by one character, 'Lice eat grass, rust eats iron, lies eat the soul' is moral poetry, but not a blinding light. 'My Life' is both an existential story and a classic, using devices of Tolstoy (the railway as an instrument of destruction) and Turgenev (the living consoled at the graveside). The composition of 'My Life' took virtually the entire year; by the end of April less than half was drafted.
The fiction was fed by the events that summer (not least by Anton's many railway journeys); writing such freshly inspired prose reconciled
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him to the drudgery of revising The Seagull, and quarrying Uncle Vania out of the ruins of The Wood Demon. Confessional though it is, 'My Life' breaks with the parodic mode of The Seagull or 'The House with the Mezzanine'. The use of autobiographical material is freer from caricature and vindictiveness. The conflict between a violent father and an introverted son may have been autobiographical for Anton, but the son breaks out, not from the lower classes to the gentry, but downwards. The story has some cruelties: the hero's sister is a failed actress called Kleopatra, and the character's debut, dumbstruck and pregnant in an amateur production, was painful reading for both Kara-tygina and Lika Mizinova. Nevertheless, the reader of 'My Life' is moved to compassion, not mockery. The traits of Misail, hero and narrator of 'My Life', recall Aleksandr (also known as 'a little profit' for his trade in songbirds in Taganrog). Aleksandr's vegetarianism and weakness for alcohol are ascribed to Misail, but so are his open mind and versatility as a craftsman.
While 'My Life' was being written, Aleksandr gave Anton frequent cause for pity, anger or laughter. First Toska caught scarlet fever, and Aleksandr's colleagues shunned him for fear of infection. Then Aleksandr went to Kiev as a freelance reporter on the doctor's conference, only to be robbed, together with seven doctors, in his sleeping compartment. 'Disgracefully robbed in the carriage under anaesthetic,' he claimed. Aleksandr began drinking again in Kiev.
The grimness of country life in 'My Life' reflects reality. At the end of April, Pavel recorded, 'There is no food in the house for the cows. The horses get ao/a measures of oats per day.' In early May life was still hard: 'Assumption. Because of the rain the clock in the dining room has stopped. The herd of horses got into the garden. We tried to stoke the stoves in the rooms, but there was no wood to be found.' Chekhov complained to Elena Shavrova: 'It's devilish cold. A savage northeast wind is blowing. And there's no wine, there's nothing to drink.' In spring a troika sent over half-thawed mud to meet the train from Moscow was a dangerous vehicle, so that Anton had to forgo Lika: 'If Lika comes, she'll squeal all the way.' It needed only a breakdown in communication for the affair to falter again, and although Anton, to judge by the circumstantial evidence, was close to committing himself to Lika, he again began a double game. His tone towards Elena Shavrova, who was staying with her mother and sisters in Mos376
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cow, became affectionate. On Iavorskaia's notepaper, he asked her why she wanted to flee: 'Actually, you ought to take a trip to Australia! With me!' - and apologized for seeming 'very unkind': This paper was brought on Rue de la Paix, so let it be the paper of peace!… Let this cutting, bright colour wring tears of forgiveness from your eyes… Now guess: who gave me this paper? The banter became mutual; Elena Shavrova pondered a liaison with her cher maitre. She sent him her 'Indian Summer' (literally: 'A Woman's Summer'), inscribed 'a sign of deep respect, gratitude and other warmer feelings'.
Unknown to Anton, a hundred miles south in Iasnaia Poliana, thistory led Tatiana, Tolstoy's daughter, to record in her diary for e; April 1896: Today papa read Chekhov's new story 'The House with the /Vlcv/.i nine'. And I had an unpleasant feeling, because I sensed the irality in it and because the heroine was a 17-year-old girl. Now (! h*khov is a man to whom I could become wildly attached. Nobody h,r. penetrated my soul at the first encounter as he lias. On Sunday I walked to the Petrovskys and back to see his portrait. And I've only seen him twice in real life.12 Tatiana told her mother; the countess, forgetting that she was.1 dot tor's daughter and a leveller's wife, retorted that Chekhov was too poor and of too low a birth to be considered as a husband. Tatiana questioned common friends about Anton: 'Has he been spoilt by women?' she asked the editor Menshikov13, and she urged Anton to visit. Faced with her mother's hostility and Anton's unresponsiveness, she fell instead for a married man, Sukhotin, whose wife she eventually became.
Chekhov's lowly birth bothered only aristocrats. Poverty bothered Anton more. He was committed not only to an extended family and to friends fallen on hard times, but also to the peasantry. The council and richer peasants might contribute, but he was liable for 1000 roubles towards the new school at Talezh. Suvorin gave him an advance on his collected plays and stories, but Anton was now wary of debts to Suvorin. He put out feelers to his new publisher, Adolf Marx, the proprietor of The Cornfield, who published his authors superbly. Marx would not tell him what Fet had been paid for his Ml
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Collected Poems, but equally told Chekhov not to reveal his fee for 'My Life'. The idea of selling his collected works to Marx for a substantial sum was born. For the time being, Anton had a little leeway. The Talezh teacher, Mikhailov, became the foreman for the school building. Anton instructed the carpenters, who were putting on the roof timbers, not to take orders from his father and left for a few days in Moscow.
On his return the roads were still 'vile, mud, deep ruts filled with water', but visitors crowded the house and the annexe. Both younger brothers brought their wives. It became hot. The starlings' eggs hatched and they stopped singing; by 13 May it was over 300; mosquitoes plagued everyone. Finally Lika came. She had taken a cottage with her baby and the nanny near Podolsk, half way along the line from Moscow to Lopasnia. Meetings and journeys to and from Moscow could now seem casual. Once again a family friend, she came down with Vania, the flautist Ivanenko, or even the postmaster. Pavel occasionally mentioned her sourly in the diary as Mile Mizinova. Pavel was preoccupied with Moscow's churches. Tsar Nicolas II, three years after his accession, was to be crowned in Moscow, the old capital; the city had a week of pomp in mid May. Unknown to each other, Pavel and Suvorin (accompanied by Iavorskaia) watched the five-hour coronation in the Uspensky cathedral. Pavel returned to Melikhovo directly and was not among the crowd of some 700,000 people, for whom the authorities had erected on Khodynka field in western Moscow 150 stands, each barred by a narrow gate admitting only two at a time: these stands were to distribute half a million 'presents' - a tin mug and a coronation sausage - with the lure of a special prize, a silver watch, at each stand. On 18 May a stand collapsed in the stampede. The horror was worsened by the callous authorities: the honeymoon of Nicolas II and his people ended. Khodynka precipitated the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. (The dynasty sensed nothing: the ball at the French embassy, even after the ambassador had inspected the corpses, went ahead.) A journalist to the marrow of his bones, Suvorin went to Khodynka: Up to 2000 people were crushed to death. Corpses were being carted all day and the crowd went with them. It's a rutted place with pits. The police arrived only at 9, and people had started gathering at 2
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… There were a lot of children. They were lifted up and saved over people's heads and shoulders. 'I haven't seen any gentry. It's just workmen and artisans lying there,' said a man about the suffocated… What bastards these police officials are, every one of them, and these bureaucrats. Suvorin returned to Moscow three days later, obsessed by Khodynka, meeting more eye-witnesses and public servants. On 30 May he left a third time for Moscow and invited Anton to the Hotel Dresden. Anton spent all day examining the children at Talezh school and joined Suvorin late at night. The next day was one of the most horrible in Anton's life, even for a man who had seen the prisons of Sakhalin. In west Moscow he stood on the site of a massacre. His diary is laconic: 'On 1 June we were at the Vagankovo cemetery and saw the graves of those who perished at Khodynka.' Suvorin's diary gives a more graphic account: Chekhov and I were at the Vagankovo cemetery a week after the catastrophe. The graves still smelt. The crosses were in rows, like soldiers on parade, mostly six-cornered, pine. A long pit \.A been dug and the coffins were placed next to each other. A beggar told us that the coffins were put on top of each other in three layers. The crosses are about four feet apart. The inscriptions are in pencil, about who is buried, sometimes with a comment: 'His life was i «; years and 6 months.' Or 'His life was 55 years.' 'Lord, accept his spirit in peace.' 'Those that suffered at Khodynka field.'… 'Thy grievous path of agony came on thee unawares, The Lord has liberated thee from all thy grief and cares.' The next day Anton went home to Melikhovo, while Suvorin went north, to his villa on the Volga at Maksatikha. Suvorin had, a fortnight later, nightmares of corpses. Anton said little about it, but Vagankovo cemetery and Khodynka affected him profoundly. He stopped writing for a fortnight after hearing the news of the disaster and did not begin work on 'My Life' again until 6 June. After his walk among the mass graves
