In Yalta the dogs and the cranes were sated, but Anton starved, revolted by the dead flies floating in old Mariushka's borshch and coffee. Anton sent instructions for his own reception in Moscow. Olga was to buy cod liver oil, beech creosote, export beer. She promised to meet him with a fur coat, 'a warm bed and a few other things too.' On 14 October he arrived at the 'convent' where Olga, Masha and their tenant, a piano teacher, lived. He brought with him the first sketches of his valedictory story, 'The Bride'.
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'The Bride' October 1902-April 1903 ON ARRIVAL Anton wrote a note to summon Ivan Bunin, who visited. What transpired, we do not know, but almost certainly Anton was again intervening in Masha's personal life, perhaps at her request. She was seven years older than Bunin, not a noblewoman, and Bunin was unlikely to offer her marriage. Masha was shocked by the outcome of this meeting. The next day she left to stay with their mother in Aleksandr's freezing quarters in Petersburg. She returned too ill to receive anyone. Anton made a joke of his intervention: he sent Bunin a photograph of a man inscribed with a notorious decadent verse 'Cover your pale legs'. Bunin packed to go abroad. Masha's letters to him in November 1902 are downcast: 'Darling Bouquichon, What's happened? Are you well? You've vanished and God knows what I'm to think! I've been very ill… Is it a new love affair? Your Amarantha.' They would, however, meet again in December, when Anton withdrew to Yalta, and their involvement would flicker on and off for some years.
Chekhov summoned a masseur to ease the pains that were plaguing his limbs: OA was entering his spine. Suvorin came from Petersburg to supervise the Moscow staging of The Question, his play on sex before marriage. He called on Anton, but neither enjoyed the meeting. Adolf Marx dashed Anton's hopes of renegotiating the agreement. He brought out a cheap reprint of all Chekhov's works as a bonus for subscribers to The Cornfield, so the market was flooded. No publisher would now help Anton break free. Gorky and Piatnitsky's efforts had been in vain. Even so Anton was to tell Olga a year later that he did not feel cheated by Marx: I hadn't a brass penny then, I owed Suvorin, I was being published in a really vile way, too, and above all, I was about to die and wanted to put my affairs in some sort of order.
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LOVi: AND O'EOI Meanwhile Anton's main source of income was under threat, for deep splits rent the Moscow Arts Theatre. The theatre could survive Vsevo-lod Meyerhold, too magnetic a rival for Nemirovich- Danchenko and Stanislavsky, going to Kherson on the Black Sea,48 but Sanin's departure did harm. He took Stanislavsky's methods to Petersburg, where The Seagull was a success in the Aleksandrinsky theatre. Sazonova's diary on 15 November conceded, 'If they meant to show how boring rural life is, they succeeded fully'.
Anton announced to Miroliubov, the editor of Everybody's Magazine, that his new story was 'The Bride'. Submitting to Olga's regime, he tinkered with the work, and wrote a few letters. He complained: 'I'm not allowed out anywhere, I'm kept at home, they fear my catching a chill.' In six weeks, however, he and Olga had repaired their relationship: 'We had no unpleasant minutes,' Anton recalled. On 27 November, driven out of Moscow by his incessant cough, he left for Yalta with the faint hope of a child. Olga saw him off at the station, and took home his fur coat and boots. At the flat a dachshund was waiting for her. Brom's and Quinine's offspring lived in Petersburg; this dog came from another line. Olga called him Schnap.
Anton returned to five months of solitude. Snow was falling in Italy and, because of an outbreak of plague in the Mediterranean, Odessa was a quarantine port, and travel to and from Europe by sea was restricted. Anton despaired of wintering abroad, even though the new season promised an income of 3000 roubles from Petersburg performances alone. He now had assistance from cousin Georgi, who ran the Russian Steamship Company offices in Yalta. Anton liked Georgi, but feared the influx of Georgi's kin from Taganrog. In Autka, for conversation, he had the pious cant of Arseni, the cranes, who lived with Mariushka in the kitchen, and two mongrel dogs, one-eyed Tuzik and stupid Kashtanka. By early December he was begging Suvorin to visit him.49 On 9 December Olga wrote to tell him: Unwanted visitors [menstruation] have arrived and hopes for a litde otter cub have collapsed. My darling Anton, will I really not have children?! This is awful. The doctors must have been lying to console me.50 Anton immediately consoled her:
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Dog, you'll definitely have children, that's what the doctors say. All you need is to be fully recovered. Everything is intact and in working order, rest assured, all you lack is a husband living with you all year round. A week later, he insisted that he was not hiding from her anything about her health. Olga revived and The Lower Depths triumphed, despite Stanislavsky's disdain for its sordid setting and crude socialist rhetoric. Dr Chlenov, the venereologist, took Olga to see Moscow's whores and give her role authenticity. Olga's brother Volodia married and at the wedding she ate, drank, danced and sang, while the bride's mother danced a cancan. She had apparently stopped pining for the 'little half-German who would rake through your wardrobe and smear my ink over the desk'.
Passions ran high in the theatre. Hardly had they toasted the new season with dinner at Testov's and a telegram to Yalta, hardly had Vishnevsky declared that they needed a noisy success, than they celebrated the triumphant premiere of The Lower Depths with supper, cognac and gypsy songs at the Ermitage. Gorky, who had regaled everyone with accounts of his lovelife, and brought a bedraggled example, left early. For no reason that anyone could recall a drunken row burst out, and Sawa Morozov was beaten up.
After Berlin Gorky's play took Moscow by storm. It moved the theatre's political profile sharply to the left: some supporters were repelled. The Lower Depths made money: Vishnevsky, the theatre's accountant, reported 75,000 roubles banked by the New Year, and actors were given a pay rise. Olga would now receive 3600 a year, and was disappointed only because her enemy Maria Andreeva was paid the same. Olga was less annoyed by disorder in the theatre than by the bedbugs and mice that infested their flat whose lease would expire in March 1903. She was feeling well now and longed for quarters well away from Vishnevsky, whom she found a bore and a noisy eater.
A week before Christmas 1902, Masha arrived in Yalta to look after Anton. His mood was lachrymose. He expressed a fondness for a poem by his acolyte Fiodorov: it ends 'A barrel-organ sings outside. My window is open… I thought of you and was sad. And you, you are so far.' Masha told Olga on 20 December:
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l.OVI AND I) I. A III Altshuller said that he has listened to Anton's chest and found a deterioration which he blames on his long stay in Moscow. He had a temperature, haemorrhage and constant coughing. Altshuller points out that one of us must be with him because he plays up with mother… Altshuller is serious and does not mince his words. Gorky, freed from police surveillance, had been sent by his wife and doctor to rest in Yalta: he too was coughing blood. The next day he and three doctors turned up at Anton's house. One was Dr Sredin, who claimed (prematurely, for nephritis was to fell him) to be recovering from OA even more advanced than Anton's. Anton removed the compress that Altshuller had put on his chest. He felt so much better, he assured Olga, that he was going to the dentist. The dentist, Ostrovsky, was a barbarian - 'dirty hands, instruments not sterilized' - and deserted Anton in mid operation for his duties in the Jewish cemetery. In any case, by Christmas Anton had fever, aching limbs, insomnia, coughing and pleurisy. Altshuller diagnosed flu. Masha nursed him, constantly cooking, providing a breakfast of five soft-boiled eggs, two glasses of cod-liver oil and two tumblers of milk. She left Yalta for Moscow on i a January. Anton relapsed. The Odessa News announced that 'Chekhov has fully recovered from his chest disease.'
Olga demanded bulletins by telegram, accusing Anton of hiding his illness. She was fed up with living apart, and embarrassed to be an absent wife. She did not, however, come to see him as the doctor asked. 'I can't believe Altshuller on his own,' she told Anton 11 February, 'he is not that expert.' She sketched out a life: they would buy a properly heated dacha near Moscow where Anton could see her often. From mid January, she went on expeditions with colleagues, inspecting country houses where a consumptive might survive a Moscow winter.
For his forty-third name-day Olga gave Anton mints, a large leather wallet, a tie, a case of beer, and sweets. Travellers brought these presents to Yalta. Anton became irritable. The beer had frozen in the freight car and exploded; the mints were from the wrong shop and had no taste; the wallet was too big for banknotes; the tie was too long. He complained to Masha that nobody came to his name day and that all her presents were useless too. (He was delighted, however, with bronze piglets from Olga's Uncle Sasha and ivory elephants from Kuprin.) Olga treated him like a petulant child. She sent Shapovalov,
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