with Suvorin he did not write a letter for five days.
Khodynka swept Lika from Chekhov's mind. She sent a furious note, outraged that he had passed Podolsk on 30 May and not taken her with him to the Hotel Dresden: 'Very nice of you, Anton, to send a postcard and let me know that you've steamed past! The fact that you stayed in Suvorin's hotel room is of absolutely no interest to
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me…' Anton alleged that he had never received her angry response, though it was neatly filed away in his archive at the end of the year, and pleaded with her 'to leave together for Moscow on the 15th or 16th and have dinner together.' This made Lika relent, and she agreed to meet him once again on the Moscow train. Again, Anton was not there, and she showered him with reproaches. She then received another invitation from Anton, who made it clear that a visit to the optician was the most pressing reason for him to travel to Moscow. Missed trains, like muddy roads, seemed sufficient cause for mutual affection to collapse again into reproaches and irony.
Lika replied angrily, and Chekhov put off his journey to Moscow by a day and arranged to meet Lika for lunch with Viktor Goltsev at Russian Thought. Now Viktor Goltsev was to play the same role in Anton's relations with Lika as Potapenko had, becoming a second string, just as Elena Shavrova was to Chekhov. Anton's next letter to Lika ended with a telling remark which applied to his relations with both women: 'I can't tie up and untie my affairs any more easily than I can tie a necktie.' The words 'tie up' and 'untie', zaviazyvat' and razviazyvat'connect Chekhov's love life to his writing: they also mean 'to devise a plot' and 'to devise the end of the plot'.
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The Consecration of the School June-August 1896 ANTON SAW LIKA IN Moscow and also commissioned a bell tower for Melikhovo church; building was to begin once Talezh school was finished. He saw an optician who cured his headaches: Anton's short-sighted right eye had been strained by the long-sighted left: a pince-nez put the finishing touch to Anton's image. Other prescriptions, electric shocks, arsenic and sea-bathing, were ignored.
In July Elena Shavrova departed south for the summer and autumn, hurling an affectionate letter to Anton out of the Moscow-Kharkov mail train as it steamed through Lopasnia: Anton found her arch catch phrases Chi lo sa? and Fatalite irritating. He and Lika were for the time being in harmony: she came for five days to Melikhovo. No rival was in sight or in touch.
Summer visitors to Melikhovo spent their time out of doors: Ezhov came on a bicycle; the Konovitsers brought Dunia's brother, Dmitri, another pioneer cyclist. Olga Kundasova, again patient and assistant in Iakovenko's clinic, disturbed the peace. Depression made her look, Chekhov told Suvorin, 'as if she'd been a year in solitary confinement'. At the end of June Masha returned from the Lintvariovs and Evgenia came back from Moscow: the household ran smoothly. Misha and Olga stayed in the annexe where The Seagull had been written. There were only routine distractions: a neighbour's cows in Chekhov's woods; dysentery in a nearby village.
To his editor, Lugovoi,14 Chekhov sent the first third of 'My Life': 'a rough-hewn wooden structure which I'll plaster and paint when I finish the building'. Lugovoi liked the manuscript and tucked it away in Adolf Marx's fireproof safe. As well as Marx's generous fee came more bounty: Suvorin sent Anton a three-month railway pass. Anton paid his mortgage interest and dreamed of journeys. In Petersburg, however, his affairs were going less smoothly. The censors were
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Mil I l e. e I in I HE SEAGULL baulking at The Seagull. Sazonova noted (3 June): 'Chekhov is melancholic. Suvorin too. The former is upset because of the play, the other is complaining of weakness and old age.' Potapenko, however, was optimistic, for the censor Litvinov, a crony of Suvorin's, was well disposed towards Chekhov. Unfortunately, Potapenko was not on the spot: Hotel Fassman. Dear Antonio! As you can see, I've ended up in Karlsbad, my aim being to rid my liver of stones etc., etc. A little bit of a problem with your Seagull. Contrary to all expectation, it has got caught in the nets of the censorship, but not badly, so it can be rescued. The whole trouble is that your decadent has a lax attitude to his mother's love life, which the censor's rules don't allow. You'll have to insert a scene from Hamlet: 'A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother/As kill a king and marry with his brother.'… Actually, we'll get out of it more easily. Litvinov says the whole thing can be put right in 10 minutes. Potapenko wanted Anton to tour Germany with him and his friend - it would be cheap and, Potapenko swore by his liver, enjoyable -but Anton would never travel with Potapenko again. Potapenko did not get back to Petersburg and the censor until late July. By then Litvinov had returned the play to Chekhov with blue pencil marks where he wanted changes. Reluctantly, Chekhov made Treplev more indignant about his mother's liaison with Trigorin, and deleted a scene where Dr Dorn is revealed to be Masha Shamraeva's father. Potapenko belatedly took up the baton: I don't know what's happened to your Seagull. Have you done anything about it? Tomorrow I'll go and see Litvinov… There are rumours that literature is to be abolished; so we shan't need censors… Lavrov will have a stake put up him, Goltsev will have his tongue cut out. Anton was beginning to be cast down by the antagonism of Petersburg to his work. His mood was worsened by a letter from Isaak Levitan, in the throes of manic depression, staying in the appropriately named resort of Serdobol [Heartache] on the Gulf of Finland: The rocks here are smoothed by the ice age… Ages, the sense of the word is simply tragic… Billions of people have drowned and
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will drown. We are Don-Quixotes… tell me in all honesty, it's stupid, isn't it!! Yours - what a senseless word - no, just Levitan. Anton's reply, if any, is not extant, but his own depression is clear in a letter he wrote to Aleksei Kiseliov: I live out my years as a bachelor, 'We pluck a day of love like a flower.' I can't drink more than three glasses of vodka. I've stopped smoking. He became restless. On 20 July, for the fourth time in seven months, Anton left Melikhovo to see Suvorin. He gave no reason for such a hasty trek. Suvorin's country house in Maksatikha, where the Mologa and the Volchina rivers meet, was reached by train to Iaroslavl and then river boat. Did Anton go for the fishing, or for counselling on his personal, theatrical or financial affairs? Had he intended to travel further north, to console Levitan? Petersburg was uninviting, for Alek-sandr had become demented after his drunken binge in Kiev, although he was writing articles on the care of the insane. He complained to Anton: 'The old woman Gaga is wasting away… I have an abscess between my cheek and my gum. We've got a puppy named Saltpetre, it messes.' Natalia's postscript asked why Chekhov had 'forgotten his poor relatives'.
On Anton's return to Melikhovo he found that Lika's behaviour changed. Neither affectionate nor angry, she wrote in a scrawl that betokened emotional disarray, heralding her arrival, hinting that she had found a new lover: 'Viktor Goltsev and I will come on Saturday for the consecration of the school. I'm not yet fully infected; when I kiss you I shan't infect you.'
The consecration of the school galvanized everyone. Anton spent a whole day at council meetings in Serpukhov. He could stand the formalities only because he was leaving next month to see Suvorin in the Crimea. He was besieged by mad patients. One of the Tolokonni-kovs, whose factories polluted the village of Ugriumovo [Sullen], kept a female relative on a chain to stop her abusive shrieking: for weeks Anton searched for a hospital to take her.15 On the eve of the consecration, a peasant showed violent melancholia con delirio.
Aleksandr did not come to the consecration: Dr Iakovenko and Olga Kundasova represented the mentally unstable. The occasion was SO alcoholic that guests were immobilized for two days at Melikhovo
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with hangovers. The servants made merry, except for Roman, whose baby son had died. The consecration was so moving that Chekhov transmuted it into an episode of 'My Life'. Even Pavel's thirst for ceremony was satisfied: 'The village elders offered the school governor bread and salt, an icon of the Redeemer and speeches of thanks. Cherevin the manager offered Masha a bouquet. Girl choristers sang May you live many years' Chekhov himself made a rare diary entry: 4 August. The peasants from Talezh, Bershovo, Dubechnia and Shiolkovo offered me four loaves, an icon, two silver salt cellars. The peasant Postnov from Shiolkovo made a speech. Next came the consecration of the bell tower. (Anton had the church painted orange.)
'My Life' was sent to The Cornfield - Til put the sweetening in and polish it up in proof form,' he told Lugovoi. He sent the last draft of The Seagull for Potapenko to take over the next hurdle. The Moscow News of the Day was advertising the play - 'Chekhov's Seagull flies towards us,/ Fly, my darling, fly to us/ To our deserted shores!' wrote the poetaster Lolo Munshtein. Anton cringed. It was time to leave.
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