Weeping in the train, Olga wrote to Masha. She posted the letter in Kharkov: Do you feel better now I'm gone? You know, I want to shake off all our misunderstandings in the summer months like a vile nightmare… We do love each other. Nobody met Olga in Moscow. She sought out a five-room apartment, a wooden house in a courtyard, for herself and - she hoped - Masha. Her unease persisted. She asked Anton: In your house nobody ever mentions me, do they? I shall always stand between you and her. And I fancy that she will never get used to me as your wife, and will thus turn you off me. I am avoided like a sore.' Anton deplored her jealousy: 'What rubbish! Just be silent for a year… all life's comforts are to be found in nonresistance for the time being.' In Yalta Masha resigned herself to her new situation, telling Misha on 30 August: Recendy Antosha has been so gentle and kind that I wouldn't have the strengm to abandon him, anyway his health is no better. The sister-in-law has rented a flat in Moscow where I shall live and Antosha will come for a time… bad though I feel, I still want to stay with him. The young poet Lazarevsky, who had become a 'Person from Porlock' in the Autka house, recorded Masha as 'the first and last of old maids, more likeable than the most beautiful ladies… a charming, suffering face'. On 31 August 1901 Masha left for Moscow; she stayed first with the Knippers and then with the Konovitsers until the new quarters were ready. Sharing was bearable, for Masha spent days at school, Olga evenings at the theatre, and servants, notably Masha Shakina who became pregnant every year, ran the household. Olga's passport listed her as the wife of a Yalta doctor. She bore her colleagues' teasing that Chekhov's latest play was Two Sisters, as the author had taken one (Masha, played by Olga) away for himself. The day he was left alone with his mother, Anton took the draft
JUNE-SEPTEMBER I9OI
of a new story, 'The Bishop', out of his suitcase and wrote. He would join Olga while Moscow was still warm, in mid September. Now that he was married, few Antonovkas bothered to call. Anton renounced old dalliances and gave Lazarevsky a rude message for Avilova.12 A Polish girl, another Masha, was hired to cook; Arseni the gardener resumed work; the tame crane trumpeted with delight. Finally Ivan Bunin arrived on 5 September. Finding Anton 'ill and lonely', he visited daily; his tact and wit restored Anton's spirits. Nearby, at Gaspra, Tolstoy was recuperating from a nearly fatal attack of pneumonia. Anton's concern at this time was for Tolstoy's health, not his own. (The government forbad bulletins, and stationed a priest outside the house in Gaspra, to announce his deathbed recantation of heresy.) If Tolstoy died, Anton believed, Russian literature would lose its moral bulwark. His attendants, when Anton visited, found Chekhov 'aged, coughing all the time, talking little', but apparently happy to be without his sister and his wife.
Anton still had Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko as a rival, but Anton's and Olga's marriage made it possible to ignore his role in Olga's life. Anna Knipper, Olga's mother, now lifted her ban on the Moscow Arts Theatre director's visits. 'Your mama has made up witb Nemirovich-Danchenko? So she no longer fears for her daughter?' Anton asked. Olga, for her part, dismissed Anton's former girlfriends as ruthlessly as she had once courted them.13 Lika Mizinova was a marked woman. On 25 August 1901 she presented herself at the Moscow Arts Theatre for public entrance tests. Lika was told to read Elena in Uncle Vania, a role which Olga had made her own. Unabashed, Olga told Anton how she and Nemirovich-Danchenko had humiliated Lika: Lika Mizinova tried to imitate me, a dirty trick, but everything she read was complete rubbish (just between ourselves) and I was sorry for her, frankly. We rejected her unanimously. Sanin suggested she open a hat shop. Tell Masha about Lika. Perhaps she can have a non-speaking part. After this rebuff Masha, Vania and Misha made a point of befriending Lika, while the theatre company found her a role as an unofficial, unpaid social secretary. When Olga wanted to install her cat Martin in the new flat, Anton
544
545
LOVK AND 1)1 E I II
forbade her: 'I am afraid of cats… (Jet a dog instead.' He was furious with Olga's refusal to give her new address when she moved apartments - she preferred to receive her letters at the theatre - and stopped replying to her, but he had met a woman with willpower to match his own. She remonstrated with telegrams. To build up his health for renewed conjugal life, he drank bottles of kefir (Tatar fermented milk); Dr Altshuller also made him massage himself with eucalyptus oil and turpentine.
On 17 September, after ignoring Olga's birthday on the 9th, Anton arrived in Moscow for the Arts Theatre's new season.
SEVENTY-SEVEN O
When Doctors Disagree October 1901-February 1902 FOR THREE SEASONS in a row the Moscow Arts Theatre had put on a Chekhov play that was new to the Moscow public. For October 1901 Anton had given them nothing. Three Sisters was still a magnet; it had played for only half of last season. They also had Gorky's first play, The Petty Bourgeois, which promised to cause a scandal. They opened with Ibsen's Wild Duck, but the public and critics agreed with Chekhov: 'tired, boring and weak'. Stanislavsky was shattered by a fire that had burnt down a family factory, and then he was struck down with tonsillitis: his performances let the theatre down. Then Nemirovich-Danchenko made the mistake of staging his own introspective play In Dreams. The reviewers slated the play, Olga had no confidence in her part in it, and she was worried by Nemirovich-Danchenko's depression.14 After three rehearsals, Stanislavsky cancelled a revised production of Ivanov. Anton was pressed for a new play. At rehearsals of Three Sisters, he hindered more than he helped, but the author's presence at performances of this play and of Uncle Vania filled the house: Anton earned some 8000 roubles that season (and another 1000 roubles from productions all over Russia).
Moscow was still warm enough for his lungs. Petersburg, where he planned to go, was not. Aleksandr came to Moscow to talk to Masha and Anton. Though he stayed the night, he never met Olga. He told Misha that Anton looked 'pretty bad'. Aleksandr, on his way to the Caucasus for New Times, was sober. He hid his drinking until he was far away. Suvorin sent Ezhov to Moscow. Ezhov twice met the man who had, he felt, libelled him in Three Sisters; 'a shadow of the old Chekhov,' he told Suvorin. The weather grew colder. Olga used friends as sitters while Anton was confined indoors. Anton left the house only to help Olga Vasilieva. At nineteen she was adopting a
546
547
LOV1. AND l)i:AI II second orphan girl, and asked Anton to come to her solicitor's to witness her will.
Masha was rarely at home. She taught at a school for 40 roubles a month.15 She went with Aleksandr Khotiaintseva to an art studio, where they were painting Abram Sinani for his bereaved parents. She sold a painting. In the evenings she received girlfriends whom Anton no longer met, while Olga's relatives kept Anton company. Anton liked Olga's Uncle Sasha, another Aleksandr in name and character, with his womanizing, drinking, and public outrages. Uncle Karl the doctor and Olga's brothers, the lawyer Volodia and the engineer Konstantin, left Anton cold. Masha told Misha: 'The worst thing about Antosha's marriage is his wife's numerous bourgeois relatives who have to be taken into account.'6
In Yalta, Evgenia moaned, begging to be fetched to Moscow. Anna told her she must wait until he got back, and Masha placated her by saying that the apartment Olga had chosen had a smelly lavatory, rats decomposing beneath the floorboards and walls too thin for privacy. If Evgenia agreed to stay, Masha would bring her to Moscow in the New Year. Anton guaranteed this journey and Evgenia calmed down.
It was cold, and by mid October Anton knew he had to leave Moscow. To Miroliubov, the editor of Everybody's Magazine, Anton confided: 'My wife is crying, and I forbid her to leave the theatre. In a word, commotion.' Vania told a friend that Anton would not let Olga quit, telling her that life 'without work was impossible.' In the end Olga let him go alone. She sent Evgenia a complicated and patronizing list of instructions which confused and insulted her, even though Olga's intention was to provide Anton with a diet that was easily digested as well as nourishing: Here he has been eating grouse, turkey, partridge, poussin; he eats salt beef, pork chops, but not often. He likes tongue, cook him kidney, liver, fry mushrooms in sour cream. Make fish soup, but give him rissoles very sparingly. And please give him a sweet or fruit pastille, or get chocolate from Vernet's. Find fresh eggs for his breakfast. On 28 October Anton travelled from the railhead to Yalta, frozen from the six-hour coach ride over the mountain. He brought with him an ox tongue that had gone off in the heat of the railway carriage
548
o. I cm H IOOI-FEBRUARY I0O2 and yet another clock, broken on the journey. Intact were dried and salted mushrooms, slippers for Evgenia and felt boots for the ancient Mariushka. A passionate letter from Olga was following him: 'Antonka, how much I want to have a little half-German, to use your phrase 'a half-German which would distract you and fill your life'. There is confusion and struggle inside me.' Olga reproached Anton for not begetting a child as soon as they married; yet the longing for a child was his. A fortnight later she reported the
