Night on a Bare Mountain August-September 1896 ANTON WANTED to make the best use of the rail pass Suvorin had given him. He decided first to visit Taganrog, and end up in Feodosia with Suvorin, but was vague about the itinerary. He told only his sister that he would go to Kislovodsk, a spa in the north Caucasus. He teased Potapenko: 'I'll be in Feodosia, I'll make e pass at your first wife' - for Potapenko, saddled with alimony, wanted a pretext for divorce. Potapenko could not, however, fathom Anton's motives; 'What mad idea to go to Feodosia? It's utter horror! Do you really want to write a novel about the life of cretins!… I hear you have some convict's travel warrant.' On 23 August 1896, a lew days after Anton left, Potapenko wrote to him about the The Seagull, literary adventures and liver stones. He began: 'And where you've vanished to, nobody knows. You gave me a Feodosia address, but I think you've gone to the Caucasus.' The frankest of men, Potapenko suspected from Anton's evasions that he had abducted Lika.
Three clues might point to a journey with Lika. Firstly, the route that Chekhov took was one that Lika had proposed for a journey four years ago. Secondly, Lika vanished at the same time as Chekhov. Thirdly, Lika's letters that autumn would suggest that Anton had promised her marriage exactly a year after his arrival in the spa of Kislovodsk. Yet would Anton, who valued privacy so much, have provoked gossip by taking a woman as attractive and alluring as Lika to his birthplace and then to a fashionable mountain spa? And does a promise of 'mutual bliss', as Anton had put it, have to be sealed with a preliminary honeymoon? In any case, would Lika have gone to Feodosia? She knew that Suvorin advised Anton not to marry her, and panicked at the thought of meeting him.
Where did Lika vanish to? On 19 August Chekhov left Melikhovo with Lika and her friend Varia Eberle for Moscow, where Anton
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would catch the express train south. Even Granny Ioganson was nonplussed. She had no news of Lika until 5 September, after which Lika reappeared in Podolsk, between Melikhovo and Moscow: 5 September: They've brought Christina and the nanny. 6 September: How could Lika send [the baby's] things off in such a rush? Now the child has no clean linen, it's terribly annoying. 16 September: Lika still hasn't moved from Podolsk, I am so disappointed, as I expected to see her in Pokrovskoe tomorrow.16 Nobody in Kislovodsk or Taganrog saw Lika; Anton spent his time in both places with male friends. If Lika disappeared with any man, it was probably not Anton, but Viktor Goltsev. Maybe the date, 1 September 1897, for 'mutual bliss' was set before Anton's departure south, or after his return.17
Anton spent a day or two in Taganrog, seeing cousins and the library, avoiding admirers. He wrote no letters from his birthplace, and almost nothing until his holiday ended. He sent instructions: Masha was to buy timber for a new school at Novosiolki, Potapenko was to act for The Seagull. His diary is terse: In Rostov I had supper with my old schoolmate, Lev Volkenshtein… At General Safonov's funeral in Kislovodsk I met A. I. Chuprov, then A. N. Veselovsky in the park.'8 On the 28th went hunting with Baron Steingel, spending the night on Mt Bermamyt; cold and a very strong wind… To cousin George in Taganrog Chekhov revealed only that he had met friends in Kislovodsk 'as idle as himself.' Kleopatra Karatygina recalls stumbling on Anton in Kislovodsk: hot and irritable, he was cajoled into posing for a photograph. Anton found relief from the heat by going on a boar hunt on Mount Bermamyt with a man who should have known better, his colleague Dr Obolonsky, who was next to appear in Anton's life when catastrophe struck. Mount Bermamyt is a remarkable place for climbers and hunters, but no careful doctor would let a tubercular patient spend a night there. The guide books of the time warned: 8559 ft above sea level, 20 miles from Kislovodsk… Bermamyt is a virtually bare rock usually swept by winds blowing off Mt Elbrus. There are ruins of a Tatar village, but no protection from rain and
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wind… People travel to Bermamyt to watch the sun rise… It is always cold on Bermamyt and snow falls even in August and the temperature falls well below zero… The northeast winds that prevail at this time often strengthen at Bermamyt to hurricane level… It is especially important not to chill the stomach: it should be wrapped in a woollen cummerbund.19 The trip to Mount Bermamyt undoubtedly shortened Anton's life.
A day or two later, Anton made for the warmth of the Black Sea. Reaching Novorossiisk, where his brother Alexandr had been so unhappy, Anton was only a night's sailing from Feodosia. Suvorin had waited for him for eleven days. The ten days that Chekhov spent with Suvorin, regardless of his 'cretinous' sons, he would call the 'one bright spell' in 1895 and 1896. The fact that he wrote no letters is evidence of his bliss, not distress. He and Suvorin were more relaxed than ever in each other's company, even though - or perhaps because - Suvorin now deferred more to Anton, than Anton to Suvorin, and Anton saw clearly the flaws in Suvorin's character. On 22 August,it dinner with Shcheglov, Suvorin conceded: 'Chekhov is a man of flint and a cruel talent with his harsh objectivity. He's spoilt, his antOUt propre is enormous.' The same summer Chekhov told Shcheglov: 'I'm very fond of Suvorin, very, but, you know, Jean, sometimes at grave moments in life those with no strength of character are worse than evildoers.'20
Iavorskaia's marriage to the young Prince Bariatinsky was the topic of the day. Both were already married, and needed the Tsar's consent. The prince's mother was horrified, but the Bariatinsky sons needed Iavorskaia's earnings. Moreover, Bariatinsky, a budding writer, wanted a mascot. lavorskaia broke with Tania. Suvorin's diary echoes what he told Anton, who still had an interest in both women: 5 August. Shchepkina-Kupernik… was having lunch with lavorskaia and her husband Bariatinsky, the conversation touched on these two ladies' past, which there was so much gossip about. 'No smoke without fire,' said Tania… After lunch Iavorskaia-Bariatinskaia flew at Tania in front of her maid, speaking in French, accused her of gossiping and so on…'My husband is in hysterics,' she said… 'He doesn't want to see you again, and you must leave right now.' - 'But I'm just wearing a blouse, let me change.' - 'You can change, but that's all.' Tania left without even changing. She borrowed 500
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roubles from me and is off to attend lectures in Lausanne. She is very upset. Suvorin noted Anton's sigh at the mention of Iavorskaia, but Anton was not seriously affected by her marriage. He was content to pass the warm Crimean days drinking, chatting in the sun, by the water. Suvorin's chief'cretin', as Potapenko called him, Aleksei the Dauphin, was elsewhere, usurping his father's power. Moscow and Melikhovo left Anton in peace: he merely read the proofs for the first third of 'My Life'. A few telegrams arrived from Petersburg. Potapenko had done Anton a final favour (in an act of ineffective benevolence or effective revenge), propelling The Seagull through the Imperial Theatre Committee. Unfortunately the play was given to the theatre least suited to Chekhov, the Aleksandrinsky theatre with its Sarah Bernhardt techniques, and its repertoire of French farce. The Seagull was to be directed by Evtikhi Karpov, who was inexperienced, unimaginative and cocksure. Worse, the first performance was set for Levkeeva's benefit night on 17 October. Levkeeva, a comedienne, would find in the heroine of The Seagull only a satire on her own career as an actress, and her followers would be outraged. The one good omen was that Potapenko and Karpov had cast some fine actors, notably Savina and Davydov, and the still unknown Vera Komissar-zhevskaia.
Suvorin, now sixty-two years old, was depressed as Anton left Feodosia: The earlier you are born the sooner you die. Today Chekhov said: 'Aleksei and I will die in the 20th century.' - 'You may, but for sure I'll die in the 19th,' I said. - 'How do you know?' - 'I'm utterly certain, in the 19th. It's not hard to see, when every year you get worse.' Unable to shake Suvorin's pessimism, Anton telegraphed Masha to have Roman meet the local train from Serpukhov with a coat and galoshes, and left the Crimea where the weather had turned as bitter as his host's mood. Suvorin accompanied him, and they stayed a day in Kharkov to watch a performance of Griboedov's Woe from Wit. On 17 September 1896 Anton stepped out in sunshine at Lopasnia. The burden of running Melikhovo had fallen on Masha and Pavel. She had bought four magnificent beams for the new school. Pavel had the
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schoolteacher paper the annexe for Antosha's return, and then his own room. Four weeks in charge had restored Pavel's patriarchal confidence. He told Misha: We expected you for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, you had two government holidays, you could have come, but you refused to accept our hospitality and see us. Mother baked an excellent pie, sturgeon grisde with mustard oil, which you would have liked… For the cattle we made the same 40 tons of hay as last year, that's not enough. Mariushka only bothers Antosha with her ducklings and chickens, he will build a run in the cattle yard for the fowls, but she hatches them in her kitchen and feeds them there, they grow up and get into the garden. Our summer is still magnificent… All summer we have been eating mushrooms fried in sour cream. The clock goes well, on time and strikes every five minutes. The weathercock on
