Professor V Shervinsky of the Moscow University medical school. In 1900 the fifteen members of the commission reported that about 350,000 people were dying from tuberculosis each year in Russia, and at the Eighth Congress it was advocated that their work be expanded to bring improvements in the living environments of the poor, among whom the disease mostly spread. After attending a tuberculosis conference in Berlin, Shervinsky organized a three-day conference in Moscow in May 1903.7 It all came sadly too late for Chekhov, who had little more than a year to live at this point.
Visiting Moscow a year after Chekhov's death on his way to Manchuria, the English critic Maurice Baring was able to attend a performance of Uncle Vanya. He declared unequivocally that the Moscow Art Theatre was, after the services at the Kremlin's Assumption Cathedral and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the most interesting place to visit. It was, he noted, almost the only thing in Russia which was organized. Uncle Vanya seemed to him to reflect 'the profound discontent of educated people with the manner in which they are governed', a discontent so 'hopeless and inconsistent as to lead to hysteria'. To this English visitor, who was vaguely
III
Part-Time Husband
reminded of Bernard Shaw minus the paradox and the extravagance, as he put it, the character Professor Serebryakov came across as a kind of Casaubon figure (from Eliot's Middlemarch), while his sultry wife Elena was 'a land mermaid, a middle class Pagan, not immoral but amoral, a passionless Cleopatra'. Chekhov had got heartily fed up with Stanislavsky's desire for his stagings to become hyper-realistic, but Bowra was impressed with the way Astrov killed flies on his cheek, and with other small details in the performance of Uncle Vanya that he attended, so that 'the sultry oppressiveness of the thundery day seems to reach us over from the footlights'. Baring also had some perceptive comments to make about Chekhov's dramatic technique, which he felt was important politically as well as artistically, 'even though politics are never directly mentioned':
What he leaves unsaid, what he suggests is far more potent and effectual than any harangue or polemical discussion. He shows the Russian soul crying out in the desert, he shows the hopelessness, the straining after impossible ideals, the people who have been longing for the dawn, and condemned to the twilight chiefly owing to their own weakness.8
On 25 May 1901 in Moscow came an event which most people had not expected: Chekhov's marriage. The seventeenth-century Church of the Exaltation of the Cross was chosen for the wedding ceremony, not only because it was small and out of the way, on a quiet back street in a rather nondescript part of town near the Moscow River where mostly merchants lived, but the priest, Father Nikolai, had officiated at the funeral of his father a year and a half earlier. For help with his wedding arrangements, Chekhov had turned to his brother Ivan as he always did where practical matters were concerned, and who knew Father Nikolai from the days when he taught at a school on the Arbat near to the church. Chekhov's sister had realized that marriage was on the cards. The day before the wedding, she had made clear her feelings in a letter sent from Yalta: 'Let me express my opinion about your marriage. I find the whole wedding process awful! And all that unnecessary stress wouldn't be good for you either… You'll always be able to get hitched… Tell that to your Knipschitz … You after all brought me up not to have prejudices!'9
The Church of the Exaltation of the Cross, Moscow, where Chekhov married Olga Knipper, May 1901
By the time the letter arrived, however, it was too late. Despite avowals that he had lost his faith, Chekhov was unwilling to follow the route proposed by his sister and cohabit as his elder brother had done. All the same, he did not want to attract attention to the fact that he was getting married, so there was no reception or party after the service. There were no guests, just the four statutory witnesses, and Chekhov informed his mother of the event by telegram on the day itself. The honeymoon was a health cure undertaken, on the recommendation of a doctor in Moscow, in a remote sanatorium in Aksyonovo, in the foothills of the Ural mountains, where the prescribed treatment was large doses of fermented mare's milk. Meanwhile, with numerous papers publicizing the news as it leaked out and also printing portraits of the happy couple,10 the hopes of numerous young women were crushed. Masha's painter friend Maria Drozdova wrote Chekhov an impassioned letter:
Dear, beloved Anton Pavlovich,
Goodness me, I was so disappointed by the news of your marriage. I was doing an oil painting at the time and my brushes and my palette went all over the place. I hadn't completely given up hope of marrying you, you know! I kept thinking that it was nothing serious with all the others, and that God would reward me for my modesty, but now my hopes have been dashed. How I hate Olga Leonardovna now! My jealousy has reached a state of frenzy. I cannot stomach seeing your dear, kind face, it's become so odious to me, and the thought of you and her together, for ever and ever, is just awful! The doors of your house are shut for me now. Oh, I am so unhappy! I am sobbing as I write these lines .. .u
Drozdova had been happy to meet Olga before, and written to Chekhov to tell him how much she had admired her black eyes, her slim figure and even her elegant little moustache, but that Chekhov had married her was insupportable.
Chekhov and Olga spent just over five weeks at the sanatorium in Aksyonovo before travelling together to Yalta. Six weeks later, in late August, Olga returned to Moscow to begin rehearsals for the next theatre season, and a month after that, Chekhov joined her. Nine months after its premiere, he finally saw Three Sisters for the first time. His presence in the theatre was electrifying for the actors performing before him, and when it became known to the audience as well, there
were clamours for him to take a bow. He reluctantly appeared on stage at the end of the second act, to be greeted by a tumultuous ovation which was repeated at the end of the performance. Chekhov was pleased with the staging, and joked that it was better than the play. He stayed in Moscow for six weeks, but eventually, at the end of October, had to leave his weeping wife and return alone to Yalta. 'My wife, who I have got used to and grown attached to, will stay in Moscow on her own, and I am leaving and feeling lonely,' he wrote to a friend on the eve of his departure; 'she is crying, but I am not allowing her to give up the theatre. It's a mess, really.'12
After the happy summer spent at Bogimovo in 1891, Chekhov never rented another dacha: there was no need once he was living in the country all year round at Melikhovo. In his last two summers, however, he briefly became a dachnik again when he was invited to stay at the country properties owned by two friends from wealthy merchant backgrounds: Stanislavsky and Maria Yakunchikova. The invitation to stay in Stanislavsky's dacha at Lyubimovka came about because of Olga's illness in the summer of 1902: she had contracted peritonitis after an operation for a probable ectopic pregnancy. All this happened at the end of March during a Moscow Art Theatre tour to St Petersburg, and, although it was not openly discussed, Chekhov suspected with some justification that his wife was not pregnant by him.13 He nursed Olga for two and half months, first in Yalta, then in Moscow, but by mid-June needed to escape for a few weeks. It had been wearing having to be at Olga's bedside all day, with occasional visits to see a very skilful juggler perform providing the only respite. Quite apart from the fact that he was not terribly well himself, Chekhov was simply not used to living with his wife.
Leaving Olga in the care of her German doctor, Chekhov accepted an invitation to travel some 800 miles east to the Urals, to visit the factory and estate of the great merchant patron Savva Morozov, the millionaire who underwrote the Moscow Art Theatre. It was not a particularly enjoyable trip, but the six weeks he spent with Olga at Lyubimovka on his return were invigorating for both of them. Stanislavsky's dacha, to the north-east of Moscow,
