read as if it had been written by a cat whose tail the author had trodden on. Suvorin was the only man Anton longed to see. He telegraphed that he would be in Petersburg by the end of May. Anton joked Til marry a handsome rich widow. I take 400,000, two steamboats and an iron foundry.' Suvorin irplicd by wire, 'We consider dowry too small. Ask for bathhouse and (Wo shops more.'3
Illness freed Anton's conscience, and he felt free to travel. No woman would, he told Suvorin, 'be stupid enough to marry a man who'd been in a clinic'. From Courmayeur, a tuberculosis resort, Levitan exhorted Anton on 5 May: Is this really a lung disease?! Do everything possible, go and drink koumiss, summer is fine in Russia, then let's go south for the winter, even as far as Nervi, together we shan't be bored. Do you need money? ,md then from Bad Nauheim, where he was having hydrotherapy, on 2 9 May: No more blood? Don't copulate so often. How good to teach yourself to do without women. Just dreaming of them is far more satisfying… If Lika is with you, kiss her sugar-sweet lips, but not I whit more.14 (iiven the public acclaim for 'Peasants' - which augured well for the ?a1n of Chekhov's books - and the excuse of illness, Anton could at last live out an idea he had preached periodically, but never practised: that the prerequisite of personal happiness was idleness.
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An Idle Summer May-August 1897 PHOTOGRAPHS THAT Dr Korobov took of Anton at the end of April 1897 show a man whose body and morale are wrecked. Anton's main symptom, apart from a morning cough, was an evil temper. A three year period of creativity, that had begun with Lika's departure in March 1894, was over. Between April and November 1897 he published nothing and wrote only letters. He pruned roses and supervised tree planting. He gave up medicine and council business and only kept an eye on the school at Novosiolki. While Masha saw to it that plans were drawn, materials bought and workers hired, Anton pondered his future. He could not stand milk diets, and ruled out the barren steppes of Samara where consumptives spent months drinking koumiss. Taganrog's winters and springs were as severe as Moscow's. Yalta and the Crimea had frozen and bored him in 1894. The Caucasian spas were vulgar - Kislovodsk in the north, Borjomi in the south - even if the dry mountain air had Alpine qualities. The idea of Switzerland repelled him. Anton's options were the French seaside, Biarritz on the Atlantic or Nice on the Mediterranean, both refuges for Russians, so he would not be lonely. He considered North Africa, whose climate had rallied so many, but could he afford to travel for eight months, after an idle summer?
Elena Shavrova proposed summer and autumn in Kislovodsk. Kun-dasova, to judge by her conspiratorial visits, was also willing to travel to the Caucasus. Lika was ready to return to Paris and accompany Anton; so was Masha's friend, the artist Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, who had discreetly fallen in love with Anton. Anton was, however, shedding women friends. A symptom he had hidden at the clinic, he told Suvorin on 1 April, was impotence. Elena Shavrova was put off. On 28 May Chekhov arranged to meet her in Moscow: the letter arrived too late. Anton had arrived with Lika. Elena sent telegrams
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and spent an evening at the station in Moscow to catch him on his way back. 'Fate is unjust, the post incorrigible, and you elusive,' she lamented, before leaving for the Caucasus and Crimea where she hoped to meet him.
Anton asked Liudmila Ozerova to play her favourite part, little I Iannele in Hauptmann's Hannele's Ascension, at the annual play staged on 4 June by Dr Iakovenko in his asylum. (The church had Hannek's Ascension banned from Imperial theatres; it was now preformed only in private theatres.) Ozerova demanded her own music and props. Anton gave the part instead to Olia, Elena Shavrova's younger sister. The 'little Queen in exile' had lost her lover and her part. On 3 May she hinted that she would take an engagement in Warsaw if Anton did not protect her career. On 14 May she was so shattered by what must have been Anton's rejection of her as a woman and as an actress that she wrote: 'Anton, I don't know how I stayed alive after reading your letter. Now the last thread that held me in this world has been torn. Farewell.'5
One old flame, DariaMusina-Pushkina, the 'cicada' whom (ihrklmv had squired five years ago, came to Melikhovo on 3 May. The next day she visited the monastery with the family. Her husband had been killed hunting, and she was now a rich Mrs Glebova. 'A vny mir interesting woman, she sang about thirty romances to nu- and thru left,' Chekhov told Suvorin.
On 25 May Anton stopped injecting arsenic. He masked the smell of medicine with Vera Violetta. Any exertion, however, laid him low. After taking examinations at Talezh school on 17 May, he was shattered. He tried quiet pursuits. He studied French. He fished with Ivanenko, catching fifty-seven carp in one session. June was peaceful: Masha, Misha and his wife Olga, and Vania, without his wife, left on a three-week trip to the Crimea. Anton moved out of Masha's room into the guest cottage, away from visitors and the rows between Pavel and the servants. 'Antosha has moved to the hermitage. To acquire sanctity by fasting and labour, as a hermit,' Pavel joked. After two weeks Anton left, via Moscow, to stay with Levitan on the estate of a rich Maecenas, Sawa Morozov. Morozov bored him, and Anton ran back to Melikhovo, with Lika, three days later. Lika told Masha in the Crimea:
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21 May 1897: This is the second lime in June that I have defiled your virgin bed with my sinful body. I low nice to sleep on your bed knowing that it is forbidden fruit to be tasted only by stealth. I didn't go to the Crimea only because 1 am stuck, penniless; Anton is all right… His mood is fine, he makes relatively little fuss at dinner. • • Have you started an affair with somebody?16 Since the birth of Christina, and despite all her travails, Lika had put on weight, and in her new role her tone towards Anton softened. Now that she had become more Anton's nurse than his mistress, Lika would even condone his affair with Elena Shavrova, though she could bring herself only to call her 'the lady writer'. She tacitly acknowledged Dr Astrov's dictum that a woman can be a man's friend only after being first an acquaintance and then a mistress. Lika felt bitter, however, that Masha now preferred her painter friends, Drozdova and Khotiaintseva, to her. She stayed with Anton at Melikhovo for seven periods of three to eight days from May to August. They also met when Anton ventured to Moscow. She became once again chief aspirant: 13 June 1897… I know that if my letter is to interest you it has to breathe civic grief or lament on the unwashed Russian peasant. What can I do if I'm not as intellectual as Mme Glebova? By the way, here is an indispensable novelty for you: there is a new face paint which neither water nor kisses can wash off! Pass it on to the appropriate person. 17 June. Do I have to keep looking for you? If you want I can come and see you this evening, at Levitan's [in Moscow]. 24 June. Divine Anton, you stop me sleeping. I couldn't get away from you all night. Keep calm, you were cold and proper as ever.17 Lika realized that Anton really would go into exile when summer ended. She had no money, and retreated to her family's estate. On 5 July she offered a meeting; a week later, from Moscow, she invited herself to Melikhovo: 'You see how I love you, why don't you stay?' When Anton finally risked a journey to see Suvorin in Petersburg at the end of July, Lika saw him off. The finality of the coming separation sank in. On 1 August Lika sent the longest letter she had written to him: You frightened me by telling me at the station that you would leave
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soon. Is it true or not? I must see you before your departure. I must sate my eyes and ears on you for a whole year. What will become of me if you've gone before I get back?… It is as though the last lew years of my life had not existed and the old Reinheit purity] you so prize in women, or rather in girls!, had come back… I'm hors 1 inn ours. If I had two or three thousands, I'd go abroad with you,md I'm sure I wouldn't get in your way at all… Really I deserve y little more consideration from you than that joking-ironic attitude I get. If you knew how little I feel like joking sometimes. Well, goodbye. Tear this letter up and don't show it to Masha. 1 he letter was filed by Masha. Anton's tone, however, turned tactful And tender.
I In- Suvorins had gone on holiday to Franzensbad. From there they urged Anton to move abroad. Anna Suvorina opened Anton's li ttcr to her husband. 'But I didn't find out what I most wanted to know, when you're coming to see us.'8 She wrote again, on paper with a picture of a man eyeing a streetwalker. 'I seem to have a pi 1 monition that you will come! and so you and I shall go wild once t month. Don't fear the doctors, they lie.' She proposed a journey to I Ac (iomo with her children: Boria would teach him to bicycle, and Ntistia would flirt. Suvorin was heading back to Petersburg: the only • tin he had in Franzensbad was talking to Potapenko's daughter. He
