came only for the weekends. Cousin Georgi had left with a consignment of books for Taganrog library. February was severe: two peasants were frozen to death. March gave no respite. The estate was under six feet of snow: no school could be built until spring. The Seagull awaited an indulgent censor and a daring director. The great prose work that was to fill Chekhov's mind that year was only germinating and he had not yet disinterred The Wood Demon for transformation into a viable play. In the evenings, trying to escape Pavel's ranting, Anton picked through the books he had bought, or had been given, to despatch to Taganrog library and, although his eyes tired by candlelight he became absorbed in fortuitous reading of an extraordinary variety of literature.
His private life was empty. Kleopatra Karatygina gave her manuscript to Aleksandr to post on. Anton's reaction was chilling; on 28 February she concluded: 'We don't need to use X-rays to see that the mysterious thread that bound us has broken…'7 Elena Shavrova was chastely silent until spring; Iavorskaia, too, broke off communication. Lika Mizinova, however, reappeared. For the last weekend of February, as of old, she came down with Masha. Her daughter Christina, of whom nobody spoke, stayed with Granny and the nurse. Although she still suffered from stage fright, Lika wanted to sing. Her love for Anton was rekindled, as if the past two years had never happened. Perhaps the imminent publication of'The House with the Mezzanine' revived memories of the summer of 1891, of the younger Lika who infused the story. Anton foresaw the searchlight that The Seagull would fix on Lika, and felt a guilty affection.
When Anton went to Moscow on 29 February for five days, he left his father alone in the house with just the dachshunds, Brom and Quinine, for company. The new workman Aleksandr slept in the
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THE Flir.lll ()!• THE SEAGULL kitchen. Evgenia had gone to laroslavl to stay with Misha and Olga. Lika was in Moscow. Anton preserved a pencilled scrawl from her on lined paper. It reads: 'Come, but in 10-15 minutes. I'm very heppy.' The next few months were the most intense episode in their long love affair.8 Neither Potapenko nor Anton's actresses were in evidence, and mutual compassion, shared loneliness and bitter experience seem to have brought Lika and Anton closer than at any time in the last six years.
Intimacy with the girl whom he had taken apart to create the heroine of The Seagull inspired Chekhov to revise his play. The author entrusted his own antihero to get the play past the Petersburg censor: Potapenko, sublimely unembarrassed, agreed. On 15 March 1896 the play was posted to Petersburg.
In mid March the pond filled with melted snow; work began on the new school at Talezh; the ewes were shorn. Vania in Moscow was asked to bring for Easter: paint for Easter eggs, ten small candles and two quarter- pound candles, an Easter prayer book in a vermilion leather binding and a wall calendar. Anton spent his energies helping supplicants - Aleksandr, cousin Volodia, Taganrog's citizens, and total strangers. Visitors ventured to Melikhovo, though melting snow made the roads almost impassable. Mud and ruts held Lika back: 'Tell me about the state of the road, whether there is a chance of coming and going back without risking my life.' All three brothers came on the same train, in separate carriages, Misha and Olga for ten days, Vania without Sonia (ill at ease with her in-laws) for two, Aleksandr with his eldest son, Kolia, for four. Spring brought headaches, pains in the right eye and more ominous symptoms for Anton. He never forgot what a peasant had said when he treated the man for OA: 'It's no use, I'll go with the spring waters.' In Pushkin's words, 'I don't like spring./I find the thaw dreary… stench, mud - in Spring I'm sick/ My blood ferments; my feelings, mind are strained by anguish.' 'Spring Feelings of an Unbridled Ancient', a poem by Count A. K. Tolstoy, caught Anton's attention: 'All my breast burns/ And every splinter/ Tries to leap on every splinter.' As he waited for the ice to break, Chekhov wrote, he saw the ice as the splinters of his soul.
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The family, too, feared spring and Anton's discreet wads of paper full of blood and phlegm. On 17 March Pavel changed the rooms
FEBRUARY-MARCH 1896
around: Anton was moved to Masha's, the warmest in the house, and Masha took his study. Easter, the climax of Pavel's and Evgenia's year, coincided with Pavel's name day: 'Vania gave me a white tie, Antosha bought me an Easter prayer book and a pound of wax candles.'9
Despite the schisms in Petersburg, Suvorin's need for Anton's company was even more urgent than Anton's need for his. Suvorin's thoughts were Chekhovian, and passionately necropolitan: 23 March 1896. Today is Easter Saturday. Gei [the journalist] and I went to the Alexander Nevsky monastery and, as is my custom, I went to the graves of my dead. How much that is tragic is buried in these graves, how much grief and horror… At Gorbunov's grave we opened the lantern hanging from the cross, took me oil lamp out and lit it. I said, 'Christ has arisen, Ivan…' Soon you will lie in the grave where three already lie. All that's easy to imagine -being carried into church, where and how the speeches will be, the coffin being lowered, the earth hitting the coffin lid. How often I have seen it, but never was it so bad for me as at Volodia's funeral. I shall be laid next to him. That's what I told Chekhov. The cemetery is very near the Neva. My soul will come out of the coffin, go down underground into the Neva, meet a fish and enter it.10 Next to the graves of his first wife, shot dead in 1873, of his daughter, Aleksandra, who died in 1880, of Volodia who shot himself in 1887 and of Valerian, whom diphtheria took in 1888, Suvorin became morose and distressed: his son-in-law Kolomnin (soon to die) and Anton Chekhov were the two men whom he trusted and loved.
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FIFTY-TWO
The Khodynka Spring April-May 1896 THE FIRST STARLING returned to Melikhovo on 1 April. Two days later Anton invited Lika via Masha: 'The week after Easter you can travel our roads without risk of death.' That evening Pavel noted in the diary: 'Antosha went without supper.' For four days Anton coughed badly. Asking Potapenko to return The Seagull, he told him he was suffering from 'the old boredom. I spat a bit of blood for 3 or 4 days, but I'm all right now, I could drag joists about or get married.' He would not admit to OA. When Ezhov, desperate that his new wife was showing the same fatal symptoms as the first, asked for advice, Anton was bland, gulling himself as much as Ezhov: All that is clear from your letter so far is that your wife has been prescribed creosote and that she has had pleurisy… I've had a cough for a long time and coughed up blood, but I'm still fine, putting my faith in God and science, which is now curing the most serious lung diseases. So you have to have hope and try to avoid disaster. The best thing, of course, would be to go and take koumiss [fermented mares' milk]. Although Anton gave him letters of recommendation, as he had once given money, Ezhov never forgave Dr Chekhov the deaths of his wives.
In April Melikhovo came to life. Whitebrow, the young dog Pavel had given away to Semenkovich while Anton was away, came running back after six weeks' absence. He was caught up and banished again. The starlings flocked. Evgenia wrote to Misha and Olia: The starlings came on Friday 5 th and have nested in the two new boxes, one opposite the dining-room window, the other the one you built on to the house so that I could see them from the corridor window. Antosha and I are listening to them singing… Aniuta
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APRIL-MAY 1896 Naryshkina, the maid] has got engaged to a man in Vaskino, therc've been two balls, but for us their wild parties are very disturbing and unpleasant.11 The late spring; the starlings; the coughing of blood; the rowdy peasants and the neighbouring gentry; endless troubles with labour and materials for the new school; a morning spent with Tolstoy: all was grist to Chekhov's narrative mill. After a winter's inactivity, he had got down to a long work - originally intended to be a novel for the popular monthly, The Cornfield. The fee, more than 1000 roubles, was the temptation, the censorship of popular magazines the stumbling block. Known as 'My Life', the work was first called 'My Marriage' as a companion piece to 'The House with the Mezzanine' (which was printed in Russian Thought that April and could have been called 'My Non-Marriage'). 'My Life' too is a first-person narrative, 'a provincial's story' instead of'an artist's story'. As Chekhov worked, its scope broadened.
'My Life* contains everything Chekhovian - a gruesome anonymous provincial town, inconclusive wrangling between activist and quictisl philosophers, lyrical landscapes, dialogue of the deaf between man and woman, the lure of the theatre, the peasantry's instinctive values The story tests intuition against ideas: how 'a little profit' (the hero's nickname) is gained from following instinct and enduring one trial after another. The narrator's loss of status, of wealth, of a wife is outweighed by inner peace, despite the melancholy ending, where we see the hero visiting with his little niece the cemetery where his sister is buried. Chekhov takes another look at Tolstoy's slogans -non- resistance to evil, simplification - and his hero becomes a test-bed on which Tolstoyan principles are tried to breaking point. Chekhov does not debunk Tolstoy, but strips his ideas of sanctimony. The Tolstoyan refrain uttered
