CINCIN NA I USSUch a long way (that is, to Melikhovo) and, worse, talk! Awful! Ask him to forgive you for suhiiiittiiu; linn to such a punishment for two days. (22 January) Dear Anton. I have something important to ask you. When I was in Melikhovo I forgot my cross and I feel very bad without it… For God's sake, tell Aniuta to have a look and then you wear it and bring it to me. You must wear it, or else you will lose it or forget it some other way. Come and see me, uncle, and don't forget about me. Your Lika?? In Anton's notes to Lika, on 20 and 21 February, when he, Lika and Potapenko were together in Moscow, a note of regret, even desire creeps in: Lika, give me your little hand [in Russian 'rucbka' also means 'pen']; the one I was given smells of herring. I got up a long time ago, I had coffee at Filippov's. A. Chekhov… Darling Lika, today at 6.30 p.m. I shall leave for Melikhovo. Would you like to come with me? We'd return together to Moscow on Saturday. If you don't want to go to Melikhovo, come to the station. A clay after Anton, Lika came to Melikhovo for five days with Potapenko. In the last days of this strange menage Lika conceived a child by Potapenko.
Masha became resentful. She felt angry at what she believed to be Lika's desertion and Potapenko's betrayal of Anton; at the same time she envied Lika her passionate love life. Masha made the new couple feel awkward. On 25 January Potapenko and Lika left Melikhovo; the next day Anton followed them to Moscow. Anton and Potapenko stayed with Suvorin in the same apartment. On 27 January, Potapenko left Moscow for Petersburg and Paris, where his second wife was waiting. He made Masha a present of English watercolour paints and a disquisition on how women artists might eventually rival men. Masha was icy. On Tuesday 1 March 1894 Lika appealed to her: Dear Masha. Take pity on me and come for God's sake to say goodbye for ever to an unfortunate woman like me. On Saturday evening I am leaving, first for home, and from there straight to Paris. The affair was settled only yesterday… Surely your dressmakers would let you say goodbye to a person whom you used to
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1894
consider a close friend! No, joking apart, I somehow hope you will want to meet me…43 By 15 March 1894 Lika was in Berlin, on her way to join Potapenko in Paris.
Anton decided to leave the frozen north himself. He made enquiries about a sunny hotel room at Gurzuf, near Yalta in the Crimea, to spend a month recuperating in the warmth, while Masha and Pavel coped with ploughing and sowing. In five days of February spent in Moscow, Anton rejoined a minage-a-trois with Tania and Lidia Iavorskaia in the Hotel Louvre. He posed for a photograph in which the two women look adoringly at him, while his attention has been caught by the photographer: the picture became known as The Temptations of St Antony. Iavorskaia's adoration had a price. She wrote on 1 February: On 18 February I have my benefit night in Moscow… I hope you remember the promise you made to write me at least a one-act play. You told me the plot, it is so entertaining that I am still under its spell and have decided, for some reason, that the play will be called Daydreams. i Anton never wrote a word of Daydreams. Tania, instead, wrote for her a one-act comedy called At the Station. She wanted to present Iavorskaia with a framed blotting-pad - the frame to be engraved with autographs from her admirers. Anton refused to inscribe his name on it. Levitan had offered. 'Believe in yourself, I. Levitan', and Anton would not join his old friend, even on a piece of silver.
In February 1894 the managers of the Hotel Louvre and Madrid decided that the comings and goings through the 'Pyrenees' brought the hotels more notoriety than profit: Tania and Iavorskaia were asked to leave. By April they were living as lovers in the Vesuvius Hotel in Naples.
On 2 March, after seeing Potapenko off to Petersburg, Anton left for the Crimea. He steamed past Melikhovo without stopping at Lopasnia station.
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Lika Disparue o Ariane, ma soeur, de quel amour blessee Vous mourutes aux bords ou vous futes laissee! Racine, Phedre The spirit in which Albertine had left was doubtless like that of peoples who use a demonstration of their armed strength to further the work of their diplomacy. Proust, Albertine disparue
FORTY-THREE
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Abishag cherishes David March-June 1894 IN MARCH 1894 the Chekhov squadron scattered south and west from Moscow and Melikhovo. On the 4th Anton came ashore at Yalta, storm-tossed but not seasick. Instead of the tiny resort of Gurzuf, he chose Yalta. Settled in a hotel, he had a telegram from Tania and Iiivorskaia in Warsaw. Masha wrote on 13 March: 'I was sad to see I «ika off and I miss her very badly. Be well and don't cough… Mother asks, should she slaughter the bigger pig for Easter?' Lika Mizinova and her 'chaperone' Varia Eberle joined Potapenko in Paris on 16 March: Lika wrote to Anton from Berlin on the 15th: I shall die soon and shan't see anything more. Darling, write for old time's sake and don't forget that you gave me your word of honour to come to Paris in June. I shall wait for you and if you write, shall come and meet you. You can count on accommodation, meals and all comforts from me: only the travel will cost you anything. Well, till we meet, hurry, till we meet, definitely in Paris. Don't forget the woman you rejected, [wavy line] L. Mizinova.1 Anton was in no hurry even to reply. He merely told his French translator (while ordering 100 bottles of best Bordeaux) to look up Potapenko and 'a plump blonde Mile Mizinova' in Paris. Anton slept till eleven in the morning, and in the evenings chatted to the intellectuals who, hoping for an early spring, were in Yalta for the good of their lungs. They offered no stimulation, although Miroliubov, an opera singer,2 and an actress adopted Anton and took him over the mountains. Through Miroliubov Chekhov met a medical colleague, I)r Sredin, as consumptive as his patients. Only a few officials fostered culture in Yalta, a seaside town too small to support more than a bookshop, amateur theatricals and a three-form girl's grammar school. Lika had jumped from one menage-a-trois into another. Potapenko's
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wife was waiting in Paris. Lika told 'Ciranny' that she was settled in a pleasant house with a life on Rue I lamelin, seeking a singing teacher. To Masha she was frank: 'Ignati said that he found his spouse very ill and thinks that she has consumption, but I think that she is faking again.'3
Lidia Iavorskaia was happier in her new love life, but in Milan she received a letter which her spurned lover, a customs official, had written to her father, Chief of Police Hiibbenett. It ran: Your daughter has left for Italy with Madame Shchepkina-Kupernik, this departure naturally forces me to burn my boats and I shall not direct a single word of reproach at your daughter. Her liaison with Shchepkina-Kupernik has become a vile legend in Moscow, and no wonder… nobody can pass undefiled by contact with her.4 On 23 March Lidia scrawled a letter to Anton, asking him to protect Tania's name. She was proud to be loved by Tania and wanted Anton to use his connections in Petersburg to silence her former lover in the Customs department.
Far from friends, Anton could write again. He was preoccupied with his shortest mature story, 'The Student' - a work which he himself singled out for its concise perfection, as Beethoven did his Eighth Symphony. A student priest crossing a valley before Easter awkwardly retells the betrayal of Christ to two peasant widows, mother and daughter. The women cry, and he intuits a connection between their misery, the tragedy around Christ, the human condition and history. The priest once again represents the creative writer, communicating a force he cannot comprehend to others even more helpless. Poetic economy and subtle symbolic detail distinguish 'The Student'. This is 'late Chekhov', where the protagonist's and the author's eyes become one, and where all is evoked, not stated. Solitude had sprung an inner lock. His friends and mistresses scattered, Anton found an affinity in his fictional characters, and his prose develops an intimate warmth. Anton had shaken off ideological constraints, too. He told Suvorin: Perhaps because I've stopped smoking, Tolstoy's morality has stopped moving me, in the depth of my soul I am hostile to it, and that of course is unjust. Peasant blood flows in me, and you can't astound me with peasant virtues. Since I was a child I have believed
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MARCH-JUNE 1894
in progress and could not do otherwise, since the difference between the time when I was thrashed and the times when thrashing stopped has been enormous. I love clever people, sensitivity, politeness, wit… I was affected not by the basic propositions, which were known earlier, but the Tolstoyan way of expressing oneself, the didacticism and probably a sort of hypnotism. Now something in me protests; calculation and justice tell me that electricity and steam show more love for humanity than chastity and vegetarianism. Sleeping better (and alone), not smoking, drinking little, Anton was bored in Yalta. His heart showed only physical symptoms, arrhythmia. On 27 March 1894 he wrote curtly to Lika: he was not coming to Paris, he told her, and Potapenko should buy her a ticket home. Irony drowns affection: Dear Lika, when you are a big singer and have a good salary, give me alms: make me
