this had happened.
The next day Anton and Schnap took the Crimean express. At Sevastopol he was met by Evgenia's maid Nastia - Evgenia had gone ahead overland - and they sailed to Yalta. Playing with the yard dogs and sleeping with Evgenia, the dog settled back into Yalta life better
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than his master. The house was so cold that visitors kept their fur coats on. Anton found undressing laborious; the bed was hard and cold; Nastia's soup was 'like dishwater, the pancakes as cold as ice'. He was too ill to travel abroad and it was too expensive to travel anyway - war had hit the Russian rouble. The solitary tame crane had belatedly migrated south. There was no congenial company: Bunin, now 'all parchment and sourness', as Anton described him, was in Moscow with Masha and Olga. The Cherry Orchard had followed Anton into the provinces: it was being performed in Rostov-on-Don, then in Taganrog (to frenzied acclaim) and on 10 April in Yalta, but so badly that Anton walked out.
Olga, with Vania's help, went on inspecting houses near Moscow, though winter was nearly over and she knew it was pointless. The local climate, the vendor's price, or the cost of installing a lavatory aborted every sale. Olga had more success in provoking Maria Andreeva to resign from the company. Stanislavsky accepted her resignation,74 much to Andreeva's distress and Olga's delight: She swore at everybody, including me… Nobody regrets her departure, in the management, that is, I don't know about the actors. What will come of it! I hope there is no split in the theatre. I still don't know what to do, Gorky is involved, there is no argument about that.75 Now Olga had only one enemy in the theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife, who, as Baroness Korf by birth, was unshakeable. Olga had, however, rivals outside. In Moscow Komissarzhevskaia was wildly acclaimed as Nora in The Doll's House at the Ermitage theatre. Olga declared that she ought to be ashamed of herself, her repertoire and her company. Worse, after Komissarzhevskaia's company came one led by Lidia Iavorskaia whose person, Olga claimed, 'gave everyone the horrors'. Olga was seriously frightened when her uncles, Karl the doctor, Sasha the captain, were despatched to the Manchurian front, and her brother Kostia was sent to extend the Trans-Siberian railway to the war zone. In Moscow, Dr Strauch died of a liver disease: Olga lost her gynaecologist and ally in her fight to keep Anton in Moscow. Anton was less affected by the war. His nephew Nikolai was conscripted and Lazarevsky, his most persistent visitor, was drafted to Vladivostok. Olga sent Anton soap, despite Altshuller's ban on wash
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ing (for fear of Anton chilling his lungs). Although Altshuller visited frequently, offering company rather than treatment, Anton felt lonely, in need of something to do, but too weak to do much. He advised Olga's distraught sister-in-law Lulu about her son's tuberculosis, collected for the Yavuzlar sanatorium and posted manuscripts to Goltsev and even their authors. Aleksandr, who sensed a last chance, came to stay for March, with Natalia (whom Anton had not met for seven years), the twelve-year-old Misha and their dachshund. Anton told Olga: 'Aleksandr is sober, kind, interesting. Generally promising. And there is hope that he won't be a drunk again, though there is no guarantee.' Masha arrived on 19 March, followed by Vania at Easter, for a family reunion which they suspected might be their last. Only Misha was missing, opening station bookstalls for Suvorin in the Caucasus.
When her lease expired, Olga moved to a flat with an electric lift, electric light and two lavatories, one of them working. Again she tantalized Anton with her vagueness about the address. Anton doubted that the lift would work. He had plans for the summer: he would go to Manchuria as a doctor and war correspondent. Nobody believed him, but he repeated his plan. He wrote to Uncle Sasha at the front, and supplied him with pipe tobacco.76 Olga dismissed Anton's plans as a childish whim. 'Where will you put me? Let's do some fishing instead.' She still hoped for a child. If Moskvin, who played the clumsy Epikhodov, could beget a son, 'When are you and I going to?' On 27 March 1904, Easter Saturday, she asked, 'Do you want a baby? Darling, I do too. I shall do my best.'
Anton had been sent proofs of The Cherry Orchard to check for Adolf Marx's edition. He lingered as long as he could, waiting for Knowledge to clear the censorship. When he returned the proofs to Marx in April, Marx published so fast that the Knowledge almanac was unsaleable, and Anton was badly embarrassed.
The Cherry Orchard opened in Petersburg on 2 April. Suvorin unleashed his curs again. Burenin in New Times declared: 'Chekhov is not just a weak playwright, but an almost weird one, rather banal and monotonous.' The company was nervous and Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife, Olga reported, put on a white dress and a green hat and went to church to light candles for luck, but the Petersburg audience, despite the hostile reviews, was very responsive. Olga had,
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however, uncomfortable encounters. Dr Jakobson, who had operated on her two years before, visited: 'he was a hellish bore'. She had already clashed with Lidia Iavorskaia: now was confronted with another Lesbian alliance between two of Anton's old loves: Maria Krestovskaia confessed to me, told me all her love for and disillusionment in Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, who by the way has married a barrister, Polynov. Krestovskaia's voice shakes when she says that this Tanichka is an infinitely vicious creature.77 By mid April Aleksandr, Vania and Masha had left Anton in Yalta. The tame crane flew back for spring. Anton took bismuth for his guts and opium for the pains in his chest. (Altshuller issued heroin in case the pain became worse.) Nothing relieved his emphysema: 'How short of breath I am,' he groaned to Olga. His teeth were crumbling but Ostrovsky, the grubby Yalta dentist, was away. Anton was upset by the casualties on the Manchurian front: there would be no news of Uncle Sasha until May. Once spring had set in, Anton fled to Moscow. Olga's doctor Taube would examine him and send him abroad for treatment. He arrived on 3 May, so ill from the journey that he went straight to bed from the lift. He would never get up again for more than a few hours at a time. 'The Germans are coming to pay their respects,' Masha wrote to Evgenia, as Taube and his colleagues gathered. Their diagnosis was pleurisy and emaciation, their prescription enemas and yet another special diet. Anton was to consume brains, fish soup, rice, butter and cocoa with cream. Coffee was forbidden. Taube stopped Altshuller's boiled eggs and Spanish fly compresses. Too weak to sit, irritable and dejected, Anton conceded that he was in good hands: 'My advice, let Germans treat you… I have been tortured for twenty years!!!' he told his Yalta colleague Dr Sredin.
When Masha found out that Olga was planning to take Anton to Germany, she bitterly opposed her sister-in- law. She feared he would die there. In any case, Olga kept even Anton's kith and kin away from his bedside. Masha told Evgenia: 'I don't see him often - I am very afraid of Olga.'78 Olga and Masha had a violent quarrel and on 14 May Masha took leave of her brother and left Moscow for Yalta. Vania called daily and found out from the servants how Anton was. The only close friend to break through the cordon that Olga had
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erected around Anton was the indomitable Olga Kundasova; she had what she later told Suvorin was 'one of the most upsetting encounters [with Anton] a mortal could endure', so upsetting that she refused to reveal what had passed between them.
Anton's letters to Yalta calmed his mother and sister, but privately he colluded with Olga and Dr Taube. Three opiates set his mind at rest: morphine controlled his pain; opium, as a side effect, had finally staunched his diarrhoea; the heroin would ease anything worse. He knew that he could hope for a merciful death, like Levitan's, from heart failure, rather than from a haemorrhage. To die in Germany, far from a distraught family, in the arms of a skilled nurse like Olga, was his most attractive option. To one visitor Anton said, 'I am going away to croak'. Maddened by idleness, he tried to read Goltsev's manuscripts. He longed for coffee. 20 May brought a severe attack of pleurisy, but Dr Taube saved him. On 2 2 May Olga bought railway tickets for 2 June to Berlin and Badenweiler, a spa in the Black Forest, where Taube's colleague, Dr Schworer, practised. Hail and snow fell. In Yalta Masha was struggling with the cesspit. Olga begged her to write to Anton: he sat several times in the dining room and had supper there. Taube came. He says that the pleurisy is definitely better and that it is lack of air and motion that makes him so difficult. Tomorrow we'll let him have morning coffee. His guts are strong, so enemas can be given.
On 2 5 May Anton asked for his 4500 roubles from Knowledge for The Cherry Orchard, even though Gorky and Piatnitsky faced insolvency, because Adolf Marx had ignored Anton's pleas and pre-empted their publication of the play. The 4500 roubles arrived. Olga and Anton were ready to depart, when new agony struck, despite morphine. On 30 May, at dawn, Anton sent a note to Vishnevsky: 'Get me at once Wilson the masseur. I haven't slept all night, in agony from rheumatic pains; tell nobody, not even Taube.' Wilson came round immediately. The next day
