to Australia! Where am I to go? You've grabbed the better half of the earth. Farewell, villainess of my heart. Your Well-known Writer. A few days later, sending him birthday greetings, Lika tried a different tack: 'I've just got back from your family… I'm writing in the dark and what's more after Levitan saw me home! And whom are you seeing home?' Anton relented a little. His reply ended: 'Bibikov [a consumptive poet whom Anton knew]… saw you and my sister and wrote to Petersburg 'at Chekhov's I saw a girl of amazing beauty.' There's a pretext for you and Masha to have a quarrel, even a fight.' Lika's next letter, on 21 January 1891, was the first (and almost the last) that she wrote to Anton in the intimate ty form: Knowing your meanness, my dear Antosha, and wishing to hang on to a chance to write to you, I am sending you a stamp which I had much need of. Will you come back soon? I'm bored and I dream of meeting you as the sterlets in the Strelna park] pool dream of a pure transparent river. I don't know how to be tactful and when I try to be it doesn't work out. But all the same come on the 26th and you will see that I can be tactful not just verbally… So I expect you, I hope, that you will give me at least V2 an hour! She can't have it all! For my love I deserve Vi an hour. Goodbye, I kiss you and wait. Yours for ever, Lika Mizinova. Olga Kundasova, scolding the great men of Moscow and Petersburg in their dens, or Elena Shavrova, cajoling and wheedling, left Anton in total command of himself. Lika got under his skin, as no other
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ANNf I S III l»E LERINAGE woman had done. I lis responses to her are always ironic, never passionate or jealous, but their frequency, length and extravagance betray the disturbing effect Lika had on him.
Anton called on his brother Aleksandr. He told Masha: 'His kids made a very good impression on me… Aleksandr's spouse is a kind woman, but the same stories happen every day as at Luka.' Anton's sober days in Petersburg were spent lobbying for Sakhalin's children. Through Koni, the radical lawyer, he contacted Princess Naryshkina who ran the Imperial children's charities: orphanages were set up for 120 of Sakhalin's child beggars and prostitutes. Through Vania and Suvorin, Anton had thousands of books sent to Sakhalin: the authorities paid. Chekhov, loth to meet aristocrats, made Suvorin and Koni talk to influential courtiers.
In Petersburg Anton began his monograph The Island of Sakhalin: he wanted it to be dry and impersonal. He would publish it only in its entirety to heighten the impact. The Siberian penal system and Sakhalin were in the news: an illegal Russian edition of the American George Kennan's survey of Siberia's prisons had been circulating. A work so anti-establishment as a survey of Sakhalin could not expect to be published by Suvorin. Anton's unbroken association with New Times puzzled the radicals even more. One political exile (Ertel) told another (Vladimir Korolenko): 'Pity that Chekhov is tied to that nest of robbers.'
At the end of January Anton returned to Moscow. He began a new story, 'The Duel': it grew as long as a novel. He nursed the mongoose which a Russian winter had made too ill to break crockery or leap on the table. He consoled Olga Kundasova, tantalized Lika Mizinova and flirted with Daria Musina-Pushkina (who had followed him back to Moscow). When the mongoose recovered its joie de vivre the flat seemed too small.
Anton endured two cramped weeks. Suvorin came to Moscow and took him to dinner and the theatre. Then Anton decided they should take the European tour that he had missed two years previously. On 5 March he wrote to Suvorin: 'Let's go!!! I agree, wherever and whenever you like.' Accounts at New Times were chaotic: Anton believed he was still 2000 roubles in Suvorin's debt, but he would not stay in Moscow working the debt off. He prevaricated: he assured his family that he would be back for Orthodox Easter. Elena Shavrova begged JANUARY- MAY l8ol him to stay. Lika, snubbed, was proudly silent. Vania pleaded with him to come to Sudogda, where Vania's only friends were his pet starlings and canaries.
On 11 March Anton left family, mongoose and friends for Petersburg. (Kundasova and Musina-Pushkina also made their way there.) At 1.30 p.m. on 17 March, Suvorin, the Dauphin, and Anton - Father, Son and Holy Ghost - took the Petersburg-Vienna express. Daria Musina-Pushkina spotted them on their way to the station: 'I was riding down the Liteinaia and met you travelling in a cab, and you looked straight at me but for some reason didn't greet me.' Anton's pince-nez was broken, so he had left it behind in Moscow. As a result, he had trouble recognizing friends, and no doubt a blurred view of Europe.
Neither did he understand all he heard. Anton had only schoolboy German. He was to tell Ezhov, 'I speak all languages except foreign ones. Getting from one station to another in Paris is for me a game of blind man's buff.' The Suvorins bore the brunt of the expense, decided the itinerary and did the talking. On the one hand Anton liked being treated 'like a kept woman' - he called himself the 'Nana of the Railways' and enjoyed the physical comforts: the Pullman sleeping cars with mirrors, carpets and soft beds; the flushing lavatories. He was amazed, as he had been on the Amur, by free speech - frank conversations with strangers in Moscow could lead to trouble with the secret police. In Vienna, he told his family, 'It is strange that you can read and talk about whatever you want.' On the other hand, he was quickly soured: when he crossed the border into Austro-Hungary his only note was 'A lot of Yids. The customs charged more than my tobacco cost.' As he came over the Alps to Venice, he declared them inferior to the Caucasus or the mountains of Ceylon.
Venice, however, aroused his enthusiasm: Desdemona's house and Canova's tomb sent Anton into ecstasy. He told Vania: 'For a Russian, poor and degraded, here in the world of beauty, wealth and freedom, it is not hard to go mad… when you stand in church listening to the organ you want to convert to Catholicism.' In Venice Zinaida Gippius turned up and pricked the bubble. Like many Petersburg snobs, she felt impelled to put provincial upstarts down, and wilfully misinformed Anton that the hotel charges were by the week, not the day. She noted in her diary that he was 'A normal provincial doctor.
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ANNA'S 1)1 1'i.l.IRINAGE he had fine powers of observation within his limits, and rather coarse manners, which was also normal.'
By 30 March the party was in Rome. Anton was wan. He asked the hotel porter, Suvorin claimed, for the address of Rome's most luxurious brothel. He reported to Uncle Mitrofan that the Vatican had 11,000 rooms; later he said that Rome was just like Kharkov. Letters home ask only after the mongoose. About Lika and her cough, or the convalescent Vania and his dormitories full of workers' children, he did not enquire. On 3 April the Suvorins and Anton went to Naples; on the 6th they toured Pompeii. Years later Suvorin recalled: He was litde interested in art, statues, pictures, churches, but as soon as we got to Rome he wanted to get out of town, to lie on die green grass. In Venice it was the originality, most of all the life, serenades, not its Doges' palace and so on, that held him. In Pompeii he wandered bored over the open city - it is boring in fact - but immediately he took pleasure in riding a horse to Vesuvius over a very difficult route and kept edging towards the crater. Abroad, cemeteries interested him everywhere - cemeteries and circuses with clowns, which he saw as real comedians.34 The party then took the coastal railway to Nice, a city Anton little suspected was to become a second home (it was a resort for Russians, rich and sick, and the Russian navy). Lika did not write. Pavel reported: 'The mongoose is well, its behaviour is incorrigible but deserves leniency.' To Vania Pavel was franker: 'The mongoose gives us no peace, it bit off a piece of mama's nose in the night, she was frightened when she saw the blood. Now it has healed.'35 Anton wrote back. He confessed that he would miss Easter. He and the Dauphin discovered Monte Carlo. For several days they took the train there to play roulette. In two days Anton lost 800 francs.
Three days later the party took the express to Paris. Anton celebrated Easter in the Russian Orthodox church, amazed that French and Greek Christians should be singing the Bortniansky anthems he had sung as a boy in Taganrog. May Day in Paris gave Anton food for thought. He mingled with a crowd of rioting Paris workers and was himself manhandled by the police. Three days later he sat in the public gallery of the French parliament and listened to something unimaginable in Russia - deputies calling on the Minister for the Interior to account for the deaths of seven workers. Paris, as much JANUARY-MAY l8oi as Sakhalin, developed Anton's political consciousness. Meanwhile Suvorin decided to commission a bronze bust of himself (which he was later to present to Chekhov), and while the sculptor carved, Anton and the Dauphin toured the nightclubs and watched naked women. On 2/14 May Anton was back in Moscow.
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Summer at Bogimovo May-July 1891 ANTON STAYED ONE DAY on the Malaia Dmitrovka. (Of the twenty months that the family rented Firgang's house, Anton lived there fewer than five.) The day after his arrival Evgenia, Masha, Anton and Sod the mongoose left for a dacha that Misha had found them near Aleksin on the river Oka, a
