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mustn't be disturbed. You air going to bate my letters. But I cannot be silent. You and I have to face a long separation. I'd have understood if you'd spent September in Liubimovka. Our life just doesn't make sense any more. If only I knew you needed me, and not just as an enjoyable woman… How horrible, Anton, if everything I write should arouse no more than a smile, or perhaps you show this letter to Masha as she did [mine to you].*6 Olga attacked Anton for misleading her into expecting him back at Liubimovka. Anton's replies are a disconcerting mix of resentment, fair-mindedness and manipulation. I can't think why you're angry with me, I wouldn't have left but for business and haemhorrhages… I won't write a play this year, I don't feel like it… Masha did not show me your letter, I found it on mother's desk and realized why Masha was upset. It was a horrible rude letter, and above all, unfair… naturally I understood your mood. But you must not, must not do that, darling, you must fear unfairness… Don't tell Masha I have read your letter to her. Or, anyway, do as you like. Your letters chill me… Don't let's separate so early before we've had a proper life, before you give birth to a boy or girl for me. And when you do, then you can act as you wish. Only in September 1902 did Olga, Anton and Masha declare a truce. Anton forced himself to make extravagant protestations of affection to Olga: I take my litde dog by the tail, swing her round several times and then stroke and caress her… I do a salto mortale on your bed, stand on my head, grab you, turn over several times and throw you to the ceiling before catching you and kissing you. The Stanislavskys had returned, cursing Europe. Liubimovka came to life. They took Olga on expeditions to buy honey, to fish and to explore Moscow's dosshouses before starting work on Gorky's Lower Depths.
Moscow injected Olga with new spirit. Franz Schechtel's Art Nou-veau conversion gave the Moscow Arts Theatre a permanent home: a large theatre with fine dressing rooms and electricity. Olga could go to the baths. She enjoyed an uninhibited evening with her mother and uncles - 'Boheme in full swing… I love the spirit of our house… we all sincerely love each other.' After a vigil by his sister's deathbed,
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Nemirovich-Danchenko was back: Olga talked to him at length. She was, on Dr Strauch's advice, looking for a new apartment. She felt secure by September and wrote, in her sole response to Anton's chilling offer of her freedom: 'I shall present you with a good son for next year. You write that if we have a child I can do as I like.' Olga tried to put her conflicts with Masha in a good light: 'I am not a beast, and Masha is not an underdog. She is stronger than me. I just seem stronger because I talk loudly and boil over.' A long chat with Masha, Anton thought, got rid of festering 'little splinters', but relations between Anton and Olga were cool. Anton forgot her thirty-fourth birthday on 9 September, though he had asked for the date months before. She nagged him to answer his translators' queries. Olga's and Anton's letters exchange medical details: her enemas and his creosote.
In Yalta Anton's health was so bad that he forbade Altshuller to examine him. On 4 September Masha left Yalta to join her sister-in-law and resume teaching in Moscow. Coughing uncontrollably and unable to eat what the new cook, Polia, prepared, Anton was buoyed up only when the actor-manager Orlenev, a likeable rogue, engineered a visit from Suvorin. The day Masha left, Suvorin and Orlenev came to lunch and stayed. Suvorin's diary is terse: 'I spent two days there, almost all the time with Chekhov, in his house.' Of this encounter Anton revealed only that Suvorin 'talked about all sorts of things, and much that was new and interesting.'
Anton's interest in the outside world revived. He belatedly resigned from the Academy over Gorky's disqualification.47 He took up his share in the theatre. He lamented Zola's mysterious death from carbon monoxide poisoning, possibly murder. He wanted to travel. Inspired by Suvorin, cautioned by Altshuller, he decided to visit Moscow when the first frosts dried the air, then winter in Italy. Anton warned Olga that Altshuller had allowed him only a few days in Moscow on his way abroad - which augured badly for begetting a child. Masha assured him that Olga was 'quite healthy and very cheerful, she can climb to the third floor.' Dr Strauch came to the Crimea and called, formally dressed, on Anton. He pronounced Olga cured. Anton asked her: Has Strauch said you can have children? Now, or later? Oh my darling, time is passing! When our baby is 18 months old I shall probably be bald, grey and toothless.
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Anton wrote more intimately: 'The longer I lived with you, the deeper and broader my love would be.' He asked her where Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife was, and Olga dismayed him by telling him that she, Olga, not 'Kitten', was nursing Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was prostrate with an ear abscess.
Anton totally rewrote his farcical monologue On the Harm of Tobacco and sent it to Adolf Marx. Anton told Stanislavsky that this was all he had the energy for. Evgenia and Polia, the kitchen maid, set off for Moscow ahead of him. From Sevastopol Evgenia took the fourth-class freight and passenger train; she felt trapped in an express, and preferred trains that lingered at every town on the route. Evgenia stayed in Moscow for four days, then set off for Petersburg, travelling third-class in order to sit with Polia (servants were banned from first-class compartments). At long last she would see her four Petersburg grandchildren.
In Yalta the dogs and the cranes were sated, but Anton starved, revolted by the dead flies floating in old Mariushka's borshch and coffee. Anton sent instructions for his own reception in Moscow. Olga was to buy cod liver oil, beech creosote, export beer. She promised to meet him with a fur coat, 'a warm bed and a few other things too.' On 14 October he arrived at the 'convent' where Olga, Masha and their tenant, a piano teacher, lived. He brought with him the first sketches of his valedictory story, 'The Bride'.
EIGHTY Ô
'The Bride' October 1902-April 1903 ON ARRIVAL Anton wrote a note to summon Ivan Bunin, who visited. What transpired, we do not know, but almost certainly Anton was again intervening in Masha's personal life, perhaps at her request. She was seven years older than Bunin, not a noblewoman, and Bunin was unlikely to offer her marriage. Masha was shocked by the outcome of this meeting. The next day she left to stay with their mother in Aleksandr's freezing quarters in Petersburg. She returned too ill to receive anyone. Anton made a joke of his intervention: he sent Bunin a photograph of a man inscribed with a notorious decadent verse 'Cover your pale legs'. Bunin packed to go abroad. Masha's letters to him in November 1902 are downcast: 'Darling Bouquichon, What's happened? Are you well? You've vanished and God knows what I'm to think! I've been very ill… Is it a new love affair? Your Amarantha.' They would, however, meet again in December, when Anton withdrew to Yalta, and their involvement would flicker on and off for some years.