I shall have consumption, so say all who have seen me. Before the end, if you like, I shall bequeath you my diary, from which you can borrow a lot for a humorous story. After three months' silence Lika and Anton were briefly in touch, but never did either mention Lika's child. It was as if Christina had never been born. On 22 December Lika invited Masha to Paris: 'You vile
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IIKA DI.Si'ARUK girl, you lie when you say you wnnl to sec me! You are now involved with all sorts of trash, so how can you remember me?' Whom she was calling trash was clear from Lika's letter to Anton on 2 January: Well, has Tania settled in Melikhovo and occupied my place on the divan? Is your wedding to Iavorskaia soon? Invite me so that I can stop it by creating a scene in the church… may all heaven's munders fall on you if you don't answer. Your Lika.33 Olga Kundasova became hyperactive. She no longer held any post. Her friends - Drs Kurkin, Iakovenko and Pavlovskaia, Anton, and Suvorin - financed her; they were worried by her 'conspiratorial' journeys around Serpukhov and Moscow, where she engaged biologists and philosophers in debate. She longed to break free of the psychiatric hospital at Meshcherskoe; she blamed Anton for her headaches, fever and 'unimaginable melancholy', and showered him with notes. He tried to placate her, but her retort on 12 January 1895 had all the virulence of the fictional Rassudina in 'Three Years': 'I'd like to congratulate in person a fully-qualified little Don Juan like you. I attach a stamp for the reply. Yours. O. Kundasova.'34 Anton endured her reproaches: more were to come. Kundasova recognized that she was ill - 'dementia primaria to use our terminology. I'm frightened but not desperately so' - but she believed in the prophylactic effects of travel, sleep, food and talk in Melikhovo. Chekhov contacted Dr Kurkin, who wrote to Dr Iakovenko. They agreed not to give Kundasova enough money to go far from Meshcherskoe (where she believed she was a pioneering psychiatrist, not a patient). Dr Kurkin advised Anton 13 January 1895: 'You shouldn't let your 'lady friend' out of your sight, for she tends to get entangled in situations from which she cannot disentangle herself.'35
Anton's colleagues coped with Kundasova, but, as though the attentions of Kundasova, Tania, Iavorskaia and Lika were not enough, Anton was seeking for another woman. On 30 December he wrote a jocular letter to Aleksandr with one serious request: to find the address of Anton's admirer, the children's writer Lidia Avilova, in Petersburg and to do so 'in passing, without any talk'. Aleksandr gave Anton Avilova's address and Anton slowly prepared for a journey to Petersburg. He had a pretext: Suvorin required Anton's intervention, for, alone among publishers, he had made himself an object of vituperation
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by refusing to sign a petition to the Tsar for freedom of the press. (The Tsar dismissed the request as 'senseless dreams', the secret police noted the signatories, and Chekhov, as an author printed by radical journals, came under surveillance.) Ostracized by the intelligentsia, Suvorin fell into a depression that even his theatre company, the Literary-Artistic Circle, failed to lift. On 9 January 1895 Sazonova's diary records: Suvorin was complaining of his loneliness, that his newspaper and wealth gave him no happiness, that he had known virtually no personal happiness, that life had passed him by. He was so tense, so upset, that I could sense tears in his voice. At times he simply couldn't speak.36 Anna Suvorina wrote about the same time: Anton, I ask you again to cheer up Aleksei. I'm told you're in Moscow now. Tempt him into coming if only for a few days, while you are there. He is grumbling a lot that you write him only business letters!… Write him something nice and interesting and cheer him up a little. After all he doesn't love or value anybody but you. He is very melancholy and, worse, doesn't sleep at night. He can't work at all.37 Anton responded, twice offering Suvorin the bait of a drive round Moscow's cemeteries. He even offered to introduce him to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, but Suvorin was not to be wooed. Anton went back home for just a week. He inspected the false teeth that Aleksandr had bought Evgenia in Petersburg: she would not use them because they had been made on the 13th of the month. Anton left again on 27 January. He spent four days in Moscow, during which time he visited the sick Grigorovich and saw his childhood love Sasha Seliva-nova, newly widowed, plump, leaving school-teaching for midwifery. On 31 January 1895 he went to Petersburg. Moscow's Grub Street looked on with envy: Shcheglov's diary records: 'Cruel cold, a thin rag of an overcoat, no money and now I have to write a humorous novel!… Really you have to become an egotist like Chekhov to manage to get anything done!!'38 In Petersburg Suvorin gave Anton a copy, printed on fine paper, of the half puritanical, half pornographic novel he had published, At the End of the Century: Love, and inscribed it 'from the kind and virtuous author'. Suvorin introduced Anton to Sazonova, the lady writer and diarist to whom he entrusted his secrets:
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II E e DIIPARUE Suvorin's two confidants hacked away from each other. Sazonova recorded: 'We silently shook hands, he advised me not to drink Russian wines and went to his room, gathered a company there and then left to see Leikin.' Sazonova found Anton's hostility adamant. Anton had other agendas. He renegotiated his royalties from Suvorin: now Suvorin paid Chekhov 200 roubles monthly. While Anna's beloved Italian tenors sang, Anton wrote letters, read manuscripts and began a new story in the next room. A prodigious year had begun. Visiting Leikin, Anton met his neglected acolytes - the melancholy Kazimir Barantsevich and ever-loyal Gruzinsky. He even met Pota-penko. Lika weighed on Chekhov's mind, and he consulted Suvorin. Again, Suvorin confided in Sazonova, whose diary later records: Chekhov had an affair with the Mizinova girl. He wanted to marry her but it couldn't have been a strong desire because Suvorin talked him out of it [possibly in 1891 D.R.] Then Potapenko seduced the girl and abandoned her. Aleksandr and Natalia now lived soberly; Anton willingly went to dine with them. Natalia, domesticated by motherhood and by cooking courses, was overjoyed when Anton divined his nephew Misha's talented, highly strung nature. In 1895 Lidia Avilova, the sister-in-law of the editor of The Petersburg Newspaper, a woman whose address Chekhov had taken such pains to find, became Anton's most deluded admirer. She asked Chekhov for a critique of her story - which he gave with unusual candour. She then ordered a medallion inscribed with the title of one of Chekhov's books, a page and a line number. This she sent anonymously to Chekhov, who duly found the reference to his story 'Neighbours': 'If you ever need my life, come and take it.' Avilova did not know, as Anton left for Moscow on 16 February 1895, that this medallion would be used as a final touch to Chekhov's new play, the cruellest of modern comedies.
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A Misogynisfs Spring February-May 1895 THE MEDALLION that Lidia Avilova gave Chekhov in February 1895 was an eloquent love token. Anton responded more guardedly than her 'memoirs' imply; he did less for her career than he did for Shav-rova's. Anton did not protest at Burenin's verdict that Avilova was better unpublished. When Avilova in turn tracked him down, Anton had erected a defence against Persons from Porlock. Leikin knew Avilova: in Moscow on his way to Melikhovo, he noted in his diary 9 March 1895: Went to the Strakhov [Avilova's maiden name] library on the Pliush-chikha where L. A. Avilova is staying, and had tea with her. She is grieving, ten days ago she wrote a letter to Chekhov from Moscow inviting him there, but he did not appear or reply, she asked in the offices of Russian Thought if he was now at his estate, and she was told he had left for Taganrog. I informed her tliat I was told in Russian Thought that he was at his estate, expecting me and I was off to see him tomorrow.39 Anton also took care, while in Petersburg, to avoid Shavrova, whose manuscripts he had mislaid. She received not the meeting she craved, but a roasting for maligning doctors in a story about syphilis and the family. The story was in any case unprintable - only medical journals could discuss syphilis. Anton told Shavrova to leave disease to professionals, and write about picnics instead.
In February 1895 Anton sent to a Moscow anthology 'The Spouse', yet another piece about a long-suffering doctor whose life is wrecked by a spendthrift, unfaithful wife.40 Chekhov's recurrent topic in 1895, an idealist thwarted by an amoral woman, stems from private disillusion and from a more general misogynistic undercurrent in Russian literature at that time. Repeatedly toying with, and then rejecting, the
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affections of one woman after another, Anton was not so much searching for his Dulcinea, as reiterating a bitter experience: each liaison seemed an obstacle to creative and personal freedom. Like Tolstoy, Anton felt at heart that Schopenhauer was right to assert that 'only a male intellect befuddled by sexual drive' could worship woman. Schopenhauer was widely known in Russia and the heroine of 'The Spouse' is a Schopenhauerian Weib, as are Chekhov's next heroines, in The Seagull and in the stories 'Ariadna' and 'Anna Round the Neck'. When Anton returned to Melikhovo, he avoided the sirens. Tania had to seek him out at the end of March. Iavorskaia was by March on tour 300 miles away to the east, in Nizhni. The Moscow critics, Anton warned Suvorin, 'had hunted her
