs squeaking so treacherously? I loved all that so awfully.' She fussed over him. Who was cleaning his study and ironing his shirts? 'You're not quarrelling with your mother? And you're being kind to Masha?' she wrote on 16 August. She sent him another 'Green Reptile'. She and other actors kept up pressure on their author: they were midwives to Three Sisters as much as Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, but the midwives could not make the birth of the play any less painful.
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, meanwhile, held gruelling rehearsals for Ostrovsky's Snow Maiden. Moscow swallowed Olga's time. Lonely People opened on 25 September. Uncle Sasha confided in his niece: alcohol, debauchery and loneliness had brought him to the verge of suicide: he wanted her to consult Anton about him. On 19 August 1900 Masha left for Moscow, to sell Kuchiik-Koy for cash. (Konshin had defaulted altogether on Melikhovo and was secretly trying to sell the estate.) Olga was to help Masha find new quarters; they spent their spare time together and slept at each other's apartments, attended assiduously by Vishnevsky. Round them gathered Anton's friends: Lika, Kundasova ('turned into a shadow,' said Masha), Bunin, Gorky, and a new acolyte, the Tolstoyan sailor-turned-gardener Sulerzhitsky. Anton was the magnet that held these disparate people together.
As summer ended, one tame crane flew away and the other, now blind in one eye, hopped dejectedly after the gardener. The maid Marfa Motsnaia was recalled to Livadia by her uncle. Even so Anton
AUGUST-NOVEMBER I9OO
was not as isolated as he wanted to be. He asked Masha to have Evgenia with her in Moscow in the autumn. Masha resisted: If you only knew what a hard time I had getting her back to the Crimea from Moscow]! The household I have in Moscow is in student style, there isn't a bed, there's too little crockery, I sent it all in spring to Yalta. The rains will pour down, her legs will start aching, it's cold, damp. Where was Anton off to, she asked, and for how long? Masha wanted to enjoy the theatre season: she would have Evgenia only from January until Easter 1901. Anton overruled her. On 23 September he put Evgenia on the boat for Sevastopol, where a friend of the Chekhovs offered her dinner (she declined because of her false teeth) and put her on the Moscow express.
'I am very grateful, thank you very much for giving me the pleasure,' Evgenia wrote to Anton.53 Masha was too angry to write. Olga took Evgenia to the theatre when A. K. Tolstoy's magnificent costume drama Tsar Fiodor opened on 3 October. Evgenia even asked to be taken to The Snow Maiden, but never to her son's plays. (She, like Pavel, seemed to be convinced that Anton's plays and stories were a source of income too shameful to be spoken of.) Olga told Anton 11 October: 'Poor woman, she keeps imagining I'll get my claws into her Antosha and make him unhappy.' Evgenia accepted Olga's hospitality but kept her guard up. Anton relished his solitude and resisted Olga's cajoling: 'Do you really not want to see your actress, to kiss her, to caress her, to fondle her? She is yours.'54 Three Sisters took shape, even though, Anton complained, one sister had 'gone lame'. Adolf Marx's editor, Julius Griinberg, wrote: they had heard that Chekhov was writing lTwo Sisters' and could hold up volume VII of The Complete Works to include it. (Anton replied that Marx would have Three Sisters only after it had been staged and after it had been published in a periodical.)
Visitors to Autka were kept at bay, except for the irrepressible Sergeenko55 and for Olga Vasilieva. Eighteen and independent, she came to Yalta from Nice, bringing with her a nanny and a little girl of three, Marusia, whom she had adopted, she said, from an orphanage in Smolensk. Anton took to the child. Aleksandr Kuprin was bemused to see Marusia clamber onto Anton's knee, and, babbling, run her
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in ei i eie Mr us fingers through his hair. Anton had never been seen to fondle any creature except a dachshund in public. Gossip would have spread like wildfire, had others seen Anton's letters to Vasilieva, where he playfully called himself Marusia's 'daddy'.
On 9 September the Yalta theatre burnt down, not that Anton cared: 'It was quite superfluous here, by the
