Professor Ostroumov, who had taught Chekhov, was at Sukhum on the Black Sea. His juniors mapped Chekhov's lungs, showing the top of both, particularly the left, badly damaged by tuberculosis. Wheezing exhalations came from both lungs. Ostroumov was no believer in the curative power of Robert Koch's 'tuberculin'. Treatment was conservative: ice packs, peace and nutrition, until the threat of a fatal haemorrhage had receded; convalescence with subcutaneous arsenic, exile to a dry climate and a diet of koumiss.3 Anton was carefully watched - doctors are unruly patients. Visitors were admitted by pass, in twos, and forbidden to ask questions.
Anton wanted his parents kept in the dark. When Masha arrived at the Kursk station on Tuesday morning to start teaching, Vania silently handed her a pass to the Ostroumov clinic. Only next day was she calm enough to visit. Lidia Avilova came twice, once bearing flowers.4 Dr Korobov, who had known Anton for sixteen years, was turned away. Anton was fed cold broth. He asked Masha for tea and some eau de Cologne; Viktor Goltsev for caviar, four ounces of black, eight of red; Shavrova for a roast turkey. She sent a grouse, which Anton washed down with fine red wine from Franz Schechtel and Dr Radzwicki, Anton's optician. Sablin of The Russian Gazette sent a roast chicken and, when this gave Anton erotic dreams, a woodcock. Flowers and letters also poured in, as did unsolicited manuscripts and solicited books. Anton wrote passes for the visitors he wanted. Goltsev and Liudmila Ozerova called. Elena Shavrova, confined in Petersburg with a chill, wired her sister Olia on 29 March for news: I found him up properly dressed as always, in a big white, very bright room with a white bed, a big white table, a little cupboard and some chairs. He seems to have lost a little weight and his bones are showing, but he was awfully nice, as always, and bantered cheerfully with me… What do you think I found him doing? He was choosing lenses for a pince-nez.'
MARCH-APRIL 1897
Ë more important visitor had come the previous day. On Wednesday J6 March Lidia Avilova left the clinic in distress and walked round ihr Novodevichie cemetery, where she met Tolstoy. Tolstoy needed no pass: on Friday he appeared at Chekhov's bedside. Weeks later Anton recalled the visit to Mikhail Menshikov: We talked about immortality. Tolstoy recognizes it in a Kantian sense; he supposes that we shall all (people and animals) live in a principle (reason, love), whose essence and aims are a mystery to us. Hut I see this principle or force as something like a shapeless mass of aspic; my ego - my individuality and mind - will merge with this mass. I don't want this immortality. At lour the next morning Anton suffered a severe haemorrhage. The doctors forbade all pleasure except letter-writing. Anton, wanting to I" discharged home, declared Melikhovo healthy, on a watershed and her of fevers, but the doctors exiled him south, to the Mediterranean HI the Black Sea, from September to May.
()n \ April the bleeding stopped. Visitors came again, except from 1.00 to 3.00 p.m. when, as Chekhov put it, 'the sick animals are fed ritid exercised'. A week later he was discharged. His health was a matter of public bulletins. On 7 April, appeasing the censor by hastily replacing page 193, which blamed the state for the peasants' misery, Hitnian Thought published 'Peasants'. Never was Chekhov so feted by the intelligentsia. A wave of sympathy forced even Burenin to acclaim him. I,ate in April Sazonova observed: 'It sounds like a funeral knell. I Ir must be very bad and they're holding a requiem. Really, they say that his days are numbered.' The literary world commiserated.
I.ika neither wrote nor visited. Elena Shavrova showered her cher mattre and intrigant with letters. She offered him the health of 'the.1 upid, indifferent and dim'; she promised to kiss Professor Ostroumov •ill over; she told him of a French play, Uevasion, about a married woman's happy adultery, a play where it was said 'doctors have no right to be ill'. He could still be her intrigant: 'What do we risk? As long as Tolstoy doesn't find out.' All she requested was that Anton ihould: 'Tear my letters into little pieces (jealous men are dangerous), I don't want someone else to do it';6 he never did. On 11 April, Shavrova shook off her husband and came, but Anton had been dis-, h.n-ged the nightbefore. Olga Kundasova was running round Moscow
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for Anton, returning to their owners all the books he had borrowed.
Vania ran messages, while Aleksandr worried. Misha and Olga went to Melikhovo on 6 April to make ready for Anton's return. Anton had left Masha penniless and the cupboards bare; Vania was to bring beer, best beef and to see that Anton brought money. Misha wrote to Vania: 'Desperate famine here, brother… we have thin gruel instead of soup. Be a pal and bring parsley (roots), carrots and celery. If you have the money, some onions too. We have to feed Anton up now.'7 Masha's sinking spirits were restored by Maria Drozdova. Pavel and Evgenia seemed not to know what was happening. They sheared the sheep, and mucked out the cattle. Only Misha's arrival on the 6th alerted them that something had happened to Anton.
On Good Friday, emaciated and weak, Anton was brought by Vania and laid on Masha's divan. Here he injected arsenic into his abdomen, read and wrote letters. The comfort was cold. Dr Sredin, who treated himself and others for ÒÂ in Yalta, urged Anton to go to Davos. The radical novelist Aleksandr Ertel revealed that 16 years ago he had been given a month to live, but wondered if Anton's will to live matched his own.8 Menshikov said that he had wept as he read 'Peasants' and that Petersburg was awash with rumours of Chekhov's illness; he wrote again, advocating a diet of oats and milk and a stay in Algiers, which had done wonders for Alphonse Daudet (who was to die in eight months).9
Emilie Bijon sent two touching messages in French.10 Cousin Georgi in Taganrog urged Chekhov: 'the south is warmer and the ladies are passionate'." Warm comfort came with Lika Mizinova on 12 April, the eve of Easter. She left on the i8th (Vania's birthday), with Sasha Selivanova, who had arrived three days before. Pavel was glad: 'At 9.45, glory to the All Highest, the two fat ladies left."2
On Sunday 13 April forty male and twenty-three female peasants lined up for Easter gifts of money from the Chekhovs. Pavel's diary sounds vigilant: 14 Apriclass="underline" … Antosha liked the roast beef. Ants got into the house… 2 3 Apriclass="underline" … The cherries are in leaf. Antosha is busy in the garden. Importunate visitors - 'the loud-mouth Semenkovich', Shcheglov and the vet - annoyed Pavel. Two students turned up, to be fed and housed. On 19 April, seeing his brothers off, Anton risked a three-mile
MARCH-APRIL I897
journey to survey the second school he was building. Dr Korobov, who had come to photograph Anton, not to heal him, then took Anton to Moscow for two days. (The other doctor to visit in April was Dr Kad/.wicki with a case of Bessarabian wine and lenses to correct Anton's astigmatism.)
Anton was glad to see his visitors go. Shcheglov had pestered him wnli a play, which, Anton told Suvorin, read as if it had been written by a cat whose tail the author had trodden on. Suvorin was the only man Anton longed to see. He telegraphed that he would be in Petersburg by the end of May. Anton joked Til marry a handsome rich widow. I take 400,000, two steamboats and an iron foundry.' Suvorin irplicd by wire, 'We consider dowry too small. Ask for bathhouse and (Wo shops more."3
Illness freed Anton's conscience, and he felt free to travel. No woman would, he told Suvorin, 'be stupid enough to marry a man who'd been in a clinic'. From Courmayeur, a tuberculosis resort, Levitan exhorted Anton on 5 May: Is this really a lung disease?! Do everything possible, go and drink koumiss, summer is fine in Russia, then let's go south for the winter, even as far as Nervi, together we shan't be bored. Do you need money? ,md then from Bad Nauheim, where he was having hydrotherapy, on 2 9 May: No more blood? Don't copulate so often. How good to teach yourself to do without women. Just dreaming of them is far more satisfying… If Lika is with you, kiss her sugar-sweet lips, but not I whit more.14 (iiven the public acclaim for 'Peasants' - which augured well for the ÷à1ñ of Chekhov's books - and the excuse of illness, Anton could at last live out an idea he had preached periodically, but never practised: that the prerequisite of personal happiness was idleness.