way.'56 Life at Autka with old Mariushka as cook was rough. Anton wrote Three Sisters on a diet of soup and fish. He stopped work only to recover from bouts of'flu', catch mice or attend to Kashtanka's broken paw. He ignored his siblings. Vania and Masha sulked: 'I can't imagine why,' he told Olga. Olga begged Anton to come to Moscow, but he insisted that they lived apart not by choice, but because 'of the demon that put the bacilli into me and love of art into you'. Anton would not come until he had finished the play and could attend rehearsals: he would not, he said, leave four heroines to Stanislavsky's mercy. Olga, however, needed a shoulder to cry on. She was hurt by poor reviews of The Snow Maiden, by being out-performed by Stanislavsky's wife in Haupt-mann's Lonely People, and by anti-Semitic outbursts from spectators in Chekhov's Ivanov.
After many telegrams, Anton arrived in Moscow on 23 October 1900 with a manuscript of Three Sisters. The next day he read the whole play out to the assembled theatre. There was a dismayed silence afterwards - nobody expected anything so complex or sad. Then Anton went to watch Ibsen's Dr Stockmann. He returned to the Hotel Dresden, where a note from Olga was waiting to seduce him: 'Stay at the Dresden and copy [out the play], I'll come, I'll bring perfume and sweets. Do you want me? Answer yes or no.'
On 29 October Anton attended a reading of Three Sisters. Stanislavsky was thrown by Anton's diffidence. Those around him were becoming more and more excited. Misha wrote that he had been asked by a lady in a train when Anton was getting married, and that an actress saw Nemirovich-Danchenko raise his glass to the union of Knipper and Chekhov: '… it would be very nice if these rumours turned out true.'57 Yalta speculated: Lazarevsky's diary for 12 November reads: 'I've heard Chekhov has got married. I don't believe it.'
Masha and Anton had promised to keep an eye on Isaak Sinani's son, Abram, a student in Moscow. On 2 8 October Abram killed himself. Anton summoned Sinani to Moscow and took him to the funeral,
AUGUST-NOVEMBER I9OO
telling him his son had died of 'melancholy'. He warned Masha not to utter the word suicide in Yalta. That night he watched the hero in Hauptmann's Lonely People kill himself; the following week Anton's editor at Marx's, Julius Grtinberg, died. Anton revised Three Sisters in a very gloomy mood. Komissarzhevskaia was still asking for the play. Anton disabused her, yet appealed for her sympathy: 'I'm on the treadmill, i.e. I run round visiting and at night I sleep like the dead. I came here perfectly well, now I'm coughing again and am evil-tempered and, I'm told, jaundiced.' By day Anton lived with Olga and Masha; he slept at the hotel. It was high time he was away. November in Moscow would be fatal. News of the Day reported that he was off to Africa and America and that Three Sisters was postponed.
In fact Three Sisters detained him. So did Suvorin. Anton was taken aback that Nastia had married and that he had not been told. He reproached Suvorin: 'I am almost as fond of your family as of my own,' and asked Suvorin to Moscow. Suvorin, though busy with his theatre, came within days, with Burenin. He noted: Chekhov was leaving for the south, for Algiers, he asked me to come and see him. I wanted to be back on the 22nd for the dress rehearsal of Sons of Israel ox The Smugglers as we christened the play. Chekhov talked me out of it. I stayed. On Wednesday I could have met Tolstoy. I had a telegram from Petersburg that there had been a scandal in the Maly Theatre. I took the express at 12 a.m. The play that Suvorin was staging in Petersburg was a melodrama about smugglers, written by a farce-writer, Viktor Krylov, and a renegade Jew, Saveli Litvin. Its anti-Semitic ranting revolted even a Petersburg audience. Orchestrated by Lidia Iavorskaia, the auditorium threw binoculars, galoshes and apples at the cast. Suvorin's beloved son-in-law, Aleksei Kolomnin, backstage, died of a massive heart attack. In this bereavement too, Anton was unable to console Suvorin. In late November Anton saw Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and annoyed Stanislavsky and Olga by his 'subtle smile, making fun of what we respect'. (Chekhov always claimed to be unable to see any merit in Ibsen.) Two acts of Three Sisters were in rehearsal. Anton would revise acts 3 and 4 in France. He had withdrawn 2000 roubles from his account in Yalta; Adolf Marx sent 10,000 to Moscow (he owed a final 15,000). Anton had money to travel and Olga reluctantly
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in e ii' i IIIUM i'ii s concurred that he had to leave for warmer climes. On n December Anton took the train to Vienna. In Nice Suvorin's granddaughter Nadia Kolomnina, as well as Olga Vasilieva with little Marusia, were waiting.
SEVENTY-FOUR O
Nice Revisited December 1900-February 1901 As THE VIENNA TRAIN steamed off, Olga Knipper walked to the end of the platform. Anton's new friend, the Tolstoyan Sulerzhitsky, escorted her home in distress, and Masha attended her until she recovered her buoyancy. Masha, too, was miserable, but would not say why. 'The poor thing didn't sleep all night: something has been happening all this time,' Olga wrote to Anton. Masha's distress may have had something to do with a new friendship. Ivan Bunin had taken upon himself to be, in Anton's absence, attentive to Masha and helpful to Olga.
Europe was now thirteen days ahead of Russia: Anton had forgotten that in Vienna shops would be shut and theatres full for Christmas Day. In his hotel room he looked 'with concupiscence at the two beds'. The next day he took a first-class train for Nice, and on 14/27 December 1900 was back in La Pension Russe, in two rooms with a wide soft bed. In four days Anton made fair copies of the last two acts of Three Sisters, expanding Act 4. He devised Chebutykin's ominous lines 'Balzac got married in Berdichev' and cut Andrei's speech in defence of die ghastly Natasha to 'A wife is a wife'. The play that had haunted Anton for two years was now off his hands. Anton was upset that Olga was apparently not writing to him, until he found that another Russian in Nice was being handed all the letters addressed to Chekhov.
On New Year's Day Anton made a pilgrimage to the Beau Rivage where he had first stayed in Nice with Suvorin nearly ten years ago, and only then sent Suvorin belated condolences on the death of Aleksei Kolomnin. To Suvorin Chekhov mused that 'life here is not like ours, it is rich, healtby, young, smiling'. Nice brought out francophilia in him. The Russians, he told Knipper, were all 'squashed-down, as if oppressed… outrageous idleness'. Despite an unseasonal frost, he
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i i in i i HI iti 141.s told Dr Sredin in Yalta, Nice was paradise and Yalta was Siberia: people here were happy, with no magistrate and no 'puffy-faced Marxists'. A week later Anton saw Nemirovich-Danchenko's mortally ill sister Varvara in Menton, stopping on the way in Monte Carlo. Anton gambled with his friend Franz Schechtel for two weeks, won 500 francs and exclaimed to Olga 'How much Russian money is being lost here'.
The Nemirovich-Danchenkos joined Anton on the Cote d'Azur. To please Olga, perhaps, Anton belittled Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife 'Kitten', whom he had once liked: 'Nemirovich is under house arrest: Katichka won't let him a step from her side, so that I don't see him… she's just like a merchant's wife…' Nemirovich-Danchenko had been unwilling to talk about Three Sisters at first, but he came to love and understand it as the weeks went by. Stanislavsky did not write about it until mid January. He was puzzled about the death of Tuzenbakh: should the body not be carried across the stage, could Anton insert a crowd scene to explain the sisters' calm? These queries did not distress Anton so much as Stanislavsky's delusion that the play ends with 'the author's uplifting thought which will redeem the play's many depressing minutes'. Nemirovich-Danchenko was practical: he demanded cuts in the sisters' monologues. So did Olga, who found Masha - the one passionate sister, the challenging role Anton had written for her - difficult to act.
Olga was worked to exhaustion by Nemirovich-Danchenko. He wanted her to feel 'the tone' of her part in the new play. When Masha and Evgenia left for Yalta on 19 December, Olga collapsed with a bad cold. She went deaf, took morphine and went to bed. Performances were cancelled, but she did not mope. Had Anton met 'beaucoup de jolies femmes… Ecrivez-moi si vous o trouvez de bien interess-antes'. She made him write to his mother - 'Why upset the old woman? She'll think I made you change towards her.' Obediently he sent Evgenia 10 roubles and a card every three days. Masha, however, angered Anton. She had delayed banking 15,000 roubles received from Marx: 'not careless, simply swinish'. Masha cried at the injustice of his fury. When he sent instructions to Yalta on repairing the stoves and digging round the fruit trees, she would not reply. He had to ask Dr Sredin if Autka and its inhabitants were safe. 'My family, darling, don't spoil me,' Anton commented to Olga.
DECEMBER I900-FEBRUARY I90I
Masha and Evgenia had caught the servants Arseni and Mariushka unawares: the house was unheated, moths had eaten a bedside rug and the divan had collapsed under the weight of old newspapers. Masha looked at the garden and told Anton it was bare. He replied tersely that everything was planted to plan and in five years' time she would see that he was right. The crane that had flown away came back, but it injured itself when it began to
