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NOVEMBKR 1899-FEBRUARY 1900
In the New Year Anton was awarded the Order of Stanislav 3rd grade 'for services to education'. (It was awarded to half the teachers in Taganrog gimnazia.) Anton was also elected to the writer's section of the Academy. Honorary academicians had no salary, but they were exempt from arrest, censorship and customs inspections (and also from Academy prizes). Chekhov nominated a man he disliked, the critic Mikhailovsky, and a man he pitied, Kazimir Barantsevich, to be fellow academicians. Becoming Academicus made him the butt of his friends and the object of begging letters. His maid's uncle called him 'your excellency'.
Levitan, close to death, was struck by Anton's gloom. 'Your fever is a fever of self-infatuation - your chronic disease… your Achilles heel,' he wrote on 7 February. When he saw Uncle Vania in December, he liked best the bit 'where the doctor kisses Knipper'. On 16 February he revived old amorous rivalries: 'I went to see Masha and saw my darling Knipper. I begin to fancy her more and more: I notice an inevitable cooling towards the honorary academician.'
'In the Ravine', published in Life, allied Chekhov with men whom Suvorin thought criminaclass="underline" radical Marxists like Gorky and Posse, the editor of Life, who were often under arrest or police supervision. Karl Marx, as much as Adolf Marx, cut Anton off from Suvorin. Though their affection never died, Chekhov warned Misha, and others, against Suvorin as the owner of New Times. Posse had printed 'In the Ravine' 'in an orgy of misprints', but Anton joined the radicals nevertheless. The story's originals were, Anton asserted, even worse than his characters, but in his view: 'drunken syphilitic children are not material for art'.
Dr Altshuller examined Anton at the end of February 1900 and reported that his left lung was worse, though his right lung was clear. Spring came early in Yalta. Some mornings Anton did not cough. The old women, Evgenia and Mariushka, frightened of responsibility when Masha was away, forgot their giddiness and pains. Chekhov's new prose, ending a year of silence, was widely lauded. Anton rested. Three Sisters was still only an idea.
In mid February the camellias blossomed after ten degrees of frost. Anton proudly announced: 'I could have been a gardener'. He longed for the coming of the mountain to Mahomet, when Nemirovich-Danchenko, Olga and the theatre's elite would arrive to perform in
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Ill Ê I I I II I I'M I'IIS the Crimea. Ever since Christmas he had asked Masha to persuade Olga to spend the summer in Yalta. They had eaten pancakes together at Shrovetide, first at Masha's and then at Vania's, and were now on ty terms. Masha evidently felt equal to the sophisticated Olga and able to befriend and manage her, as she had done with Dunia Efros, Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizinova, on her brother's behalf. Masha and Olga declared themselves inseparable. Anton could be sure that if one came to Yalta, the other would too.
SEVENTY-TWO Ô
Olga in Yalta March-July 1900 FOR ANTON, Andrei Vishnevsky was the first herald of spring in Yalta. He arrived to check the ramshackle theatre and the electric lighting that would be its undoing. Vishnevsky maddened Anton by harking back to school days and by making him read the cues for his Dr Dorn and Uncle Vania. Chekhov's revenge was gentle: he created the good-natured fool in Three Sisters, Kulygin, not just for, but out of, Vishnevsky himself. All five performances (a Hauptmann play, as well as their Chekhov repertoire) planned by the Moscow Arts theatre for Yalta were sold out: even the Crimean Karaims (an indigenous Judaic sect) were coming. At Anton's request, there would be no cast list and no individual curtain calls. Rarely had he anticipated so intensely a public event, but all he had to do in practical terms was to meet the government electrician at the theatre and persuade the Yalta magistrate that Hauptmann's Lonely People had been passed by the censor.
The Chekhovs had money, for the Society of Dramatists and Composers sent royalties of 1159 roubles for the quarter. A migration to the Crimea began. Cousin Georgi was coming from Taganrog. Gorky bought thirty tickets for the Yalta performances. Masha was to come in the sixth week of Lent and bring Olga: she sent ahead pillows, crockery and bedsteads. Evgenia expected a flood of visitors. On 12 March Georgi arrived to stay with Anton; Gorky (followed by a police spy) came to Yalta on the 16th; on the 25th a party of Moscow doctors arrived to witness their colleague's apotheosis.
Anton put his foot down. He asked Olga not to bring Vishnevsky when she came: 'or he'll always be under our feet and won't let us say a word, and he'll give us no peace, since he'll be reciting Uncle Vania all the time.' Anton told Sergeenko that he could not have him to stay, and recommended a distant resort. At the end of March an
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I II 1(1 I I 1(1 KM I'll N express train reached Sevastopol with three wagons full of theatre sets. This cost 1300 roubles, to be defrayed, as Nemirovich-Danchenko reminded Anton, by putting on, with Anton's permission, Uncle Vania in Petersburg. On 2 April Masha and Knipper arrived.42 Olga had a room next to Masha's, downstairs. Anton slept upstairs. The stairs creaked loudly and Evgenia slept lightly, so night-time visits between Olga and Anton were difficult. Sheltering an actress, let alone one who visited her son's bedroom, was enough to stretch Evgenia's tolerance.
On 7 April the theatre company arrived in Sevastopol for the start of their Crimean tour. They brought a new Nina for The Seagulclass="underline" Maria Andreeva. The next day Anton's haemorrhoids bled: he and Olga put off joining the actors until Easter Sunday, the 9th. In Sevastopol Anton, for the first time, saw Uncle Vania performed and endured the roar when the audience spotted the author. He walked next day over the ruins of ancient Chersonesus and then returned to see Olga as a high-minded seductress in Hauptmann's Lonely People. Not Olga's best role, it moved Lazarevsky, a young poet who had begun to pester Anton, to behave very tactlessly: 'I found the actress Knipper so loathsome that if I'd met her in real life she'd have been just as loathsome. I shared this opinion with Chekhov.'43