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October, to show Evgenia Kiichiik-Koy. The mountain road shook her and Anton resolved that this summer residence would have to be sold. The Autka house was becoming habitable, Anton's study now had a desk and a door, and the Chekhovs had hired a maid, Marfa Motsnaia, for 8 roubles a month. Masha told Misha: Everyone now has their own room, we are sorting ourselves out, there is very little furniture. Anton's study and bedroom have turned out pretty well, we now have an upright piano. There is masses of cleaning - lime everywhere, impossible to wash off, everything covered in dust… I have to leave my Moscow flat and look for a little one, cheaper, of course - those are my orders. To move to Yalta for good, before I have a job in the Yalta school, is something Anton finds unsuitable for me, and that's it. Masha rebelliously dreamed 'of getting some money and living as freely as I can'. Konshin, however, still failed to pay what he owed for Melikhovo.
Anton's health succumbed to an exceptionally wet autumn. He talked again of surgery for haemorrhoids; his intestines lost in a day's diarrhoea a month's painstakingly gained weight. He feared loneliness, telling a colleague, Dr Rossolimo, 'without letters one could hang oneself, learn to drink bad Crimean wine and couple with an ugly, stupid woman'. Rumours that Anton was about to marry had fed Petersburg and Moscow gossip for years. Now the gossip became warmer. Aleksandr asked first, on n October 1899, 'Petersburg is persistently marrying you off to two actresses, what shall I tell them?' (The second, Olga Knipper's 'shadow', was the stunningly beautiful Maria Andreeva.) Rumours even reached Nizhni Novgorod. Gorky, still a happily married man, told Anton: 'It's said you are marrying an actress with a foreign surname… if it's true, I'm glad.'
After four dress rehearsals, Uncle Vania was performed for the first time in Moscow on 26 October 1899, two years after it had been published. Masha arrived in Moscow from Yalta too late for the triumph. Only Nemirovich-Danchenko and Olga were at first unhappy with the play: Nemirovich-Danchenko had removed forty of the fifty pauses Chekhov had specified; Olga blamed Stanislavsky for making her act Elena as highly sexed. Nemirovich-Danchenko had made Stanislavsky 'go through [his] part literally like a pupil in drama school'.
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Ill U I I I UIUM MIS (Having seen Stanislavsky act Trigorm, Anton could not believe he could be lecherous enough as Dr Astrov: 'Inject some testosterone into him,' he had advised Nemirovich-Danchenko.) The second performance on 29 October, at which Masha accepted the author's acclaim by proxy, was even more triumphant: the theatre and Chekhov's fame were safe. There were to be twenty-five performances of Uncle Vania this season, and The Seagull would be played once a fortnight: Anton's share of the earnings, with full houses, would be some 3000 roubles. The theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko announced, stood, like the world in Russian folk myth, on three whales: A. K. Tolstoy, Hauptmann and Chekhov.
The Knippers and Chekhovs drew closer. Masha reported on 5 November: 'Knipper and I meet very often, I've dined several times at her home and now know her Mama, i.e. your mother-in-law, and a drinking aunt.' Olga befriended Masha, as the gateway to intimacy with Anton. Masha praised her: 'What a fine person she is, I am more sure every day. A very hard worker and, I think, extremely talented.' Olga spent nights with Masha, who lived near the theatre, though the flat was in chaos. (The servant girl had given birth to a baby daughter.) In the same letter, Masha revelled in her new life, telling Anton: 'With the girls we have a servant, a French teacher, the German teacher often calls, the class assistants keep visiting, the headmistress, Masha and her baby which squeals and Olga Knipper's laughter - just imagine!'
Both Anton and Masha touched on an impediment to the Knipper-Chekhov alliance: Olga's relations with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko were more than professional. A charismatic teacher, he held her in thrall, despite her mother's opposition. In Russian theatres a leading actress tended to be the director's mistress. There was no break in the liaison between Knipper and Nemirovich-Danchenko, even when Olga and Anton behaved as if they were betrothed (not that Nemirovich-Danchenko showed any jealousy).37 Conversely, Anton and Nemirovich's wife 'Kitten', whom Olga detested, were old friends.38 On 5 November Masha offered to help Anton: 'Nemirovich… came to see me, stayed for a long time, we chatted a lot, and it occurred to me that I might lure him away from Knipper.'
Unlike Olga, Anton had no other irons in the fire. Although Lika Mizinova was back in Moscow and lonely, Anton did not write to her,
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and Masha repelled Lika's attempts to join the theatrical throng. Anton thought only of Olga Knipper and he told Masha forlornly on 11 November, 'I envy Nemirovich, I have no doubt that he enjoys success with a certain person.' Anton felt, he said, like the piano: neither it nor he was played on. At Autka he planted cypresses, and put up barbed wire between himself and the Tatar cemetery. In the Indian summer, his self-esteem boosted, he felt well. He decided to sell Kuchuk-Koy and buy a cottage and a few acres of rocky coast at Gurzuf nearby, for swimming. Nemirovich-Danchenko talked of bringing the Moscow Arts Theatre to Yalta so that Anton might see Uncle Vania performed.
Anton had given Marx copies of his works: now only proofs would arrive to plague him. That autumn inspiration came back. For Russian Thought he wrote his archetypical Yalta work, 'The Lady with the Little Dog': a cynical adulterer, Gurov, on holiday in Yalta, seduces the unhappily married Anna, only to find her image so haunting that he travels to the provincial town where she is stifling and turns an affair into an intractable involvement. Just as the reader wonders how it can end, the author talks of new beginnings and ends the narrative. 'The Lady with the Little Dog' seems to defend adultery and to explode Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: of all Chekhov's works it upset Tolstoy most. Gurov is a very ambiguous hero: he is Don Juan in love. We first meet him classifying women as predators or victims or, with Nietzschean scorn, as a lower race: has he in the end fallen in love, or have his first grey hairs frightened him? The only unambiguous elements are the mountains and sea, against which what 'we do or think when we forget the higher purpose of existence' is ephemeral. The story's empathy with adulterers awoke Chekhov's readers. 'The Lady with the Little Dog' showed them that, despite the rumours of Chekhov's moribund state, he had something new to say.
On 24 November 1899 Anton finally confirmed to Nemirovich-Danchenko that he was mulling over a new play. 'I have a plot for Three Sisters' he wrote, but would not start it until he had finished 'The Lady with a Little Dog' and another story. Before winter set in, he planted a lemon tree from Sukhum, oleanders and camellias. A stray puppy slept under the olive tree and was adopted by the Chekhovs. Stray cats in search of a home, however, were mercilessly shot - even though Aleksandr in Petersburg now edited the Journal of the
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òí HI i i HI èì ãì s Society for the Protection of Animals. November's winds ripped the leaves off the magnolias and kept Anton indoors. He watched flames fan across the mountain scrub, towards his uninsured property. It was cold: he slept in a hat and slippers under two eiderdowns, with the shutters closed. He struggled with a new story, and made notes for Three Sisters, his most complex and subtle play to date. He wrote few letters; even Olga Knipper received none that November. Anton's brothers were resentful. Misha complained to Masha: Mother is somewhere at the edge of the world, way over the mountains, I am in the far norm, you are neither here nor there… Anton has become proud… This year he gave me just one minute of his time, in an express railway carriage… How has the money been spent this year: 25,000 from Marx, 5000 from Konshin, 3000 from The Seagull and Uncle Vania? If the house and estate cost 25,000, then, by my reckoning, 8000 has gone missing. Anton had over 9000 roubles in his Yalta Mutual Credit passbook.