In Petersburg, Aleksandr reported, at the Suvorins' New Year party, Anna drank to the absent Anton, while Suvorin moodily lurked in his study, telling Aleksandr he would not go to Nice, as Anton was off with Kovalevsky to Algiers. In January 1898, however, Kovalevsky plucked up courage and told Anton that rheumatism and flu prevented him sailing for Africa. This, Anton replied dejectedly, 'depressed me very much for I have been delirious about Algiers.'
Lika Mizinova had mortgaged her land, but the bank withheld funds and she could not come to France. Instead she would open a milliner's shop; physical work would heal her dejected spirits. Masha was scornfuclass="underline" Lika was too disorganized to compete with professionals. On 13 January Lika told Anton she had her old looks and her former self, 'the self that loved you hopelessly for so many years.'34 Anton told Lika he approved, and would flirt with the prettier milliners, but privately agreed with Masha: 'Lika will hiss at her milliners, she has a terrible temper. And what's more she is very fond of green and yellow ribbons and enormous hats.'
In France Anton celebrated Russian New Year's Eve on 12 January 1898, watching the roulette wheel with a new companion, Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, who had moved to the pension on Russian Christmas Day. Khotiaintseva feigned a polite interest in roulette, but proved good company. They did not stay long at the tables: Anton was moni-. tored by a Russian doctor, Dr Valter (another Taganrogian staving at the pension) and had to be in his room by 4.00 p.m. Khotiaintseva and Anton liked shocking the guests: Aleksandra would stay in his room until the signal for her departure, a donkey that brayed at ten. She painted cutting watercolour caricatures of the women guests. She
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1897
and Anton called them Fish, the Doll, Red Ribbons, the Clothes Moth and the Slum. She observed Anton with loving sharpness, telling Masha, whose close friend she had become: I lere it is thought indecent to enter a man's room, and I spend all my time in Anton's. He has a wonderful room, a corner room, two big windows (here the windows always reach the floor), with white curtains. 11/23 January 1898… we have to listen to the stupid talk of the most repulsive ladies here. I tease Anton that he is not recognized here - these fools really have no idea about him… Anton and I are great friends with Marie the maid and join her cursing the other clients in French.35 Brewing tea in his room, Anton spoke with passion on one topic: Alfred Dreyfus.
446
447
SIXTY FOUR
Chekhov Dreyfusard January-April 1898 I N 1894, AT a travesty of a trial the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island for betraying French military secrets to Austro-Hungarian intelligence. In autumn 1897 a colonel of the security services and a senator forced the French government to re-open the Dreyfus case. Dreyfus's brother Matthieu named the real traitor, Major Esterhazy, in Le Figaro. French and Russian public opinion polarized: anti-Semites and nationalists faced democrats and internationalists. Major Esterhazy was, however, 'cleared'. Anton wondered if 'someone had carried out an evil joke'. Two weeks' study convinced him of Dreyfus's innocence.36 On 1/13 January Emile Zola's polemical article J'accuse came out in 300,000 copies of L'Aurore: the storm led to Zola's prosecution. Nothing that Zola had written won such vindictive fury from the French establishment, or such admiration from Chekhov, as his J'accuse. Chekhov made his first political stand. He now praised Korolenko, who had gone mad after undergoing the same ordeal as Zola when he stood up for Udmurt villagers accused of human sacrifices. Anton read the Voltaire he had bought for Taganrog library - Voltaire's defence of Calas, the judicially murdered Protestant, was a precedent for Zola's defence of Dreyfus. Chekhov's fondness for Jews was rather like his fondness for women: even though, to his mind, no Jew could ever fully enter into Russian life, and no woman ever equal a male genius, he vigorously defended their rights to equal opportunities.
Aleksandra Khotiaintseva had gone, leaving Anton a portrait of, himself. To Kovalevsky (29 January/10 February 1898), Anton denied he would marry her: Alas, I am incapable of such a complex, tangled business as marriage. And the role of husband frightens me, it has something stern, like
448
JANUARY-APRIL 1898
a regimental commander's. With my idleness I prefer a less demanding job. A new girl had entered his life: on Russian New Year's Day a bouquet of flowers came from Cannes, followed by a letter from an Olga Vasilieva. Khotiaintseva was amused. She told Masha around 9/21 January: Two litde girls came from Cannes to see Anton, one of them asked permission to translate his works into foreign languages… Little, fat, bright pink cheeks. She lugged a camera along to photograph Anton, ran round him saying, 'No, he's not posing right.' The first time she came with daddy and noticed Anton cursing French matches, which are very bad. Today she brought two boxes of Swedish matches. Touching?37 I -ike Elena Shavrova, Olga Vasilieva was just fifteen years old when she came under Anton's spell. Unlike Shavrova, she was a sickly, self-sacrificing orphan. Now an heiress, she and her sister had been adopted by a landowner. She spoke English - which, like many Russian girls brought up by an English governess, she knew better than Russian and set about translating Chekhov. To her he was a god who would dispose of her fortune and her person. She would follow Anton from france to Russia, seeking affection and advice, offering everything. In Nice she found him newspaper cuttings, looked up quotations, sent him photographs she had taken, and asked him the meaning of the most basic Russian words. He treated her with a gentleness rare even for him, and tongues were soon wagging.
Anton was growing to like the women folk of the pension. The Fish, the Doll, Red Ribbons, the Clothes Moth and the Slum were more good-natured than he or Aleksandra had allowed. The Fish, Baroness Dershau, became a fanatical Dreyfusarde under Anton's influence, as did many Russians in Nice. When Suvorin's granddaughter, Nadia Kolomnina, came to Nice, Anton used flirtatious banter to convert her too. Only Anton's brothers sat on the fence: Aleksandr and Misha, dependent on Suvorin's patronage, could not afford their own opinion.
Anton now found New Times repulsive, and ordered instead the liberal World Echoes, which exposed the bias of Suvorin's paper.38 Suvo-rin saw Dreyfus as the villain in a war between Christendom and Jewry, on which hung the future of civilization: the question of
449
F L î w v. ê i N (; ñ i ì i i i; í i ê s whether Dreyfus was innocent or guilty was a technicality. Anton argued so vehemently with Suvorin that the latter conceded: 'You've convinced me'. Nevertheless, attacks on Dreyfus and then on Zola -even while New Times was pirating Zola's novel Paris - were even more virulent in the weeks following Anton's remonstrations. Pavlovsky, the Paris correspondent of New Times, and himself a supporter of Dreyfus, found his copy either binned or distorted. The Russian correspondent on the Riviera, Michel Deline (Mikhail Ashkenazi), sent Suvorin a protest: It's not my attitude to the Dreyfus case, but yours which is disgraceful. I refer you to someone whom you love and respect, if you are capable of loving and respecting anybody: A. P. Chekhov. Ask him what he thinks of your attitude to this case and to the Jewish question as a whole. Neither you nor New Times will be unscathed by his opinion.39 Deline's rebuke upset Chekhov more than Suvorin: he hated his name being cited in a public airing of what he still considered private differences, and he ostracized Deline. Anton was bewildered because Suvorin would not retrieve New Times's honour from the Dauphin and Burenin. Anton told Kovalevsky that Suvorin was the most weak-willed man he knew when it came to reining in his own family.40 Anton's tone to Suvorin cooled: he joked that a Jewish syndicate had bought him for ioo francs. He told Aleksandr that 'he no longer wanted letters from Suvorin, in which he uses love of the military to justify his paper's lack of tact': he was disgusted by Suvorin's pirating of Zola, while pouring filth on the man. Yet the two friends still wanted to meet in March.