arrival of her period: 'Once again we shan't have a little half-German… why do you think that this little half German will fill my life?' Masha and Olga moved again to a bright new flat, in the same building as Vishnevsky, close to the Sandunov baths, with central heating and electric lighting. (The servant girl's baby daughter, Anna, was sent to a baby farm in the country and was not heard of again.) Olga's letters regaled Chekhov with what she had eaten and drunk; Masha's with the absurdities of theatre life.
Until the New Year Anton led a monotonous life in Autka, working desultorily at 'The Bishop'. His health deteriorated. After Dr AltshuUer examined him on 8 December 1901 he suffered a haemorrhage and began to take creosote. Diarrhoea and haemorrhoids followed. AltshuUer decided to abandon his trip in the New Year to the Pirogov congress in Moscow. At Christmas Dr Shchurovsky came to the Crimea to Tolstoy's bedside. Dr AltshuUer and he compared notes. Shchurovsky found Anton's state 'serious'.17 AltshuUer used more drastic remedies: large compresses, some with cantharides (Spanish fly) to irritate the tissues and disperse pleurisy. There were few diversions. The pianist Samuelson came and played Chopin's C-major nocturne for Anton. Gorky, after illegally stopping in Moscow for an ovation at the Moscow Arts Theatre, kept Anton company. (When he visited, a gendarme patrolled outside.) A wild crane broke off its flight south to join the surviving tame crane in Anton's garden and kitchen. Visitors filled Anton's study with smoke and made him miss meals. Masha did not come until 18 December, followed by Bunin. Anton begged Olga to secure leave from the theatre for Christmas. How else could they conceive a child? She offered a few days, perhaps in Sevastopol to save travelling, but she did not come, blaming her director for keeping her in Moscow. Anton's colleagues, Dr Chlenov and Dr Korobov, she said, claimed that Moscow could do him no harm. On
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Christmas Day 1901 Olga begged Masha for affection; she felt 'very lonely and utterly abandoned'. The next day she had Masha's report that Anton was 'iller than we thought' and promised to rush to Yalta, with or without leave: 'I know I must give up my personal life… but it's hard to do it straight away.' Still she did not come. In Moscow, as winter deepened, Olga's thoughts turned to babies. On Anton's forty-second name-day, 17 January 1902, she told Anton: 'I began to squawk like a baby, I can. Everyone was alarmed and began telling people that a baby Chekhov has been born and congratulating me. God grant they are prophetic' A week later there was a wild party in the theatre from midnight until morning. The actors slid down waxed boards; the actor Kachalov fought a boxing match in drag - pink tricot and high heels; Chaliapin sent for beer and sang gypsy songs; Masha laughed hysterically; everyone exchanged joke presents. 'I had a baby in nappies: Dr Grinevsky broke its head off,' Olga reported. This was horribly prophetic.
Winter was cold in Yalta. Dr Altshuller confined Anton to the house for the whole of January 1902. Olga persisted in inviting Anton to Moscow; she reported a Dr Bobrov at the Pirogov medical congress of January 1902 saying that consumptive southerners, like Anton, were best treated by northern air. Dr Altshuller insisted that Yalta was the only haven in a Russian winter. The medical congress had Dr Chekhov in mind: on January 11 the Moscow Arts Theatre gave them a matinee performance of Uncle Vania and they responded with telegrams to the author and the gift of a large reproduction of the Braz portrait that Anton loathed.
Anton wrote to Olga of the weather, which, as she told him, she could find out from the newspapers. To Masha Anton spoke of finance: they had failed again to sell an estate. The purchaser of Kiichiik-Koy did not like what she had bought, and had to be repaid. (The Chekhovs had no prospect now of being paid for Melikhovo.) There were consolations in January 1902. Three Sisters was awarded the Griboedov prize; after injections of arsenic, Tolstoy recovered his health.
Evgenia and Mariushka were too set in their ways to heed diet sheets. They fed Anton the rich food they had always cooked and, unable to digest fat, he lost all the weight that koumiss had put on. By 9 January it was -io° in Yalta. Anton felt that he had been 'in Kamchatka for twenty-four years'. He had nowhere warm to wash.
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Masha left for Moscow on 12 January and broke her promise to take Evgenia: Anton could not be left on his own. He complained of boredom and loneliness, not breathlessness and emaciation. I It-despaired of writing the comedy he had half-promised the theatre. If he deserted literature for gardening, he wrote, he might live ten years longer, but he had to sit down after pruning one rose bush.'K
Misery worked its way into 'The Bishop', which was completed by 20 February 1902. In Bunin's opinion the finest Russian story, e shoi 1 work which took fifteen years to pupate, 'The Bishop' is Chekhov's last analogy between the cleric and the artist. On Palm Sunday.1 provincial bishop, taken ill, wonders why he reduces the congregation to tears. By Easter he is dying, attended only by a grumbling old monk. His awed mother talks to him as a bishop, not a son. ()nly his niece shows no fear. Harassed by visitors and typhoid, he dies Willi e vision of himself striding the fields: a phantom resurrection aftei thl crucifixion of disease. Years later not everyone believes that his mot lin had a bishop for a son. The bishop's life is eerily like Anton's, as are his intimations of early death and doubts about his renown; thr similarities would make painful reading for those who knew Anion and his mother. 'The Bishop' was Chekhov's swan song, and a pro genitor of modern prose about loneliness and death, such as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.
Anton had given up Misha to Suvorin's clutches. Aleksandr, meanwhile, felt lonely and cold, and broke the ice with a letter to Anton: New Times, he said, was to him 'a latrine', and hostility to Chekhov in Petersburg might lose him his job. He lived all year, sometimes alone, in a freezing dacha he had built, with fancy poultry in runs he had designed, writing pot-boiler novels during his sober spells. This year Anton's affection for his elder brother was rekindled as he himself deteriorated. In January 1902 Altshuller warned Olga: The process has taken a step further… he has been very badly nourished… his irresponsible excursions north are harmful and dangerous to his health… loneliness cannot fail to have a bad effect.19 In Moscow Dr Dolgopolov, Olga complained: 'simply swore at me for not giving up the theatre.' The Chekhovs' new friend, Sulerzhitsky, who was in Yalta, getting over pleurisy, reproached Olga:
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Anton is more depressed than anyone. Yesterday he had another small bleed, he is suffocating confined to the house. You must come, he is not just your husband but a great writer whose well-being is vital to everyone, to all Russian literature. The Arts Theatre must… despatch you here.20 In letters all that winter Olga bewailed her own egotism, but her flattery of Anton sounds like Arkadina's from The Seagull: 'You are the Russian Maupassant!' She made sentimental journeys, taking tea in Room No. 35 in the Hotel Dresden from which Anton had 'abducted' her. She promised erotic delights - 'I kiss you hard, tastily, long and penetratingly, so all your sinews feel it', 'I shall bite off your ear', 'I shall hug you till your ribs crack' - and demanded: 'be rough to me and I'll like it, then you'll kiss and caress me.'21 She talked of loneliness in letters that told with relish of excursions and parties until dawn. She asserted 'I must build you a life that is good, pleasant, peaceful,' and added the rider 'that's my dream for old age.'
The sisters-in-law got on harmoniously in Moscow until March 1902: living together, they could enjoy a private life without gossip. Olga had Nemirovich-Danchenko to lean on; Masha had Bunin. Masha's letters to Anton depict Olga on Anton's name day, carousing past dawn with a crowd of men. The Stanislavskys also hinted to Anton at her joie de vivre - Maria that she flirted with Konstantin, Stanislavsky that her neckline shocked even the roue Aumont, at whose theatre they were rehearsing.22
Now Antonovkas visited Olga in Moscow, not Anton in Yalta. Curiosity about Olga drove Tania Shchepkina- Kupernik and Nina Korsh to risk rebuff; Maria Drozdova shocked Olga by flirting with her brother and talking of her sexual adventures. Olga could not endure either Lika Mizinova or Maria Andreeva, both of whom Masha persisted in cultivating. At Christmas Olga told Anton: 'Lika was drunk and kept pestering me to drink with her, but I evaded her, I don't like it.' To Masha she portrayed Lika (whom many in the company now adored) as a man-crazed, drunken harridan. Ousting Olga's rival, the beautiful Maria Andreeva, from the theatre was harder. To Anton Olga accused Andreeva of acting so badly as to destroy Nemirovich-Danchenko's reputation as a playwright.'23 Olga saw him as one writer facing three merchants - Stanislavsky, Morozov and the actor Luzhsky; Nemirovich-Danchenko was a David among
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Philistines, 'plucked and gnawed at on all sides'. If he left the Moscow Arts Theatre, she said, she would go too. Anton was aware that Olga was loyal to the director, not to the theatre.
