parcel of lavatory paper. Instead she gave him instructions to buy a Bukhara quilt in Yalta.
582
583
I.OVK AND DKATH
By 9 November the play was copied and the actors began work. Anton strained at the leash but Olga would send for him only when dry frosty weather began. In the meantime she ordered a fur coat of young Arctic fox, warm enough for a Moscow winter, but light enough for a frail body. Anton stipulated that it had to have eiderdown padding, a fur collar and a matching hat.
The story of The Cherry Orchard took on a life of its own. After selling the timber from the Melikhovo plantations, Konshin declared himself insolvent, and the estate was put up for auction. Masha negotiated a sale to her Moscow neighbour Baron Stuart. Not a kopeck came of it. Baron Stuart took out a private mortgage, for five years and at 5 per cent, with Masha who at last now had funds.
Evgenia abandoned Anton to Mariushka's cooking and Arseni's caretaking and took Nastia the servant to Moscow on 18 November. She descended on Olga, who put her up in Anton's study. (Evgenia soon moved to Petersburg to spend Christmas with Misha, his children and Lika Mizinova.) Alone, Anton vented his bile. Stanislavsky was stopped from inserting spring noises - frogs and corncrakes - into a summer act. Nemirovich- Danchenko's questions revealed, Anton grumbled, that '[he] has not read my play. It began with misunderstandings and will end with them.' Anton feared that the premiere would be used as a pretext to mark his twenty-fifth year as a writer. In vain, for he hated the prospect of Jubilee celebrations, he protested that this would not be due until 1905. Olga hinted that she might soon call Anton to Moscow. 'Have you dreamt of your Hungarian? Will you be making rude signs in the morning? Although we shall sleep together here and I shan't be coming in the morning straight from the sea.' On 29 November she telegraphed: 'Frosts. Talk Altshuller and come.'
Many years had passed since Anton had last celebrated Christmas, New Year and his name day in Moscow. He experienced a surge of energy and attended rehearsals almost daily, disconcerting Stanislavsky: 'The author has come and confused us all. The flowers have fallen and now we only have new buds.' Anton was upset too. The censor had removed two of Trofimov's tirades and new words had to be spliced in, while Stanislavsky cut two magically evocative episodes from Act 2. Anton, only half in jest, offered the play outright to Nemirovich-Danchenko for 3000 roubles. At home, once he had his
MAY I903-JANUARY I9O4
breath back after climbing the stairs, he received friends. They were perturbed. Bunin often stayed with Anton until Olga returned: Usually she left for the theatre, sometimes a charity concert. Nemirovich-Danchenko would fetch her; he wore a dress coat and smelt of cigars and expensive eau-de-Cologne. She wore evening dress, was perfumed, beautiful and young, and went up to her husband saying: 'Don't be bored while I'm out, darling, anyway you always feel fine with Bouquichon…' Sometimes he would wash his hair. I tried to amuse him… About 4 a.m., sometimes at daylight, Olga would come back, smelling of wine and perfume. 'Why aren't you asleep, darling? It's bad for you.'71 Before Christmas Bunin went abroad, never to see Anton again. Lika did not venture from Petersburg, but her husband gave her a view of Anton's condition: Potapenko says that he is finished as a writer and a man. 'It is simply pitiful to read him, to see him now, in life or a photograph… No, I put a cross on Chekhov. The man has got in an impasse and is finished. Why did that Knipper marry him? I saw them in Moscow, saw Masha [who said] 'What horror! What a misfortune!''72 Olga knew that her behaviour towards Anton was attracting unflattering comment, and told Evgenia: I can't tell you how much Anton's illness has upset me all this time. You must tfiink very badly of me when you look at your life… It's awfully hard for me suddenly to abandon my vocation… I know you have different views and understand all too well if in your heart you condemn me.73
Consul Iurasov and Professor Korotniov invited Chekhov to winter once again in Nice, but The Cherry Orchard detained him. In any case, he was barely well enough to venture into the street, let alone cross Europe. Just before the New Year, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, and their lawyers drafted a letter to Adolf Marx, urging him to give Chekhov a new contract for his forthcoming twenty-fifth jubilee. Anton told them to desist.
In Petersburg Evgenia was forgetting her worries with Misha's family, but on 7 January Anton ordered her back: 'You've outstayed your welcome, it's time you came to Moscow. Firstly we all miss you,
584
585
LOVK AND DI.ATII
and secondly we need to discuss Yalta.' There appeared to be nothing to discuss, but a crucial day was approaching, 17 January, Anton's forty-fourth name day, the day set for The Cherry Orchard's first performance.
EIGHTY-TWO
O
Last Farewells January-July 1904 :? 'THINGS WERE RESTLESS, something ominous hung in the air. It was no time of joy, that evening of 17 January 1904,' Olga recalled in 1929. Few plays had been so well rehearsed as The Cherry Orchard. The theatre was packed, and behind many seats sickly looking spectators stood. These 'angels' were said to be consumptives from Yalta, a memento mori to the celebrities in the stalls and boxes: Rachmaninov, Andrei Bely, Gorky, Chaliapin and almost all Chekhov's Moscow friends. Anton was not in the theatre for the first three acts. He was recovering after a night at the opera, listening to Chaliapin sing. The Cherry Orchardwas having a muted reception. Nemirovich-Danchenko sent a carriage with a disingenuous message: 'Couldn't you come for the third interval, though you probably won't get curtain calls now?'
During the third interval Anton was duly brought on to the stage. Into the centre of a half-circle of distinguished academics, journalists and actors, to loud applause, walked a living corpse, hunched, pale and emaciated. Stanislavsky was aghast. A voice from the stalls cried out, 'Sit down!' There was no chair. Speeches began. Professor Vese-lovsky spoke: Anton recalled his hero Gaev addressing a bookcase on its 1 ooth anniversary. He muttered 'Bookcase!' and everyone sniggered. Speeches and telegrams were read until Anton, his eyes like a hunted animal's, was led off to lie on a dressing-room divan. Gorky chased out everyone except the young actor Kachalov who, made up as Trofimov, looked as moribund as Anton. Half an hour later, the play over, the audience too subdued by the third interval to applaud loudly, Anton went to sup with the actors. He was showered with speeches and given presents of antique furniture: he detested it. What he really wanted, he told Stanislavsky, was a new mouse trap. The police charged the theatre for holding an 'unauthorized public gathering'.
586
587
I.OVi: AND DIAIII
Tickets were readily available for the next performances of The Cherry Orchard. A black comedy was ill attuned to the public's mood of Jingoism on the eve of the Russo-Japanese war, which was declared on 24 January 1904. Three days later, the Japanese sank the Russian Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. In a mournful, even apocalyptic mood, reviewers tended to dismiss the play as a political allegory about gentry overthrown by commoners. In Petersburg by the end of Lent, The Cherry Orchard was playing to half-empty houses. Gorky set up the text, but his almanac Knowledge ran into the sands of censorship. Time was needed for Russia's mood to turn elegiac and for Nemirovich-Danchenko to find the necessary 'lace-like' touch to make the play a success in the even more turbulent year that was to come.
Anton wanted to flee to the Riviera or the Crimea. The stairs to the Moscow apartment were 'real agony'. Jubilee celebrations for his writing career had brought many a past acquaintance out of the woodwork. Demands on his sympathy were unbearable. Olga's nephew, Liova, had tuberculosis of the spine: the prognosis was paralysis or death. The eldest Golden sister, Anastasia, married to the dramatist Pushkariov, her beauty, wealth and health all gone, begged for a pension. Lidia Avilova wanted advice on charity for wounded soldiers. The Gurzuf schoolteacher asked Anton to make the church remarry him to his late wife's sister. Kleopatra Karatygina wanted money to send her consumptive brother to a sanatorium.
Anton needed an undemanding occupation. Goltsev made him Russian Thought's literary editor and fed him manuscripts to sort out. Anton abandoned the brilliant opening pages of two stories he would never finish, 'The Cripple' and 'Disturbing the Balance', and set willingly to skimming over, and even annotating, beginners' prose. On 14 February 1904, as Evgenia headed for the Crimea, Olga took Anton to Tsaritsyno, fifteen miles south of Moscow, to look at a dacha. The area had an unhealthy reputation, but the house was built for winter living. At Tsaritsyno there had been a derailment and Anton had to return in a freezing cab. Altshuller was appalled when he heard that
