Zvenigorod on 2 August 1888.
The Dauphin and Anton raced back to the Crimea. Suvorin junior hastened to his father. Anton avoided the bereaved Suvorins and returned to the Lintvariovs and the river Psiol. The Dauphin wrote to Anton on 12 August 1888: I found our father completely shattered and tired, as if after an attack of mental illness… Now everything seems impossible, futile… My father is trying to follow common-sense prescriptions, trying to live 'a normal life', is doing the bookshop accounts, going to the building site… We expected you here, I did my best to make excuses for you. Appeals for compassion came from Moscow as well as the Crimea. Aunt Fenichka wrote to her sister on 11 August: I grieve for the children now that Anna is no more and I wake up at night and think about them… I can't bear it, when the child [little Kolia] misses his mother.' He can't talk and told me - he shows me with his hands - how mama was dressed and put in the coffin and then buried in a hole in the ground, shows me with his hands and simply I have never known such grief; I just cannot calm myself. Anna was a dear and I was quite certain that her relatives would take them in and not let them live like this. I pray that Our Father in Heaven will soften Anton's heart… poor Shura [Anna's 16-year-old son] cried a lot for his mother and fell unconscious, and the daughter [the eleven-year-old Nadid] cried a lot. Anton could not cope with any more demands on his sympathy, his living space, or his purse. His nephews, for whom he felt scarcely more affection than did Pavel, were abandoned to their drunken father, and Suvorin to his wife and surviving sons. Since 'Steppe' in March Chekhov had not maintained his
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MY III I II I H,s' KF.F.PER reputation. He was ashamed of 'Lights', his second story, which was to appear in The Northern Herald. (He excluded it from his collected works.) Inspired by revisiting Taganrog, it tells the story of a successful provincial who returns to the seaside town where he grew up. The local girls pine for the boys who abandoned them for the metropolis: they endure loveless marriages. The narrator seduces a girl, Kisochka, whom he once revered. The work to which Anton devoted most thought but which never saw the light of day was an unwritten novel. The hints that survive in others' recollections and Anton's letters suggest that it was based on the life of the Lintvariovs. Perhaps it was recycled into The Wood Demon and the stories which Chekhov wrote, when inspiration returned, in the autumn. The company of writers all summer had left Anton so irritated, and the suffering of others weighed so heavily, that his novel was abandoned.
Physically and spiritually exhausted, but desperate to write, Anton returned to Luka. On 2 September 1888 he and his family returned to the Korneev house in Moscow, evicting Aunt Fenichka (who returned to her cramped quarters) and her stray cats and dogs.
TWENTY-FIVE O
The Prize October-December 1888 BACK IN HIS STUDY, Chekhov began a busy autumn. The house was noisier: Seriozha Kiseliov stamped upstairs when he came back from school. There was now a family retainer, the cook Mariushka Dormidontovna Belenovskaia, already over sixty, who would serve Anton for the rest of his life.
The protests about Kolia's dereliction were loud. Early in October 1888 Schechtel (who had suffered financially) voiced to Anton everyone's thoughts: That Kolia is feeling bad, and very bad, is obvious - I wouldn't give tuppence for his life expectancy. I can positively affirm that he is incorrigible. With tears in his eyes he assured me that he could see and sense the evil which his Big Slag [Anna Golden] causes him, that from this instant he is breaking with her forever, he will see people, dine, lunch, work. Excellent: I almost believed him; for a few days he behaved just like the Kolia of old, he came to see us every day. Apart from a little glass of Sauternes he drank nothing. Whom he was trying to deceive, I now can't understand. The other side of the coin: constant vodka, salami (Luxus) and Slag [Anna] every day. No inclination to work. He fancied the idea of painting my wife's portrait. All right - a mass of money has been spent - I don't know what will happen; so far the canvas is standing in a virginal state. Three weeks later, Schechtel said, Kolia had taken 100 roubles and an iconostasis: 'He definitely suffers from a mania which lets him see all his actions, some criminal, through rose-coloured glasses… I'm sorry to bother you, but what can I do?… Return the inconostasis to my messenger?
The next warning came in a note from the landlord, Dr Korneev, to Misha: Tell me where your brother the artist Kolia is sleeping. Today there
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was an incident. I caught a Icllow looking into your windows. As a vigilant landlord I gave the lad a (right… He admitted he was Kolia, that he'd taken a room in Medvedev's lodgings and, he said, he didn't know where he'd spent the nights for three weeks and he had no papers! I tell you in such detail in case there's trouble and you have to pay a fine.28 (Ihekhov appealed to Suvorin's son-in-law and legal expert, Kolomnin, to see if Kolia could get a certificate of exemption from military service. The crime of having hidden was inexpiable; none of Kolom-nin's suggestions would save Kolia. Schechtel persisted in salvaging. At the end of November he wrote: I sent two telegrams to the Big Slag - no answer. Clearly, he's not there. Has he been to see you? Just let him give me back the boards - I don't want anything else. Why does he punish me twice over! Perhaps he'll sort himself out and work; I am ready to forget everything if only he'd work. Through Aleksandr in Petersburg, Anton traced Kolia to a new woman. Not until the approach of Easter 1889, did the family hear from their black sheep again.
After he had left Sumy in a huff, Aleksandr twice wrote to Masha asking secretly whether he might marry Elena Lintvariova. Masha told Anton, who defended a vulnerable colleague and comrade, as he always felt Elena to be, from his brother. He told Aleksandr: Above all, you are an 84° proof hypocrite. You write 'I want a family, music, affection, kind words when I'm tired after… running round fires etc'… you well know that family, music, affection and kind words come not from marriage to the first woman you meet, even if she is very decent, but from love… you know Elena less than the man on the moon… As for Elena, she is a doctor, a landowner, free, independent, educated and has her own views. She may decide to get married of course, for she is just a woman, but she won't get married for a million roubles if there is no love on her part. Aleksandr capitulated. Suvorin set aside his own misery and remonstrated with Aleksandr. Aleksandr remained for some months, under Suvorin's influence, sober.
Soon, Aleksandr found 'affection' for himself and a mother for his sons. Natalia Golden, Anton's old love Natashevu, re-entered the Chekhov circle. Aleksandr's letter to Anton of 24 October 1888 had a sting in the tail: 'Natalia is living in my apartment, running the household, fussing over the children and keeping me up to scratch. And if she crosses sometimes into concubinage, that's not your business.'
New Times had printed an article on the dying Putiata. Into the office came Natalia to ask where Putiata was living. (Her sister Anastasia was Putiata's estranged wife.) We got chatting. I invited her to visit and have a look at my boys. She agreed, visited and after a few evenings spent between 'the widower and the maid' the end result is that we are living together. She has one room, I have the other. We live, we curse each other from morning to night, but our relationship is entirely conjugal. She fits me like a glove. If our parents, whose old age I intend to console by exemplary behaviour, don't view this 'intimacy' as incest, fornication and onanism, then I have nothing against marriage in church. Anton received a wry note from Natalia: Dear Anton, I know that this letter will astound you gready, but I'm just as astounded. The things that happen! I would love to know your opinion about all that has happened. Sincerely devoted to you, N. Golden.29 Anton answered nothing, until he had another death to announce in Latin, that of Korbo the whippet. The decrepit dog's death in early November took the brothers back to their early days in Moscow in 1877 and brought them together more than the transfer of Nata-shevu's affections. Aleksandr confessed to purloining money from Anton's earnings from New Times. He appended condolences in Latin from his dog, Gershka-Penchuk, who had outlived Korbo.
Within a week Natalia, who, like the other Golden sisters, had a gargantuan appetite for food and sex, was more than Aleksandr could cope with: I could put under her portrait the inscription I saw in childhood in an inn on a picture which showed gorillas grabbing and gnawing at negro women while Englishmen in bowler hats fired guns at them. The inscription is simple but expressive: 'This passionate and sensual beast…'
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EE autumn 1888 Anton received letters from 'the Dauphin'. The Dauphin, an apologist of pogroms, sent anti-Semitic ravings.30 The only effect was to confirm Anton's own respect for Jews and to sow doubts about the whole Suvorin empire's noxiousness. On his other favourite topic the Dauphin found a more sympathetic ear: 'Never
