with the daughter. Chekhov had opened a school of creative writing - a task he liked, even if the pupil was not a pretty girl. A flirtation started with Elena: a Biblical seven years would pass before she offered Anton her body.
Anton stayed three weeks in the Crimea. When he was not charming the Shavrova girls, he mused aloud to aspiring writers: one, the twenty-four-year-old Ilia Gurliand, noted Chekhov's rules for drama: Things on stage should be as complicated and yet as simple as in life. People dine, just dine, while their happiness is made and their lives are smashed. If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. There's nothing harder than to write a good farce. Friends at home and abroad were, like Grigorovich, aggrieved; the actor Pavel Svobodin wrote, 'Villain, to drop Rome for Deribasova street in Odessa.'57 Leikin asked: 'I was flabbergasted, how could you head abroad, not reach the frontier and turn away. What weak will! How could you fail to take a ticket to Vienna… I have spent two weeks in Yalta. It is a bandit town.'58
By August Anton was sated with women. He told Pleshcheev that they now all seemed ugly, Masha that they all smelt of ice cream. Pavel was writing to Anton c/o the Suvorins in Paris, but Anton did not go abroad. He did not know where Suvorin was, he had no money and he had to write. He had promised Svobodin The Wood Demon and The Northern Herald a long story. Besides, his unruly father had to be quelled - Pavel was harassing Anna Golden for Kolia's paintings. By 11 August 1889 Anton was back at Sumy, with Misha, Masha and Evgenia. Vania was back in Moscow, where, Pavel reported, Aunt Fenichka had taken a turn for the worse. Kolia's death had broken her heart, and Gavrilov demanded, on pain of dismissal, that her son Aliosha stay in the warehouse. Nobody nursed her.
For a fortnight Anton worked at 'My Name and A, his bleakest and most powerful piece so far, later titled 'A Dreary Story'. Told by a professor of medicine, incurably ill, it surveys life with the despondent
202
203
MY 11 IMP i Ml' US' KKKPEK wisdom of Solomon. The professor is alienated from the wife he loved, the students who adore him, even the actress to whom an ambiguous affection binds him. He loathes his daughter's music and her fiance. His disillusion with all things Russian is so wittily expressed, his fear of death so moving that the reader forgives him the torture he inflicts on others. Readers saw parallels with real medical luminaries, or read the story as a retort to Tolstoy's recent Death of Ivan Ilyich. The despair implicit in Chekhov's story, however, was the aftermath of Kolia's death. Not yet thirty, Anton felt like his moribund professor.
The play that Anton, at Pavel Svobodin's insistence, struggled to write also centres on an elderly professor. This professor is, however, a nuisance and a pedant, and The Wood Demon is hopeful, not despairing, even though a central character, Uncle Georges, kills himself. Only the 'Wood Demon', a highly strung doctor, saving forests from the professor's predation, has any autobiographical input. The Wood Demon however is strikingly clumsy and tedious. Anton, inspired by his own thoughts of death, was unable to make a drama out of another person's idyll. His finest prose and most awkward drama arose at the same desk. Death infiltrated other work: revising for Suvorin the story of an unhappy adolescent, 'His First Love', for a new book, Chekhov retitled it Volodia. Like Suvorin's Volodia two years before, the fictional Volodia, too, shoots himself dead.59
On c September 1889 Valentina Ivanova, a schoolteacher who admired Anton and for whom Vania pined, packed the Chekhov bags. At four on a freezing morning, the surviving Chekhovs and Marian Semashko said goodbye to the Lintvariovs. The death of Kolia had brought them close: Aleksandra Lintvariova refused rent for that summer. Anton felt an enduring affection for them: 'If it were acceptable to pray to sacred women and maidens before the heavenly angels take their souls to heaven, I'd long ago have written a psalm to you and your sisters,' he told Elena. The Chekhovs took a slow train for Moscow. In their carriage sat Professor Storozhenko, Masha's examiner. Chekhov made Masha's embarrassment worse: 'I talked loudly about working as a cook for Countess Keller and what nice masters I had; before I took a drink I bowed to mother and said I hoped she'd find a good position in Moscow. Semashko pretended to be a valet.' In November 1889 Chekhov would tell Suvorin, and his play would prove it, 'I have it in for professors.'60
IV
Annees de Pelerinage I sometimes feel now it is just possible that, setting off on his journeys, he was not looking for something so much as running away from something… V. Nabokov, The Gift
204
•
TWENTY-NINE O
Exorcizing the Demon October-December 1889 IN Moscow Kleopatra Karatygina awaited Anton: she had left the Maly theatre and was looking for a new company. Her letter of 13 September sets the tone: 'Hellishly elegant writer!… Dear man, for old time's sake come and see me and don't forget to bring the photo you promised.' In November a grateful Elena Shavrova arrived in Moscow: Suvorin had printed her story, 'Sophie'. Her mother wrote to Anton 'If you remember your Yalta friends, come and see us: the Slav Bazaar No. 94.'2 By December the Shavrovas were living on the Volkhonka, only twenty minutes from the Chekhovs. Anton deputed Misha to see Elena. Olga Kundasova frequented the Chekhov household: she was teaching Masha English; she later tried to teach Anton French. The house resounded with loud female voices: Olga Kundasova laid down the law, Natalia Lintvariova stayed three weeks in November, infecting Anton with her laughter. A piano teacher, Alek-sandra Pokhlebina, nicknamed 'Vermicelli', was an inconspicuous visitor, nursing a passion for Anton that later exploded into paranoia.
A new woman entered Anton's life. She was, like Masha, a Guerrier student teaching at the Rzhevskaia girls' school. She was Lidia Mizi-nova: the Chekhovs called her Lika, after the actress Lidia (Lika) Lenskaia. Only nineteen when Masha introduced her, Lika is best described by the writer and familiar of the Chekhovs, Tatiana Shchep- kina-Kupernik, a connoisseur of female beauty: A real Swan Princess from the Russian fairy tale. Her ash-blonde flowing locks, her wonderful grey eyes and 'sable' eyebrows, her extraordinary softness and elusive charm, combined with total absence of affectation and an almost severe simplicity, made her spellbinding. Masha recalled:
207
ANNf I S 1)1 I'f I.K RINAGE People could not take their eyes off her. My girl friends often stopped me and asked, 'Chekhova, tell me, who is that beauty with you?'… Lika was always very shy. She huddled against the hat stand and half-covered her face in the collar of her fur coat. ButMisha managed to get a look. He entered Anton's study and said, 'Listen, Anton, there's a really pretty girl come to see Masha! She's in the hall.' Lika was of genteel family: her mother was a concert pianist, Lidia Iurgeneva, but her father had deserted the family when she was only three. Lika was brought up by a great-aunt, Sofia Ioganson, 'Granny'. She was not content to be a teacher. She wanted to be an actress, but inveterate stage fright frustrated her. Her charm and wit were undermined by an inability to protect her interests, which made her vulnerable to ruthless men. Eighteen months earlier, she had written Anton a heart-felt anonymous fan letter.
No woman yet affected Anton as much as another visitor, Piotr Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky had loved Chekhov's prose (and Chekhov his music) for two years. He called on 14 October 1889: they agreed to collaborate on an opera, Bela, about the abduction of a Circassian princess by a Russian officer, based on part of Lermontov's A Hero of our Time. Anton gave Tchaikovsky his books, inscribing his latest collection, entitled simply Stories, 'from your future librettist'. Tchaikovsky responded with a photograph 'from your ardent admirer.' When the composer left, he forgot his cigarette case: Semashko the cellist, Ivanenko the flautist and Vania the schoolteacher each took a cigarette and solemnly smoked it before letting Anton post the case back. Tchaikovsky responded by sending a season ticket to the Russian Musical Society's symphonic concerts in Moscow, a ticket which Masha used. Anton dedicated his new collection of stories Sullen People to Tchaikovsky. Literary friends were bemused. Gruzinsky grumbled to Ezhov: 'Why should Chekhov dedicate a book to Tchaikovsky? He ought to dedicate it to Suvorin, oughtn't he?'3
Suvorin had forgiven Anton his failure to meet in Vienna. Others had not. Grigorovich was telling the Suvorins that there were now better writers, and that Anton had libelled the Suvorins in The Wood Demon. Anton blustered: You're not in the play and can't be, although Grigorovich with his usual insight sees the opposite. The play is about a bore, egotistical, wooden, lecturing on art for 25 years… For God's sake don't OCTOBER-DECEMBER l88y believe these gendemen who… ascribe to others their personal foxy and badgery features. Oh how glad that Grigorovich is! And how pleased they'd be if I'd put arsenic in your tea or turned out to be a secret police spy. Grigorovich never quite forgave Anton for all the trains he had met in vain. Anna Suvorina, however, on 12 November 1889 accepted Anton's apology: 'I know, and they say, you're in love again. Is it true or not? That was the only explanation I had
