flesh; everything else is just pointless and
Chekhov's house in Autka, 1901
fei›s«v. ii.'isi. ??.?? .;';. i'.. !]›:???.
boring, however cleverly we might pontificate about it.'32 There was no question in Chekhov's mind as to why he married Olga. He was to write her hundreds of tender letters during the five years of their relationship. Sometimes the letters were ardent, as at the end of October 1901:
My darling, angel, my dog, dear friend, I beg you, believe me, I love you, love you deeply; don't forget me, write and think about me more often. Whatever might happen, even if you suddenly turn into an old woman, I will still love you – for your soul and your good spirit. Write to me, little hound! Take good care of your health. If you fall ill, then come to Yalta and I will look after you. Don't wear yourself out my child… May God bless you. Don't forget me, I am your husband after all. I send you much, much love, hugs and more love. My bed seems lonely to me, as if I was a miserly, wicked old bachelor. Write!!
Your Antoine
Don't forget that I am your husband, write to me every day. Greetings to Masha. I am still eating the sweets your Mama gave me. Greetings to her too.33
And sometimes, despite his feeling completely wretched, Chekhov's letters were playful, as at the end of January 1902, just when he was putting the finishing touches to 'The Bishop'. Alluding to Olga's German origins, he wrote;
And so, my wonderful, good, golden wife, may God preserve you, be healthy, be happy, remember your husband at least at night time when you are going to bed. The main thing is don't be down. Your husband is not a drunkard after all, nor a clod or a ruffian, but a totally German husband in his habits; I even wear warm underwear … I embrace you a hundred and one times, and kiss my wife endlessly.
Your Antoine34
The sombre mood of 'The Bishop' is also infused with Chekhov's love for his mother, with whom he had lived almost his entire life and to whom he was very close. Bishop Pyotr's self-effacing mother unexpectedly comes to visit him in the story:
It was so stuffy, and so hot! Vespers had been going on for such a long time now! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was heavy and rapid, his mouth was dry, his shoulders ached with tiredness and his legs were shaking. And it was upsetting that there was a holy fool crying out occasionally from the gallery. And then suddenly, as if in a dream or a delirium, it seemed to His Reverence that his own mother Mariya Timofeyevna, whom he had not seen for nine years now, or an old woman who looked like his mother, had come up to him in the crowd and taken a branch of pussy willow from him, and then walked away, still beaming at him with a warm, joyful smile until she merged back into the crowd. Tears for some reason started pouring down his face. He was at peace in his heart, everything was fine, but he had his gaze fixed on the left cleros where the reading was taking place, and where you could no longer make out anyone in the evening darkness – and was crying. Tears glistened on his face and on his beard. Then someone near to him started crying, and another person further away as well, then more and more people started crying, until the whole church was full of quiet weeping. But after a little while, about five minutes later, the convent choir was singing, people had stopped crying and everything was as it had been before.35
Like Bishop Pyotr's mother, Evgenia Yakovlevna was a gentle, devout woman with little education but a kind and generous spirit. Having lived through the death of one son from tuberculosis, the state of her son Anton's health was her prime concern. Chekhov wrote to her punctiliously whenever they were apart – short, simple letters in which he never abandoned the formal form of address. She wrote back ungrammatical letters without much punctuation, usually in pencil, on whatever piece of paper she could find. Since Chekhov did not consider her large archaic-looking script suitable for the mail, he prepared cards for her to send to him while he was away, ready addressed to 'Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Yalta'.36
Chekhov finished his story during the bleak early weeks of Lent in 1902, when not only his mother but also old Maryushka, the cook, the maid and the gardener were all fasting. In an odd kind of way, 'The Bishop' is also a veiled tribute to Chekhov's father, whose excessive piety may have caused his son to demur from attending church in adulthood, but left him nevertheless with a profound knowledge of the
scriptures (which he certainly felt enriched by) and an interest in religious writing: Pavel Egorovich's spiritual books were all kept on the Yalta bookshelves. He had also left his son with a deep respect for people who had strong faith, religious or otherwise. Chekhov had known and been friendly with many priests and bishops during his life, and drew from that deep well of experience when creating the character of Bishop Pyotr. There was his contemporary Bishop Sergy, for example, who the Chekhov family had got to know back in the 1880s when he was a history student at Moscow University. He was made a bishop in 1899,37 and exchanged several warm letters with Chekhov while he was living in Yalta. According to his friend Father Sergei Shchukin, who taught in the Yalta parish school, Chekhov also was inspired by a photograph he stumbled on in Yalta of Mikhail, Bishop of the Crimea, who had just died prematurely of tuberculosis. The photograph depicted him sitting with his head leaning sadly towards his old mother, who looked as if she was the widow of a village deacon, who had come to visit her son from deepest Tambov. Like the bishop in Chekhov's story, Bishop Mikhail had served abroad and had become known in clerical circles for founding a new kind of scholarly monasticism. Among the religious works Chekhov read during these years was Bishop Mikhail's book on the Gospel.38
Recalling an earlier conversation, the ailing, housebound Chekhov told Olga in September 1901 that he did indeed long to be able to go roaming round the world with just a knapsack on his back, 'breathing freely and wanting nothing'.39 How poignant then that just before the lonely Bishop Pyotr dies in Chekhov's story, he has a vision of himself doing precisely that:
And he already could not say a single word nor understand what was happening and was imagining himself as a simple, ordinary person, walking briskly and happily through the fields, tapping his stick, while up above him was the huge sky, flooded with sunshine; he was as free as a bird now and could go wherever he wanted!40
Chapter 12
WHITE DEATH IN THE BLACK FOREST
Badenweiler
Badenweiler is a nice little place, warm, easy to live in, and cheap, but in about two or three days I will probably be starting to think of where to run away from the boredom.
Letter to Dr P. Kurkin, 12 June 1904
Chekhov said his last goodbye to Moscow on 3 June 1904, when he was helped on to a train bound for Germany. He had arrived from Yalta exactly a month earlier, and had spent the intervening weeks taking his leave of the city. When he was well enough, what he most enjoyed was going for carriage rides with his wife along the city's leafy boulevards and basking in the spring sunshine; in early May the trees would have just come into leaf in
