years old chatting in French and German, reading, despite Natalia's ban, his uncle's works, acting in amateur theatricals and chasing girls. As for Aleksandr's own potency: My life is pretty celibate, But I don't curse my luck. I fuck, although not well, but All the same, I fuck. By September, despite his painfully slow pace, Anton was sure of his
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plan for The Cherry Orchard. 1 Ic warned Stanislavsky's wife: 'At places it is even a farce; I fear I shall get it in the neck from Nemirovich-Danchenko.' Stanislavsky feared worse, telling his sister Zinaida on 7 September: 'I imagine it will be something impossible on the weirdness and vulgarity of life. I only fear that instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy. Even now he thinks Three Sisters a very merry little piece.'65
Like The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard is subtitled 'comedy', even though it focuses on the destruction of a family and their illusions. The new play is crowded with reminiscences of earlier work and of personal traumas. The cherry trees that blossom in Act i recall those of his boyhood in Taganrog; the cherry trees axed in Act 4 recall the trees of Melikhovo, bought ten years earlier and now felled by Kon-shin. As in Anton's first play, feckless owners face an auction. The merchant Lopakhin, who urges them to sell land for cottages and then betrays them at the auction, has overtones of Gavriil Selivanov in Taganrog twenty-seven years before. The breaking string that punctuates Act 2 and Act 4 was first heard in the steppe stories of 1887. The seedy student Trofimov reminds us of the mentor, Sasha, in 'The Bride'; the feckless heroine marrying off her children to save the estate uses the tricks and phrases of the heroine in 'A Visit to Friends'. Anton's friends furnish the plot: Gaev and Ranevskaia lose the estate, as the Kiseliovs lost Babkino; Charlotta and the servants recall the motley entourage at Stanislavsky's Liubimovka.
An elegy for a lost world, estate and class, The Cherry Orchard nevertheless displays Anton's farcical invention at its richest. As in all Chekhovian comedy, however, the ending is grim, for the old retain power while the young are scattered to the winds. One factor alone is missing from the play: passion. Only the mistress of the house, Ranevskaia, who comes to Russia from her lover in France and then leaves again, is a sexual being. Nobody else expresses ardour, any more than Charlotta's rifle or Epikhodov's revolver ever fire. The doctor, increasingly inert in Chekhov's plays, fails to call. Death, in an ending which heralds Samuel Beckett, is banal: a senile servant is forgotten in a locked house. Black humour, menace, wistfulness, the characters' doll-like quadrilles, the dominance of landscape over inhabitants; all these qualities make The Cherry Orchard the progenitor of modern drama from Artaud to Pinter. The engineer GarinMAY I903-JANUARY I904 Mikhailovsky saw the same incongruity between Anton's creative imagination and his doom as we see in the owners of The Cherry Orchard. He noted: 'Chekhov could hardly walk, noises came from his chest. But he seemed not to notice. He was interested in anything but illness:… Why are such precious contents locked up in such a frail vessel?'66
Olga was happy. Her compliant husband even let her cat into the house. They slept in separate rooms, but she came to Anton each morning after her dawn swim. On 19 September 1903 Olga left, with Schnap but widiout the cat, for Moscow, for the opening of the theatre season. She was hoping that she had conceived, and was confident that the play would follow her shortly. Anton bathed in the afterglow of her affection: he wrote to his 'little horse': 'I stroke you, groom you and feed you the best oats.' He was finishing The Cherry Orchard with pleasure - for once ending a play not with a gun, but an axe - but he was tormented by his cough and pains in his muscles. Altshuller forbade him to wash, applied Spanish fly and beseeched him not to go to Moscow. Anton would ignore this advice.
Masha returned to Moscow on 8 October and reported on Anton's progress under her care. The same day Olga exploded with jealousy to Anton: You are doing something about your health at last?! Why is that so difficult when I am there?… Probably Altshuller thinks I am wearing you out. He avoids talking to you about health when I am there. And when I leave, you begin to eat twice as much and Masha can do anything. Anton retorted that in Moscow he would live apart from her in furnished rooms. All he wanted was somewhere to sit in the theatre and a large lavatory; she could take a lover if she wanted. Diarrhoea, coughing and Altshuller's Spanish fly compress were making Anton's life unbearable. He complained to Olga: 'Once Masha left, the dinners naturally got worse; today for example I was served mutton which I am forbidden now, so I missed the main course… I eat eggs. Darling how hard it is to write a play.' Olga barely sympathized: her constipation was a match for Anton's diarrhoea. Masha had left a diet sheet in Yalta and Anton had written instructions for Mariushka and the
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I.OVK AND DliATII cook. One of them even jotted down an invalid's menu. They were to provide chicken and rice, cherry compote and blancmange; they blithely served beef, salt fish and potatoes. Anton went on hunger strike: on 15 October he was at last fed his diet.
The theatre rehearsed Julius Cesar with a heavy heart: Shakespeare was not their territory and Stanislavsky was a weak Brutus. When it opened, Julius C«esar was an unexpected success, but Anton still felt Stanislavsky's pressure to deliver The Cherry Orchard forthwith. On 14 October Anton packed up the new play and posted it to Moscow. He did what he said was absurd in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: he sent the only copy. In Moscow Olga's visitors queued for permission to copy it or merely to glance. Gorky offered 4500 roubles to print it in his annual, Knowledge. Anton was dubious. Did his contract with Marx permit this? Was an annual a periodical? To get round the stipulations of Marx's contract with Anton, Gorky then promised 10 per cent of the proceeds to charity. (Despite his proletarian affiliations Gorky could behave like an aristocratic patron, for he was both Russia's best paid author and her most lavish commissioning editor.)
Anton wanted the play kept secret, but Nemirovich-Danchenko recounted the plot to Efros, the company's most sympathetic critic, on The Courier. Efros garbled the resume and his garbled version was reprinted in the provincial papers. Anton berated Nemirovich-Danchenko for this breach of confidence, in a telegram too violent to show to Olga; he broke off all relations with Efros. Never had he been so touchy about a play and its production. He dictated the casting, the scenery and the mood. Altshuller could not stop him planning a journey to Moscow to supervise everything.
Nemirovich-Danchenko came round to The Cherry Orchard slowly: he felt it was 'more of a play' than Anton's previous drama, that it was 'harmonious and had new characters', but he found the tears excessive, which exasperated Anton, given that Varia was the only character who wept at all. Stanislavsky's own floods of tears at Act 4, and his claim 'This is not a comedy nor a farce, as you wrote: it's a tragedy,' dismayed Chekhov. Stanislavsky's wife hit the right note: 'Many cried, even the men; I thought it full of the joy of life and I find it fun just travelling to rehearsals… The Cherry Orchard somehow seemed not a play but a musical production, a symphony, to me.'67
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Gorky was printing the play, but told his editor Piatnitsky, 'Read aloud, it doesn't impress one as a powerful piece. And what the [characters] are all moping about I don't know.'68
The day the play arrived in Moscow, Olga's period came. After five months together, she and Anton would still have no baby. Quarrels broke out. The whole family was in a crisis whose nature we can only guess at. Bunin, now frequenting Masha and Olga, may have been involved. Olga's close collaboration with Nemirovich-Danchenko undoubtedly unsettled Anton. Evgenia's letter from Yalta to Vania in Moscow suggests that Anton had had enough of his wife, his sister and his mother: Antosha told me that Masha had to find her own flat, while Olga could go and live with her mother… poor Masha does not want to leave mem, please don't talk to her about my letter I only ask you to let me come and live with you until we find somewhere… Olga has got her own way, she has persuaded Antosha to get rid of us, she can do as she wants, but he is sorry for us and never sees anything through. E. Chekhova.69 Olga seemed disturbed that her enemy Maria Andreeva (who was thirty-one) was favoured by Anton for the part of the seventeen-year-old ingenue, Ania. (Anton next proposed Andreeva for Ania's pious foster-sister Varia, but Olga was not appeased.) In a letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko Anton accused him of ignoring him for years: 'I've been asking you to get an actress for Ranevskaia.' On 5 November Nemirovich-Danchenko wired a cast list, letting Anton choose actresses for only the minor roles. Olga put forward Schnap, despite his snoring and farting, to be Charlotta's nut-eating dog: Anton said no - he specified a 'small, shaggy, sour-eyed dog'.
One of the pet cranes died. Anton moaned that Olga wrote either like Arkadina in The Seagull: 'Do you know you are a superman?' or like a nurse and courtesan: 'Are you spraying your throat? You're not making rude gestures in the morning? Would you like your Hungarian [i.e. herself] to come in at night with pillow and candle and then vanish grumbling?'70 She heeded neither his angry entreaties not to keep valuables at home, nor his demands for a
