Carlo, where Chekhov tasted the thrills and dangers of gambling, and managed not to succumb to them, unlike so many of his compatriots. In this Chekhov was indeed unusual. Pushkin gambled away his poetry, Tolstoy gambled away his house and Dostoevsky gambled away everything he had, but Chekhov was able to walk away, glad nevertheless to have tried his luck a little. He was certainly not immune to fine living, but the 'roulette-style luxury' of the French Corniche reminded him of a luxurious WC. 'There is something hanging in the air which you feel offends your sense of decency,' he wrote to his family; it was something which 'vulgarizes nature, the sound of the sea, and the moon'.44
Having been almost continuously on the road for the previous twelve months, Chekhov felt slightly jaded by the time he arrived on the C6te d'Azur. After the privations of travelling in Siberia the previous summer in the most austere conditions possible, it was something of a shock now to stay in luxury hotels and dine in smart restaurants in the manner to which Suvorin was accustomed. With the memory of the prison colony he had visited on Sakhalin clearly still in his mind, Chekhov was slightly nauseated by the amount of time people abroad seemed to spend eating and sleeping, and also by the richness of French cuisine, where every morsel seemed to be garnished with artichokes, truffles and nightingales' tongues. Writing home to his family, he concluded that it was much better in Siberia in that respect, since one generally never had any lunch or dinner there, or got any sleep, and he confessed that he had actually felt much better for it.
His squeamishness may also have been attributable to the fact that he was writing during the last week of Russian Orthodox Lent, knowing that devout believers such as his parents would have begun a final strict fast, in addition to the earlier relinquishing of meat, eggs, dairy products and alcohol. At midnight on Great Saturday would begin the joyful celebration of Easter – the biggest festival of the Russian year – accompanied by special Easter foods to break the fast, the exchange of painted eggs, family celebrations and the jubilant ringing of bells. Even for lapsed believers like Chekhov, Easter spent away from home was significant enough to him to be worthy of comment, and his
15 April letter to his family is headed 'the Monday of Passion Week'. On Palm Sunday, the day before, he had gone to the Russian church in Nice, and wrote to tell his family, knowing they would be interested, that as well as the usual lighted candles, the congregation had held proper palm leaves rather than the sprays of pussy willow used in Russia as a substitute. He also told his family that there were women singing in the choir, rather than young boys, which made the singing slightly 'operatic', but that they had given a magnificent rendition of a simple 'Our Father' and a Bortnyansky setting of the much-loved hymn 'The Assembly of the Angels'. Seeing people place foreign coins on the plate during the collection and hearing the church servitors speaking French was also a novelty.
Being able to go to an Orthodox church outside Russia was not to be taken for granted for most of the nineteenth century: the pious Gogol had nowhere to go during the winter he spent in Nice in 1844. Building an Anglican or a Lutheran church in Catholic countries was one thing (the English church in Nice was built in 1822), but the Vatican was clearly not keen for there to be places of worship built by the church it had been in feud with since the mid-eleventh century. The Church of Saints Nicholas and Alexandra in the Rue de Longchamps in Nice, which dates from the late 1850s, is in fact the oldest Russian Orthodox church outside Russia. It was built at the instigation of Tsar Nicholas Fs widow, the Dowager Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, who had spent the winter in Nice in 1856, the year after her husband died.45 Construction began while the city (Nizza as it was then called, the name still used by Russians) was still in the domain of the Italian Counts of Savoy, and the Roman Catholic authorities would not allow either a belfry or a cemetery to be attached to the church.46 They also insisted that the building should look like a private residence, which explains why Chekhov had to go upstairs to the first floor to enter the church proper. The challenges posed by the restrictions, and communication problems between the architect in Russia who designed the church (believing it would be bigger) and the French architect who actually built it, resulted in the single large room being dwarfed by the ornately carved iconostasis made out of oak which was brought all the way from St Petersburg, along with a sixteenth-century icon of the Vladimir Mother of God personally donated by the Dowager Empress. The only concession apparently won by the Russians was the construction above
the nave of a sky-blue cupola, the symbol of heaven one traditionally finds in Orthodox churches. The Church of Saints Nicholas and Alexandra was consecrated in January 1860 – the month in which Chekhov was born.
Chekhov's last stop in Europe in 1891 was Paris, where he marvelled at how tall the Eiffel Tower was, saw some naked women at the Folies Bergeres (or some similar establishment), got tangled up in political demonstrations, and felt a rush of homesickness when forced to celebrate Easter at the Russian Embassy church. It was the first Easter he had spent abroad. Although he jocularly referred to the West as Sodom and Gomorrah when he returned to Russia, Chekhov certainly enjoyed himself. He was not one of those Russians stricken with intense homesickness the minute he stepped on foreign soil. All the same, and notwithstanding his broken pince-nez left behind in Russia, without which he was short-sighted and undoubtedly missed a lot, he did not find French painters as good as Russian ones, certainly not in the genre of landscape painting. Levitan had the edge, as far as he was concerned.47
He next visited Western Europe in the autumn of 1894, again with Suvorin. They were abroad for about a month and their hastily put-together itinerary this time included Abbazia, Trieste, Milan and Genoa, along with some of the cities they had visited before: Vienna, Venice, Nice, Paris and Berlin. From the few, sparse letters he sent back home from this trip it is clear that Chekhov did not become any more enamoured of Western Europe the second time around. He enjoyed the beer, and saw some Italian actors perform in a stage version of Crime and Punishment which brought him to the depressing conclusion that Russian acting by comparison did not even have lemonade in it, let alone any alcohol. But he seems to have most enjoyed visiting a crematorium in Milan and following the labyrinth of quiet paths in Genoa's Cimitero di Staglieno. Situated on a hillside planted with cedars and cypresses outside the city, the cemetery's ornate tombs and marble sculptures were justly celebrated, and Chekhov was as amazed as other visitors to find not only lifesize statues of the deceased, but also of their distraught widows, mothers-in-law and children.48 Perhaps he had developed a fondness for such places, having spent time while he was growing up wandering through Taganrog's leafy cemetery, older even than the Genoa cemetery, and similarly full of marble tombs and
statues erected by the town's wealthy Greek and Italian merchants. Suvorin may have been bemused to travel with a companion who preferred the outdoors to the priceless relics of ancient civilizations; he commented that what Chekhov had been most interested in during their trips abroad was cemeteries and circuses.49
Chapter 7 MELIKHOVO I A Place in the Country
Conversation on another planet about the earth in a thousand years time: do you remember that white tree?… (a silver birch).
Notebook No. 1
Whatever sort of roses I plant, they all turn out to be white.
Comment to Maria Chekbova
It was snowing on the February day in 1903 when Chekhov wrote to tell Stanislavsky about his vision for the first act of The. Cherry Orchard, his play about the death of old Russia. 'Blossoming cherry trees can be seen through the windows, an entire garden of white,' he wrote from Yalta, 'and the ladies will be in white dresses.'1 Perhaps he was thinking back to his first February in Yalta four years earlier when the temperate Crimean climate had brought the cherry trees there into early blossom. But it is more probable that he was thinking nostalgically
