The Doctor is Sick March-April 1897 STILL CLUTCHING ice to his blood-stained shirt, Anton Chekhov was taken by cab to Suvorin's suite, No. 40, at the Slav Bazaar. He fell on to a bed, telling Suvorin 'Blood's coming from my right lung; it did with my brother and my mother's sister.' They summoned Dr ()bolonsky, but he could not persuade Anton to go to hospital. Anton scrawled a note to Bychkov, his devoted footman at the Great Moscow, to send the proofs of 'Peasants' on his windowsill to the Slav Bazaar. The haemorrhage did not abate until morning. Anton was calm, though afraid, but his friends panicked. Lidia Avilova, invited to call, could not find him. Bychkov had been ordered to tell only Vania where Anton was.
/Ml day Chekhov and Suvorin stayed indoors. Anton asked Vania to call, as he was 'unwell'. Shcheglov came to see Suvorin. Thrilled to find his two idols together, he left without noticing Anton's perilous state.1 Anton too seemed to ignore it. Early next morning he told Suvorin that he had letters to answer and people to see back in the (ireat Moscow. Suvorin remonstrated, but Anton spent Monday there: he sent a touchy teenager a critique of her novel about fairies; he apologized to Avilova. He wrote, talked, and spat blood into the wash basin.
At daybreak on Tuesday 25 March Doctor Obolonsky was handed a note: 'Bleeding, Great Moscow No. 5, Chekhov'. Obolonsky took Anton straight to Professor Ostroumov's clinic by the Novodevichie cemetery, then went to the Slav Bazaar and woke up Suvorin. At 1.00 p.m. Suvorin saw Anton: Chekhov is in Ward No. 16, 10 above his 'Ward No, 6', as Obolonsky remarked. The patient is laughing and joking as usual, clearing his throat of blood in a big tumbler. But when I said I watched the
423
FLOWERING CEMETERIES
ice moving on the Moscow river, his face changed and lie said, 'Has the river thawed?' Suvorin telegraphed Vania, revisited Anton and took the night train to Petersburg, where he tried to allay fears. Sazonova wrote in her diary: 'I'm told it's just haemorrhoidal blood, but they still put him in a clinic.'2 Aleksandr was alarmed by Suvorin's vagueness.
Professor Ostroumov, who had taught Chekhov, was at Sukhum on the Black Sea. His juniors mapped Chekhov's lungs, showing the top of both, particularly the left, badly damaged by tuberculosis. Wheezing exhalations came from both lungs. Ostroumov was no believer in the curative power of Robert Koch's 'tuberculin'. Treatment was conservative: ice packs, peace and nutrition, until the threat of a fatal haemorrhage had receded; convalescence with subcutaneous arsenic, exile to a dry climate and a diet of koumiss.3 Anton was carefully watched - doctors are unruly patients. Visitors were admitted by pass, in twos, and forbidden to ask questions.
Anton wanted his parents kept in the dark. When Masha arrived at the Kursk station on Tuesday morning to start teaching, Vania silently handed her a pass to the Ostroumov clinic. Only next day was she calm enough to visit. Lidia Avilova came twice, once bearing flowers.4 Dr Korobov, who had known Anton for sixteen years, was turned away. Anton was fed cold broth. He asked Masha for tea and some eau de Cologne; Viktor Goltsev for caviar, four ounces of black, eight of red; Shavrova for a roast turkey. She sent a grouse, which Anton washed down with fine red wine from Franz Schechtel and Dr Radzwicki, Anton's optician. Sablin of The Russian Gazette sent a roast chicken and, when this gave Anton erotic dreams, a woodcock. Flowers and letters also poured in, as did unsolicited manuscripts and solicited books. Anton wrote passes for the visitors he wanted. Goltsev and Liudmila Ozerova called. Elena Shavrova, confined in Petersburg with a chill, wired her sister Olia on 29 March for news: I found him up properly dressed as always, in a big white, very bright room with a white bed, a big white table, a little cupboard and some chairs. He seems to have lost a little weight and his bones are showing, but he was awfully nice, as always, and bantered cheerfully with me… What do you think I found him doing? He was choosing lenses for a pince-nez.'
MARCH-APRIL 1897
E more important visitor had come the previous day. On Wednesday J6 March Lidia Avilova left the clinic in distress and walked round ihr Novodevichie cemetery, where she met Tolstoy. Tolstoy needed no pass: on Friday he appeared at Chekhov's bedside. Weeks later Anton recalled the visit to Mikhail Menshikov: We talked about immortality. Tolstoy recognizes it in a Kantian sense; he supposes that we shall all (people and animals) live in a principle (reason, love), whose essence and aims are a mystery to us. Hut I see this principle or force as something like a shapeless mass of aspic; my ego - my individuality and mind - will merge with this mass. I don't want this immortality. At lour the next morning Anton suffered a severe haemorrhage. The doctors forbade all pleasure except letter-writing. Anton, wanting to I' discharged home, declared Melikhovo healthy, on a watershed and her of fevers, but the doctors exiled him south, to the Mediterranean HI the Black Sea, from September to May.
()n April the bleeding stopped. Visitors came again, except from 1.00 to 3.00 p.m. when, as Chekhov put it, 'the sick animals are fed ritid exercised'. A week later he was discharged. His health was a matter of public bulletins. On 7 April, appeasing the censor by hastily replacing page 193, which blamed the state for the peasants' misery, Hitnian Thought published 'Peasants'. Never was Chekhov so feted by the intelligentsia. A wave of sympathy forced even Burenin to acclaim him. I,ate in April Sazonova observed: 'It sounds like a funeral knell. I Ir must be very bad and they're holding a requiem. Really, they say that his days are numbered.' The literary world commiserated.
I.ika neither wrote nor visited. Elena Shavrova showered her cher mattre and intrigant with letters. She offered him the health of 'the.1 upid, indifferent and dim'; she promised to kiss Professor Ostroumov •ill over; she told him of a French play, Uevasion, about a married woman's happy adultery, a play where it was said 'doctors have no right to be ill'. He could still be her intrigant: 'What do we risk? As long as Tolstoy doesn't find out.' All she requested was that Anton ihould: 'Tear my letters into little pieces (jealous men are dangerous), I don't want someone else to do it';6 he never did. On 11 April, Shavrova shook off her husband and came, but Anton had been dis-, h.n-ged the nightbefore. Olga Kundasova was running round Moscow
424
425
FLOWERING CEMETERIES
for Anton, returning to their owners all the books he had borrowed.
Vania ran messages, while Aleksandr worried. Misha and Olga went to Melikhovo on 6 April to make ready for Anton's return. Anton had left Masha penniless and the cupboards bare; Vania was to bring beer, best beef and to see that Anton brought money. Misha wrote to Vania: 'Desperate famine here, brother… we have thin gruel instead of soup. Be a pal and bring parsley (roots), carrots and celery. If you have the money, some onions too. We have to feed Anton up now.'7 Masha's sinking spirits were restored by Maria Drozdova. Pavel and Evgenia seemed not to know what was happening. They sheared the sheep, and mucked out the cattle. Only Misha's arrival on the 6th alerted them that something had happened to Anton.
On Good Friday, emaciated and weak, Anton was brought by Vania and laid on Masha's divan. Here he injected arsenic into his abdomen, read and wrote letters. The comfort was cold. Dr Sredin, who treated himself and others for OA in Yalta, urged Anton to go to Davos. The radical novelist Aleksandr Ertel revealed that 16 years ago he had been given a month to live, but wondered if Anton's will to live matched his own.8 Menshikov said that he had wept as he read 'Peasants' and that Petersburg was awash with rumours of Chekhov's illness; he wrote again, advocating a diet of oats and milk and a stay in Algiers, which had done wonders for Alphonse Daudet (who was to die in eight months).9
Emilie Bijon sent two touching messages in French.10 Cousin Georgi in Taganrog urged Chekhov: 'the south is warmer and the ladies are passionate'.' Warm comfort came with Lika Mizinova on 12 April, the eve of Easter. She left on the i8th (Vania's birthday), with Sasha Selivanova, who had arrived three days before. Pavel was glad: 'At 9.45, glory to the All Highest, the two fat ladies left.'2
On Sunday 13 April forty male and twenty-three female peasants lined up for Easter gifts of money from the Chekhovs. Pavel's diary sounds vigilant: 14 April:… Antosha liked the roast beef. Ants got into the house… 2 3 April:… The cherries are in leaf. Antosha is busy in the garden. Importunate visitors - 'the loud-mouth Semenkovich', Shcheglov and the vet - annoyed Pavel. Two students turned up, to be fed and housed. On 19 April, seeing his brothers off, Anton risked a three-mile
MARCH-APRIL I897
journey to survey the second school he was building. Dr Korobov, who had come to photograph Anton, not to heal him, then took Anton to Moscow for two days. (The other doctor to visit in April was Dr Kad/.wicki with a case of Bessarabian wine and lenses to correct Anton's astigmatism.)
Anton was glad to see his visitors go. Shcheglov had pestered him wnli a play, which, Anton told Suvorin,
