His spiritual suffering in Yalta was greater - 'I'd like to talk to somebody about literature… but here [there is only] irritating swinishness'. Newspapers came late. 'Without papers one would fall into gloomy melancholy and even get married,' he told Sobolevsky on Christmas Eve. Anton befriended the editor of The Crimean Courier, but, unable to improve the paper, gave up. He loved his future house, but hated Yalta's wintry filth. All Yalta was ashamed when the newspapers printed Anton's telegram to Moscow, saying that he felt like Dreyfus on Devil's Island.
He missed Suvorin, despite the fact that New Times was 'splashing about in filth'. The paper had outraged even the government, which banned it for ten days. The poet Balmont declared New Times 'a brothel by appointment to the crown'. Pavlovsky, Suvorin's Paris correspondent, sought Anton's help to switch to a liberal Moscow newspaper. Potapenko abandoned Suvorin. Suvorin was like Zeus the Bolt-thrower and the Dauphin like an angry bull, Aleksandr reported. New Times was printing the specious Le Dessous de I'affaire Dreyfus by the real traitor Esterhazy. Anton told Suvorin that rehabilitating Dreyfus was the 'great cultural victory of the age'. Suvorin replied that pro-Germans were whitewashing Dreyfus.
The taciturn Vania gave Anton brotherly support; on 19 December he came for a fortnight with supplies. Misha was voluble, but unhelpful. He offered his mother asylum, but she suspected he really wanted her as a nurse to his baby daughter. He did not pay for burying Pavel, and held back Masha's allowance. In Petersburg Aleksandr was even less help. He was supporting his sister-in-law Anastasia: her husband Pushkariov had lost his last penny on a bingo machine he had invented. AJeksandr's eldest son Kolia, meanwhile, had been caught robbing passengers at the railway station. Natalia feared that he would corrupt his brothers, in particular her own son, the seven-year-old Misha, so Aleksandr enrolled the fourteen-year-old boy in the merchant navy. Little Anton, now twelve and ineducable, was working for Suvorin as a bookbinder's apprentice. As New Times sank, Aleksandr himself was
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Ill III I I Ê I ÈÌ I'll S searching for a new career. On 24 November he told Anton: 'I am thinking of opening a new sort of brothel, like a touring theatre. If my planned institution arrives in Yalta "to enliven the season" you of course will be the first free customer.' To this letter Potapenko added a greeting, and Emilie Bijon 'un gros baiser'.
Anton was now a citizen of Yalta, his movements monitored by the press. He sat on committees for schools, the Red Cross and famine relief. As Babakai's men dug foundations, Anton wrote: two months at Au mur produced four stories. Three - 'An Incident in Practice' for Russian Thought, 'The New Dacha' for Sobolevsky's The Russian Gazette, and 'On Official Business' for Menshikov's The Week - use Melikhovo material, a Satanic factory, or hostile, thieving peasants. 'On Official Business' is the most powerful of this trio: a magistrate and a doctor are called in a blizzard to a remote village to investigate a suicide, and the magistrate is haunted by nightmares of misery. The radical protest in 'Peasants' and 'My Life' strengthens: the oppressed now become threatening to their oppressors. In Yalta, as Anton told Masha, 'there are neither nobles nor commoners, all are equal before the bacilli.' In a brighter tone he wrote 'The Darling' for a weekly called The Family. It portrays a woman utterly absorbed by any man - impresario, timber merchant or schoolboy - on whom she dotes. 'The Darling' startled radicals. It enchanted Tolstoy who saw an ideal, not irony, and called it, to Anton's face, the 'work of virgin lace-makers'.
Anton was tense, as Altshuller realized, because of The Seagull. His lungs and intestines suffered. The Petersburg premiere had sickened him; another fiasco could kill him. The Seagull and Uncle Vania had been performed everywhere but the capital - the latter play had earned Anton 1000 roubles and held the provinces spellbound. In November 1898, from Nizhni Novgorod, Chekhov heard from Maxim Gorky, a thirty-year-old herald of revolution, Russia's first 'proletarian' writer. He said he had wept like a woman when he first saw Uncle Vania; it was 'a blunt saw through my heart,' Act 4 'a hammer on the audience's head': the effect was 'a childhood garden dug up by a giant pig'. Gorky's postscript ran: 'I am a very absurd and crude person, but I have an incurably sick soul.' Anton responded warmly. Gorky initiated an unlikely friendship, disarming in January 1899 all Anton's defences: 'I am as stupid as a locomotive… but I have no rails under me.'8
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NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1898
Enough people had seen a Moscow rehearsal or provincial performance for The Seagull to acquire an awesome reputation. Masha was feted as Anton's plenipotentiary. She began to relish life. She dined with actors and actresses and became self-confident, an amusing guest. She made friends with Anton's school friend Vishnevsky, who played the part of Dr Dorn, and with Olga Knipper, who, though fifteen years too young, played Arkadina. Anton's friends clustered round Masha. Sasha Selivanova vaccinated her against smallpox; Dunia Konovitser (Efros), Anton's fiancee in 1886, was as close as twelve years ago; Elena Shavrova and Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik visited. Masha was invited to Mrs Shavrova's house and, though she disliked the Shavrova girls' monocled cavalieri, she found Elena Shavrova beautiful and interesting. Olga Shavrova even invited her to become an actress. Levitan, near death, was too ill to court her - 'I lie breathing heavily like a fish out of water,' he told Anton - yet Masha felt she might still find 'personal happiness'. She did not want to teach geography in Yalta. She meant to enjoy the Moscow season and study art.
On 17 December 1898, with carriages jamming the streets, The Seagull opened to a full house. Nemirovich-Danchenko telegraphed 'colossal success mad with happiness'. Anton wired back 'Your telegram has made me healthy and happy'. Nemirovich-Danchenko requested Uncle Vania exclusively for the Moscow Arts. Anton's school friend Vishnevsky telegraphed, 'Seagull will be our theatre's battleship.' The Seagull, Nina, was badly interpreted by Roksanova (soon to be ousted), and Stanislavsky acted Trigorin like 'an impotent recovering from typhoid', but the audience was ecstatic. Olga Knipper won special praise. Nemirovich-Danchenko told Anton: 'She is so involved in her part mat you can't tell her apart from [Arkadina's] elegant actress's get-up and vulgar charm, meanness and jealousy.' Masha encouraged her brother's instincts: 'A very, very nice actress, Knipper, was playing; she is amazingly talented, it was pure enjoyment to see and hear her.' Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik wrote to Anton: 'for the first time in three years I have had enjoyment in the theatre… Everything was new, unexpected, enthralling… Knipper was very good.'
Many old friends made contact. Levitan got off his sick bed, paid double for a ticket and said that he now understood the play; torn between older and younger women, he felt for Trigorin. Even the
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I ÏÊ I I l i. i (è i è?, actor Lensky, a sworn enemy since lie had been caricatured in 'The Grasshopper', was enchanted by The Seagull. By January 1899 Sergei Bychkov, the footman at the Great Moscow Hotel, had seen The Seagull four times: he reminded Chekhov 'how passionately Liudmila Ozerova wanted to act your Seagull'.9 Women clamoured to be Seagulls. Kundasova informed Anton that her sister Zoia was widowed and free: Nemirovich-Danchenko must give her the part.