but could not digest food and could hardly walk. He coughed incessantly and he quarrelled with his mother. Other people's deference to the dying made him more capricious. He was given creosote, ipecacuanha and menthol. Death cast a pall over the Psiol: the fishing and the songbirds lost their appeal. Anton tried to distract himself. He dreamed of Mile Emilie, the Suvorins' governess; he went to the Sumy theatre that Aleksandr had disrupted the previous year; he buried himself in work. He wrote the first act of The Wood Demon to an outline agreed with Suvorin: the core of this play, which eventually became Uncle Vania, is in the doctor-landowner who finds ecstasy in planting a birch tree, but there was little drama yet. The original plan was based on the Suvorins. The elderly professor, his young second wife, his daredevil son, two children called Boris and Nastia and a French governess called Mile Emilie are the Suvorin family transferred to Luka; the idealists and cranks who cross their path have aspects of the Lintvariovs and the Chekhovs. From the start, the material is unstageable, for it is as rich and broad as Middle-march. Suvorin would soon back out, but Chekhov persisted.
On 8 May Suvorin arrived for six days, on his way to more comfortable summer quarters. His arrival caused as much tension as that of the professor in Uncle Vania. The Lintvariovs, principled radicals, ostracized Suvorin (not that this stopped them from later asking Suvorin to send their village school free books). Anton was torn between two sets of friends. Worse, Kolia begged Suvorin for an advance for book cover designs. (Anton forbad Suvorin to pay him.) Meanwhile Kolia's mistress, Anna Ipatieva-Golden, at her wit's end near Moscow, was begging both Suvorin and Anton for financial help and a job.
Suvorin promised Anton 30 kopecks a line for the novel. He tactfully talked of buying a dacha nearby, but soon left for his villa in the Crimea. From there he discussed with Anton Paul Bourget's novel, The Disciple. Suvorin sympathized with Bourget's attacks on freeMARCH-JUNE 1889 thinkers as the godfathers of anarchy and murder. Russian readers, said Anton, liked Bourget only because French culture was better: 'a Russian writer lives in drainpipes, eating slugs, making love to sluts and laundresses, he knows no history, geography, natural sciences.' Anton wrote grimly to Leikin: he yearned for a time 'when I shall have my own corner, my own wife, not somebody else's… free of vanity and quarrels.'
Kolia also longed to be elsewhere. He wrote letters, mostly unposted, in all directions, begging for help. Kolia wanted to be back in his birthplace: I definitely need to visit Taganrog on business and, while I'm there, bathe in the sea… Get me a ticket from Kharkov to Taganrog and back… The class of ticket should correspond to my social position and take account of my weak state. In exchange I'll send you a woman's head painted in oils (very nicely done, I don't want to part with it)… I impatiently wait for a letter with 'Yes' and 'No' but with no 'ifs' etc.4* Kolia still had a sharp eye and steady hand. He wrote a calligraphic masterpiece to Dr Obolonsky, and illustrated it with a stout passenger in a first-class compartment and a train steaming across the steppes. Misha's letters to his cousin Georgi draw a veil over Kolia. He had to give up revisiting Taganrog: 'The poor man is so bad that really it would be awkward to leave him.' As Kolia declined, Misha ignored him. On 29 May 1889 he told Georgi: If you knew how good our evenings are, you'd drop everything, dacha, family, and come straight away to us… The smell of flowering lime trees, elder and jasmine and the scent of newly mown hay, scattered over our terrace for Trinity Day and the moon, like a pancake hanging over us… Next to me Masha is sitting, just back from Poltava, and a little further is nice Ivanenko. Both are reading. Through the open window come the conversations of Suvorin, who's come to stay with us, and… Anton… Semashko has taken a room with us for the whole summer, so all summer we shall be enjoying music. At the end of May the irrepressible actor Pavel Svobodin came, but could not bear the spectre - he too was dying of tuberculosis. He took a train back for Moscow, but Vania persuaded Svobodin to turn
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back and give the Chekhovs moral support in a seemingly interminable vigil. Kolia, Anton reported to Dv Obolonsky on 4 June, was bedridden, losing weight every day. He was taking atropine and quinine, dozing, sometimes deliriously. A priest gave last rites: Kolia confessed to maltreating his mother. Then he wrote with frenzy: graphic childhood memories, letters to Uncle Mitrofan and Suvorin, begging for loans, promising paintings.
Aleksandr insisted on coming: he gave Suvorin a reason so odd that Suvorin passed it to Anton: 'ambulatory typhoid' became the Chekhov term for alcoholism: I am fettered to my bed. I had ambulatory typhoid. I was able to walk, attend events and fires and give the paper reports. Now the doctor says I have a relapse. The doctor is urging me south; give me leave and the right to take 2 months' salary (140 roubles) in advance.47 At 2 p.m. on 15 June Aleksandr arrived with the children and Natalia, and for one hour all five Chekhov brothers were together. After two harrowing months on duty, sleeping in the room next to Kolia, Anton suddenly snapped. Taking Vania, Svobodin, and George Lintvariov with him, at 3 p.m. he took the carriage to see the Smagins, a hundred miles away in Poltava. Evgenia, exhausted, could not cope; Misha refused to recognize Kolia's agony and went to an annexe to sleep. Aleksandr alone nursed Kolia for two nights. Anton had left no morphine, and few medicines. The three local doctors - including two Lintvariov daughters - stayed away.
In a long letter to Pavel (who was not summoned to Sumy that summer), Aleksandr showed himself at his best. As I drove up to the manor house I met Anton in the courtyard, then Masha, Vania and Misha came onto the porch. Mama met us in the hall and began kissing her grandchildren. 'Have you seen Kolia?' Vania asked me… I went into the room and saw that instead of the old Kolia a skeleton was lying there. He was horribly emaciated. His cheeks had sunk, his eyes fallen in and shining… To the last he didn't know he had OA. Anton hid it from him and he thought he just had typhoid.
'Brother, stay with me, I'm an orphan without you. I'm alone all the time. Mother, brothers and sister come to see me, but I'm alone.'… When I lifted him from the bed onto the pot I was always afraid
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that I might break his legs… The next morning I went crayfishing in the river, not for the crayfish but to get strength for the next night.48 Kolia talked of living in Petersburg with Aleksandr and said that he loved his father. At supper I said 'God grant Kolia lives till morning'… Our sister said I was talking rubbish, that Kolia was alive, would go on living, that he often had these attacks. I calmed down… Everyone went to bed… Kolia was completely rational. He kept going to sleep and waking. At 2 in the morning he wanted to go outside; I tried to lift him onto a wheelchair but he decided to wait and asked me to fluff up his pillows. While I was doing that he burst like a fountain. 'Look, brother, I've shat myself like a baby in bed.' At 3 a.m. he became very bad; he began choking on mucus… Around 6 a.m. Kolia started choking. I ran to the annexe to ask Misha what dose to give Kolia. Misha turned over in bed and replied, 'Aleksandr, you keep exaggerating.'… I raced back to Kolia. He seemed to be dozing. At 7 a.m. he spoke. 'Aleksandr lift me. Are you asleep?' I lifted him. 'No, I'm better lying.' I laid him down. 'Lift me up a bit.' He offered me both arms. I raised him, he sat up, tried to cough but couldn't. He wanted to vomit. I supported him with one arm and tried to get the pot from the floor with the other. 'Water, water.' But it was too late. I called, shouted 'Mama, Masha, Nata [Natalia Lintvariova].' Nobody came to help. They ran in when it was all over. Kolia died in my arms. Mama came very late and I had to wake Misha to tell him that Kolia had died.
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Shaking the Dust June-September 1889 THE DEATH OF KOLIA on 17 June 1889 shook Anton to the core: for years to come he hinted how much he was haunted by it. He knew: last year Anna, this year Kolia, in a year or two Fenichka, Svobodin, and then himself, not to mention a dozen other friends, would die of the 'white plague'. He became restless and could not stay in one place more than a month.
As soon as Kolia died, the family summoned him back to Luka from the Smagins. He wrote to Pleshcheev: For the rest of my life I shall never forget that filthy road, the grey sky, the tears on the trees; I say never forget because a ragged peasant came from Mirgorod that morning with a soaking wet telegram: 'Kolia dead.' You can imagine my feelings. I had to gallop back to the station, take the train and wait at stations for eight hours at a time… I remember sitting in a park; it was dark terribly cold, hellishly dreary; behind the brown wall where I was sitting actors were rehearsing a melodrama. The Lintvariovs took charge. Elena led Masha and Evgenia away, while peasant women laid out the body - 'dry as tinder and yellow as wax', Misha noted - on the floor. The church bells rang; the priest and cantor held a requiem. Elena offered money for the burial; Alek-sandr found a carpenter to make a cross. Aleksandr's two boys spent the night with their grandmother. Masha was taken in by the Lintvariovs. Three old women from the estate kept vigil over the corpse, while the cantor chanted psalms. At noon the next day a white coffin lined with brocade came from Sumy: Kolia was lifted in. Evgenia, in black, prostrated herself by the
