solitude…' Haemorrhoids were his excuse for not seeing Lika: 'a general's disease - can't travel,' he told her. The dachshunds, not Lika, were caressed that spring. Anton complained to Aleksandr that Suvorin was not getting his
APRIL-AUGUST 1893
letters. The Dauphin demanded that Anton edit Aleksandr's copy for New Times, but the brothers would not let the Dauphin sow discord between them. That summer they were closer. Aleksandr was unhappy with Natalia, and saw her and the children only at weekends forty miles outside Petersburg. After five months without alcohol, he was suffering again from 'ambulatory typhoid', and from toothache, which he treated with a mixture of resin, ether, ammonia and menthol that Anton prescribed. For Anton's ills Aleksandr, on 15 May, prescribed marriage: When you decide to get 'hitched', then things will be fine up top. A wife must not argue. 'Shut up!' deals with that… All you have to do is follow the general law, submit to Aunt Liudmila's desires and take some lessons in God-fearing coitus from Uncle Mitrofan. Aleksandr came to Melikhovo for a week in June: he found the suppressed unhappiness of its inhabitants unbearable. On 9 June IHOJ, as he waited at Lopasnia for the train to Moscow and Petersburg, he scribbled a rambling letter (which Lika, who was arriving, took wiili her to Melikhovo): I left Melikhovo without saying goodbye to the Tramontane) htit nickname for Pavel]. He was asleep, so let him be. May he dream ol smoked sturgeons and olives… I suffered all the time I watched you, the foul way you live… In [mother's] opinion you are I lit I man… and the dogs, damn them, she isn't going to feed them any more… The only way to stop all these misunderstandings and mutual insults, tears, inevitable suffering, muffled sighs and bitter tears is your final decision, only your departure. Mother absolutely can't understand you and never will… Throw everything up: your dreams of the country, your love of Melikhovo and the labour and feelings… What sense is there in the Tramontani eating up your soul as rats eat tallow candles?… You and our sister have a false relationship. One kind word from you with a sincere note and she is all yours… Lika is approaching. I have to finish. After Aleksandr had gone (leaving in the new pond a bottle with a polyglot message from a shipwreck), Evgenia went to a convent for three days' retreat. Only those who were closest to Anton, as was Aleksandr, understood how irritable physical pain, mental stress and loneliness made him and how much he could, without intending to, torment his mother and sister.
294
295
CINCI NNATUS
In summer 1893 Anton wrote- almost nothing new. He denied that he was writing a comedy about Siberian exiles and their jailors. He kept up his reputation with old work. When Russian Thought published 'An Anonymous Story', in March 1893, few readers knew that Chekhov had abandoned it five years before, before taking it up again, because of its political theme. A revolutionary (the anonymous narrator) is planted as a servant to spy on a minister's son, but reneges on his mission and elopes with his target's mistress, who dies abroad of OA (only three heroines in all Chekhov's mature work die, and two of OA). When the narrator returns to Russia, he surrenders the heroine's baby girl to the enemy. 'An Anonymous Story' is Chekhov's only story with revolutionaries, aristocratic protagonists, or a Petersburg setting: the work is more like Turgenev's than Chekhov's. Anton's own world is better reflected in 'Big Volodia and Little Volo-dia', whose forlorn heroine might have suggested to Lika Mizinova that she was Anton's raw material, not muse. Many more times she would see her vulnerable character and unlucky fate mirrored, even anticipated, in Anton's fiction.
In 1893 Anton's reading was as important as his writing. Zola's novel Dr Pascal was serialized in Russia. Dr Pascal devotes himself to the welfare of mankind, defending humanism against the Christian piety of his niece Clotilde. She nevertheless comforts him and becomes his mistress. Anton's life at Melikhovo with Masha seemed to outsiders an idealization of Dr Pascal. No wonder that he discussed the novel heatedly with Suvorin, once communication between them was reestablished. There was one 'happy' event at Melikhovo: on 9 July Vania married Sofia in the local church. Six weeks later, Anton was telling Suvorin that he felt crowded by the presence of Vania, his wife and the homeless flautist Ivanenko. Real inspiration visited Anton once, after a heavy dinner. He awoke from a nightmare, telling Misha he had dreamt of a black monk. Into 'The Black Monk' he wrote at the end of 1893 comes imagery from his orchard, where workmen desperately tried to shield the blossom from frost. A story of overwork leading to madness and OA, it shows Vsevolod Garshin's ghost working on Chekhov. It needed a musical theme for the plot to crystallize. The bringer of music to Melikhovo in August 1893 was Ignati Potapenko, and the bringer of Potapenko was Suvorin. By May Suvorin was in Paris, seeking distraction in Le Moulin Rouge, with the
APRIL-AUGUST 1893
dot lors of La Salpetriere, or in jewellers' shops. Only on 7/19 June does his diary show animation: Back at my hotel I found a letter from Potapenko asking me for 300-400 roubles. Today I gave him 300 roubles… Maria [Pota-penko'ssecond wife]… said that she needed treatment, some operation had to be done, but they had no money. Potapenko works a lot, far too hard, and doesn't conceal from himself that this is wearing him out; but he works fast. Potapenko invited himself and Sergeenko to Melikhovo. Anton groaned: he recalled Sergeenko taking him to see Potapenko,' 'the god of boredom', in 1889. Sergeenko had proved unmitigated tedium all 1893 he had urged Anton to make a pilgrimage with him to see Tolstoy. Anton resisted, fleeing a Moscow bathhouse when he found 1 hat Tolstoy was there. He wanted to see Tolstoy alone, and hid from Sergeenko and even Tolstoy's son, Liovushka.
Patients died. A rainy summer washed away the harvest. With Sergeenko, Potapenko arrived on 1 August and, as the god of amusement, lightened Anton's gloom. He plunged into everything, even the muddy pond Anton had dug. Anton recanted to Suvorin (who warned that Potapenko might be a crook): 'My Odessa impression misled me… Potapenko sings very nicely and plays the violin, he and I had a very interesting time, quite apart from the violin and drawing room songs.' In Anton's phrase, the 'crow' of Odessa had become the 'eagle' of Moscow. Anton talked as intimately to him as to Suvorin. Potapenko became an alter ego in a few days. He fell under Anton's spell and respected his secrets. Potapenko recalled: The head of me house was Anton. His tastes dominated everything, everything was done to please him. He treated his mother with tenderness, but showed his father only filial respect… And he said that his father had been a cruel man… He had cast a pall on his childhood and aroused in his soul a protest against the despotic imposition of belief.' Anton, for all his memories of enforced church services, sang with Potapenko: 'not love songs but church music… He had a fairly resonant bass. He knew the liturgy extremely well and loved improvising a family choir.' Again, as she had used Levitan, Lika used Potapenko to arouse Anton. Lika joined the men, singing to the
296
297
«: IN c IN NAT US accompaniment of Potapenko's violin. The music was Braga's 'Wal-lachian Legend'. The main motif of'The Black Monk' was born, and the form too, for as Shostakovich noted, 'The Black Monk' has a perfect sonata form. Potapenko and Lika were thrown together; other harmonies, as ominous as those of Braga's 'Legend', were born.
That summer Potapenko was a deus ex macbina in many of Anton's plots. In Petersburg he made Suvorin's accountants recalculate Anton's debt: instead of owing Suvorin 3482 roubles, Anton found he was owed 2000 and could abandon a plan to sell Suvorin ten years' rights to his books.33 Potapenko prided himself on extracting money from publishers. He was paying for a sick second wife in Paris and an embittered first wife in the Crimea. Potapenko's unsinkable temperament made all problems, even Anton's, a pretext for merriment. He made things work. Anton's haemorrhoids, coughing, and the depression, which Aleksandr's letter had tried to pinpoint, vanished.
On 30 July/i 1 August, in Stuttgart, coming home, Suvorin wrote a poem that showed in what deep gulfs he was drowning. It ends: I feel the flies are crawling Over the membrane of my brain… 'It's not flies sitting in your head,' The surgeon answers with a laugh. 'Old age has come, and your brain Is being eaten all the time While water is filling up the holes.' Suvorin reached Petersburg in August; he described his symptoms to Anton. Anton told him- not to worry and Suvorin took the train, alone, back to western Europe.
FORTY-ONE
O
Happy Avelan October-December 1893 NOT UNTIL LATE OCTOBER could Chekhov visit Moscow. He made only day trips to Serpukhov, to council meetings, or to meet Olga Kundasova. After Potapenko's arrival, his mood remained buoyant, despite the washed-out harvest. A new well was dug; fish swam in the new pond; there were watermelons from the kitchen garden. Russian Thought began serial publication of The Island of Sakhalin. (Its
