development of rejuvenating 'botox' injections to relax the muscles that cause wrinkles. Kerner had loved staying in Badenweiler, Chekhov did not.
Anxious to protect his mother to the end, however, he wrote his last heroically upbeat letter to her from the Villa Friederike a couple of weeks before he died:
Dearest Mama, I send you greetings. My health is improving and I should think that I will be completely better in a week. I like it here. It's quiet and warm, there is a lot of sunshine, but it's not too hot. Olga bows to you and sends her love. My respects to Masha, Vanya and everyone else. I bow deeply before you and kiss your hand. I wrote to Masha yesterday.
Your Anton'
On 22 June, after ten days at the Villa Friederike, Chekhov's restless spirit got the better of him and he and Olga moved again, this time to the imposing five-storey Hotel Sommer, where Josef Schwoerer was doctor-in- residence. Initially, because it was high season, the only room they could obtain overlooked the main road, but eventually they were able to move to a larger and quieter first-floor room with a balcony, on the side which looked out to the busy village post office and the Kurpark across the road. Chekhov was too ill to take the waters or go to hear the band play in the park, but he did manage brief walks in
its magnificent arboretum, which had been cultivated since 1825. Alongside native trees, conifers, pines, laurels, yews and cedars of Lebanon, he would have enjoyed seeing fir trees from Chile and tulip trees from Japan. Grand Duke Friedrich Fs Russian sister-in-law had even helped to bring two Paulownia tomentosa from north China. The giant Californian redwoods were planted at the time of Chekhov's stay in Badenweiler. Olga also took her husband out on carriage rides to neighbouring villages, where he delighted in seeing cherry trees, well-cared for fields and streams, and lilies and roses blooming in small gardens.7 But then suddenly it became very hot, and Chekhov became even more uncomfortable. Apart from the breathlessness caused by his condition, he had no summer clothes, and on 29 June, three days before he died, Olga travelled to nearby Freiburg to order him some flannel suits (one white with a blue stripe and one blue with a white stripe). She took along for company Lev Rabenek, a young Russian student who had arrived in the hotel. Rabenek and his brother were Moscow University students, and were already acquainted with Chekhov and Olga through their friendship with Stanislavsky's family. They had been sent by their mother to Switzerland to attend lectures on French literature, but had detoured to Badenweiler when the younger brother fell ill. He was also put under the care of Dr Schwoerer.8
The next morning Chekhov almost collapsed in the hotel corridor and had to retreat back to bed, where Olga propped him up with five pillows to enable him to breathe more easily. Lev Rabenek had been coming to visit almost every day and now realized that Chekhov's suntanned face was a deceptive mask for the precarious state of his health. During his visits to Chekhov's room, he would read aloud from the Russian newspapers, and later recalled the writer's intense interest in everything going on in the Far East and his distress at hearing reports of the dismal progress of the Russo-Japanese War. When it had first begun, in February 1904, Chekhov had declared an intention to go to the Far East himself that summer and contribute to the war effort by working as a doctor. He now asked his wife to translate the articles in German newspapers about Russia's humiliating losses. Chekhov not only followed the events of the war closely because his wife's beloved Uncle Sasha was on active duty with his regiment (Olga's mother thought her brother was probably the prototype for Chebutykin, the
army doctor in Three Sisters), but because of his own travels in the Far East; everything must have seemed particularly vivid to him. The Berlin correspondent of the Russian Gazette, to whom Olga recounted the events of Chekhov's last days alive, recorded that he started talking about a sailor and the Japanese in the last hours of delirium before he died.9
Chekhov spent his last day playing patience, and died in the early hours of a warm July night in the presence of his wife, Dr Schwoerer, and the student Lev Rabenek. It had been the first time he had actually asked for a doctor, and Olga had dispatched Rabenek to run down the road to Schwoerer's house and ask him to come. Events then moved rapidly and Chekhov died immediately after downing the glass of champagne prescribed by Schwoerer. It seems fitting that the self-effacing Chekhov died in this more modest resort, and not in the grander spas visited by the likes of Paganini, Queen Victoria, Bismarck, Wagner and Dostoevsky.10
Lev Rabenek was sent off to start writing telegrams. In the hours after Chekhov's death, with the smell of hay wafting in through the open window,11 Olga was left alone to grieve with the body of her dead husband. At dawn the silence was broken by birdsong and then by the sound of the organ playing at the nearby church in preparation for the morning's services. Dmitry von Eichler, the Russian Consul to the state of Baden, who happened to be staying in Badenweiler at the time, arrived at the Hotel Sommer at seven, and was instrumental in cancelling official procedures and ensuring a minimum of fuss. It was agreed that Chekhov's body would remain at the Hotel Sommer for the duration of the next day, and then (in a faint echo of events following Pushkin's death) be removed under cover of darkness. Before being persuaded to move to the house of Dr Schwoerer and his Russian wife, Olga sat for a while on the balcony with Rabenek, and commented drily that the suits which had been made for her husband had turned out to be funeral shrouds. Towards evening later that day, Rabenek escorted Olga back to the hotel, where Chekhov's body now lay surrounded by flowers. Rabenek had earlier been involved in the unpleasant task of straightening out Chekhov's corpse (he had died on his side), and after nightfall was distressed to observe the undignified way in which it was put into a laundry basket that proved to be too small. He and his brother then accompanied the procession to the Catholic chapel a
quarter of a mile down the road, with two people carrying lanterns to light the way.12
The next morning, Chekhov's widow and Dr Schwoerer's Russian wife did their best to create a Russian Orthodox atmosphere in the chapel by bringing their icons and setting them up on a stand by the coffin. Later in the day an Orthodox priest from Karlsruhe arrived to perform the first panikhida. The small congregation included Dmitry von Eichler, Grigory Iollos, the Berlin correspondent of the Russian Gazette, the two Rabenek brothers, and Olga's sister-in-law, who arrived from Dresden. Then began the long journey back to Berlin, Petersburg and finally Moscow. In Berlin, in a railway siding where the carriage bearing Chekhov's coffin sat waiting for permission to be coupled to a passenger train going to Russia, a second memorial service was conducted by the senior priest from the embassy church, Father Maltsev, whom Olga later recalled as a person of great depth, intelligence and humour. Russian staff from the embassy brought garlands of oak leaves, flowers and foliage to decorate the carriage. The panikhida was sung in hushed voices at the request of the German authorities, lending it a mysterious aura, and Olga was moved by Father Maltsev's oration, in which he praised her late husband's gentle, sad (and occasionally denunciatory) stories. They were distinguished, he said, by the desire to help people break loose from difficult situations by pouring warmth and light into their troubled souls.13
The train bearing Chekhov's body pulled into the Warsaw station in St Petersburg early in the morning on 7 July. Only one person was there to greet it – the temporary president of Russia's Literary Foundation, Semyon Vengerov – and he was as embarrassed by the fact that he was alone as Olga was shocked by the absence of other representatives of the Petersburg literary world. Masha soon arrived from Moscow, and the three of them sat down to wait for the train which would transfer Chekhov's coffin to the Nikolaevsky station, from which trains departed for Moscow. By midday they had been joined by Chekhov's brother Alexander and his family, his publisher Adolf Marx, and Suvorin. Despite their estrangement (the letter Suvorin wrote to Chekhov in February 1902 had been the first in three years), the manner in which the grief-stricken old man ran with his stick to greet Olga is revealing; it seemed to one witness to be more like that of a
father struggling to cope with the death of his child.14 A requiem was performed at the station.15
