Although it is hard to say now whether I loved him then, I thought hard about getting married… I went to the study and said, 'You know, Anton, I've decided to get married…' My brother naturally realized to whom, but he made no reply. Then I sensed that he found this announcement unpleasant, although he remained silent. Smagin's proposal was Masha's third; she was nearly twenty-nine and it could be her last. Anton told Suvorin, who told Olga Kundasova: Petersburg and Moscow were abuzz. Smagin was coming to Melikhovo on 2 3 March: Masha left to teach in Moscow, and only returned a day or two before Smagin left. Smagin grasped that this flight meant a refusal, and spent two days chatting about farming: he kept his promises and sent the Chekhovs bags of seed, but he seethed. On 31 March 1892 he wrote to Masha: It cost me great efforts to refrain from having a scandalous row at Melikhovo. Do you realize mat I could have crushed you there - I hated you… only Anton's constant hospitable welcome saved me.2 On 28 July 1929 Smagin was to write: although a whole lifetime has passed since 25 March 1892… for me you remain the most enchanting and incomparable woman. I wish you health and a long life, but I should like to meet you again before I die.3 Anton later told Suvorin that his sister was 'one of those rare, incomprehensible women' who did not want to marry, but some years were to pass before Masha became sure that marriage would give her less happiness than her position as her brother's amanuensis. In later life she told her nephew Sergei that she had never really been in love with anybody.4
That spring Anton was as ruthless with his own suitors as with Masha's. Before Easter none of his women friends ventured out to Melikhovo. Few even wrote, so bruised were they by his departure. Anton, busy planting an orchard, had little time for correspondence, but on 7 March he sent a long misogynistic letter to Suvorin: Women are most unlikeable in their lack of justice and because justice is organically alien to them… In a peasant family the man is clever, reasonable and fair and God-fearing, while the woman is - God help us!
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Anton lost Elena Shavrova's manuscript, and sent her fee to famine relief. He recommended her to a dilettante editor, Prince Urusov, but not as a writer: 'She gives a sort of lisping first impression - don't let that bother you. She has a spark and mischief in her. She sings gypsy songs well and can handle her drink. She dresses well, but has a silly hair style.'
Masha, 'with remarkable self-sacrifice', Anton commented, spent the weekend planting out the kitchen garden and her weekdays teaching at the 'Dairy' school. The school was in financial straits, so that Masha worked unpaid. None of her friends came to Melikhovo. Anton's note to Lika was as frosty as the weather: Masha asks you to come the week before Easter and bring perfume. I'd buy it myself but I shan't be in Moscow until the week after Easter. We wish you all the best. The starlings have flown away. The cockroaches haven't left,5 but we've checked the fire engine. Masha's brother. Two days later, he teased Lika that she would again take a summer dacha with Levitan and Kuvshinnikova. His letter ended half flippant, half appealing, paraphrasing Lermontov: 'Lika, it's not you I ardently love! I love in you my former suffering and my lost youth.' On 2 April Anton sent Masha an Easter shopping list, ending: 'Bring Lika.' Lika came, deserting her family's Easter reunion.6 Hard on Lika's heels came Levitan. The Chekhovs brought a priest from the monastery to take the Easter service in Melikhovo church (which had no clergy): the family and guests acted as choir and Pavel relived his Taganrog days as cantor. Anton kept Lika and Levitan apart: the two men went shooting for two days after Easter Sunday, until an incident that foreshadows The Seagull. Anton confessed to Suvorin: Levitan fired at a snipe; the bird was winged and fell in a puddle… Levitan wrinkles his brow, shuts his eyes and asks in a trembling voice: 'Dear boy, bang it on the head with the gunstock.' I said I couldn't. He keeps nervously twitching his shoulders, his head trembling, begging. And the snipe is still looking bewildered. I had to do as Levitan said and kill it. One fine lovelorn creature less, and two fools go home to supper. When Levitan went home next day, he discovered that Anton had treated him less mercifully than the snipe. 'The Grasshopper', in The
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Performing Artist, set all Moscow tittering or seething. The 'heroine' of the 'little' story, 'The Grasshopper', is a married woman (with the features of Lika and the circumstances of Kuvshinnikova) who has an affair with a lecherous artist, very like Levitan; the 'grasshopper' heroine's husband, a saintly doctor (who faintly recalls both Dr Kuvshinnikov and Dr Chekhov), is driven literally to self-destruction by the situation. Dr Kuvshinnikov was alive and well, but his loving tolerance (recognized by his wife in her diaries) imbues the fictional doctor. Sofia Kuvshinnikova, forty-two, swarthy, and a serious painter, saw herself in the heroine, despite Anton's heroine being, like Lika, twenty, blonde and without artistic talent. Others also felt libelled. The actor Lensky, who frequented the Kuvshinnikova salon, and had told Chekhov not to write drama, recognized himself in a minor character.
Sofia Kuvshinnikova never spoke to Anton again; Lensky did not speak to a Chekhov for eight years. Levitan wanted to fight a duel and did not meet Anton for three years. (Levitan had other worries. The police were expelling Jews from Moscow, and he fled 150 miles east, until Dr Kuvshinnikov, a police surgeon, secured his return.) Levitan's relationship with the Kuvshinnikovs broke down. Sofia marked the summer of 1892 as their last. Dr Kuvshinnikov kept a discreet silence, but he never spoke to Anton again.
Lika was as badly hurt as the Kuvshinnikovs and Levitan, but she was in love and, in this matter, was wiser than Anton: What a savage you are, Anton… I know full well that if you say or do something hurtful it's not out of any wish to do it on purpose, but because you really don't care how people will take what you do.. J Neither Lika's reproaches, nor the loss of Levitan, a friend of ten years, seemed to mean much to Anton. Nor did the visit of his ex-fiancee Dunia Efros (now married to Konovitser, a lawyer from Taganrog gimnazia). Anton wanted to see only Suvorin and Pavel Svobodin. Suvorin came on 22 April (a day after Dunia Efros left). Suvorin, who owned a palatial mansion in Petersburg and a fine villa in the Crimea, could not stand the ill-heated smoky rooms, with no W.C. and no sprung carriage to take him to the station. On the 24th he took Anton to Moscow to spend three days in luxury at the Slav
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Bazaar. While Suvorin slept, Anion wrote. Melikhovo was modernized over the next five years, but it was hard to persuade Suvorin to go there again: if he passed on his way south, he met Anton at Lopasnia station. Anton returned to Melikhovo with Svobodin, just as Pavel was consecrating the sowing of thirty acres of oats. Apart from the Dauphin, Svobodin was the only guest at the end of April 1892. He returned in late June. The family planned to build him a cottage. Until the theatre season opened, Svobodin devoted himself to Anton, for whom he felt, both as actor and patient, admiration and affection. Anton wrote his new work, 'Ward No. 6', for a Moscow journal, The Russian Review. The editors had paid a 500-rouble advance and would print whatever Chekhov sent, but they disliked the gloom and radicalism of the story. The obvious journal for such a work was the left-wing Russian Thought, but Anton had quarrelled with its editors, Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev, two years before. Svobodin's tact now reconciled Anton to men who had called him 'unprincipled', but it took until 23 June to get Chekhov to transfer his story from The Russian Review, and to conjure an apology from Lavrov. Svobodin pitched Chekhov into the camp of Russian Thought, the bete noire of Suvorin's New Times. Anton could do little in return. Svobodin's heart had tired of pumping blood round tubercular lungs. On 25 June 1892, after Svobodin had left, Anton told Suvorin: He has lost weight, gone grey, his bones are showing and when he's asleep he looks like a dead man. Extraordinary meekness, a calm tone and a morbid revulsion for the theatre. Looking at him I conclude that a man preparing for death cannot love the theatre. Dramaturgy too was stale. On 4 June 1892 Anton complained to Suvorin: 'Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. The damned endings won't come! The hero either gets married or shoots himself.' All Chekhov could write was a story of illicit love and family conflict, called 'Neighbours', with a sidelong glance at the Varenikovs next door to Melikhovo.
'Ward No. 6' depleted Anton's creative resources. Set in the psychiatric ward of a remote hospital, the story is a bleak allegory of the human condition. There is no love interest. The plot is a Greek tragedy in its violent reversal of fortunes. Like 'The Duel', it confronts
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activist with quietist. Now the activist is not a scientist, but a madman, Gromov, who has been incarcerated for proclaiming that truth and justice must triumph one day. The quietist, Dr Ragin, is drawn into dialogue and borrows every excuse devised by Marcus Aurelius or Schopenhauer for condoning evil. By consorting with a madman, Ragin alarms his superiors: he is trapped into his own ward, where, after a beating from the charge
