the architect, with new mints. On 1 February Anton listed what he really wanted: chocolates, herrings, bismuth, toothpicks and English creosote. Suvorin, equally depressed, wanted contact again, but Anton was too wan to maintain the friendship, even though it had sparked into life the previous autumn. Olga Kundasova begged Anton, in five close-written pages, to forgive the old man his political crimes: 'Don't be so imperturbably calm and write to him… there are many things it is best to forget.' Anton wrote, but brusquely. Suvorin, now that the Dauphin 'was ruining his life', was no longer a stimulating correspondent.
Flotsam from Anton's past surfaced in Moscow. The actor Arbenin, who had married Glafira Panova, told Olga that Anton had pursued Glafira in Odessa fourteen years before. Anton vehemently denied seducing her. Vera Komissarzhevskaia confronted Olga in Moscow. She wanted to have the rights to stage Anton's new play, and warned him, 'You seem to have forgotten my existence, I exist all right, and how.' 'If the actress bothers you,' Olga told Anton on 3 February, 'be sure I shall wallop her. I think she's mentally ill.'51 A crone, the sister of the dramatist and inventor Pushkariov, whom Anton had known in his student days, called on Olga with her comedy set in Bulgaria: Pushkariova wanted the Chekhovs to have it staged. As she was, through Aleksandr and Natalia, a remote sister-in-law, Olga was polite. To Anton she was sarcastic: She has eyes like olives, poetic curls and a single tooth which hangs on her soft lip, crimson and tasty. You have good taste… You propose when you come to Moscow to sleep three in a bed, so I'll invite her. Lika Mizinova, with her husband Sanin and her old friend Viktor Goltsev, also braved Olga, who disabused Anton of any fantasies he might have had: 'Lika has got horribly stout - she is colossal, gaudy, rustling. I feel so scrawny by comparison.'
Altshuller's compresses of Spanish fly pulled Anton through pleurisy. By his forty-third birthday, 16 January, he could sit at his desk. Altshuller warned Olga a week later: 'The stay in Moscow has had a far worse effect on his lungs than any previous journey.'52 Evgenia was worried: she wrote to Masha and to Vania's wife in Moscow: 'For several days I was in floods of bitter tears in case you found out he
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I.OVI: AND m e) e was ill. I asked Georgi to write that Anton was well, but thank God he is now.'53 At the end of January Altshullcr allowed Anton to ride into Yalta for a haircut, but henceforth forbade him to walk or to wash. Surely, Olga demanded, he could stroll on the covered veranda and wash with buckets of hot water, or eau de cologne? Anton had no illusions: 'You and I have little time left to live.' He relented about his presents and made the wallet a portfolio for drafts of his story. A better present arrived: Olga was bored with Schnap, the dachshund which had been given to her, and Shapovalov brought the dog down from Moscow.
Anton never let Olga read his manuscripts. She was hurt to be almost the last of his intimates to read 'The Bride'. What had taken him a day in 1883, and a week in 1893, to°k a Oaaa o I0°3» a slowing down which marked not just the decline in Anton's vitality, but the extreme care with which, in his final period, every phrase was chosen. When it was published in autumn 1903, all who knew Chekhov read it as a farewell. As with all the work he treasured, he grudged the censor the slightest change. 'The Bride', like Three Sisters, portrays three women trapped in a remote northern town, but this time they are ordered vertically: grandmother, mother, and Nadia the heroine. Nadia deserts her fiance and her windswept garden for university. Her liberation at the end of the story from provincial boredom would be a triumph, but for the narrator's sly interpolation of the phrase: 'or so it seemed to her'. 'The Bride' shows inspiration, perfectionism and thrift. It recycles material from Three Sisters. In the speeches of Nadia's mentor, Sasha, who dies while taking a koumiss cure, Chekhov adumbrates the ragged- trousered philanthropist Trofimov of The Cherry Orchard.
The Cherry Orchard, through superhuman effort on the part of Anton, was now crystallizing too. The image of cherry blossom had recurred in Chekhov's prose for fifteen years. In autumn 1901 he first mentioned it to Stanislavsky as a setting for a future play. The title The Cherry Orchard was first mentioned to Masha in 1902, shortly after the news came that the cherry trees at Melikhovo had been chopped down by Konshin, the purchaser. Not until 1903, however, did Anton confirm to Olga that this play would be the 'vaudeville or comedy' he had vaguely promised to the theatre.54 He weighed each of its four female roles as a vehicle for Olga. She saw the play as hers
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and was furious when he thought of letting Komissarzhevskaia stage it in Petersburg. She told him that Nemirovich-Danchenko needed a monopoly, and that Anton, as a shareholder, could not let the company down. Nemirovich-Danchenko backed her that February: 'Your wife is pining manfully. Really, can't you live near Moscow? What doctor do you really trust? We awfully need your play.' The degree to which Anton was still spellbound by his first Seagull is shown by his frankness when he wrote to Komissarzhevskaia and disassociated himself from Olga's intransigence: 'My wife is either sick or travelling, so we never make a proper go of it.' To nobody else would he confess so unambiguously his unhappiness with his marriage.
While he struggled to write, Olga went skiing. Shrovetide came and she had a pancake party. In April she took her first automobile ride with the actors, delighted that Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife was left behind. The company was seriously split at this time: Sawa Morozov and Olga's bete noire Maria Andreeva wanted revolutionary plays that filled the house; Olga, the Stanislavskys and Nemirovich-Danchenko wanted to stage drama of literary value. On 17 February the Moscow season ended with a triumphant Three Sisters.
A row erupted in the theatre on 3 March. Morozov backed the left wing who would one day destroy capitalists like himself; he blamed Nemirovich-Danchenko's conservatism for the theatre's ups and downs. Nemirovich- Danchenko walked out, Olga shouted, Andreeva wept. The split was hard to mend: Olga apologized to Morozov and persuaded him that the theatre needed both Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky. Nemirovich-Danchenko then left for Petersburg to prepare for the company's tour there.
Olga's brother Kostia was in Moscow and she bought her four-year-old nephew birthday toys. 'I hellishly wanted a son like that for you and me,' she wrote to Anton. She urged him to take second opinions: her doctor Strauch would prescribe life near Moscow. Next winter she would adopt a different, but unspecified, plan for their conjugal life 'about which I have not spoken to Masha, so as not to upset her for no good reason'. Anton's friend from his Nice days, Prince Sumbatov, also rejected Altshuller's prescription of Yalta and compresses: a friend had 'definitely and radically recovered after two years in Switzerland on a special mountain air cure… I can't help thinking that you're not fighting the illness forcefully enough'.55
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Anton agreed to go to Switzerland at Easter with Olga, on one passport 'so that you can't run away from me', but would not talk of the future. In March life improved. Cubat, the Petersburg delicatessen, opened in Yalta: now Anton could buy caviare, smoked meats and other northern delights he had missed. The only visitor he wanted was Bunin, but Bunin let him down by travelling past the Crimea without stopping off on his way to see his sister in Novocherkassk. In Moscow Olga and Masha had now moved to yet another apartment. Despite Anton's veto, Olga allowed a smoky tomcat to move in with her. She was pleased with her bright bedroom next to Anton's study, high ceilings and room for her mother's grand piano. Olga made light of Anton's shortness of breath: 'Don't fear the stairs. There's nowhere to hurry to, you can rest on the landings, and Schnap [which Anton was to bring with him] will console you. I shall say silly things to you.'
During Lent Mariushka cooked nothing edible for a consumptive. Anton grew testy. After booking a Pullman compartment from Sevastopol to Moscow, he stopped his almost daily letters to Olga. Stairs were bad news, and she had again withheld her exact addresses in Petersburg and Moscow. Anton raged. On 17 March 1903 he asked Vishnevsky where his wife and sister lived. Olga retaliated by demanding he take her mother's portrait down and send it: 'nobody needs it in Yalta, and I'm never there'. Under threat of divorce proceedings, she finally wired the new address. (After this spat, jokes spread around Moscow that Olga would divorce Anton and marry Vishnevsky.) Anton sent her no Easter greetings. Marriage seemed very unalluring.56 Olga relented. In mid March the Stanislavskys took her to spend a few days at St Sergei monastery. The monks had read Chekhov and told Olga that she should 'dine, drink tea with her husband and not live apart'. Protestant by confession and nature, she was nevertheless subdued by their admonitions.
Anton disliked the theatre's bargain with Suvorin: in exchange for the right to stage Gorky's Lower Depths in Petersburg, Suvorin would lease the Moscow Arts Theatre his own building for their Petersburg season. (Suvorin had by now stopped vilifying Stanislavsky.) Gorky was outraged: 'Between me and Suvorin there can be no agreements.'57 The man who had staged the anti-Semitic Smugglers, or Sons of Israel two years before should not
