noted receiving a purse from his son, but did not forget to add 'without money'. These items were all transported back to Moscow by Russians returning home from the Pension Russe. The time-honoured tradition of sending things to Russia with people travelling there is thus not merely a recent phenomenon, but it is – and was – sometimes a haphazard business, as emerges from a humorous letter Chekhov sent Masha in December:
Ma chere et bien aimable Marie, if you are brought or sent something completely worthless, don't express surprise and say that it was not worth sending such rubbish all those thousands of miles. The fact is that the chance to send things comes very suddenly; you usually find out that someone is going back to Russia by chance and so you send whatever you can manage to grab from the desk, like a magnifying glass or a cheap pen … A certain Miss Zenzinova is going to get in touch with you next week, she is the young daughter of Zenzinov the tea merchant. She is going to bring you something, but please don't open the parcel in front of her because she will see that she has brought things which are not valuable all that way and will be offended. The Zenzinovs stayed in the Pension Russe and gave me tea in the evening … Be friendly to the girl, i.e., thank her for the hospitality which I received from her parents in Nice, say a couple of nice things to her and her Papa will give you 1/4 pound of tea for your trouble.
Put the magnifying glass on my desk.56
By the end of March 1898, knowing that this was the time for his flowers to spring up again, Chekhov was longing to be back home looking after his garden. He wrote to Masha to ask her to put canes by the lilies and peonies so that they did not get trodden on. 'We've got two lilies,' he reminded her, 'one in front of your window and the other near the white rose, on the way to the narcissi.' He was also concerned about his roses. 'Don't prune the roses before I return,' he wrote a little later, 'just cut off the stems which have gone mouldy over the winter or aren't looking healthy; but be careful when you cut them, and bear in mind that some unhealthy-looking stems recover. The fruit trees need to be painted with lime. It wouldn't be a bad idea to put lime on the earth underneath the cherry trees either.'57 It was already hot on the French Riviera in early April, but in Moscow there was still snow after a long, hard winter. 'We are still using sleighs,' Masha wrote back, 'the snow is melting slowly and today we had new snow falling for a good half of the day. There is frost in the morning, and you can walk on the ice on the pond behind the red gates. There is no way one could even begin to think about the roses and the lilies and you will probably have to do the pruning and put up the canes yourself; the snow has got to melt first and there is still a lot of it about.'58
Chekhov spent his last mornings in Nice in 1898, not entirely
happily, in an artist's studio sitting in a green velvet chair wearing a black jacket and trousers and white tie, posing for a portrait that had been begun in Russia the previous summer. The 26-year-old painter Iosif Braz had come down to Nice to finish the painting for the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Chekhov quipped that it was a good likeness of him and his tie, but he still thought the expression made him look as if he had been sniffing horseradish.59 Just after a rainy Easter he left finally for Paris, longing now to be back home in Russia.
He returned to Nice for another prolonged visit in December 1900, again in pursuit of the chimerical dream of arresting the progress of his illness. This time he stayed for a month and a half rather than an entire winter, but was even less enthusiastic about the prospect of being abroad than before. A major factor now was his involvement, albeit mostly at a distance, with Olga Knipper. The success of their relationship was almost predicated on their living apart, but a large part of Chekhov's reluctance to return to Nice in December 1900 came from the thought of being so far away from Olga. Once again, Chekhov took a south-facing room with a balcony at the Pension Russe looking out into the garden, and immediately felt homesick. Even the large monkey puzzle tree which stood in front of his window reminded him of Olga, as she had one growing in front of her window in Moscow. Chekhov wrote twenty-two passionate love letters to her during the six weeks of his stay in Nice, and could not work out at first why he was not receiving any replies. He began wondering, with increasing indignation, why Olga had not been writing to him. 'Write to me, darling, don't be lazy,' he pleaded. 'You've got a pile of letters from me and I haven't had a single one from you. What have I done to make you angry?' A couple of weeks later the mystery was unravelled, when it turned out that Chekhov's life had inadvertently become entangled with that of a retired officer living in Nice. Andrei Chertkov had started receiving the love letters intended for Chekhov because their surnames were similar and the French postman had muddled them up. When the distinguished Russo-Turkish War veteran turned up one morning at the Pension Russe to hand the missing letters over to their rightful owner, Chekhov was relieved, but embarrassed that one had been opened. Chekhov reminded Olga of the need in future to spell out clearly Monsieur Antoine Tchekhoff, 9 Rue Gounod.60
When he returned to Nice for that last visit, he spent the first week
of his stay putting the final touches to Three Sisters, already in rehearsal at the Moscow Art Theatre. The major changes he now made to the last act included the addition of Masha's last words: 'Oh, how the music plays! They are leaving us; one of them has gone for good, never to return, and we will be left alone to start our lives again. We have to live … We have to live . ..' Was Chekhov reminded, when he wrote these lines, of the miserable days spent sequestered in his room at the Pension Russe while itinerant musicians played underneath his window back in October 1897? Perhaps they were indeed in the back of his mind as he reworked the poignant last act of the play, which ends with the sisters stoically facing up to the bleak reality of their lives while listening to rousing merry tunes played by a military band offstage. It was such a potent image that he returned to it two years later when he was writing his story 'The Bishop'. As the bishop in the story enters the last days of his life, he remembers the years he spent working abroad earlier in his career. Apart from sounds of the warm sea, he particularly recalls the homesickness he felt when a blind beggar girl came to sing about love underneath his window every day, accompanying herself on the guitar.61
Chekhov had wanted to go to Africa back in 1898, and he refused to give up on the idea when those plans did not work out. When he returned to Nice in 1900, he started planning a trip to Egypt. That idea was dropped in early January, but he and his friend Kovalevsky started thinking about Algiers again. This time bad weather intervened: Kovalevsky thought the sea was too rough to make a safe crossing and refused to go. A few weeks later it seemed that Chekhov's dream of seeing the Sahara was at last to become a reality, but in fact it proved again to be a mirage. Kovalevsky's last-minute qualms about rough seas (or perhaps in truth he feared the effects of the journey on Chekhov's precarious health) meant that they actually got on a ship going east, towards Italy, rather than south, towards Algeria.62 Like Dr Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Chekhov must have spent some time looking at a map and thinking about how hot it was in Africa at this time. The frequent references to his proposed journey to Africa in his letters home at this time are reminiscent of the way in which his three sisters repeatedly yearn to be in Moscow. One has the slight sense that Chekhov himself, deep down, doubted he would ever reach Africa, and that this exotic continent perhaps remained (like Moscow for Masha, Irina and Olga)
an ideal, a symbol – something to focus on in the face of the depressing reality of his increasing infirmity. In other words, Africa was like an escapist fantasy which the 40-year-old Chekhov clung to as if to will away thoughts of the disease which he knew was slowly killing him. The time he spent on the French Riviera did not lead to any improvement in his condition.
Chapter 9 THE RUSSIAN RIVIERA
I Yalta and the Romanovs
Nothing can be more charming than the sight of that white Yalta, seated at the head of a bay like a beautiful sultana bathing her feet in the sea, and sheltering her fair forehead from the sun under rocks festooned with verdure. Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus, amp;c, Adele and Ignace Xavier M.
