Elected an honorary member of the literary section of the Imperial Academy of Sciences; the first volumes of the Marx edition of his collected works are published; spends part of autumn in Moscow; second long stay in Nice
First performance of Three Sisters at the Moscow Art Theatre; marries Olga Knipper later in the year in Moscow
Spends summer in Moscow, partly at Lyubimovka
Spends part of spring and summer in Moscow, partly in Nara; returns to Moscow to attend rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard
Attends first performance of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre; worsening condition of his health leads to decision to seek treatment in Germany; dies in Badenweiler on 15 July (2 July according to Russian calendar)
PROLOGUE: CHEKHOV THE WANDERER
In the last months of his Hfe, Chekhov pondered the subject of a new play he wanted to write. He told his wife, Olga Knipper, that the hero of the play would be a scientist who either suffers from unrequited love or who is betrayed by the woman he loves. Chekhov had set his previous plays in provincial Russia. As the Moscow Art Theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko rightly pointed out, this gave him more potential for lyricism. Chekhov was most inspired by the open spaces of his native landscape, and even if landscape and open spaces cannot easily protrude into the dramas themselves, they function as an important backdrop, providing both the author and his characters with room to breathe. In his projected last play, Chekhov planned to take this dimension one step further by having his scientist go on a journey to the far north. That is where the crucial third act would take place, and Chekhov imagined an icebound ship and the scientist standing alone on deck. Surrounded by silence and the majesty of the night-time sky, the scientist would suddenly see the shadow of his beloved flitting past against the backdrop of the northern lights.1
This embryonic idea is highly revealing. First of all it shows us Chekhov's creative mind in vibrant form even if the shell that housed it was gradually ceasing to function. One wonders what Stanislavsky would have made of a play in which there was no opportunity to introduce naturalistic detail. The constant swatting of mosquitoes that Stanislavsky introduced into his stagings in pursuit of atmosphere had led Chekhov to vow he would write a play in which the main character would specifically state how wonderful it was that there were no mosquitoes!2 More importantly, however, Chekhov's idea for his next play reveals a great deal about his own preoccupations. Apart from the obvious connection with the extraordinary journey he undertook to Siberia in 1890, it is clear that he was thinking about his contemporary,
the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had sailed his ship to eastern Siberia in 1893 and waited until it was completely enclosed by ice. Convinced that the ice of the polar sea drifted eastwards, Nansen was going to let his icebound ship be carried back to Norway by the currents – which it was, albeit three years later. Chekhov's plan to go to Norway himself in autumn 1904 to research his idea was perhaps delusional given the state of his health that year.3 In the event, his only journey abroad that year was to a spa town in the Black Forest to die. But his undiminished thirst for adventure becomes even more poignant seen in the light of events. He did not write an obituary of Nansen as he had done for Nikolai Przhevalsky, the great Russian explorer whom he admired equally, for the simple reason that Nansen (who was just one year younger than he) was still fighting fit, and would outlive him by twenty-six years. The fact that he named the Siberian hunting dog he was given in 1897 Nansen, however, indicates how much the explorer had caught his imagination. In 1898, Nansen was presented with the Order of St Stanislav when he came to St Petersburg (the same order that Chekhov received), and later had cause to become directly involved with Russian affairs.
Chekhov's early contraction of tuberculosis forced him to adopt a restricted lifestyle which has obscured the fact that he was a man with a nomad's blood in his veins who longed for adventure, and to be free. 'Besides talent and material, other things are needed, no less vital,' he wrote in January 1889; 'the first necessity is maturity, and after that a sense of personal freedom; this feeling has only very recently begun to grow in me.'4 Even when he was already quite ill, he yearned to see the Sahara, and then did his best to persuade his wife that they should travel to the more unusual destination of Scandinavia rather than the French Riviera. After the Russo-Japanese War started at the beginning of 1904, he thought about going to the Far East to offer his services as a doctor to the sick and wounded, but was himself dead by the time of his planned departure. Even in his last few breathless days in Badenweiler he dreamed of going to Como and seeing the Italian lakes. It is characteristic of Chekhov that he once said that he felt terribly cowardly when he was most successful and braver when he was unlucky. But the bold and almost reckless streak in this self-effacing, self-controlled man, which had led him to travel to Sakhalin, symbolizes the contradictions and oddities of his life.
The contradiction between the image Chekhov projected of himself, whether consciously or not, and the reality of his personality is one we can find throughout his work. As with his characters, there was often a gap between the sentiments he professed and the feelings he actually experienced. Even during his lifetime Chekhov gained a reputation for being elusive, withdrawn and rather cold. Certain comments we find scattered in the thousands of letters he wrote over the course of his life, and his love of the empty steppe suggest that he was in some respects a loner in the mould of someone like Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who was also endowed with artistic gifts. Thesiger fell in love with the desert, exhilarated by its sense of space. Chekhov fell in love with the enormous expanses of the Russian landscape, particularly the steppe, and the area beyond Lake Baikal in Siberia. Thesiger wrote about feeling in harmony with the past, 'travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across the deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills'.5 The theme of continuity appears again and again in Chekhov's stories, and always connected with the landscape. The bishop in his penultimate story dies imagining that he is happily striding through the open countryside in bright sunshine, as free as a bird. Chekhov may have largely lost his religious faith as an adult, but in his own dream of wanting to leave home with just a bundle and set off to find the real life, he was following in the hallowed traditions of the stranniki, the religious wanderers from all walks of life who went on pilgrimages to visit holy places, walking great distances, usually barefoot, and who were such a distinctive feature of the life of old Russia.
The inscription engraved on the signet ring which Chekhov inherited from his father seems to sum up the creative tension which informs his life, that is to say, the desire to live in the community and contribute to it, and the desire to run away from it. 'Odinokomu vezde pustinya' after all can be interpreted both negatively: 'everywhere is a desert to the lonely person' – and positively: 'the desert is everywhere for the solitary person'. As Hugh Pyper has commented in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, the desert offers both asylum and threat: 'Life- threatening yet liberating in its unbounded spaces and solitudes, for the biblical tradition it stands in contrast to the orderliness of the city, which may represent security but also can be claustrophobic, violent and decadent… The desert is a liminal space
where constraints of social life are stripped away and both destruction and transformation are possible.'6 Chekhov loved being with his friends and family, but he always had an aching need to be on his own, on one occasion expressing a desperate desire to move to the North Pole to get away from his incessant visitors. Despite his sociability, several of his contemporaries described him as actually being quite unsociable, and he himself confessed to having a reclusive tendency.7 It is not a coincidence that fishing was one of his favourite occupations, and that he had such a fondness for monks and people of the church. Even when he was in Siberia, he confessed that he found it 'far more interesting to sit in a carriage or in your room alone with your thoughts than to be with
