Pink cupids play on her pretty cheeks.
'I love you!' he continues … 'As soon as I saw you, I realized what I was living for, and what the goal of my existence was! It is life with you or complete non-existence! My dear! Marya Ivanovna! Is it yes or no? Marya! Marya Ivanovna … I love you .. . Manechka . . . Answer me or I will die! Yes or no?'
She lifts her large eyes up to him. She wants to tell him 'yes'. She opens her little mouth wide.
'Aagh!' she shrieks.
Racing across his snow-white collar are two big bedbugs, trying to outpace each other . .. Oh, what horror!! 17
In 1883 the proprietor of The Spectator could afford to start the journal up again, but again it only survived for a few months. However, Chekhov was its main contributor during its second incarnation. By this time its former secretary, Chekhov's eldest brother Alexander, had left Moscow. He initially moved back down to Taganrog with his common-law wife Anna Ivanovna on what would be just one of the many stops on his peripatetic career, and in November 1882 Chekhov sent him an update on family affairs:
Nikolka [Nikolai] has gone to Voskresensk with Maria, it's Misha's name-day, Father is sleeping, Mother is praying, Auntie's thinking about herbs, Anna is washing dishes and is about to bring down the chamberpot, I am writing and wondering how many times tonight my whole body will start twitching for daring to try to be a writer. I'm getting on with my medical studies . .. There's an operation every day. Tell Anna Ivanovna that the old paper- boy who sold the Spectator has died in hospital from prostate cancer. We're just carrying on quietly as usual, reading, writing, hanging around in the evenings, drinking the odd glass of vodka, listening to music and singing, et cetera .. .18
Chekhov was certainly kept busy by his medical studies during the day, while the need to earn money meant that much of his spare time was spent sitting at his desk scribbling diverse stories and sketches, without any guarantee that they would be published. In the autumn of 1881 he had started writing the occasional review and proved to be an incisive critic. Unlike swooning audiences everywhere else in Europe, he was not very impressed with the doyenne of the French stage Sarah Bernhardt ('la grande Sarah') who came to Russia on tour with the Comedie Francaise. Her Adrienne Lecouvreur (in Scribe and Legouve's play) was moving, Chekhov argued, but too mannered and narcissistic to bring the emotional Russian audience to tears. A Russian production of Hamlet at the first private theatre in Moscow in 1882 met with greater approval from Chekhov the critic.
As well as going to the theatre, Chekhov also enjoyed hearing music.
He went to see Glinka's A Life for the Tsar at the Bolshoi with his sister in his first winter in Moscow, and in November 1881 got to know the Spanish virtuoso violinist and composer Pablo Sarasate during his Russian tour (having perhaps already met him when he had played in Taganrog). A few weeks later Sarasate sent Chekhov his photograph from Rome, writing to him in Italian: 'To my dear friend Doctor Antonio Chekhonte, Pablo Sarasate. Rome, Piazza Borghese … With love.'19 Maybe it was Sarasate who inspired the parodic story 'The Sinner from Toledo', which Chekhov published in The Spectator that December under the heading 'translated from the Spanish'. Chekhov was good at cod-Latin, but he did not know a word of Spanish, and he never went anywhere near Spain.
Much of the music Chekhov heard was at home. In June 1882 he and Nikolai went to the national exhibition of art and industry that was held in Moscow and were particularly struck by a demonstration given in the piano section. The performer was Pyotr Shostakovsky, a Moscow musician who founded the Russian Philharmonic Society and conducted his own orchestra. Shostakovsky dazzled the Chekhov brothers with his performance of a rhapsody by his teacher Liszt, and Nikolai was so taken with it that he started to play it several times a day. Some times he played to Shostakovsky himself, who became a family friend. Nikolai had inherited his father's musical gifts and taught himself the violin as well the piano. To judge from his repertoire (apart from Liszt, he was very fond of the Chopin nocturnes), he was extremely competent.
Chekhov was particularly close at this time to his brother Nikolai. Before his sad descent into alcoholism and his subsequent fatal illness, Nikolai had everything to look forward to. His prodigious artistic talents promised success as a serious painter, and were also recognized by regular commissions from journals like The Alarm Clock. His friends were to become some of the most important figures in the Russian art scene. Two of them also became friends of Anton. First of all there was the painter Levitan, with whom Chekhov shared an almost identical approach to landscape, the prime source of lyrical inspiration to both of them. The painting of the River Istra in summer time which Levitan gave Chekhov in 1885 was to follow him wherever he moved, the canvas finally settling along with its owner in Yalta. The course of Chekhov's friendship with Levitan was not always smooth, but there
Chekhov and his brother, Nikolai, February 1882
were few people to whom he was closer. The loss of his letters to Levitan leaves a huge hole in his correspondence. In 1891, in a letter to his sister, Chekhov was thrilled to report Levitan's first major success after seeing his canvas 'Quiet Monastery' exhibited in St Petersburg. It is this same painting (with a few details changed) which Yulia Lapteva is moved by in 'Three Years', Chekhov's masterly 1895 story of Moscow merchant life:
Yulia stopped in front of a small landscape and looked at it dispassionately. In the foreground there was a little river, a timber bridge over it, a path on the other side disappearing into dark grass, then some woods on the right hand side and a bonfire near it: no doubt people were watching over the horses pasturing for the night. In the distance an evening sunset burned.
Yulia imagined going over the bridge herself, then along the path, further and further, with everything quiet all around, corncrakes calling sleepily and the fire flickering in the distance. And for some reason it suddenly seemed to her that she had seen those clouds which stretched
out over the red part of the sky, the forest and the field long ago and many times over; she felt completely alone, and it made her want to go walking down that path further and further and further; and the reflection of something eternal and unearthly hovered around the place where the evening sun was setting.20
Another of Nikolai's friends was the architect Franz (Fyodor) Shekhtel, who would go on to create Moscow's most fabulous Art Nouveau buildings in the early 1900s. Among these was the extraordinary house he designed for the merchant millionaire Stepan Ryabushinsky, where Chekhov's friend Maxim Gorky was later virtually imprisoned by Stalin in the 1930s. Shekhtel remained more Nikolai's friend, but his connection with Chekhov was long-lasting. In 1895 Shekhtel designed the little house in the garden at Melikhovo where Chekhov wrote The Seagull, and in 1902 he received a commission to convert the old theatre on Kamergersky Lane as a permanent home for the Moscow Art Theatre. After Chekhov's death he designed the new library building in Taganrog, which was named after the donor of a large part of its collection.
Nikolai never lived to fulfil his artistic promise, but before he went into terminal decline, he illustrated many of his younger brother's early stories, and some evocative photographs of them taken in the early 1880s commemorate their collaboration. The brothers are captured posing in a well-appointed room with heavy Victorian furniture, long drapes and lighted candles, both neatly turned out in jackets and ties. The bespectacled Nikolai is seated at a small table looking at the large sheet of paper he is holding in one hand, with a paintbrush in the other.
