The poet got out of the water, not suspecting anything untoward, and set off home, laughing wildly. In a few days he went to Petersburg: after visiting editorial offices, he infected all the poets there with pessimism too, and from that time onwards all our poets have been writing dark and gloomy poems.75
By the second summer at Melikhovo, Chekhov had already tired of the endless numbers of guests filling the small house, several to a room, with an overflow in the barn. In 1894 he commissioned his architect friend Franz Shekhtel to build an annexe in the garden, a clapboard cottage with a sloping roof and a balcony, consisting of all of two rooms. The Chekhovs now had their very own Flugell It was originally intended as guest accommodation but usually ended up accommodating Chekhov himself, plus a writing desk. It was here that he famously wrote The Seagull, and where he sequestered himself when he needed to escape from all the people in the house. Iosif Braz, the Petersburg artist commissioned by the Tretyakov Gallery to paint Chekhov's portrait, came to stay for a month in June 1897. Even after all that time, he had got no nearer to capturing Chekhov's elusive nature on canvas. Both artist and subject were dissatisfied and agreed there should be another attempt.
Not all the guests at Melikhovo were unwelcome, of course. Before they fell out over Chekhov's indiscretions in 'The Grasshopper' (in particular a thinly disguised artist character, satirically portrayed), Levitan was someone Chekhov was glad to see. With the resumption of their friendly relations a few years later, Levitan's visits to Melikhovo also resumed. Among Chekhov's many female friends, most of whom were hopelessly in love with him, Lidia Mizinova continued to occupy a special place. She was, in fact, adored by all the Chekhovs, and particularly by Anton Pavlovich. 'The fair Lika', as she was known by everybody, made her first visit to Melikhovo early on in May 1892. At the end of March Chekhov had written her a long, typically playful letter, in which he used one of his own pet names for her, inspired by Sappho:
I've no money Melita. It's a bit smoky. We can't open any little windows. Father has been burning incense. I've been stinking of turpentine. And there are smells coming from the kitchen. My head aches. I don't have any solitude. But worst of all – Melita is not here, and there is no chance of seeing her in the next day or two .. . Yours from head to toe, with all my soul and all my heart, to the gravestone, to oblivion, to stupefaction, to insanity, Antoine Tchekhoff.76
Lika and Chekhov had become close at the beginning of the 1890s, just before his trip to Sakhalin, and at Melikhovo they drew even closer. But when it became clear that Chekhov was not ultimately going to reciprocate Lika's feelings, she turned in despair to a mutual writer friend, with whom she had an affair. Ignaty Potapenko was married, and he refused to leave his wife and do the decent thing when Lika became pregnant. He ended up abandoning her. Lika's relationship with Chekhov was never quite the same afterwards, but she was nevertheless one of the few people he wanted to see after the Seagull fiasco. The letters she wrote to him over the course of their relationship make sad reading, and Chekhov revealed his coldest, most callous side in his prolonged silences. Lika was a talented musician (she would accompany Potapenko when he sang Tchaikovsky songs during their stays at Melikhovo), but she failed to become either an opera singer or an actress. She was indirectly immortalized instead in the character of Nina Zarechnaya in The Seagull. The magpie Chekhov also pilfered from Lika's biography when he wrote his story 'Ariadna', about a young woman whose affair with a married man leads to her being abandoned in Europe. Written at roughly the same time as The Seagull, it is one of his more misogynistic stories.
One of the very last visitors to Melikhovo was the actress Olga Knipper, the woman who was finally able to capture Chekhov's heart. They met briefly in the autumn of 1898, at a rehearsal in Moscow, just before Chekhov headed off to spend his first winter in Yalta. Olga Knipper's father was a German factory manager from Alsace who had relocated to Russia as a young man, while her mother came from the German-speaking Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. Mr and Mrs Knipper led Russian lives and brought up their three children, Konstantin, Olga and Vladimir, as true Muscovites. Olga's father had been as horrified by the idea of his only daughter becoming an actress
as the pious father in Chekhov's story 'Requiem'. But his unexpected death in 1894 when Olga was twenty- five opened the way for her to pursue her dreams. After three years of drama classes with Vladimir Nemirovich- Danchenko at the Philharmonic School in Moscow, she graduated in 1898, and was immediately taken on by her former teacher and Konstantin Stanislavsky when they formed the Moscow Art Theatre that autumn. One of the first plays they started rehearsing for their inaugural season was The Seagull, and Olga was given the part of Arkadina. On 9 September 1898, Olga's thirtieth birthday, Chekhov came along for the first time to a rehearsal. Before heading off south to Yalta he came along to two more rehearsals, by which time his head had definitely been turned by the vivacious Miss Knipper.
The death of Pavel Egorovich during Chekhov's first winter in Yalta, coupled with his illness which required long periods spent in a warm climate, spelled the end of the Melikhovo period in the family's life. The newly widowed Evgenia Yakovlevna had fled Melikhovo following the unexpected death of her husband, and in time would relocate to Yalta to live with her son. Chekhov came back to Melikhovo one last time the following summer, in order to tie up loose ends before the property was put on the market, and to complete the construction of his last school. It was a sombre time, and Chekhov's mood was not helped by the unseasonably cold weather and the demise of his beloved dachshunds (probably suffering from rabies, Brom died in June 1899,77 and Quinine died a few weeks later probably also from rabies, having been bitten by a yard dog).78 The three days in May when Olga Knipper came down from Moscow to stay at Melikhovo were an exception, however. Although we have no record of how they spent their time, it is safe to say that Olga Leonardovna and Anton Pavlovich cemented their friendship during her stay; their correspondence began soon after she left. A romance soon blossomed.
Chapter 8
A SEASON ON THE COTE D'AZUR
I Nostalgia in Nice
I'd be sitting by an open window in the evening, you know, all on my own, and music would start playing and I'd suddenly get so homesick, and I think I would have given anything just to go home . . .
The Bishop
The severe haemorrhaging from his lungs, which occurred in March 1897, forced Chekhov to face up to the fact that he was definitely suffering from tuberculosis. Suvorin had come to Moscow from St Petersburg for a few days and Chekhov caught the train up from Melikhovo to join him for a Saturday night dinner at the Hermitage, which was still his favourite restaurant. But just after they had sat down at their table, blood suddenly started pouring out of Chekhov's mouth. All he had managed to order before being hurried away in a sleigh back to Suvorin's hotel was ice. Chekhov was understandably very scared. His brother and aunt had both died from tuberculosis in the last ten years, and he interpreted it as an ominous sign that he too was now bleeding from the right lung.
He was nevertheless still unwilling to give in to the idea of being seriously ill. He had been exceptionally busy since the beginning of the year, and early in the morning two days later he discharged himself from Suvorin's hotel before his friend was even up, saying he needed to deal with his correspondence and arrange meetings. But after another haemorrhage at six o'clock the next morning, he was taken by the doctor who had been summoned to his hotel to be treated in a specialist clinic, where he remained for over two weeks. The diagram by his bed
showed his lungs shaded in blue, their upper parts coloured in red. It was in keeping with Chekhov's character to make light of the serious nature of his situation, but his frightened reaction to the news that the ice on the Moscow River had moved is revealing. Peasants he treated for tuberculosis would regularly tell him: 'It won't do
