longed to go on an intrepid adventure to somewhere like Africa – which is exactly what he recommended his new friend, the young writer Maxim Gorky, should do. He unfortunately no longer had the strength for travelling to exotic climes. Chekhov typically played it down, but it was clearly more than 'annoying' for him at the age of forty to be suffering from breathlessness and 'all kinds of other rubbish' which prevented him from living properly, as he put it. He also longed for Russia. There was no snow in Yalta, and no sleighs, and therefore it seemed to him that there was no life. It was particularly painful to be so far away from Moscow. Even though he could have purchased identical items locally in Yalta, he studiously ordered writing paper, galoshes, sausage, and even lavatory paper from Moscow, in denial that he had moved.1
Bereft of stimulating company, and unable to do much in his garden over the winter, Chekhov found some consolation in the mongrels who had decided to settle in his yard and congregated round him whenever he stepped outside. There was the fierce, crooked-faced Tuzik who slept in the cellar (the Russian word for the ace in a pack of cards is 'tuz'). The yellow-eyed puppy who made its home under the ancient olive tree in the garden was christened Kashtanka, after Chekhov's famous early story about a dog who ends up as a circus performer (the name comes from the Russian word for 'chestnut'; Olga called him Ginger). Kashtanka would follow Tuzik's example and bark at people, but he was also prone to roll on to his stomach at the slightest opportunity, and acquired a reputation for laziness by sleeping all day on the wood chippings.2 Chekhov pretended not to care very much about Kashtanka. All the same, when the dog was run over by a passing carriage out in the road and broke one of his back legs, Chekhov performed emergency surgery and tended to him solicitously. Then there was the afore-mentioned Schnap, Olga's dachshund (called Foma to begin with by Masha and Anton,3 and Schwarz by Evgenia Yakovlevna4), whose arrival had been eagerly awaited by everyone at the White Dacha. 'Bring him to Yalta, or he won't have anyone to bark at,' Chekhov had written to Olga in November 1902, considering there would then be enough dogs in the household.
When two more mongrel puppies turned up the following February and barked furiously all night, they were finally bundled up and put in someone else's yard. But a doctor acquaintance in Yalta decided to take Kashtanka in the spring of 1903, and Masha wrote to her brother (then staying at the dacha in Nara) to tell him that their cook, Polya, was so upset she had been crying, and Tuzik had stopped barking. They both immediately decided to find another dog. Kashtanka had become so lazy and gluttonous that Chekhov was not all that sorry to see him go, and instructed Arseny the gardener to look out for a small male mongrel puppy. That puppy was Sharik ('little ball'), a small white Pomeranian-mix with black ears and very sharp teeth, who took a while to learn how to bark, and then made up for it by barking day and night. Masha loved the dogs as much as her brother did, and over the years he kept her up to date on how they were faring in her absence: Tuzik appeared ever more crooked-faced, and occasionally succumbed to pessimism5 (maybe he had a presentiment that he would be poisoned
Chekhov with his dogs Schnap and Sharik, 1904
in the same year that Chekhov died), Kashtanka got fatter and was always asleep, Sharik felt that he was somehow a lower-class meshchanin kind of dog and so was rather timid about wagging his tail. The dogs seemed to have a pretty good life at the White Dacha all in all. Chekhov's Yalta doctor, Isaak Altschuller, felt the hours his patient spent in his garden surrounded by his dogs were among the happiest in his life.6 'Sobaka' – dog – and its many variations (Sobachka, Sobachonka, Pyos, Pyosik, even Fomka) was one of Chekhov's favourite terms of endearment for Olga. Sometimes he even wrote to her as though she were a dog, telling her he wanted to take her by the tail and wag it and stroke her fur gently. T love you and will love you even if you turn from a dog into a crocodile,' he once joked.7
The major event in the spring of 1900 was the Moscow Art Theatre's tour of the Crimea at Easter, a major undertaking in those
days. Olga arrived a few days early with Masha, and then joined her colleagues in Sevastopol for the first performances. It was here that Chekhov saw Uncle Vanya for the first time – and it was also the first time he had seen the company perform before an audience. He also attended performances of Hauptmann's Lonely People and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler before his ill-health forced him back home to Yalta. Then followed ten heady days over Easter when the company took up residence in Yalta's brand new theatre. The dacha was suddenly full of noisy actors, directors and writers, and it was a bit of a shock for Chekhov now to have convivial lunches every day and stay up all hours after his long, boring winter, but it was clear to his sister that he thrived on the stimulating company. The Yalta Theatre had opened in 1896 and was home to an operetta company, but never played to full houses. Suddenly it was packed, and Chekhov was forced to endure ovation after ovation. Two days before the Moscow Art Theatre left, members of the company held a literary evening at the theatre whose proceeds were donated to the charity that cared for people with tuberculosis and other invalids who had travelled to Yalta without means of support. As well as extracts from Sophocles, Maria Andreyeva, the beautiful young actress playing Nina in The Seagull, read Chekhov's touching early story 'Vanka'. It had been a great favourite with his fans ever since its publication on Christmas Day 1886, and was one of his very best works according to Tolstoy (who, conversely, had not long before gone to see Uncle Vanya and found it exasperating). The orphaned young Vanka (short for Ivan) has been sent from his village in the countryside to become an apprentice shoemaker in Moscow. He is treated so badly by his employers and the other apprentices, and is so lonely, that on Christmas Eve he writes a letter to his grandfather, the only family he has left, begging him to come and take him away. But it takes Vanka a long time to write the letter because he keeps being distracted by thoughts of home:
Vanka trembled as he sighed and then again started staring at the window. He remembered that it was his grandfather who always went into the woods to get the master's Christmas tree and would take him along too. It was such fun! His grandfather would crackle, and the frost would crackle and Vanka would crackle too as he looked at them. His grandfather would smoke his pipe and stand there sniffing his tobacco for ages before
he cut the tree down, laughing at frozen-stiff little Vanyushka… The young fir trees, all wrapped in frost, would stand without moving, wondering which one of them would have to die. And then all of a suddden a hare would shoot like an arrow over the snowdrifts .. .8
The nine-year-old Vanka thinks it is enough to address his letter to 'grandfather in the village' and put it in the nearest postbox for it to reach him. The twenty-six-year-old Chekhov had already mastered the art of ending his works on a tragi-comic note. Constant calls for the author to take a bow had induced Chekhov to escape early from most of the performances during the Moscow Art Theatre's tour to Yalta in 1900, but he stayed to hear all the readings on this particular evening. Six months later the theatre burned down.
II Pushkin, the Old Oak of Taganrog, and Three Sisters
Masha: A green oak by the curving shore, and on that oak a golden chain . . .
Three Sisters, Act 1
Chekhov began the twentieth century thinking about Alexander Pushkin. This was not only because he received news on 17 January 1900 (his birthday) that the august Academy of Sciences had elected him to the new belles-lettres section it had recently inaugurated to mark the centenary of Pushkin's birth. To old Maryushka this meant Chekhov was now a 'general', but to him it was about the same as being made an honorary citizen of a small provincial town. He knew the staid Imperial Academy would never tolerate writers with any kind of a social conscience having an active say in its affairs, still less writers who actually lived in St Petersburg and could ask the distinguished professors difficult questions at meetings.9 It was not for nothing that his appointment was only honorary. The Academy's president, after all, was the poet K.R., otherwise the Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (it was his father who had built the church at Oreanda). That Chekhov and the
