Had I got your letter in Abbazia then I'd have gone via Switzerland to Nice to see you, but now it's awkward to drag Suvorin along. Potapenko too let Lika down: from Petersburg he came for forty-eight hours to Moscow, not to Montreux: he wanted to talk Masha Chekhova round.
Avoiding Switzerland and Lika, Anton found Europe less thrilling than in 1891. He bought three silk ties, a tiepin and some glass in Venice, and caught nettle rash. In Milan he watched a dramatization of Crime and Punishment: he felt that Russian actors were pigs compared with the Italians - an opinion which boded ill for the play he was germinating. He visited first the cathedral, then the crematorium. In Genoa, Anton and Suvorin strolled around the cemetery, then left for what Maupassant called 'the flowering cemetery of Europe', the Cote d'Azur. They spent four days in Nice; here Anton worked on 'Three Years', and 'coughed and coughed and coughed'. He felt misanthropic and told Masha to see that she alone met him at the station when he got back. Suvorin, too, was disgrunded. Sazonova noted: 'A letter from Suvorin in Nice. He and Chekhov are fed up with each
328
329
1,1 E A DI.SI'ARUE
other, they are both roaming from place to place and saying nothing.' Suvorin never forgot a spat with Anton on the Promenade des Anglais. He asked Anton why he no longer wrote for New Times. Anton curtly told him to change the subject, and his 'eyes flashed'.22 On 6/18 October Anton and Suvorin set off for Paris. They left Paris three days later, just before Lika came down to Paris from the Swiss Alps to seek new lodgings and a midwife.
After a day in Berlin, Anton arrived in Moscow on 14 October. Autumn rains had made the journey to Melikhovo hazardous, so he stayed there for five days and read proofs. He thanked Masha for her hard work with a ring and a promise of 25 roubles. He sent a note to the Louvre and Madrid hotel, for Tania and lavorskaia, who, no longer dressed in violet and green, still astounded Moscow's theatregoers. Anton's note, on a blue card, was in their style: 'At last the waves have cast the madman ashore… and he stretched his arms to two white seagulls…' Lidia lavorskaia responded eagerly: Waiting for you is a hot samovar, a glass of vodka, anything you want, and above all, me. Joking apart, please come tomorrow. You will be off to your village and again I shan't see you for ages. And with you I relax from everybody and everything, my friend, my kind, good man. On 19 October nine degrees of frost hardened the mud roads: Anton returned to Melikhovo, where the family had installed new bedroom floors, a well, a flushing lavatory and new stoves, though they could not raise the temperature in me house that freezing autumn above I5°C. Anton was to stay a whole month in Melikhovo, writing and sleeping in the new guest cottage. Pavel, as he put it, 'moved into His Cell, into the Kingdom of Earth';23 Franz Schechtel had presented the family with their most valuable possession, an Art-Nouveau mantelpiece. There was one drawback. Anton wrote twice to Masha, who was teaching in Moscow: Find out in the shops what the best mouse poison is; the bastards have eaten the wallpaper up to four feet from the floor in the drawing room… If you can't find mouse poison, bring 1 or 2 mousetraps. Soon there was little need for Anton or Masha to leave the estate for Moscow. In mourning for Tsar Alexander III, who died on 20
CC0
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1894
October, Moscow's schools and theatres closed. Until the first snow came, in any case, travelling over icy ruts was torture. One journey to a patient nearby made Anton's 'innards turn inside out'.
Lika, in Paris, believed that Anton was still in Nice. Her last letter from Veytaux eventually reached Melikhovo: Lika, in the literal sense, very very much wants to see you, despite my fear that if you ever did have a decent opinion of me it will now change when you see me! But all the same, come! I'm sad, darling, infinitely! Masha shared Lika's mood. On 10 October Masha had gone to Moscow for an event so distressing that the ioth became a bad omen for her. On 10 January 1895 she wrote to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik: 'a sad event that happened on this very day three months ago makes my mood quite unsuitable for merriment.'24 We do not know what this sad event was: had Masha renounced yet another man? Unhappy, sleepless, she stayed away from Melikhovo until 4 November. She did not meet Tania or lavorskaia. She was taking cod liver oil and putting a cold compress on her heart. When she came, she brought Ivanenko, because she could not face the train journey alone. To judge by his evasive tact, Anton had an inkling of what was behind her anguish -conceivably, she had been seeing Levitan. Anton told Masha to consult his colleague the neurologist Professor Vasili Shervinsky ('and take 5 roubles just in case'): he would help her sleep.
In Moscow Vania, Sonia and the baby Volodia had become a loving trio, closed to outsiders. Misha was unhappy in Uglich, but hoped that his protectors could transfer him to another tax office. Cousin Aliosha Dolzhenko, free of Gavrilov's warehouse, won Anton's respect. He was now a violinist in an amateur orchestra. Aleksandr in Petersburg, however, was distressed, even though little Misha, Natalia believed, was 'something outstanding'. The more affectionate Natalia's postscripts to Anton, the more Aleksandr disparaged his wife: 'Natalia gives birth almost every day to whole ribbons of some tapeworm.' Aleksandr's unhappiness led to new aberrations. On the night of 12 November 1894 he arrived at Melikhovo with Vania and Ivanenko. The next day a note arrived from Natalia: Dear Anton, I beg you to write and tell me if my husband is with you. This strange man left when I was out. I am worn out. Where
331
1.1 EE DISPARUE
is he? What's wrong with liiin? Please, dear Anton, don't show him my letter.25 Aleksandr stayed for the celebrations of Tsar Nicolas II's marriage. Anton thanked Natalia wryly 'for letting him come and see me.'
While Aleksandr took refuge at Melikhovo, his wayward behaviour infected the village. A drunken peasant, Epifan Volkov, set fire to the thatched roof of his cottage. Despite Aleksandr's experience with the fire brigade, the hut burnt down, and Volkov was arrested for arson. Otherwise, Anton had an undisturbed November. Only Elena Shav-rova accosted Anton, asking him to return six stories which had vanished in Anton's absence. Anton denied having them and told her to rewrite them from memory. This, said Shavrova sulkily, was untrue and impossible.
Prince Shakhovskoi, ruined by debt, had sold his estate of Vaskino to an engineer, Vladimir Semenkovich. The new neighbour seemed at first just a monstrous reactionary,26 and gave Anton no reason to emerge from solitude. A month in Melikhovo relatively free of visitors, in a cottage apart, gave Anton the conditions he needed to write. When he rose from his desk in the cottage, Anton talked only to his inferiors. Occasionally he helped Masha teach the two maids, Aniuta Chufarova and Mashutka, to read and write. (Anton would soon be a governor and builder of schools.) He was kind to Mikhail Plotov, the schoolteacher in the nearby village of Shchegliatevo, and gave him medical advice, a gun, a gundog and tickets to the theatre. The schoolteacher at the village of Talezh, Aleksei Mikhailov, an even needier figure, was also befriended. Grey at thirty, with four children, Mikhailov spoke only of misery on 24 roubles a month.27
In near solitude, Anton completed the book version of The Island of Sakhalin and the long story he had pondered since 1891, 'Three Years'. Not since his journey to Sakhalin had he been so absent from literary circles. Viktor Bilibin told Gruzinsky: 'It's said in Petersburg that Chekhov has consumption and that the Moscow doctors have given him only a year to live.'28 Russia's minor writers, fed by Suvorin's gossip, buzzed with rumours. Gruzinsky told Ezhov, who told Anton: 'Kindest Anton!… inviting you to my Moscow flat is like sowing semolina and expecting maize to sprout. You are unattainable for us little people. I remain the friend of your youth, now your enemy.'29
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1894
Anton responded with enough warmth to persuade Gruzinsky and Fzhov to visit Melikhovo before the winter was over. To Lika he gave not a word of encouragement or comfort.
Lika was no longer alone in Paris. Potapenko, pocketing more advances, had rushed there. (He told Masha he was in Kherson province by his father's sickbed.) By early November Potapenko was with the second Mrs Potapenko, on Rue des Mathurins, a couple of miles from Lika. On 9/21 November Lika gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Christina. She coped alone for nine days; she and the baby were both ill. A wet nurse was found. Maria Potapenko offered to bring the baby up as her own. Lika spurned the offer as a ploy to recapture Potapenko. Lika told Masha in February 1895 that Maria Potapenko threatened to kill herself and her own children, and Ignati to shoot just himself.30 While Lika was still prostrate, Potapenko wrote to Anton from Paris, unusually legibly: First: keep my location absolutely secret, for that is essential. Secondly, the following: I have got into a tout a fait desperate situation… here I am shivering with cold and other misfortunes. This is hard to understand for a man who is sitting in a warm house in front of a newly constructed fireplace, but an artist must imagine it. The reason I am
