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I III I IK.II I ()!• THE SEAGULL
Dear Mama, I've arrived today, Sunday at n. I need to see you, but as I am up to my neck in business and am leaving tomorrow, I shan't get round to visiting you. Please come and see me on Monday morning at nine or ten. You can have coffee with me. I shall get up early. Lika stayed with Anton all day and he prescribed her a sedative. At 7.00 p.m., when Lika had left, Elena Shavrova arrived with a manuscript, leaving a chaperone in her carriage. She and Anton discussed life in Italy. After a Biblical seven years, the inevitable happened in the hotel room. The cber maitre became the intrigant (as she put it). When Elena came to her senses and asked the time, Anton's watch had stopped. Shavrova regained her carriage and frozen chaperone: it was midnight. All that year broken timepieces - a motif for Three Sisters - had put the Chekhovs' lives in disarray. Now an erotic whirlwind swept Anton off his feet. Shavrova's next letter to Chekhov was decorated with a hand-painted devil in a red coat. She wrote that she wanted fame even more than love, and she would be back with a watch that worked.
Evgenia never got her coffee. At dawn Chekhov sent a porter with a note, 'Dear Mama! Have to go home. Halva!! Buy and bring. Off to the station.' Early the same morning Misha had left Melikhovo to take Masha to the station; he brought back Anton, off the first train from Moscow. Like a returning prodigal son and grateful father rolled into one, Anton had the white calf slaughtered; Melikhovo's rhythm resumed. Chekhov wrote the briefest note to Lika: 'Dear Lika, I'm sending you the prescription you were talking about. I'm cold and sad and so there's nothing more to write about. I'll come on Saturday or on Monday with Masha.'
Lika came to Melikhovo instead, a week later with the painter Maria Drozdova and Masha. It is hard to say what distressed Lika more -to have lost Christina or to be superseded by others in Anton's affections. She spent four desolate days in Anton's study, silently playing patience on his desk, while he wrote letters in pencil on his lap. Drozdova painted Pavel's portrait; Evgenia's new crockery arrived from Muir and Mirrielees; old Mariushka moved out to live in the cattleyard, and a new cook took her place. Books were ordered, sorted, and sent to Taganrog library. On Monday, without Lika, Chekhov went to Moscow to settle his accounts: he had missed the small print
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lit MuiVs contract and only now discovered that he could not reprint 'My I.ifc** as a book for a year. He took the watch that had compro-MII? cl I'lena to Bouret, the watchmaker, who gently told Anton he Ii t.l lorgotten to wind it up.
When Anton got back, bearing felt slippers he had bought for Pavel,.1 liim onsolate Lika was still in his study. Chekhov read a letter from \ ledumr Nemirovich-Danchenko, who lamented, as did other friends, llbti they never talked properly because… you crush me with your giftedness, or whether because we all, even you, are unbalanced or lack conviction as writers… Urn I fear that so much diabolical pride - or, to be exact secretiveness lias accumulated in you, that you will just smile. (I know your Bnlle.)35 1 in if) November Anton gave Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was soon In br more his interpreter than his friend, the same defence of silence tii In- had to Lika. He sounded like his own fictional doctors in 'A Prcary Story' or Uncle Vania: What can we talk about? We have no politics, we have no life on a social, circle or even street level, our town existence is poor, monotonous, oppressive, boring… Talk about one's personal life? Yes dial can sometimes be interesting, and perhaps we might, but we straight away get embarrassed, we are secretive, insincere, held back by an instinct for self-preservation… I'm afraid of my friend Ser-f.ccnko… in every railway carriage and house loudly discussing why I am intimate with N when Z loves me. I am afraid of our moralizing, afraid of our ladies. Alter Anton had posted this letter one of the stoves began to smell id smoke and the whole family developed headaches. Then tongues of Ïèïå spurted out between the stove and the wall.36 As Pavel recorded: 'Tonight we caught fire, the wooden beams above the chimney in Minna's room. The Prince and the Priest took part in extinguishing it and put it out with a fire-hose in Vi an hour.' Even Anton was moved to open his diary: 'After the fire the Prince told us that once when he had a fire in the early hours he lifted a barrel of water weighing four hundredweight.' The Herculean Prince Shakhovskoi was a welcome guest; fortunately Melikhovo was surrounded by ponds and Anton, who had seen every year one house or another nearby
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burn to the ground, had prudently bought a fire engine - a stirrup-pump with a bell and a long hose mounted on a cart. Moreover, he and Masha had insured everything from the house to the cows.
Prince Shakhovskoi demolishing the stove and smashing the walls with an axe to get at the flames, stoked by the draught from a badly made chimney, was a sight that Chekhov recreated in 'Peasants'. Peasants doused flames in the attic and the corridor; November's mud and slush flooded the floors that Aniuta had scrubbed; the stench of soot was unendurable. Anton's water closet was out of action. Evgenia, her bedroom wrecked, took to another bed and did not get up for a fortnight. Pavel forgot the pose he had adopted for Drozdova's portrait and roared at all whom he held to blame. The bereaved Lika, brought up, however negligently, in a genteel household, could not bear the shambles into which the fire had thrown the Chekhovs and left the next afternoon.
Constables and the insurance agent came. Masha saw the insurers in Moscow and sought builders and a stove-maker. The temperature was dropping to minus20°C, so the need for a stove-maker was pressing, but the first one they found remembered working under Pavel and refused to come. Weeks passed before Melikhovo was habitable, but the insurers paid, and for a long time Aleksandr teased his brother as 'the arsonist'.
Chekhov wanted to see Suvorin again, but fire or Lika, or both, had stopped him inviting Suvorin to Melikhovo. Instead, he wrote: In the last 11/ã-ã years there have been so many different events (a few days ago we even had a fire in the house) that my only way out is to go to war like Vronsky [in Anna Karenina; war was feared in late i8y6\ - only not to fight, but to treat the wounded. The only bright spell in these i Vi-ã years has been staying with you in Feodosia. Small clouds passed between Anton and the Suvorins. Anna Suvorina had forgiven his flight, but had been hurt to find that The Seagull was not dedicated to her. Chekhov discovered that, instead of 10 per cent of the takings from five performances of The Seagull in the contract that Suvorin had arranged, he was receiving 8 per cent, on the basis that the play had only four acts.37 In any case, until they received the contract the Society of Dramatists would not pay him, and Anton had
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left it on Suvorin's desk from which it had vanished. Short though the play's run had been, it had had full houses and the author was owed 1000 roubles. To cap Suvorin's sins, his printers sent proofs of plays and stories haphazardly.
After the fire Lika stayed away. On i December Masha warned her brother: 'Viktor Goltsev was at Lika's this morning.' Despite his rival's presence, Anton invited Lika. Chicken pox had stopped classes at the 'Dairy' school so that Masha could bring Lika, but Lika did not come. She threatened not to come for New Year 'so as not to spoil your mood'. If he wrote her a pleasant letter by the 30th she might come. She had endured worse embarrassment, as more people identified her II the prototype of The Seagulclass="underline" 'Today there was a reading of The Seagull… and people were raving about it. I even went upstairs… so as not to hear it.' Now Lika had for consolation a young landscape painter, Seriogin, whom she proposed to bring with her, as Masha's guest. She knew it would upset Anton: 'You can't bear young people more interesting than yourself.' Anton invited her, affectionately calling her Cantaloupe. He mentioned Seriogin only in his diary.