The Petersburg newspaper had picked up a news item in Odessa News the day before which spoke of Chekhov's worrying cough and blood-spitting, and then several other papers had run with it, including (unfortunately for Chekhov) the Moscow-based Russian News. A hack for a local Crimean newspaper in Simferopol went for the sensationalist angle by dressing the story up a little: 'There has been a significant deterioration in recent days in the health of the famous writer A. P. Chekhov, living in Yalta. He is tormented by a constant cough and sometimes there is blood-spitting. These ominous symptoms cause one to have serious fears for his life.' As it happens, the editor of Russian News just then received a letter Chekhov had sent earlier in which he professed to be in good health, so he swiftly published a retraction, as did the local Yalta paper, the Crimean Courier, at Chekhov's specific request – but not before he had, by his own admission, spent five days panicking that his mother would find out and start worrying about him; he found it all extremely unpleasant.25
A few weeks later Chekhov actually met the editor of the Crimean Courier (yet another native of Taganrog), and arranged for the paper to be sent to Masha and Ivan in Moscow. Over the next few years, the Crimean Courier would publish Chekhov's various appeals for donations to charitable causes, including several to help peasant children during the famine which followed the failure of the harvest in
Samara in 1898. Thanks to a group of village school teachers, doctors, priests and members of rural sections of the Red Cross, Chekhov reported that over 412,000 meals had been provided for more than 3,000 children in the 1891 famine. As a result of the new appeals (each person's donation was listed in the newspaper individually, from Olya and Vera T's five kopecks to Mrs M.M.'s twenty-five roubles), Chekhov was later able to report that over 24,000 children would be saved from starvation following the 1898 harvest failure. He also wrote about the appalling situation of the impoverished consumptives who flocked to Yalta in the winter months, with nowhere to live and no one to turn to.26 Chekhov's name certainly helped both these causes. Meanwhile, the Crimean Courier's readers were really more interested in reading about him, and the paper seized every opportunity to write about its most famous resident. The paper already published the names of those visiting Yalta as a matter of course – it had announced Chekhov's arrival on 20 September 189827 – and it was quick to announce that he had disembarked from the steamer from Novorossiisk, together with Olga, in July 1899. Their marriage was front page news two years later, and the Courier continued to follow the writer's every move, even publicizing his departure for Moscow in May 1904 and his subsequent journey to Badenweiler the following month. Such was the price of celebrity and Chekhov felt he had nowhere to hide. 'I'm fed up with the Courier,'' he exclaimed in exasperation to Olga in August 1901, 'they write rubbish about me in almost every issue.'28
And so the notoriously reserved Chekhov was forced to endure the distasteful experience of watching the gradual extinguishing of his life being made public property, even as he took pains to minimize the seriousness of his condition to his family and, indeed, to himself. His health became noticeably worse in the autumn of 1901, right after his marriage, and not even the red blossom on his quince tree during the snowy days of February 1902 could distract him very long from thoughts of death. Ironically, this should have been a time of great personal happiness for Chekhov: he had recently married his beloved and, in so doing, had acquired the kind of part-time wife he had famously confided to Suvorin, back in 1895, was his ideal:
All right, I'll get married if you want. But these are my conditions: everything must be as before, i.e., she has to live in Moscow and I'll live
Yalta, seen from the east
in the country, and I'll go and visit her. I couldn't take the sort of round the clock happiness which goes on day after day. I get vicious when people talk to me about the same thing every day in the same tone of voice … I promise to be a wonderful husband, but give me a wife like the moon, who won't appear in my sky every day. NB: I won't start writing better if I am married.29
And yet the practicalities of marriage to a successful full-time actress in Moscow were not in the end very favourable to someone in Chekhov's tubercular condition. It is true that a man with his restless spirit found it hard to stay still in one place, but since moving to Yalta, where he was supposed to lead a quiet life, Chekhov had taken several trips to Moscow, had travelled to the Caucasus, and had gone all the way to France to spend a prolonged period in Nice. Olga heightened his desire to get away from Yalta even more, and the relationship was certainly beneficial in that it distracted him from his illness. 'Your letters are like medicine without which I can no longer exist,' he wrote to her in December 1901. But, conversely, the relationship probably also contributed to the advancement of his illness. There was the strain of being apart from Olga, and the strain of having to get used to being in each other's company
again after their separations; and the Moscow Art Theatre productions of Chekhov's last four plays were also a source of intense emotional stress, following that disastrous first staging of The Seagull in 1896 in St Petersburg. The experience of seeing his plays staged well at last, and greeted with acclaim, ultimately brought Chekhov great happiness, but not before he had expended large amounts of nervous energy – the last thing someone in his delicate condition needed. Thus, in a way, Chekhov's last years became an example of the paradoxes of existence he had explored so masterfully in his fiction.
The potent mixture of love and death which pervaded Chekhov's last years found perhaps its greatest artistic expression in his penultimate story 'The Bishop', which was completed in February 1902. It is one of his most finely wrought pieces of prose, a highly lyrical work which was completed at great emotional cost. Due to his poor health, it took Chekhov longer to write this story than any other. He had been musing on the subject for about fifteen years, but first began it in December 1899. Work on the story continued in fits and starts for the next two years. It is hard to find much that is overtly joyful in the account of the rapid escalation of Bishop Pyotr's illness, from his initial feelings of infirmity on Palm Sunday to his untimely death from typhoid less than a week later on Easter Saturday. The story is exquisitely sad, and Chekhov poured into this sympathetic character all his own feelings of loneliness, alienation and fear experienced during his Yalta exile, where he considered his lifestyle so ascetic that he took to signing his letters 'Antony the monk'.30 He too found his endless visitors debilitating; he too was weary of being treated with awe and reverence; he too longed for true companionship; he too could not but look back on his life with nostalgia as he confronted the prospect of it coming to its end; he too longed to get away from his provincial prison, and he also did not want to die. But the life-changing experience of love also filled his writing with a new warmth and a sense of peace:
The monks' singing that evening was harmonious and inspired; there was a young monk with a black beard leading the service; and as he heard about the bridegroom who cometh at midnight, and about the bridal chamber being adorned, the bishop did not feel repentance for his sins, or sorrow, but a spiritual calm, a quietness, and he was carried away by thoughts of the distant past, of his childhood and youth, when they had
also sung about the bridegroom and the mansion, and now that past seemed vivid, beautiful and joyful, as it had probably never been. And maybe in our next life we will remember the distant past and our life here on earth with the same feeling. Who knows! The bishop was sitting by the altar where it was dark. Tears were running down his face. He was thinking that he had achieved everything possible for a man in his position, and he had faith, but still not everything was clear to him, something was missing, he did not want to die; it seemed to him that he was still missing something really important, something which he had dreamed about vaguely once long ago, and that same hope about the future stirred him now, as it had during his childhood, while he was at the academy and when he had been abroad.31
A few weeks after first setting eyes on Olga, and just before moving down to the Crimea in the autumn of 1898, Chekhov had given his younger brother Misha a lecture about marriage, telling him it was only ever worth marrying for love. 'Marrying a girl just because she is nice is the same as buying something you don't need in the bazaar just because it's pretty,' he wrote. 'In family life the most important element is love, sexual attraction, one
