'Why are you howling?' I told him what had happened and admitted I didn't know what to tell Levitan, and how. My brother replied: 'Of course, you can marry him if you like, but remember that he wants women of the Balzac age, not girls like you.' Whenever Masha referred proposals to Anton, she received a strong negative signal. Anton never expressly forbade her to marry, but his silence and his actions, if necessary, behind the wings left her in no doubt how much he disapproved and how deeply he was dismayed.
Anton could stop his sister marrying, but he could not keep his girlfriends on stand-by. Despite chocolates from Petersburg, Dunia Efros kept her distance; Olga Kundasova fell instead for Professor Bredikhin, at the Moscow observatory. LilyMarkova vanished to Ufa, among the Bashkirs in the Urals foothills. Finally, in Petersburg, she accepted the artist Sakharov. Aleksei Kiseliov thought Anton's love life hilarious and celebrated it in verse that was recited all around Babkino. To A. P. Chekhov Sakharov got married And he was not thrilled When he found that Lily Was already drilled. Who? he'd like to know. The truth is what he's after. But Lily and Anton Can't hold back their laughter. The groom is coming, scowling, And if he gets his hands on That wretched whoring Chekhov, He'll loudly thump Anton And give him such a thrashing
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MY HKO I III lis' E E E PER So that he'll remember To keep off others' brides With his dripping member.' Others saw Anton as a threat to the married. When Bilibin's wife, Vera, read a story Anton wrote that August for New Times, 'A Misfortune', she told her husband that the ruthless seducer of the married heroine was Chekhov himself. Vera Bilibina refused to greet Anton when he visited the house. Four years later Bilibin deserted her for Anna Arkadievna Soloviova, a secretary at Fragments. Vera always felt that Anton had exerted a pernicious influence on her husband.
TWENTY O
Life in a Chest of Drawers September 1886-March 1887 MASHAANDMISHA rented from a surgeon, Dr Korneev, new premises for the family: a two-storey brick house, eight rooms for 650 roubles a year, on the west side of the Moscow Garden Ring, then a country road where a horse tram passed once an hour. Anton moved in on 1 September 1886. Here the Chekhovs spent nearly four years. The only Chekhov residence in Moscow to be made into a museum, its fussy red-brick facade reminded Anton of a chest of drawers. Anton lived like a gentleman in his study and bedroom. On the ground floor was an enormous kitchen and pantry leading to the chamber maid's and cook's rooms. Upstairs Masha's room adjoined the drawing room; her guests' siren voices lured Anton up from his study. The dining room was also upstairs: the tramp of feet on the stairs never ceased. Under the stairs the ageing whippet Korbo dozed. Pavel visited daily, but slept at the warehouse or at Vania's, a few minutes' walk away.
Anton was spending more than he earned. He pawned his watch and the gold Turkish lira the Ianovs gave him after their typhus. His short pieces at this period show him preoccupied with status. A story, 'The First Class Passenger' is told by an engineer whose mistress, a mediocre actress, gets all the attention when the bridge he built is opened. Anton, too, felt he deserved better. His skit, 'A Literary Table of Ranks', ranks writers on the 13- point scale of the Russian civil service: the highest rank of 'Actual State Councillor' is vacant. Next highest are Tolstoy and Goncharov, followed by the gruesome satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin and the defender of the peasants Grigorovich. Below them come the playwright Ostrovsky and novelist Leskov, together with the melodramatic poet Polonsky. The New Times journalists - Burenin and Suvorin - are ranked with a real genius, the young story writer Vsevolod Garshin. At the bottom, the anti-Semitic
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MY A E n» I 11 I E S ' E 1. E I» E R Okreits, known to Chekhov as Judophob Judophobovich, is left with no rank at all.
Women guests exerted demi-monde charm, but Anton's correspondence for the year to come shows that, for once, he was unresponsive. Only Maria Kiseliova evoked any reaction: she rebuked him for his dissipation and lubricious stories. On 21 September he undid any illusions she might have about his hedonism: I am living in the cold with fumes from the stove… the lamp smokes and covers everything with soot, the cigarette crackles and goes out, I burn my fingers. I could shoot myself… I write a lot and take a lot of time over it… I've ordered the doctor's sign taken down for the time being! Brrr… I'm afraid of typhus. Oil 29 September he wrote to her again: Life is grey, no happy people to be seen… Kolia is living with me. I Ie's seriously ill (stomach haemorrhages that exhaust him to hell)… I think that people who feel revulsion for death are illogical. As I understand the logic of things, life consists just of horrors, quarrels and vulgarities… The Kiseliovs, too, were desperate: they could not pay off their children's governess. Aleksei Kiseliov wrote on 24 September 1886: I sat my writer-wife down and made her write a tearful letter to the Aunt in Penza, saying save me, my husband and children, save us from this hissing hag [the governess]. Perhaps she'll take pity and send not just 500 to pay her off but enough to buy us all sweets. This letter sowed seeds for The Cherry Orchard, where Gaev appeals for money to an aunt in Iaroslavl and spends his fortune on boiled sweets.
The Chekhov family is reflected in Anton's fiction of autumn 1886. Me acknowledged Pavel's touchy obstinacy, for he sensed it in himself. His story for New Times in October 1886, 'Difficult People', relives appalling rows between father and son: they admit that they share a tyrannical temperament. In Anton's second story for New Times that month, 'Dreams', a sick convict trudges to Siberia, while his guards know that he will soon die. Anton was thinking of Kolia, if not himself. Kolia had crawled home after writing a desperate note: 'Dear Anton I've been in bed for five days… vomiting mercilessly and turning
SEPTEMBER 1886-MARCH 1887
my guts inside out.' Doctors in the 1880s deceived OA patients that the blood they coughed was from the stomach or throat, not from the lungs: 'I even thought I had consumption,' Kolia told Anton. Kolia was hiding from death in the arms of Anna Golden or of his mother, or fled them all to his student haunts. Within days Kolia ran away again.
Aleksandr threw himself on Suvorin's mercy. Suvorin gave him work as a copy editor and a freelance reporter, and found him a second job editing Russian Shipping. From the latter Aleksandr was soon dismissed, but he was paid enough by Suvorin to bring his family from Tula, where Anna's relatives lived, for the Christmas goose. Aleksandr, as Anton's agent in Petersburg, collected royalties and gossip. He hoped to edit New Times, if Fiodorov went to prison, but Suvorin was too canny: Aleksandr remained a hack.
Petersburg, however bad its air for the lungs and its water for the gut, had in spring lifted Anton's spirits: the company of Suvorin, successful writers and lively actresses excited him. At the end of November he went for a third visit, this time taking Masha with him: her gratitude and joy were vehement. In Petersburg Chekhov's new stories were sensations: stories of lost children, such as 'Vanka', or of 1 a lone man and a child ('On the Road'), quenched the public's thirst for Dickensian Christmas sentiments, yet dumbfounded critics with their desolation. Acclaim restored Anton's self-esteem: 'I am becoming as fashionable as [Zola's] Nana!' Literature was like fornication. Soon Anton saw himself as an unholy trinity, 'Antonius and Medicine Chekhov, Medicine the wife and Literature the mistress'.
After Petersburg Anton met the festivities in Moscow, from Christmas to his name day, in gayer spirits. Grigorovich visited the Chekhovs then. Vamped by laughing women, he walked the actress Daria Musina-Pushkina to her home and recalled his youth, when he was notorious for seducing the wife of the poet A. K. Tolstoy on a garden swing. In Petersburg Grigorovich told Anna Suvorina, 'My dear, if you only knew what it's like at the Chekhovs: Bacchanalia, my darling.'9
Men as well as women were attached to Anton. Bilibin wrote 'I must secretly tell you, I love you,' but as 'the husband of a learned wife' he was tugged out of Chekhov's circle. Unhappy with Vera and with Leikin (for whom he worked until the latter's death in 1906),
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MY II It (I I 11 I It S ' E I I! P E E AOUe presented tedious psychosomatic symptoms, and was passed over for new acolytes. Chekhov's new disciple was Aleksandr Lazarev, who signed himself Gruzinsky. A provincial seminary teacher, who aspired to be a writer, Gruzinsky visited the Chekhovs on New Year's Day 1887. He brought with him another schoolteacher-writer, his close friend, Nikolai Ezhov, who worshipped Chekhov just as fervently. The affection of Ezhov, as prickly as his name 'Hedgehog', was to sour in a few years, as he resented Chekhov's ascent and his own obscurity.
An old admirer came to stay: Sasha Selivanova, Anton's pupil in Taganrog, who now taught in Kharkov. Back
