publications, while at the same time maintaining a close relationship with Suvorin, the proprietor of Russia's most right-wing newspaper, was a tribute to his ability to maintain independence and freedom in a suffocatingly small world dominated by narrow factions, but it did not go down well with New Times. The Russian Gazette, founded in 1863, was selling at least as many copies as New Times in the 1890s, and Chekhov enjoyed an easygoing friendship with its publisher, Vasily Sobolevsky; he liked the paper very much. By the time that 'Ward No. 6' was published in Russian Thought, Chekhov had patched up his differences with that journal's wealthy merchant owner, Vukol Lavrov, to whom he had fired off his impassioned refutation of the journal's allegation that he lacked principles, and he became particularly close at the end of his life to Viktor Goltsev, the journal's editor. Indeed, relations were to become so cordial that Chekhov later became part of the editorial team. His nostalgia for Moscow and the Russian winters grew acute when he was surrounded by Yalta's evergreen foliage during his final years of exile, and it was Russian Thought which published his most famous story, 'The Lady with the Little Dog', in 1899. In his description of Gurov's return to Moscow from his autumn trip to Yalta, Chekhov's prose was as autobiographical as it would ever be:
When the first snow falls, and when you climb back into a sleigh for the first time, how wonderful it is to see the ground and the rooftops all white; the air is all soft and lovely, and it makes you start remembering the time when you were young. When they are clothed in white rime, old lindens and birches have a good-natured sort of appearance; they seem far more endearing than cypresses and palms, and being near them dispels any desire to think of sea and mountains. Gurov was a Muscovite and he arrived back in Moscow on a wonderful frosty day; when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves and walked down Petrovka, and when
he heard the church bells ringing on Saturday evening, his recent trip and the places he had visited completely lost their charm for him .. .2
'Petrovka', or Petrovskaya, was one of Moscow's most fashionable shopping streets, and very close to Malaya Dmitrovka, where Chekhov rented a flat in the summer of 1899.
If Chekhov pined for Moscow above all when he was in Yalta, it was because only in Moscow did he fire on all cylinders. It was where he had family and where most of his friends lived; it was where he received his medical training and subsequently practised; it was where his literary career started and was increasingly based in the 1890s, and it was where he had close ties with the theatre. Starting in 1898, when the Moscow Art Theatre first staged The Seagull, Chekhov even had a theatre that more or less understood what he was trying to achieve as a dramatist. Typically, this was just when he had to leave Moscow and relocate to the Crimea for the sake of his health. When he returned for the first time since moving to Yalta the following summer, a private command performance of The Seagull was put on specially for him on 1 May. A week later a photographer preserved for posterity the image of Chekhov reading Uncle Vanya to the assembled cast before it went into rehearsal. Seated close by the author was Olga Knipper, with whom he was about to embark on a romance.
II The Art Theatre
A few months after Suvorin had brought his gravely ill friend back to his suite at the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel after their abortive attempt to dine at the Hermitage in March 1897, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko sat down in one of its private dining rooms to have the famous lunch which launched the Moscow Art Theatre. The lunch turned into dinner and Stanislavsky suggested they leave the smoke-filled room and repair to his dacha just outside the city to continue the conversation. What resulted was a decision to found a
new kind of theatre. The amateur actor and director, scion of one of the great merchant families in Moscow, made a good team with the drama teacher and playwright. The company they created in October 1898 finally injected the life into Russian theatre that it so badly needed. Picking up on the new approach to the stage that had begun with Wagner, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko elevated drama to high art, investing it with the capacity not only to uplift, but to transform and enlighten, its audiences.
Initially, the educational aspect of their activities was emphasized in the word 'accessible' being part of the company's original title, but the Moscow police objected to their early attempts to draw in audiences from the working classes and it had to be dropped.3 The word 'artistic' (typically contracted in English to 'art') remained, however, serving as a reminder of the idealistic goals nurtured by the theatre's founders. Going to the theatre suddenly became a serious business: auditorium lights were no longer kept burning during performances so that audience members could inspect each other; they were dimmed, forcing spectators to concentrate from within the blackness on what was unfolding on stage. The decor of the auditorium was similarly austere -a marked change from the gilt and velvet of traditional theatres. Productions were properly rehearsed, and a production method pioneered which placed the emphasis on ensemble work. For the first time in the Russian theatre stagings were conceptual, their style and atmosphere determined by a director. The story of the Moscow Art Theatre is by now the stuff of legend.
Chekhov's The Seagull, first performed on 17 December 1898, was the Moscow Art Theatre's sixth production, but only the second to score a success. It saved the theatre from plummeting to financial disaster in its first season. After the scandalous first production of The Seagull by the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg, Chekhov was reluctant to risk his play turning into a travesty a second time. In the end, he had no cause to regret giving his agreement after Nemirovich-Danchenko had pleaded with him twice, and his last two plays were written specifically with the Moscow Art Theatre in mind. Before Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, however, came Uncle Vanya, which had been written a few years earlier in Melikhovo and initially promised to the Maly Theatre. Chekhov was in Yalta when the premiere took place, and it was in Yalta that he first saw the Moscow Art Theatre production when the company
came on tour in the spring of 1900. He was also in Yalta on 11 January 1902, when a special matinee performance of the play was given for the hundreds of Russian doctors who had gathered as delegates to the Eighth Pirogov Congress to discuss problems of national health care.
Dr Astrov in Uncle Vanya, perhaps Chekhov's most famous physician character, was partly inspired by his friend Pyotr Kurkin, a zemstvo doctor he had got to know during the Melikhovo years – Chekhov had borrowed his friend's maps for the actor playing Astrov to use in the Moscow Art Theatre production.4 Dr Kurkin was responsible for correlating disease with geographical factors as part of his work as a zemstvo doctor, and it was only a short step from poring over maps to pondering the looming ecological crisis. 'Russian woods are groaning under the axe,' exclaims
Astrov in the first art, 'millions of trees are dying, the dwellings of animals and birds are being ravaged, rivers are silting up and going dry, beautiful landscapes are disappearing for ever, and all because lazy human beings can't be bothered to bend over and pick up firewood from the ground.'5
Chekhov had also put a great deal of himself into Astrov and was extremely concerned that the play should make a good impression on his medical colleagues at the Pirogov Congress, as is evident from the increasingly anxious letters he sent to Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper in the days running up to the performance, containing instructions to the actors. Writing from Yalta on the day itself, cut off from his colleagues and friends, he complained to Olga that he felt as if he were exiled in Siberia. Uncle Vanya was a huge success with the doctors, of course; some of them even cried, and one woman had to be carried out in hysterics. Zemstvo doctors from the 'remotest corners of Russia' sent Chekhov a telegram afterwards to assure him that they would remember 11 January for the rest of their lives.6
It is ironic that tuberculosis was high on the agenda at the Eighth Pirogov Congress. In 1899, two years after Chekhov was officially diagnosed with the disease, a 'Pirogov Tuberculosis Commission' had been set up, chaired by
