During Lent Mariushka cooked nothing edible for a consumptive. Anton grew testy. After booking a Pullman compartment from Sevastopol to Moscow, he stopped his almost daily letters to Olga. Stairs were bad news, and she had again withheld her exact addresses in Petersburg and Moscow. Anton raged. On 17 March 1903 he asked Vishnevsky where his wife and sister lived. Olga retaliated by demanding he take her mother's portrait down and send it: 'nobody needs it in Yalta, and I'm never there'. Under threat of divorce proceedings, she finally wired the new address. (After this spat, jokes spread around Moscow that Olga would divorce Anton and marry Vishnevsky.) Anton sent her no Easter greetings. Marriage seemed very unalluring.56 Olga relented. In mid March the Stanislavskys took her to spend a few days at St Sergei monastery. The monks had read Chekhov and told Olga that she should 'dine, drink tea with her husband and not live apart'. Protestant by confession and nature, she was nevertheless subdued by their admonitions.
Anton disliked the theatre's bargain with Suvorin: in exchange for the right to stage Gorky's Lower Depths in Petersburg, Suvorin would lease the Moscow Arts Theatre his own building for their Petersburg season. (Suvorin had by now stopped vilifying Stanislavsky.) Gorky was outraged: 'Between me and Suvorin there can be no agreements.'57 The man who had staged the anti-Semitic Smugglers, or Sons of Israel two years before should not have The Lower Depths. Despite these ructions, the season was sensational. Anton earned 3000 roubles, as
OCTOBER I002-APRIL I903
well as 2000 for performances in other cities and theatres. Uncle Vania received ovations. At the premiere of The Lower Depths in Petersburg secret policemen replaced the ushers.
Two weeks before Easter, Masha came down to Yalta to soothe her disgruntled brother. Anton had checked the proofs of'The Bride': the censor had left it untouched. He left the house just once, for the funeral of his colleague Dr Bogdanovich. On 10 April Olga summoned him to Petersburg. She had a large room to herself and the weather was warm. 'You and I could flirt.' He wired back 'Don't want go Petersburg. Well.' and left, with Schnap, for Moscow. He arrived on 24 April 1903, the day before Olga returned from Petersburg. He felt very ill, but went to the baths and had five months' worth of dirt steamed and beaten out of his skin.
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The Cherry Orchard May 1903-January 1904 THE FIVE FLIGHTS of stairs up to the new Moscow flat were 'martyrdom' for Anton. It was very cold outside. For a week he sequestered himself with Olga, Schnap and proofs for Marx and Miroliubov, and wrote letters. Friends and old colleagues descended, diagnosing and commiserating. He emerged in the second week of May to buy Evgenia spectacles for church and for the garden. He summoned Suvorin, who came and talked for two days. Anton urged him to publish his old friend Belousov, a crippled tailor who made trousers by day and translated Robert Burns by night.
Anton followed Suvorin to Petersburg, to see not him, but Adolf Marx, who was now willing to re-negotiate the contract if Chekhov came in person. Marx offered Anton 5000 roubles 'for medical treatment' - which Anton hastily refused - and a trunk of Marx editions, which he accepted. He and Marx put off discussions until August. Although the weather was warm and Anton had not seen Aleksandr, he would not stay. Anton avoided Lika too. Sanin, her husband, on military training, was worried and wrote to her: 'I can't wait for you to come to Moscow - I can't bear life without you… Chekhov is in Petersburg now. Are you sure he won't be looking in on you?'58
Masha had gone to Yalta to care for Evgenia and the garden. All at the Moscow apartment would have been peaceful, had Schnap not run under a cab. Schnap survived, his neck awry, but Anton was summoned for losing control of him; it took ten days to secure an acquittal. In May, Anton spoke to other doctor friends: none would countenance his plan to travel to Switzerland. Finally, on 24 May, he allowed Professor Ostroumov, who had taught both him and Dr Obolonsky, to examine him. Anton disliked Ostroumov, who used the ty form and called him 'a cripple'. Ostroumov found both Anton's lungs to be heavily damaged by emphysema and his intestines ruined
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by ÒÂ. Íå prescribed five medicines, and countermanded his pupils' recommendations. Anton had wasted four winters in Yalta: he needed dry air. Olga could renew the search for a house near Moscow. To Olga's relief, Ostroumov told Anton to bathe.
Masha was distraught at the implications of Ostroumov's new recommendations. Just as she was about to repaper Anton's study, she feared that the Yalta house might be sold, for Anton had already put the cottages at Gurzuf and Kuchtik-Êáó back on the market. If so, she could not take up the post of headmistress of Yalta girls' school, which, rumour had it, was hers for the taking. Suddenly her home and her career were threatened. She could not sleep, she told Misha, for anguish. Misha encouraged defiance - 'If I'd obeyed the man who opposed my marriage and my move to Petersburg, I wouldn't have what I have now'59 - and travelled 1300 miles to see her. He had hidden plans: he coveted the Gurzuf estate for himself. When he found that Masha wanted 15,000 roubles for a house that had cost 2000 - for the planned coastal railway had inflated prices - he turned on her: 'You high-principled people of rare purity of soul have been infected by the general tightfisted Yalta mood. It's a sin. I'm sad, sad, sad.'60
Anton assured Masha he would spend Moscow's treacherous spring and autumn in Yalta, when the Crimea, Ostroumov agreed, was safer for consumptives. The day after he saw Ostroumov, Anton left with Olga for the country: an admirer, Iakunchikova, had lent them her dacha on the Nara river southwest of Moscow. He fished the Nara, and invited his brother Vania to come and join him. He wanted silent company and told Vishnevsky that excitement might be bad for him. Did Vishnevsky not recall a performance where 'three workmen in make-up had to tie down your genitals with string to stop your trousers bursting on stage and causing a scandal?' Safe from voluble visitors, Anton wrote by the large window of the cottage or ranged the countryside west of Moscow, with Olga, in search of a house.
Anton accompanied Olga north to his haunts of the early 1880s, when, a novice doctor, he worked in Zvenigorod and Voskresensk. On 12 June, after sending off 'The Bride', rewritten in proof, he visited the dilapidated grave of Dr Uspensky of Zvenigorod, then stayed with SawaMorozov at New Jerusalem. Old friends, like Eduard Tyshko, were as crippled as Anton. No property suited Anton and
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after a fortnight he was hack at Nam. He had not visited Babkino where he had spent three summers with the Kiseliovs, but memories merged with summer impressions into 1'he Cherry Orchard. Kiseliov was bankrupt and Babkino under the hammer: when all failed, Kiseliov found, despite his gross incompetence, like Gaev in the play, a post in a bank.
Masha waited for the couple, tempting them with enormous peaches and plums and a lush green garden at Yalta. On 6 July Anton and Olga set out to join her and Evgenia, for two months. Olga put up with her sister-in-law and mother-in-law to ensure that Anton could work at The Cherry Orchard undisturbed. A third season with no new Chekhov play would doom the theatre. Anton had begun the play at Nara, but the search for a house had broken his train of creative thought and several pages had been lost when they blew out onto the rain-soaked grass. On 17 July 1903, resting on his wife's estate, Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote to Olga: 'I am very pleased you are in Yalta.' To Stanislavsky he wrote a week later, 'Olga writes that he sat down to his play again once they arrived in the Crimea.'61 Anton blamed 'idleness, the wonderful weather and the difficult plot' for his sluggish progress. Stanislavsky wrote to Olga at the end of July 1903: What upsets us most is that Anton does not feel very well and is sometimes down in the mouth. We have often cursed Ostroumov. He talked rubbish and spoiled Anton's good mood… we think about the play at other times, when we worry about the fate of the theatre.62 Olga drove visitors away. Only Tikhomirov, her colleague, could sit in the house for six hours at a time. The poet Lazarevsky's visit was cut short. His diary reads: 'once Knipper comes everyone is tense in the house… he is in love with his wife'.63 Masha told him that even she had limited access to Anton. The theatre was in rehearsal, but gave Olga leave until mid September to be Anton's 'Cerberus', as she put it. She felt strong: 'I am round and tanned. I get up at 6 a.m., run to bathe and swim a lot and pretty far. I eat, sleep and read and nothing else,' she reassured Stanislavsky. She made Anton work every day when he was physically able. She was now getting ready for The Cherry Orchard and 'drowning her new part with tears'. Vishnevsky was preparing for his new part too: Anton put him on a diet.